Subject: boredom in an empty horizon
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 14:34:13 -0500 (EST)


There is some writing on boredom by Heidegger in _The Fundemantal Concepts
Of Metaphysics_. In that book it is as an important an attunement as
anxiety in _Being and Time_. In so far as a will with time and practice
begins to revolve around nothigness, it is an impetus for the hand's
becoming that in its very activity dissolves form, breaks up the
coarseness of language to release its materiality: "it [the trace of
writing] is an _energon_, a labor which reveals -- which makes legible --
the trace of its pulsion and its expenditure. the line is visible action."
(Barthes, the responsibility of forms, pg. 58). The line then as
dissolution of meaning is a flame that consumes language and so writes the
silence of inner experience, of an impression , a typing out, a mark that
precedes meaning and constitutes not the desire for the new needed by the
bored (Kierkegard in Either/Or talks much on boredom also which might be a
place to meet) but an event, a producing reception that is the
connectedness of writing and reading as a hand's becoming. It seems to me
that Derrida in _Signature Event and Context_ is getting at something like
this which is the dissolution of the symbolic and the emergence of the
real kernel of language as action painting. what is this dissolution as an
alchemy of the will but its very pedagogy which Serres towards the end of
_Le Tiers Instruit_ writes is the art of reticence, that is, anticipatory
resoluteness, in Heidegger's lingo, and inwardization in Kierkegard which
passes beyond anxiety to despair. This he explores in _Sickness Unto
Death_. Therefore, not that I am being reasonable, alchemy is expenditure
without return, potlatch, asymmetrical communication in Bataille's sense.
Carnival.

Ariosto

 



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