From: Goodchild P <p.goodchild-AT-ucsm.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Ethics
Date: Fri, 07 Jun 96 16:18:00 BST



On June 6th, Randall wrote:

> Personally I consider all academic discourse to be sublimated violence.

But Will wrote:

> The faith that one has to go on living "in any case"

> To love without demanding
> To continue to love without exchange
> That is divine

And he quoted:
> "Trust would then be a compound quality of mind,
> like foot-pounds as a definition of work: hope-hours, or minutes or days 
or
> years. In the very young it can at times seem more to be hope-seconds as
> the baby's face crumples when mother turns the corner out of sight."

Tom Wall wrote:
> that Neuter, that unrequitedess, is a kind of fundamental
> affect, an obscure affect that can resolve itself only [into] resentment, 
on the
> one hand, or amor fati on the other.  The latter is love of that which 
must
> escape every time, which is indifferent to us.

The outside, the BwO, escapes us in its neutrality and impenetrability.  Its 
absence is a perpetual postponement, crumpling the baby's face.  Trust lacks 
energy and duration, and fades, leaving only violence and its sublimations. 
 Love does not return.

What, then, can one affirm?  Is trust still possible?

There is a technique.  To have done with judgement.

For violence always judges the body according to the symbolic law that it 
creates in its acts of violent inscription.  The law is absent, withdrawn, 
future, indifferent.  Moral principles are displaced from present experience 
and concern themselves with
progress towards a better future, appealing to the free choice of subjects 
who are not
encumbered by an inheritance of economic, social, and psychological 
pressures - unencumbered by bodies.
The passage of time itself breeds violence and decay.

But judgement springs from representation.  A representation of love does 
not itself love.  Once the inspiration for a feeling of love has withdrawn, 
the representation of love remains as an after-effect.  Precisely because 
this representation is no longer an
expression, memory attempts to recover the past, and the act of representing 
commends itself as an obligation: "You must continue to love."  The illusion 
of values is inseparable from the illusion of consciousness.  Morality is 
born from the death
of love.

Representations are static: they show a network of laws or power-relations 
in an instantaneous present, from the perspective of a body that does not 
itself live.  Or, rather, that lives by grasping at the future as a complete 
and ideal state, a future that would be a scarred and mutilated corpse; 
morality as necrophilia, a strange mutation of the death-instinct.

The body can live time in a different way.  Surprisingly enough, the ethical 
impulse as such, in Deleuze's thought, is merely an effect of the asymmetry 
of time: it is non-organic, pre-personal, inhuman.  For the emotion by which 
a body evaluates requires a duration: an increase or diminution in the power 
of a body must be felt relative to some preceding state.  In this respect, 
evaluation is an experience of joy or sadness that is felt over a duration; 
this duration itself coexists with action in the present.  Here we encounter 
the passage of time itself: the constitution of a virtual, unconscious 
territory of emotions that is differentiated from exterior relations in the 
present.  In addition, time has a second direction of passage: the 
abandonment of the living present in favour of a future.  A body does not 
merely sense and evaluate: it acts and creates.  An asymmetry characterizes 
the flow of time, differentiating the receptivity by which the past is 
preserved in itself from the spontaneity through which the future is 
created.  Instead of time being judged in relation to the death of its 
contents, Deleuze conceived of time purely in terms of life: "This is the 
powerful, non-organic Life which grips the world"  (Deleuze, Cinema 2: 81). 
 One must distinguish three levels of existence  or syntheses of time  in 
the unconscious: a set of encounters and exterior relations - forces or 
habits - constituting a body or institution; a set of feelings and 
evaluations by which such encounters are judged; and a set of actions or 
creations.

Where, then, is redemptive trust?  Not in the future.  Not in a dead body. 
 Not in the self.  Not even in emotion - the love of love (  -  folding too 
soon).  But in a body that would be almost unliveable, an untimely body, a 
body without organs, a body of fire.  A body that is yet to create itself, 
but is already now-here.  An impenetrable body.

Have done with judgement.  Affirm all chance.  Turn to neither future nor 
past, but  to the virtual dimension of time.  Listen - in the hope of 
enfolding and being enfolded - to the arrival of an immanent utopia.


Phil
(Did I forget to mention that I'm a theologian?)
(I'm definitely going to shut up this time.)

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