File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2004/lyotard.0411, message 142


From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 08:45:24 -0500
Subject: RE: sideways - incapacity



eric,

wowellyes... situating all this across rilke in a bee.aroque manner.ist... 
yes... these passages are quite important, i think, to working out this notion 
of 'capacity for incapacity'... (watching the audio-commentary to wim wenders 
_wings of desire_ last night, and its interesting how important rilke is there 
too...) 

you know... speaking of 'bees of the invisible'... i was also reading j. von 
uexkull's _theoretical biology_ (1926) this weekend in search of a passage 
concerning a tick that agamben mentioned. instead, i came across one of, what i 
believe is, one of heidegger's favorite passages.  (...either heidegger quotes 
this passage, or someone who i talk to who talks about heidegger notes 
something like this...)

"Suppose, however, that there is a great quanity of honey.  After a time the 
bee stops sucking and flies away, leaving the remainder untouched.  In this 
case the indication was not annihilated objectively.  Why then did the bee 
cease its action?  It has been found that if, while a bee is feeding, its 
abdomen be carefully cut off, the insect will go on drinking with the honey 
flowing out of it again behind. In this case the action does not cease; the bee 
goes on drinking like Baron Munchhausen's horse.  The check set up by satiety 
is lacking."  

such bees, in other words, lack the ability to know what they are 
lacking... 'the snap of release' as the loss of one's stomach... (--one no 
longer can view the homeless and unsheltered as having stomachs that simply 
need to be full... a thanksgiving trope, to be sure... but rather, a 
recognition of a stomach.less condition ::  "I can't stomach such talk that 
always come down to stomachs... y.ours is the stomach ache of the snap of 
release... the release of stomach such that one is abandoned to a sense that 
homeless that is without abdomen... exposed by a lack of satiety... flowing..."-
-)  buzz, buzz...     

here's another nice passage from uexkull:

"In principle, the step of a beetle's foot or the stroke of a dragonfly's wing 
must carry their effect as far as the dog-star."

b.est, geof  



Quoting Eric <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>:

> Geof,
> 
> I really can't do justice to your earlier post tonight. I'm too drunk
> and tired, but I'll try. You mention Rilke in connection with love. I
> think his poetry has an interesting connection with the theory of the
> multitude and the general intellect.
> 
> Rilke spoke of humanity as becoming 'bees of the invisible'.  At first
> this seems like quaint and eccentric metaphysics, until you begin to
> realize how apt a description this really is for immaterial labor in a
> post-Fordist age. 
> 
> Despite the pious references to Nietzsche, Rilke seems to be on more of
> a Hegelian path when he posits an alienated humanity in migration away
> from nature (joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up even in
> marriage, for everything is womb) towards the terrible angels who
> subsume opposition and negativity with themselves.
> 
> I agree with you when you say:
> 
> "Love is thus not, as the dialectic of desire suggests, the affirmation
> of the self in the negation of the loved object; it is, instead, the
> passion and exposition of facticity itself and of the irreducible
> impropriety of beings.  In love, the lover and the beloved come to light
> in their concealment, in an eternal facticity beyond."
> 
> However, it is necessary to be more concise about what is meant by this.
> 
> 
> In an essay entitled "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment", Virno speaks
> of the fact that "alienation, far from eliminating the feeling of
> belonging, empowers it. The impossibility of securing ourselves within
> any durable context disproportionately increases our adherence to the
> most fragile instances of the "here and now". What is dazzlingly clear
> is finally belonging as such, no longer qualified by a belonging to
> something."
> 
> This is also what Rilke observes in connection with the sublime Angel.
> It is not merely that the lover realizes the negation of the loved
> object, but rather that in this recognition of the negation of love, the
> lover realizes something else, "no longer qualified by a belonging to
> something". 
> 
> As Rilke writes:
> 
> "But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;
> for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing 
> of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
> who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified. 
> Begin again and again the never attainable praising;
> Remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was
> Merely a pretext for achieving his final birth. 
> But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back
> Into herself, as if there were not enough strength 
> To create them a second time."
> 
> What I am trying to suggest is that in mythic terms, Rilke has already
> realized the basic homelessness of the multitude ("Alas who is there we
> can turn to, not angels, not men") with the recognition that a new form
> of love is necessary; neither the Christian love of agape or duty nor
> the romantic love of possession of the desired beloved, but a new kind
> of love, which like the angel, feeds upon death and the very loss of the
> beloved.
> 
> "Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl
> deserted by her beloved might be inspired 
> by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love
> and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her"? Shouldn't this
> most ancient of sufferings finally grow 
> More fruitful for us?  Isn't it time we lovingly 
> Freed ourselves from the beloved, and quivering, endured:
> As the arrow endures the bowstring's tension. So that 
> Gathered in the snap of release it can be more than 
> Itself. For there is no place were we can remain."
> 
> Or, as Virno puts it, 
> 
> "Today defection and exodus express the feeling of pure belonging that
> is typical, in Bataille's terms, of the community of all of those who
> have no community."
> 
> Such is the homeless love of the multitude. 
> 
> Is this what you meant by a love that is capable of its own incapacity?
> 
> eric
> 
> 




   

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