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Ascolo Parodites
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DAS HINZUTRETENDE AND THE IMMANENT AND TRANSCENDENTAL ORDERS OF AFFECTIVITY
Performing a determinate negation of his image of Kantian moral philosophy, Adorno goes searching for an account of freedom in precisely those domains that Kant would have dismissed as giving rise to heteronomy. Freedom. he argues. requires communication was a rather mysterious anarchic other of reason which he, in the Negative Dialectics, calls the addendum (das Hinxutretende). It is remarkable how emphatically Adorno insists, on the one had, that a considerable level of coercion is necessary for self-resolved moral behavior to be possible, while on the other hand, by locating genuine absene of constraint, and hence freedom, in the addendum, moves the dicussion of freedom towards a consideration of drives and the unconscious. Even though he seems close to contradicting himnelf, it is easy to see the negative rationale for the adoption of this view. If the establishment of a self-identical ego is itself based on acts of coercion, then the negation of such coercion would seem to be found in a solidarity with that which has been repressed. As always, Adorno is far from recommending any kind of return to nature. Rather than relinquishing autonmy, his aim, rather, is to consider it in relation to it otherness- in relation, that is, to the object which etither grants or denies autonmy to the subject. In Zur Lehre von der Geschite und vond der Freiheit, Adorno turns to Shakespeare's Hamle in order to elucidate the notion of the addendum. finding himself in a post-medieval world devoid of moral cetrainties, Hamelt, the intellectua, appears as a victim of the new and early modern demand for autonomyous reflection. As oppoised to the active Fortinbras, who represents the medieval world of chivalry, GHamelt famously cannot bring himself to act. rather than revealing himnself to Others, he remains stifled, passive, lockined inside his own monologue. In Philosophical terms. Hamlet's problem is that unless an experience can provide motivation from outside the space of reasons, the sheer reflection itself retrogrades into an empty gesutre, leading to skepticism and nihlism. Eros, retrograted into empty gestures, will be spoken of as the formalisms of Eros - narcisssim and infatuation, in a later chapter.
The only real fidelity, then, is an external one: fidelity out of conviction is not real fidelity because it is already mediated through our subjectivity - that is, we are not really honoring the matrimony between ourselves and our beloved but simply following our own judgment, which tells us that the beloved deserves to be treated in faith insofar as she is good and beneficent. External fidelity to the beloved is thus not submission to external pressure, or even to so called ideological brute force, to the socio-political dimension of marriage for instance, but fidelity to the conviction to undergo experience, to enjoy eros, to be happy, - insofar as it retains a traumatic and irrational character: far from hiding its full authority, this traumatic, non-integrated character of the conviction to undergo experiences, to be happy and to love, for instance, is a positive character of it.
The fear of a loss of self-identity in response to beholding the multitude, which has not yet stimulated the courage to undergo experiences, the courage for eros to direct himself upon the Other as beloved in order to preserve his self-identity as desirer, is effectively a shuddering, or what Plato calls phrike in the Phaedrus, the uncontrollable anxiety and shivering that comes over one at the sight of the beloved; for it is in the beloved that repulsion for the Others is allowed to linger, as the das Hendentrende of the entire primordiality, a primordiality which can be comprehended in terms of a triad: fear, courage, repulsion. This phrike is not, however, a direct response in proximity to the beloved, as in Levinas - but the premonition of a genuine subjectivity, receptive to Penia - the needs of the beloved, and also to Poros, - to the euporia of metaphysical and Climacusian, all-consuming desire. Phrike, the fear of losing self-identity, opens up the seemingly irreconcilable orders of affectivity to Adorno's das Hinzutretende in the form of their immanent/somatic and metaphysical/transcendental orders, (orders which in complete abstraction, viz. as formalisms of eros, are typified by narcisism and infatuation) analagous to Adorno's intramental and extramental states; to the 'physical addenum' to Kant's idea of freedom, the originally untamed impulse, 'the rudiment of a phase in which the dualism of extramental and intramental ( as in the somatic and mental orders of affectivity) was not thoroughly consolidated yet, neither volitively bridgeable nor an ontological ultimate.' Moreover, this phrike opens up a novel stimulus to pleasure, to ero's 'mystic authority':
"The old hedonism in the philosophy of eros must focalise in what it claims to be a perverse implication of the ideal of the profane, namely the
notion that the darker and earthly aspects of eros ought to yield something approximating pleasure. Actually, the
ideal of this earthliness does no more and no less than postulate that eros, properly understood, must find happiness
in nothing besides its ability to stand its own ground, and to receive its earthly measure. This happiness illuminates
the sensuous phenomena from the inside, hominem facit res una contiguum Deo, servare lapsos. [Hugo Grotii
Sophompaneas] Just as in the internally consistent relationship of Eros with regard to the beloved spirit penetrates
even the most impermeable phenomena, redeeming them sensuously, as it were, so the profane too - the antithesis of
the fraudulent sensuality of philia - has a sensual appeal. For Eros, there is more pleasure in dissonance than in
consonance, for there is a kind of pleasure in true love's objectively determined impossibility, a thought that metes
out justice to hedonism, measure for measure. This discordant moment of realization, dynamically honed to a point
and clearly set off from the homogeneous mass of affirmative moments in the passions and affections, becomes a
stimulus of pleasure itself. "
In this sense the das Hinzutretende, what is not eliminated in the abstraction to narcism and infatuation, viz. the repulsion toward the multitude, is a condition for true erotic consciousness. If we maintain that this das Hinzutretende may, at most, be sublimated, we may infer that its complete elimination would render genuine loving, genuine engagement with the beloved, impossible. Hence the freedom of Kant's transcendental subject is entirely an illusion dia Phaidron, and by that extension dia Phaidron, so the freedom of the beloved is illusory, viz. a freedom from the multitude, because it cannot be asserted on the basis of transcendental subjectivity, on the basis of an 'eros trapped in reification' :
"Eros, like Psyche, is compatible with experiences of an order of magnitude similar to
itself. Just as pathos mediates and sets up the boundary of emotional life, thymos sets up the boundary of erotic life.
If the object of this experience is raised out of proportion to Eros, if Eros defies the earthly measure given him by
Thymos, then Eros does no longer truly experience it, but registers it dia Phaidron and unmediatedly, through the
daemon and its non-intuitive concept, as desire, and therefor as something extrinsic to itself, something
incommensurable, to which the latter relates as coldly as to the catastrophic shock; even as Stesichorus, to avoid
becoming blind, exonerates the beautiful Helen from her responsibility for the Trojan War."
Levinas writes:
"All the transfers of sentiment ... could not take root in the ego were it not, in its entire being, or rather its entire nonbeing, subjected not to a category, as in the case of matter, but to an unlimited accusative."
NARCISISM AND INFATUATION AS THE FORMALISMS OF EROS
We must understand that a condition for Eros as such is das Hinzutretende; that moment in which the immanent and transcendental orders of affectivity had not yet been broken down into their somatic and intellectual components, and consolidated to either the volition or an ontological ultimate in a variation of Ero's narcisistic/infatuated formalism. Yet narcisism and infatuation, and any other love which reduces eros to his first principle, destroys it; in effect, contaminating das Hinzutretende with Ero's pure formalism of self-identity and creating what Adorno called ' a consciousness trapped in reification,' a consciousness in which access to the shudder has been denied. The contamination ammounts to the complete elimination of das Hinxutretende: it ammounts to the total consolidation of one of the orders of affectivity, somatic in the case of infatuation and intellectual in the case of narcisism, to either the volition or an ontological ultimate. With this in mind we may interpret the various forms of 'a consciousness trapped in reification' through an analysis in terms of a variation of the following narcisisitic impulses and infatuated impulses.
1. An example of the total consolidation of the order of somatic affectivity to volition would be infatuation proper, as in intense sexual infatuation.
2. An example of the total consolidation of the order of intellectual affectivity to volition would be the natural proclivity towards monogamous relationship which arises between two deeply involved lovers.
3. An example of the total consolidation of the order of somatic affectivity to an ontological ultimate would result in the orgiastic vision, the multidude of Others which threaten eros's self-identity, viz. through revealing his assimiability to the multitude.
4. An example of the total consolidation of the order of intellectual affectivity to an ontological ultimate: the Other as beloved.
In all of these cases the 'transfer of sentiments' has been prevented from taking place in the ego, by virtue of the absence of the 'unlimited accusative.' In terms of Adorno's 'physical addendum' it may be said that the pronounced lack of freedom on the part of the transcendental subject, the lack of the beloved's freedom from the multitude in absense of the shudder, provokes the total consolidation of affectivity insofar as it does not permit the leftover, the repulsion, das hentrentede to be carried over, insofar as it traps consciousness in refication, such that narcisism and infatution arise as complete formalisms of this reified eros -- exposing the solipsistic materialism which underlies any sexuality, or more generally speaking, any eros without an ethical dimension.
DAS HENTRETENDE AND THE PURE FORMALISM OF EROS'S SELF-IDENTITY
Eros, that is, constitutes an affect in which it is difficult to separate out whether it is the loving subject of the beloved object that is responsible, as it were, for 'generating' the affect. --- Das Hentrente is a precondition of a true eros. Total consolidation of affectivity results in either narcissism or infatuation, but the jump to agape lies in the repulsion towards the orgy, the multiplicity of beautiful objects, the Others on the part of eros, and not in the Levinasian face-to-face with the other. It is in that repulsion that the first ethical constellation appears. For Levinas this constitutive ambiguity - that erotic desire begins 'in' neither the subject nor the object exclusively, and that it is simultaneously psychic/somatic - becomes separated out into its narcissistic and Other-regarding components; the former the aspect of immanence, the latter of transcendence. In my view, it is the repulsion towards the orgiastic vision of the Others which induces Eros to begin evolving within an ethical dimension, and not the transcendental face-to-face with the Other. The primordial ontological moment, in being located within Ero's repulsion towards the orgiastic vision of the Others, is simultaneously exonerated from ethics; such that ethics is reduced to eros. In Levinas the immanent aspect which comes from and returns to the lover is associated with need; in its transcendent aspect - that which comes from and goes to the Other - it is associated with metaphysical desire. The ambiguity which gives rise to eros then becomes the problem of the tendency of metaphysical desire to turn into selfish sensual concupiscence. My view resolves this problem in that this perversity results from a total consolidation of affectivity to either a somatic or intellectual order. The primordial repulsion abrupts the consolidation of affections and prevents the development of narcissism and infatuation. That primordial repulsion is Ero's resolution in fecundity. Transcendence, or metaphysical desire, would be a ceaseless movement towards exteriority, towards the Other, while eros, for Levinas, completes a circular movement back to the self in its seemingly inevitable transformation into the satisfaction of a need. The other exists only for the satisfaction of my desires. I ultimately am only concerned with myself. Thus the character of eros - eros without fecundity - is essentially unethical, or perhaps non-ethical. This is the judgment on eros when eros is described - and described very well - as the affective state of voluptuosity, very different from the formal structure outlined in the earlier work. This eros, affective eros, manic eros, must be overcome in the name of both transcendence and ethics. But again, in my view, primordial repulsion abrupts the consolidation of the orders of somatic and metaphysical or intellectual affectivty, such that the das Hentretende is preserved from contamination by ero's pure formalism, and eros is forced to ocupy an ethical dimension, a dimension of activities we might say occluded from both the spheres of narcissism and infatuation, and insofar as Eros is provoked, in response to primordial repulsion, to direct himself upon the beloved alone, not in what Zizek calls an act of privileging, but insofar as the orgy as such collapses ero's formalism, in terms of his self-identity, - in what can be called the 'courage to undergo experiences.' The turn from repulsion or even grotesque fear to courage, from the orgiastic vision, from the Others to the Other, then constitutes the primary ethical dimension, in which eros is operative as such. The Others reveal, in the midst of self-satisfaction, in the midst of Eros's pure formalism, an insufficiency in Eros's pure formalism, an insufficiency in the terms of the weakness of Eros's self-identity, an insufficiency exemplified in the third of the narcissistic-infatuated impulses, viz. Eros's assimiability. The exteriority foreign to the need generated from this insufficiency, the need of the Other, the one towards which Eros can direct himself out of repulsion towards the orgy, would then reveal an insufficiency full of sufficiency, full not only of hope but of courage, a contact more precious than distance, a possession more important than any non-possession, a hunger which is so pleasurably satisfied in every moment of its very appearance. This is not some romantic dream, but what, from the beginning of this research imposed itself as agape. Agape does not coincide with the Other which implores universal, infinite, and unconditional love: it is situated beyond the Other which is loved conditionally or unconditionally. This exteriority is not an affectively hollowed out space in which eros and ethics can each breed and feed upon and magnify their own hunger, but rather a space in which the need for the Other is immediately satisfied in its every appearance, in effect, a space in which ethics as metaphysical need and desire has been reduced to Eros. Levinas states: 'What is termed an affective state does not have the dull monotony of a state, but is a vibrant exaltation in which dawns the self.' But here he does not discern that the moment of affectivity itself, which I have borrowed the term das Hentretende from adorno to specify, may be contaminated with the pure formalism of eros's self identity, in narcissism and infatuation, and it is in these two perversions of eros that the affective state certainly obtains to the dull monotony of a state, in effect, the death of eros. Strange then that, in Levinas, thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, and warming one's self in the sun, should all be 'vibrant exaltations' but eros is not. But of course, is my view, eros is; and eros can be evoked in the world jouissance or enjoyment. Primordial repulsion abrupts the consolidation of affectivity and prevents the das Hentrentede from contamination by the pure formalism of eros, effectively opening up or revealing an agape in which Eros does not itself interrupt enjoyment thus defined, in other words, das Hentrentede is prevented from being contaiminated intosofar as repulsion, as the lingering of the primordial, effectively includes Eros within the primordial. Love is a courageous act born of a primordial fear, the fear of loss of self-identity, beheld in the vision of the multitude of Others, in the Orgy, whereby the Other is grasped in an attempt to prevent self-identity from being lost in assimilation to the Others, while simultaenously introducing a radical imbalce into the structure of the multitude, generating reupulsion towards the Others as the lingering or after effect, as the das Hentretende of primordiality.
AFFECTIVITY RECONSIDERED
Now the true erotic consciousness is not a vaguely conceived kairos on the part of meeting a beautiful woman. If it were, it would merely sanction the temporal course of the world that is all but the unfolding of a divine love. Correctly understood - and speaking from the perspective of possible salvation - true erotic consciousness refers to the most progressive and transformational, as opposed to salvific consciousness, which is one that is aware of the viciousness and of the passions, as well of the dissonances within the horizon of its possible reconciliation. 3
Does Eros seep relentlessly back into the places from which Levinas would banish it, does it reintroduce the constitutive ambiguity at the heart of affectivity, muddying the clear pool in which is reflected only a ghostly figure of a transcendent intelligibility, or can the orders of affectivity, seemingly irreoncilable, be deduced from narcisism and infatuation as purely consolidated formalisms of eros? If they can, it must be possible to reinterpret eros in other terms besides its narcissistic-infatuated formalisms. Nicolai Hartmann writes, " Indeed there is such a thing as the courage to live, to undergo experiences, to see things through and to know their quality, not less than the courage to be happy. Thus it comes about that merely participant wisdom refers us step by step to the complementary virtue of courage." Eros belongs wholly to the order of affections for the sole reason that he is enjoyed. That is the mystic basis of its authority. Anyone who tries to bring Eros back to its first principle, the courage to undergo experiences and to be happy, destroys it, separates it from the shudder and traps it in reification:
"The contemplation of love must learn to yield to the abandon: to receive love, in all it's frustrations and antinomies, without subjecting it to an order it essentialy denies. Eros belongs to the realm of appearances, to the semblances of beauty apprised by a thymos, by a spiritedness which ultimately bears a man towards the beloved alone, and would like to bypass this latter, forma boni: formosa venus viz. through an agapic vision of the beloved: o curue in terras anime: celestium inanes quid iunat illecebris mentes involuuere carnis quid fuigitiua iuuant fallacis gaudia sensus quid fucatus honos quid adultera forma quod auro intertexta chlamis: quid cyclas choa, quid aule conditio attalice quid veri vera propinat forma boni: formosa venus. [Badius Ascensius Jodocus in Argentoratum P. 23] Love, in it's subjectivity, never seeks, however, to substitute itself through the semblances of beauty in an erotic fashion, as through a symptom, in place of the body of the beloved: phusichon me meton stergein philei eu men gao esches, tis epiplastou charis; eu s an amartes phusechu duschlera enegchen ouden to peplasmenon pleon. [Arsenios] Theoleptos of Philadelpheia in his monastic discourses says: "The perfection of virtue weaves a garment of love; love preserves the soul and bestows splendour and pleasure on it through the beauty of union with God. When love sees that the soul is stripped by the virtues of all worldly desire, it immediately enfolds the soul as with a garment." Eros, when it superordinates over the semblances of beauty, negates the reality of the beloved, and holds up to the beloved what therefor does not and cannot resemble it; invise divis Gorgoneum caput, quid machninaris tela Cyclopea, frustraque, ludis, & taducos ingeminas per inane bombos. [Nicolas Caussin in Felicitas]"
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