|
Ascolo Parodites
|
Almost every lover knows, at one stage of his development, the "Zopyrian existence," one in which we should do anything it takes to be loved: put out our eyes, burn our lyres. But from this eventually springs up a feeling of desperation that, born from such passions unacquit, nonetheless is not registered as pain, bearing no usual salt for the old wound of solitude, a wound in which formerly all pains were interpreted by the great lover as healing salts. Zopyrus- the form of pre-existence of every Orpheus, the true womanizer, and Thamyris, the true poet, the greatest of lovers. Credis me potuisse meae maledicere vitae ambobus mihi quae carior est oculis?- It is this question, that is the first to be put to the lover,- as a test of conscience. The capacity for despair and the capacity for love are the same, credere, pastores, levibus nolite puellis; Phyllida Mopsus habet, Lycidan habet ultima rerum. The unrestricted openness to experience in which despair is both sewn and bolstered, amounts to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers itself as the object of some love as yet inaccessible to it,- just as the children of Medea who, in giving themselves over to their mother as instruments of her revenge, and for no other reason than, by virtue of the sheer grotesquery of their mother's thought, they could not absorb the injustice which was to be dealt them, find in her the semblance of a love as yet inaccessible to them, but which nonetheless they are compelled to accede. Excess of love is alone the proof of love: that is the most foreboding lesson, which we should take from Medea's children. Even the blooming vine lies the moment that its flower is seen without 'O caecitatem immensame. O atram ingeniorum calignem.' [Laguna's Europa Heauten Timorumene] Even the innocent appreciation of a young girl becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously perverse, and there is no longer love except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in the unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of beauty, even if that may be illusory. This malignant deeper meaning of levity, canis festinas, caecos parit catulos, [Johannes Sinapius in Adversus Ignavium, Et Sordes Eorum sint De Pane Lucrando] should call back to diffidence every act of spontaneity and self abandonment, for such impetuosity implies pliancy towards the superior Apollonian image of the 'beauty of illusion.' Despair is kathartically displaced by love, for what would trepidation be that was not measured by the immeasurable love which it illicits? It is through the image of iniquity, of unjust suffering, that our love for the first time is expressed within the consciousness of its own apropos. Love is bound to the principium individuationis of self-abandonment, - the image of iniquity, which abolishes itself out of its own consistency: love grants to perennial despair as much right to express itself as the martyr has to scream, - none whatsoever. The silence imposed by despair, does not impose the silence of paralysis, it does not impose, at least originally, the implicit and unacknowledged consent to the injustice passively witnessed; it imposes what Adorno calls the velleity of consicence, that is in truth a coenaesthesis, a mere empathy resolved to the primordial affectivity in the human being, an affectivity completely isolated from any transcendental meaning. Empathy becomes, koina aisteta, confirmation of every injustice that exists, in that it trivializes the distinction which must be made between it and the moral catastrophe. With respect to the erotic life, this imposition is nothing less than penia. Eros cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than with any other of his conditions and qualities; desire and destitution, not even with the sui generis of his being the lover of some particular person... there is no element of sanctity in his condition, in his worldly life vulnerable to the inveiglement with the generosities of female form. If Eros is not equivalent to mere life, if he is truly split in his being between penia and mere existence, and poros, some excess, then that excess is, in a way, sentenced to existence, to the burden of penia. This existence, mere life, bears whatever order of vitiation is pronounced upon Eros. It is the site of the injunction of conscience precisely because it is the site of guilt's inscription. As long as there is the mere life of Eros, there will be penia. The context of penia is temporal in a totally inauthentic way, very different in its kind and measure from the time of redemption, or of painting, or of a good meal, or of truth. Love, characterized as the immediate disposition towards the image of iniquity, which disavows all existential attitudes, arrives at its objective truth in a moment which leads beyond the delusion of self-abandonment: "Coacta virtus similis hibernae rosae, diuturna non est. Cum nihil potuit amor, justas amoris sustinent partes timor. [Tragico-Comoedia parabolica Androphilus] Yet, the kind of agape which could arouse courage in us exists only in the Diana we might have defiled, in the children we could have killed." This self-abandonment, which Plato speaks of in the Phadrus as a 'saving madness,' is precisely that which the example of Medea's children addresses: it is this alone, this excess of love which is alone the proof of love, which carries Eros beyond his mere life, and through a kind of 'divine violence' re-integrates despair and love in terms of the unanimous capacity for self-abandonment, interrupting the mythic history of the fallen soul, opening Eros up to a divine dimension comparable to that opened by Zerbolt and Climacus. Although the consciousness of despair seems to be a memory inaccessible to any re-enactment in the imagination or sympathy, a moment that has been abolished by the progress of moral consciousness itself, it nevertheless contains in germ all possible moments of the life and future of the moral consciousness, even as 'the heart has its own order,' because it conceals within itself the secret of its own passing, which is of the 'order of intellect.' The guilty pressure of self abandonment has withstood, perhaps even strengthened itself on the unceasing moral catastrophe. Only self-abandonment must suspect, that the life in which it fortifies itself, is becoming what it shudders at: not a love at all, but a mere sensation which the waking consciousness sees through as non-existent. The guilt of love, what as pure factum already takes our lover's breath away, before we have even to tell her we love her, is no longer to be reconciled with life, or even with our waking thought: this girl, who presently I might only have bared to look at under the rays of Apollo, now I must entrust to the hands of Onerioi, because she frightens me even more then those terrible brothers do. The image of this world's iniquity must be kept in nightmares, for as a reality it defies the most grotesque imaginations of the waking mind. Unimaginable horror separates love, in its mere affectivity, from the injunction of conscience by the sharp edge of despair and constitutes it as 'genuine love,' as agape, which may be interpreted as a mere vainglory against the world, taken up from the perspective of a temporary respite from its catastrophe; it co-operates thus with the growth of interrogative thought, and to a seeming solicitude for the general welfare of mankind, which perhaps owes more to the problem of evil than to the enigmas of the Chinese calender. Because it is the possible truth of the apropos of agape, of universal love for mankind, the unimaginable catastrophe of world-history preserves the reality of my empathy beyond the consciousness of my possessing it, and more particularly the reality of injustice beyond the feeling of shame and guilt. Despair may be properly defined, that moment of conscience which opposes to the equalitarian experience of love the graduated experience of shame, and by virtue of the total consistency of this opposition reveals to love the moment of its objective truth, its incommensurability with the genuine image, of the truth of iniquity: Eros then registers its object 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 with Eros as to the moral catastrophe; even as Stesichorus, to avoid becoming blind, exonerates the beautiful Helen from her responsibility for the Trojan War. The consciousness of love, on the other hand, congealed into the apparition of waking thought, arises from the decomposition of the empathic response into despair and the image of iniquity, respectively. The incommensurability effected thereby, between love and iniquity, is the very constitution of the moment of love's objective realization: this moment snaps us out of our merely subjective affectation towards individual woman, for instance, and reintroduces us to despair proper, and to the apropos of a universal love for all mankind. One therein, through love, experiences the shock, that the deeper, the more powerfully love penetrates the depths of the world's nightmare to redeem it of its iniquity, the greater the waking suspicion that it would be distancing itself from how things really are. To treat the oneiric as an object of discursive thought would be heinous: in it the moment of the supplementary in love can be bodily felt, the image of iniquity which supplements love but which, by virtue of the consistency of its opposition to it, is incommensurable with love. Bodily, because it is the anxiety and despair, hyperbolized well beyond its mere veniality, of the unbearable pain inflicted upon on individuals, even after love, as an intellectual form of empathizing, is on the point of disappearing. Medea, the first wholly self-aware and despondently self-reflecting individual, experienced her own self as an ultimately destructive power when carried outside the bounds of her own country and her ancient God. In her the absolute experience of the individual as the self, and the awareness of the self's usurpatory and murderous potential, when deprived of its essence as something capable of political and social impact, are coincided and reduced to silence, to passive consent to whatever use is being made of the murderous powers of the will. Medea herself claims that she was bound to break the codes. Diffidence is a moral category. The separation of theodicy and the possibility of consoling victims of the unspeakable, which makes it possible to say, blessed are these vain little Elihus, hypostasizes the historically achieved subsumption of human compassion to its completely negativized form, soteriology. By contrast, it is probably the case today that, because the individual no longer exists, the usurpatory and murderous potential of the will, of individual power, has become something wholly incommensurable with the entire order of personal life, the annihilation of a nothing. The immanent affectivity in the human being, completely isolated from any transcendental meaning, is the staging grounds of despair. In this inescapably dense affectivity human beings perceive iniquity solely as something extrinsic and alien to them, without illusions as to its commensurability with their life. They cannot absorb the fact of slavery and exploitation. An oblique, severed, and even paradoxical piece of hope clings to this fascinatio nugacitatis, however, as something which might be preserved from from such an illusion: precisely because injustice does not, as in Levinas, constitute the entirety of existence, one experiences iniquity and its emissaries, slavery, exploitation, and murder, as heterogeneous, ego-alien. The super-ego would be nothing other than the principle of self-abandonment opposed to iniquity and incapable of absorbing it within the consciousness, which is itself already super-ego.
|
090328
|
