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Ascolo Parodites
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Holderlin writes in an ellipsis: "The wise ones, however, who differentiate only with the mind, and only generally, hasten quickly back into pure Being and fall into an all the greater indifference because they believe to have differentiated, and because they take the non-opposition to which they have returned for an eternal one. They have deceived their nature with the lowest degree of reality, with the shadow of reality, the ideal opposition and differentiation, and nature takes revenge by..." Nature takes revenge through Thanatos, the supreme indifference. Yet who knows, in this world of fire and water, earth and air, rather the other side of our existence, when we think we die, is not another life, seeing that these elements determine our affects, passions, and limitations: these passions are a matter of water and ash, of breathing and suffocating, and all the deepest and most secret aspects, in the Goethian sense, of life. Thanatos is elemental, pure- while Eros has, since the beginning, been permeated with Thanatos. Our passions are transformed or transform us into phenomena that can be earthly or watery, lunar or seismic, blazing with light or lost in shadow. We must not therefor think of the return to the inanimate as a retrogression, but rather perfect ourselves in the reinterpretation and revaluation of death, and thereby reconcile ourselves with what is actual, the dead world, the Empedoclean world, the world of elements. Here it is a question of replacing the Aristotelian entelechy with 'effuse potentiality,' a potentiality which is not actualized, (as entelecheia is actualized in energeia) unless an internal genetic property or externally transmissible property were to give it some particular determination. It is not Eros that is the feeling of life- it is the elemental organizations of Thanatos which Eros gives us access to, through the effuse potentiality of metaphysical desire, that we feel what it is to live. Whereas Thanatos, the ground-less, supported and brought to the surface by Eros, remains essentially silent and all the more terrible, we may never encounter Thanatos: its voice is never heard; for life is lived through and through under the sway of the metaphysical desire. As in Freud, what is called for is an alternative to evolutionary theory which, in the usual case, would ruin the notion of Thanatos by imposing linear causal and development history onto either the ancient drive or the illusion of consecutive, reasonable and discrete moments of man through time. Freud's opposition to evolution is involution as a regressive move towards the inorganic. Yet, to use Adorno's concept of absorption in place of Deleuze's concept of involution in his own re-analysis of Freud's death drive, in what Eros has become; the category of Thanatos is only one element, one that has moreover undergone fundamental change: by absorbing death, the concept of life has been transformed in itself, without, however, psychology being able to dispense with it. In the absorption of thanatos, Eros is strong enough to expand itself by its own opposite: the world of the inanimate, which is no longer to be equated with death. In other words, it is through the expansion of the concept, that Eros obtains to negativity. The absorption of death as the moment of death against itself appears as the transformation of Eros, the principle of life. The subject, then convulsed by eros, has real experiences; by the strength of insight into eros as eros, life as life, these experiences are those in which the subject's petrification in his own subjectivity dissolves and the narrownes of his self-positedness is revealed. If in eros the subject finds his true happiness in the moment of being convulsed, this is a happiness that is counterposed to the subject aand thus its beauty is the veil itself, a veil of tears, which also expresses the grief over ones own mortality. Here the Freudian Urverdrangung, the unpresentable, becomes Thanatos; and Thanatos appears as the truest meaning of the Kantian analytic of the sublime. When Lyotard says that "from time to time the unconscious affective cloud condenses, gets organized, brings on an action, commands a flight without a real motive," this flight without a real motive is none other than the expansion of the concept of Eros, the life-principle. The lie of thanatos consists in the repeated affirmation and rigidification of mere being, Eros, and life,- of that which the course of the world has made of human beings, instead of paying tribute to the unconscious by elevating it to consciousness so as to fulfill its urge and at the same time pacify its destructive force. Death is neither the limitation imposed upon matter by mortal life, nor the opposition between matter and immortal life, which furnishes death its prototype. Death is rather the last form of the rigidification of mere being; in Deleuze's language, the translation of intensities into mere extensive and expansive quantities, and the ultimate repression of the unconscious.
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