Sunday, September 11, 2016

impalpables

Sometimes the things held are so tiny, it's easy to forget
that there's a smallness of relation you're also holding.
you lose one idea to keep another.

---

almost daily, it seems all of it could disappear
I can't find the way into the way I want to see things, now.

---

The university in ruins/visited by
over-abundance, the redundancy

---

oh, so, really? you wait to be told something you don't know.
and yet everything is something you don't know. every minute
that passes, a tidbit of once what was thought
disappears. next door, everything appears so generally that the edge
also seems immaterial, as in, non-constative.

---

if there's a trend responsible for the demise of the university already in ruins,
it social constructivism, its dispensing with the thought of the regulative.

---

what kind of risk is a silence that doesn't appear to risk anything? doesn't appear to risk
least of all its breaking from that ground of over-abundance/the spoiled, the in ruins?

---

risking that silence is grounds to not be admitted, with one's flocculated words,
from out of hiding. and knowing you might never find what you're looking for,
and that no one there might find it either. still, you risk this, even if some people might ask why
you find yourself without answer

---

a little bit, save refrain, for thought.
in scope, in scale, scapes not returning.

---

if you can't tell the size of what you're looking at, hold it up to something/
hold it up against something. sometimes what you're holding is so tiny,
not even this helps, not even this tells you anything. magnification does nothing.

---

even syntax is misleading, though at first, it seems it could hold/
could hold whatever there is. but there, too, indeterminacy turns to overdetermination,
and it's gone. and you are just where you were all along.

Friday, September 2, 2016

as in, parts



"The exchange from part to whole generates wholes that turn out to be only parts."
--Paul de Man, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant"


In Adorno's writing on damaged life, guilt—the “context of guilt” [Schuldzusammenhang]—is understood as constitutive of postwar society.[1] This phrase, which he uses in the lectures on Metaphysics, noting that “all culture shares the guilt of society [alle Kultur am Schuldzusammenhang der Gesellschaft teilhat]” (153), is key to thinking about how experiences of guilt becomes rewritten according to a model of complicity that functions as the predominant mode of figuring postwar European subjectivity. Even if it is the case that all culture shares in the “context of guilt,” by which Adorno refers to the inextricability of culture and barbarism, there is yet another question here, of how the European subject comes to know this inextricability, which is also a matter of how guilt is experienced. Adorno figures this as a problem of practical knowledge rather than aesthetic experience; insofar as they can be seen via the aesthetic problem of representation, artistic works share this problem of being imbricated in a barbarism they also seek to rise above. In Adorno’s description, culture’s “taking part” in society’s “context of guilt” phrases the latter as given and the former as acting upon it, the latter as a “crime,” and the former as a crime of the second order, of complice. The more colloquial phrasing Adorno uses through these lectures and his lectures on moral philosophy, about how to live a good life in a bad world, is a translation of this scenario. What kind of “good life” one might lead is not a problem Adorno or theorists of compicity take up, rather, the problem is dealing with the apparent necessity of dissolving the terms of the relation of inextricability—a problem for practical knowledge, echoed in aesthetic works. But if culture and society relate to one another through these logics of consumption and sustenance, which may—though do not necessarily need to—lead to an understanding of the social “context [Zusammenhang],” terms of extricability are also equally evident. Although they often get parsed as impossible “in reality”—in the sense that, we could say, it is impossible to isolate one’s psychic reality from social reality, and so forth (even though the obverse, that social reality can be imagined as separate from psychic reality, is often not just possible, but the dominant explanation)—such relations of extricability make it possible to think about how compelling the imagination of oneself as part rather than limit is. In their social untenability, such relations make it possible to think about spaces and cultural experiences that open under what might be called the aesthetic problem of sublimation, in which the relief afforded by state change, as in being able to make this distinction between part and limit, is not available, for one reason or another, including that defenses come to been seen as entirely necessary. The aesthetic problem of sublimation pertains to the illusiveness of the representation’s mediating determination about the kinds of state changes that go into the constitution of a dynamic that becomes construed as necessary, as between culture and barbarism, addressing the extent to which the achievement of the aesthetic is a negotiation of the availability of a perspective as part in contrast to as limit of the Zusammenhang of society. The problem of sublimation acknowledges a constraint on one’s ability to negotiate this perspective, as when the bad world described by Adorno seems not just bad, but as W.R.D Fairbairn might say, “unconditionally bad”—in other words, perhaps not “there” at all. In such a world, the terms and concrete conditions of the “guilt context” of society are apparently so diffuse and vast that everything seems to be a part; poetic modes that point out minute distinctions between sustenance and destruction challenge the idea that what can be used to explain them is actually there. If culture is not just a part of the guilt context of society but one of its limits, part of its task—which Adorno also recognizes and to which he assigns the task of art—is to resist the totalizing context of guilt. Left off, however, is the experience of culture as the expression of this limit, an experience of guilt that is extricable to the extent that it is non-utile. For it is preferable to think of what one “cannot do” when one imagines oneself as a part of the good world, and this is the perspective that complicity always produces; this is what it means, in Adorno’s world, to live (or not) the “good life.” It is preferable, only when one glimpses the alternative, ideas about forms of inaction that are not enough in a bad world—for here, where everything is dissatisfying and/or absent, what can possibly be enough? Only in this scape does asserting what is given assume a certain risk, as also it takes place in relation to what is lost; only here does it mean something to say that there is a there, there.

Adorno’s concern with the adequation of culture to society leads to his 1955 essay “Guilt and Defense,” a qualitative summary of the findings of the Frankfurt School’s Gruppenexperiment, which surveyed Germans about conflicts present in accepting responsibility for Nazism. Adorno describes an “intermediate layer” of “transsubjective elements” that he imagines as a “subjective social-psychological disposition” (52) that spans social and psychological, ultimately explaining how it would be possible for individuals to take responsibility for their part in the context of guilt. If the “transsubjective” means to point to one’s implication in social institutions and discourses, it can be seen as a solution that also holds in place a certain dynamic between guilt and complicity, and maintains a set of assumptions about part/whole relations, more generally. Adorno describes this dynamic in the following way:
Instead, it is most often a matter of trying to reconcile one’s own excessive identification with the collective to which one belongs with the knowledge of the crime: one denies or minimizes this knowledge so that one does not lose the possibility of identifying with the collective to which one belongs, which is the only thing that psychologically allows countless people to overcome the unbearable feeling of their own powerlessness. (53)
Here, Adorno positions the “unbearable feeling of…powerlessness” as that against which a certain tension between identification with a collective and knowledge of a crime defends. As Adorno argues, “identifying with the collective to which one belongs” is preferable to feeling powerless in committing a crime, and this amounts to the difference between living in a conditionally bad versus an unconditionally bad world, a world, which Fairbairn describes as a world ruled by god versus one ruled by the devil.[2] Denial or minimization is read as a defense that allows for identification and the feeling of belonging, and that ultimately protects people from experiencing the “unbearable feeling of their own powerlessness.” This dynamic of complicity, in which such a denial or minimization of knowledge secures a feeling of belonging, has the secondary but perhaps more significant function of holding away an experience of guilt that might come upon one as the feeling of this powerlessness. While we can glimpse, from Adorno’s perspective, the threat posed to the coherence of society by this guilt or powerlessness, we can also see that in his work, the maintenance of the dialectic, including the dialectic of civilization and barbarism—another iteration of the dynamic between the “possibility of identifying with a collective” and “knowledge of the crime”—serves a conservative function, in still protecting the idea of civilization [Kultur] against a more damaging idea about the guilt of society.[3] If the transsubjective refers to these relations of complicity that are secured within the dialectic, the experience of guilt, as a feeling unprotected from this badness, is a nonsubjective registration of the environment of destructiveness. One way of thinking about the contrast in modes I am trying to articulate might be to think about experiences of guilt as the loss of a registration of what is “whole” or total about society—it might be to indicate a realm of experiences in which one’s idea of oneself and others follows more closely a model of relations between part objects than between subject and objects. Experiencing relations as between part objects might be another way of thinking about not being able to afford the relief offered by state change—state changes that pertain to the shifting of attachment and investment (of instinct, for Freud), as for example, involved in experiencing oneself as part of society, or as belonging to it, rather than as a limit. The experience of European subjectivity in the postwar articulates the aesthetic problem of sublimation; there is no insight into or knowledge of destructiveness that can be used to negotiate the relation between one’s part and one’s limit, between one’s experience as a human [menschliches] subject and one’s experience as a metaphysical [metaphysiches] subject. Paul de Man’s reading of Kant’s location of aesthetic judgment as the mediation of pure reason and practical reason pushes in the direction of thinking about conditions that maintain the irreconcilability of these experiences. While it becomes clear that for certain subjects this means the re-entrenchment of an impossible politics of reparation, which counts on establishing not just lyric works but the artwork as a vehicle for change, what is far less clear is what is desirable about situations of imperceptible state change, or when what is desired is the obscuring of change. In much the same way, it’s always clear what sublimation, in its traditional sense as the shifting of instinctual energy from sexual to non-sexual, makes representable, though it’s far less clear what theories of sublimation have to say about how the logic of change governs ideas of the scapes that (part) objects find themselves in.



[1] In his lectures on Metaphysics, Adorno uses the phrase in this way: “all culture shares the guilt of society [alle Kultur am Schuldzusammenhang der Gesellschaft teilhat]” (153).
[2] See W.R.D. Fairbairn, “The Return and Repression of Bad Objects,” page 66-67.
[3] Consider Michael Rothberg’s distinction between guilt and complicity, for example, which I disagree with, in Multidirectional Memory: “The concept of complicity offers a way of thinking about the iterations of the face that neither transcends race and racism, nor subsumes all of the figures into identical subject positions as racist perpetrators. The rhetoric of complicity suggests both a form of binding and a degree of distance: to be complicit is to be responsible (bound to certain events, processes, or people),” but it is not identical to begin guilty. Complicity suggests an ethical binding distinct from legal guilt…[t]o be complicit, as opposed to being guilty, implies at least a minimal distance from the center of events” (250).”

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

softly dying world

soft death the dying that is what
takes place between one moment and another
between the dark times and the postwar

a moment in which it is impossible to think
either of these as not being there
so that dark times and postwar
merge and nothing else emerges
even though there is something else there
where we are

there where
in this domesticated swell
the land—because what is not
clips forward
paces itself out
over all the years

in Minnesota, anywhere,
people look away
from the sides of the road
these minor escarpments
their dearthed insides
and wild overflower
falling forever

something
in the what is not at all rare
in the enabling to fall
think about how softly the whole thing
takes place, has taken place
the falling off
the falling into
the falling away

the fall out

the falling without
feeling the falling forever

Thursday, July 14, 2016

July 3, 2016

ecotonal innards

flattened squirrels

it's not that hot but
everyone says it is

minnesota, good city

all kind of withdrawal
sigh your little sigh

what else, but without end, to feel--
you might as well stop

the bad world, the one we live in:
no one sees it as such. sigh your
little sigh. the neighborhood blasts

how could they not be? how could they be anything other than
the blasts this week in Dhaka, Istanbul, Baghdad

coming home to roost?

living at the poles, it's possible to feel
you've no part in them, in any of it, except all of it

if you take words in your mouth, they'll likely come back up again
as ether

thistle troves rarefied--

anyone who lives after
may also mistake the airs

of this midsummer flowering
(sentient nostalgia, what else?)

for the descent of cluster flies
fleeing.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

alles verloren, die Gedichte zuerst

Alles verloren, die Gedichte zuerst
dann den Schlaf, dann den Tag dazu
dann das alles dazu, was am Tag war
und was in der Nacht, dann als nichts
mehr, noch verloren, weiterverloren
bis weniger als nichts und ich nicht mehr
und schon gar nichts war,

Rückzug muss ein inneres Hinterland
mit allen verbriefte Jahre und gesehene Orte
noch vor den Augen, da die Erde
nicht mehr und keine Schmach, dann
hinten noch immer ein Raum
krallenumflogene Weiten für Taube, Stumme
Helle ruflange Weiten für er
die Ankunft, Erstummter

Für den Erstummten die Wüstenei
mit dem verständlichen Gespinnst
das sanft seinen Wahnsinn einpuppt
bis er das gläserne Hotel malt,


Ingeborg Bachmann, 1962-1963

Saturday, June 18, 2016

"self-incurred minority"

What, then, does the “intellectual elite” discover as it begins to take stock of its feelings? Those feelings themselves? They have long since been remaindered. What is left is the empty spaces, where, in dusty heart-shaped velvet trays, the feelings--nature and love, enthusiasm and humanity--once rested. Now the hollow forms are absentmindedly caressed. 
[Was findet “die geistige Elite,” die an die Bestandaufnahmne ihrer Gefühle herantritt, den vor? Diese selbst etwa? Sie sind längst verramscht worden. Was blieb, sind die leeren Stellen, wo in verstaubten Sammetherzen die Gefühle—Natur und Liebe, Enthusiasmus und Menschlichkeit—einmal gelegen haben. Nun liebkost man geistabwesend die Hohlform.]

--Walter Benjamin, "Left-wing Melancholy”

In "The University and the Undercommons," Fred Moten and Stefano Harney dwell on Kant's phrase, which opens "What Is Enlightenment?," of a "self-incurred minority" [selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit]. They are talking about a stage of "teaching for food," which is either surpassed if one is "successful" or consigned to the sociopathological labor of the university. Moten and Harney propose that those who refuse to move past this stage remain in the "beyond of teaching," continuing to take sustenance from others around them. Kant's notion of the selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit refers, as M & H also parse, to "having the 'determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.'” Schuld--here the root of selbstverschuldeten--both "debt," as its translation "self-incurred" seems to imply, and "guilt." And Unmündigkeit, which M & H take as "minorities," carries mündig, "to be of age," "mature," "responsible," within. I'm drawn to this double implication of "guilt" and "responsibility" as minor terms of this phrase. How is being not "of age" something that is brought about by one's own fault? How does being "one's own fault" relate to what on the other side is a "being guided by another"? At what point is it not a stage that persists, but the guilt/debt itself? And at what point (at that point?) is this "eines anderes" also not "another"? Where, when does this become a personification of something like a holding environment? Is there a determination here, about personhood, that arises from the indeterminacy of environment?

Moten and Harney write that "Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them [the self-incurred minority] as waste." Being seen as "waste," as objects sold "at a loss," and thus remaindered in this way--is it from this perspective of feeling something quite irrecuperable about yourself, as your sense of yours and others' estimation of you, of a persistent guilt, that the fuzziness of personhood/environment can also be registered? Then, this describes not so much what there is to be gained from a stage that one persists in (as a kind of self-sacrificial model might have), but it can perhaps help to think about why one might want to remain in such a place, even when all the reasons, social, political, psychological, and otherwise, point to the advantages of not.

There are ample places here to link such a state of Unmündigkeit with Paula Heimann's idea of "children-no-longer," perhaps as the other side of it--for Heimann's "child-no-longer" is not someone who has surpassed such a stage, but someone whose being there "no longer" indexes a firm attachment to, rather than a leaving of, childhood.

It's all happening within my wondering about being able to "return" to a place where I am "no longer"--and so a place where I left my "heart," where my "heart" remains. There's feeling that, and then the badness of that feeling. And there's the not knowing what to do with any of it. There's a question that seems silly and completely besides the point about all of it, and also completely narcissistic, because it's not at all about me, but it's a question about why my return to Irvine, which I had not been able to undertake at any earlier point since I left six years ago, coincided with Joe's death. There's always that question, why?, about death, especially about the deaths of people like Joe, like Frank. It's so futile, it often can't be asked, is not bearable. I had told Imogen about Joe dying when I returned from California three weeks ago. I don't think I've talked about it since then. Today, just a long day of feeling all these things and feeling like there's no place to put them, and no place to return to here, in Minnesota. So it's evening, before bed, and I say, finally, after being beyond and at the edge of tears all day, I'm just feeling so sad. Several minutes later, Imogen says, "Mommy, are you sad because your friend died?" Three weeks, for a three-year-old, is a long time to hold a memory, to hold something in mind. "Yes, I am." "What was his name?" This, I've already told her, too. She's asking not to know, but to be reminded, or to remind me, or to let me know, and it gives me a small place to return to.


Thursday, June 9, 2016

complice in humanity


In his 1931 essay “Left-wing Melancholy,” which presents a critique of the poetry of Erich Kästner, Walter Benjamin makes a proposition about the “task” (Aufgabe) of “political lyric”:
Was Wunder, da sie ihre Funktion darin haben, diesen Typ mit sich selbst zu versöhnen und jene Identität zwischen Berufs- und Privatleben herzustellen, die von diesen Leuten unter dem Namen »Menschlichkeit« verstanden wird, in Wahrheit aber das eigentlich Bestialische ist, weil alle echte Menschlichkeit – unter den heutigen Verhältnissen - nur aus der Spannung zwischen jenen beiden Polen hervorgehen kann. In ihr bilden sich Besinnung und Tat, sie zu schaffen ist die Aufgabe jeder politischen Lyrik, und erfüllt wird sie heute am strengsten in den Gedichten von Brecht.

[It is surprising that their [the poems’] function is to reconcile this type of person to himself, and to establish that identity of professional and private life which these men understand by the name “humanity” but which is in truth the genuinely bestial, since authentic humanity—under present conditions—can arise only from a tension between these two poles. In this tension, consciousness and deed are formed. To create it is the task of the all political lyricism, and today this task is most strictly fulfilled by Bertolt Brecht’s poems.]
In this somewhat involuted formulation, Benjamin describes as the task of political lyric its capacity to create “authentic humanity.” In contrast to recourse to a humanity that is actually “bestial” because it is formed through the identity rather than the difference of professional and private life, “authentic humanity” would be formed through the maintenance of this tension. In Benjamin’s estimation, the easy reconciliation, or identity, of professional and private life involves the absorption of “life” into professional interests, constituting the “bestiality” of bourgeois consciousness. The formulation is marked by the indeterminacy of the object (sie) of this task: sie zu schaffen--“to create it,” humanity; “to accomplish it,” the tension between poles; “to form them,” consciousness and deed. This indeterminacy is not merely an index of overdetermination, of the multiply determinate processes invoked by the task, but points to a series of mediating processes that must be moved through in order to oppose humanity and bestiality in such a way that an idea of “genuine humanity” can also be preserved.

This scene, a scene that retains “genuine humanity” as a possible outcome of not reconciling one to oneself, begins to articulate the terms of complicity upon which political consciousness—and political lyric following the Brechtian model—is based. Benjamin values political lyric because it prevents an individual from becoming reconciled with himself—and from this tension, “consciousness and deed” can be seen to arise. Such tension can be described in the terms of guilt that complicity proposes.

Complicity, Mitschuld, or Teilhaberschaft, is defined as “association or participation in or as if in a wrongful act,” and it’s the “complice” part of this that is important, as it sets up a relation between the act, or crime, i.e. what has been done, and a nebulous idea about what counts as “association or participation” in this act. In this sense, then, the problem that underlies complicity—and onto which this work opens—is a problem of part/whole relations, and how one can be seen, or see oneself, as having a part in a wrongful act. It could be said that complicity raises a question about the phantasy or reality of the wrongful act—and this, perhaps, in a way not dissimilar to the stakes of reality/phantasy in Freud’s thinking about seduction. So if complicity begins with an assumption that there is a crime and therefore someone who can assume guilt for it, it ends more speculatively, with relations of guilt as Freud describes in The Ego and the Id (and/or Civilization and Its Discontents), where something like aggression, the need for punishment, pushes guilt into a fantasy formation. Indeed, it becomes easy to see how complicity is a structure of fantasy. I am interested in relations of “associations or participation” that register at the most minimal level, and thus that hold this question of in what way the notion of “taking part” can be construed. If the effective relation of guilt/aggression holds complicity in place, at once offering an explanation for it and suggesting how it contributes to the compelling hold that complicity seems to have in thinking about political agency. 

In what way—in what place, in what time—is living itself a form of complicity; more: in what way—in what place, in what time—is it not?

Thursday, June 2, 2016

asking too much


the egregiousness of living on, the ontology of death. when laura cubarubbia died in 9th grade, having hung herself in a forested area near her parents' house in ohio, there was no way to understand what had happened. remembering her life, her living, the moment of her death, or the moment of hearing about her death--none of it goes anywhere in thinking about the absence of her in the world. what i'm thinking about now is the feeling that comes with this. there were a couple of the teachers we had been close to, and whom we had all met with the next morning, and they told us not to act like we could just go on, that it was not like any other day. in many ways, that was the only thing to hold onto, the sense that just because everything else did, you didn't have to continue on. already quiet, i didn't have anything to say. i remember that about being in the counselor's office at school, and i remember that about being together with other classmates--not being able to say a thing, and how everything that was said felt like a blow; the incommensurability, a kind of violence enacted by just being there. as if this was asking too much.

i've felt that in the past week, returning to minnesota from california, from the death of someone who was, unlike laura, very distant to me, but part of a community that i feel very close to. there is only a limning of a connection, and yet, there is a loss and an absence that i continue to stumble over, to not get beyond.

writing about the death of her adult son in Time Lived, Without Its Flow, Denise Riley tries to account for an experience of time--located specifically in the experience of a mother following the death of a child--that is the stopping of time. She begins: "I'll not be writing about death, but about an altered condition of life. The experience that not only preoccupied but occupied me was of living in suddenly arrested time: that acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow that can grip you after the sudden death of your child. And a child, it seems, of any age" (7). death as "an altered condition of life." if death is what happens to the dead, then this altered condition is a way of describing how this death--and the person who remains dead--continues to relate to those who (must) live on. a state of insufficiency that is also an asking too much. and then one wonders, what is life ever, if not this?

i've also been thinking in the past months about the acuteness or sensitivity to feeling after a loss of life, after a death, about what opens up here that does not elsewhere and what remains in this space that others seem to want to evacuate too soon, as it's suffocating or a form of death itself. i came to this in thinking about how palpable the sense of loss is to me in indiana, where my young cousin died, now nine years ago in a car accident. it's still not possible to go there, as i did just over a month ago, and not feel that his death lives on. it's not possible to not feel this everywhere, but especially, perhaps, in forms of silence that reach out to you, still. thinking about the poignancy of this, i went to thinking about how, with the death of my dad's mom when i was a year, it would have been quite possible to have a very acute (although unrecognized) sense of one's life being itself the continuing on after/of another's death. my dad's 30+ year depression is in this case not insignificant, itself something that has altered, it seems, only in the past two or so years.

when laura died, all i could see for years was the side of death. it was only possible to see everything about "life" i was learning--i remember it especially in the case high school history--as about death, or end, or stoppage, or disappearance, or non-existence. it was as if it was some kind of hallucination, like the only thing you could see was something that wasn't there for others.

riley writes, "How, then, can I struggle to convey this sharply distinctive life inside a new temporal dimension--while in the same breath I want to save it from being treated as unapproachable, and exceptional? That, straightforwardly enough, might be a question of allowing the myriad specificities of loss their distinctive impacts on lived time" (52). i have questions about what this temporal dimension might be--how to even think of "stopped time," making quick recourse to the tropes of repetition and the kind of stoppage or movement toward stillness that is deliberated there. a temporal dimension that opens up from image loss, or absence of impression, for example, of no longer having something you can "hold in hand," maintain (main-tenir).

all of the photos of california i took after the party were on a camera that i then lost/left behind, somewhere between the car rental place and the airport. probably nothing special, but i wondered, like rei's having lost her keys, if there was a desire for divestment, or a sense of insufficiency, or a hint that that was already asking too much, about continuing.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

preference of paths


Supposing the other letters have not been about love, this one makes its proclamation to the contrary. In a final essay, a student of mine (CC) wrote about the perspective of the object in relation to Margery William’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real. It’s easy to see from the very beginning, how inanimateness or deadness is taken as preceding existence or presence in the world, and that also places emphasis on the use of the term “object” in relation to people; what seems to be a metaphor-concept for people is perhaps more than that already. As CC describes, the rabbit emerges as an object through processes of “real” abstraction, which demonstrate the ways in which its being acted upon is a means of its becoming worn, its “fraying,” a term Derrida takes up from Freud in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (thanks CM for this reference). The difficulty of grasping this process (not just a matter of understanding but of touching/taking hold of/feeling) has a correlate, as CC notes, in Winnicott’s discussion of object relating vs. object use: “Within the context of Winnicott’s understanding of object use there seems to be an implication that object usage is equitable to the love of an object; that the child must destroy the object so that it can love the object, or that in loving the object the child destroys the object. One cannot love an object that they cannot accept is an ‘entity in its own right’ and not simply a ‘bundle of projections,’ for the love of the self-made projected object is simply the love of oneself (Winnicott 118-120).” It’s Williams’s story that adds the terms of love explicitly, and CC’s paper identifies and lingers over these terms.

In thinking about this, I’m interested in how this process of destructiveness “places the object outside,” which is the moment responsible for the object becoming an “entity in its own right,” about which there is an implicit priority. In other scenes, such a placing “outside” is a gesture that is protective or defensive on one side and hallucinatory on the other, part of the distorted perspective of mental abstraction, which registers in complicity’s desire to see oneself there simply so that an “outside” can be experienced or felt as non-illusory. I’m interested in how this constitutive relation detailed in the Winnicottian scene relates to the otherwise protective /defensive gesture. Perhaps, as Balint describes, this indifferentiation accounts for the primacy of primary love, which disregards the object totally. But this prevalence raises a question about the implicit value placed on the “entity in its own right.” If this common work of putting something “outside” brings complicity and love into relation, it’s interesting that love becomes significant because it carries the possibility of feeling that complicity otherwise denies. Love (perhaps here it’s useful to re-invoke preference as Vor-liebe (although below Derrida will cite Freud as using “Bevorzugung)) is able to shore up the inadequacy of complicity not because it is reparative but because it reveals itself (from the perspective of the object) as destructive. This is a possible explanation of how the protective or defensive aspect of complicity also wants to hide from or de-link its destructiveness so that one can continue to love oneself (through others). Maybe that’s much the course of things but I feel radically uninclined in this way.

How to love that which is real about the object, when what is real is the process only of fraying? Derrida writes,
“An equality in resistances to the fraying or an equivalence in the forces fraying would eliminate any preference in choice of itinerary. Memory would be paralysed. It is the difference between frayings which is the real origin of memory and thus of the psyche. Only that difference frees a “preference of path” (Wegbevorzugung): ‘Memory is represented’ (dargestellt) by the differences in the frayings between y-neurones.’ We must then not say that fraying without difference is insufficient for memory; it must be stipulated that there is no pure fraying without difference.”

Memory’s being the “very essence” of the psyche accounts for this imperative. This stipulation turns away, as does Williams’s story, from the Lacanian real as hole or lack. If there is only fraying with difference, we might also say that there is only loving as becoming real, but then how is it that we must also account for so much brokenness, deception, misdirection, errant and irreversible fraying in these processes, when “fraying with difference” seems to displace the insufficiency of conceptualizing “fraying without difference”? Thinking about what is being frayed in this differentiating moment draws me back to CC’s earlier questions about the found/created distinction. Perhaps this is a site of violence (in contrast to destructiveness) where there is played out the demand of this question repeatedly. What if you were to see the processes repeated, the movement of this repetition, even against the seductive appearance of it being for the first time? Is this “entity in its own right” something encountered along the Wegbevorzugung or not, I wonder? And what is the difference between the “preference of path” (Wegbevorzugung) and “fraying” (Bahnung), the “breaking of a path (Bahn)”?