Download Subtitles for Nick Land's Fanged Noumena Lecture 2

Hey, how's it going? This is Chad H reporting from Southern India. I'd like to continue the series of videos in our group reading of Nickland's Fang Nomina. In this second lecture, we will examine the essay Narcissism and dispersion in Haidiger's 1953 Trole interpretation. All right. So, if we go ahead and get into the essay itself, we'll notice that um Land opens his own essay about Haidiger's essay about Truckle's poem by asking the legitimate question whether that essay by Haidiger succeeds in um doing any of the things which we would normally expect an essay about a poem to do. For example, it would seem perfectly reasonable to expect an essay about a poem to succeed in telling us something. for example, telling us something about poetry or um history or even language in general to um go through the list of hypothetical items which Land himself puts forth. Land asks though not only um whether the poem succeeds in in conveying information about those topics, but um asks instead whether it succeeds in doing anything at all. Now, you'd have to I I guess be familiar with the later Hideiger to see the humor in this uh borderline sarcastic set of questions which Land opens the essay with in so far as Land is really trying to um make a joke about all of the things which he himself obviously knew that the later Haidiger um did not think about language. A reader familiar with the later Haidiger will recall that um he largely sought to overturn our common sense ideas about language. Above all the idea that language is in itself nothing more than a tool which we humans use in order to accomplish tasks which are teologically oriented towards some goal. Above all, the task which humans think they use language to accomplish is to convey information from one person to another through reducing language to a set of words which are themselves understood to be so many labels which can be arbitrarily but still reliably correlated with various objects out there in the quote unquote real world. These labels under this view can allow anybody who speaks that language to reach an intersubjective consensus regarding some shared meaning which would be universally transmissible to anyone else in the social network in the more traditional sense of that now widely abused term. If you look closely though, each of the things which land implicitly admits right from the start that um Haidiger fails to use language to do in this um short list um is really just another instance of using language as a tool to convey information about a given topic or subject matter. His own examples of poetry, history, and language in general, however, is something of a loose set in which one of these um items doesn't really fit. Because if you really think about it, um language, the final item he cites, um is uh would would be a strange uh contender for the subject matter which language is supposed to tell us about because even if succeeded in doing that, that would be a case of language telling us about itself, which would imply a circular relationship, which Land himself later reveals to be more like narcissist relation to his own reflection in a pool of water, which of led him to drown in his own self-love. The alternative to that circular narcissism is of course the kind of dispersion which makes up the second half of that part of the title to Nick Lan's essay. We'll notice that H Highiger's supposed failure to use language successfully to do anything productive with the poem by Truckle might be compared not coincidentally to Tral's own failures to do anything productive in his own life since after all the biography of the man tells us that he only ended up getting lost in drugs, alcohol, and psychological ailments. Lan reminds us that the man's failure is violently traumatic in an almost positive sense of an intensive excess. And this must be kept in mind when recognizing his poetic style as a quote unquote dissolution of every criterion for evaluation. In so far as we can interpret the man's poetry, this act of interpretation cannot ever be thought of as a simple act of obtaining mastery over these quote unquote traumatized signs. nor should we even attempt to do so. Lan tells us that Trole did not use language to linearly develop one single coherent argument as instead H highaidiger um himself use the metaphor of a wave to describe something which repeatedly builds itself up into an intensity which crashes before receding and then returning again in the same movement towards the shore. Lan tells us that Haidiger had avoided the European tradition of aesthetic theory when discussing trle because any attempt to re-ransate a given poem into a clearer language of philosophical mastery only leads to the creation of a new meta language and a corresponding metaphysics which would negate the goal of allowing the poem to give us that impersonal thinking which would no longer be tied down to a thinking which belongs to any one subject. This impersonal thinking which is not just my own use of language allows language to come to itself in a speaking which has no need for any teological orientation towards getting stuff done for me. The later Haidiger was of course concerned with poetry above all other forms of language because the poem is what allows language to be freed up to concern itself with itself and only with itself rather than say communicate information about external facts, objects or subject matters. Land dares to ask though whether language's concern with itself is inherently narcissistic, for that would imply a circular desire which leads back to itself. Under those grounds, language would seem to have an autoerotic desire for its own self. But we must recall from the myth of narcissists that this selfdesiring led him to fall into the pool and drown. As the opening chapter of Moby Dick warns that the sailors in the story can also paradoxically gaze into the deepest ocean which spans the whole earth but still only ever see themselves and find that in so far as a deeper truth lies below the surface of that water it is only one's own death which one will find by drowning. At any rate, to return to Lan's essay, he notes that Haidiger's own reinterpret reinterpretation of Nichzche's eternal return was more like this circular return of language to itself than the alternative of say the Freudian cliche of the death drive. The death drive, in contrast, is a return to the inorganic through the idea that quote unquote, "We're alive now, but we wish to return to a state of inanimate matter." Len questions whether Haidiger's preference for languages narcissism over the Freudian death drive is, in properly psychoanalytic terms, a repression in itself. But we'll have to return to this question much later to see the answer. At any rate, we can finally consider that the only poem cited in its entirety in this essay by Haidiger is Truckle's Gista Damong. Land notes that Haidiger's um own discourse on the poem about languages self-love is itself circular in essence for there is no clear point where Haidiger's discussion of the poem begins. A little bit like how Leonardo DiCaprio's character in the film Inception noted that one never actually sees the beginning of the dream. For once one realizes one is dreaming, one is already deep in the middle of that same dream. The poem speaks of something like a wild beast. But Lan criticizes the translation of the German word vilt as inadequate. For what is being discussed here is more like a feral animal which would be hunted as game. Not coincidentally, a feral animal as one which is vil lives in the forest or vault. Even if we have this animological clarification, the question remains, who exactly is this mysterious beast which has gone feral and now lives in a dark forest? Well, the mysterious blue beast mentioned in the poem is presented as something of a threshold between animal as such and a certain opening of the horizon of Daazine where being can interpret itself. And therefore, it's not really a wild animal so much as it presents an edible riddle for which the answer is once again just me. The blue beast in the poem is just man himself. Lan tells us that the kind of thinking opened up by that hermeneutical horizon which that thing does sort of have access to is not reducible to any sort of biological calculation which even a very sophisticated animal might be capable of. For this hermeneutics concerns itself with the temporalization of the ontological difference or the difference between being and beings. But in so far as the ontological differences dealt with in classical philosophy, it is through the hermeneutical space of a transcendental thinking or as Kant tells us a type of reflective thinking which is carried out by a subject with that unique power of reflective reflective transcendental thinking which is for that reason also a narcissistic circle through which the human animal uses its thinking to think about its own reflective thought and the limits of its reason. We must ask at this point which reflection yields the reflection of daine as that which exists fully behind any idea of mere animality. Well, it's no coincidence that even within this poem itself, the thing which allows us to reflect is a pool lying nearby much like the one which narcissist himself had fallen into. Lan asks then the legitimate question whether we desire ourselves like he did but notes that the poem itself does not provide a conclusive answer one way or the other regarding this problem. One thing which is clear from the poem though is that what returns to us from that pool is not the image which we had sought out. In fact, what returns to us from the pool is no image at all, but instead only the groundlessness of Daine as a certain oblig. To understand this groundlessness though, we have to make another quick detour into Haidiger's obscure talk, what is metaphysics? A text which um at least 10 years ago when I was in college um was not really officially translated from German into English. So when I was in undergrad, my professor had to provide his own translation um while teaching it. Um, I had a I still have a physical copy of that translation with all of his footnotes and I made a full video over it um for YouTube back in July 2018, which I've provided a link for in the video description um which I'd recommend you to check out. But for our purposes um the big theme of relevance here is the idea of a certain groundlessness of da which does indeed make it meaningful to speak of nothing. Now, Haidiger noted from the start of this talk that the idea of nothing really cannot be discussed anywhere except in philosophy because um science and even logic tell us that um nothing is not only useless but it's also impossible. In so far as logic allows us to speak of that which is not. It presumes that this negation is always a higher order operation which had to have been applied to something which already was. The idea of an obkund is for Heidi however not simply a negation of some more originarily given positivity of some other object on which this relation would be parasitic. It is rather something which the original German wording escaped nisht um reveals in a way that I guess is only ever you know imperfectly translated into English. If you look at the um German wording esipnished that could obviously uh mean um the uh intuitive uh sense of something which uh does not exist because esipped means there is. So if esnished it means it doesn't exist. But um it could also mean that nothing is given okay or that it is somehow disclosed to us within experience but on its own terms. Modern science of course assumes that the only thing which is given is data which makes sense on etmological grounds considering that data just is the Latin transliteration of givens. But the giveness of this nothing calls into question the relation to the ground which we would normally take for granted. Grund of course is the German word for the ground that you stand on but also the idea of the grounding of a system or science of knowledge. Right? is therefore the negation of that but is really more like the almost positive idea of an abyss. Grund is also though a word for a type of understanding. So obund Haidiger tells us of the understanding cannot be any faculty of reason but rather something far more fundamental than that. We are somehow familiar with nothing even if we try not to think about it. For we don't know this nothing through subsuming it under a concept in the contine sense we are somehow already thrown to it and it is precisely when we are confronted with being as a whole rather than any one particular being with a little B in experiences like say extreme boredom which does not even have a cause which could be pinned down one particular object like say a really boring movie rather we say it is boring in a very creepy um symmetrical manner to the it which is indeterminate which is more like the mood as a whole which discloses being in all of its groundlessness. The mood which discloses that is of course dread. But this does not disclose the nothing as any sort of object. Rather, in so far as metaphysics goes beyond physics or the ancient Greek idea of ausis or physical nature, it has not taken us to the ultimate being of say medieval scholasticism. It has rather taken us to the groundlessness of the nothing as the obund or the lack of grounding of our own daine. To return to Nick Lan's essay, he notes that we know from H Highiger that this abyss or abundant is the precondition of any ontology. But now suddenly with the nihilism of this groundlessness of Daine established out in the open. Suddenly we find within the poem itself the voice of a mysterious figure called the sister. This voice appears ironically enough after the flight of the Greek gods had, you know, been a historical problem. So the sister is associated with the moon in much the same way that Julius Evol's revolt of the modern world noted a connection between the feminine lunar principle as something which follows after a shift from the golden age of the masculine solar to the successive ages of decline leading to technological modernity as the worst dark age. Well, Land notes here that because the moon gives us a kind of light, but one which shines during the nighttime in so far as we are able to have a world disclosed into visibility by the moon's light. This light is just tracing a path through the darkness. Given that this is a post golden age and post Greek gods era of technological decline, this must be the darkness of nihilism. In so far as any path is traced out for us in that darkness, that path is only a drifting away from the theological metaphysics of long ago and towards something which can now only be identified in the positively negative title of the stranger. The sister's voice is then a transition from the past to the future, but in itself it belongs to neither of them. At this point, suddenly a whole cast of mythical characters appears within the poem. One of these includes a female character who Zeus had an affair with, but who was then tricked by Zeus's wife, Hera, into having Zeus reveal his true form in her presence. Zeus's true godly form was of course so dazzling that no mere mortal could withstand it. So the lover exploded in the presence of Zeus's radiance. Land uses this humorous myth perhaps to warn the reader that any attempt we make to provide a full and clear genealogy of the gods is by definition a repression of this dazzlingly bright lightning bolt. or for the god Bakus, a repression of the drunken frenzy. But such repression misses the point that these excesses are exactly what those gods in themselves are. The only reason why such repression could occur would be to satisfy the needs of civilization to make discontents of its inmates in order to meet the police's requirement for over socialization. That over socialization of course reaches its worst form in the modern technopile SJW. But at any rate, Lan notes that civilization and its discontents also repress or rec or covers over the originary delirium of western history. Because in so far as this history ever does come to be written, this writing is a recursive forgetting of an amnesia that was already there. In other words, writing is the forgetting of a forgetting. But what is the first forgetting? A forgetting of. Well, land tells us it is a forgetting of the lack of any pre-given foundational discourse which could hope to ground even the knowledge of the sciences. This is a lack which is repressed in an act which substitutes another lack for the one which was already there in order to forget the first forgetting. Therefore, we find the sister speaking within the poem, but it is a question whether we can really interpret her words. For in so far as the moon speaks at night, this night is a time of derangement, land tells us. It is all too fitting, then that the kind of person associated with both the darkness of the night and the halflight of the moon is even on a purely etmological level someone who is called a lunatic. The sisters speaking of lunatic words then leads to a transition in which the poem suddenly speaks of a shattered mirror but also of the movement of astronomical stuff. Lan asks what connection there might be between these two themes. Well, if we consider the mirror cracking first, this is something which happens because desire is an excess which explodes any attempt to contain it within the closed circuit of a selfloving reflection. But this explosion coincides with a lunar process um in which the sister no longer sublimates the family's desire of itself. Now with the mirror and circle broken, the family is truly opened up to the possibility of an encounter with radical alterity or radical otherness, a theme which interests Lan over and over again within these books. Is not this alterity though the true uncanny night which negates the familiar light of the day? And is it a coincidence that in so far as the mother has two eyes, they're really two moons? Well, even if we accept these premises, it remains somewhat unclear whether this cracking of the lunar mirror is the dialectical restoration of a first order which had been lost but has now been found again. Or in contrast with this easy pseudo Hegelian reading, Lan asks whether um this must instead coincide with the spreading out of an endless open space. Under these conditions, it would seem that the moon's relation to the stars was ultimately that it just caused their light to fade from sight. But with these stars now restored with the cracking of that moon, their endless space can no longer be repressed into the self-encclosed circle. For now we get the kind of difference in itself which deloo referenced in difference and repetition as a pure difference which cannot be reduced to any mathematical overmining in Graham Harmon's sense of that term such as the abstract formula of equality or identity. Lan notes that we repress the threat of such pure difference in itself in order to write the foundation of a cosmology which perverts this dispersion of the stars into just another pseudo science of epistemological containment. It makes sense then that philosophers of all people would tend to repress this dispersion of the stars because the first Greek philosopher Thales had famously made the mistake of falling into the pit while gazing at those same stars. Hegel also expressed discomfort over the topic of the stars in his um nature volume of the three volume encyclopedia because such a dispersion has no ordering to it. Land humorously notes though that this lack of order makes this dispersion of the stars more like the outbreak of a rash which spreads because it is the rash of irrationality. Not sure if the pun is intended or not on his part. But in classical land fashion, he notes that the threat does not come to us from somewhere on the outside. And this is perhaps related to the very strange way that Haidiger never dealt with TroL's many poetic references to lepers because lepers are after all those who are excluded or segregated to a colony lying outside the limits of the city. Well, the rash spreads because any attempt to repress it only leads to an ironic repetition of it in the form of a symptom. In so far as a kind of light is given by such stars, it is not the kind of light which provides the transcendental grounding for the phenomenon to appear clearly in the disclosure of truth. Rather, the light of the stars is just a secondary effect of an uneven distribution of differential intensities which defies any principle of logical ordering. No longer then are we in the realm of metaphysics. This must instead be a stratophysics such that whereas metaphysics is defined by form and law. Stratoysics is an open-ended stratification of impersonal and unconscious intensive positivities. Land notes that such a generation of intensities is possible only due to a certain redundancy. But a redundancy which is more like the redundancy between the 26 letters of the alphabet and the countless words which can be formed from them or the countless sentences which can be formed from those words in turn. Once again each repetition here is a symptom which spreads the rash further without ever containing it. He notes that the flame of the star might seem initially to be like Dawine because it is outside of itself in the literal sense of being explosive. But there is a certain ambiguity in H Highiger regarding whether the flame could be on the one hand the gentle illumination of truth or on the other the devastation of unordered intensities. Yet, the very need to consider a dichotomy between the good binarity of the former and the bad binarity of the latter, which would be one of conflict or antagonism, is one which Nickland accuses Haidiger of um espousing because he was not ready to confront anything except an equally gentle critique of Western metaphysics despite his project of trying to deconstruct exactly that. Nor was Haidiger yet ready to fully acknowledge the real conflict which was building up between the patriarchal boogeois capital and a fluctuating pool of insurrectionary energy tracing its genealogy to the or catastrophe of organic matter to quote land himself. Uh, Land notes that Haidiger responded by simply closing the book, closing his eyes, and perhaps doing so because he still believed in God after all.