On the Aesthetic Stability of Philosophical Systems
It is the beginning of the end of the course, the professor sees the effect on all students, they can invent in their field. The surprise is that these effects are not only in philosophy but about invention in several fields.
For philosophy, the result was abstracted into this schema:
This is an imaginary synthesis of philosophy, thought the professor, even if mysticism and abduction give some coherence to the schema. Indeed, it is not a real synthesis, because we show that philosophy (-ies) is not alone. If it is alone, it is not possible to recognize her as philosophy. We need integrative objects.
How to make? The first step is contingent. The professor thinks of Derrida, because he was not entirely in philosophy, but in the boundaries of philosophy and human sciences.
The para-pharmacy of Derrida
What is the project of Derrida? To show that it is a pharmacy by Plato, implicitly in all of the philosophy. The writing evidently, and what follows the diagram, the cavern, the light of the sun.
The professor so decides to go with his/her students to a special pharmacy, a para-pharmacy, which is a para-philosophical pharmacy.
With the students in the para-philosophical Pharmacy (PPP), they visit a lot of stands. Some of them had the name of a philosopher: Proclus, Wittgenstein, who were a form of therapy, but by writing?
All was in a lived light, and this light, never all white, gave some color to the philosophy.
First, some red: in French: le sang/sans de la coupure pure (blood et without in English). Oh here is just the difference stand, here the posters of Derrida and Laruelle, come in! It is a recitation!
The posters of Derrida and Laruelle
“Immediately after having closed the tomb and covered the excavation site, Kant sets the example of the tulip:” But a flower, for example a tulip, is considered beautiful because, in perceiving it, one finds a finality which, judged as we do, does not refer to any end. ”
The tulip is beautiful only on the edge of this cut without adhesion. But for the cut to appear – and it can only do so according to its border – the interrupted finality must be seen, and as finality and as a break: as a border. The finality alone is not beautiful, the absence of goal either here will be distinguished from the absence of the goal. It is the finality-without-end that is called beautiful (said to be here, as we have seen, the essential). It is thus the without who counts for beauty, neither the finality nor the end, nor the goal which misses, nor the lack of goal but the border in without of the pure cut, the without end-endless.
The tulip is exemplary of the without, the pure cut
on this without which is not a lack, science has nothing to say.
The absence of the pure cut was announced in the disused utensil, defunctum, deprived of its operation, in the sleeveless hole of the machine. “Interrupting a finalized functioning but leaving a trace of it, death always has an essential relation to this cut, the hiatus of this abyss where beauty takes us by surprise.”*
“The flow / cut structure, emission / closure is thus generalized”, it will flow from everywhere in Mimesis, it will drink and cure, taste and vomit. Drunkenness, elixir and poisoning. Purge, enema and discharge. Threat of a stream of shit whose evacuation is carefully controlled, cathartically controlled by Aristotle. Not only a scene of vomit, all “Scene” is invaded by a certain red thing. Or it is Nietzsche that Heidegger tells us that the “overthrow” ends in a “spill (Herausdrehen) out of Platonism”. The versions of the Eternal Return will have been spills and flows cut and revived. Potion, vomit or blood, they are all equal flows in their inequality. And the Kantian cut? By what metamorphoses “without the pure cutoff” has it become the blood of the impure cut, of a mimachine cut that cuts and re-emits the flow of pure Kantian analytics, which closes and raises, according to another schema, the flow of Wittgenstein’s analytic language, disrupting the physiological, anthropological and chemical codes of one, and the logical codes of the other? making unequal flows equal to their inequality?**
Philosophy in a red color
Is it the “other” color as red is in philosophy? Something red in the “still life” of philosophical painting.
This double-poster we are talking about, from Derrida and Laruelle, is not a story or a narration. She is an operator (an application of future in philosophy, precisely) that consists of seeing how this endless scene is played. It is a freeze frame that allows any new beginning but remains indifferent. There is philosophy, which gives rise to infinite narratives, but one can construct a fiction that is a kind of new rigor in the way in which philosophy engages philosophy.
Music and sciences
This recitation was a little long, but it gave the idea that all philosophy is not only in words. She can be with colors, with painting! Go on:
Found in the room, Tony plays the harp. He said: the harp is just the good instrument to hear the transcendental, the fluidity and the beauty of these sounds. But I play philosophy beyond the encounters on the Internet, encountered between not only philosophers but between students, these such meetings produce the music.
But where is Joevenn? He takes care of the sciences. If we forget the sciences, it is no more objectivity and relationships with objects. He conducts the stand of Carnap and Neurath: we have to construct a boat to trip on the ocean of the sciences.
The solutions of the students
The students said: are words, harp and boat sufficient to understand philosophy and the other disciplines? Christy said we need the help of history, philosophy is as well a tradition. Artemis gave to our attention the conditions for a good design to process a generic space for philosophies. Ed invented the orientations of light upon this space, Mike proposed a proper context to render it solid, Lenka said to us: don’t forget the poverty, it can be infinite, but reversible… Bettina said to search the beyond, for she will encounter Lenka as Deleuze encounters Nietzsche! For Andrea, all this is too simple, we need to use informatics and cognitive sciences, we have not only words, but symbols, what can be symbols for words, for pictures, for sounds…. Is philosophy compatible with such informatic styles as 2/3? It is not sure, we have to think about this topic.
The professor thought: the students take care of the world, my task is just to help them from the cavern to the universe, if it is not too late for me…. I will ask Patrick, how to turn to help in a good way? I don’t know, it is the unknown for the professor. Patrick constructs a new consortium of research and practice to render easier collective intimacy and shared memory. He said: it is the task for an artist, not for a philosopher alone.
Thank you to you all, that is the last word of the professor. He leaves for the desert of Rousseau, to hear music and for Kant’s sand of the sea, to view it as if there were traces of other humans.
* Jacques Derrida, “The Sans of the Pure Cut” in The Truth in Painting trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 89.
** François Laruelle, “The vomit scene or how it breaks down in theory”, Critique 347 (April 1976) 342.
(Cited in “Quelque chose rouge dans la philosophie »)