Untimely Meditations

1. The Agony of Eros

Byung-Chul Han

2. On Hitler’s Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism

Albrecht Koschorke

3. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects

Byung-Chul Han

4. The Terror of Evidence

Marcus Steinweg

5. All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse

Martin Burckhardt and Dirk Höfer

6. Positive Nihilism: My Confrontation with Heidegger

Hartmut Lange

7. Inconsistencies

Marcus Steinweg

8. Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese

Byung-Chul Han

Inconsistencies

Marcus Steinweg

translated by Amanda DeMarco

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Originally published as Inkonsistenzen in the series Fröhliche Wissenschaft by Matthes & Seitz Berlin: © Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2015. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in PF Din Text Pro by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Steinweg, Marcus, 1971- author. | DeMarco, Amanda, translator.

Title: Inconsistencies / Marcus Steinweg ; translated by Amanda DeMarco.

Other titles: Inkonsistenzen. English

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2017. | Series: Untimely meditations | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017009920 | ISBN 9780262534352 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262343534

Subjects: LCSH: Inconsistency (Logic) | Philosophy, German--21st century.

Classification: LCC BC199.I45 S7413 2017 | DDC 193--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009920

ePub Version 1.0

d_r0

Le plus beau serait de penser dans une forme qu’on aurait inventée.

—Paul Valéry

Table of Contents

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Epigraph

Acrobatics

Game

Arché

Self-Transcendence

Sexuality

Samurai

Violence

Reality

Tiger

Distance

Stage

Vector

Integrity

Hegel

Philosophy

Contemporary Art

Sensitivity

Strength

A Tear in Immanence

Hand

World

Self-Objectification

Drift

Duras

Excess

Element

Floating Architecture

Wandering with Foucault

Toxic Concepts

Crazy?

Leap

Critical?

Derrida with Debord

Stupidity

Self-Implication

Fragmentary

Parrot

Fantasy of Consistency

Subject

Body Intelligence

For Instead of Against

Vision

Love

Extreme

Incommensurability

Assertion

Harmlessness

The Texture of Facts

Culture

Cat

Beauty

Cliché

Finance Romanticism

Dream

A View from Space

Evidence

Tumbling

Meaning

Truth

Virginity Fantasy

Break

Contingency

Fact Esotericism

Beginning

Politics

Sex

Exile

Hiatus

A Question of Perspective?

Subobject

Arrow

Artwork

Journey

Suspension

Deconcentration

Badiou with Derrida

Desubjectification

Decision

Eros

Hurrah-Negativism

Transgression

Antigone

The Obscuring of Evidence

Suicide

Infinitesimal

Ontological Poverty

Equality

Sun

Rift

Definition

There Is No Right-Leaning Thought

Celan

Outside

Consensus

Hyperbole

Reality

Diaphora

Active Nonthought

Blindness

Why?

Moral

Ethics

Vanitas

Definition of Art

Naive Thought?

Sex with Hegel

Breathing Freely

Spinoza

Ghost

Writing

Gentle

Panther

Background

Reason

Nihilism

Emotion

Critical

Self-Loss

Hegel with Kierkegaard

Glue

Creatio Ex Nihilo

Naturally?

Consistency

Ideology

Immanence Idiots

Desire

Contemporaries

Ground

Nothingness

Definition of Art

Abstraction

Heterology

Gadamer and Derrida with Hegel

Continuing to Think

Desert

Doing Nothing

ACROBATICS

The acrobatics of thought includes leaps and somersaults. You could say that it allows the subject to leave the ground of reflection. But doesn’t this very term imply a motion that drags reason behind it, threatening to rupture it? Reflection has nothing to do with taking secure steps on stable ground. The conditions of reflection guarantee that thought cannot be guaranteed. The subject’s only guarantee is that it borders on an abyss, which it cannot bridge. And yet it itself is a sort of bridge—one that reaches into the unknown.

GAME

If it’s true as Georges Bataille claims, that for Friedrich Nietzsche life was in essence a game, then what kind of game is it? Bataille is right to associate it with war insofar as war itself is a game or exercise, before it becomes brutal, violent politics.¹ Gilles Deleuze would say that Nietzsche mounted a war machine that caused the collapse of established values and certainties. The subject qua subject is martial in the sense that it mounts a resistance to the zeitgeist’s muster and commands in order to commit itself to a contingent future. Openness to contingency can only be playful, as it is openness to the world as a game that knows no determination. Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Kostas Axelos, and Deleuze developed the category of the world game into a model in which the cosmos is a game with inconsistent rules. To think is to play because no thought is firmly grounded.² The fathomlessness of thought perforates the subject by inscribing an irreducible contingency within it. It sets it on the path of coincidence, which it attempts to answer with provisional consistency. Each of these attempts at consistency is indebted to engagements with ontological-mathematical inconsistency, which as Daniel Heller-Roazen writes, the Pythagoreans defined as unspeakable (arrhetoi), irrational (alogoi), or incommensurable (asummetroi).³ When confronted with its own fathomlessness, logos becomes playful. You could say that it emancipates itself from myth by integrating myth’s ludic qualities into itself. The logification of myth cannot be logified. It arises from a game that it simultaneously opposes. Nietzsche is just one example of this conflict. He stands at the beginning of logos-metaphysics’ impossible end. His undertaking consists in showing metaphysics its own inconsistency by playing with it. Perhaps, said Bataille, he didn’t completely abstain from philosophy, but he definitely passed over the opportunity to become a philosopher, preferring to devote himself to writing, which allowed him to constantly play with what he wrote.⁴ But it is a game that demands the utmost concentration from its player. The game of thought demands such force and such rigor that in comparison the force and the rigor demanded by construction can give the impression of laxity. The free-floating acrobat is subject to stricter rules than a mason standing on solid ground.⁵ Nietzsche’s game with logos, metaphysics, and their conceptual culture reflects the game of a world without ultimate meaning: He protests against the fact that we assign a purpose to things and to the world. For him, the world has no purpose, and we have no choice but to laugh at that which is.⁶ To laugh at the world as a game that pulls the ground out from under the subject, leaving it to float over the abyss of ontological inconsistency, is to play a game whose meaning remains suspended. A person who is playing the game always finds the power to overcome those horrors that the game entails.⁷ This is ultimately what Nietzsche calls life, actively participating in a game whose meaning proves to be the impossibility of meaning.

ARCHÉ

By translating the ancient Greek word αρχή with the words origin and command, Giorgio Agamben makes the claim that there is no αρχή for command—that is, logos ex nihilo—because the command itself is αρχή—or at least because it takes the place of the origin.⁸ In this, Agamben approaches the ontological axiomatics of two philosophers whose thought culminates in the repudiation of a positively formulated origin (αρχή): Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida. In his notes titled On Certainty, Wittgenstein states, It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.⁹ What Wittgenstein calls the beginning is logos (language or meaning), which assumes the position of the origin. To begin at the beginning doesn’t mean going back to the absolute origin. Wittgenstein’s late thoughts revolve around the absent origin—the missing αρχή—in whose stead a sort of assertion arises that is the architecture of logos, and that Wittgenstein describes as a language game or form of life.¹⁰ It is a construction perched over the abyss of ontological inconsistency. It generates the milieu of consistency that we call reality. But that means that reality is a groundless ground, an entity that itself is not grounded. Its grounding—the level of logos; the system of organization and reference that we call reality—remains groundless. The origin is without origin. This is why Derrida spoke of a prosthesis of origin, which must be believed all the same, whether believable or not.¹¹ Here he approaches the slogan from Wittgenstein’s late work: What I know, I believe.¹² In another proposition, Wittgenstein says, The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.¹³ Can it be said that the thought of Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Agamben all share a structural homology in which the origin, the αρχή, appears as an element that cannot be made logical?

But that would mean that a certain floating and lightness is proper to thought. It indicates a logos that totters with precision. Would that be the logos of art and philosophy?

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE

Philosophy entails opening to the dimension of the exterior, which Jacques Lacan labeled the real. One could—along with Nietzsche as well as Deleuze and Félix Guattari—also speak of chaos. In any case, it’s the experience of a resistance that cannot be internalized, and that drives thought to its limits.¹⁴ The experience of the limit implies that the thinking subject hazards self-transcendence. If there is a subject, then it is a subject of originary self-transcendence that knows itself to be affected by forces that traverse and codify its body of knowledge. In the act of thought, the subject identifies itself