Sloterdijk om Adorno och cynism

Adorno tillhörde pionjärerna för en ny kunskapsteori som räknar med ett emotionellt apriori. Hans teori rymmer motiv i en krypto-buddhistisk anda. Den som lider utan att förhärdas kommer att förstå. Den som kan lyssna till musik kan i upplysta ögonblick se över till världens andra sida. Vissheten om att det verkliga i en handskrift nedtecknats under lidande, kyla och hårdhet präglade denna filosofis sätt att närma sig världen. Den trodde visserligen knappast på en förändring till det bättre, men gav inte efter för frestelsen att låta sig avtrubbas och vänja sig vid det givna. Att förbli känslig var så att säga ett utopiskt förhållningssätt – att hålla sinnena skärpta för en lycka som inte kommer, som som genom att vi är beredda på den skyddar oss från förråandets värsta former.
Politiskt och emotionellt har den estetiska, den “känsliga” teorin sin grund i en av sorg, förakt och vrede präglad anklagelse mot allt som innehar makt. Den stiliserar sig till en spegel av världens onda, den borgerliga kylan, herraväldets princip, det smutsiga geschäftet och des profitmotiv.

/…/

Cynismen vågar komma med nakna sanningar, men de framförs på ett sätt som gör att de behåller något osant.

Peter Sloterdijk: Ur inledningen till “Kritik av det cyniska förnuftet” (1981)

Ernst Jünger (ur Eumeswil) om historikerns värv

Jag anser det vara dålig historisk stil att göra sig lustig över förfädernas misstag, utan att respektera den eros som en gång var förbunden med dessa. Vi är inte mindre hemfallna åt tidsandan; narraktigheten gå i arv, vi tar bara på oss en ny kåpa. /…/
Det är inte själva misstagen som retar mig utan det förbrukade, detta idisslande av fraser som en gång i tiden i egenskap av mäktiga ord satte världen i gungning.
Misstag kan lyfta den politiska världen från des gångjärn; men det är med misstag som med sjukdomar: I krisen kan de uträtta en hel del och rentav bota – – – i febern prövas hjärtana. Akut är det ett vattenfall med nya energier; kroniskt en dödlig sot, ett moras. Så rä det ställt i Eumeswil; vi tvinar bort, låt vara blott av brist på idéer, i övrigt har infamin lönat sig.
Bristen på idéer, eller enklare uttryckt på gudar, frammanar en oförklarlig misstämning, nästan som en dimma som solen inte förmår genomtränga. Världen blir färglös; ordet förlorar i substans, framför allt när det uttalas med pretentioner som går utöver det rena meddelandet.

/…/

Som historiker är jag övertygad om hur ofullkomlig, ja utsiktlös, varje ansträngning är. Jag medger att en sen tids övermättnad här kan spela in. Repertoaren av möjligheter tycks vara uttömd. De stora idéerna har genom upprepning slipats ner; med dem kan man inte längre lura ut någon ur den goa värmen. Såtillvida förhåller jag mig, inom min ram, likadant som vem som helst i Eumeswil. Här går man inte ut på gatorna för några idéers skull; det skulle i så fall vara att bröd- och vinpriset har stigit något öre, eller att det har blivit något bråk med tävlingsförarna.

Som historiker är jag skeptisk, som anark är jag på min vakt. Det gynnar mitt välbefinnande, och till och med min humor. Så håller jag ihop min egendom, låt vara inte för mig själv som om jag vore den ende. Min personliga frihet är en vinst vid sidan om. Därutöver står jag i beredskap för det stora sammanträffandet, det absolutas genombrott i tiden. Där tar historien och vetenskapen slut.

/…/

Historikerns ämbete är tragiskt; i sista hand har han med döden och evigheten att skaffa. Härav hans rotande i sopor, hans kretsande kring gravar, hans outsläckliga törst efter källor, hans ängsliga lyssnande till tidens hjärtslag.
Vad kan väl dölja sig bakom den här oron – det har jag ofta frågat mig. Hur förståelig är mig inte vildens ångest när han ser solen försvinna och fruktar att hon inte ska återvända. På en återkomst hoppades den som försvarade mumien i klippan, och vi berövar den dess bindlar för att bekräfta hans – nej våra – förhoppningar. När vi förlänar liv åt det förgångna, lyckas vi med en tidsövervinnande handling, samtidigt so men dödsbetvingande handling förebådar sin ankomst. Om den senare lyckas, är det också tänkbart att en Gud blåser sin andedräkt i oss.

/…/

jag är historiker, och som sådan vet jag vad som kan erbjudas när det gäller idéer, bilder, melodier, byggnader, karaktärer.

/…/

Jag tar alltså mina göromål på allvar inom ett helt, som jag avböjer som torftigt. Härvid är att märka att denna förnekelse avser just av det hela och inte blott röjer någon konservativ, reaktionär, liberal eller ironisk inställning eller vilken annan socialt definierbar inställning som helst. Man bör hålla sig fri från skiktväxlingen i inbördeskriget med dess allt hårdare slit.
Under den förutsättningen kan jag trots allt ta det på allvar som jag här ombesörjer. Jag vet att underlaget rör sig, ungefär som vid ett bergras eller en lavin, – och just för den skull förblir relationerna i detalj orubbade. Jag ligger skevt på en skev slätt. Avstånden mellan människorna förändras inte. Jag ser den rentav skarpare på det här bedrägliga underlaget. Deras läge så nära avgrundens rand manar fram min medkänsla.
Jag betraktar dem ibland som om jag ginge genom gatorn i Pompeii före Vesuvius’ utbrott. Sådant räknas till historikerns njutningar men ännu mer till hans smärta. När vi ser någon göra något för sista gången, om han så bara åt en bit bröd, fördjupas denna handling på ett underbart vis. Vi deltar då i det efemäras förvandling till det sakramentala. Vi anar de tider då denna syn tillhörde även vardagen.

Jag har alltså kommit därhän, att jag lever som om Eumeswil vore en dröm, en lek, eller också ett experiment. Det utesluter inte inre deltagande, så som vi känner det när vi blir gripna av ett skådespel.

/…/

Jag däremot vet ju, att jag inom en skev verklighet under alla förhållanden ligger skevt, och att just denna vetskap gör tänkandet nyktert. När jag handlar, handlar jag inte skevt utan på snedden, alltefter lägets beskaffenhet och utan självmedlidande. Det är en distinktion som man i Eumeswil inte längre kan ta för given.

Bataille’s Peak. Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (introductory chapter)

Allan Stoekl: Bataille’s Peak. Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Introduction. On Shortage, Excess, and Expenditure
At the end of the twentieth century, we were regaled with arguments concerning history: it had ended, we were told. /…/
Barely a few years into the new century, may have concluded that that “posthistorical” ideal is radically insufficient. /…/
In short, energy has been rediscovered. In the 1970s and very early 1980s, first world society was made acutely aware of energy, its limited supplies, and the consequences of energy shortages. A U.S. president (Jimmy Carter) even based his central policies on the idea that energy sources (fossil fuels) were scarce and could only grow scarcer in the coming years. /…/ He was, of course, brusquely turned out of office and replaced by a president (Ronald Reagan) who cheerfully answered that “the free market” would take care of energy supplies forever. Luckily for him, the quantities of fossil fuels available shot up in the mid to late 1980s and throughout the 1990s /…/
As I write this, in 2006, even mainstream news sources have become aware that fuel supplies are fundamentally limited. /…/
The labor of construction of civilization is not over, in other words, history is not at an end, because labor itself is not autonomous: you can’t work or produce anything if you don’t have the fuels (the sources of energy) to do it. The great myth that Man “forms himself” by forming, and transforming, brute matter is over. The idea that Nature is dead is over because fossil fuels were not made by Man, they were only extracted by “him”. They are brutally natural, and their shortage too is a natural shortage (their lack is natural). And when a profound, irremediable shortage of those fuels supervenes, history opens back up. /…/ No one yet wants to think about how History should continue in the absence of an adequate supply of fossil fuels. It is too horrible to think about. Human die-off is quite natural, but it also constitutes an incontrovertible historical event. With the finitude of cheap energy, alas, the end of history is itself finite. But how do we think the end of the end of history?
Now along with a permanent energy crisis, or rather a permanent shortage of cheap fuel supplies, we face another crisis: a permanent religion crisis. It seems as if energy and religion are inseparable issues. /…/
Marxism was the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, because its decline was due to an energy crisis, the first to shock the world since the crises of the late 1970s. Marxism collapsed because its great, worldwide patron, the Soviet Union, collapsed, and the Soviet Union collapsed because it could no longer support itself by selling its oil profitably on the world markets. It was driven into the ground by Saudi Arabia, which in the late 1980s produced so much oil that the world markets became flooded. /…/
The great irony is that religion came to the fore in the very countries whose vast production of fossil fuels had made the Soviet system untenable. The Islamic countries of the Middle East were the producers of the fuels that the West needed to continue its individualist lifestyle. /…/
Many of the regions that provide these fuels have turned to a religion that is, in principle at least, indifferent to the fossil fuel lifestyle and to the cult of the human. /…/
As fuel reveals its finitude, we come to recognize our dependence on it and our dependence on others who affirm a religious culture that survived and flourished in the profound absence of fossil fuel. /…/

This book is about Bataille’s take on these issues and my version of what Bataille’s take would be if it were extrapolated to the twenty-first century. /…/

On the other hand, an ever more counterproductive orientation will assert itself in the years ahead. Such an orientation sees energy as an adjunct of, at best, a certain humanism: we spend to establish and maintain our independent, purpose-driven selves, our freedom as consumers, spenders of certain (rather lavish, given available reserves) quantities of refined energy. This model is doubly humanistic in that not only is the benificary the “free” self of Man; the human spirit itself is incessantly invoked to get us out of the jam. We are told over and over again that the human mind alone produces energy; when reserves are short, there is always a genius who comes along and devises some technology that turns things around, makes even more energy available, and so on. Technology transcends energy, in other words, and reflects the human mind’s infinite ability to derive energy from virtually nothing. /…/
One can argue that the religion that confronts the fossil fuel-driven civilization of Man is equally grounded in the demands of a human subjectivity. People demand salvation, an ultimate purpose for which they are consuming so much fuel: I spend, or waste, so that I will ultimately be saved. Conversely, energy inputs are available because God has blessed me with them; the faithful are rewarded with a healthy, fertile, and energy-rich environment. /…/
Against this energetico-theological model is arrayed an ecoreligion, one that would defy the “comfortable” or “free” (and nonnegotiable) lifestyle of consumerist humanism, not through a recognition of the literal truth of the divine Word but through a religiously inspired truth of austerity, simplicity, and personal virtue. Such a cult refuses certain basic human urges to consume or destroy, and in the process involves the affirmation of yet another humanism (the self as virtuous in its austerity) and, after consumer profligacy, yet another model of nature as a standing reserve to be protected largely for its value to Man.
Fossile fuel civilization, then, and its antitheses, or antidotes. Man and/or God as ultimate referent: a couple we can expect to hear more from in the coming years. Bataille poses a very different model of the interrelation of energy and religion. /…/ Bataille’s energy and religion are not an alternative; they promise nothing for the future, certainly no salvation, although their aftereffect may entail a future more livable — by whom? — than that promised under the signs of God or Man.
Bataille’s energy is inseparable from that which powers cars and raises elevators, but it is different as well. It is excess energy, and in that sense it is left over when a jo is done, when the limits of growth are reached, or, in the current situation, when fossil fuels themselves reveal their profound limitations. Bataille’s energy is a transgression of the limit; it is what is left over in excess of what can be used within a fundamentally limited human field. As such, it is quite different from what can be used: it is not just left over in the sense of not being consumed; it is fundamentally unusable. At the point at which quantification reveals its finitude, energy asserts itself as the movement that cannot be stockpiled or quantified. It is the energy that by definition does not do work, that is insubordinate, that plays now rather than contributing to some effort that may mean something at some later date and that is devoted to some transcendent goal or principle. /…/ Energy is expended in social ritual that is pointless, that is tied not to the adhesion of a group or the security of the individual but to the loss of group and individual identity — sacrifice.
Bataille’s religion is thus inseparable from Bataille’s energy. /…/ If there is community, it is the unplanned aftereffect and not the essential meaning of this energy, of this mobement of the death or void of God.
Thus ethics for Bataille, the community, and its meaning and survival are aftereffects of the expenditure of the sacred. Bataille’s theory is profoundly ethical but only in the sense that the instant of preservation, of meaning, of conservation, of knowledge, is the unforeseen offshoot of another movement, that of the drive to spend without counting, without attempting to anticipate return. To deny the ethical moment, the moment, the moment in which conservation and meaning are established only the better to affirm the destruction of expenditure, is to relegate that destrection to the the simple, homogeneous movement of the animal, unaware of limit, meaning, and purposive act. Expenditure, in other words, is not the denial of the human, its repression, but instead its affirmation to the point at which it falls: the sacrifical act, the recognition of an energy that does not do “work” for the maintenance of the human, is the affirmation of a God who is not the slave of the human. It is the impossible movement in which awareness doubles the unknowable loss of energy and the virulence of a God who disbelieves in himself.
The ethics of Bataille, then, entail a vision of the future in which the “left-hand sacred”, the sacred of impurity, of eroticism, of the radically unconditioned God, spins off a community in and through which expenditure can be furthered (a community of those with nothing in common). Not nuclear war, the channeling of excess in ways that ensure survival so that more excess can be thrown off. And (one can continue along these lines) not generalized ecocide, but an affirmation of another energy, another religion, another waste, entailing not so much a steady state sustaininability (with what stable referent? Man?) but instead a postsustainable state in which we labor in order to expend, not conserve. Hence the energy, and wealth, of the body — the energy of libidinous and divine recycling, not the stockpiled, exploited, and dissipated energy of easily measured and used fossil fuels.
This book has two goals: in the first part, to sketch out Bataille’s positions on energy expenditure, religion of and against the Book, and the city; in the second, to extrapolate from those positions and consider current questions of energy use and depletion, religious literalism and fervor, and urban “life”. /…/

This book is a small effort that tries to suggest that there are other ways of thinking about how we power our lifes, with energy and with religion: these ways, these directions have been there all along. These other ways are not so much opposed to sustainability (as it is conventionally conceived) as they logically precede it and spin it off not as a goal but as an aftereffect. /…/ In a future (and imminent) era of scarcity we rethink what it means to be happy — thereby recognizing that happiness is tied not to the mere consumption and disposal of materials, but to their wise use — we will perhaps also realize that happiness means something more, or other, than a meager conservation or a placid contentment grounded in a placid sociability.

Afformative, Strike

Werner Hamacher: “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’
In Andrew E. Benjamin & Peter Osborne (edts): Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience
Routledge, 1994

111: “This more powerful law is the law of historical change and internal structural transformation, dictated by the ambiguity of being both means and end. In connection with this ambiguity, Benjamin speaks of a ‘dialectic’ and its ‘law of oscillation’ (Schwankungsgesetz).”

114: “‘Upon the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythical legal forms’, Benjamin now writes, ‘upon the deposing [Entsetzung] of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore upon the abolition of state forces, a new historical age is founded’.”

115: “Pure violence does not posit, it ‘deposes’; it is not performative, but afformative.”

116: “Deposing is thus not encompassed by any negation, is not directed toward anything determinate – and therefore is not direted. Deposing could not be the means to an end, yet it would be nothing but means. It would be violence, and pure violence, but therefore entirely non-violent.”

117: [Benjamin writes that] “pure means are never those of direct, but always those of mediated, solutions. They therefore never apply directly to the arbitration of interpersonal conflict, but do so only by way of things. the sphere of pure means unfolds in the most material human realm – conflicts relating to goods. For this reason technique [Technik] in the broadest sense of the word is its most proper domain.”

117: “Language in its mediality is pre-positional, preperformative – and, in this sense, afformative. Even before and even during its performative effects, language does not initially lay the foundation for anything outside itself”.

118: “Language is not a medium that can be measured against ‘an objective state of affairs’ – a standard verifiable independently of this medium and already available outside itself. Rather, language is the articulation of a mediacy prior to any distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ and is therefore not subject to that distinction. /…/ Mediacy is the field of afformation. Whoever speaks is afformed and afforms.”

119: “On Benjamin’s account, the technique of language as pure means (and thereby as pure violence), which enables peaceful agreements and ‘mutual understanding’ independently of any legal order, has its contemporary political ‘analogue’ in the strike, specifically in the proletarian general strike. /…/
Benjamin explicitly refers only to George Sorel’s /…/ distinction between the political and the proletarian general strike.”

120: “For whereas the political general strike is only concerne with inverting the relation of domination, and is still based on the preservation and strenghtening of state violence, the proletarian general strike aims at nothing less than the abolition of the state apparatus and the legal order maintained by it. /…/
the proletarian general strike is pure means, not means to an extortion that would affect modifications in the working conditions, in the distribution of power or the power structure and as such would be violent. Rather, it is a non-violent means of annihilation of legal as well as state violence. /…/
This strike, directed toward the annihilation of state violence by way of suspension of all positing violence – in other words, directed toward nothing – can be described as being without intention.”
120-121: “For Benjamin, the strike is the social, economic, and political event in which nothing happens, no work is done, nothing is produced, and nothing is planned or projected.”

125-126: “Unlike historical-transcendental pragmatics, which are oriented toward historical forms of linguistic and social action, Benjamin’s sketch of a politics of pure means is a theory not of positing, producing and presenting, not of forming and transforming action, but a theory of the abstention from action”.

128n12: “the use of afformative event is to contrast with the use of performative act – implying that afformatives are not a subcategory of performatives. Rather, afformative, or pure, violence is a ‘condition’ for any instrumental, performative violence and, at the same time, a condition which suspends its fulfilment in principle. /…/
The afformative is the allipsis which silently accompanies any act and which may silently interrupt any speech act.”

Georges Bataille: Method of meditation

The servile intelligence serves folly, but folly is sovereign: I can change nothing without it.

/…/

The idea of silence (the inaccessible) is disarming!
I am unable to speak of an absence of meaning without giving it a meaning it doesn’t have. /…/
In the end, being is offered to us as impossible!

/../

Every problem is in a certain sense a problem of the use of time.

/…/

Scientific work is more than servile, crippled. The needs to which it responds are foreign to knowledge. They are:
1. The curiosity of those who do crossword puzzles /…/
2. The needs of the collector (to accumulate and organize curiosities);
3. Love of work, intense output;
4. The taste for a rigorous honesty;
5. The worries of an academic (career, honour, money).
At its origin, often enough, a desire for sovereign knowledge, to go as far as one can go, a desire so quickly born, nullifies itself, by accepting subordinate tasks. /…/ Science is practiced by men in whom the desire to know is dead.

/…/

One must choose: one is unable to subordinate oneself to some ulterior result and “to be sovereignly” at the same time. (Because “to be sovereignly” means “not being able to wait”.)

/…/

If I lead being to the extreme limit of reflection, to its misunderstanding of itself, like the infinite, starry expanse of the night, I FALL ASLEEP.

/…/

Often enough, sufficient leisure is left for me to order my thought, in obedience to the rules. But today I express this movement: “Sleep invades me…”: It is more difficult! In other words, I arrive at the sovereign operation, wherein thought accepts no subordinate object and losing itself in a sovereign object, annihilates the demand for thought within itself.

/…/

When I am laughing or having an orgasm, the impossible is before me. I am happy but every thing is impossible.

The simple truth:
Servile activity is possible (on the condition of remaining enslaved, subordinate – to other men, to principles, or even to the necessity of production – human existence has a possibility in front of itself).

But sovereign existence is in no way, for even an instant, separated from the impossible; I will live sovereignly only at the heights of the impossible and what does this book mean if not:

LEAVE THE POSSIBLE TO THOSE WHO LOVE IT.

/…/

Part II
Decisive Position

Principles
1. If I wish it, to laugh is to think, but this is a sovereign moment.

/…/

Not only does the sovereign operation not subordinate itself to anything, it is indifferent to the effects that might result;

/…/

knowledge relating objects to the sovereign moment in the end risks being confounded with this moment itself.
This knowledge that one could call free (but that I prefer to call neutral) is the use of a function detached (free) from the servitude that is its principle: the function related the unknown to the known (to the solid), whereas dating it from the moment when it detaches itself, it relates the known to the unknown.

13. What I’ve just said seems to oppose itself to the fact that without a sketch, at least, of neutral knowledge, a sovereign operation could not be represented. /…/
The sovereign operation engages these developments: they are the residue of a trace left in the memory and of the subsistence of these functions, but, insofar as it takes place, it is indifferent to and mocks this residue.

/…/

16. In order to describe it better, I would like to situate it in an ensemble of apparently sovereign behaviors. Other than ecstacy, these are:
* intoxication;
* erotic effusion;
* laughter;
* sacrificial effusion;
* poetic effusion.

/…/

18. The behaviors I have just listed are effusive in that they demand muscular movements of little importance and consume energy without any other effect than a kind of interior illumination /…/

19. Previously, I designated the sovereign operation under the names of inner experience or the extreme of the possible. And now I designate it under the name meditation. Changing words signifies the boredom of using whatever word it should be (sovereign operation is, of all the names, the most fastidious: comic operation, in a sense, would be less misleading). I like meditation better despite its pioous appearence.

20. In laughter, sacrifice, or poetry, even partly in eroticism, effusion is obtained through a modification, willing or not, in the order of objects: poetry makes use of changes on the level of images; sacrifice, in general, destroys beings; laughter results from diverse changes.
In drunkenness, on the contrary, and willingly, the subject himself is modified: it is the same in meditation.

/…/

22. In meditation, the overwrought subject looks for himself.
He refuses himself the right to remain enclosed in the sphere of activity.
Still, he refuses exterior means: toxins, erotic partners, or alterations in objects (comic, sacrificial, poetic).

/…/

35. I am writing in order to nullify a game of subordinate operations (it is, when all is said and done, superflous).

36. The sovereign operation, whose authority results only from itself – expiates this authority at the same time. If it atoned for it, it would have some point of application, it would look for an empire, for duration. But authenticity refuses this: it is only powerlessness, absence of duration, hateful (or gay) destruction of itself, dissatisfaction.

/…/

In the end everyting puts me at risk, I remain suspended, stripped, in a definitive solitude: before the impenetrable simplicity of what is; and the depths of the world opened, what I see and what I know no longer has any meaning, any limits, and I will stop myself only after having advanced the furthest that I can.

/…/

But the smallest activity or the least project puts an end to the game – and I am, lacking play, brought back into the prison of useful objects, loaded with meaning.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. this is still, the instant .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . . . . this, presently, neither my absence nor me, neither death nor light – and my absence and me, death and light – a light laugh rises in me like the sea, fills the absence immensely. All that is – IS TOO MUCH.

Georges Bataille on the summit and the decline (March 5, 1944)

I. (Fundamental proposition). It is a question of opposing not good to evil but the “moral summit”, which is different from the good, to the “decline”, which has nothing to do with evil and whose necessity determines, on the contrary, the modalities of the good.
The summit responds to excess, to the exuberance of forces. It takes tragic intensity to its limit. It relates to measureless expenditures of energy, to the violation of the integrity of beings. It is therefore closer to evil than to good.
Decline – responding to moments of exhaustion, of fatigue – grants all value to concerns for preserving and enriching the being. Rules of morality result from decline.

/…/

‘communication cannot take place from one full and intact being to another: communication wants being twith their being at stake, places at the limit of death, of nothingness; the moral summit is a moment of risk taking, of the suspension of being beyond itself, at the limit of nothingness.

II. In “communication”, in love, desire has nothingness as its object. It is like this with any “sacrifice”.

/…/

IV. Humans only “communicate” – live – outside of themselves and since they must “communicate”, they must want this evil, this deseceation which, putting the being within themselves at risk, renders them penetrable to one another . . . Thus: all “communication” partakes of suicide and crime . . . In this light, evil appears as a life source!

/…/

Communication, essentialy, wanting being to be overstepped: essentially, what is rejected in evil is concern for the future. /…/

In common judgment, the essence of a moral act is being servile to some utility, to return to the good of some being a movement in which the being aspires to surpass being. In this way, morality is no more than a negation or morality.

If i suppress consideration of the future, I am unable to resist temptation . . . To tell the truth, this state of happy openness is not humanly imaginable. Human nature as such cannot reject its concern for the future /…/

As long as we are animated by a youthful effervescence, we consent to dangerous squandering. But when these forces begin to fail us, . . . when we begin to decline, we become preoccupied . . . with accumulation . . . with enriching ourselves for difficulties yet to come. We act. And action, effort can only have an aquisition of forces as its goal.

/…/

X. We must go further. To formulate such criticism is already to decline. The act of “speaking” of a morality of the summit itself arises from a morality of decline.

/…/

XI. Like Kafka’s Castle, in the end, the summit is nothing but the inaccessible. It slips away from us, at least insofar as we don’t stop being human, speaking. Besides, we cannot oppose the summit to the decline like evil to good. The summit is not “what one must reach”, decline not “what one must abolish”. Just as the summit is, in the end, nothing but the inaccessible, decline is from the very beginning inevitable.
(”The summit is, in essence, the place at the limit where life is impossible.”)

XII. Through history the reasons that a human being might have for going to the summit (the good for the nation, justice, salvation, etc.) have developed. “But the difficulty is to go to the summit without a reason, without a pretext.”
“. . . Every gamle, every ascent, every sacrifice being, like sensual excess, a loss of strength, an expenditure, we must justify our expenditures every time with a promise of gain, be it illusory or not.” Even though a revolutionary action would establish the classless society – beyond which a historical action could no longer arise – it seems that, humanly speaking, the amount of energy produced is always greater than the amount necessary for its production. Hence this perpetual overfull seething og energy – which continually leads us to the summit – constituting the malefic share.

/…/

XIV. (Conclusion). Within hostile and silent nature, what becomes of human autonomy? “Maybe the desire to know has only one meaning: to serve as motive for the desire to question. No doubt knowledge is necessary for the autonomy of that action – by which it transformed the world – procures for humanity. But beyond the conditions of doing, knowledge finally appears as a decoy, when faced with the interrogation that commands it. When this interrogation fails, we laugh. The raptures of exstasy and the fires of Eros are so many questions – without responses – to which we submit nature and our nature. /…/ It is by leaving the interrogation open as an inner wound that I maintain chance, a possible access toward the summit . . .”

Aase Berg: Förord till en novellsamling av Gunnar Blå

Män gör vad som helst för att mörka sin allomfattande oförmåga. Men en sak är säker – potensen är alltid fejkad. Det har skett ett överslag i den manliga analogin mellan kuk och kraft, fallos och framgång. Att kuken står ibland betyder inte att mannan är oövervinnerlig. Tvärtom är han som svagast i sin högsta potens, nästan död faktiskt – enligt Gunnar Blå är erektion fossilisering.

Men normala snubbar paller inte riktigt med den här kunskapen, så istället för att acceptera sin egen sårbarhet har de mage att ha kastrationsångest! Som i sin tur självklart måste kompenseras med krampaktig handlingskraft. Som om kastrationen vore ett problem och inte ett mognadstecken?

Det är den falliska mannen som är monstret, det är han som förverkligar kastrationsförnekandet genom erövring, prostitution, porr och trafficking, krig, BNP, tillväxt och snabba cash, löjliga lyxbilar och meningslösa affärsresor med förpestande flygplan tvärs över jordklotet. Det otrevligaste draget i patriarkatet är just alla dessa monumentala och världsekonomiskt fatala försök att dölja impotensen. Såna manliga tics förväxlas till råga på allt med frihet. /…/

Torsken är det ynkligaste som finns, men i cirkelns ände knyts patetiken ihop med den manliga framåtandan, vilket förstås även förvandlar överläget till debil impotens. /…/

Kvinnan är visserligen också kringskuren, bland annat av rädslan för sin egen alluppkäknde råstyrka, men eftersom hon av hävd befinner sig i samhällsmässigt underläge blir situationen nästan den motsatta: kvinnan mörkar sin styrka av hänsyn till den i grunden miserabelt mesiga mannen. Patriarkatet har genom många långa år av indoktrinering lyckats väcka dåligt samvete över alla tänkbara jämställdhetssträvanden hos kvinnan. Så slår det heterosexuella frihetsprojektet knut på sig själv. /…/

Nuförtiden tycker jag i och för sig tanken på oförmågan är ganska upplivande. Välkomna hit, snubbar – vi kvinnor har redan suttit i rävsaxen i tusentals år. Moment 22 är andra sidan av kakan som inte längre går att både ha och äta upp. Ni har bränt det där ljuset i båda ändar, och nu är nöden uppfinningarnas moder! /…/

Gunnar försökte ju skriva vanlig porr först. Det gick inte så bra, för normalporren (där räknar jag alla konventionella perversioner också) kräver motsatsen till vad Gunnar har att erbjuda – trygghet enligt mallen. Än en gång alltså: manlighetens monotoni utklädd till upptäckarlusta. /…/ det ska uppnås orgasm, helst flera, och det är detta som är den storartat konventionella poängen. Alltid samma gamla aha-upplevelse, målet för den manliga utvecklingskurvan. Längre eller djupare än så kan en patriarkalt insyltad snubbe inte tänka. Men det kan Gunnar.

De tidiga novellerna är alltså ganska misslyckade. Porr är visserligen alltid tvångsmässig och överdriven, men detta faktum måste hållas genomskinligt. Gunnarmannens uttalat tvångsmässiga galenskap hotar därför redan i den taffliga början av karriären att sänka hela maskineriet. /…/

Sex är i grunden att visa sin sårbarhet, att tappa masken. Alla ser vi lika löjliga ut när vi knullar. Kolla på ett knull utifrån, stäng av inlevelsen, och vad ser du? Ett skitlöjligt ormande, som kravlande, grymtande daggmaskar. /…/

Och när män trots allt visar sårbarhet, det vill säga är romantiska (som det heter), så är det knappast gratis, då tycker de att de ska få betalt för det i form av oavkortad beundran och okritiskt impad kärlek. /…/

Gunnars bristande behov av att förneka bristen gör honom till en sann feminist. /…/

Folk med Aspergers syndrom (en form av autism där man har svårt att relatera socialt och skilja filk från föremål) har en väldokumenterad förmåga till sjukdomsinsikt. Det har inte psykopater. Asperger är en hög form av mognad i jämförelse, och den diagnosen är fullkomligt möjlig att uppnå för en Gunnarfigur som vill utvecklas. Asperger är en filosofisk sjukdom, som ifrågasätter den sociala ordningens grundvalar. /…/

Förhållandet till oförmågan, såväl filosofisk som fysisk, är Gunnarprojektets essens. Hör på här, snubbe: oförmågan är din utloppstarm i natten mot en empatisk och rimlig frihet, och Gunnar är din håglöst hoppfulla profet!

Nietzsche om medkänslans genealogi

142. Medkänsla
För att förstå någon annan, det vill säga för att efterbilda hans känsla i vårt inre, går vi utan tvivel ofta tillbaka till anledningen till hans si eller så bestämda känsla och frågar till exempel: varför är han ledsen? – för att sedan själva bli ledsna av samma anledning; mer vanligt är emellertid att låta bli detta och istället i vårt inre återskapa känslan av de verkningar som den utövar och upppvisar på andra; vi efterbildar med vår kropp (åtminstone med en viss likhet i muskelrörelser och innervationer) uttrycket i hans ögon, hans röst, hans sätt att gå, hans attityd (eller till och med deras avbildningar i ord, måleri, musik). Därpå uppstår en liknande känsla hos oss till följd av en gammal association mellan rörelse och känsla, som har drillats i att röra sig fram- och tillbaka i båda riktningarna. I denna färdighet att förstå den andres känslor har vi nått mycket långt, och i närvaro av en annan människa är vi nästan alltid automatiskt sysselsatta med att öva denna färdighet: man bör i synnerhet iaktta linjespelet i kvinnors ansikten, hur de skälver och strålar i ett oupphörligt avbildande och återspeglande av allt som upplevs runtomkring dem. Men allra tydligast visar oss musiken vilka mästare vi är i att snabbt och subtilt kunna gissa känslor och vara medkännande: när musiken närmare bestämt är en efterbildning av känslornas efterbildning och ändå, trots detta avstånd och denna obestämdhet, tillräckligt ofta gör oss delaktiga av dessa känslor, så att vi blir sorgsna utan minsta anledning till sorg, likt fullständiga narrar, enbart för att vi hör toner och rytmer som på något sätt påminner om sörjande personers tonfall och rörelser, eller till och med om deras vanor. Det berättas om en dansk konung att han genom en trubadurs musik lät sig hänryckas till en sådan krigisk hänförelse att han flög upp och dödade fem personer i sin församlade hovstat: det rådde inte krig, inga fiender fanns, det var snarare raka motsatsen, men den kraft vars orsak stod att finna i känslan var tillräckligt stark för att överväldiga iakttagelseförmåga och förnuft. Men denna verkan har musiken nästan alltid (under förutsättning att den alls verkar –) och man behöver inte ta till sådana paradoxala exempel för att inse det: det känslotillstånd som musiken försätter oss i står nästan allltid i motsats till det uppenbara i vår faktiska situation och till förnuftet, som förstår den faktiska situationen och dess orsaker. – Om vi frågar hur vi har kunnat bli så skickliga i att efterbilda andras känslor, så blir vi inte svaret skyldiga: människan, som den ängsligaste av alla varelser på grund av sin fina och bräckliga natur, har i sin egen ängslighet haft sin läromästare i detta medkännande, i denna snabba uppfattningsförmåga av den andres känslor (också djurens). Under tusentals år såg hon en fara i allt som var främmande och livaktigt: vid dessåsyn efterbildade hon ögonblickligen uttrycken i anletsdrag och attityd och drog sina slutsatser om vad för slags onda avsikter som låg bakom anletsdragen och attityden. Denna uttydning av alla rörelser och linjer härledda ur avsikter har människan till och med använt på de själlösa tingens natur – under vanföreställningen att det inte finns något som är själlöst: jag tror att allt det som vi kallar känsla för naturen vid anblicken av himmel, fält, skog, åskväder, stjärnor, hav, landskap och vår har sitt ursprung i detta, – utan rädslans uråldriga träning att i allt detta se en annan, bakomliggande mening, skulle vi nu inte ha någon glädje i naturen, precis som vi inte skulle ha någon glädje i människa och djur uran denne förståelses läroomästare, rädslan. Glädje och angenäm förvåning, och slutligen känslan av löje, är nämligen senare födda barn till medkänslan och de betydligt yngre syskonen till rädslan, – Förmågan att snabbt förstå något – som följaktligen beror på förmågan att snabbt kunna förställa sig – avtar hos stolta och självgoda människor och folk, eftersom de hyser mindre fruktan: däremot är allt slags förståelse och föreställning hemmastadd bland ängliga folk; här är också den rätta hemorten för de efterbildande konsterna och den högre intelligensen. – Om jag utifrån en sådan teori om medkänslan – som den jag föreslår här – tänker på den just nu så omtyckta och heligförklarade teorin om en mystisk process enligt vilken medlidandet gör ett väsen av två och på så vis möjliggör att det ena omedelbart kan förstå det andra: om jag begrundar att ett så skarpt huvud som Schopenhauers fann glädje i sådan lättfärdig och föraktlig krimskrams och i sin tur överförde denna glädje till andra skarpa och inte lika skarpa huvuden: så vet jag ingen ände på min förvåning och mitt förbarmande. Hur stor lust måste vi inte känna för obegripligt nonsens! Hur lik en vansinnig är inte en frisk människa när hon lyssnar till sina hemliga intellektuella önskningar! – (För vad kände sig egentligen Schopenhauer så tacksam och så djupt förpliktigad gentemot Kant? Svaret får vi helt otvetydigt: någon hade talat om hur Kants kategoriska imperativ kunde befrias från sin qualitas occulta och göras begriplig. Om detta utbrister Schopenhauer i följande ordalag: “Det kategoriska imperativet begripligt! Vilken grundfalsk tanke! Egyptiskt mörker! Må himlen förbjuda att det någonsin blir begripligt! Ty just det att det finns något obegripligt, att detta elände hos förståndet och dess begrepp är begränsat, villkorligt, ändligt och bedrägligt; vissheten om detta är Kants stora gåva till oss.” – Man kan fråga sig om en som redan från början känner sig lycklig genom tron på det obegripliga i moraliska frågor verkligen har ett seriöst intresse av att få kunskap om dem! En som fortfarande tror uppriktigt på klarhet från ovan, på magi och andeuppenbarelser och sköldpaddans metafysiska fulhet!)

Ur Morgonrodnad.

Stig Larsson (1979) om diskotek och dans

Stig Larsson: Det belysta diskoteket
Ur Kris extranummer, juli 1979. Här citerat ur Artiklar 1975-2004.

217: “Om diskoteket skulle ha en filosofi skulle det vara att man inte ska tänka utan enbart vara. Att dansa med en kritisk självreflektion är ungefär lika svårt som att läsa Hegel starkt berusad. Så att skriva om diskotek blir den verkliga motsatsen till att vara på ett diskotek.”

218: “Det är nödvändigt att studera diskoteket i sitt veckosammanhang. Om man kopplar loss, vad är det man kopplar loss ifrån? Alla har väl gjort tankeexperimentet att de föreställt sig människorna inne på diskoteket plötsligt utelämnade i blixtbelysning, hur deras underliga rörelser skulle framstå i hela sin underlighet. Att ensam dansa bugg på kontoret inför de förvånade arbetskamraterna. Reglerna för hur vi ska uppträda är alltså annorlunda. Men det är ju samtidigt inte så att det inte finns några regler på diskoteket. Det kan inte vara det att vi plötsligt vill vara oss själva, att vårt naturliga sätt att umgås på vore att i olika komplicerade turer hoppa omkring på ett golv. Vi väljer alltså att för ett ögonblick vara underkastade ett helt annorlunda regelsystem.”

218-219: “parlamentarismens och den offentliga debattens mest bärkraftiga suggestionsbild: den nivellerade människan. Men denna föreställing om allas likhet med varandra slås helt i likhet på diskoteket. Där är ingen lik den andra. Alla människor förhåller sig till varandra utifrån sina skillnader.”

220: “Diskoteket gör betydelsen av ens utseende så mycket tydligare, även om det samtidigt genom mörkret och röken gör själva utseendet suddigare.”

221: “Tjejen ska tvärtom vara ren, inte ha lämnat ut sig, inte ha åtrått någon annan. Hon vet att de flesta killarna gör allt för att få ligga med henne men samtidigt föraktar henne om de lyckas. I spänningen mellan dessa två perspektiv lever diskotekets riter och myter.
Därför blir tiden på diskoteket starkare upplevd i sig själv av tjejen. Dansen, spelet, samtalen på damtoaletten får ett egenvärde i en annan mening än tiden på diskoteket för killen. För honom är det en blind tid, en tom plats, där man helst ska vara ordentligt berusad. Det är ett öde utanför tiden. För killen blir upplevelserna omkring detta vakuum mer laddade av betydelse. Bilresan dit; redan då man satt hemma hos någon och söp timmarna före; kanske hela dagen sett som ett förspel.”

221: “Tjejerna dansar nästan alltid bättre än killarna. Alltså: deras kroppsrörelser följer en tätare rytmstruktur i musiken. (Denna differentiering av olika rytmstrukturer är ett verk av den senare diskomusiken. Den är knappast märkbar i sextiotalspopen.) /…/
En kille ska inte anstränga sig. Han ska vara slapp och oberörd.”

222: “Den utvecklingen har idag gått så långt att det har blivit ett problem för folkparkerna. Det är allt färre som kommer och dansar till dansbanden. Det beror inte bara på en ökad tillströmning till diskoteken. Dansbandsmusiken är ju betydligt enklare, simplare.”

222: “Och det som idag enar resterna av vänstern och sextiotalet är väl främst ett sätt att klä sig och faktiskt också – ett sätt att dansa. Då man medvetet bryter mot regler gör man det ofta för att eliminera regler överhuvudtaget. Enligt en av vänsterns tidiga ideologier skulle man klä sig som man ville, eftersom klädseln, ‘ytan’, inte spelade någon roll. /…/ Då man dansade ville man visa att man var fri. /…/ Så man hoppade upp och ner och rörde armarna så vilt som möjligt.”

222-223: “En människa som vill visa att hon är fri är naturligtvis inte fri. Det man missförstod, redan då man tog sina första yviga steg bort från de strikta reglerna, är att dans är behärskning. Dansens njutning är att låta kroppen genomfaras av en rytm som man avhåller sig ifrån eller bara bitvis, med sin egen kropp, uttrycker. Den frihet 1968 års vänster inbillade sig var den kitschiga motståndslösa friheten ovanför molnen. De trodde, och tror fortfarande, att dans är fullständig utlevelse. Men varje danssteg är en behärskning av den utlevelsen.”

223: “Det stökiga, kaotiska och organiska draget hos en fest kan aldrig ett diskotek frammana. Allt är för perfekt. Kvällen har sitt mönster.”

Anna-Lena Carlsson about Nietzsche and creativity

Anna-Lena Carlsson: “…Is it hunger or superabundance that has become creative?” Nietzsche on creativity in art & life
(Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in aesthetics,
presented at Uppsala University, 2005)

246: “If we were to talk about Nietzsche’s aesthetics, it is aesthetics from the perspective of the creator. /…/
According to Nietzsche, human beings are fundamentally artistic, down to the level of the creation of language and the truths. He thereby uses the terms ‘art’ and ‘artistic’ both in a narrow and in a broader sense.”

71: “In ‘On Truth and Lying’, Nietzsche speaks of a broader sense of the artistic. He argues that human beings are artistically creative ['künstlerisch schaffend'] and regards an impulse to image-making as being fundamental to language and our existence in the world.”
73: “Nietzsche writes of a ‘mysterious x and indicates how we act as if we have access to the thing-in-itself when we designate objects. /…/ The thing-in-itself is incomprenhensible to human beings, according to Nietzsche. He has turned away from his early artistic metaphysics and he no longer argues in favour of a possibility of gaining access to the sphere of things-in-themselves.”
76: “To sustain a certain society, existence is ordered into a forgetfulness of our fundamental artistic creativity. /…/ this creativity is forgotten – and thereby denied – according to Nietzsche /…/ Nietzsche thereby expresses an order of rank among human creations in the essay; everything is not equally valued as artistically creative.”

83-84n55: “He continues [in Human, all too human] ‘for he who does not have two thirds of his day to himself is a slave, let him be what he may otherwise: statesman, businessman, official, scholar’. This is a defence of a certain kind of idleness [Müssiggehen] /…/ that means being true to oneself in a more profound way, not just in a simple suspension from external demands. /…/ Nietzsche’s notion of a ‘higher culture’ is related to ‘true leisure’. This is seen, for instance, when he writes that a higher culture can only come into existence where there are two different castes in society: The cast compelled to work and the cast that works if it wants to work. /…/ The notion of work and leisure is moreover related to the capacity of suffering and being sensible. /…/ Nietzsche writes: ‘In a better ordering of society the heavy work and exigencies of life will be apportioned to him who suffers least as a consequence of them, that is to say to the most insensible, and thus step by step up to him who is most sensitive to the most highly sublimated species of suffering and who therefore suffers even when life is alleviated to the greatest degree possible.’”

86: “To ‘create a comfortable life for as many as possible’ is then to be regarded as life-negating, because it does not affirm existence in its whole.”

85: “Morality is a means to preserve society; it wards off a destruction. To be moral is to act according to custom. /…/ We only suffer from new chains, Nietzsche writes, /…/ the fettered spirit does not take its position on grounds of reasons, but out of habit.”

87: “The fettered spirits and their culture are nevertheless triumphant, according to Nietzsche, and they hold out four things to be right: 1) that which possesses duration; 2) things that are not inconvenient; 3) everything that brings them advantage; 4) and all things for which they have made a sacrifice.”

105: “It is important to note that there is no fundamental distinction between the master and the slave of morality. Although Nietzsche writes of these two types as being two different historical types of existence; their powers are not opposites but are considered as being a difference in degree. Both want to increase their power, but the slave is hindered in his activity by a stronger force, and turns his attempt at increasing in power elsewhere.”

98: “The advocates of old values or those who destroy old values without creating new values belong to forms of lives that ought to be overcome.”
118-119: “To affirm life as the will to power is to affirm one’s own increase in strength. It is self-mastery, a creation of one’s own rules, one’s own path and existence in the world. /…/
A strong will excludes, selects and orders a multitude of forces into rank. /…/ It is in association with the will to power and life-affirmation that we must also consider the question of the eternal recurrence ['die ewige Wiederkehr'].”
121: “I interpret the eternal recurrence as Nietzsche’s attempt to express the pathos od a future type of existence; to express the pathos of the being that has overcome contemporary man and nihilism – the pathos of the overman.”

109: “When Nietzsche writes favourably about morals, he focuses on the individual and associates morals with an affirmation of life as hierarchical. There is an order of rank, he writes, between moralities and between human beings.”
246: “To affirm life is to affirm existence as creative, but also as destructive and hierarchical. /…/ In his early writings, this is described in metaphysical terms whereas in his later writings it is described in physiological terms.”
117: “If existence is affirmed as destructive and creative, one also affirms that equality is not the fundamental principle of society. /…/ Life itself is ‘essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppresion, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, explosion’. The order of the world and life is hierarchical, because life (as the will to power) is hierarchical.”
192: “Nietzsche asks: ‘Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?’ To want to live according to nature is to be an actor and self-deceiver.”

124: “Nietzsche writes of an active and a passive nihilism: ‘Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and ecession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.”
125: “Vattimo underlines this difference between passive and active nihilism, where passive nihilism becomes a reactive response in its refusal to accept chaos and annihilation, while active nihilism remains open and affirmative concerning new values. Affirmation, however, is not a creation of active nihilism. Vattime writes:
‘/…/ this [reactive] nihilism has always taken an affirmative appearance since its very purpose is to conceal tha nothingness which lies at the base of all that which is believed to be true, to have value and to subsist as an objective structure.’”
125-126: “Nietzsche writes in a note from Nachlass dated 1887 that it is an exhausted nihilism which no longer fights – the most famous form is Buddhism.”

189: “Nietzsche writes that the overestimation of consciousness is absurd /…/ One can neither capture the qualities of great art by transforming the will to a form of consciousness, nor set out from consciousness and get a grip on the art. Consciousness and language are always related to a Yes-saying or No-saying to existence. /…/ Aesthetic judgements are then to be considered as a mode of existence. When a life-affirming event is given significance, the judgement made is not separated from the ‘judge’ /…/ There is nothing outside the self justifying this Yes-saying. The ’strong’ will affirms itself.”
190: “If a life-affirming utterance about art has an effect, it is not brought about by arguments or rules. It rather imposes itself on the other, if the other affirms life. /…/
To follow one’s own path is not to be confused with a desire to have one’s own path. A striving for originality has nothing to do with this privileged uniqueness. /…/ Magistrates in matters of a life-negating taste also utter their ‘Great art!, ‘Art!’ and ‘Non-art!’, but alienate themselves from their judgements. These ‘judges’ do not walk on their own paths, but rely on something external (arguments, rules, authority, desire for power et cetera) in forming their judgements. /…/ According to Nietzsche, great works of art have more in common with other life-affirming creations (in a broader sense), than with life-negating art, such as the creation of oneself.”

242: “Nietzsche thinks of life-negation as a beautification of life and the world that makes the life-negating type of lives bearable and attractive. This beautification keeps humans within bounds. The construction of an ego, the ‘I’ of thinking, is also taken as an example of a life-prohibiting image.”

211: “Both the ego and the self are creations, but the willing of the self is an affirmation of the whole of our physiological existence. The body, Nietzsche writes, possesses a greater reason than the ‘I’.”
205: “The truth gained through the ‘I’, excluding other forms of reason is only one part of the body. Behind the ‘I’ there is a ’self’ [das Selbst]. As we have also seen, there is a gap between the ‘I’ and the self. According to Nietzsche, we find that human beings should affirm a self, not their thinking. To affirm one’s self, is to affirm one’s own will: ‘Will a self‘, Nietzsche stresses”
206: “When Nietzsche speaks of an affirmation of the self, rather than the affirmation of the ‘I’, our physiological body is consequently also emphasised. The body, he writes, is a greater reason than the reason of the ‘I’. /…/
Zarathustra values that which human beings produce in an affirmation of their whole existence, not that which humans produce only with their thinking.
To emphasise being as becoming, the affirmation of one’s self is a state that threatens binary oppositions, such as that between a real and an apparent world. Along with the abolition of the subject, the real world is also abolished.”
207: “To create one’s own self is to become wiser than artists, Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, because artists stop where art ends while ‘we want to be the poets of our life’. /…/ In this state of being, the need for traditional works of art passes away. If one has enough tragedy and comedy in one’s own company, one keeps away from the theatre.”
208: “Nietzsche’s emphasis on the perspective of creation and organisation also emphasise the possibility of works of art without an artist. /…/ about art as organisation /…/ A work of art without an artist represents a change in Nietzsche’s attitude from the metaphysical artist of the world, in The Birth if Tragedy, to the world as organisation and as a work of art giving birth to itself”

194: “Artistic creativity is crucial for both the life-negating and life-affirming type of existence. /…/ To stress human existence in the world as fundamentally creative, as Nietzsche does, is to stress the repudiations of all values, nihilism.”

176: “one of the beliefs protexting the life-negating artist and his art is that the artist has access to a ‘true truth’, a ‘real reality’ which is expressed in art. This is one of the consequences of elevating the artist as genious. In a life-negating culture, one believes that the work of art is able to convey such truths.”
177-178: “There is, however, also a positive aspect to art in Nietzsche’s time. Firstly, Nietzsche seems to mean that this art is better than no art at all. In Human, all too Human he says that we do not have leisure enough for art. /…/
‘Let us be grateful to it that is has consented to live as it does rather than flee away; but let us also admit to ourselves that an age which shall one day bring back true festivals of joy and freedom will have no use for our art.’
/…/ Art can restore these faded ideas and make different ages and old spirits return. Old emotions are, for a moment, aroused. This is a useful function of art, Nietzsche argues /…/ Without his knowledge, the artist’s task becomes that of making mankind ‘childlike’ and this is regarded both as a glory and a limitation.”

196: “The beautiful does not exist. /…/ That which is regarded as beautiful in a community, depends on what type of existence is triumphant in the world.”

2: “Some commentators associate current aestheticization processes with Nietzsche’s broadened sense of art and the artistic.”
3: “I soon came to believe, however, that the processes of aestheticisation spoken of today originated in an aesthetic paradigm that Nietzsche opposes. This is a paradigm that has come to associate aesthetics with the perspective of the receiver of art, while Nietzsche emphasizes the perspective of the creator.”

191: “In the aestheticism of Wilde, life itself becomes a work of art.
Nietzsche indeed also links art and life, although he does not link life to an already established notion of art. Instead, he criticises the aesthetic paradigm and emphasises artistic creativity in and outside the realm of art. This artistry is far from being disinterested and its prime concern is not beauty. Our aesthetics up to now, he writes, has been an aesthetics of the receivers of art; ‘the receivers of art have formulated their experience of “what is beautiful?” In all philosophy hitherto the artist is lacking.’ The last sentence is important: the artist is lacking in all philosophy so far.”
210: “Nietzsche’s suggestion of humans’ self-creation and the future overman has little to do with the aesthetic paradigm taken to its extreme in aestheticism, of the disinterestedness and beautification of life according to Oscar Wilde.”

243: “I believe that the processes of aestheticization spoken of today have their roots in an aesthetic paradigm that Nietzsche opposes. This is a paradigm that has come to associate aesthetics with sensory perception and the receiver of art (in a broader sense), while Nietzsche emphasises the perspective of the creator.”

4n: “Hegel writes that aesthetics ["Ästhetik"] designates the science of the senses [des Sinnes], of perception [des Empfindens]“

5: “My thesis is that there is a two-fold type of art and the artistic in Nietzsche’s writing. Nietzsche emphasises the perspective of production and asks: Has hunger or superabundance ["der Überfluss"] become creative? That is: Has life-affirmation or life-negation become creative?”
241: “Life-affirming art is made out of the artist’s own abundance; it is the result of an overflowing into a new creation. This art does not originate from the conscious intentions of the artist or from conformity to pre-established standards. /…/ The beholder of this art is physiologically stimulated; he is strengthened in his life.”

180: “Great art should be what we give away in an overflow, not something that is created and received because of a need for relief, security, and beauty. A conscious desire to create art is not favoured by Nietzsche, because the existence of great art does not have its origin in this desire. In Human, all too Human he writes: ‘I intend never again to read an author of whom it is apparent that he wanted to produce a book: but only those whose thoughts unintentionally became a book.’ /…/
Nietzsche says that creativity consists in the artists’ (or thinkers’) highly sharpened and practised power of judgement which rejects, selects and joins together.”
181: “The artist has practised and sharpened his power of judgement into a sharpness of the senses and a feeling of enhanced power when he chooses, discards, and creates new constellations. His art does not represent anything, it adds to the world of phenomena. In this creation he too, by necessity, destroys established images. /…/ Concerning art, Nietzsche emphasises the creative, organising process. This approach is in itself a critique of the existing aesthetic paradigm, of the emphasis on the receiver of art.”
185: “Great art in Nietzsche’s thinking, as we have seen, cannot serve as a standard for someone else to follow. What we can learn from the artist, he writes in The Gay Science, is their kind of creativity.”

11: “The concept ‘artist’ is sometimes used as a word of abuse, regarding someone who negates life. Sometimes it is the highest praise of someone who lives in life-affirmation. Another concept Nietzsche uses in a two-fold sense is ‘philosopher’.”
185-186: “Nietzsche argues [in HH]: ‘One man wants to enjoy his own nature by means of art, another wants with its aid to get above from his nature for a time. In accordance with both needs there exists a two-fold species of art and artist.’”
186: “there are two kinds of sufferers, those who suffer from an abundance of life and those who suffer from an impoverishment of life. The former kind wants Dionysian art, the latter seeks redemption from themselves through art. Life-denying art appeals to life-denying lives and liffe-affirming art corresponds to life-affirming beings. /…/
Art is created out of a surplus of life and it is only experienced by another ‘Yes-sayer’ to existence.”
35: “Life-affirmation is now regarded as an immanent justification of existence, in no need of any kind of external justification. Life-negation depends on something external for its justification of existence – such as God.”

187: “The superabundance of creativity is involved in both the perception and creation of an object. There are certain beings incapable of producing and responding to great art. /…/
judgements have nothing to do with understanding /…/
What happens when a life-denying existence is confronted with life-affirming art? Nietzsche answers that they ‘would interpret their own value feelings into it’.
In the correspondence between art and life, Nietzsche opposes the strict division between the artist, the beholder of art, and the work of art.”
188: “The physiological correspondence between the artist, the work, and the beholder of art levels out a hierarchy among them, which can be regarded as a critique of the cult of the geniusm of the autonomy of the work of art, and of the disinterested contemplative beholder of art. /…/ The beholder is therefore /…/ active in the participation of both the creative process and the work of art.”

224: “When [Wolfgang] Welsch writes that Nietzsche’s views on the aesthetic constitution of reality have become commonplace /…/ – he does not recognise the difference between a life-affirming and a life-negating structuring of reality. “
234: “Both Wolfgang Welsch and Richard Shusterman acknowledge an all-embracing notion of creativity, as did Nietzsche. Both of them refer to Nietzsche’s writings in their attempt to broaden the field of the aesthetic, but in contrast to Nietzsche they do not distinguish between a life-affirming and a life-negating type of artistic creativity. This is evident, for example, when Shusterman regards Oscar Wilde’s ‘life itself is an art’ as a ‘Nietzschean maxim’. /…/ Welsch and Shusterman do not acknowledge Nietzsche’s affirmation of an order of rank. Instead, they hold that this coexisting plurality of aesthetic phenomena is democratic.”
238: “An acknowledgement of the hierarchical character of life as the will to power, however, eliminates an interpretation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who affirms plurality without any order of rank.”

199: “Nietzsche asks: How does the subjective become an aesthetic phenomenon? He finds the answer in a certain ‘musical mood‘ which is prior to the actual act of creation. The ’subjective’ poet, as a Dionysian artist, first has to become united with the ‘primordial unity’, he then has to produce its image as music. /…/
Nietzsche writes that subject and object, as well as doer and deed, are constructions. This is expressed, for example, in a note from Nachlass dated 1888: ‘Subject, object, a doer added to the doing, the doing separated from that which it does: let us not forget that this is mere semiotics and nothing real.’”

40: “the Apollonian, this is characterised as an acknowledgment of human beings as artistically creative in their production of ‘beatutiful illusions’ /…/ a plastic energy forming a harmonious whole.”
41: “The Apollonian also forms individuality. /…/ Apollo is the image of principium individuationis“
43: “The Olympian world is produced through the Apollonian tendency, which made it possible for human beings to live with the terror and horror they knew from existence.”
45: “Apollonian culture indeed affirms life as artistically creative in its affirmation of illusions, but it attempts to exclude pain and contradictions within existence, inasmuch as pain and contradictions are hostile to individuality.”

46: “In the Dionysian emption, ‘everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness [Selbstvergessenheit]‘ This ’self-forgetfullness’ is to be understood in relation to the Apollonian ‘know thyself’.”
47: “Although Dionysian music touches the essence of things, it is significant to note that Nietzsche does not consider music as the will in itself. /…/ Music precedes other formations and creations – such as words and concepts – because it is more closely related to the universal ‘primal unity’ ['das Ur-Eine'].”

189: “a kind of music which has forgotten the world and speaks to itself, of itself, while disregarding the hearers’ and listeners’ effects and failures. He regards it as ‘innocent, as opposed to ‘guilty’ music in need of justification and explanation. Nietzsche generally dislikes verbal explanations of great art.”

62: “There is a difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche regarding their respective views on what constitutes the veil of illusion. Nietzsche makes a distinction between the artistic Apollonian and the inartistic theoretical, or Socratic, world of illusion. Nietzsche uses the word ‘artistic’ as an indication of something highly values and ‘inartistic’ as a sign of something of low value. The inartistic veil of illusion is indeed artistically produced, as we shall see later, although it denies itself as such a creation.”

49: “We may now say that the Dionysian brings a fuller view of existence into Apollonian culture and art. The Dionysian affirms the whole of existence. I regard this as an artistic life-affirming alternative in The Birth of Tragedy, in the sense that the Apollonian-formed Dionysian state affirms the whole of existence.
One might also say that the Apollonian relieves existence of the suffering associated with the Dionysian.”

53: “We have three types of culture: a dominant theoretical culture, an artistic one and a tragic culture. Although Nietzsche seems to distinguish between an Apollonian artistic culture and a Dionysian tragic one here, we must keep in mind that the Dionysian tragic culture must always be Apollonian formed and hence artistic as well as tragic.”