But since, in a world whose law is universal individual profit, the individual has nothing but this self that has become indifferent, the performance of the old, familiar tendency is at the same time the most dreadful of things. There is no getting out of this, no more than out of the electrified barbed wire around the camps. Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But is is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.

Adorno, Negative Dialectics

There is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within. This is where the truth and the untruth of Kantian philosophy divide. It is true in destroying the illusion of an immediate knowledge of the Absolute; it is untrue in describing this Absolute by a model that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, even if that consciousness were the intellectus archetypus. To demonstrate this untruth is the truth of post-Kantian idealism; yet this in turn is untrue in its equation of subjectively mediated truth with the subject-in-itself--as if the pure concept of the subject were the same as Being.

Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Theory and mental experience need to interact. Theory does not contain answers to everything; it reacts to the world, which is faulty to the core. What would be free from the spell of the world is not under theory's jurisdiction. Mobility is of the essence of consciousness; it is no accidental feature. It means a doubled mode of conduct: an inner one, the immanent process which is the properly dialectical one, and a free, unbound one like a stepping out of dialectics. Yet the two are not merely disparate. The unregimented thought has an elective affinity to dialectics, which as criticism of the system recalls what would be outside the system; and the force that liberates the dialectical movement in cognition is the very same that rebels against the system. Both attitudes of consciousness are linked by criticizing one another, not by compromising.

-Adorno,Negative Dialetics

In the description of the origin of time from the self-alienation of eternity, also, the guiding idea is still the ancient contrast typology of the bustling inquisitiveness that forgets its own business. But here an attempt at motivation does after all show through clearly: The reposeful presence of eternity is perceived as a reservation, awakening the vaque idea of a possible greater possession, which seems graspable by the bold venture of self-appropriation (idiosis). Thus the repose of possession gave rise to motion, in which eternity 'temporalized' itself. The world arises from eternity's venturing forth into time as a result of a restless passion for the incommensurate, a passion that, as it were, produces its own objects and in its enjoyment of them goes outside itself. If this mysterious unrest in the essential self-sufficiency of the eternal is the origin of the hypostatic surplus, as which the cosmos is now conceived--and thus defined, in terms of its origin alone, as the object of an equally mysterious recollection of the truth of its origin, by which the degenerate being is awakened to itself and brought back.

Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

The result of these inventions is that the entire world has become communicable. The phenomenology of being is replaced by the phenomenology of communication. We see the world as visual communication suggests it to us--even if not so dramatic, not in such high contrast, not so flawless, not so colorful, and, above all, not so select. The world we perceive, both the normally perceived world and the television world, pales under the constant drive to outbid. What is more, the very aspect that had been fascinating in language now declines, namely, the possibility and necessity of distinguishing between information and utterance. Although we still see people talking on television, indeed, even viewers again play a part in the medium, be it only as ridiculous background laughter indicating that there is something to laugh about, the entire arrangement evades the controls that had been developed over thousands of years on the basis of distinguishability between utterance and information. For this reason, the yes/no coding of linguistic communication also fails. We can be positively or negatively affected by a film, we can find it good or bad, but, in the overall complex of what is perceived, the intensification is lacking that would allow a clear distinction to be drawn between acceptance and rejection. Although we know that it is communication, we do not see it. This can raise suspicions of manipulation, which cannot, however, be substantiated. We know it, we live with it. Television produces a produced form that binds all everyday means of persuasion. And the other side of the form is precisely the suspicion of manipulation.

--Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society

Listen, there's something I must tell. I've never, never seen it so clearly. But it doesn't matter a bit if you don't understand, because each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you don't know it. Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening....It's a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn't happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely purposeless play--exuberance which is its own end....There is no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn't anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn't happen to anyone! There isn't any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It's a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety.

Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology (1962)

For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing but the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible...

--John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon

Chaos is open, it gapes wide, it is not a closed system. In order to code, one has to close, in order to class, one has to define, or shut off with a boundary. Chaos is patent. It is not a system, it is multiplicity. It is multiple, unexpected. Chaos flows, it flows out, an Albula, a white river. I hear a silky white noise, hardly smooth, with little jumping, jolting bits. A white river would not have any direction or precise bank, it wanders, nebulous. Chaos is nebulous. It does not flow out with a point or a direction, or following some rule, or abiding by some law. Look how much trouble we have thinking it or seeing it. The whole of reason protests--I mean logically. Our whole classified rationality, all the coding, habits and methods, lead us to speak in externals or negations: outlaw and nonsense. But I say positive chaos. Spinoza does not say otherwise: determination is negation. Indetermination is thus positive, and yet we express it with a negative word. I am simply writing the positive concepts of the under-determined, the undetermined, the positive concepts of the possible, thus the positive concepts of time: the nebulous, the blank, the mix, the surge, the chaos, the adelos multiplicities--I mean the ones that aren't obvious, that are poorly defined, confused. Instead of being excluded, rejected, confusion becomes an object, it enters the realm of knowledge, it enters into its movement. And it is classification, on the contrary, that is negative, it is coding that operates in a negative manner, it is the concept, in general, an determination, that is a negation. Our reasoning is negative as a whole, it cannot and does not know how to say yes except with a double no, conjecture and refutation, hypothesis and critique, it is given over as a whole to the work of the negative, and I understand finally why death, so often, is its result, its outcome or consequence and why hatred is, so frequently, its driving force. And why rationalism comes under the heading of the sacred, why rationalists are priests, busily ruling out, cleaning up the filth, expelling people, purifying bodies or ideas. Behold the positive chaos, the casting mold, the matrix. And behold the pure possible.

Michel Serres, Genesis, pg. 98.

Peirce, 1893:

There are those who believe in their own existence, because its opposite is inconcievable; yet the most balsamic of all the sweets of sweet philosophy is the lesson that personal existence is an illusion and a practical joke. Those that have loved themselves and not their neighbors will find themselves April fools when the great April opens the truth that neither selves nor neighborselves were anything more than mere vicinities; while the love they would not entertain was the essence of every scent. (4.69)

Michel Serres on writing:

I do not know who it was that said that one does not write initially with ideas, but by making use of words. That is such a shallow thing to say. In the beginning is not the word. The word comes where it is expected. One writes initially through a wave of music, a groundswell that comes from the background noise, from the whole body, maybe, and maybe from the depths of the world or through the front door, or from our latest loves, carrying its complicated rhythm, its simple beat, its melodic line, a sweet wafting, a broken fall. One cannot grip one's pen but this thing, which does not yet have a word, takes off. In the beginning is the song. Language is not the subject, it is still less the infra-subject, why bother with this useless repduplication? The words then easily take their places along the line of this volley or the lines of this volume, even the strictest mathematicians know that one cannot invent or demonstrate anything without the coming of the secret and right harmony of the notation. Then the musical wave embraces space: does it drive away the fury? does it wipe out the murmuring? I do not know, I know that at times it steps aside, painfully negotiating the noise, spreading somewhere else, forming a new space still unknown to the squabbling, it invents a blank space, out of the shouting, out of the hell, where it can lay out its peaceable feasts and its fragile truth value, before the noise shrouds it in night. Under the the word and language, this wave, and beneath the wave, the black noise. The unknown, the infra-subject of hate and multiplicity, open chaos, and closed simply under the numbers. At the seeding of the wave and the surge, as at the beginning of the world, is the echo of pandemonium. The word will be its messiah, and the idea will be the messiah of the messiah, awaited in the noise, hoped for in the raising up of the musical renaissance.

If you love only those who love you and to the extent that they love you, if you hold so strictly to this symmetry, mutuality, and reciprocity, then you give nothing, no love, and the reserve of your wages will be like a tax that is imposed or a debt that is repaid, like the acquittal of a debt. In order to deserve or expect an infinitely higher salary, one that goes beyond the perception of what is due, you have to give without taking account and love those who don’t love you.

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death

With respect to the external world, an initial sanity requires recognizing that I cannot live my skepticism, whereas with respect to others a final sanity requires recognizing that I can. I do.

Stanley Cavell

Rilke, "Lament"

Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road...
When did it start?...
I would like to step out of my heart
an go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is--
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city...

Jonathan Edwards on love:

How soon do earthly lovers come to an end of their discoveries of each other's beauty; how soon do they see all that is to be seen! Are they united as near as 'tis possible, and have communion as intimate as possible? how soon do they come to the most endearing expressions of love that 'tis possible to give, so that no new ways can be invented, given or received. And how happy is that love, in which there is an eternal progress in all these things; wherein new beauties are continually discovered, and more and more loveliness, and in which we shall forever increase in beauty ourselves; where we shall be made capable of finding out and giving, and shall receive, more and more endearing expressions of love forever: our union will become more close, and communion more intimate.

More and more. Is this a alternative view of love to the solipsistic "unconditional" love so often sought? Love as asymptotic process?

Everything is both affirmative and negative, pregnant with its contrary. The universe incessantly engages in on going agonistics

--Floyd Merrell