Wolfgang Schirmacher. Philosophical Methodologies.

Wolfgang Schirmacher. "Philosophical Methodologies." in: EGS Lecture. 2011.

That was supposedly what Bataille wanted to see, the ugly face of death. That’s his romantic idea…some of your quotes here, I think I must have quoted Bataille. I must have included…it’s no longer in there? What are all these people here? Yes, Bataille. Look. Right. The first one is from Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. [student name] could you please read this for me? Student: “Spontaneous physical revulsion keeps alive in some indirect fashion at least the consciousness that the terrifying face of death, its stinking putrefaction, are to be identified with the sickening primary condition of life.” So, the terrifying face of death, the stinking putrefaction, the facticity of it, that is what he really wanted because in art, as you know, an writing death is a wonderful topic, you know. With death you can always catch people. So I always ask myself what will happen when one time there is no death, just the ending of life, so how to live life with death not a threat anymore. So your friend who welcomes you to the long sleep you are getting, all the thrillers will not be understood anymore, all that, what we now see, the death in life interrupting what was so hopeful etcetera, this audience of the future will have no idea about death.

One of our professors who is quite a crazy guy himself, Michel Houellebecq – have you heard of him? Come on, he’s the only one who this year he even became the highest, he’s the only one in France who, with every book he writes he gets people upset. And he has written, the island, man as an island, and so he took the idea of the cloning and wrote something I would love to have written. Usually he writes books, a mixture of pornography and philosophy. [Student asks Wolfgang to spell Houellebecq’a name.] The Possibility Of An Island, Michel Houellebecq. Just look at our website. The last name begins with an ‘H’. So look at the alphabet, I hope you have learned the alphabet. He wrote The Possibility Of An Island, and it is the story of the three hundred twenty fifth, or whatever, generation of a clone in a world. This clone wants to know who was number one. How did he live, number one? How did I get through that? And he lived in a world in which there was no sex, there was no death. All that was gone. And it was a world so, so terrifying for readers nowadays because of its emptiness in there, when all that what we fear, also lust after was gone. They had sex. Right, there was some sex, but it was like a play date. Okay, maybe he does not need three hundred twenty five, just maybe called hooking up, I think, nowadays.

Okay, but since we are at this quote here, these are to be identified with the sickening primary condition of life because that is why Heidegger said he is the philosopher who knows more about death than any other, Bataille. Because Bataille, as I told my class, and I’m sorry if I repeat myself, for him against all the tradition of Western philosophy being was not continuous. It was discontinuous. So our life, which feels like from birth to death etcetera, is a lie, is a construction, and we need ruptures to suddenly understand how being really is discontinuous. And this was for him, this hanging was for him, lust murder was for him a kind of rupture, but also laughter in the face of death. I think that was his goal here. He wanted to go there and not weep but laugh about it, saying, “What can you do, you idiot? Hang yourself.” It is a, it is a kind of very anti-intuitive reaction to that obviously, but it’s therefore a reaction which fits the discontinuity. I laugh at something I should be sad about. And as you know, there a cultures, like in Asia or South sea, where they have a party when you die or when somebody you loved dies, and their color is white, you know, and not black in there. And who says that they don’t understand the world better than we do with our kind of reaction to it. So the primary condition of life is sickening, and it is important for everyone of us, according to Bataille, and I think he is totally right, to get a reminder of this sometimes, a wake up call. Okay, later you do some other stuff. You are again in the routine of your life, but you are changed. Laughter in the face of death, lust murder, orgasm and poetry, those were the four ways of interrupting your everyday life. So please stay with poetry, yes, in Saas-Fee.

“In reality when we curse death we only fear ourselves. The severity of our will is what makes us tremble. We lie to ourselves when we dream of escaping the movement of the luxury exuberance of which we are only the most intense forms. In this respect the luxury of death is regarded by us in the same way as that of sexuality. First as a negation of ourselves, then, in a sudden reversal, as a profound truth of that movement of which life is a manifestation.” What does he talk about? Let’s talk about sex, one thing every one of us knows something about, not that you understand it, but you know things about it. Firstly we experience it as a negation of ourselves. That is, my English teacher, Henry Miller, said once, “you drown,” and I only read him n English actually at that time, “you are drowning as human being in love an are reborn as lovers, and you…” [student’s cell phone rings interrupting Wolfgang] whoever it is, then leave. At least it’s not Wagner. Yeah, and then, as a negation of ourselves, and that is becoming one body, the animal with two backs, this becoming one, the romantic idea of the – what is it? – but then in a sudden reversal it’s over, orgasm happened, and then who is this person? Why is he or she not leaving? “The profound truth of that movement of which life is a manifestation.” You find, then, the disgust in that which you found attractive in that.

And, yeah, this is a, Bataille once wrote a book called Law, and it’s actually a kind of true story of a very bourgeois French lady who used to prove to herself that she is a saint by taking the train from Paris to Marseille - and it was not the fast train, it was still the train that took ten hours or so – and then going through the train looking for the most ugly men she could find and then inviting him to one of the stinking bathrooms to have sex and giving, in this respect, them certainly something to remember, the touch of the sacred. And for Bataille this was really a saint. It was Saint Teresa in modern times. As far as I remember the bathrooms on such trains were so small it must be really a kind of acrobatics. Good. It’s called The Visions of Excess: Death and Sensuality.

Okay, still, why is he in my list of phenomenologists? No he isn’t, see? He is dialectics. Okay, let’s go to the next one, dialectics. That is the moment when you see, because nearly everybody disagrees with him there. So he has a lot of con, of contra. His thesis is a contra in itself, against the entire history of being to say you are discontinuous; You are not a continuum. So you are nothing to be trusted, and the best thing in life is when you are getting hit over your head or an orgasm with somebody you don’t want, and…no, I did not say that. So he is a, there are abvious contradictions here, death and sensuality, lust and murder; These are contradictions. I never understood what lust had to do with being painful or something like that, but I’m just raised in east Germany so what should I know? If I’d been raised in San Francisco, yeah…no. So it’s still a dialectical process. It’s a pro and con, a contradiction in there, and philosophically we are kind of asked to solve the contradiction, find what is the right answer, the either or, or maybe a third one, but either or is the first. Something must be wrong: either it’s painful or it’s lustful. What, are you going to create this monster of lust-murder in there? And why is orgasm called the little death? Because that was the reason why he was attracted to it. In French they call it the little death because the French people obviously can’t have fun without thinking of death. And poetry, you know, who reads poetry? Writing, yes, but reading? That’s a different story.

So the entire history, just our everyday behavior always goes to erase contradiction by choosing a side, but it was Hegel who understood, well, it was Plato who came up with dialectics, but Plato’s dialectics is different. In Plato’s dialectics it’s like an American court. There are accusers, defenders, and there is the judge, and the judge knows nothing. He only knows what both parties present as evidence. German court is different. In German courts the judge knows everything, and the defenders and accusers, they are also judged by the judge how truthful they are because he has also checked out the evidence. So, no, but in Plato not. The judge knows nothing. So it is important that both sides bring up the best rhetoric, the best arguments, and truth plays no role, and the judge at the end has to kind of probably throw the – what’s it called? – throw the dice.

Hegel’s dialectics has nothing to do with this. Hegel observed, as a phenomenologist, one of his first books is called Phenomenology of Spirit, or of mind, whatever book you read – I think spirit is better. He looked at the world. Hegel actually single handedly created history. Before Hegel, it’s kind of crazy to think of that, there was no history. There were only historical tales. There were reports about some wars in there, but it was never what we now call history, a long way, an epoch, and this is happening, and this an important date, and this happened, and then that happened etcetera, a kind of storytelling coming from the first time of recorded history to today, and it is usually a story of progress, or as Hegel said, the progress in freedom. We can see, and somebody…to say it is laughable to have a progress in freedom. But it’s not. Go back to Hollywood with the Medieval ages. Remember in a book like – what was the book from the guy who could smell? – the perfume, right! Things were stinking, these French people! They still do, but at this time it was unbelievable, or in Venice they were shitting out of their windows. It was an unbelievable, uncivilized…and the same building, the same building, but the inhabitants were totally for our taste, you know…They’re all like Reagan in his last phase of Alzheimer’s I guess. It was unbelievable, and Hegel was right. We have much more freedom of self determination than ever in human history, and that we are still angry with all the bad things happening shows only that we are now believing it can be changed. To the better. So even if we are not believing in progress with a big “p” anymore, as a story of enlightenment etcetera, our criticism, our complaints about how the world is is only possible because we believe there is a progress going on, and there is. Something like this school would never have been possible fifty years ago. There would only be the Black Mountain College. You can do that some place in North Carolina, but never ask us to give you a degree. Just party with John Cage.

So, Hegel told us a story, and he wrote The Philosophy of History and so on and so on, about the certain phases. The first were the phases of innocence. That was the Greeks. Then came the bourgeois society, the civil society. That’s where we still live in, the fighting, and hopefully one day they will be sustained, which is not a political state, but a state of existence in which people do right because they live right. Nobody has to tell them anything. It’s their custom to be truthful, their custom to be nice, and don’t say that’s impossible. Yes, even in our world there are a few niches where people act like that. I’m not saying the Amish or whatever. Maybe they come close, these people, but they need all their bibles etcetera as crutches. They can’t just do it on their own. Be human. That should be the easiest way to live, and it will be, one day, the easiest way tot live. That’s what Hegel sustained. But in the meantime we are in the civil society. It means we are fighting each other about that and that.

So that was the big picture of the three historical epochs, but the point in Hegel is his dialectics, and the point in dialectics is to understand that the world is full of contradictions and not trying to erase them but to engage them in a process, in a dynamic process, or progress, whatever. Engage the contradictions. Make them fruitful. And that is in many ways what every artist did. They took the materials which did not fit together and create something out of it. Make, don’t erase, don’t bad mouth contradiction. Make it something worthwhile. But you do it in different ways. We have seen in Bataille, you know, and actually Bataille, I feel he’s like a school teacher, you know, like a sadistic school teacher who tells us all the bad news about life you know. Okay, gives us an orgasm too, but the rest is, okay, do I want to know this really, that life is discontinuous. But after he said, you cannot take it away anymore. You would talk about continuity, but you would always have to say maybe it’s not the case, maybe no continuity. And then what are you going to do with it? In both case you have to live on. In both cases you have to kind of survive, you know, to fight everyday for this or that. There is no stillness. There is no moment where you say okay now it’s over, except death, and their, unfortunately, you never experience death. You only experience dying. So the fighting goes on until the last moment.

So the best to do something is somehow in Hegel’s view to use this contradiction, but in a comprehensive way. Hegel’s great project was to understand, that’s why he is called idealist, to understand the entire world in all its contradictions, and don’t judge saying this is bad and this is good. This is the real, and this is ideal, and both are okay, both fighting, so what? There is a strong phenomenological impulse here still in dialectics.

For Adorno, he wrote the Negative Dialectics, but he did it after the first World War and under the impression of the second World War – what was it? 1947 I think – the dialectics of enlightenment came out, and, right, it was after the second World War when he published the Negative Dialectics. Adorno’s point was to say Hegel let us off too easy. To give us a chance of understanding also means that we allow the evil and all the stuff still to exist, and the fact that we cannot change it right away should not be the same as accepting it Hegel’s attitude was acceptance, and Adorno’s was criticism. So his negative dialectics says don’t try to find a solution because Hegel, I forgot to tell you, did not stick to pro and con. Pro and con is the first negation, which should change into the second negation. In he second negation the first negation will be negated, but you don’t return to the first one. You come to a new realm of it, elevation, the elevator – you get to the next floor. And I am very interested in the second negation.

I taught a work shop in New York last fall about the second negation because that is still something very few people understand, if at all, how this works, the second negation. It is not a solution in the form of a business. Okay, I give a little bit, you give a little bit. But it’s also not an erasure. You are not throwing out pro and con because pro and con are both right in their own way. So you bring both in your solution, but since it is no longer this floor they are, have a different emphasis now. They are not so important. They have now to listen, now to obey the laws of the third floor and not of the floor they have been before. But what is this third floor? What is the third? You know when you write and read all of our philosophers they all have a kind of third in there. What is the third? What is that which gets us out without being dishonest and saying pro is right, con is right; They are both right. So what is the third floor? The good news about that is if there were no third floor, third view point, already you would not be able to even search for it because you are attracted by it, strange attractor as they call it, the chaos in mathematics. The strange is a strange attraction going on there. In pro and con we are not satisfied. We are not satisfied from the contradiction; We are not satisfied from both sides; We have the feeling there is more. There is something else in which we can bring with us what we learned in pro and con, but we are not in the world as we know it. And in fact again nobody, no philosopher, no artist, can think or do something which is not already there. There is no creation out of nothing. It’s already happening. Artificial life is there long before I discovered it, and it will stay on long after my death. So this attraction, that is what you will hopefully feel when you write your work. That is your intuition of something which comes out of contradictions and which you feel might be a possible new third in there, and it is extremely vague. That’s why courage is so important. You have to trust your instinct here, the vagueness, and then all people coming and saying, “yeah, we have explained this already.” Don’t listen to them. You may have explained it, but you cannot explain it like me because you are not me. That’s the first thing you have to tell them; You are not me. I am not you, and you are not you. “I’m not you” was just a dissertation I approved, the title “I Am Not You.” Maybe I should have given a better grade, now that I think, but he angered me.

Anyway, so what is this in dialectics? I could play, but I’m too tired already, I could play the dialectical game I did a few years ago. I could have half of you say life is worth living and the other half make the argument life is not worth living, please kill yourself tonight. And you will find arguments for both sides. It’s always funny to let one and the other discuss, but, again, I am not…Two and a Half Men is my solution to the third viewpoint – I cannot wait, I must see them already, on the coast of Santa Monica, you know, so why should I…[student interrupts: So you like Charlie Sheen?] Charlie Sheen, right. I have all seven I hope I get through here in Saas-Fee so I have something from this summer.

Okay, again, Adorno said no, no solution. The world is so bad. Keep the dialectical contradiction sharp. And that is quite a nice way to do things, you know. Don’t let anybody talk you into a solution. Be a contrarian, as DJ Spooky calls me, contrarian. But again, as I said, truth in art is same thing here. You cannot stay a contrarian all the time. Firstly, it’s kind of dishonest. Every time you go to sleep you become one again. So your contradictions are erased until you get the dreams of [audio unclear], but I never have nightmares. I am a nightmare, so I don’t have nightmares.

Okay…but still I like my friend Teddy, I saw him once in Berlin when I was a young student, little guy. Called him silver tongue. Had a great voice, and he was able to talk any of his PhD candidates in his bed, and his assistant was standing – what is it called? – was in the hotel floor and waiting so that Mrs. Adorno is not coming. So that was at this time, but we, in the sixties, we loved it. It was not that we had any objections to that. Get the orgy going. Anyway, but in his life, you know, he was a trained composer with non-traditional same tone – what’s it in English? [student answers but audio unclear] – thank you, and so far I had no taste for jazz, or something like that, and unfortunately this poor guy, he was a Jew, and he was in England, so he could have stayed there, but he went to America and ended up in Hollywood and was hired by Hollywood people as a script write. Can you believe that? One of the greatest thinkers was a script writer in Hollywood. None of his scripts, I don’t think he ever wrote one, but what he did, he wrote The Dialectics of Enlightenment and criticized the culture of the industry like crazy. So whatever he learned in Hollywood he bad mouthed. This was very helpful back in Germany later obviously because in the sixties the Frankfurt School became the leading school, and the, yeah, they hated me for doing my dissertation on Heidegger, but being hated is the best thing which can happen to you because then you might be right.

Hermeneutics. For dialectics, again, phenomenology is something you all have to do. That is your basis of stuff. That is your collective stuff. Dialectics is something you use when you have contradictions, to bring them into play. You do pro and con, and actually you always have kind of a dialectical element in your work because it helps you to fill your pages and helps your readers to have a better view of it. And when you do collecting quotes for later, time those because you will never find those again, trying to find the right ones, quotes I needed, and I looked through forty books of Lenin in my library, his entire works, and I couldn’t find this thing. It was such a good quote, but without the source I could not use it in an academic work. So you can paraphrase it, or you can just steal it and hope nobody finds out, but in Google times I would not do it. So you need dialectics when you read, as I told my class today, not just take out what supports your idea. Also take out what contradicts is because what contradicts, the enemies you need very much. So I have this idea of the bodyguards, on the one hand, they are the people supporting you. So, if you shoot me, shoot Derrida first. That’s not easy. It’s a very hard to shoot target. And on the other hand get the snipers in, the people who shoot after you with very strong, very patient soldiers. They are the people contradicting you. So you have both, and then you are the God in your world. You are the writer. You can play with them anyway you want, and at EGS we ask you to do that. Don’t write something you can submit to Yale University. The only thing where you have to be careful is the academic form, please. It’s the only thing I am inflexible. I want to have a table of contents. I want to have quotes and footnotes, and I want to have a bibliography, the European kind in which you also list books you have not read b ut want your readers to read.

I did actually – sorry, on the side – I wrote 120 pages of Ereignis technique without any quotes, and I wrote it ten years after I had forgotten Heidegger. So people later, my readers, said, “we never know where Heidegger ends and Schirmacher starts.” And I don’t know. I think Heidegger copied me because they are my words. It is absolutely my language. Heidegger’s language is so terrible you can see the difference. I was called the best writer of philosophical prose in Germany. So, my English is not me. It is this lady. [Wolfgang gestures to Virginia] My German is much more powerful. It’s like boxing, hitting, hitting, hitting, small sentences and how do I get him? With Kung Fu, yeah. And at the same time I watched Kung Fu. That’s probably where it came from.

Student: How can we get that thesis on Ereignis?

Yeah, it came out as two books, but you can also get it in the original form. Every German library has it, and it was the most rented – whatever, rented? – taken out book in Germany at the time. And even, this was amazing, I only did it to become, whatever…[student: It’s only in German?] That is in German, yes. Yeah, yeah, you have to wait. There are six books coming in English, and we are working on that, but the translators, my main translator is very good but very slow too. She has no sense of time. She thinks time goes on forever. So one word a year!