09/15/2021
[I publish this against my better judgment for the contents are, for once, too personal (even then, I exclude that which is even more personal than “too personal.” This introduction was one of the last dying breaths of a period of my life that feels so distant. I probably have not thought of my ex-girlfriend for probably the entirety of this month, i.e., not a single second of any day of this month. My past life has been lost to me. My current philosophical trajectory is a refutation of all that I built with Bataille. May we all reach where we are supposed to be!]
To start, let us go over the preface…
In Patrick Pobiak’s beautifully moving and relatable book (hereinafter referred to as ‘the/his/this/etc. text’) Deprived of Assurance, the main movement is to express the inexpressible. This is evidenced by the fact that he says, “I hope to best illustrate the feelings one undergoes when in contact with another on a level unable to be formulated with words.” Here, Patrick is repeating a gesture which has been repeated many times before, by many authors. But, this does not in any way take away from his writing. The fact that the movement of this text is not necessarily a unique operation does not take away from his writing, because his text is of a specific non-uniqueness. It is of a certain line of thinkers, and they are those philosophers of Evil. In the very first words of the preface, the immorality of literature is demonstrated because his writing which is of a “burning, painful longing that endures in [him] like an unsatisfied desire” is in opposition “to the moral ends that are normally proposed” (this is the desire of the totality, to use Georges Bataille’s words).[1] Uniqueness is not present in this text, nor any of Bataille’s or Nietzsche’s, because God is “represented as a veritable, unique end”.[2] This text is not necessarily atheological, it still has relapses into theology from time to time, but this text is not of God! This is to say, this text has no end, because what it tries to do, discursively express that which escapes the discursive, cannot be done, and uniqueness relates to either the prosperities of a being or teleological ends (or just the phenomenological subject in the case of Max Stirner), which this text demonstrates neither. This text is not (and thus it has no properties (I’ve already explained why it doesn’t have an end, and therefore it is not in any way unique like I claimed)), in the sense that what this text tries to communicate, what Patrick wants the text be, or rather, what the text is for him (he “knows” what he wants to say, he just can’t say it (and thus he doesn’t actually know what he wants to say)) is never what the text actually is. So, if the Being, the essence, the eidos, etc. of this text is not present then it is not “really” present either. I know what I have just said may be confusing, but let me try to explain the unexplainable once more.
So, to attempt to explain the unexplainable once more.
What Patrick is doing in this text is writing with his life, just as Bataille did in his “magnum opus” (all of his works are his magnum opus in my opinion) On Nietzsche.[3]
All the works of those philosophers of Evil come from the “ludicrous resources” which are of one’s life.[4] This is the case in Nietzsche “who ‘wrote with his blood,’” and it is the case in Bataille as well.[5] In fact, this is also the case in Nick Land’s The Thirst for Annihilation, and it is the case in my writing too. This is even the case in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. And it is the case in Patrick’s text. I cannot think of a “better” way to start off one’s status as an author than to write something that one does not have to produce or accumulate, as one’s life and experiences are already there (excess precedes production and accumulation), ready to be written about!
Patrick has joked about wanting to be me, or how he is in the process of becoming me (whatever the fuck that means!). And he is right and wrong. He is wrong in that within those movements which are neither scalar nor vectorial (these movements do not move across space as catastrophic time annihilates all existential space and thus they have neither direction nor magnitude) — those movements of lacerating oneself which open oneself as a wound, letting one’s blood drip all over blank pages — one is not, and thus, he is not me, nor is he becoming me. But he is also right in the sense that Bataille was Nietzsche and how I am Bataille. This is to say, Patrick (author; object (he is the object from my perspective)) and I (reader; subject (I am obviously the subject from my perspective)) dissolve into one another within the communication that takes place inside our friendship. Subject and object collide into one another, they interpenetrate one another. Now, I do not physically penetrate Patrick, and he does not physically penetrate me, so this is not physical eroticism. But we are not in love so it is not emotional eroticism either.
And it is not spiritual eroticism, so what is ‘it’? ‘It’ is NOTHING. It is the expenditure of sense which is nonsense (did Bataille not hold sense to be equal to nonsense?). In other words, my friendship with Patrick is a composition which inevitably decomposes (like all things do).
THE COMPOSITION THAT IS OUR FRIENDSHIP DECOMPOSES IN ANNIHILATORY LAUGHTER!
Wait… We’ve only talked about the second sentence of the preface… Let us then continue. Patrick says, “I find that these feelings are best intricately formed through their paradoxical nature.” This text of Patrick’s displays what all texts accidentally display: truth has the face of violent contradiction.[6]
But let us not stop at three sentences in! Let’s keep going a little deeper into the abyss that is this book, sentence by sentence, word by word, and so on. Patrick says, “But I do not think you’d have to be understanding this from this writing as it can only be understood by undergoing it first,” and it is this remark of his which reflects the fact that language cannot communicate (inner) experience, just like one cannot talk about Being (even Heidegger could never say what it is), and that is why it is nowhere.
Then we move to the topic of love within the preface, and Patrick has this to say, “[Love is the] absolute offer of oneself to another with no expectation of return.” This latter remark of Patrick’s takes on an unintentionally Bataillean tone (all Bataillean tones are unintentional). Love is sacrificial. But love must be mutual, or it is not all. And this reason is the case is revealed to us by Patrick in the very next sentence. He says, “The drive of wanting to make the experience of another better through you as the tool.” Becoming a thing which is used, i.e., to use Patrick’s word, a “tool” is completely opposed to sacrifice, as sacrifice is the destruction of thinghood, and thus love loses its sacrificial character and ceases to be love at all. What it becomes when one is using the other, as they aren’t in love with them, is just a sad and poor fantasy for that person who is being used. Love is lively decay. But can one lose decay? Contrary to Patrick, I say that one cannot lose love because love is loss. Losing love isn’t a feeling of loss because one must first have love to lose it. In other words, there is no feeling of losing love. And if one “has” love, they are not, as they have been dissolved in the corroding waters of emotional eroticism. Thus, one can never have love, they can only fall into love. Love is an abyss. Love isn’t lost, one just stops falling, and they begin the climb out of the abyss. But one day, they may fall back into the abyss, even deeper maybe.
Later in the preface, Patrick says something which may startle some, he says, “Though repair may end up within the realm of the cliche phrase, ‘oh, how broken I am’, ‘oh, how I am left in pieces[.]’” But are they really cliché? Some may consider them dramatic, but is dramatization not a part of experience? Some may view these phrases as “cringe(-inducing,” or “embarrassing,” but we have all felt it. Those people who unironically make fun of others by commenting “broken” or a bunch of edgy emojis under a social media post about one being upset over something for example, those people are just slaves (in the sense of slave morality). It takes a truly sovereign being to go beyond all limits. Though going beyond all limits entails going beyond the limit that is the self and thus sovereignty entails not being at all, there is a hint of the “sovereign attitude,” the attitude of going beyond all limits, in saying how you truly feel if what you feel is contrary to a “social limit” (a cultural attitude (e.g., mocking people who express themselves by way of dramatization, or mocking people who say things like “I’m so broken,” etc.)). Those slaves, who cannot think beyond the herd, repeat in unison, “repression is what must happen to expression.” Those masters (they are not whole men (they haven’t gone beyond all limits); the master is still a part of the decline like the slave is, and this is why I think dubbing what is taking place here in Patrick’s text as a morality of decline is not wrong, but it is not a slave morality, and thus it is a master morality) do not care for repression, they do not let certain social limits stop them from taking actions which they desire to do.
Patrick says, “There can be truth to these statements, it simply depends who utters them”; I say, “[T]ruth is madness.”[7] Patrick then goes on to speak of his conception of time. Here Patrick has a very restricted conception of time which does not even begin to see time as the catastrophe that it is. Time in its domesticated state is linear (Patrick is conceptually domesticated here then), but in those moments of death, time destroys existence.
But in relation to the seeming inhumanity of time, he says, “How every moment which I attempted to cherish when confronted with the force of time itself, I was only left hollowed and dissolved.” Hollowed out? Maybe. Dissolved? No. Maybe I say no because of anguish. Anguish in the face of time appeared and Patrick could have fallen into the abyss of despair… which is like the Sun. But he did not, to my knowledge at least, and thus he was not annihilated and because of this he feels alienated from himself and he describes this alienation as a feeling of being hollowed out, and this is a description of alienation which I can agree with.
Further reflecting on those moments which cause him anguish in face of time, Patrick says, “these moments cherished can only be cherished within the present.” I cannot agree unless they are moments of dissolution which include love (emotional eroticism), (physical) eroticism, expenditure, sovereignty, etc. as then they have to do with the immanence of the present-moment. The present-moment is infinitely deferred by transcendent thinking. One leaves the immanence of the present-moment, and becomes transcendent in the sense of transcending the immanence of the present-moment. In transcendence, one can only act in regards to the future, and thus teleology becomes one’s new master. Action is slavery! Let us go beyond ourselves, let us go beyond action! To quote Georges Bataille, “I cannot exist totally [italicize] without surpassing the stage of action in some way.”[8] But we must not confuse total existence with the existence of subjectivity, or life, because the totality, which one dissolves into (this annihilation of the subject is “total existence” then), is of death. To quote Georges Bataille once more, “In this totality is the desire to laugh that I mentioned, this desire for pleasure, for sanctity, for death.”[9]
Then, in the third to last sentence of the preface, Patrick says, “I must emancipate myself, from myself” [emphasis mine]. Everything Patrick says after this sentence is either a repetition of the latter sentence’s sentiment or a domesticated cry.
Now, let us cover Chapter 1: To Understand…
Patrick says,
I look back years and question how one can stay so attached to something which is lost beyond revival. Possibly it is because the only source of indescribable emotion came from this. This, experience. This moment in time where it all fell to ashes unable to be brought back, even with the strongest wills. Nonetheless, time has passed and I am unable to reach what is lost, I only hold memories which hold the faint sounds of one who once uttered my name in a way which made me feel such an intense wave of infatuated thoughts, my mind a tsunami to the shore of my body. Oh how the waves look so beautiful before they strike shore.
This is our fundamental condition: searching for a lost intimacy. Now, this lost intimacy is multiple things, but all of these things have the same condition: the annihilation of me. I am annihilated in the embrace of a lover. This impulse toward the annihilatory embrace of a woman, bosom and all, is from a certain sexual contradiction within me, or rather, a certain sexual contradiction that I am. The intensity of the communication that occurs between my mouth and the breast of a woman is one that lacerates me. It cuts me open, and I become an open wound, open to annihilation (joy before death). These experiences,*[10] these moments which turn to ash the moment after they pass, cannot be willed, they are not the annihilation of the will though, they are the surpassing of the will, that is, those moments wherein one goes beyond themselves. Patrick is wrong though. Our body is not a shore which waves crash against. Rather, our bodies are bridges which are to be walked across, and, for Nietzsche, one is walking toward the overman, which is on the other side of the bridge. We do no such thing though. No one has made it across the bridge, for one jumps off half way through. One is annihilated as their body returns to the base sea. The fall from the bridge is like a tributary which flows into the Deep. But wait! Is the overman not the sea?
Seventh grade was quite a school year for Patrick wasn’t it? Nevertheless, Patrick says “Keep in mind I never held any idea of god so that couldn’t be why the nuns comforted me. It’s because they didn’t treat me as a punching bag. The only idea of god I held as a 7th grader was ‘it is all fake!’. I was quite the ruckus during church and religion class.” Is God a fiction? If so, does that mean He doesn’t exist? Can that which is fictional still have some reality in its difference from what is non-fiction, that is, what is “real”? God is dead, this is a fact! But does dying not mean going beyond oneself? Did God go beyond Himself because He is God, because He must be limited by nothing, including Himself? Did God go beyond Himself into the divine? “From this standpoint, nihilism, as the denial of a world of truth and being, might be a divine way of thinking…”[11]
[I have excluded that which I know is too personal for both Patrick and I to share]
“Calm found during the storm.” Is there such a thing?
I find that the sentiments of Christianity hold close with those who are servile. But what about a hyperchristianity? Is hyperchristianity not the flight beyond theology? The Christian says, “Father hold me close. DON’T LET ME DOWN.” (Kanye West says this in his great song “Hurricane,” which is a part of the phenomenal album Donda). The hyperchristian says, “I have suffocated our Holy Father in our close and tight embrace… I must go beyond him.”
I don’t even know how to write, I forget how to write every second I am not writing, but when I write again, I lose myself in the keys (of the keyboard).
Notes
[1]: Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), 3.
[2]: Ibid., 4.
[3]: Ibid., 8.
[4]: Ibid.
[5]: Ibid., 7.
[6]: Georges Bataille, “Note on the Dead Man,” Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille, ed. and trans. by Paul Buck (The Georges Bataille Event, 1984) pp. 25–28, 26.
[7]: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and virulent nihilism (An essay on atheistic religion) (London, UK: Routledge, 1992), 124.
[8]: Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche , trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), 9.
[9]: Ibid., 10.
[10]: *(I only speak of erotic acts as these experiences which slice one open, revealing one’s guts in the shape of the labyrinth, because they have been the only experiences in which I have lost myself in collision with another body. This is to say, the emotional eroticism, decompositional laughter, etc. that I have felt is something that occurred, but what left the intense mark that Patrick speaks of has only been the experiences of physical eroticism.)
[11]: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s, ed. R. Kevin Hill, trans. R. Kevin Hill and A. Scarpitti (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2017), 21.
