The Power of the Impossible: On Community and the Creative Life - Softcover

Erik S. Roraback

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785351494 ISBN 13: 9781785351495

Publisher: Iff Books, 2018

Synopsis

On community and the creative life. The Power of the Impossible surveys cultural figures from Spinoza to popular culture icon Ivan Lendl, to illuminate the challenge and problem of establishing a future-oriented world community and its conceptual intersection with heterogeneous forms of the creative life. 'This original, unorthodox study illuminates our current crises of community formation and creativity in ways unexpected but necessary.' Robert Appelbaum, Uppsala University

About this title

About the Author

Erik S. Roraback was born in Seattle, USA, and teaches U.S. literature, cultural-studies, critical theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis in Charles University, and international cinema in Pragues film academy, F.A.M.U. He has lectured in fifteen countries and published more than thirty-five conference papers. He lives in Prague, Czech Republic.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Power of the Impossible

On Community and the Creative Life

By Erik Roraback

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Erik S. Roraback
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-149-5

Contents

Illustrations/Photos, 
Preface and Acknowledgments, 
Abbreviations, 
Note on the Quotations, 
Introduction: Ways for Thinking Community and (De)creativity, 
Part I: Toward Community with Élite Culture Energies I 39, 
Chapter 1 Expression, the Fold and Spinozan Existence qua Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Zizek, 
Chapter 2 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being-In-Common and the Absent Semantics of Myth, 
Chapter 3 Freedom, Nancy and Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903), 
Part II: Toward Community with Élite Culture Energies II 121, 
Chapter 4 Walter Benjamin's Status in Interpretive Communities, 
Chapter 5 Bearing Crosses for Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), 
Chapter 6 Bataille's The Atheological Summa (1943-45), 
Chapter 7 Existence, Creation and the Inoperative/Operative Commons in Invisible Man (1952) and in La Divina Commedia (1308-21), 
Part III: Toward Community with Popular Culture Energies 209, 
Chapter 8 The Standstill of a Fully Fledged Reality: Jimmy Connors versus Ivan Lendl at the 1982 and 1983 US Open, 
Chapter 9 The Unconscious, Athletic Identity and a Whole Galaxy on Stage; or, the 1984 French Open, John McEnroe contra Ivan Lendl, 
Chapter 10 Tennis Conclusions, 
Notes, 
Select Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Expression, the Fold and Spinozan Existence qua Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Zizek

In Baltasar Gracián's valuation: "what's to last an eternity, must take an eternity. Only perfection is noted, for success alone endures. A truly deep mind achieves eternity" (POAP, 22). This encapsulates basic tenets of the system we shall elucidate of the Dutch philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–77) of Sephardi/Portuguese descent. The following passage from Zizek articulates the missed opportunity of Spinozan happiness and joy that summarizes a liberated Spinozan modernity, which awaits realization: "the new we are dealing with is not primarily the future New, but the New of the past itself, of the thwarted, blocked, or betrayed possibilities ('alternate realities') which have disappeared in the actualization — of the past [ ...]" (LN, 322). In addition, the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) writes in a judicious study of Spinoza, "Nowhere has thought raised so vast a claim, nowhere has philosophical thought attained such heights of happiness." The profundity of Spinoza's meditations on existence, creation, and community produce the philosophical 'happiness' to which Jaspers refers. As the present chapter will demonstrate, Spinozan knowledge, desire and values activate the power of the impossible: powerful lives and communities of meaning and value informed by the principles of justice, freedom and democratic equality.

Cheery and ethereal properties pervade Spinoza's work; these affects and effects abide too in Gilles Deleuze's output, including in his coauthored works with French scholar Félix Guattari, and in the intellectual happiness and joy in Zizek's philosophical work. One purpose here is to highlight how the projects of happiness, human flourishing (or eudaemonia) and joy are cardinal aims for the human subject in a Spinozan modernity. The emancipated, generous, humane, open and synthetic human work of the historical baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), and its properties of development, modulation, rhythm and tempo offer a similar politics of existence. A commonality on the achievement and experience of joy with Spinoza and Bach would thus inaugurate a creative commons of transpersonal and intercultural mutuality.

The viewpoint of the philosophical baroque's allegorical outlook––and of the historical baroque's aesthetic fingerprint for Deleuze's Leibniz of the aesthetic property and operation of the fold––illuminate Spinoza's work and life. Spinoza was enfolded in a world of power. He is one of the few philosophers who not only contributed to philosophical-civilizational accomplishment, but also was excommunicated in 1656 at age 24 from Amsterdam's Jewish community. This shows how community may also function as a regressive and exclusionary form of enclosure. According to the official history, Spinoza also endured a violent attempt on his life. Deleuze notes, "It is said that Spinoza kept his coat with a hole pierced by a knife thrust as a reminder that thought is not always loved by men." Spinoza's summa the Ethics (1677), unpublished in his lifetime, illuminates a perception of his epoch that forges and enfolds the modern world in which incubating, and not yet hegemonic, (neo) baroque configurations of capitalist and religious power and relationships need dealing with in one's daily practices. This praxis would modulate the fold of subjectivity and so activate the enfolding, folding and unfolding of an efficacious existence amidst the kairology of an ongoing cultural modernity.

Reminiscent of Hegel's critical philosophy on the power of negative experience to beget knowledge in a retrospective narration that yields positive self-knowledge (witness for example Hegel's statement, "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk") consider Spinoza's words on life as a testing period, an opportunity for the politics of possibility, and in Benjaminese a 'weak messianic power':

I resolved at last to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good [...] which [...] would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity.

[...] if only I could resolve, wholeheartedly [to change my plan of life], I would be giving up certain evils for a certain good. For I saw that I was in the greatest danger, and that I was forced to seek a remedy with all my strength [...].

Here we discern the impetus of Spinoza's life and deeds: hard-won experience in practical reality, to grasp "the true good" of a flourishing form of life replete with autonomy, courage (animositas), freedom, generosity (generositas), joy and kindness (modestia). Hence the importance of our historicity for our acts of cognition, and for new forms of individual and by extension of the praxis of communal development and being-in-the-world as exercises of joyful immanence; the lattermost constitute a moralethical knowledge, as well as liberating forms of cultural and existential capital, and flashes of dynamic energy.

Spinoza sees through the dysfunctions, toxicity and traps of a world of irrealism; his work seeks an active self-starting human agent to live effectively and meaningfully within it by expressing forms of joy as manifestations of eternity, and so too by extension of a certain immateriality as immortality and even as a paradoxical true form of materiality. At stake here is the problematic of the practices and exercises of a powerful creative existence and commons: one must discover that which gives one joy, and moves one, to find one's clinamen or swerve, for a line to follow and a platform on which to stand amidst the abstract and chaotic powers of modern life and a perplexing modernity.

Thus, as the fledgling consumerist era of capitalist big finance emerges in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Spinoza must revolt against a social system that would thwart his projects and aims for an efficacious existence of radical creation (and of a community including that of a self in a spiritual and intellective task). Spinoza hence seeks a self-community in order to immunize himself against the social system, if as Robert Esposito has put the matter, "the category of immunity is inseparable from that of community: as its inverse mode, it cannot be eliminated."

The Spinozan values of substantive authenticity (a notion we have since become skeptical about more generally), of eternity as immortality, of hope, of achieved individuality, of expressive human agency, and of the capacity for meaningful self- and other-and so transindividual transformation through the inventive and mediating agency of the power of virtue as an individual and social praxis inaugurate communal forms. Such activities allow one to hover over the mess of humanity's run of the mill behaviors that are a stack of cards that will fall down. This both inward and outward conversion to a powerful mode of immunized life constitutes the truly precious thing. Credisne miraculis? (Latin: Do you believe in miracles?) For one is at a crossroads here, a midpoint, and the future will be decided on the basis of a profound, and even militant stunning power of decision. Self-mediation arises out of a moral-ethical choice. Spinoza describes this quest as 'something' that would be 'acquired' and so the operation of a spiritual knowledge purchase.

To safeguard and to immunize one's self against modern obscurantism, vanity and pomposity within the coordinates of the baroque world of a misguided understanding of what constitutes real power, Spinoza notes that one must "assume certain rules of living as good:"

1. To speak according to the power of understanding of ordinary people, and do whatever does not interfere with our attaining our purpose. [...].

2. To enjoy pleasures just so far as suffices for safeguarding our health.

3. Finally, to seek money, or anything else, just so far as suffices for sustaining life and health, and conforming to those customs of the community that do not conflict with our aim. (TE, 6)

Strikingly, Spinoza claims that clear writing and speaking may operate as a sacramental penance and gesture of solidarity for the category of the truth, and secondly these procedures may establish clear corridors of communication in the construction of communities. For to communicate in a clear language that is accessible to one's contemporaries will yield a greater audience for apprehending the content of one's arguments and the drift of one's intellectual work. To democratize one's capacity to be understood then holds an inestimable value for community relations.

Spinoza's proposals indicate too that pleasure and money should be health-bringing and not extend overkill structures that obstruct equality, justice, liberty and blunt our true interests and productive activities that affirm the power to act and to exist (our conatus). For another commons to come, Spinozan battle strategies invent effective forms of existence and creation. A Spinozan form of spiritual discipline captures the magical power of existence and creation. A virtuous practice of human agency itself constitutes also the wellspring of knowledge, meaning, movement, and value. Herein too lies in one flash of the eye (coup d'oeil), the philosopher's aesthetics of existence.

According to one of Spinoza's philosophical disciples, Deleuze, Spinoza's life embodies these foregoing intentions exemplarily. Spinoza practices what he teaches, and this augments the credibility of his message. Deleuze writes of Nietzsche (1844–1900) another key reader and disciple of Spinoza, in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy: "The philosopher appropriates the ascetic virtues — humility, poverty, chastity — and makes them serve [...] extraordinary ends that"

are not very ascetic [...] a production, a productivity, a potency, in terms of causes and effects. Humility, poverty, chastity are his [...] way of being a grand vivant, of making a temple of his own body, for a cause that is all too proud, all too rich, all too sensual. (SPP, 3)

This is suitably paradoxical because for all of his highly concentrated abstractional work, Spinoza remains interested in the good life, and in questions of how ought one to live with practical force in practical reality with his practice and exercise of a "General Ascetology" and a "General Immunology" à la Sloterdijk's You Must Change Your Life. The image of the philosopher as a transformative agent instances a forceful being able to function on a plane of self-same immanence (of causa sui). The milieu and ideological universe/multiverse of a species still living unconsciously to itself is constitutively unable to comprehend the expressive value ideals of 'humility, poverty, and chastity' for the folds of subjectivity and of a producer-creative existence. This is partly because such practices occur in a situation of self-interests mediated by a society built on finance, spectacularization and surveillance. Such Spinozan procedures and selections are necessary as immunizations for the (unlikely) occurrence of cultural production of high achievement for the individual and the community. A love of thinking and philosophy are desirable too in this context in terms of indefatigable work toward a powerful form of existence as an exercise and practice where so much is at stake and rendered possible.

Recall from the Introduction, for comparative purposes, the tennis icon Lendl's relaunching his own post-Spinozan geometrical methodology of the tennis courts in the 1980s. As Deleuze declares on Spinoza: "The geometric method, the profession of polishing lenses, and the life of Spinoza should be understood as constituting a whole. For Spinoza is one of the vivantsvoyants. [...] he says that demonstrations are 'the eyes of the mind.'" To this idea of a complex dynamic system neo-Hegelian approach to Spinoza's thought and historical person, his mode of reality and of the production of intellectual work, Deleuze adds, "He is referring to the third eye, which enables one to see life beyond all false appearances, passions and deaths. The virtues — humility, poverty, chastity, frugality — are required for this [...]. Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy, and in vision" (SPP, 14). Crucial is here, "the third eye", which conducts forms of radical creativity for radical democracy and for deeds and work of value and substance. Though, Deleuze is mistaken in that Spinoza did find content in the notions of hope and of courage (we quoted Spinoza above on 'hope', and courage is part and parcel of a Spinozan mode of reality on some level too, which he terms animositas). All the same, Deleuze finds in Spinoza's geometric style a way out of both philosophy and theory for a more powerful mediating activity for the creation of a potent expressive aesthetics of existence. Accordingly, Spinoza invests the business of living in capitalist modernity with new knowledge, value and life. It is a question of an ethic of responsibility, to a more authentic and moral-ethical form of being, which would find motivating vectors in forms of 'joy' and of 'vision' in one's existence, and in inventive forms of creative production. Thus emerges a Spinozan morality and faculty of reason for the cultivation of good choices of the praxis of existence. In this model, a moral-ethically enlightened and awakened life takes stage center for the delicate and luminous force and prize of the power and miracle of (de)creative existence.

Deleuze also polemicizes for Spinoza's sake, "No philosopher was ever more worthy, but neither was any philosopher more maligned and hated."

[...]. We must start from the practical theses [...]. These theses imply a triple denunciation: of 'consciousness,' of 'values,' and of 'sad passions.' These are the three major resemblances with Nietzsche. And already in Spinoza's lifetime, they are the reasons for his being accused of materialism, immoralism, and atheism. (SPP, 17)

Spinoza bypasses various illusions and confronts reality in the face for a special sort of knowledge work. The device of Deleuze's reliance on Nietzsche as a way of legitimating his version of Spinoza indexes one signal vector in this dynamic (the scholar Louis Althusser for example in contradistinction uses Karl Marx vis-à-vis Spinoza in this way to accredit his Spinoza). As for the category in Spinoza of the body (model) that entails for Deleuze "a devaluation of consciousness in relation to thought: a discovery of the unconscious, of an unconscious of thought just as profound as the unknown of the body. [...] consciousness is by nature the locus of an illusion. Its nature is such that it registers effects, but it knows nothing of causes" (SPP, 18–19). Again here we remain unconscious. Key is to enact "a discovery of the unconscious, of an unconscious of thought just as profound as the unknown of the body". In this Deleuzo-Spinozan sense then our bodily and mental existences wait to be forged with a better notion of this transcendental subjectivity that would be the life and subject of the unconscious. Thereby, we may tap into desire, knowledge and values that would construct forms of community and the creative life to alter oppressive relations of power and violence.

The mind-body identity thesis provides a twofold way for a transformative relation for the modern subject to respond to the dictates of the winner-take-all modern culture of competitivity, power and violence. Additionally, for Deleuze, Spinoza's Ethics communicates the specific idea that "only joy is worthwhile [...] bringing us near to action, and to the bliss of action" (SPP, 28). For existence, blissful and joyful acts in the practical reality thrive in a Spinozan-inspired plan. Perceptively Deleuze adds that with regard to its formal structure, Spinoza's magnum opus "is a book written twice simultaneously: once in the continuous stream of definitions, propositions,"

demonstrations, and corollaries [...]; another time in the broken chain of scholia, a discontinuous volcanic line, a second version underneath the first, expressing all the angers of the heart and setting forth the practical theses of denunciation and liberation. The entire Ethics is a voyage in immanence; but immanence is the unconscious itself, and the conquest of the unconscious. (SPP, 28–29)

The concept "immanence is the unconscious itself, and the conquest of the unconscious" remains to be unpacked in Spinoza studies and beyond. Our unconsciousness therefore is where to locate powerful redemptive work. This would mediate a set of individual and collective archaeologies of the future, of a tracing of memories, and of imagining spaces of togetherness for both individual and collective projects and practices of existence, creation and communitas. Further the idea of creative joy takes here center stage in a purposive whole for how to compose a genuinely agential human life full of the politics of radical possibility and joy for both individual and communal-civic experience.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Power of the Impossible by Erik Roraback. Copyright © 2017 Erik S. Roraback. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Edition details

• Publisher: Iff Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1785351494
• ISBN 13: 9781785351495
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400