Intermission: In The Lapse Of The Gods?
"A restless feeling of guilt would always be present with him: he would confess and repent and be absolved, confess and repent again and be absolved again, fruitlessly."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“You implore now a moment of earthly life wherein to repent: in vain. That time is gone: gone for ever.”
As the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard wrote in his 1849 book, The Sickness unto Death, as translated by Walter Lowrie, “But in the Christian understanding of it death itself is a transition unto life. In view of this, there is from the Christian standpoint no earthly, bodily sickness unto death. For death is doubtless the last phase of the sickness, but death is not the last thing. If in the strictest sense we are to speak of a sickness unto death, it must be one in which the last thing is death, and death the last thing. And this precisely is despair.”
For Kierkegaard, this sickness is the despair of death, whose paradoxical cure is death itself — or the end of our lives — and thus the mortal conclusion of sin, as infected by the patient zeros of the original sin in the Garden of Eden. What carries us through this sickness is our knowledge of being unhealthy, or the guilt of carrying the pathogen of evil inside of us, but we refuse any cure. We know we are going to die, and therefore, cannot die because it is precisely this despair, this sickness, which keeps us alive and afraid of death and its very commute.
However, there is absolution from death by honest and arduous Christian faith, given that death is far more promising than life to the Christian, but which despairful Christian is more worthy of heaven? Is it the sated pious or the agonising disbelievers? Is it the church-bound faithful or the despairing apostates? One group in possession of God and the other group with its faith in absentia, and yet, in the absence of possessing God, do the absent maintain him all the more because of their despair?
Make a painting sacred and everyone wants to touch it, like touching the wooden splinters of the true cross of Christ. The greater the sacredness, the greater the desire to touch it, or at least to secretly to covet it, as if you could have a special affair with the divine that way. After the questions of possession and guilt, however, is the question of value; if someone had a piece of the cross in their home, and known only to them, would they forget to respect its divinity, as if guilty of its possession, and thus substitute it for ordinariness? Is this not the structure of the congregant Christian, for whom salvation is their ordinariness?
Meanwhile, the anguished apostate has no luxuries, because they are constantly living with the guilt of losing a sacred benefactor. But what Kierkegaard defines as characteristic of Christians is true of recanted ones too: there is a psychology of guilt as lying in the fault of the Christian heart — whether you believe in Heaven or not, why are you nonetheless afraid of death? In both cases, death is the end of despair; what is your guilt of being alive?
This guilt cannot be forgotten either way, as much as the existential fear of Hell or no Hell is remembered; and in the relapse of faith, the guilt remains, for no leap back into faith can span the loss of the completed world — the idolatry of the Nietzschean post-God man — when you knew God was the world itself.
In other words, to live a Christian life is no bliss, because its every moment seeks in the shadow of damnation an exodus from despair, and this shadow is sin, which is inescapable no matter how many times you attend Mass or sit at the altar and the feet of the symbolised Lord, and so who is the greater misbeliever? Is it they who steadily sit in the Church pews and feel the Word of God or the ones who abandoned the Church and felt the Word still? Is it the feeling souls or the agonising ones, unwilling to feel and thus punished to feel more, who will be praised when both of them lapse into Heaven?
As Kierkegaard continues, “Sin is this: before God, or with the conception of God, to be in despair at not willing to be oneself, or in despair at willing to be oneself. Thus sin is potentiated weakness or potentiated defiance: sin is the potentiation of despair. […] Despair is potentiated in proportion to consciousness of self; but the self is potentiated in the ratio of the measure proposed for the self, and infinitely potentiated when God is the measure. The more conception of God, the more self; the more self, the more conception of God. Only when the self as this definite individual is conscious of existing before God, only then is it the infinite self; and then this self sins before God.”
When one is conscious of themselves, says Kierkegaard, one is more conscious of God and thus potentiated to despair in relation to a sin of defiance. But in defiance of what? For Kierkegaard, it is a defiance against being oneself, because one does not wish to die and thus, “For so it is with men in this world: first a man sins from frailty and weakness; and then yes, then perhaps he learns to flee to God and to be helped by faith which saves from all sin; but of this we are not talking here — then he despairs over his weakness and becomes, either a Pharisee who in despair manages to attain a certain legal righteousness, or he despairs and plunges again into sin.”
In both outcomes, there is a denial of death and thus the true condition of the self — you are going to die — but through your despair, you cannot die and you will not die and thus you cannot make peace with your death. Your sin becomes a counterpoint to the weight of a black or pearly eternity and you cannot accept either. But what is the shape of this despair? It is because you cannot accept the way things are; you can neither accept your death and neither fate and nor the despair it brings you living. Your affirmation of death becomes a way of life, or a state of perpetual sin, because there cannot be faith in this incapacity to die, which Kierkegaard believes we must meet with forgiveness, as if to forgive ourselves for the sin of our own lives will absolve us. To wallow in despair and thus a denial of death is to sin and to torment yourself relentlessly, without the greater relief of seeing sin and thus seeing your death without remaining in a state of either.
As he writes, “Sin is despair, the potentiation of this is the new sin of despairing over one’s sin. […] Despairing over one’s sin is the expression for the fact that sin has become or would become consistent in itself. It will have nothing to do with the good, will not be weak enough to harken once in a while to another sort of talk. No, it will hear only itself, have to do only with itself, shut itself in with itself, yea, enclose itself within one enclosure more and by despair over its sin secure itself against every assault of the good or every aspiration after it. It is conscious of having cut the bridge behind it and so of being inaccessible to the good as the good is to it, so that though in a weak moment it were to will the good, this would nevertheless be impossible. Sin itself is detachment from the good, but despair over sin is a second detachment.”
Despair your sin and you either redouble or become apathetic to it; however, the apathy is part of your comfort in suffering, as if suffering were the right method to assuage your hidden or conscious guilt to a loss of faith, like a self-flagellation in the interior of your mind, when it is forgiveness and thus faith that alleviates you otherwise. Even for the guilty atheist or the apathetic agnostic, there can be a forgiveness of the self for the cause of sins.
“The potentiation of sin is clearly shown when it is apprehended as a war between man and God where the tactics are changed; the potentiation ascends from the defensive to the offensive. Sin is despair: here one fights by evading. Then came despair over one’s sin: here one still is fighting by evasion or by fortifying oneself in the position to which one has retired, but constantly pedem referens. Now the tactic is changed: notwithstanding that sin becomes more and more absorbed in itself, and so withdraws, yet in another sense it comes nearer, becomes more and more decisively itself. Despair of the forgiveness of sins is a definite position directly in the face of the offer of God’s compassion; sin is now not entirely in flight, not on the defensive. But the sin of abandoning Christianity as a falsehood and a lie is offensive warfare. All the foregoing forms of despair conceded that the adversary is the stronger, but now sin is aggressive. Sin against the Holy Ghost is the positive form of offense.”
For Kierkegaard, the defensive strategy of the Christian in despair is to sin and the offensive strategy is to reject God, and in either case, it is a rejection of forgiveness. But was it not God themselves who became human? And was it the Human who created God or God who created themselves and themselves as Human? And out of love, they forgave us for our sins? If so, why do we resist forgiving ourselves for the sin of despair about death, asks Kierkegaard. And why is this resistance to forgiveness of this sin so great, such that we would assault the very idea of a forgiving God, who would make our sins both natural and forgiven?
Kierkegaard closes the book: “In this denial of Christ as the paradox there is naturally implied the denial of everything Christian: sin, the forgiveness of sins, etc. This form of offense is sin against the Holy Ghost. As the Jews said of Christ that He cast out devils by the help of the devil, so does this form of offense make of Christ an invention of the devil. This offense is the highest potentiation of sin, which is a fact people generally overlook inasmuch as they do not Christianly construct the opposition sin/faith. On the other hand, this opposition is affirmed in the whole of this work, which straightway in the first section constructed the formula for the situation where no offense at all is to be found: "By relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the Power which constituted it." And this formula again, as has often been noted, is the definition of faith”.
The method to escape the despair of life, created by the mortal sins of death, is to affirm life and not death itself through faith; in other words, do not take the existential route of despair but take the extant route of faith, because one is an affirmation of death and the other the affirmation of life.
One route is the self-chastisement for a condition of perpetual sin and the other is a forgiveness for the perpetual condition of life — you are going to die; and by the grace of God, or the rest of your life, let you not be afraid of death nor stride in fear of it because of a guilt of living in sin. You will sin in your life, and thus, have faith in your own forgiveness or power of your life as a condition of that life itself; and do not resist against forgiveness and thus despair for your irresponsible death. Forgiveness and your faith in yourself and its salvation from death — through the acceptance and no resistance of death — is the paradoxical antithesis to the very causes of sin and despair.
“He flung the blankets from him madly to free his face and neck. That was his hell. God had allowed him to see the hell reserved for his sins: stinking, bestial, malignant, a hell of lecherous goatish fiends. For him! For him!”
I write with words as if I write them for the first time — the first birth of words in this world. What was the name of the first human being and who gave it to them? What was the first word uttered? And when was the first story retold?
When I choose the story of my life, I think of Achilles and his mother’s prophecy: either for him to live an immortalised and glorious and short life of kleos or a long and forgotten and beloved one, and as a boy I chose to follow Achilles — and Alexander and Julius Caesar and Hannibal — into war and I have been paying for it since. I love life too much; I take it far too seriously. In this indulgence in the excess of life, screaming outwards like an affirmation, I will not follow unto a command of death, but a sickness unto life, even if it causes me to despair. With a drawn spear and restlessness to live, as if to conquer death, I become the symbolic and thus unliveable.
Was it not another hero of mine, Odysseus, who spoke to the shade of Achilles in his visit to the Underworld in Book XI of The Odyssey, as translated by A.T. Murray, and received the reply: “Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished.”
How many times shall I tell this story again? And yet, in the presence of love, I lost myself because the world slimmed itself to a unit; and in its absence again, the world expands out and my individual is remembered and restored. In the former, I was distracted by the case of annihilation, or to the end of myself and to the beginning of we, or the site of a self-crucifixion for the sake of the human race belonging to one person. Mount Golgotha was myself and the end of the universe was our lives, combined with the lives of another, like the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda, but no lovers can live on Calvary forever; instead, we must inevitably resurrect from the Sepulchre and become two lives again.
In the history of a hundred billion lives, or the history of our eight billion, I imagine that each one of us wrote a novel, a poem or a song. I imagine eight billion paintings, sculptures and drafts, and how many of them would we remember in history? One must ask, at the sight of great and small lists of novelists and poets and musicians and artists of the previous centuries, how could they be so representative of the human race and yet be so svelte in number? How could a handful of people so represent the lives of a billion others and represent us still?
In the glory and end of a name like Klaus Nomi, Michel Petrucciani, Napoleon II, Sylvia Plath, Fernando Pessoa, the unnameable woman of Kagerō Nikki, Daniel Dumile or Zhong Acheng, I see gorgeous people in time. I know I will forget them like a person I have met within a crowd or a restaurant or an art museum, and gaze at and whose face I forget as soon as the moment is left behind. But in the moment now, they exist as a wondrous thing to me, second to my own beauty reflected in my sight of them, like Wilde’s Narcissus or Poussin’s Arcadia. Et in Arcadia ego; I myself have become dumb, even in Arcadia; and I see myself like a circular particle of the human race, and perhaps I believe these people are emblematic of the greater spiral in which all us particles spin.
In the tango that always grows, new people are born and the tango goes on. New faces, new symbols and new moves, but the people are still dancing with each other, in every letter of love, every song in memoriam of another, and every commandment which instructs us how to live for the first time in history. If we play among the graves of gods, we have forgotten their names, but never the aspect of their divinity nor how to worship them nor how they live amongst us.
And yet, any student of history, when well-read, become familiar with the details of the other side of the dance: the other stories of the massacres, debaucheries and brutalities of the human race, and one never numbs to them, because they are everywhere in time and because they are so dominated by revenge, lust and hatred; and one is never surprised by a new catastrophes either, because there has always been catastrophic slaughter in every dance.
Read any anecdote of history and horror becomes an impotent word — repeated over and over. It becomes easier to believe in the sarcastic Satan of Mark Twain’s posthumous Letters from the Earth, who writes in Letter XI of the human interpretation of God, “The mouth that uttered these immense sarcasms, these giant hypocrisies, is the very same that ordered the wholesale massacre of the Midianitish men and babies and cattle; the wholesale destruction of house and city; the wholesale banishment of the virgins into a filthy and unspeakable slavery. This is the same person who brought upon the Midianites the fiendish cruelties which were repeated by the red Indians, detail by detail, in Minnesota eighteen centuries later. The Midianite episode filled him with joy. So did the Minnesota one, or he would have prevented it.”
Were these acts of despair — were these sins stemming from the despair of death? Can you forgive yourself for a sin like that? Or can you reply the advent of your death with greater death and can you stomach a plenary indulgence for the Stedinger Crusade, the Moriori Genocide or the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in the name of uncompassionate God?
How much better to live in the 21st Century, where innovations have created a longer peace; and our atrocities are limited to skirmishes and not to total wars of religion, extermination and hatred? Could you imagine eight billion murderers? Our strategy for peace has become singular: create every material incentive to avoid a wickedness like those of the Israelites against the Midianites in the Bible, the Dakota against the Minnesotan settlers in the 1862 Dakota War, or Russian Empire soldiers against the Circassians; but are one of these grisly violences worth the same as another, and if the the other side are murderers too, which murderer is more worthwhile to lament and grieve over? How much forgiveness atones for them?
“Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he would wake. The past was past.”
I wish to throw off another idolatry: the idea of courtly love. The Romantic sympathy is to elevate the tragic and extend a connection to that which does not exist. The idea of courtly love as a blueprint for the adoration of strangers, celebrities and figures from history is illusory insofar as it is not the object of our affections whom we connect with, but with the author function of them, or their symbolic role as a motivator and medium of discourse.
I read an author and I know I have no connection with them. If I connect with their words, I am connecting with myself who understands them. Each work is a mirror for themselves and every author is a mirror for us. In the sea of influence, a connection requires two people, and where is the other person here? Point them to me in this room; call their name and hear their response; and ask them, do you know me too?
If the Dantean Beatrice were the real Beatrice di Folco Portinari, and her veneration into a sublime symbol of love, was Dante motivated by his real connection with her or through a connection that was sustained entirely within himself? Was it not a shade of Beatrice whom he loved but did not know? And can such unproductive love be called love, especially without a real connection between them?
The Italian esotericist Julius Evola wrote in his 1958 book, Eros and the Mysteries of Sex, that “The desire for and possession of the loved one are what distinguish all sexual love from love in general as in benevolence or purely human love. The difference between the two is obvious. Pure love wants the real being of its object in a disinterested way: It affirms, it says yes ontologically to the other person as other person, as a separate being. Its model is the love of the Christian theistic God which gives existence to a free creature and desires it to live its own life without any tendency to dominate or absorb it. As against that, sexual love implies desire as a need to absorb or consume the loved being; and when possession does not have the deviated character, examined earlier, of compensation for the need of affirmation of self-worth, it has precisely that meaning. Therefore, we may speak of an ambivalence in every strong erotic impulse, because the being whom we love, we would at the same time like to destroy, to kill, to assimilate, to dissolve within us. For we feel that being to be our own complement, and we would like it to cease to be a separate being. Therefore, there is an element of cruelty attached to desire, and this element is often shown even in coitus itself. We may therefore talk of "a hostile rapture of love", of the "deadly hatred of the sexes," which is the basis of love and which, whether hidden or evident, persists in all its effects.”
Courtly love is therefore a step removed from universal love or agape, and another step entirely from sexual love or eros, because courtly love is not love. Since we entertain the idea of connection as a basis for love, courtly love presupposes a connection in the form of an attachment, or a unilateral relation of feeling, higher than agape and on the same level of eros. In the universal love of agape, each entity is connected to one another through a universal condition; in the sexual love of eros, one entity is connected to another through a sexual condition; however, in courtly love, one entity is connected to another through a universal condition, but neither through a physical or sexual one, and yet a desire for the love of the Other exists.
Courtly love, in this case, does not refer to the literary method of selecting a muse, who was historically some lady of great inaccessibility, from which the artist may generate ideas and art in lieu of her qualities — both perceived and unperceived, extant or misinterpreted — without any desire to consummate this expedient love beyond. Given that it is hardly a love, it does not exist on the level of eros, and perhaps is closer to friendly love or philia, but the courtly love in this case, given that it is not love, refers to the kind of attachment that is mistaken for love, represented most infamously in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
In the German novel, the titular Werther professes, in a series of letters to his friend Wilhelm, his love for Charlotte — who is eventually wed to Albert — culminating in the second half of the novel with his famous suicide by dual pistols to the forehead. The relationship between Werther and Charlotte is considered an exemplar of unrequited love, with Werther driven to suicide and grief because he cannot possess Charlotte, and Charlotte considering Werther to be a dear companion to her, and the uneven dynamic a cause for chaos and despair for both parties.
During their intense reading of The Songs Of Selma (1761) by Ossian — or the Scottish poet, James Macpherson — or rather, Werther’s passionate reading of his own translation of Ossian to Charlotte, it is commented that “They felt that their own fate was pictured in the misfortunes of Ossian's heroes, they felt this together, and their tears redoubled.”
However, it is clear from Charlotte’s antecedent comments and Werther’s subsequent ones that this is unlikely to be the case, and moreover, that Werther is the unproductive one here; by unproductive, I mean that his love is imaginary, unreciprocated and thus productive of nothing outside of him.
It would have been different if Charlotte broke her vows for him, thus risking her own love of Albert — and thus Albert’s love for her — for another, but no such move is made. Instead, her response is this: “Werther supported his forehead on Charlotte's arm: she trembled, she wished to be gone; but sorrow and sympathy lay like a leaden weight upon her soul. She recovered herself shortly, and begged Werther, with broken sobs, to leave her, implored him with the utmost earnestness to comply with her request.”
How Charlotte feels towards Werther is less relevant than how he feels about her, because it is he who believes in the gravity of their love and connection that is disproportional to the productivity of the love itself; hence, he is being delusional of reality, refusing it out of fear and inventing his own, as if Charlotte were not there at all.
Goethe writes of Charlotte’s own feelings this way: “She was for ever united to a husband whose love and fidelity she had proved, to whom she was heartily devoted, and who seemed to be a special gift from Heaven to ensure her happiness. On the other hand, Werther had become dear to her. There was a cordial unanimity of sentiment between them from the very first hour of their acquaintance, and their long association and repeated interviews had made an indelible impression upon her heart. She had been accustomed to communicate to him every thought and feeling which interested her, and his absence threatened to open a void in her existence which it might be impossible to fill. How heartily she wished that she might change him into her brother, — that she could induce him to marry one of her own friends, or could reestablish his intimacy with Albert.”
But in the climax of their poetry, when Werther embraces her and offers a flurry of kisses, both of them brought to tears from the spirit of his reading, Charlotte is the one who pushes him away, despite his promise of suicide — to end the love triangle between them — if Charlotte does not release him otherwise. However, what is Werther’s partial interpretation of these events?
In a summary to Charlotte, “Everything passes away; but a whole eternity could not extinguish the living flame which was yesterday kindled by your lips, and which now burns within me. She loves me! These arms have encircled her waist, these lips have trembled upon hers. She is mine! Yes, Charlotte, you are mine for ever! And what do they mean by saying Albert is your husband? He may be so for this world; and in this world it is a sin to love you, to wish to tear you from his embrace. Yes, it is a crime; and I suffer the punishment, but I have enjoyed the full delight of my sin. I have inhaled a balm that has revived my soul. From this hour you are mine; yes, Charlotte, you are mine! I go before you. I go to my Father and to your Father. I will pour out my sorrows before him, and he will give me comfort till you arrive. Then will I fly to meet you. I will claim you, and remain your eternal embrace, in the presence of the Almighty.”
In neither agape nor eros nor philia, Werther commits to an illusion of love, or an unproductive love, or an unproductive attachment, which might be characterised as unrequited love, but in spirit, cannot be called love because it is perpetuated by the lonely spirit of himself — in fear of death? His despair is his own, and therefore his sins are his own, but dangerously he draws in Charlotte, as if she were his equal accomplice, and he submits to an idolatry or sin.
This form of courtly love, or unrequited love, is profoundly unproductive, and lies as a love between the subject and themselves, and therefore it is not a love that exists between two people in the truer cases of agape, eros and philia — it is not a connection and therefore a fantasy. In his delusion, Werther cannot achieve the annihilation of the ego in eros nor bear to live with the agony of mere philia, because if the goal of eros is precisely the search for a transcendental loss of the self, which cannot occur in the accepting nature of philia, then he as a subject is doomed to a half-step love, except that he fails in both accounts. Charlotte is not committed to her own annihilation through him, whether in coitus or otherwise, and he is not able to accept her reality, or the authenticity of her own feelings, and thus he flees into himself like a fear of death and thus he sins.
But speaking of coitus and annihilation, Evola later writes, “However, if any reflection of a transcendence actually experienced unintentionally takes form in ordinary existence, it does so through sex and, in the case of the common man, through sex alone. Not those who busy themselves with speculations, with social or "spiritual" intellectual activities, but only those who raise themselves as high as heroic or ascetic experience, go further into the beyond. But for ordinary mankind it is sex alone which, even if only in the rapture, illusion, or obscure trauma of an instant, leads to some opening through and beyond the conditionalities of merely individual existence. This is the true foundation of the importance that love and sex have and will always have in human life, an importance unmatched by any other impulse.”
The connective function of sex between lovers, for Evola, is therefore the productive element of eros or erotic love: it is the recognition of the other person as extant too, and yet mixed with a thirst for their annihilation. In any case, a connection between them is no longer confined to the workings of their individual lifeworlds as human beings, but it is shared between them as two human beings or more, in the clearest and most instinctual fashion.
This is not to say that annihilation cannot occur otherwise, or rather that union cannot occur by other means, but that if we consider how Evola structures love, and that if mere philia is thus to say that I accept you as being separate from me, and thus recognise your independence from possession, eros is both to accept you as separate and to wish you were fused with me. In other words, the nature of this possession is the loss of self in the other, or the desire for a connection in the interstice between existence and non-existence. I want you to exist and to not exist as you, and likewise, I do not want to exist and only to exist with you as one. I am therefore willing to destroy my precious sense of self in search of a higher existence as us, with the signification of the sexual experience as the portal between this world of separation and deeper union.
It becomes clear that Werther’s cause for annihilation, or his desire for non-existence and therefore his destruction of his own ego through suicide, is unproductive because Charlotte is unwilling to become the other half of we through any comparable means. For eros to operate productively, and thus to be considered love in the greater sense, it must be reciprocated and occurred in the moment with another person who, also willing, annihilates their precious sense of self for you too.
In the ending of his life, Werther is condemned to a connection between himself and himself, such that his I in the moment of death was entirely his alone, without becoming anything closer to his sought-after we. But in reading both Goethe and Evola, I am aware of feeling no connection between them and I, because no direct connection exists and, indirectly alone, I am instigating the premise of such a connection, which cannot go further nor be consummated through actual discourse.
What remains of Goethe and Evola to me is their author function — held in his name— because a direct connection to either of them, however, is foreclosed to me forever. Otherwise, it is an implied connection, and thus what is connection except the acknowledgement or realisation of the existence of another? However, I am aware of falling into the same traps as young Werther, and observing a connection where none exists, such as believing in a connection with Goethe or Evola, whereby I refuse the acknowledge reality and thus live inside of an attachment.
In other words, I am aware of my risk of transference — the psychoanalytic concept — with respect to them, in which it is not Goethe’s Werther who may remind me of myself, but that it is I who reminds myself of being like him, when otherwise, I may not be. It is not reality that my life is like Werther, for instance, but more so that some elements of my life can be extrapolated onto Werther, and thus a mistaking of myself for him, as if he could speak for me, when in fact, his life is not mine and neither is his destiny. This act of transference can be considered the basis for courtly love as well as many cases of empathy in literature, but it is not a real connection which exists in the case of the alleged lovers, but the elements of a connection which one of them mistakes for connection with the other.
However, it is entirely that one must encounter their partner in coitus, for example, and one cannot escape into an abstract connection when making love; hence, there is no mistaking what the act is nor what it means between honest lovers.
As Evola writes, “Writers have always recognized as important the sincerity that possesses lovers at the moment of sexual union. At that moment, all teasing, frivolity, meaningless gallantry, and sentimental trifling come to an end. The libertine and even the whore, unless completely anesthetized in the exercise of passive and apathetic service, are no exception to the rule. "When one is making love, one does not laugh; perhaps one may just smile. During the spasm one is as serious as death." Every diversion ceases. […] This is implied both emotionally and symbolically by the total giving of oneself to the other in coitus, even in the case of a casual union. This behavior, sincerity, and concentration are reflections of the deepest meaning of the act of love and its hidden mystery. […] At the beginning of orgasm, a change of state takes place—a further strengthing of the state that occurred tendentially at the time of falling love—and in an extreme case, during the spasm, the individual undergoes a traumatic experience of the power that "kills." This, however, passes through the individual instead of being held and absorbed.”
Evola remarks that such a communion cannot occur if the “selfish purpose is the organic spasm, rather than true communication or mutual permeation” which is native to the deeper realities of love. In the psychoanalytic practice of Jacques Lacan, we might observe this as irrational strategy for connection, and more pointedly, as the expression of jouissance or excess enjoyment that often occurs in the act of eros or erotic and sexual love.
To fulfill the objet petit a, or the insatiable and impossible object of all our desires, such that if it were fulfilled we would never desire again, we fall under the symbol of sexual consummation as an act which could fill this exact role by uniting us with our lover — they could complete us. Hence, for genuine lovers, sex is an attempt at deeper connection, and with its primality and directness, it evokes the strongest example of a case for annihilation, even if said annihilation is never permanent and always fleeting and thus irrational to attempt over and over again.
But it is perhaps unsurprising that Evola describes loveless sex as “a kind of impotence” because one “only finds enjoyment for himself or herself” and this is true of the Lacanian idea as well. The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, famously says that “there is no sexual relation”, because for such a relation to occur, it must practice what cannot exist within a pure sexual motive: it must acknowledge the reality of the other person and thus make a productive connection between you and someone else as being real and themselves.
Coitus as an act of love, for Lacan, operates with love as a giving act and not a taking one, and thus it is promptly the subjugation of one’s own pleasure for the pleasure of the other which characterises it, whereby the self is annihilated and one’s desires are subsumed by the desires of the Other — to give them pleasure, to give them happiness, to give them peace — who could fulfill them.
As Evola parallels, “By overlooking the reality of his partner, the lover fails to reach contact with her intimate, subtle, and "psychic" substance, which alone can nourish a "psychic" substance, which alone can nourish a dissolving and propitiatory intensity of ecstasy.”
By observing reality, there is an acknowledgement of otherness which dominates the sexual moment and not the reinforcement of the self and the pleasure principle of its own ego, which would make for unproductive love. In reversing this process, denying reality and thus and dominating the exchange of love, there can be no sexual relation because there is no relation at all. It is no longer an act between two individuals but one individual in a masturbatory circuit of self-pleasure. Even less than philia, it cannot be erotic love in eros, although in eros, we find the paradoxical pulls of accepting someone out of philia and wishing to annihilate ourselves for them through eros. Inevitably it must be an exchange of these similar wishes, and not a one-sided attachment, which may define love as a connection that has been made productive.
Hence, the serious case of courtly love is akin to cerebral masturbation. It exists entirely in the mind that an object or person of desire has a connection with us, and thus a relation which exists to us in reality, whereas in fact, it is usually a counterfactual. While it is true that eros is fleeting and passing in nature, and impossible as a means of fulfilling our objet petit a, irrespective of the excess enjoyment we try and produce through the sexual act, it is much preferable as a claim to connection than courtly love, which disfigures it entirely. This is because such an idea operates on the symbolic level as an explanation; it is not that we consciously attempt annihilation with each other, but that unconsciously we are drawn together as if we could.
The iconolatry of half-baked courtly love is deranged and unproductive, and perhaps it is because it has mistaken the symbolic for reality, and hence that annihilation must be pursued consciously in the sinful death of young Werther. Given the historical copy-suicides in the same spirit and image of Werther — likewise driven by a delusional set of premises and illusions — the merits of this literary fillip are too often at-risk of being mistaken for the delirium and despair it wishes to profit of and yet remain distant from.
These can be called infatuations and attachments but not love, and for the sake of productive and extant love, it is called for to stave off such romantic ideas and wait for the real thing and connection to come along. It is possible to speak more of attachments for changed loves, such that one flees themselves from reality, but the distinction is obvious: in a changed love, there was love and thus a connection in the first place.
“There were so many flagstones on the footpath of that street and so many streets in that city and so many cities in the world. Yet eternity had no end. He was in mortal sin.”
But how are we to reconcile our past despairs or sins in reality? Or rather, how do we live with the guilt of being alive, if we have forgive ourselves for having to die? Is the only method forgiveness and faith? I shall explain.
If Kierkegaard replied with faith and its acknowledgement, therefore, of forgiving the reality of sin and being human, or that which tortures the self to be human — the fact that you must die — and then living for yourself without the guilt of a crime bearing, then the French philosopher, Emil Cioran, offers an antithetical idea of guilt in his 1973 book, The Trouble with Being Born, as translated by Richard Howard: “Why fear the nothing in store for us when when it is no different from the nothing which preceded us: this argument of the Ancients against the fear of death is unacceptable as consolation. Before, we had the luck not to exist; now we exist, and it is this particle of existence, hence of misfortune, which dreads death. Particle is not the word, since each of us prefers himself to the universe, at any race considers himself equal to it.”
Like the Norwegian philosopher, Peter Wessel Zapffe, Cioran offers a stark reaction to the same scenario of despair over death and the resulting despair of sin: be unforgiving of the fact that you must die, and hence, of the fact that you were even born. To be born is to despair and to kill oneself, as Cioran famously retorts, is “not worth the bother […] since you always kill yourself too late.”
If Kierkegaard affirms the permissibility of living with sin and thus death, then Cioran affirms its impermissibility, and yet that we are alive nonetheless. Our despair is to be overcome through scorn for our condition, given that it was not our choice to be born, and yet we are foisted a responsibility to despair in sin, as it were, given our predilection for a life we cannot live. To be held responsible for our sins, therefore, is a brutality. What is the nature of our accountability to sin then, if we were guilty from birth and moreover, might have chosen otherwise not to be born? For instance, listen to a crying infant and one grating sentiment is obvious: I am suffering. Crying reminds us of that, and that why it is so torturous to listen to, because from the moment of birth, we emerged with that as our first sound in the world.
In his famed 1933 essay on anti-natalism, The Last Messiah, as translated by Gisle R. Tangenes, Zapffe puts forth a more explicit case for the nastiness of birth: “He sees himself emerge in his mother’s womb, he holds up his hand in the air and it has five branches; whence this devilish number five, and what has it to do with my soul? He is no longer obvious to himself — he touches his body in utter horror; this is you and so far do you extend and no farther. […] Nothing exists without himself, every line points back at him, the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice — he leaps up loudly screaming and wants to disgorge himself onto the earth along with his impure meal, he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability. But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities. From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.”
But is there also an alternative to a refusal of forgiveness? In his 1951 book, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, as translated by E. F. N. Jephcott, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno offers a possible caveat, made in relation to the insightful and negative reflections on over a hundred topics, which we may borrow in likewise departing from our sins.
Contextually, it might be strongest to juxtapose Reflection 33, Out of the firing line, with the Finale of Reflection 153, given the concern of the former with the impossibility of reconciling the Holocaust with history with the intentions of the latter in offering a direction forward. Each may not construe as a direct response to the other, given the separate years of writing and Adorno’s two suggestions for how a post-war Germany might be punished — which were inherently insufficient — in Reflection 33 itself; however, let us assume that Reflection 153 is also a response to Reflection 33, and that their inclusion in the same volume is proof by disjunction.
As Adorno writes in Reflection 33, “The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' — as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation — is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for? And even if countless people still have time to wait, is it conceivable that what happened in Europe will have no consequences, that the quantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at large, barbarism? As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated. One need only think of revenge for the murdered. If as many of the others are killed, horror will be institutionalized and the pre-capitalist pattern of vendettas, confined from time immemorial to remote mountainous regions, will be re-introduced in extended form, with whole nations as the subjectless subjects. If, however, the dead are not avenged and mercy is exercised, Fascism will despite everything get away with its victory scot-free, and, having once been shown so easy, will be continued elsewhere. The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death.”
I once alluded to how the Holocaust — the ultimate symbol of the failed promise of the Enlightenment — in the pandemonium of horrific symbols from World War Two, risks being cheapened by any comparison to any lesser event in human discourse; however, I repeat the same conviction that the inclusion of the Holocaust in such a comparison makes the resulting point irrefutable by its profundity and horror. It is in this great castigation and shaming of the human race by its own sins, for whom the parallels of history show no possible or equivalent vengeance and satisfaction for, that Adorno thus asks how we might live with ourselves thereafter?
If our sins cannot be forgiven, and retribution for said sins is worthless, although which Adorno himself blames no one for attempting to retribute, his answer is thus redemption. If this conclusion is considerable enough for the Holocaust, it must be simple enough for the cause of ourselves.
As he writes in Reflection 153, “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects — this alone is the task of thought. […] But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.”
For Adorno, this messianic light is coloured by his stature as a Marxist. For our purposes, we may fashion a simpler glow: the task of forgiving ourselves and thus redeeming this life onwards. To live in a perpetual condition of sin is inescapable, and the despair of death is unforgivable to impose on the unborn, and yet we are alive and we can live without the despair; it is not a condition that we must despair of both life and death. Given either affirmation, we might choose to affirm life through its forgiveness: I forgive myself for being alive.
Likewise, I forgive myself for being impossible to annihilate. I forgive myself for being unable to forgive my desires; I forgive myself for things I cannot change; I forgive myself for the things I could not think of nor figure to change. I redeem a desire by forgiving myself for both having it and for being unable to fulfill its cause, and demonstrate faith by believing that this forgiveness may absolve and lend me peace.
But what does redemption mean for Kierkegaard’s faith, which considers forgiveness as the action of life? In The Sickness unto Death (1849), forgiveness through faith is not the preclusion of sin but its acceptance. Through a method of redemption, however, we find a method beyond forgiveness, which Adorno raises as insufficient. It should be noted that in Practice in Christianity (1950), as translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard elaborates on his suggestions, arguing that we thus live and redeem ourselves further by following the prototype of Christ, which would bring us closer to the true mark of Christian living through a harsh but reassured praxis.
On this hard reality of living therefore, he writes that “This is the test: to become and continue to be a Christian, a suffering with which no other human suffering can be compared in pain and anguish. Yet neither Christianity nor Christ is cruel. No, Christ is himself leniency and love, is love and leniency itself; the cruelty comes from the Christian’s having to live in this world and having to express in the environment of this world what it is to be a Christian — for Christ is not so lenient, that is, so weak, that he wants to take the Christian out of this world. In an impassioned mood related to the possibility of offense, Christianity may seem cruel to one. But it is not so; it is the world that is cruel — Christianity is leniency and love.”
But what of the Christian, or the lapsed Christian or the pagan after the Holocaust? What is their redemption from death? For Kierkegaard, it would be to follow the life of Christ — by the definition of follower and not mere believer — and forgiving oneself for the failure to do so, and having faith to continue nonetheless, in spite of such worldly cruelty and the indirectness of God. And does this satisfy?
If Adorno mentions a messianic light, then is the task to become a messiah yourself, or to create the conditions from which a messiah may arise, or unto which a messiah will no longer be required? Redemption involves change, which forgiveness merely acknowledges and in which faith is required thereof.
How does one redeem themselves from the Holocaust; or how does one redeem themselves from despair? To forgive the Holocaust is to let the fascists win, and for the event itself to be unavenged; and yet, to reject forgiveness like Cioran, and to extrapolate his point to a coarseness here, is to accept our nature negatively and our call to redemption negatively, and to demand the extinction of the human race as the only redemption thereafter. One becomes the messiah by discontinuing the cycle of life itself; therefore, there will never be another Holocaust.
As a Marxist, Adorno would be sympathetic to positive redemptions, or a stalwart belief in the capacity of human beings to redeem themselves, in the negation of horror and sin, which could also be considered an act of faith. But how does redemption rank against the acceptance or rejection of forgiveness? To a point, both cases are acts of redemption, but in each there is a fall preceding, as said before, a change. Therefore, redemption is the natural means forwards: one redeems oneself by continuing to live, in spite of what happened. One redeems oneself from the Holocaust by continuing to live; one redeems oneself from birth by continuing to live; and thus, one affirms life and not death, for which no change can be affirmed because death is unchangeable.
“A flame began to flutter again on Stephen’s cheek as he heard in this proud address an echo of his own proud musings. How often had he seen himself as a priest wielding calmly and humbly the awful power of which angels and saints stood in reverence!”
Altered on the cause of love as annihilation, however, I have changed my perspective. I no longer believe that the cause of love is the annihilation of the ego, or the wilful sacrifice of the ego in a bid to satisfy the objet petit a or impossible desire in Lacanian desire, because the evocation of that structure is helpful to a point before real and living life. Likewise, this talk of death and redemption is useful to the point before it reaches life itself.
For instance, if annihilation functions as a symbolic desire or explanation in psychoanalysis, it cannot function as a productive one in reality, even if the putative energy of a psychoanalytic statement is not broken by reality, but altered by it. This is because, even if annihilation is the cause for love, it is not productive to actually be annihilated, because as we know from Lacan, this product of love is fleeting and impossible to our desires by nature. Moreover, it goes against the very premise of psychoanalysis: the analysand is alone in their neuroses, and whether they escape or change from them is a matter only unto themselves; in which case, salvation and death is entirely on our own.
It is the acceptance of this condition, or its awareness, which Lacan draws us to understand in psychoanalysis: we exist as individuals. We may yearn for collectivity and hence for annihilation, but it is an impossible desire thereof. To seriously attempt at this way of life is likely an evidence of some greater neurosis, and more than likely, it will lead to nothing except a suffering and despair over an impossible life, and likewise, so will a conscious pursuit of neurotic redemption.
But acceptance is separate from later productivity; in the way that courtly love is unproductive because it is not a connection — it is an attachment — and thus one-sided and purely imaginary, the cause of real love is productivity and thus reality itself. Productivity is simply increase and not decrease, a growth and not a regression, and a real connection over an imaginary relation. For this, it requires at least another person — a partner — to operate the libidinal machine, and to accept individuality is not the preclusion of any attempt at love. Without two hands, nothing can be produced together; it will otherwise be a product of one person, or the product of the person they saw in someone else, uninhibited from the real person thereafter. Instead we must turn towards a gentler effort — or just the thought of annihilation — to educate us through reality and not to become reality itself.
But for the past year especially, I have been living outside of my mind. In the mind of another person, I read and wrote to supplement its purpose. But when the habits of the interior are opened up to the habits of someone else, and in the loss of homage to those new habits, the old ones return changed. To keep to the new ones is akin to a neurotic call for annihilation, which I have accepted will not arrive. I must redeem myself through the change thrown to me, and now I am able to accept it within reality and not a symbolic life.
Of the old habits, I raise them to what Fernando Pessoa wrote in The Book of Disquiet (1982), as translated by Richard Zenith, “Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry.”
In other words, I revert to an old habit: to the intellectualisation of my life. In these texts and works I read for the purpose of explicating myself again, in searching through the interdisciplinary smorgasbord once more, and writing out hors d'oeuvres for each of the longer works themselves, and leaving a masterwork for myself overall, I search for some productive semblance of a now-unknown self, because I have escaped from the symbolic.
In writing further, I do not presume to be better than the untold artists and unwritten poets in impossible books, which Pessoa gives tribute to, but I return to write of the actual experience and the process of mishmashing philosophies, which is closer as a real process we adhere to, rather than some austere and ultimate symbol we declare to follow like a painting or myth.
On the import of his works for others, Pessoa writes, “I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others. But I’m neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing — for myself alone — wispy songs I compose while waiting. Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I’m given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don’t read it, or are not entertained, that’s fine too.”
Reading his words, you can almost imagine a real grief behind them. You may even believe that Pessoa was once alive. But his words, which reflected his living soul, cannot reflect it anymore than a corpse can reflect a life. Pessoa is gone but do his intentions remain, and are they similar to my intentions now? Am I connected to him and are you connected to, if you can understand me? I challenge you to imagine me alive, as I am now with a life behind my eyes, and will you be able to imagine my corpse too, especially if I write more directly to you than he does? Do you feel a connection that exists between you and yourself with the mirror of these words? And if I had not read Pessoa, and if you had not read me, were it such a loss to the world to lose the words of an office clerk and another human being?
Later he writes, “Literature — which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality — seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life. What moves lives. What is said endures. There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well described. […] It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world. […] The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.”
I feel that Cioran has a similar idea: “We know, we feel that everything has been said, that there is nothing left to say. But we feel less that this truth affords language a strange, even unsettling status which redeems it. Words are ultimately saved because they have ceased living.”
Would it matter if a sentiment was not shared between me, Pessoa, Cioran and you? Or that if you thought you knew what we meant and not what I meant myself? You make these connections between the unconnected — perhaps in my alleged connection between Pessoa and Cioran too — and through an act of transference, feel that altogether they make a larger point related to you.
My words will not survive because of my life; they will survive because they are not me, and neither are these words Pessoa nor Cioran, but their author functions and their identity as part of the current game of language. Language is like an authoritative person; they stand and substitute for what you really wish to say, because it consists of things which you cannot say and for which otherwise are not linguistic. Through the proxy of language, these substitute words will either fail or misrepresent you in the deep play of a language game. And like a table-top game with a set of rules and engagements, and thus a limited set of possible moves, even if seemingly infinite, you will more closely observe them to follow a banal slit, because to make use of most of these moves is gibberish and to make use of a handful them is plain. Genius lies in the mesoscopic plane; an unexpected move in the other handful of games. And what moves have I made, brave Achilles?
Ostensibly-speaking, these moves are the simple revolutions I have made in passing the crowded orbits of empty suns, and each set of analyses strays neither too close to pedantry nor enough to intricacy to resemble a formal monograph or analysis, but the melange of sources and the stupefaction over new connections between unmet thinkers is precisely the point of my innovation.
When I write well, I feel as if I am Pessoa: “It’s so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don’t know what human words could define it. I don’t know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I’ve stopped having the fever of sleeping through life. Yes, I repeat, I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time — since birth and consciousness — and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now. […] I saw the truth for a moment. For a moment I was consciously what great men are their entire lives. I recall their words and deeds and wonder if they were also successfully tempted by the Demon of Reality. To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word. But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.”
And to think of myself now, I have no fear to imagine I cannot know myself, because when I dreamt of a hand reaching out to me, I reached back as if I had never seen one before, and to forgive myself for that dream is now my knowledge, and yet, she was not a passerby to me.
As Pessoa concludes, “What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too — I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a 'What’s become of him?'. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passerby on the everyday streets of some city or other.”
But she was not a passerby to me. And thus I understand what Pessoa means, when he writes that “We can die if all we’ve done is love.” The whole question is about death, and death has been my fascination, my calling and my purpose to throw myself into a cause of annihilation, as if annihilating myself could save me, and make my death worthwhile. However, a death-affirmation is neurotic. It borrows the quality of death and immobilises time, as if time and thus change could be broken in nature, and I cannot live that way and my annihilation is replaced by individualism. When I dreamt of another hand, I dreamt of the person holding that hand. Out of freedom, it was reached out to me and by freedom I reached back to hold it. What taints and destroys freedom thus cannot be love, because it was love in the first place, arriving out of freedom and thus the exclusion of other freedoms, which gave love its value like a breeze entering two lives.
Pessoa writes that “Art is a substitute for acting or living. If life is the wilful expression of emotion, art is the intellectual expression of that same emotion. Whatever we don’t have, don’t attempt or don’t achieve can be possessed through dreams, and these are what we use to make art. At other times our emotion is so strong that, although reduced to action, this action doesn’t completely satisfy it; the leftover emotion, unexpressed in life, is used to produce the work of art. There are thus two types of artist: the one who expresses what he doesn’t have, and the one who expresses the surplus of what he did have.”
If this is the case, then I write for the things I lack — an eternal life — and for the things I once and thus have been fated to have — a life of my own. I wield the spear; I settle it down. I live both a glorious and quiet life because you, Achilles, are not my destiny nor my faith.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.