From Vortices to Clarity

I must die: must I, then, die groaning too? I must be fettered: and wailing too? I must go into exile: does anyone then, keep me from going with a smile and cheerful and serene? "Tell your secrets." I say not a word; for this is under my control. "But I will fetter you." What is that you say, man? Fetter me? My leg you will fetter, but my moral purpose even Zeus himself has the power to overcome. "I will throw you in prison."My paltry body rather? "I will behead you." Well, when did I ever tell you that mine was the only neck that could not be severed? These are the lessons that philosophers ought to rehearse, these they ought to write down daily, in these they ought to exercise themselves.

Epictetus, Discourses, book 1.1.22-25

To follow up on my last post on Stoicism: yes Stoicism is a philosophy concerned more with the conditions of the personal soul then with the souls of others. But thinking in absolutes has never gotten anyone anywhere interesting. It has led me to run around in circles, spirals, vortices around such characters as Negri, Badiou, Spinoza and (again, I always seem to return to) Deleuze. But not, ultimately, to a discursive lesson ameliorating my soul and destabilizing my habitual ways of acting. One must grant Stoicism several positive attitudes: for one thing, it is a practical philosophy, it takes you out of the ivory tower and into the streets. For another it is (as we can see above) a philosophy that befits the concept of resistance. Let's forget then, for now, that it prioritizes the personal over the social, let's, for now, forget about Badiou and Deleuze. Let's focus instead on action and resistance, Negri and Spinoza.

Negri wrote a book on Spinoza in jail, which, I would say, is a very Stoic setting. It is this 1981 book, The Savage Anomaly, which, I will suggest, lies at the basis of the recently so popular concept of the Multitude. It is via Spinoza that I want to chart the influence of Stoicism on this concept (and see where they diverge). To chart, thus, how the ultimate philosophy of individual 'liberation' has influenced the formation of the ultimate concept of social resistance. A rather straightforward line of questioning, but doable in a week, and that's all I have left after my circling around this question.

Whereas Epictetus suggests writing down the philosophers lessons every day, Seneca proposes another strategy: at the end of the day, after your studies, you should take time to, as John Sellars writes, 'call ourselves to account and go over the events of the day.' These two procedures come together in a diary, or a blog (it seems thousands of people have taken Seneca's lesson to heart). And that is why I do it. To explicate my thoughts, to keep focused. If only I had done this everyday this week, I might not have lost myself in time-consuming diversions, in philological dissections. As it is, it is deadline stress again...

From one paper to the other

In my research for the Fascism & Psychoanalysis paper, which I am writing on the fact that I perceived a subtle but recurrent conflation between Fascism and Homosexuality, I came across an article written by a self-confessed progressive homosexual which ends as follows: "Many of the mainstream elements of gay culture - body worship, the lauding of the strong, a fetish for authority figures and cruelty - provide a swamp in which the fascist virus can thrive". So this would strongly subscribe both my thesis and the idea that when you are exposed to certain figures of thought often enough, you will eventually end up (partly) believing in them.

But when you think you think things can't get any worse you come across a book called The Pink Swastika (I link to an annotated version, because we alll know hoe Google works) which claims to uncover ‘homosexuals as the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities’. The book fulminates against the ‘aggressive’ homosexual power that both forces the acceptance of sodomy—a ‘corruption of the natural and moral orders of creation’—as a normal variant of human sexuality and enforces a ‘politically correct’ whitewash of this conflation in the media and academia.

On the contrary, I would say, the imaginary link has been endlessly recycled, but that is not what I want to elaborate on here. Discovery of this kind of supposed 'independent' research, used to underpin their homophobic political agenda, made me realize how much I myself am caught in very specific ideological construction of reality, and how much I like that construction. So much so that I became somewhat zealous and started to purge wikipedia of false references to the book (under the illusion that once you offer people the truth they will see it is the true truth, a remnant of my Catholicism I guess). It made me realize that stoicism, despite its attractions, is ultimately not 'my thing'. So my paper subject for the stoics course (for which I haven't had much time yet to think of a definite subject) must be a critical engagement with it. I've started reading Badiou's Deleuze in which he is critical of Deleuze's engagement with the Stoics. Wonder whether he gives some more body to his short remarks on this in the introduction.

retroactive revolutions

someone suggested to me that a revolution might also be called a revolution when we decide afterwards that someting was a defining moment or a distictive set of events. It got me thinking that the minimum qualifiers I identified in my paper, which do not allow retroactive revolutions, are to strickt.