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International Journal of Philosophical Studies

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The Last Refuge from Nihilism

James Williams Online Publication Date: 01 March 2000 To cite this Article: Williams, James (2000) 'The Last Refuge from Nihilism', International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8:1, 115 124 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/096725500341747 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/096725500341747

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The Last Refuge from Nihilism

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Cham bre sourde. By Jean Franois Lyotard. Paris G alile, 1998. Pp. 122. ISBN 2-7186-0489-1. 140 FF. I In the two books written prior to his death in 1998, Sign M alraux (Paris: G rasset, 1996) and Cham bre sourde (Paris: G alile, 1998), Jean-Franois Lyotard came to grips in a new way with two problems that had haunted him through his philosophical career. First, how should we continue to think with the subject after the postmodern critique and the practical sundering that imply its fracture? With this question he returned to perhaps the most severe problem and academic A chilles heel for those convinced of the validity of the critique and for those prone to the experience of a division hinting at no future return to a modern subjective origin. It still does not seem to make much sense to speak of thinking and of life without taking account of actions and decisions made by subjects with a sense of their self-identity. Second, how can we continue to satisfy any lingering yearning for the political as it is manifested in private drives associated with dreams of political progress and personal ful lment? In short, he tried again to answer the problem of nding a place for a re ective identity capable of action and hope in contemporary thought. O r, more accurately, he tried to express how we can live with the persistence of this problem, without allowing either the errors of believing in identities and xed truths or the impossibility of simply ignoring the profund ity of the problem from plunging us into despair and nihilism. It is hard to think of the death of the rst generation of postmodern thinkers as signi cant, not in the sense of any regret for premature loss and hence waste, or as an expression of a more general sadness about death, but in the sense of death as marking the passing of a generation. Taken at its own word this generation cannot pass meaningfully since it denies the possibility of that approach to time. The postmodern attack on history as progress, development or even regress accompanies the attack on the subject as actor and political dreamer. So there is no privileged point, subjective or even absolute, from where to make important judgements about chronological movement. If we sense the passing of a generation, if we feel that somehow things have moved on from a particular account of the signi cance of Lyotards work, then sensation and feeling (nostalgia or regret, perhaps) betray elements of the enduring problems of his thought. True, some postmodernists the Sans-soucis , maybe, or perhaps the Inconscients claim to be able to rid themselves of what they see as dispensable effects of modern beliefs ( You have regrets, because you had hope; sadness, because you attached yourself to illusory xities). Lyotard is 115

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never of this naive or suspiciously hardened camp, since his work always views the af rmation of difference as a never-ending task against the return of absolute claims concerning origins and identities. In that sense his work is always marginal either a corrective to modern excess or a troublesome counter, but never a simple alternative. In L ibidinal E conom y (London: A thone, 1993), this marginality is de ned in terms of the destabilizing but also re-energizing properties of feelings and desires that escape given structures, if only until they are re-incorporated according to a new account. The political direction of the philosophy is given by the aim of triggering such feelings; it is to set political structures onto an unknowable and more libidinally vivid path. In T he D ifferend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), the marginal is de ned by the task of testifying to absolute differences that are subsumed into systems claiming to be able to bridge them, for example, in the way in which judgements about performativity bring together different approaches to education or research ( W hich one contributes best to G D P?). Testimony is triggered by the feeling of the sublime that indicates a case of absolute difference without allowing it to be comprehended. It is the de nition of this marginality that changes dramatically in the later works. It does so in a way that appears to bring Lyotard back to the modern thinkers he is supposed to move away from. It also does so in a way that nally lays to rest the rather hackneyed criticism regarding performative contradictions ( W ho speak s on the m argins? A re they not de ned according to structures and system s? Can they not be identi ed as a voice, a think ing thing capable of self-re ection?) The margin is de ned as a struggle between a fragmented self and a subject reacting to that fragmentation. A kin to the most sensitive and complex of modern writers, avoiding any portrayal of the self in terms of a straightforward identity, yet bringing that self into some kind of unity through the activity of the subject, Lyotard seems to return to the dialectic of passive fragmentation and active uni cation: The leaden circles dissolved in the air. But she must go back. She must assemble (Virginia Woolf, M rs D alloway (London: G rafton Books, 1976), p. 165). So, in Sign M alraux and Cham bre sourd e, the opposition between structure or system and margin is rendered within the relation of subject and self. It is a struggle for someone, in the sense of a ght for life, as opposed to the operation of quasi-independent feelings against something that denies them. Prior to discussing the detail and then the signi cance and aws of this shift in Lyotards thought, I want to insist on the break it represents in his work. It could be argued that, even if he returns to the struggle of a living thing, the struggle is not de ned by that thing because, as I shall show later, it is not for a well-de ned and self-possessed human being. O n the contrary, he values those moments of loss of self, as in the earlier libidinal feelings and desires or feeling of the sublime. But such an argument would underestimate the importance of the locus and stake 116

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of the later philosophy. First, where the earlier philosophy sets a direct relation between feelings that trigger actions on the margin and the structures that they resist, the latter mediates it through the subjectself relation in such a way that the speci city of that relation becomes crucial. Localized history and space become important and resistance is mediated by a sense of my history, thoughts and sensations. Second, as opposed to the brute, degree-zero, setting of stakes in the earlier philosophy, where a feeling occurs and actions necessarily follow, the last philosophy de nes general stakes, such as the political resistance to totalization, in terms of the struggle for survival of a speci c instance of the subjectself relation. Close to his own death, Lyotard developed a new sense of resistance around particular lives and deaths. The most signi cant of these lives may be Lyotards, as read through his account of the life of the French thinker A ndr Malraux, but it is also more than that. The style of Sign M alraux and Cham bre sourde plays on Lyotards earlier studies on the relation between addresser and addressee dating back to D iscours, gure (Paris: Klinksieck, 1971) and then present through most of the remaining works, in particular L e D ifferend (Paris: Minuit, 1983). The books draw the reader in as would a very personal essay or a particularly intimate private conversation on a general topic. Though the issues (modernity, death, the importance of art) could demand a detached form of rationality in addressing them, the addressee is approached in such a way that they remain trapped in particularity: I am being spok en to in con dence about her death, the im portance of art for her. No doubt, it could be claimed that this speci city can be and ought to be overcome in philosophy, but at least in the cases of the conversation and of Lyotards late works this would be at the cost of a certain boorishness and insensitivity. These works ask us to consider a possibility expressed in philo-sophical essays at least since Montaigne: the particular voice, place and style take priority in a re ection upon the general and the universal. II So the last Lyotard stages his philosophy in human lives, though he values the moments in which such lives become inhuman, not in the sense of inhumane, but in the sense of a shared eshly automaticity some sort of truth: H ere is the truth. When G od is dead and the Self moribund, there remains the beast-like I that the self was ignorant of and that would have horri ed it. Strange conversion of poles: for the self, life, its life, is doomed to rot; and, while it is in agony, the vermin within it resists, insists, struggles to be. Stranger still: it says I. A s with a voice that no one is left to hear. ( Cham bre sourde, p. 51) 117

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The struggle between the self, de ned as that part of us to which we can attach biographical details, and the subject, the part that eludes facts other than the brute characteristic of that which acts as a conduit between the self and brutal affects, is the main abstract topic of the book. It is dramatized according to an account of the importance of art and its relation to these affects in the life of A ndr Malraux ( Sign M alraux is an unconventional, highly philosophical biography of Malraux). Malraux is a mirror for Lyotard, at least according to the latters tendentious account. Lyotard paints him as a highly political writer whose politics cannot be separated from re ections on art and his own literary writing. This Malraux is a being prone to violent affects, whose life depends on escaping from the feelings associated with nihilism. H e is also a marginal thinker, opposed to political systems and social structures, including those associated with valid forms of thought and philosophical deduction. The tendentiousness of the biography is then understandable and excusable because the books are more a working through of Lyotards demons, which may resonate with those of others, than an objective account of Malrauxs life or even a balanced assessment of his work. Yet arguments for that working through constitute the philosophical importance of Cham bre sourd e. They operate more in terms of illustrations than forms of re ection that can be applied to different cases free of interpretation and empathy. The reader is presented not with a set of principles or imperatives but with the thoughts and affects of a postmodern anti-hero anti because its demons come from within and are the result of a base series of instinctive moves, both mistaken and perverse when viewed from the point of view of modern teleology. The most perverse move of this kind, with respect to Malraux and to the modern philosophical tradition, is outlined in the rst few chapters of Cham bre sourde, and it haunts the remainder. The modern belief in new beginnings falls foul of a dark version of Nietzsches eternal return. E ach new hopeful start is only a repetition of all the failed dawns that came before. It carries and repeats the horror that followed them: The West is condemned to the obscenity of repeating the gesture of beginning anew. . . . the proliferation of the modern cannot stop the new from becoming old, or stop the voice that awoke from suffocating inaudibly. Too late to start, it makes us laugh sadly (p. 18). Very brie y, Lyotard surveys the great modern political movements of the twentieth century, and sees in each a terrible decline and failure. H is own philosophical and political efforts matched these failures throughout his career: in the disappointments of the A lgerian revolution, the return of reactionary politics after May 1968, the betrayal of the Left, in France and elsewhere, in the 1980s and 1990s, the dominance of right-thinking, self-serving mediaphilosophers on the great issues of our day and the decline of the university into a provider of brute vocational training and specialization. 118

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This match between the public and the private saves the book from understandable accusations of melodrama. Lyotards comments on his times must not be taken as conclusions drawn from an objective assessment or as hypotheses aiming at general assent. R ather, he means to explain an inner tension between nihilism and activity through the way in which it is exacerbated by and expressed in the world. A parallel is drawn between the negative aspects of the self, in the way it tends to a xed and repetitive identity, and the desires and violent failures of modern politics and philosophy. The seeds of nihilism and despair are in the attempts to x identities, to judge them and then to overcome those judged bad or negative, in the self and in the public sphere. In Cham bre sourde, the strongest source of this nihilism is the certainty of death. Judgement and identi cation, and hence negation, visit death on the self and on others by emphasizing what we are not and what we would not want to be in the face of the certainty of our perishing: What can the word autobiography mean when the autonomy of the self is restored to all delusions? What can it mean when its existence is deserted and invaded by all submissions, when for its part the bios, deprived of all nality, becomes only the misleading moment of a more complete death than death itself: a cosmic death? (p. 44). A possible interpretation of this dif cult book may then be that it is Lyotards attempt to come to terms with his own death. A s such, it represents a profoundly anti-Socratic model for the death of the philosopher. Far from a death borne by a re ection on the signi cance of the self, in terms of the endurance of the world through the immortality of the soul, with Lyotard, we have a view of death as the essence of the self and of endurance, and only borne by a search for a beast-like passivity. Where Plato lays down the rational grounds for a cool and redemptive death, Lyotard approaches death through its material effects (on the voice and audition) and through the way in which they disturb the calm pretences of the understanding: Then it is as certain as anything can be, Cebes, that soul is immortal and imperishable, and that our souls will really exist in the next world. There is one way, then, in which a man can be free from all anxiety about the fate of his soul; if in life he has abandoned bodily pleasures and adornments, as foreign to his purpose and likely to do more harm than good, and has devoted himself to the pleasures of acquiring knowledge; and so by decking his soul not with a borrowed beauty but with his own with self-control and goodness, and courage, and liberality, and truth has tted himself to await his journey to the next world. ( Phaedo 106A 107B; 114A 115D ) 119

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With the imminent entrance of death into the life of the understanding, with the nightmare that convulses audition, an anguish essential to the self suddenly bursts in: the anguish of being raped. Stridency wakes the latent horror that lies dormant in our sense of hearing; an exorbitant scream penetrates it, incommensurable to its faculty, improper. Senseless repetition triumphs without a face, having neither tail nor head, billions of precarious existences slopped about by the viscous eddy of the material soup, humming and hawing their own return. ( Cham bre sourde, pp. 86; 79) Socrates keeps the wails of the women away while he calms his followers, whereas Lyotard is interested in how stridency of Brittens War R equiem or of Tom Waits grating vocals and bizarre sounds on the very dark B one M achine , maybe offers an intimation of death that cannot be sublated or banished. Indeed, he sees the Socratic attempt to banish that stridency as nihilistic, since it is bound to fail. It is not so much that Lyotard does not believe in a tranquil death; it is rather that he does not believe that the following appeal on behalf of tranquillity allows the truth of death to come through: R eally, my friends, what a way to behave! Why, that was my main reason for sending away the women, to prevent this sort of disturbance; because I am told that one should make ones end in a tranquil frame of mind. Calm yourselves and try to be brave ( Phaedo 117A 118). So, instead of the detached, ideal, operation of hemlock that is the dream and lie of modern executioners, Cham bre sourde learns from Malrauxs near-death experience in the Salptrire hospital in Paris: O n all fours in his vault, a man, deprived of his human life, gropes the ground as if it is a wall. H e pulls himself up on the bedside table, mistaking it for his cot. It exists, obstinately, it is a worm. (p. 50). Close to death the body must take over, if existence is to retain any vibrancy a quasi-purpose. A s read by Lyotard, Malraux does not report a conscious struggle for life, where the mind drags the body back from the abyss. H e describes the self as already dead and empty of will, but dragged back to life by the esh, the I-without-self: The minute, intense, point of this resistance is called I-without-self. Is real life, inscribed in syncopated dots, in agonizing gasps, within the accid movement of living death, that of an existence struggling against the dissolution of its own identity, like a fourlegged beast? (p. 48). The philosophical interest of Lyotards treatment of death is in his working through of the apparent paradox of the Iwithout-self or of an automatic struggle for identity. H e sees that working through as essential for any resistance to the nihilistic results of modernism and modernity. 120

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So it is not so much the Platonic legacy of angelism that Lyotard intends to resist, but the much more sophisticated root, at least in terms of the intertwining of the self and the body, of D escartess work on the self and the passions. D escartes accepts the closeness of the self and the passions that ow from the body, and even values the way in which the passions unsettle the self whilst giving it a sense of what is of worth. But, according to Lyotard, he rules and judges the passions through rational deliberation and subjects them to a calculus where the self is the end: The different modernities that come after [Christian incarnation] repeat the same incredible gesture: here is my body, says the vo ice, here and now. My E go, says D escartes, thought in action, appropriating nature (p. 14). Lyotard wants to reverse this privileging of the rational self as instigator and end of worthwhile action. H e does so, perhaps perversely, but certainly not out of line with the tradition, by considering what happens in extrem is. III Notwithstanding all the problems that arise from considering life through the way in which death is experienced, two dif cult questions arise from Lyotards turn to the minimal I-without-self. H ow can we specify it further without falling back into the long-standing divide between re exive consciousness and brute matter? In other words, how can we overcome the classic Cartesian mindbody problem: is Lyotards minimal and intense point self-aware, or is it a material point whose behaviour can in principle be predicted objectively? H ow too can we build on this I-without-self ? Can it ever satisfy the demands for at least a relatively secure foundation and locally consistent system on which to develop doctrines of human action? In order to answer these questions and to understand why they are particularly thorny in this instance, it is helpful to return to the extremism of Lyotards position in terms of the tone he has chosen for Cham bre sourd e. The tone of the book is a tension between despair and morbid revelation. The sentences are convoluted and highly wrough t, not because of any crucial theoretical purpose, in the way great philosophy has to grind out a revo lutionary style for itself whilst satisfying conditions concerning the validity of arguments, but because of an aesthetic demand. The sentences convey an errant breathlessness, as if the voice reading them is propelled by tight lungs and fed by a clouded, alternately distressed and enthused, mind. So they are frequently short and dramatically despairing in content (The strident scream calls for the sacri ce of the self (p. 88)). But this shortness is not an occasion for clarity; on the contrary, the components of each sentence are often uncanny and strange, which adds to the effect of delirium W hat is he trying to croak ? E ven when the sentences are long, they bring together short, hermetic and quite 121

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mysterious clauses that interfere with one another. The clauses tend to attract a reader to a re ection on their own sense instead of completing a pure sense that they are secondary to: In existing solely for itself, in understanding its own small world, in listening to itself take pleasure in it, the self learns from stridency that this is not its value. The self is the body; it has worth through this other, through what it is and what it is capable of. The alienation that exceeds the self, despite the body, instructs it of its truth: to be split (p. 88). A s yet, there is no translation of Cham bre sourde, though given that nearly all of Lyotards books have appeared in E nglish and many other languages, one should appear over the next few years. When it does, the translator will have the dif cult task of weighing up the bene ts of the simpli cation that E nglish and the analytic tradition tend to bring to complex French constructions against a loss of style and of a confused but perhaps more valuable sensation. Indeed, in the last chapter of the book, Lyotard de nes style as that which undoes sense in order to allow sensation to burst through in a raw state: Without respite, style works, it undoes and remakes the material in order to tear it away from the concatenation of that which has been sensed, in order to subvert it and to offer it to the call of that which is unheard of (p. 108). This does not necessarily imply an advocacy of grand gestures and styles or a new and bizarre de nition of style. R ather, he seeks to emphasize that which makes every great style a sign of particularity and a form resistant to de nition in terms of meaning. For example, Lyotard follows Malraux in paying special attention to the gures drawn as if in chalk in the background of Tintorettos paintings; these discrete lines explain the power of the works and not the familiar and sense-laden gures in the foreground. This return to the importance of detail by Lyotard may serve his early works better too: despite his reputation as a rather extreme thinker, more often than not his gaze is directed towards an essential detail that our powers of recognition have rendered us blind to. Style resists sense because it depends on a material sensation as opposed to an understanding. That sensation must arrest us as something extraordinary, though we may have felt, heard or seen it before, something like the tone of the voice of a loved one in a time of stress or affection: But style rmly maintains the words, colours, all the timbres with which it composes the work in their material element. The forms that it invents for them and that it imposes on reality will not be freed from it: they prom ise escape (p. 109). Lyotards resistance to science comes out strongly in this passage. For him, real matter is exp erienced through art; it is not approachable by way of instrumental reason. ( You m ay seek an abstract de nition of distress or seductiveness in a voice. You m ay even be able to trigger form s of behaviour using that k nowledge. B ut that is not to capture what m ak es a particular voice or style a destabiliz ing event for m e.) 122

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There is a strong and acknowledged relation to Barthess views here, though Lyotard refers to the punctum described by Barthes in L a Cham bre claire (Paris: TelQ ud, 1977) and not to his remarks on voice and style in Fragm ents dun discours am oureux (Paris: G allimard, 1980). It is only in his very last works that Lyotard approaches Barthess sensitivity and fragility. Perhaps it is for this reason that it is only so late that he felt able to allow his voice to resonate with those of the great of French literature. A s opposed to the capacity of revelation of Barthess cam era lucida, Lyotards mute room has nothing for the self in search of identity. H is paraphrasing of Barthess title emphasizes Lyotards view that it is in being cut off and cut up that we experience the truth and our truth. Barthes is a romantic when it comes to sound (and much more than sound); we are deaf to ourselves, but that can be redeemed by writing for others to hear: H ence to entrust himself to writing: is not writing that language which has renounced producing the last word, which lives and breathes by yielding itself up to others so that they can hear you? ( R oland B arthes by R oland B arthes (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 170). E ven when Barthes seems to share Lyotards despair, in his late diaries, for example, that despair is caused by the fear of losing a loving reciprocity and by a selfloathing associated with the feeling that he, his body, may have been the cause of that loss. There is no romantic hope in Lyotard; instead, there is an attempt to make nihilism liveable by accepting it and discovering its true source in the nature of the self. H e reads Barthess grieving book for his mother in this light; it is not a book about love, but a book that captures the truth of broken spirits: Through the punctum that Barthess Cam era L ucida isolates in the photograph of his mother, stridency passes and shatters her sons soul, but it also lifts the writing of a little book whose singular acuity leaves us trans xed ( Cham bre sourde, p. 110). This harsh reduction of Barthes returns us to the questions put at the start of this section. Where does this idiosyncratic reading take us? There is more to Barthes, to any one of us, than the moment when we are transxed by an emotion. Why privilege that moment? E ven if we are to stay with it, where does that leave us if not in a terrible hell? What is the philosophical status of Lyotards beautiful and moving book? Is it only the dark thoughts of a dying thinker or something of a more lasting and truthful importance? IV There is, in fact, no escape from a kind of political and ethical despair in Cham bre sourde: The poetical does not lend itself to politics or ethics. No consideration for others in creation. To whom writing is addressed is an inane question. With words, with physical sensible things, one makes sorts of empty ducts where maybe silence will resonate (p. 112). 123

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This does not mean that the later Lyotard abandons politics and ethics; rather, he expresses the need to withdraw from them when they make claims to be the seat of truth and private sense. O n the contrary, it is only possible to live life truthfully in art, because the truth of life is division and emptiness. A rt creates the space, the mute room, for that emptiness to resonate and bring us back to a profound state of stupefaction where we stop asking the questions W ho am I? W ho are we? W hat is this for? W here is all this going? In speaking of death, hearing and the voice, Lyotard prepares a ground where these questions are seen to be futile and destructive of even the minimal space he wants to open up with art. So art gives thickness to the I-without-self by associating it with the creation and experience of art-works as they strive to carve a mute room. It also gives rise to a space that is neither subject nor object, but rather a transient but more truthful escape from both that only has pretensions to exist alongside them for a while. The last Lyotard cannot give direct answers to the two questions asked earlier concerning the tness of the I-without-self as a kind of ground for philosophy and concerning the nal resolution of the mindbody problem ( if that is what you are still look ing for, stay away from him ). Instead, he argues for something that can maintain some distance from the desire for grounds and the inevitable realisation of that desire in social structures. H e does so because he sees nihilism in the way in which those structures operate by negation ( this as not that, and better) and in the way in which that desire subverts the intensity of all others in some worthy postponement and projection forward. This nihilism is the cold death he seeks to evade in Cham bre sourde. In answer to the qualms that come out of the reduction of Barthes raised in the previous section, art and the I-without-self are not all there is or all that matters. R ather, they are the nal refuge of brute intensity in a world where sense and purpose seem to be overtaking all things. There will always be this return to false identities, but art allows us to feel that they are false, mere covers for a more truthful void: The external appearance, the facies of the work, seems to be destined to simulate, to hide, to lie, but it can happen that through its empty innards the mask captures truth, the nothing, in strident apparitions (p. 112). These are the last lines of Cham bre sourde, from a chapter entitled Communion. A rt provides for a paradoxical communion based around silence and nonsense: Solitude is shared in the instants where the dreadful nothingness screeches in the emptiness of the self (p. 102). Not an occasion for despair, not an occasion for hope, only a shared refuge from a more dreadful modern nihilism. University of D undee Jam es W illiam s

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