Peter Pál Pelbart - Cartography of Exhaustion - Nihilism inside out

O AVESSO DO NIILISMO
CARTOGRAFIAS DO ESGOTAMENTO
by Peter Pl Pelbart
n-1 publications, 2013

Translated by John Laudenberger and Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos as
Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out

First Edition
Minneapolis 2015, Univocal Publishing

Published by Univocal
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Minneapolis, MN 55401
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Designed & Printed by Jason Wagner
Distributed by the University of Minnesota Press

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ISBN 9781937561789
Library of Congress Control Number 2015955620

Table of contents

I

Life, Body, Power

How to Live Alone?

The Populated Solitude

In the early eighties, in a class about cinema, if I remember correctly, Deleuze was interrupted by a rather fraught student, perhaps one of Guattaris patients, or a former La Borde inmate, amidst such a heterogeneous audience, composed of philosophers, architects, painters, drug addicts, vagrants. He asked Deleuze why people were so alone, why there was such a lack of communication nowadays, and unraveled his sad story about how we are victims of abandonment and helplessness. And Deleuze, sensing that his class was being driven off track, replied politely, before proposing a small break: the problem is not that we are alone, but rather that we are not left alone enough. Indeed, Deleuze never tired of writing that we suffer from an excess of communication, that we are riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images, so that it is no longer a question of making people express themselves, but rather to provide small vacuoles of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. To conjure the gentleness and the right to have nothing to say is perhaps the condition so that one might form the rare, or even rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

But what is this solitude that Deleuze called for, one that he came to qualify as absolute solitude when referring to the creator, a condition that he finds in Nietzsche, Kafka, Melville, Godard, and so many others? It is the worlds most populous solitude. Populated not with dreams, phantasms or plans, but with encounters.

Thus, it is anything but solipsism. Solitude is the means by which one deserts the form of the Ego and its infamous commitments to a determined totality in favor of a different combination with the flows of the socius and of the cosmos in such a way that the solitarys challenge, contrary to any autistic reclusion, is always to find or rediscover the most connections. To call for a people to come. To make another community possible. To establish a different interaction between the singular and the common.

Take the figure of Bartleby, the scrivener described by Melville, who replies to every order of his boss as such: I would prefer not to. The lawyer oscillates between fraternal compassion and indignation, between pity and repulsion, with this employee planted behind the screen, who barely speaks, barely eats, pale and thin like an irremovable lost soul. With such passivity, Bartleby empties out meaning and neutralizes the cogwheel that previously turned the gears of the world making everything run. By way of a deterritorialization of language, places, functions, and habits, he enables everything to break away in an unbridled flight. From the depths of their solitude, these individuals not only reveal the refusal of a poisoned sociability, but are the calling for a kind of new solidarity; the plea for a community to come. Not the community based on hierarchy, paternalism, or compassion, as his employer would like to offer, but the community of celibates, the society of brothers, a federation of men and goods. A community of anarchist individuals, which Deleuze often finds in American literature, as opposed to the inquisitorial utopia of the collective soul. And he asks: what remains of souls once they no longer cling to an identity, but also refuse to melt into a universal totality? What remains is precisely their originality, that is, a sound that each one produces when taking to the open road, when leading life without seeking salvation, when embarking upon an incarnate voyage, without any particular aim, and then encountering other travelers, recognizing them by their sound. Against the European morality of salvation and charity, there is a morality of life in which the soul is fulfilled only by taking the road, exposed to every contact, never trying to save other souls, turning away from those who produce an overly authoritarian or groaning sound, forming even fleeting and unresolved chords and accords. The community of the celibates is that of whichever man and his singularities that cross one another: neither individualism nor communalism.

Apparatus of Life

In light of these remarks, allow me to mention a course given by Roland Barthes many years ago on the subject of How to Live Together , when he confessed that the title resulted from a kind of obsession, and his research on the subject, therefore, was the fruit of a fantasy that had long been haunting him. Interestingly, Barthes only states this fantasy of living together and discards collectivist utopias where everything is meticulously regulated and shared. How to live together and escape tyrannical gregariousness? How to reject forms of living together that suffocate singularity? Maybe by inventing a game made of distances and differences. A socialism of distances, where what is shared is the asymmetry.

But another note creeps in at the end of Barthes' course, without which this panorama could not be complete: the experience of dpaysement, of expatriation, of voluntary exile. To drop everything, to escape, to leave, even if the nature of this movement is internal, spiritual, imperceptible, carried out with no ostentation or vanity. As if any collective were unthinkable without a line of flight. Perhaps community itself, in the strong sense of the word and history is full of examples can only be born out of a desertion, an exodus, however solitary, mystical, or psychotic it may seem.

I Need to Die a Little

In a more clinical context, psychoanalyst Nathalie Zaltzman evokes the anarchist drive of the uncompromising, beings whose lives are punctuated by dramatic ruptures, and who fight fiercely against imprisoning organizations of life. If these lives can give off an almost epic image, we must remember that these people are caught in a solitude that can neither be shared nor alleviated, they are devoid of what we habitually surround ourselves with in order to protect us from solitude and death. What matters above all is to ascertain the extent to which they do not attach themselves to anyone or anything, to what extent they remain free to abandon everything, to spoil everything to give everything. They are not worried about protecting the reasons that bind them to life; what keeps them busy is making sure they are free of any ties. For they do not go into exile from themselves, they expatriate themselves in every corner of their lives. This is attested by the anarchist geographer Elise Reclus, who was repeatedly deported, exiled, imprisoned: Im tired of eating and drinking, sleeping in a bed, and walking around with full pockets. I need to die a little from hunger, to sleep on the gravel . Here is, by tortuous paths, an urgency to show that one is alive, even at the price of constantly being exposed to death. The anarchist drive is that which fights the binding intention of Eros, which is annexation, ownership, annulment of alterity gregariousness. The libertarian impetus, with its anti-social charge, has a demoniacal, or even terroristic, halo. But what is at stake, even here, is a resistance against the unifying domain, deceptively idyllic, sweetening and leveling of ideological love, an impulse to make the whole structure of Power, authority, connection, and their sacred fantasies fly through the air. To relieve yourself from the love that embraces and paralyzes everything is not Thanatos, but rather a vital struggle against death. I think that many of Dostoyevskys characters are of this type; they experiment with their leeway, mobility, vitality, even if they need to flirt with the demonic. Opposed to Dostoyevskys Grand Inquisitor, who guarantees the herds pacified happiness by paying for their docility, the Underground Man is unwillingness personified, the refusal of the promise of narcotic quietude, the frenetic rejection of all truth, divine or scientific, in favor of an impatient freedom. Clearly we know that the Grand Inquisitor has now acquired his biotechnocapitalistic and planetary version what remains is knowing who the underground men of today are.