Smells like teen spirit - 2010
The Housekeeping department is pleased to announce an addition to the photo section: It is the documentation of a recent reliving of our teenage years – the 90’s! Bottoms up!
Housekeeping
10
Feb 10
Smells like teen spirit – 2010
The Housekeeping department is pleased to announce an addition to the photo section: It is the documentation of a recent reliving of our teenage years – the 90’s! Bottoms up!
18
Jan 10
Walter Benjamin – Aufklärung fĂĽr Kinder
The Housekeeping department would like to briefly draw your attention to an update in the audio section: Walter Benjamin’s writings for children’s radio Aufklärung fĂĽr Kinder. Enjoy!
13
Jan 10
What matter who’s speaking?
A friend recently questioned the use of the personal pronoun “we” on aleph.dk. The question was posed on a rather bacchanalesque occasion, so the debate soon wandered off and finally had to sit down against a wall somewhere. In order to actually answer the very interesting question of personal pronouns, however, it would be pertinent to quote Beckett: “Qu’importe qui parle, quelqu’un a dit qu’importe qui parle” 1
There is a funny double entendre in the French original, which is sadly lost in translation. The sentence has three members. The first one is perceived as a question even though it has no question mark. The second member states that someone said something, this something being the third member. The ambiguity arises in this last member, which can be read as both a direct and an indirect quotation. Either someone repeated the question in the first member – “What matter who’s speaking” – or someone said that, in fact, it matters who is speaking.
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- Beckett’s own English translation goes as follows: “What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking.” ↩
10
Mar 09
Derrida’s haunting of Fragmentum
The Fragmentum-section has had additional philosophical dribble jammed down its throat! The aleph housekeepers have recently been looking at late Derrida and found a couple of cutesy quotes to share with the world:
“La substitution n’est pas simplement le remplacement d’un unique remplaçable : la substitution remplace l’irremplaçable. Qu’il y ait tout de suite, dès le premier matin du dire ou le premier surgissement de l’Ă©vĂ©nement, itĂ©rabilitĂ© et retour dans l’unicitĂ© absolue, dans la singularitĂ© absolue, cela fait que la venue de l’arrivant – ou la venue de l’Ă©vĂ©nement inaugural – ne peut ĂŞtre accuillie que comme retour, revenance, revenance spectracle.”
This one is from a mainly improvised lecture given at le Centre Canadien d’Architecture on the first of april 1997.
“L’hĂ©gĂ©monie organise toujours la rĂ©pression et donc la confirmation d’une hantise. La hantise appartient Ă la structure de toute hĂ©gĂ©monie.”
And this well phrased banality is from Spectres de Marx which is largely based on lectures given on the 22nd and the 23rd of april 1993. As always titles and pages are served with the quotes in Fragmentum.
At the moment we are without comment or justification for their presence in the Fragmentum Hall of Fame, but we hope to use them in some theoretical waffle later on. In the mean time: Enjoy!
20
Feb 09
The unbearable lightness of being sick
Unless mine eyes deceive me, it has been almost three months since the last contribution to this bloggery manifestation of ennui. This is not because I have been going gently into that languid light of laziness, oh no! There was a visit from Paris, there was Christmas, there was a visit to Paris, I have done a couple of translations, and, finally, I applied for a PhD, which does take a bit of time. Another reason for my neglect of this reticular cultivation of the ego via its eternal written affirmation is that I got a bit bored with my attempts at rendering certain theoretical problems in bloggish. Bloggery is fit for the more or less cultivated or casual considerations of the works of mice and men over digital drinks and dinner, but not for laborious elaborations on the subtle workings of all things theory.
We therefore turn to the unbearable lightness of being sick. I am in such a state of illness right now, which, of course, is the reason for my choice of subject matter. It is not that I am really seriously sick, it is more that I am not at all well… Why, oh why must it be this way? A question which the afflicted tend to ask the room that contains them, most of them without expecting an answer. I, however, am a man of science! If God has chosen to punish me, I want him down here to tell me why, God dammit! But, since God is a very domestic animal with no great love of communication, I will have to invent my own unholy explanation. This, my invention, has three factors: The seed, the fun and the exercise.
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24
Nov 08
Housekeeping, libidinal economy, and the problem of saying I – III
So, where were we? The housekeeping department has been away for a couple of weeks in order to see loved ones in Paris, but it is now time to return to business and get our house in order. We thus continue where we left off:
When the ethopoetic relation to textual fragments becomes constitutive of the I by which you meet your reader, your fellow, your brother, with whom you then establish a doxopoetic relation, there is trouble. The fragments are presented as a totality by the name of I. “I” is the incorporation of the different fragments who bear the rather technical name, hypomnemata, meaning memory aid or substantification of memory. But is this totality possible? Is the incorporation of hypomnemata possible without an irreducible difference or maybe even “DiffĂ©rance” between the fragments and their meaning?
It is probably time to whip up an example. L’OrĂ©al once used the slogan “Because I’m worth it”. This slogan became “Because you’re worth it” and then simply “You’re worth it”. All slogans were and are pronounced by various heroes of popular culture – models, actors and even a race car driver. I say! It’s so elegant, so intelligent!
Continue reading →
10
Nov 08
Housekeeping, libidinal economy, and the problem of saying I – II
Libidinal economy, the housekeeping of the ego, the ordering of the self as a well-kept abode, implies individuation – the development of the self in a given direction. French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, combines the idea of individuation with the foucauldian notion of a ‘writing of the self”. This implies the relation of the subject to a textual fragment as virtual, ethical other, whereby an ethos is incorporated by the subject. Borrowing from Plutarch, Foucauld calls this the ethopoetic relation.
This ethopoetic incorporation is the writing of a corpus, the body with which you meet your peers, so that they can see your spiritual genealogy. Since this demonstration of the construction of the self by fragments is forcibly a negotiation of what is right or wrong, good or bad, and thus constitutive of a doxa (the community of values), we propose to call this relation of the ethical incorporation to the others a doxopoetic relation.
And now we get to the problem of saying I. The doxopoetic relation is a way of showing yourself as a textual corpus, and as Levinas was kind enough to remind os, to show yourself in a meaningful way is to speak. Let’s return to housekeeping for a moment. The ordering of the self as a well-kept abode is to a wide extent a doxopoetic relation. Of course, you yourself can appreciate nice furniture, a clean floor, art on the walls and a good espresso machine but when this becomes constitutive of who you are, the fragments that make up your public face or body, there is trouble. When the well kept abode of the self, whether an actual abode or an actual self, is no longer a function of your way of life, your life form, your personal praxis, but a means to the end of saying I, so that the others will see your “I” and raise you one more, then the I will condemn itself to an eternal existence as not-I.
We’ll get there eventually, don’t you worry. To be continued…
7
Nov 08
Housekeeping, libidinal economy, and the problem of saying I – I
In the past few days we have had several posts of housekeeping by Housekeeping. The housekeeping department now feels that it might be time to have a post on housekeeping – reticular, domestic and other.
As is widely known, the greek word for housekeeping is oikonomos. In the wild currents of time this word swirled and bobbed until it multiplied and transformed into the English word economy, the French Ă©conomie, the German Ă–konomie, the Danish økonomi and many others (Greek words are strumpets and have bastard children everywhere). As such, a housekeeping crisis might be waitin’ ’round the bend, my Huckleberry friend, if the financial rugrats do not get their house in order in the near future.
As implied by the historical and geographical transformation of the term oikonomos, there are many different forms of economy. One among them is, as suggested above, related to money and their less than evenhanded distribution between what we might call agents. These could be nations, companies, the man on the street, the person writing this, or even actual secret agents with surprising gadgetry and a license to kill. A very different and in many ways more interesting type of economy is what a long dead Austrian psychoanalyst dubbed libidinal economy. Libido is the instinct energy or force, contained in what Freud called the id, the largely unconscious structure of the psyche. Sometimes libido is perceived as mere sexual energy but we’ll try not to mount that old hobby horse or, indeed, to mount anything or anyone – at least for the duration of this post.
Libidinal economy is thus the restrictions on pure libidinal flow imposed by the super ego. Restricted libido can be good and bad, the good one being sublimation, i.e. the productive usage of libidinal energy or the channeling thereof towards productive instead of destructive outlets. This type of economy, of course, is the housekeeping of the ego. Bear with us, we are within smelling distance of something like a point…
To be continued…
2
Nov 08
Insurgency of anglo linguistic racism
In a display of anglo despotism, the newly updated database, which hosts and governs this blog, chose to publicly denounce any foreign letters, signs or accents in previous posts. This was done by cruelly styling the perceived culprits as phonetic monstrosities, vulgar semiotic conglomerates, ungodly produce of perverse penmanship. Sadly, the housekeeping department is too lazy to actually rectify this racist insurgency, contenting ourselves with the knowledge that it is unlikely to happen again or, at least, any time soon. And maybe, when confronted with these atrocities, we finally see the need for a structural transformation of the public sphere which permits and conveys this bloggery waffle and of the anglophile devices that control it.
1
Nov 08
The blogification of an index
The housekeeping department finally decided to get rid of the old index page, replacing it with this – the polemos blog. The old index page was supposed to greet any visitor with a media player displaying all sorts of fun, but the player wasn’t in the greatest of hurries to appear on the screen which just left the page empty, quite ugly and utterly useless. So now it has been blogified. It is still quite ugly and utterly useless, but at least it is less empty…
