Full version of the interview with Peter Pál Pelbart appeared on February 13, 2010 in Public. Made after the visit of Peter Pál Madrid. Peter Pál
Pelbart a philosopher. Born in Budapest, philosophically trained in Paris, now a professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo (Brazil). He is coordinator of a theater company with psychiatric patients. Among his research topics are the crazy, over time, common or biopolitics. In Castilian published Philosophy of attrition (Tinta Limón editions).
By the grace of the economic crisis, the word "crisis" is now everywhere. With it, we usually refer to a process fundamentally negative, we suffer passively as victims and they must leave as soon as possible to return to normal. But the crisis also underlies a great potential for transformation.
How do you think the crisis?
In Spain surely well acquainted Tosquelles François, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and Catalan anarchist militant. Refuge in France after the English civil war, was responsible for a revolution in psychiatry from work at the hospital of Saint Alban. He understood immediately the similarity between the situation of the hospitals and camps, which led him to a subversion of the institutional logic. Lo que se conoce menos de Tosquelles es su producción teórica. Escribió un libro llamado La vivencia del fin del mundo en la locura, donde describe los cuadros clínicos en los que se pierde radicalmente la confianza en el mundo, la expectativa elemental de que el mundo pueda continuar, tras una quiebra en la vida, un desastre, una crisis. Todo eso apenas sería una contribución en la descripción fenomenológica de un cuadro clínico, como las que hicieron Binswager o Minkowski. Pero su idea más interesante, desarrollada a partir del trabajo de Goldstein, es que esa catástrofe anímica coincide con la apertura a la creación de mundo. Junto a la disolución padecida de la existencia, se da un esfuerzo vital de inventing a new way of life. Ie, catastrophe and creation go together. Something similar
wrote the German physician and neurologist Viktor von Weizsäcker, who made an equally suggestive. The moment of crisis, he says, is one in which nothing seems possible. But it is also the time that cross many transformations. And so, although the patient now seems completely blocked, it's time they open all possibilities. That is, the crisis is a conjunction of "anything is possible" and "everything is possible." The crisis reveals the forces at play or, rather, redistribute answering the question: "Things will go in the direction of life or death? So conceived, the crisis is the cumulative result of a previous series, but a beginning, an origin, a vital decision. Corresponds to the creation of a space and time itself, no longer reflects the objective world coordinates or ontic, but the dimension pathic as he appoints, where a mutation can occur from the experience and potential. Felix Guattari drank from that source even if it has set in its own way with his words when referring to "chaos" to the "chaosmosis" to "heterogenesis" and, especially, when explicit how caosmótico subsidence is the condition for a heterogenesis, not only in psychosis, not only in psychological terms, not only in the individual plan, but also collective, political, aesthetic, etc. So I say, running cross between these levels so different, that the crisis, catastrophe, breakdown, the collapse of meaning or as we like to call these moments of collapse, are the conditions of possibility for a mutation subjective, existential, vital, either micro or macro contexts.
Why do you say that at the time of crisis, "anything is possible" and at the same time, "everything becomes possible"? Explain this (apparent) paradox.
Yes, it is a paradoxical phenomenon. "Nothing is possible," "everything is possible." But do not oscillate constantly between these dilemmas or, rather, not live simultaneously? Can we not recognize in this strange conjunction a feature of our contemporary feel? But this is not an individual or psychological sense, but a wider logic that can be found in the phenomena of culture or civilization. Perhaps Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism is where that logic is spelled out more clearly. What is nihilism for him? The process by which values which form the basis of our Western culture is devalued. It is the historical-philosophical process by which what was supreme object of belief (Being, Good, God, Reason, Progress) loses its credibility. Thus, the figures metaphysical, religious or moral sense of the world giving life or are no longer operational, bringing the world or lose the meaning of life they once had and fall into ontological orphans. It is a very complex process of emptying is detected in areas as diverse as philosophy, art, politics, history, but you can always read at least two opposite ways: an apocalyptic, another retirement.
Indeed, the end an interpretation of the dominant world (Socratic-Christian) is equivalent, for some, the dark end of the world and of man is the "anything is possible." For others, however, the release of a hegemonic interpretation of the world, and therefore the end of a world and a man, represents the opening to another world and something beyond the man is the "everything is possible." Particular expression of Nietzsche's position is to think the two things together at shoulder together. Because, for him, a world devoid of meaning, following the devaluation of the supreme sense, there is nothing reprehensible or frightening, and only leads to paralysis of the will impoverished since a superabundant life, by contrast, supports and even requires that depletion to result in its power of interpretation and creation, one that does not look for meaning in things, because it imposes. In contrast to the believer who depended on the senses transcendent spirit that Nietzsche claims a "goodbye to all beliefs, all desire for certainty, exercised, as it is, in order to stay on thin ropes and possibilities, and even before the abyss, dance ". A reading of nihilism nihilistic process remains in the "anything is possible." How to make the passage, which is already in the concept of nihilism, the "anything is possible" to "all is possible "? We know how some postmodern made a nihilistic and cynical interpretation of contemporaneity: end of utopias, ideologies, politics, history, etc. Therefore, nothing is worth it, everything is equivalent, "anything is possible." Would need to examine how other perspectives, however, think positively these historical passages crisis, without nostalgia in relation to traditional forms that have expired and which the present is free, for other forces and forms to come: " everything is possible. "
Associates the crisis (or the catastrophe of meaning) to the creation of the world. Therefore, the crisis becomes a turning point in the political and social transformation, because they go through the creation of (other) world (s). However, nobody likes to be in crisis, that the senses to orient you yesterday no longer work, because that hurts. How could then hold a crisis so active?
Clearly the threat of a crisis there is always an effort to preserve the lifestyle prior existing identity, subjectivity crystallized, traditional values, in short, the current system. Uncertainty can trigger twitches defensive identity to appease the anguish, reterritorializations (1) brutal, sometimes deadly. The problem is that this reactivity was not "enough" what is at stake in this crucial time of transformation. We may use here the beautiful formula of Deleuze: the only ethic is to live up to the event. But how does this imply detachment sometimes! Nietzsche said to be detached from the religion, homeland, family, knowledge, friends, self ... and also the pleasure of detachment! But of course, is the fear to let go of possessions and territories, to lose yourself, go crazy or die, to live a landslide, separation, bereavement, a sag. Fear to let fall the masks and not get to grasp the new opportunities that open when established forms of existence are shown as feasible. Yes, they are passages in which one is affected by great uncertainty, an uncertainty, a gap even in the domain either individual or collective, existential and axiological. None of this occurs without pain, without some kind of death, not a radical experience of deterritorialization (1). The challenge is to live the crisis as a process (2) open, which reserves virtual life and that the crisis unfolds and reveals whether the raw material change. This requires an art of very complex and subtle mutation. Of course the loss of referrals, limits, management many risks and dangers, as happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall with resurgences nationalists, fascists, fundamentalists. I do not know if it is a matter of conscience. It is rather a certain position of desire that is at stake, no doubt. What is needed is a new arrangement (3) to support the ongoing mutation, that is the challenge. It requires an art major or minor: emotional intelligence, constructivism experimental schizoanalytical mapping (4), a micro.
Could we say that the positive process of a crisis (the creation of new meanings and relationships) is both a therapeutic process, healing in some way? It would be different from the usual therapy that bypasses the "containment" or "repair", but by a certain existential renewal and metamorphosis. What do you think?
I totally agree. The challenge is from the "hole effect" that exists, and deterritorialization rates are deployed, to build new existential territories (1), open new lines of life, generate new ways, generate new refrains. But this is not to replace existing ways new ways from the previous sensitivity is running or just came into collapse. As I said François Deleuze Zourabichvili from a mutation of the sensitivity of individual or collective, is characterized precisely by a redistribution of the border between what is no longer tolerated, even before it was the most everyday, and what you want to forward but shortly before it was unimaginable. You can not make the economy of this mutation, which is the sensitivity, perception, thought, vitality, a metamorphosis, as you say. Yes, a process that could be called therapeutic, if you want and if we extend much sense, or schizoanalytical, if we radicalize the ante in new coordinates of enunciation from a molecular (5) intensive and stores open, accompanied by forms of expression that are generated in the process of ongoing subjectivations. It is true that sometimes it also requires very trivial things, a kind of care, continuity. The collective situations relevant speaks very ordinary knitting every day, point by point, in a work of great delicacy, as craft. In any case, I see all this together as the construction and maintenance of a plane of consistency (6). In certain work groups or groups that is essential. But we must add, that plan is constituted by a field of virtuality, an unconscious, if you still use the word turned towards the future. An unconscious expanded and open to future cuts makes no sense and breaks refer to an interpretation of deep content, but part of a machine (7) extended, so that show a nascent subjectivity, openness necessary for deterritorializing emerge demands something where everything was closed.
Retrieve a quote from Deleuze to say that today "we do not believe in the world", that nothing we're concerned, we are spectators of what (we) passes. Could you explain what this means? Does the issue of the crisis?
philosophy is like a shout: "We lost the world, us removed. " Or, in another context, Deleuze says the same thing in different words: "The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. Even in the events that happen to us, love, death, as if we have concerned only by half. " It is puzzling that exclamation. But it should not be read as a lament, tragic or melancholic, but rather as a sign of this. And indeed, when his books on cinema, Deleuze discusses the passage from classical to contemporary cinema, for example with the Italian neo-realism, Rossellini, De Sica, insists on these characters before a situation of extreme horror and beauty, as a city destroyed by war or volcano eruption, are traversed by a stupor, a paralysis, a suspension of action. Faced with an excess of suffering, beauty and abjection, and even manage to react, they become spectators of what affects them. For Deleuze, this situation is a symptom that broke the sensorimotor connection with the world, that we're not in a system of action-reaction.
Beyond a consideration of the film, and that passage of a motion film to a cinema of the time, there is ultimately a reflection of a deeper change, a break in the connection between man and the world. More radically, which was disturbed is the belief in the world. Is not cinema, art, thought or policy which would restore the belief in the world? But it is not, precisely, to believe in what once made us act, whether metaphysical dogmas, religious or political. William James, along with Nietzsche, was one of the authors who inspired Deleuze on that topic, because he thought in depth the issue of belief in the context of a world very pluralistic, uncertain, dangerous, disconnected parts, uncertainties-a nondeterministic world, but agonistic. For James, as for Nietzsche, is not believing in things that just fell into disrepute: God, revolution, Progress, these universal or absolute ruined, but to revive the belief from pluralism, a perspectivism of indeterminism, a collision of wills and of the particles. According to the beautiful reading that offers LAPOUJADE from David James, believe the world is not believing that the world exists, which no doubt, but believe in the possibilities of the world, have confidence in our ability to connect with the forces the world, have confidence in the ability of our forces to connect with the forces of the world or, as he says, in one way rather Bergson, have sympathy, sympathy with the world, with his strength, his becoming, in the future of others with the becoming-other of the other in the world. If it is claimed that trust is precisely because it has been disturbed. It is on the bottom of the disturbance that the action became problematic, and more necessary. American pragmatist philosophy all that is read by Deleuze as a constructive effort, where the fragments are connected, piece by piece, where sympathy and trust are positive elements on the background of a chaotic abyss. I think that element is present in Deleuze, if not always explicit, and is sometimes used in unexpected contexts. When Negri Deleuze asks why politics can prolong the splendor in the history of the event, Deleuze responds: "Believe in the world is what one would need. Believing in the world means above all generate events, however small, beyond the control, or give rise to new space-times, including surface and volumes. "
Another topic of your work is the question of the ordinary, how do you think? What is common? What is the relationship-if any-with the problem of the crisis?
Several contemporary authors, among others, Toni Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Paolo Virno, Jean-Luc Nancy, and even before them, Maurice Blanchot relate strongly to the obvious: we live today a crisis of "common." The forms that once seemed to guarantee people a common boundary, which will provide some consistency to the social bond, lost its cogency and definitely entered into collapsing. Since the so-called public sphere to the modes of association enshrined: community, national, ideological, partisan, union. Wander between spectra of the ordinary: the media, political staging, legitimate economic consensus, but relapse in the ethnic or religion, the invocation of civilization based on the panic, the militarization of existence to defend the "life" supposedly "common"-or, more precisely to defend a life-form called "common." However, we know that this "life" or the "form-of-life" is not really "common" when we participate in that consensus, these wars, such panic, these political circuses, these outdated modes of association or even in a language that speaks on our behalf, we are victims or accomplices in a kidnapping.
If today is, in fact, a kidnapping of the ordinary, an expropriation of the ordinary, a manipulation of the ordinary, under consensual forms, unit, spectacularized, aggregated, transcendentalizadas, we must recognize that, at the same time, and paradoxically, such configurations of the "common" finally beginning to appear as what they are: pure spectrum. In another context, Deleuze reminds us that, especially from World War II, the plates began to appear as what they are: mere clichés. The relationship clichés, the clichés of love, the clichés of the people, the clichés of politics or revolution, the clichés of what binds us to the world. And just in time, drained of its cogency, is revealed as clichés-that is, as finished pictures, prefabricated, recognizable patterns, mere tracings of the empirical-the thought might rid of them to find what is "real."
Now, today, both the perceived hijacking of the ordinary, as the revelation of character that common spectral transcendentalizado, occur in very specific conditions, precisely at a time usually, and not his image is ready to appear in its full force of impact, and immanent way, given the new context and biopolitical production today. To put it clearly, unlike what happened several decades ago, when usually defined and was experienced as that abstract space that combines individuality and get over them-out as public space, either as policy, "today is usually productive space par excellence. The contemporary context brought to light, so unprecedented in history-as it did in its economic and biopolitical nucleus itself, "the prevalence of" common. " The so-called immaterial labor, post-Fordist production, cognitive capitalism are all the result of the emergence of common: they all demand powers linked to what we are most common, that is, the language and its corresponding beam: intelligence, knowledge , cognition, memory, imagination and, therefore, the common invention. But they also require subjective requirements linked with language, the ability to communicate, relate, associate, cooperate, to share the memory, to forge new connections and networks proliferate. In this context of capitalism or connective network, which some call even rhizomatic (8) - at least that which is common ideally set to work together. And it could be otherwise: after all, what would be a private language? What connection would be a solipsist? What sense would know only referred to himself? Sharing what is common, circulate it already is patrimony of all, to grow what is in all and everywhere, is the language, life, inventiveness ... But this dynamic only partially correspond to what actually happens, and that is accompanied by the appropriation of the ordinary, the expropriation of the commons, privatization of the ordinary, the vampirism of the ordinary undertaken by the various companies, mafias, states and institutions, for purposes that capitalism can not hide, even in its most rhizomatic.
In this case the crisis of representation of the ordinary opens and reveals, at the same time, another common method of production.
recently said in Madrid that may seem Deleuze strange to hear a talk about a crisis or catastrophe of meaning (even if for example the main theme of Deleuze's book on painting and diagram), why? In contemporary philosophy is well aware of the problem of the crisis, the event, disruption, discontinuity, what are differences between readings?
In an obituary in 1995 after the death of Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben compares two seminars he attended, one of Heidegger and another, twenty years later, Deleuze: "A gulf separates these two philosophers ... the general tone of Heidegger distress is tense and almost metallic ... On the contrary, nothing better expresses the fundamental key to a sense that Deleuze liked to call the English name of self-Enjoyment. " Agamben's conclusion is as follows: "The great philosophy of this grim century, beginning with the anguish, the joy ended with" That sounds fair and at the same time, paradoxical. But decades earlier, Jean Hyppolite said something very similar, comparing the Bergsonism and existentialism, but with the sign reversed, as if he regretted. He warned that there is no place for human anguish Bergson, only for serenity. And he added: "It is the serenity that today we are not able to understand. As if in a period of particularly tragic history like ours, had no more room for that serenity. "
Here is a fundamental issue, the Stimmung, the affective tone of thought. It is admirable that after the war as sober a line passing through all the work of Deleuze, made afirmatividad and joy, so different from the one that dominated the preceding philosophy. Deleuze never caught up in the negativity and affections, or by the cult of distress, let alone the subject of the end (the closure of metaphysics, the end of philosophy etc.). No work of the negative, but the enjoyment of the difference! But I think it was misunderstood. Some even make him an apostle of spontaneity hedonistic "he explained at length about it (the desire is not natural, but pure artifice, construction, etc.). But more deeply, we should ask whether the emotional tone to which we refer, that afirmatividad so characteristic of his philosophy of difference justifies a monotone reading that becomes a full positivity, and joy, in an emotional opinion. I see so many breaks, mismatches, holes, escapes, so many movements and paralysis, speed and slowness, shouting, even landslides, collapses, catatonia ... And do not think his mind's hide, on the contrary, exposes, sometimes installed on them for food, then skip, like a devil or a flea. It's what makes it so contemporary, so multiple, so funny, polyphonic, yet so enigmatic. Deleuze scrambles the letters of our emotional range.
See the issue of exhaustion, to stay in one example. Deleuze says in a short text about Beckett that is different from exhausted tired, the weary rest to regain strength and return to work, according to an internal dialectic at work and its logic. The exhausted, however, is that he exhausted the potential, which exhausted the world and sold himself. The exhaust is one that is installed it impossible. Sleepless sitting in the dark, as in Beckett, in waking, sometimes you come fugitive images, ephemeral, which are consumed and disappear ... They are phenomena of clairvoyance, are glimpses, are flashes of intensity. It is an enigmatic text, very beautiful. What is exhaustion, which is the combustion intensity, which is the paralysis? The best reading is in François Zourabichvili, who explains that this text was written by Deleuze shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It was a time when it was felt that all possible had been tried, had been exhausted and it was an impossibility. Exhaustion means the repertoire of potential which we had stored empty, abandoned, deserted him. It also means that all the clichés about what we feel, think, do, how we love, outrage, to make revolution, evoke the people also have evaporated, leaving gaps to the world, without mediation or filters. It is an encounter with the real, from a void, an impossibility. But none of that leads to tears or lamentation, much less to the nostalgia, but it forces us, and not to choose between the existing potential has been exhausted, but to invent a potential to become "blind", ie , a glimpse of just powers from impotence. It is a strange way to describe a time, to think from the bottom of exhaustion, relying on the inability to challenge the melancholy, hope, anguish or voluntarism. Toni Negri
once protested, rightly, that people approached him with the expectation of hearing words of hope. He added that Spinoza was not a priest, who was not his role to express joy or rhetorical glut, and that the role of theory is no comfort to anyone. I think so, Negri could theming a certain disenchantment, even a void, but not to indulge in a nihilistic pleasure, as did some of his contemporaries, but rather to indicate that something has been exhausted, a time, a cycle, a paradigm that we should address that does not entrench ourselves in what is running. It was necessary to admit the vacuum-not a very common word in political discourse. But he pointed out the gap, unlike the empty depression, looked more like an uncertainty, the feeling that everything is open, power of innovation, disutopia. This vacuum allows a fresh start, an autonomous desire, an absolute process. It is from a vacuum and think it is a power not made subject to the need, or resentment, or pity. It is not filling a proactive or nostalgic way, but insist on affirming the pure drive and passion constructive ethics.
So neither Deleuze and Negri, although very different from one another, are lyrical Spinozists Leopardi or priests. Each articulated in their own way, and his tone, the relationship between the discontinuity and the event. Other thinkers like Badiou and Rancière and Benjamin before they all did so differently and with other affective tone. We should think more how vital it is that in thinking, the affective tone ...
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Two interviews with Peter Pál Pelbart:
On the exhaustion of possible
"When you think is at war with itself ..." ------------
NOTES * :
1. Territory reterritorialization, deterritorialization: the notion of territory is understood here in a very broad sense, which goes beyond the use it receives in ethology and ethnology. The territory may be on a lived space and perceived as a system within which a subject feels 'at home'. The territory is synonymous of ownership, self-enclosed subjectivity. The territory may deterritorialize, that is, grow and take flight lines and even break down and destroyed. Deterritorialization consists in an attempt to rebuilding a country engaged in a process reterritorialization. Capitalism is a good example of a permanent system of deterritorialization: the capitalist class is constantly trying to "recover" deterritorialization processes in order of production and social relations. In this way, try to master all the drives processual (or machinic phylum) who work in the society.
2. Process: continuous sequence events or transactions which may lead to other sequences of events and operations. The process involves the idea of \u200b\u200ba permanent breakdown of the balance established. The term is not used here in the sense of classical psychiatry, speaking of the schizophrenic process, which always involves the arrival at the terminal. Its meaning is closer to what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers called "dissipative processes."
3. Agency: broader notion that the structure, system, form, process, etc. An arrangement carries heterogeneous components, also of biological, social, machinic, epistemological. In theory schizoanalytical of the unconscious, the arrangement is conceived in opposition to the "complex" Freudian.
4. Schizoanalysis: while psychoanalysis was based on a model of the psyche based on the study of neuroses, person-centered and identifications, and operating from the transfer and interpretation schizoanalysis inspired, by contrast in research into psychosis, he refuses to reduce the desire to personological systems and denies any efficacy to the transfer and interpretation.
5. Molecular / mole, the same elements that exist in streams, layers, arrangements can be arranged in a molar or a molecular mode. The molar order corresponds to the stratifications that define objects, subjects, representations and reference systems. Molecular order, however, is that of the flows, transformations, phase transitions, the intensities. Call mainstreaming this throughput molecular layers and levels, operated by different types of agencies.
6. Plan Consistency: flows, territories, the machines, the universes of desire, regardless of their different nature, refer to the same map / plan of consistency (or drawing / plan of immanence), not to be confused with reference plane. Indeed, the different modes of existence intensities systems do not concern idealities transcendent, but engender processes and real transformations.
7. Machine (and machine): distinguish here the machine mechanics. The mechanics is relatively closed in on itself, perfectly coded relationship only with external flows. The machines considered in historical susevoluciones, are, however, a phylum comparable to those of living species. Are generated each other, are selected, are eliminated and lead to potential new lines. The machines, in the broadest sense, that is, not only machines but also technical theoretical machines, social, aesthetic, etc., never work in isolation, but added or arrangement. For example, a technical machine in a factory goes into social interaction with a machine with a forming machine, a research machine, with a commercial machine, etc.
8. Rizoma, rhizome: tree diagrams come under successive hierarchies, from a central point, so that each local element back to that central point. By contrast, systems with rhizomes or arbor can lead to infinity and no cross connections that can be focused or closed. The term "Rhizome" is derived from botany, which defines the system of underground stems of perennial plants that emit buds and adventitious roots at the bottom. (Example: lily rhizome).
* All notes are taken from the "Glossary of schizoanalysis" present the final plan on the planet, Felix Guattari (dealers of Dreams, 2004). Offside
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