On Seduction (1) E-Book

Reinhold Urmetzer

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: On Seduction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 97

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Let us still dive deeper into the waters of a cheerful and unabashed disorientation - now and again catching a brief glimpse of an edge of truth, led by all-mighty Destiny (which we can neither recognize nor see through nor govern) - each of us with the most individual and multiplicitous goal of felicity. So let us live further in an open, portentous, and chaotic system. It need not be difficult. Perhaps we could even enjoy this condition of imponderableness and contradiction?! At least now and again. Brief and also but rare are the days of real happiness (sigh). - I get rather poetic, and this despite the many boldfaced and foreign terms, which may require googling or not. (On Roman Morals and Disorientation)

Leseprobe

Imprint

Copyright © 2017 edition weissenburg

First Edition 2017

Layout: Alexei Chibakov

Translation: N. Andrew Walsh

Publisher: tredition

ISBN:

978-3-7439-4502-9 (Paperback)

978-3-7439-4505-0 (Hardcover)

978-3-7439-4504-3 (e-Book)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, photocopied or recorded, without the permission of the publisher except for review purposes.

Reinhold Urmetzer

On Seduction (1)

edition weissenburg

2017

Index

Preface

1 - Ave Atque Vale

2 - Greco-Roman

3 - On Occupying Terms and Definitions like Train Stations

4 - Roman Morals and Disorientation

5 - On Understanding and Speaking Proficiency

6 - Over-Complex Thinking and Writing (Part 1)

7 - Over-Complex Thinking (Part 2)

8 - Love and Parting 1 (Interview)

9 - Forefront, Foreskin, Fore-what?

10 - Manifesto on Atrophy

11 - On Beauty and Pleasure

12 - Addendum – Bibliography

Afterword from the Translator

Preface

Time and again I have come back to the task of investigating my self, my entire life. With the eyes of a man, with the eyes of a woman, and through the lens of feminism. I’ve sought advice and wisdom from the philosophers of the past, and of the present. From this it’s become clear to me: I’m a Roman. Yes, in fact, even a Roman of the past. But still more: a Roman of the present, perhaps even of the future.

In my intellectual and blog-writing work I see myself as an interpreter, a translator from these times. For many years I worked in newspapers, magazines, and in radio as a translator: I’ve tried to make art, music, and culture comprehensible to a wide audience. I’ve offered up terms to understand the world and reality, or at least to get started doing so. Your language is your world. And the other way around as well.

That we are presently living (one might say, are compelled to be) in a chaotic state regarding truth and knowledge, one of transition and change. That this presents us with danger, but also great opportunity. I want neither to educate nor nurture, nor disseminate irrefutable truths; rather, I want to to reveal the world and its people in all its variability and multiplicity. Likewise the felicitous diversity of living things. And even the felicitous contradictions. In this, I want to provoke, give impetus, in order to find one’s own life’s journey, one’s own path (or to find a trace of it).

I write these lines, which should be about “seduction” (whatever that might mean), at the end of the age of love. For an age in which love in the romantic sense will die out, and even in marriage, to the extent that this institution can even still exist, will be dominated by terms such as “reason,” “planning,” “calculation,” and “breeding.” I don’t say “conditioning”, but rather “breeding”, and breeding in the sense of a technological, of a prenatal cloning.

Only lust hasn’t yet died out, for desire—desire for the sake of pleasure—seeks “eternity, deep, deep eternity,” as Nietzsche says.

I write these questioning words and sentences with wistfulness and nostalgia, as I am myself still a member of this dying breed, of a perhaps already long-dead age. Even if I imagine to be, or have been, a thinking person—for those do, in fact, still exist—a realist.

Yet the time of those past exemplars, as alluring and beautiful they may have been, tend eventually and inexorably towards their end.

Ostende/Belgium, November 16th, 2016

Stuttgart/Germany, June 2017

Don’t let yourself be seduced

(Jean Baudrillard)

1 - Ave Atque Vale

A warm welcome to my new blog, created with the help of Alexei Chibakov for edition weissenburg! Andrew Walsh has undertaken the admittedly difficult task of translating this blog into English. Many thanks to both!

“On Seduction” is the title of this blog, and Jean Baudrillard’s ironic motto, “Don’t let yourselves be seduced!” will accompany us throughout this cultural history. We’ll examine many areas of thought, we’ll jump across and through philosophies of the arts, histories of psychology, from sociology to politics. I come myself from the Frankfurt School, with Karl Otto Apel (whith whom I studied for many years in Saarbrücken), and Jürgen Habermas as my mentors.

But I also draw perhaps significant inspiration from the French philosophers, especially Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and François Lyotard. Not the least, I am especially drawn to the lives and thoughts of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods. My exemplar from that period is Sextus Empiricus.

So now you know how to set me and this blog in context, do you not? Even though I will gladly attempt, from time to time, to spring out of whatever pigeonhole you might place me! Be ready for surprises; they’ll pop up often!

I want to start off this new form of communication— our new form of meeting, perhaps of relating to, one another—on the subject of sexuality. My new book, which I’ve been working on for half a year so far, is titled “On Love and Lust.” It deals with the sexuality of the future; less so that of the present or the past, from the point of view of man and woman. Rather, it also deals with relating, encountering, and whether the family as a social institution will survive, at least in our western cultural sphere.

I suspect most likely not.

But how should we—here and now, in this new medium—communicate, how should it be written? How should the whole thing proceed? Each according to how he/she wants to, or can? With or without a constructed language?

There’s also the problem of anonymity and transparency. I have nothing to hide, and we also shouldn’t have anything to hide. How do we want to keep in direct contact with one another, if nobody has a name, and we keep hidden from one another?

Hegel, in his philosophy of law, includes a treatise on the necessity of signatures (i.e., at the bottom of contracts). Without a signature, there is no subject, no “me,” no person: nothing but lifeless machines. Communications-machines, eventually replaced entirely by computers, which are themselves gradually learning to speak.

This brings us to another subject, that I’ll be discussing shortly: communication, mis-, and meta-communication, by means of electronic media. Perhaps I should relate this to the subject of my book: On Love and Sex marked by SMS (not marked by [BD]SM! That is nowadays probably hopelessly archaic!).

There will be several main topics/categories. “General” is for the continuation of my Twitter messages; better formulated, my earlier TwittLonger-Texts. “Literature” is provisionally concerned with my new book, perhaps also with my already-published texts. The category “Journalism” covers my various interviews, as well as the more illustrious of my newspaper articles (such as for the Berlin “tageszeitung”) and others. The last section, “Poetry,” contains poems from myself and others. Not the least, I also work as a composer and musician—my favorite hobbies of all!

For now, we’ll have to wait and see. I still have to learn everything, test it, try it out. Maybe I’ll end up instead staying with my TwittLonger messages, with the printed book, or my illustrious performance-presentations, of which I’ll be posting reports including reactions from the press and my contemporaries.

But this is, foremost, a beginning: our beginning.

If publishing by mouseclick works, even without the siteadmin’s help, then the tracking, which might help or hinder us in covering our tracks—or better yet: the trail, which traces us covering our tracks, or doesn’t—is already at hand.

What a terrible language and formulation! some might object: this is supposed to rally readers, like-minded collaborators, commentators to our cause? As a Saar-Frenchman (as some of our rightward-leaning neighbors have tended to describe me), I have a soft spot for French authors and their particular way of thinking. I love constructed language: the more difficult, the less comprehensible, the more complex and abstract it is, the better! The longer the sentence (with further parenthetical subordinate clauses interposed [and yet further subordinate clauses interposed in them]), with foreign terms, and the floridness of heavyweight imagery (“heavyweight” imagery; what’s that supposed to be?), it should be exactly that! What?

It’s sufficient, with certain texts like those of Serres, Derrida, or Baudrillard, to read just half a page—that’s enough! That leads further: to new ideas, new questions, new ways of thinking, which are presently ever more atrophied. If language atrophies, so does thought. Humankind atrophies. Thus the French philosophers set against this creeping impotence, even idiocy and ignorance, their linguistic over-complexity; who would provoke us, even shock us and jolt us out of our somnolence: that we might remain human, become human once again, and not atrophy into machines, or into some sort of machine-like existence (without resorting to speaking of “degeneration”). Reductionism will be a major topic for us!

And here I come to one of my other favorite topics: technocracy, by which people find themselves imprisoned and helpless things within an Internet of Things™, who wish themselves molded, controlled, and manipulated by whomever. I don’t use the term “technocracy” in Boulevard’s sense, but rather how its discoverers—i.e., Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School—would use it.

That is certainly something other than respectable “purpose-oriented rationalism,” that Protestant-Prussian and easily-understood reasonableness so often found in this country. But that’s enough to say, to pronounce, to promise, to doubt, for now!

Adieu for now and thanks for reading!

2 - Greco-Roman

Freestyle

I’ve been asked about the somewhat odd title of my last blog entry: “Ave atque vale.” Ave means “welcome,” and vale means “adieu;” but enough with the TwitLonger commentary.

I want to explain it more thoroughly.

My salutations, and the writing that follows, are in Latin because I feel entirely Roman myself: say, one from the time of Lucian. One born under the same kind of imperialistic power that feels itself permanently threatened and thus compelled to defend itself by measures up to and including unlimited spying on its own citizens. Exhausted and almost sickened by the excessive luxury of the times, at least with regards to (over-)nourishment, species- and self-preservation.

Moreover, one who finds himself trapped in confusion and uncertainty of thought and its laws, where everything is relative and in which everything is possible and seems permissible without limit, especially morals. My favorite philosopher in this regard is Sextus Empiricus. Thesis and Antithesis can be, according to him, equally well proven—the principle of isothenia. Absolute truth cannot be presently identified. This may lead, in the words of Lucian, to an “abominable desolation of the mind.” It is, however, a fact, that truth as we understand it develops dialectically (in Hegel’s sense). But synthesis, and thus consensus, don’t always materialize. It is thus essential, in the sense of the French philosophers (i.e. Lyotard), to suffer opposites, sometimes even tolerate them, and occasionally refrain from seeking consensus.

Last but not least, the gods have taken their leave of us (at least, as I believe, temporarily). They have been replaced by other gods: of numbers, of science, of power, of lust, or of money. In ancient Rome triumphant Christianity and Stoicism victoriously entered the breach left vacant through disorientation and the pluriversal “anything goes” mentality. Julian Apostata was the last apologist of the old manner of thinking and of the old Greco-Roman gods—in vain, it turned out. Before the age of Constantine the Great, there was a long period of confusion and experimentation, of new replacement gods, a hedonistic multiplicity, and intellectual disorientation.