Power of the Impossible, The: On Community and the Creative Life - Softcover

Roraback, Erik S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785351494 ISBN 13: 9781785351495

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

On community and the creative life. The Power of the Impossible surveys cultural figures from Spinoza to popular culture icon Ivan Lendl, to illuminate the challenge and problem of establishing a future-oriented world community and its conceptual intersection with heterogeneous forms of the creative life.

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Erik S. Roraback teaches critical theory, international cinema, theoretical psychoanalysis and U.S. literature in Charles University (est. 1348) and in F.A.M.U. (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague. He is the author of The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities (Brill, 2017), The Dialectics of Late Capital and Power: James, Balzac and Critical Theory (Cambridge Scholars, 2007) and of 100 scholarly articles, book chapters, conference papers and guest lectures in 15 countries. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford (D.Phil.) and from Pomona College (B.A.) and has been Visiting Professor in the Université de Provence. He has also been a Visiting Researcher at the Universität Konstanz, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington and holds a Five-Year University Visiting Research Fellowship in the University of Winchester.

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The Power of the Impossible

On Community and the Creative Life

By Erik Roraback

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Erik S. Roraback
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-149-5

Contents

Illustrations/Photos, 
Preface and Acknowledgments, 
Abbreviations, 
Note on the Quotations, 
Introduction: Ways for Thinking Community and (De)creativity, 
Part I: Toward Community with Élite Culture Energies I 39, 
Chapter 1 Expression, the Fold and Spinozan Existence qua Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Zizek, 
Chapter 2 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being-In-Common and the Absent Semantics of Myth, 
Chapter 3 Freedom, Nancy and Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903), 
Part II: Toward Community with Élite Culture Energies II 121, 
Chapter 4 Walter Benjamin's Status in Interpretive Communities, 
Chapter 5 Bearing Crosses for Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), 
Chapter 6 Bataille's The Atheological Summa (1943-45), 
Chapter 7 Existence, Creation and the Inoperative/Operative Commons in Invisible Man (1952) and in La Divina Commedia (1308-21), 
Part III: Toward Community with Popular Culture Energies 209, 
Chapter 8 The Standstill of a Fully Fledged Reality: Jimmy Connors versus Ivan Lendl at the 1982 and 1983 US Open, 
Chapter 9 The Unconscious, Athletic Identity and a Whole Galaxy on Stage; or, the 1984 French Open, John McEnroe contra Ivan Lendl, 
Chapter 10 Tennis Conclusions, 
Notes, 
Select Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Expression, the Fold and Spinozan Existence qua Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Zizek

In Baltasar Gracián's valuation: "what's to last an eternity, must take an eternity. Only perfection is noted, for success alone endures. A truly deep mind achieves eternity" (POAP, 22). This encapsulates basic tenets of the system we shall elucidate of the Dutch philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–77) of Sephardi/Portuguese descent. The following passage from Zizek articulates the missed opportunity of Spinozan happiness and joy that summarizes a liberated Spinozan modernity, which awaits realization: "the new we are dealing with is not primarily the future New, but the New of the past itself, of the thwarted, blocked, or betrayed possibilities ('alternate realities') which have disappeared in the actualization — of the past [ ...]" (LN, 322). In addition, the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) writes in a judicious study of Spinoza, "Nowhere has thought raised so vast a claim, nowhere has philosophical thought attained such heights of happiness." The profundity of Spinoza's meditations on existence, creation, and community produce the philosophical 'happiness' to which Jaspers refers. As the present chapter will demonstrate, Spinozan knowledge, desire and values activate the power of the impossible: powerful lives and communities of meaning and value informed by the principles of justice, freedom and democratic equality.

Cheery and ethereal properties pervade Spinoza's work; these affects and effects abide too in Gilles Deleuze's output, including in his coauthored works with French scholar Félix Guattari, and in the intellectual happiness and joy in Zizek's philosophical work. One purpose here is to highlight how the projects of happiness, human flourishing (or eudaemonia) and joy are cardinal aims for the human subject in a Spinozan modernity. The emancipated, generous, humane, open and synthetic human work of the historical baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), and its properties of development, modulation, rhythm and tempo offer a similar politics of existence. A commonality on the achievement and experience of joy with Spinoza and Bach would thus inaugurate a creative commons of transpersonal and intercultural mutuality.

The viewpoint of the philosophical baroque's allegorical outlook––and of the historical baroque's aesthetic fingerprint for Deleuze's Leibniz of the aesthetic property and operation of the fold––illuminate Spinoza's work and life. Spinoza was enfolded in a world of power. He is one of the few philosophers who not only contributed to philosophical-civilizational accomplishment, but also was excommunicated in 1656 at age 24 from Amsterdam's Jewish community. This shows how community may also function as a regressive and exclusionary form of enclosure. According to the official history, Spinoza also endured a violent attempt on his life. Deleuze notes, "It is said that Spinoza kept his coat with a hole pierced by a knife thrust as a reminder that thought is not always loved by men." Spinoza's summa the Ethics (1677), unpublished in his lifetime, illuminates a perception of his epoch that forges and enfolds the modern world in which incubating, and not yet hegemonic, (neo) baroque configurations of capitalist and religious power and relationships need dealing with in one's daily practices. This praxis would modulate the fold of subjectivity and so activate the enfolding, folding and unfolding of an efficacious existence amidst the kairology of an ongoing cultural modernity.

Reminiscent of Hegel's critical philosophy on the power of negative experience to beget knowledge in a retrospective narration that yields positive self-knowledge (witness for example Hegel's statement, "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk") consider Spinoza's words on life as a testing period, an opportunity for the politics of possibility, and in Benjaminese a 'weak messianic power':

I resolved at last to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good [...] which [...] would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity.

[...] if only I could resolve, wholeheartedly [to change my plan of life], I would be giving up certain evils for a certain good. For I saw that I was in the greatest danger, and that I was forced to seek a remedy with all my strength [...].

Here we discern the impetus of Spinoza's life and deeds: hard-won experience in practical reality, to grasp "the true good" of a flourishing form of life replete with autonomy, courage (animositas), freedom, generosity (generositas), joy and kindness (modestia). Hence the importance of our historicity for our acts of cognition, and for new forms of individual and by extension of the praxis of communal development and being-in-the-world as exercises of joyful immanence; the lattermost constitute a moralethical knowledge, as well as liberating forms of cultural and existential capital, and flashes of dynamic energy.

Spinoza sees through the dysfunctions, toxicity and traps of a world of irrealism; his work seeks an active self-starting human agent to live effectively and meaningfully within it by expressing forms of joy as manifestations of eternity, and so too by extension of a certain immateriality as immortality and even as a paradoxical true form of materiality. At stake here is the problematic of the practices and exercises of a powerful creative existence and commons: one must discover that which gives one joy, and moves one, to find one's clinamen or swerve, for a line to follow and a platform on which to stand amidst the abstract and chaotic powers of modern life and a perplexing modernity.

Thus, as the fledgling consumerist era of capitalist big finance emerges in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Spinoza must revolt against a social system that would thwart his projects and aims for an efficacious existence of radical creation (and of a community including...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1785351494
• ISBN 13: 9781785351495
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland