The ticking inside her the noise of a metal insect, a bomb red wire blue wire that refuses to be defused, palms joining like the gesture of a jester, aerobic, yogic in his posture of willing time to stand still, one leg above the ground, for eternity. She listens to it ear to the ground, rail tracks, the white coat of a doctor. She bows to the artificial sun, turns her face to its yellow light, writes „arcadian rhythm” instead of „circadian rhythm”, and realizes, it’s time to call it a day.

Sampurna Chattarji

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It is normal for a Subject to go beyond normal relations. That is the essence of Kant’s formula of metaphysics as a “natural predisposition” (12) . One can also say: unnatural as natural or abnormal as normal. We move in the sphere of what is “human” but we are talking about a humanity that does not exclude the inhuman. On the contrary, it is open to the inconsistency not only of “humanisms” but of all ideas and concepts that aspire to win over the self of the human being as against what he supposes to be the outside (or inauthentic), be it his animality with all conceivable semantic connotations, be it his tendency to strain himself to the limit, bringing himself in touch with his (non-external) exterior. The Subject apparently exists only as a hyperbolic animal. Always and everywhere the individual will reach out beyond himself. (13)  He is not satisfied with what is possible. He wants the impossible and so creates new possibilities. He resists being fenced in by established concepts and realities. He overshoots his objectivity. Existential philosophers since Kierkegaard have insisted that what is real in a Subject defines a force that cannot be reduced to abstract concepts. Philosophy was never anything but the attempt to attach names to the nameless by using the tools of an experience compromised for the name. Provided, of course, that one is not able to “give a name immediately to an experience – or else it would be no experience at all!” (14)

(12) Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, § 57, S. 353 (Orig.), Hamburg 1957, S. 119.
(13)  Hierzu hat Sloterdijk bemerkenswerte Untersuchungen vorgelegt: Peter Sloterdijk, Nicht gerettet. Versuche nach Heidegger, Frankfurt a. M. 2001, S. 255-274.
(14) Heiner Müller, Schriften, Werke 8, a.a.O., S. 257.

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The topoi of ignorance and the unconscious (by no means identical: the unconscious implies knowledge that I am unaware of, while the ignorance, that Nietzsche speaks of should be the object of not only my knowledge but also my will) evoke a certain dispossession with regard to the Subject, a kind of ontological poverty that defines it as naked life or empty cogito; in brief, as a Subject without subjectivity. While the Subject of idealism defines itself by being part of a universal we-subjectivity and the Subject of Christianity understands itself to be the ens creatum of a creator, the Subject without subjectivity is an original decapitated Subject. Open to the top and the bottom, without telos, without foundation. Its hyperbolism defines this openness, which allows it to border on the infinite. Philosophy confronts itself in all its historical moments with the infinite parts of the Subject to ultimately (in the metaphysical critique phase) hold out the prospect of a notion of enlightenment enlarged to include this infinity: a new enlightenment, as Nietzsche says, a new Subject and a different rationality that recognise their hyperbolism, or quite simply their blind power.

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Writing – like all art – means having the courage to turn one’s attention to the incommensurable parts of the world. In the enlightened consciousness, there persists a mythical rest that conveys the most enlightened narrative of its blindness. Enlightenment that refuses to enlighten itself, is a repetition of “Brecht’s enlightened attitude to myth”: “The deliberate blindness to the dark sides of enlightenment, its private parts.” (8)  In other words, the insight into its blindness is part of the blind power of writing. Blindness proves to be a condition of the possibility of sight. Which is why, in a text dedicated to Nietzsche, the media theorist Friedrich Kittler can speak of the “mercy of blindness” (9) . Tiresias, the clairvoyant, was blind as we all know.

We expect the act of thinking to lead us from darkness into light. In terms of the Enlightenment this is taken for granted. It was in the 20th century that initial attempts were made to complicate this imperialism of light (a term for making things more complex is deconstruction) – whether in philosophy, art, or science. This was not to slide into the esoteric and the irrational, but to introduce a way of thinking that accommodates the blindness of the Subject with a precise concept of enlightenment, subjectivity and reason. “If there is enlightenment, then not as the establishment of a dictatorship of transparency […]” (10) , said Sloterdijk. Neither of transparency nor the lack of it, as all knowledge remains dependent on ignorance, as does transparency on the lack of transparency and meaning on its absence. “It is not enough”, says Nietzsche in one of his posthumous fragments, “that you understand in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance. You need to grasp that without this kind of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is a condition under which alone the living thing can preserve itself and prosper: a great firm dome of ignorance must encompass you.” (11)  The philosopher of active forgetting turns out to be an apologist for active ignorance – not to be rashly confused with a reactive irrationalism. Nietzsche is concerned about containing the naivety of religiosity with reference to reason and knowledge; he insists that knowledge is not everything, that ignorance does not oppose it, that the Subject must be willing to integrate its blind sides in an enlarged notion of itself, conveyed by the Subject’s inconsistencies, ignorance, the limits of its awareness, and by itself as the Subject of blindness. It is then that psychoanalysis steps in to deal with the concept of the Subject supplemented by the unconscious, and to deal with the attempt to describe the Subject in its openness to an entity that speaks in it while the Subject speaks and decides for it before it can appropriate its decisions.

(8) Heiner Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht,  a.a.O., S. 205.
(9)  Friedrich Kittler, „Wie man abschafft, wovon man spricht: Der Autor von  <Ecce homo>“, in Jacques Derrida & Friedrich Kittler, Nietzsche – Politik des Eigennamens, Berlin 2000, S. 83.
(10) Peter Sloterdijk, Der Denker auf der Bühne. Nietzsches Materialismus, Frankfurt a. M. 1986, S. 10.
(11) Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884-1885, KSA 11, hrsg. von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, München 1988, S. 228.

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Like all writers, Müller asks himself what exactly constitutes writing. He answers the question by defining writing as a blind power: “an area that is simultaneously free and blind, completely untouched by the political.”(6) Writing means resisting facts. Power is a term for this resistance and centrifugal force. Its blindness is its indifference to what exists. It is an expression of a distancing of reality, of an escape:

“Of course writing is invariably also an escape from reality, if you will. But this is in itself a wrong judgement: it is simply another world and it would be wonderful if one could stay there. Yet one is repeatedly disturbed and then must work this disturbance into the writing.” (7)

(6) Heiner Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht, Köln 1999 (4. Aufl.), S. 64.
(7) Heiner Müller, Gespräche 2, Werke 11, S. 518.

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A Journal for Art, Sex and Mathematics is appealing because:

It trains our perception of differences and oppositions (gender, polarity, property, capacity, opportunities) and it also expresses hope. Hope, that thinking itself (mathematical construction, zero/nothing) might be able to continue to think. (Realometer)

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Archimedes lost his head to a corporal’s sword.
What sort of madness would one need to fall for numbers and stay intact?
Trying to understand love via tensor algebra, a sheet of obscure signs appears across the bed.
Don’t use the word infinity unless you mean it.

Sampurna Chattarji

The polka is a dot, a dance, a spot of ink on a sheet of skin, on a thing, a ring of purple.
The spud is a letter away from the sud, a singular bubble of foam.
The shoot is a leaf, is a hunt, is a game of light in a frame of film, is a root in a bed of purple.
The finger is a digit, a gesture, a tease, a fidget away from a glove.
The skirt is a ruse, a bruise, evasion, suggestion, short fuse, darker than a deepness of purple. 

Sampurna Chattarji