Re-reading Blanchot\u2019s essay \u201cFrom Dread to Language\u201d and thinking of Kierkegaard\u2019s concept of Dread there is a feeling I have of self-obsession.\u00a0 Dread is the ultimate solipsism.\u00a0 Exteriority abandons oneself in Dread and leaves one in a state of irrecoverable and unsalvageable narcissism.\u00a0 The impending doom of an absolute immediate moment that cannot be intervened, mediated away and requires the blank death-like stare of Medusa\u2019s face.\u00a0 Nothing can emerge from Dread and nothing can escape its orbit.\u00a0 Its event horizon refuses meaning, love, concern\u2026otherness.\u00a0 It encapsulates and seals in tomb-like devotion.\u00a0 It is the mark of Death.\u00a0 Life requires that one escapes and flees in the face of Dread; that one is not swallowed into its catacombs.\u00a0 In Dread, life dreams. In the face of Dread, life requires awareness, movement away-from, emersion in otherness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dread, while incapable of exteriority, mimics absolute exteriority.\u00a0 It is as if the gaze of Dread paralyzes and stupefies while only bare consciousness is imprisoned in concretized death.\u00a0 The eyes cannot even blink only behold the site of Dread in emptiness.\u00a0 When life is encapsulated in death movement is always from without.\u00a0 As a marionette, movement is hollow and initiated as pure externality.\u00a0 When inwardness is raised to the infinite in Dread its absolute emptiness is exposed, raw and abysmally hollow.\u00a0 The result of absolute inwardness is absolute exteriority, mechanical, Frankenstein-like.\u00a0 It is the tornado-like act of god that can only consume itself, without ever knowing an end, as pure dread. \u00a0Dread is all and in all, unabashed and without form.\u00a0 Form is the refuge life would take in the face of Dread.\u00a0 Form flees from formlessness.\u00a0 Life must always rise from the bog of Dread.\u00a0 The moment of mechanical exteriority must create a silhouette, a form.\u00a0 Thus language, meaning and sense must usher one from the gaze of Dread.\u00a0 \u00a0The escape must create world, history\u2026a shadow of the mechanical exteriority that faces it.\u00a0 In this then is the interlocutor, the mediation\u2026the drunkenness of oblivion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Oblivion here is not abstract extinction.\u00a0 It is release from ill y a, the meaningless background noise of existence.\u00a0 It is the moment of breath, the sacrament of defilement.\u00a0 It raises the exteriority imposed by Dread into a false god, a simulacrum of its tormentor.\u00a0 In this way life can \u2018face\u2019 Dread, get a handle on it, and make it other than what it is\u2026bare \u2018isness\u2019.\u00a0 With this then is the third person.<\/p>\n
The third person is the narrator, the voice of god, the chorus of tragedy.\u00a0 The third person is not a he or a she but an \u2018it\u2019.\u00a0 It is the oracle that gathers and holds.\u00a0 It sanctifies by stealing away the moment of Dread.\u00a0 It is the neuter, the thing.\u00a0 It truncates the absolute emptiness of dread into an abject object.\u00a0 As \u2018suchness\u2019, the thing resonates and glimmers in effervescent release.\u00a0 \u00a0Life therefore becomes the retreat from the stymied death of Dread.<\/p>\n
In all this a map is traced of syntax and semantic, infinite orthogonality\u2026the trace the can never be untied from the knot of existence.\u00a0 It can only be reaffirmed in its obscurity.\u00a0 This then is oblivion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At this point Levinas might take a turn.\u00a0 Could it be that the gazes of Dread is none other than the face of the other.\u00a0 The other not as something I know or am familiar with but as the puppeteer the marionette can never know, shed light on, see and perceive.\u00a0 Why must Dread get its birth from nothingness and self-petrifaction?\u00a0 If Levinas is right, the absolute alterity of the other that can never be \u2018mine\u2019 or even recuperable as in \u2018my\u2019 time, a temporal ecstasies, take on the truncated form of a thing, can make Dread the expression of absolute impotency, infinitely more passive than passivity.\u00a0 \u00a0The negativity of form yet rests on form.\u00a0 However, the notion of alterity that Levinas may be hinting at may only show itself as an unnoticed breeze through autumn\u2019s fall, the sadness of my love\u2019s passing, a ghostly clearing in the wood where sun-filled rays go unnoticed.\u00a0 In the excess, the abundance of this alterity a glimmer of grace eclipses the gaze of Dread, a still small voice that easily goes unnoticed plays around the moment of death\u2026and children play while Dread takes its last breath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Re-reading Blanchot\u2019s essay \u201cFrom Dread to Language\u201d and thinking of Kierkegaard\u2019s concept of Dread there is a feeling I have of self-obsession.\u00a0 Dread is the ultimate solipsism.\u00a0 Exteriority abandons oneself in Dread and leaves one in a state of irrecoverable and unsalvageable narcissism.\u00a0 The impending doom of an absolute immediate moment that cannot be intervened, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13,14,15],"tags":[40,75,124],"class_list":["post-938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-western-philosophy","category-physics-2","category-poetry","tag-blanchot","tag-dread","tag-levinas"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=938"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3886,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions\/3886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}