*on Levinas
Levinas’s concept of otherness ——> its theoretical production is articulated from the ditch of the historical self in modernity (part of the Western philosophical tradition) […] entrenched within an enlightenment discourse that cannot conceive of a self without mediation through a formulated Other =/= *otherless subjectivity*
-Levinas’s principle goal is to repair the totalitarian self and not to explore the otherworldly powers of the Other ——proving——> ***something that might fix the master***
==> self is to be redeemed by otherness, made well by otherness, made sane by otherness ==Mohaghegh==> the Other is never entitled to just walk away and seek its own external dominion
the Other possesses (the talent of) infinity ==> the Other’s responsibility is to dispense that infinity ==> ethics (not permitting the Other leaving the situation)

***why is the Other never allowed the right to isolation, solitude, hermeticism, anticommunalism, or misanthropy?***

Levinas’s ‘an atheism that is not humanist’: the exaltation of an obedience and a faithfulness that are not obedience or faithfulness to anyone

(like Mohaghegh) it has become frustrating for me to chase these sublime phantoms (of the impossible, the unthinkable, the unknowable ~= the parasite) drifting into incessant negative theologies… ——?——> self always sees itself as that which it is not =/= (ontological differential of) the earthly dehumanized Eastern subject, the one with a staunch existential verifiability, the one whose trachea or fingertips might be severed by five bullets around the corner, the one who plays with mortal stakes and states of emergency on daily basis, the one of famine, war, or occupation

[about demand: Lacan argues that “demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs,” and that indeed the child’s biological needs are themselves altered by “the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier.” … The subject has never done anything other than demand (since infancy!)]

{liberalism: humanism, and idealism had become moral and political expectations of the secular education projects}——> [*]humanism: what could reach, reveal, and cultivate the *proper and ethical* humanum of man ==> [*]man: irreducible, perfectible bearer and guarantor of dignity, equality, and freedom

(Freud Levinas)
not yet guilty, an almost predisposition, an almost inclination toward being guilty, an openness to being guilty (——>? Seba’s notion of ‘Schuld’ [~= debt, the obligation to pay or do something]) ~-> super-egoic formation (~=? that which we call “raising awareness”)
Trauma is structuring***
(to be noted that the concern of super-egoic formation rests on the structuring of ‘demand,’ which is not the being of ‘question’ that it wants to be. question is risky and consequential of new articulation)

[with Avital]
*modalities of dealing-with:
-parasitism
-(under the spell) drugs =/= struggle (according to Marxian protocol: one is drugged and disabled [Date-rape-drug as an incapacitating agent] and neutralized by state apparatus, drugs are administrated and spend in all sorts of insidious ways.)
on the discourse of stupidity: Marx (in writing to Engels says that he) believed that proletariat are stupid. Marx’s insight to replace the other drugs that have put so many into a stupor. people with Religion are not around, they are praying somewhere to some hallucination [this is Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and others in 20th century] ——> ideological stuporous drugs, ‘everyone is stoned on something’ =/= alert and lucid. [highly problematic!]
-this is about a body recognizing its ‘enemy’ (the figure of enemy for every and each of us and the way we “recognize” it, as historical bodies and minds inheriting the boys of 20th century.) ——- the state of the struggle depends on certain metaphorologies on ‘clean’ that are problematic and phantasmatic and on the loose. ——> [the issue is that there is no “clean body”.] how to do dirty work? (——> for ‘morality’ and ‘clean’ go to Freud on the origin on morality: morality began as we stopped sniffing our asses and stood erect, nose in the air, away from the dirt [that we are] ——> morality’s phobic appropriations and designations, [Lacan: from the genital order to the sublime; az kun be fayakon از کون به فیکون %——> #ouroboros #serpent], [so when we stood up, stood erect, our genitals became center, exposing ourselves to the other, sexually centered exposure], [], [],)
-Marxian: language/tool/art as a virus that infiltrates ideological structures
-Lacoue-Labarthe: in 20th century there are three fundamental modalities of “dealing-with,” three modes of relatedness to our concerns, our anxieties, our worries, our work, our projects [three major motifs for the thinkers that continue to provoke our thoughts]: (1) *struggle* that would be the Marxian motor, the modality in terms of concern for social justice. [Delanda on Marx ——> a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites] (2) *mission* as introduced and lunched by Heidegger, who was on a mission: we have a mission, we have a mission of transmission, we have a mission to inscribe things——not from God but from what has happened to us and been left to us after the death of God (as Nietzsche has announced.) {yes, without a proper address, a state of epistemic alert, and so on} and (3) *task* associated with Benjamin. the Aufgabe is that which inscribes in itself ‘giving up,’ the Aufgabe, it means it is impossible, we take it on as a kind of ethical, political obligation, but in the word Aufgabe is also ‘Gabe’ meaning ‘gift’ in German, it is gift and giving-up. [Derrida beautifully asks to negotiate endlessly with the ‘given,’ even if the Gift that is given is poisonous.] ——>{ we can see how operate but also how they contaminate (and leak into each other.) we might have a sense of three of them}
-ontology of “struggling” a way out of aporia [denotes, in philosophy, a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement] ——> we can’t! ——> we must try to work to locate modalities of stagnancy (rokud رکود) without necessarily seeing the exit. how do we live with these catastrophic markers that mark us?

(Stengers) connecting materialism with struggle ——> (in apass) we are descendants of this trope

paleonymics: a certain operation according to which one continues to put old words to work. The use of a pre-existing word in a new context. —— we are stuck with old pomping meanings.