[*]visual = a form of control
1- visual organizes reality by claiming status as the preeminent form of representation
2- conflation of the ‘seen = known’: “vision = ways of knowing = experiencing the world”
3- visual organizes the worldview of the seer
——> visual is at its most powerful when it is most invisible (for example scientific diagrams, mapping @apass)
( the idea that depiction / picturing / seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them
vision is the dominant tyrannical phenomenology of the contemporary world ==> all forms of knowledge can be presented visually
*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)
it is the moderns quasi-subjects (‘person’) who feel themselves to be **directly addressed,** (redressed and saved) ——> to exist
(what art suffers now, that i should directly address the modern subject, and other mode of subjectivity or other kinds of addressee and addressing is brutally criticized and irrelativized)
-(love’s type of address: ) addressed to us ==> make us exist ——> a person
(existing as person is the only way? no no no!) —— the emergence of persons is a local and historical phenomenon that we simply cannot extend to all collectives