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On existential self-emancipation from Western selfalienation (heteronomy) today by Aaron Asphar

For me the presence of nothing depression, nihilism or fear of nothing/otherness (anxiety, disgust) is the egos fear of death, which you extricate yourself from by looking at death (negativity/nihilo) and recognise it as repressed or negated elements of the sensuous and emotional (existential), of endless sensuous particularity or otherness, and to reach this, the existential, is to reach a form of elastic, asocial autonomy today. However, in an unfree social world this existential extrication from heteronomy, this autonomy, is almost always, at least initially, monadic, autistic: but even so, in the existential, life is concrete emotional-sensuous, not specula, decentred, postmodern, ontologically insecure: and there is, for me, no depression or anxiety but concrete sensuous and emotional inadequacies, or the abstract anxiety imposed by the social and the violence imposed through the way it organizes us, i.e. endows us with an abstract future which materializes in the functional structure of social life, to estrange us from our life-content when we are making decisions i.e. to organize our life through the non-life of social history, its languages, structures, identities, ideas and so forth. This transforms emancipation from an abstract to a concrete problem, and allows you to grasp a real basis for a fight for real self-overcoming, one which I can see but havent travelled far in saying. This post attempts, in existentially unambiguous language, to give voice to what I am seeing. For my part, while I have become existentially grounded, this is at the cost, for now, of a total inability to adapt to the social and its abstract demands and negations: I am therefore in the strange position of having only one direction in which to expand my liberation: into alienation into the social. This allows me to grasp clearly the emancipatory direction for those who are socially integrated and self-alienated. I think facing off the nihilos would be expanding liberation for most Westerners not so much in their work as in themselves, because the only work that means anything is the work of their pain and desire, and it is the worker that needs the primary work if the aim is existential self-extrication from heteronomy, from self-alienation. Western depression and anxiety suffering that is abstract, or abstract suffering, is part of your life/experience/self become abject to the ego, and abstracted from, so that the nihilo behind them becomes inaccessible: and all this is because you are suffering the vicissitudes of your own body, that which is negated or denied by social reality, for the sake of adapting to the demands of that reality, that already-there, that social and historical ossification, that process, that through which humanity has estrange itself. Yet the body cannot cause you angst if it is your first category, principle, axiom: it only is social life, the external, that becomes existentially viscious: and in the emancipation from dissociative psyche to the existential, the body becomes the real human animal, and its history emerges from the refusal of that old history, and it makes you laugh and pitty and understand the old history, and makes you understand what you couldnt understand about your past, which is your path to you. If you are a ferociously healthy human being you are healthy enough to take on more compromise, to be more compromised still. I say you need much less compromise. I say your desires are much more important than anything else in the world. In them is not only your strength, it is everyone you love. What do you want, most of all? Everyone you love to be happy and to love everyone you love: there is not one thing here that is sick. Your desires are

your arrows to this they are the seeds growing for this. Your desire to express yourself can be realized only in expression: it is this recognition of your pain and negativity that turns it into something emotional and real, and you can do this through your art or writing but you must do it in your life, in your relationships dont allow yourself to be kept quiet: you can never kept silent it will turn into inner abjection or shadow or fear of nothing. Nihilo is the mark of profound somatic/psychic/existential violence, a disposession of your very being. Trauma and hurt is the concrete-real: it is not something that you can free yourself from but through recognising it in its existential, sensuous, emotional actuality in its wordless blackness, i.e. in its own language of silence, out of which emerges the bloody depths of repressed somatic negativity and its memory. Ideas themselves cannot lead you through nihilo: the latter is their very balking at the door. Because it is your hurt, you need to know it in its pre-conceptual, existential, sensuous and emotional particularity which is never fixed or enduring but imminent, existential, evolving. The ego knowing and soma knowing are radically at odds. The ego wants the object-relations answer: it wants the answer through the already there, and if it cannot find the answer, it runs from the question into things, i.e. anything-as-answer, bulimia, workomania, etcetera. This is the nihilo backed positivity of ego striving: it is how social history tears you from yourself and your life. You need to know not about objects and their relations but what hurt was in you, what emotional, sensuous and estranging (existential) or constraining damage or violence was done to you. This is what you need to know, but you only need to know it sensuously, emotionally, meditavely, not ideologically. It was you that suffered there is always only one perpetrator of violence the alien, positivity, e.g. predator or for us, social history and that which has been marked by social history. Your judgement is not safe at all: it is you deciding functionally. The reality was the material, emotional, particular, sensuous: it was the fullness of the experience itself. Where is the reason in this? It is the dissimilation and violation of the particular, always. It is the violent subsumption of real, concrete life into the functional categories of social history. Think in sensuous image and movement, think in experience:think in emotional, sensuous and existential memory: you think profane negativity and the real unreal indissolubly as the concrete-real. Anything you fear about this is the concrete real because new degrees of freedom are clumsey: but you will walk out of nihilo and feel your body open onto the world. You wont have negated spaces and you wont have fear: I can honestly say, I never fear or doubt myself I have confusion and practical, concrete problems: its all external, because it is all external. When you are trapped in the dislocated painless real of mind, you dissimilate the concretereal and try to solve the problems in their functionalized social demarcations: this way you abstract from the emotional, sensuous, somatic existentially real and the outcome becomes decisive in how you feel about yourself. This is your existential, ontological insecurity the nihilo that is supposed to drive your pathological strivings, your self-negating acts of individuation, of progressive self and social alienation. I want to say a few words about this before talking directly on self-emancipation, and outlining some intimations on the forthcoming struggle. All negativity, all nihilo, is the shadow cast by social history on life. Ancient cultures were based on the force of aggression and the historical transition to cultures based on fear e.g. Plato, Socrates, the stoics etc were another polarity which coexisted bit increasingly shifts to

fear I think from the ossification of social hence mental forms, producing the dissociation between seeing and feeling/thinking and experiencing. If we think in terms of Hegels absolute spirit as the point of redemption, for me this would mean the concrete-real, because I interpret Hegels spirit actually as emotionality/emotional sociality, hence its associative becoming character, driven by negativity toward its positive self-realization as form and content or objective universality but for me this is emotional objectivity, and reason is dialectical imminence or the philsophical experience, not form or force but truth, in his sense and Adornos sense. For me the concrete-real is virtuality embodied, or the common sense reality rich with emotional and sensuous significance and intensity that is felt by the soul as it were, because it is unmediated and not alienated, and it is a free magma of endless sensuous/emotional difference: ennui flooded with life, and the unity of antangonisms that characterize the Heraclitian cosmos would be the elastic antagonism between the sensuous and emotional, body feeling and responding imminntly and elastically, both one and radically other. This concrete-real is the existential. Thinking in and of the existentialist throught is sensuous and emotional/emotional-social patters, which is to say the emotional memory which is associative, and this memory is of forms: it is, as Adorno said, the language beneath all organic language: it is the language of the dead speaking of stones and stars. The structures of feeling and sensuous phenomenon and so forth become more apparent in social and self experience: taking a kind of fluid dynamic form, thought can offer you what you do not have a language for it offers you form at a finer level, more human and humane organization, and existential intimations, the material of philosphy, that which they try to give words to, are presenting themselves gradually to us like something coming from the depths of the ocean or sky and emerging into sensuous form. You can think on the lower, primordial, associative levels you can think reality from beneath, you can think outside of it, feels its surface from a primordial pole of psyche, think against it. Ego says nihilo: I say look at youre wounds and nihilos: you will see the figures of pain and blood as the negated depths of your own experience and needs repressed and distorted by civilization (Adorno and Horkheimer). Because the ego cannot reach it, because this is the real pushed away, because you think rationally you intellectualize it and hold on at your ego end to a belief, which is to say a compromise structure between the appearance and the existential, a belief which reconciles things on the level of appearance and leaves this nihilo of anxiety or depression as the haunting peripheries of the conscious. This cannot be sustained with facing off all nihilos. All depression and anxiety is situational and you can extricate yourself from it: but this leads to actual, concrete material conflict and contradiction between the social world. You become non-identical as your abjection finds its proper target: that which makes you depressed, not the nihilo of depression itself, which you are compelled to try and escape from, becomes the discernable real. Emotional and expressive honesty gives you immense confidence: the fear is imminent and to be embraced and noticed, like a kind of force that comes over you from without: like a ghost presence a violence. Recognising always the material inadequacies or impossibility of yourself or your life and resist the head which says this must be resolved. Achieve the impossible by abstracting from the heteronomous, ideological world of the impossible and impossible which can mean at most the actual and the not yet actual. You are not leading anything like the kind of life that is warranted from the point of view of you experiencing, creating and restoring that which you elastically would if you were free and not subject to the already-there. There is a violence

here and if you dont feel it, this is fine, but notice it has transmuted into something else: anxiety or depression or confusion or that blind spot a shadow in your grasp of yourself or the world. To recognise the actual injustice of your life right now is to turn that into aggression, anger, which is two left footed freedom, the maturity of which is called radical subjectivity or primordial health. Just to search for that nihilo, what the ego would not like to know: the job, the writing, sleeping etc is all structured in a certain way and the anxiety of facing that nihilo too are the concrete-real: but this too is violence. Everything here is violence. You are suffering compromises, and these are the things that make the nihilo unreachable. I feel nothing of this now: and it was by being radically emotionally honest to myself, through my writing, and through the world. I pushed myself through the fear of not saying or looking and thankfully, with wreckless moments of drinkng while I was bulimic, I let the world know my actuality through terrible displays of craziness. You need to say to yourself: you have no wrong feelings: your emotional reality is the concrete real: your need to say or to say no or fuck off or I hate you or show your tits and shits to the queen is the concrete-real. Anything you fear about this is the concrete real: because new degrees of freedom are clumsy but you will walk out of nihilo and feel your body open onto the world. You wont have negated spaces and you wont have fear. I have so, so much limitations and limits but I can honestly say, I never fear or doubt myself I have confusion and practical, concrete problems: its all external, because it is all external. Facing off all nihilos will do many things: it will enhance your pleasure in being, because you wont have the angst or depression: what would have caused angst/depression will cause instead anger (will-to-power might be a better word) and a hate object, because when all nihilos are stared out you know what you are depressed about and how can it be monadic? Your abjection finds its proper target: that which makes you depressed, not the nihilo of depression itself, that which you were compelled to try and escape from. Emotional and expressive honesty gives you immense confidence: the fear is imminent and to be embraced and noticed, like a kind of force that comes over you from without: like a ghost presence a violence. I use these words for praxis because they kind of incite the attitude: I am nowhere near travelling this path the more you travel the more you realize there is to go but it doesnt matter, because the gains are redemptive. Youll remember things it did, your body: I think of drugs, bulimia, going awol drunk or whatever and youll recognise and feel really sorry for that neglect, that negation, and understand your behaviour: because you are an animal who needs this and that, but are treated really cruelly, because the biggest animal cruelty today is to us. I really, really understand redemption: it means that when you have everything for a moment, all pain, past and present, gains its meaning: the idea of regret for not having done this or that becomes utterly incomprehensible. If you can achieve liberation of your emotional life, and push further and further to be able to say and be what you want all the time, the present will concretize and expand and enrich: you will feel really open to and on the world your body will want to do new things, and you will reflect on your past and understand your body and its vicissitudes so much more. Emancipated, appearance, and fundamentally, the emotionality of the other, is never remotely beyond doubt: because when you are emotionally honest and open so is your empathy and this works retrospectively also, and this is how I understood, even after I thought I had well

understood it, what I have become and why. I know that nothing between me and the other, no matter who it was, was ever wrong except for the compromises on love by ideas, things, objects, egos, situations, the other. It was most certainly not you or your inadequacy: it is easy to think that because social history has flattened that road of thought out for you. The emotionality of the other is never remotely beyond doubt: because when you are emotionally honest and open so is your empathy. The emotional need for the emotional-social, which is also in social life, is a real visceral somatic need: it points to an irreconcilable contradiction today but one you heal in all your free, elastic, voluntarily involuntary (Adorno) creation. It demands restructuring life completely in most cases, though along simpler contours, but ones which produce anxieties unless/until they are warn down through existential courage, and this courage emerges when you develop on the pathway of your angers and desires, in which you fight a humane struggle against social history and humanize the real. The drive to do so needs to be real desires not a sense of duty, but if desires emerge strong enough there can be no obstacle, and emotionalsocial solidarity, recognition, inflames desires and turns pain into passion. You shed your strictures like a skin or erupt through your skin and you dont know where you are going but guess what: your body doesnt shoot itself into a brick wall unless it was an involuntary eruption from insistent repression two left footed animality blinded by absolute social negation. Being misunderstood is a violence against you owing to social mediation or limitation: the more you express and show of yourself in your own languages, through all your free elastic self-realization, by making your whole life the art you choose, the less your irreducibility can be concealed, the less your particularity can be misunderstood. This speaks of your somatic need to go further in extricating yourself from compromise, though this doesnt have to be my kind of extrication but an extension of yourself through art, praxis, and shaping the world. If you could be totally open and unmediated nothing could be concealed but this is a direction with no end really, and any advance would ameliorate all the dark depths of heteronomous life. * I will try and express something of what I can see but cannot say. I had a kind of philosophical vision, really just a flash of recognition of what has been developing its all existentially formed so not in words yet, but it is a very other kind of dialectical, concrete social phenomenology: it is delimiting and circumscribing critical/utopian poetics, which as a dialectic forms another dialectic as negativity, with conscious positivity (for materiality is only positivity as consciousness). This is probably not very informative, but the picture that it allows me to have of social reality is very different: its psychoanalytic, phenomenological and negative theology: and it brings to (negative) light a primordial sociality that somatasizes and charges reality with dialectical tension, i.e. poeticizing ossification: and when there is too much social magma, there is a psycosocial telos towards angst and order, which I can appreciate psychoanalytically and existentially, and when order produces too much negativity the psychosocial tilts toward the production of radicality, which I can understand from the afformentioned perspective. With this there is a completely different sense of the subject then Ive ever encountered: a non-subject can suddenly become subject and vice versa, and all these other things: it basically picks out different aspects of reality, melting out others, and it is certainly settling as time goes on.

* I constitute things on the emotional-sense pattern dialectic I am under the horizon of heteronomy and can see bellow. I see the utopian and critical poetics of the body, how childhood and the child is in every eye of nihilo, and nihilo in every eye of a child, but I have taken refuge from social history to see this: my utter powerlessness is in the massive socialexistential (virtual) nexus above me I am in the limbic system and the temporal lobes and only call up the old plastic bag as a smash and grab raid in the social world to get whatever has to be done, done. I see through the emotional-sense dialectic a river of somatosocialhistorical-emotional-material coming to be, like flesh causing down the valley, dissolving all blankness of flesh into an oceanic world through the world, our Heraclitian freedom the river we become: no fear or contradiction can exist within the force of this human torrent as it rolls towards this redemption: its strength is magnified by its proximity and it becomes unstoppable. This I cant unpick at all but I can say it feels like the world of running out in a more utopian vision. I something like this before that lead to the insights about the skin not being blank but oceanic the flesh of the other is my flesh through empathy: they flow into each other like a river everything will flow into everything else; being floods through nothing in becoming; essence floods through appearance; self into other; in the same way the knife in the hand of the other draws the would behind you and points you to it, so there is only it, or in a moment of sublime freedom at some party or dancing drunk with friends, this is the existential architecture of a world without self-other, appearance-essence the black nihilo and unbearable intensity of light which are one and the same thing, experienced in different ways, the ying and yang of heteronomy, the two halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up (Adorno): yet. * When the ego is there you cannot create new things but shuffle around the old, but this shuffling is somatic doing and any emotionality expresses itself in enervated (nihilistic) or innervated (critical) subjectivity or its art of postmodernism. When you starve yourself your ability to take things seriously evaporates because the emotional intensity of reality evaporates: it is a halloween disorder Im not used to anymore. * About shadows of social history on soma the other polarity of the same suggestion is the absolute radicalism on insistent emotional honesty today, which I think is psychosocially impossible but insofar as we manage it, when we actually look and analyze the impact on situations, which Ive been doing for some time, and when you delimit it and notice it, I think you see the other side of the shadow thing the artistic mimesis or somatasization of a whole situation: there is a somatic negation, and then a positive negation, and vice versa until there is a final synthesis, just as Hegel said: so psychoanalysis, Hegelian dialectics, existentialism and historical materialism all seem to meet here. * Its basically a visual image of a psyche which has a crust with intrusions penetrating to the nuclei, and instinct that goes through those spikes is what we call ego, while negativity that transmits itself interstitually through wordless movement is what we call id, and wen the wordless movement impresses the externality of these spikes it is id that has realized itself as

will, and in Nietzsche the explosion would have been on such a surface. It is simultaniously the other way around where there are emotional spikes going into ossification: it is the interpenetrating intersection between one thing that has expand to a point of dissociation. * Aaron Asphar http://aaronasphar.wordpress.com/ copyright Aaron Asphar 2011