What is Existential Writing?

I call existential writing those texts whose non-writing causes more suffering than writing them.

To decide not to write them is thus not an option. Whereas with most texts we choose whether to write them or not, existential texts exclude that choice. They shift the choice into the existential sphere where it is no longer a choice between writing and not writing but between writing and interminable suffering, madness, and (eventually) suicide.

Writing existential texts is often a painful process and to engage in writing these texts is never harmless because it affects the writer's existence in an immanent way. 

Existential texts are those texts that cannot be simply written. One cannot simply sit down and write them, yet one has to sit down and write them. No one can pay one or in any other way oblige one to write existential texts. Nothing extrinsic can force one to write them. These are the texts that exclusively arise from intrinsic force or coercion. They are the texts that require one's complete involvement, even on a bodily level.

Looking from the standpoint outside of writing, these are the texts that can only seem impossible to be written. Existential writing thus consists exactly in turning that „cannot be written“ (transcendence) into „cannot stop being written“ (immanence).

Although delaying to write existential texts brings suffering and exposes one to the risk of becoming mad, writing those texts does not in any way deprive one of suffering or serves as a protection against madness. On the contrary, existential texts are those texts we are ready to suffer for and even accept the risk of becoming mad in the process.  

Existential writing means engaging with the radical immanence of writing.

Steven Shaviro recently posted a short text in which he gave thoughts on the old notion/concept of transgression and its political irrelevance today. I agree with Shaviro but I would also like to indicate that critique of transgression is not anything new - in his dialogues with Claire Parnet Deleuze already in a way pointed out that transgression, favored by Bataille and some others, is not nearly as subversive as it was still thought at that time. Obviously, by now, capitalism has commodified and corporatized all our sexual and other transgressions, as Shaviro writes. Interestingly enough, similar could be said for Deleuzian politics but that is another topic, although equally well covered.

However, what troubles me a little bit is when Shaviro asks: "what can be more stupid, boring, and old-fashioned to read today than Bataille’s pornographic fiction, with its extreme (and all too typical of male intellectuals of Bataille’s generation) gynophobia?"[1] By admitting that his first book was half about Bataille, he seems to imply that it was still ok to read Bataille in the 90s but suddenly that it is not ok or simply that it is so old-fashioned to do it today. But what changed so dramatically in the last two decades, except that some other topics, such as Anthropocene, came into the focus of humanities worldwide. But couldn't have someone like Julia Kristeva or above mentioned Deleuze already said in the 80s that Bataille's fiction was passé. They certainly could have. Of course, Bataille's fiction doesn't seem subversive anymore, and the way he portrays women might be called funny or even offensive, but that is still not to say that one should not read his fiction. (Similar goes for writers such as Henry Miller and many others.) At least, there are literary qualities to his fiction that many contemporary works, much more "enlightened" in their depiction of female characters, for example, do not possess.

Secondly, I agree with Shaviro that ideas we find in contemporary or even not so contemporary SF novels - for example, that "it would be better if human beings were to go extinct, leaving the planet to other (and hopefully less rapacious) organisms" - are much more disturbing than the sexual perversions described in "transgressive" literature written by Bataille and others. That is the reason why SF novels of J.G. Ballard, not less misogynist writer, are for example so popular in contemporary academia. And I agree with Shaviro that one of the most important effects of literature is to make us think but thinking doesn't have to arise from the level of representation. So, focusing on a representation or depiction of the world isn't the only way to think with some literary text...

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[1] Personally, I wouldn't call Bataille's fiction pornographic but erotic, but that is something for another post.  

 

"Desire as given" - two meanings of expression

This is another short post that reflects on expression that I have found in other people's writings and which I have also used in my own writings but which can be differently understood, depending on from which philosophical tradition one arrives (analytic or continental). That's why I think it is important to differentiate between two meanings of the word "given":

1.) According to the first understanding, which is more frequent in the continental tradition, to be given means to acquired as such. So, when something is given, it means that it is and has always been the way we acquire it. In order to avoid misunderstandings, it is maybe best to use the extended formulation "given as such". For example, to say that desire is not given (as such) means that it is not something we are born with, or that we acquire such as it is, but, on the contrary, something that is formed through our life and our encounters with others. In other words, that it is produced.

2.) The second understanding comes from analytic tradition and refers to the phrase "the myth of the given" coined by Wilfrid Sellars. It is important to note that this second meaning of the word given is not in opposition to the first, but that it is its extension. To be given still means to be acquired, through experience or senses. However, what Sellars criticizes is a philosophical move by which something that is acquired becomes a foundation of all knowledge. Sellars thus uses the word given to refer to those philosophical concepts which escape criticism because they are taken to be "self-authenticating" or "self-evident".  And desire can be definitely understood as such concept, insofar as it is something that is experientially acquired and further used to explain all our other experiences. This is, for example, something that A.L. Chu does in her writings on gender transition and which, I must admit, I also did in my essay on her. However, when at one point in the essay I write that desire is not given, it is to be understood in the first meaning of the word given, i.e. given as such.