Unity and Solitude (Politics of the One, Bloomsbury 2013).

3

Unity and solitudeArtemy Magun

“Solitude teaches us the essence of things because their essence is also solitude.”1 This line of Joseph Brodsky, a twentieth-century Russian poet, points at the ontological significance of solitude as an existential condition and hints at the paradoxes pertaining to this condition. It would be quite banal, even though true, to say that a human being is singular, and via its singularity s/he perceives, or even constitutes, the singularity of everything else. But there is more: solitude is not just unity but a longing of the one to go beyond itself. And, indeed, the moment when humans perceive a thing’s loneliness, both are not lonely anymore. Or, maybe it is because they meet, qua solitudes, they are truly solitary: together. This lyrical thought will guide us below through the labyrinthine paradoxes of the fundamental anthropological and ontological concept. My article aims to elucidate the negative aspect of the concept of unity, using historical, logical, and phenomenological perspectives. This is conceived not as yet another inversion of classical metaphysics but rather as a way to move forward and to achieve, pushing off from the negative fulcrum, a new synthetic view on the problem of the one and the many. The particular importance of One as a concept is threefold. First, it is a metaphysical correlate of the political sphere. The political is a sphere where the unity of human subjects stands in question: the unity that is not naturally given but has to be actively constituted and maintained. Today, this political unity is endangered, because society is in a state of dissolution (apathetic atomization) and because unity tends to be naturalized (as a unity of humans as such, or as ethnic or racial unity of all sorts). Second, unity is a negative ontological concept, one that logically contains the movement of destruction and reduction. It is therefore the most Modern, and democratic, philosophical concept—but before late Modernity, this negative aspect of it had been downplayed. Third, the One is a concept that sutures philosophy with mathematics. After a period of a split between philosophy and science, and a defensive posture of “Continental” philosophy against the naturalistic and nihilistic tendencies of scientific ideology, it is now necessary to reunite philosophy with Modern mathema-tized science, to supplant the non-formalizable self-critical movement of metaphysics with the strict and at the same time playful structural logic of the signifier.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 23 31/08/2012 13:44

24 Politics of the One

All of this is a trend of a certain recent tradition; the task of this chapter is to return from the logical and metaphysical construction to the experiential constitution of unity, which would allow bringing the conceptual work down to earth and avoid its degradation into an idealist art pour l’art. Experiential, phenomenological analysis requires, however, a support in the cultural tradition of the last two centuries, which I will further cite (rather than objectively describe).

History

PhilosophyThe One is a central concept of Western metaphysics. Starting with Parmenides and throughout Antiquity, being was understood as inherently one (to hen), and thus the task of thought was to grasp the internal unity of a thing. Already in the Pythagorean school, of which we have few surviving fragments, the one was considered an origin of number and a universal principle.2 But the one did not come first: it was, to Pythagoreans, a way to limit and frame the original indeterminacy (apeiron), or perhaps a synthesis between this indeterminacy (characteristic of even numbers) and the stubborn identity (characteristic of odd ones).3 Pythagoreans started the Greek philosophical tradition with a beautiful-minded arithmology, but their intuitions lay in the ground of the first two ontologies: those of Parmenides and Heraclitus, because both were in dialogue with Pythagoreans, and their ontology was ontology of the One: but without an explicit regard to numbers. As Parmenides famously says in his poem: “One way only is left to be spoken of, that it is […] It was not in the past, nor shall it be, since it is now, all at once, one (hen), continuous (synekhes); for what creation wilt thou seek for it? how and whence did it grow?”4 Heraclitus also writes about unity as an ontological principle and a value: “The wise [or wisdom] is one (hen to sophon).”5 It is wise to hearken, not to me, but to my Word, and to confess that all things are one (hen panta einai);6 And it is the law, too, to obey the counsel of one. According to a quote by Plato (now considered not precise), Heraclitus even said that “the one differs from itself and at the same time coordinates with itself ” (to hen autoi diapheromenon auto autoi symphereshai).7 This phrase became almost a motto for the young German idealists at the end of the eighteenth century. Both Parmenides and Heraclitus point at different aspects of unity. Thus, Parmenides’ “One” is identical with itself, whole, complete. But it is also held in “shackles” by Justice that prevents it from dying or being born. Mythical as this account is, it underlines the negativity of unity. Heraclitus is more articulate than Parmenides on these different meanings, since he speaks of “one” as distinct from “all”: one is the wise that is “separated” (kekhorismenon) from everything,8 and the all is what the one “rules.” There is thus already a hint at the exceptional if not transcendent character of the One as a number and as an ontological principle. Aristotle says that “in a sense unity means the same as being. […] In ‘one man’ nothing more is predicated than in ‘man’.”9 As Aristotle makes clear, and as it remains

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 24 31/08/2012 13:44

Unity and solitude 25

true in today’s language, “one” means several different things at once, particularly “the naturally continuous and the whole, and the individual and the universal” (the latter means also: in form, in definition).10 Subsequently, he adds yet another, functional meaning of the one, that, in a sense, is applicable to all those listed above. This is measure, which allows knowing other things, in their quantity and in other aspects. In all these senses, the one coincides with the being and helps us understanding its complex structure. But, paradoxically, the “one” is itself not one, and must therefore send back to a higher theological unity. Aristotle does not just describe the one as a synonym of being but valorizes and deifies it, likening his ontotheology to politics. He quotes Homer: “the world refuses to be governed badly. ‘The rule of many is not good; one ruler let there be.’ ”11

Neoplatonism, while agreeing on the highest value of the One, put it even higher than being, into the very center of the philosophical worldview. In spite of its theological dogmatism, Neoplatonism has a critical potential as a teaching that dissociates being with unity. The trinitarian doctrine, while complicating the simple deification of the One (and departing from a simplistic monotheism12), preserved the substantial unity of the three persons. Besides, the idea of trinity thematizes and problematizes the numerical determination of being, as its key definition, and it is easy to recognize in the “hypostases” of the trinity the meanings of the notion of “one”: totality, individuality, and connection. Later, in the medieval scholastics we see a return to the Aristotelian ontotheology, where one is subordinated to being, as its “transcendental” definition. “Unum … convertitur cum ente.”13 However, the scholastic thinkers could not fully escape from the influence of Neoplatonic mysticism. Thus, in St. Thomas Aquinas, unity, being a transcendental determination of being, is responsible for the negativity present in God. From the point of view of his unity, God “is only cognized by us in the mode of privation and negation (remotio).”14

The Modern scientific philosophy never questions the claim of the transcendental unity of being. “Ce qui n’est pas véritablement un être n’est pas non plus véritablement un être,” elegantly says Leibniz,15 while Kant attributes to human reason the task of uniting the indeterminate manifold into the “transcendental unity of apperception.”16 Notably, all of these authors, with the partial exception of Kant (we do not know much of Parmenides’ politics), were supporters of political monarchy. However, unity is a contradictory, complex notion. At the end of the eighteenth century, European thought turns back to the Neoplatonic dialectic in order to reconcile scientific knowledge with reason. Hegel, one of those who effectuates this move, writes about unity in his Science of Logic, in the first volume that is dedicated to Being. And, to him, the one is a unity of an object with itself that is revealed after its qualitative determinations have been attributed to its being: a being is one when it is “for itself.” But what is important for us is that Hegel emphasizes the primarily negative character of the constitution of the one: being for itself is a “polemical, negative relating to the limiting other and, through this negation of the other, is being-reflected-within-itself—even though, side by side with this immanent turning back of

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 25 31/08/2012 13:44


consciousness and the ideality of its object, the reality of this object is also retained, for the object is at the same time known as an external existence.”17 The one as such is then “an abstract limit of itself,”18 because its qualitative difference disappears in the process of delimitation. The next moment of the dialectical movement is the split of the one into the properly one and the nothing. In the one “there is nothing; and this nothing […] is [not an immediate but] a posited nothing.” Thus, “The one is the void as the abstract self-reference of negation.”19 The one is both one and the nothing—the logical movement that Hegel refers back to the Greek atomists with their ontology of atoms and void. Finally, in the third move, he shows that the one is so unitary that it excludes itself from itself, enters a negative relationship to itself. This further leads to the plurality of “ones” and the duality of forces of repulsion and attraction that act on them. This process leads, in its turn, to “a limit which is none, a limit which is in being but is indifferent to it,”20—the definition of quantity, or number, that is many in the one and one in the many. This argument of Hegel looks at a unity from outside, from the point of view of its other. This is why it is constituted negatively, and what is emphasized is neither totality nor unicity (as in the traditional metaphysics) but the redoubled, reflected negativity that detaches a thing from the world, separates it from itself, denudes its nothingness but keeps it permanently at the border of itself as something that does not lose itself even in infinitely reaching beyond itself. Hegel’s doctrine of the One attracted interest in the twentieth century, after the problematization of the number One in arithmetic. Here, I would like to evoke Henry Horace Williams, an American neo-Hegelian. In the article named “The One and the Many,” Williams emphasizes, more univocally than Hegel himself, the primarily negative nature of unity, and the consequences this has for political history:

What is one? Historically one establishes itself by destroying all not itself. “Thou shalt not have other gods” […] The one is the all-excelling […] When all has been negated, there remains, what? Alexander, having overcome all others, wept. But weeping is an effort to overcome.21

This logic of the residual negativity of solitude recalls the logic of melancholia in revolutions (the negativity turns against revolutionaries themselves when a tyranny is overthrown) that I analyzed in La révolution négative.22

Williams continues: “The unity is ideal and pure […] It is a lonely one,”23 and ends his treatise thus:

A state is not the people nor the government, but the unity of people in government. This unity is its only quality. Therefore wherever there is this unity there is the one, the state […] The one in itself is infinite and can never be other than one. And it can apply without limits, the moment of negation being absorbed […] From the point of view of the one, any other is to be destroyed. This is abundantly illustrated in history.24

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 26 31/08/2012 13:44


This idealist interpretation of Hegel turns his theory into that of atomistic militant states in which a government tends to turn (one would guess) against its own people after it defeats others. Interestingly, the Hegelian argument was mirrored in a philosophy that is seemingly quite distant from his, that is, Gottlob Frege’s. Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic is a book that is largely dedicated to the concept of One. It describes various attempts to define the one and comes to the conclusion that it cannot be a property of a thing, and that its definition contains an internal contradiction between identity and distin-guishability (of units). To resolve this problem, Frege suggests that a number is a logical attribute of a concept, and defines the one … through the zero. Frege founds the system of numbers on zero (an empty set), which is the number that can be defined logically, as a set of objects non-identical with themselves.25 And the way that the natural numbers are derived from zero is the following: the one is simply the zero counted as identical with itself (made into a set), and the subsequent numbers count the preceding ones. This is literally the same as Hegel’s idea of identity between the one and the nothing, where one is a “posited” nothing, except that Frege does not question the idea to ground the arithmetic in the “nought,” but uses it as an argument against the empiricist tradition, while for Hegel this paradox is a sign of insufficiency and a reason why the ontology of one falls into an indiscriminate sphere of numerical quantity. For Hegel, as for most of the philosophical tradition, the one is per se not a number, while Frege and his followers Miller and Badiou do not make a difference here. Frege’s argument was used, in the second half of the twentieth century, by Jacques Alain Miller, in his article “Suture,” where he likens the emergence of one from zero to the constitution of the subject, in the Lacanian system, from the point of the indeter-minate lack, “lack of nothing.”

The counting of the 0 as 1 (whereas the concept of the zero subsumes nothing in the real but a blank) is the general support of the series of numbers. That which in the real is pure and simple absence finds itself through the fact of number (through the instance of truth) noted 0 and counted for 1. Which is why we say the object is not-identical with itself: invoked-rejected by truth, instituted-annulled by discourse […] —in a word, sutured.26

Miller points out that the number “one” in the Fregean sense is not just the effect of the hypothetical position and denial of a counterfactual hypothesis, but also a ground of passing from one number to another. Zero, this vanishing negativity of the one, is thus present in every act of addition, in every next number. Alain Badiou continues the same tradition, showing, in his Being and Event, how the “ontology” elaborated in the theory of sets builds on the Fregean move that counts the pre-existing inconsistent multiplicity for the zero of an empty set, only to start counting and ordering being from this point. Badiou, in his book, points at the nihilist implications of this move27 and therefore sees a need to supplement the “ontology” with an “ultra-one”

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 27 31/08/2012 13:44


of the event, which counts for one the elements that are systematically ignored by the ontological unity (which counts them for zero and founds itself on them). Heidegger, whose thoughts on solitude I will analyze below, does not dwell much on the problematic of the one. His disciple and our contemporary, Jean-Luc Nancy, does make this step. His recent short treatise on the concept of one is in this book, but already, in Being Singular Plural,28 Nancy took Heidegger’s concept of Vereinzelung not in the banal (Leibnizean) sense in which all beings are unique and self-identical, but in the sense that, in the world of Dasein, each being is inherently plural by the very act of being; being present means already being split between what is and its existence, and from this split, other internal splits of a thing follow. Negativity or difference, there is something that breaks apart the illusion of a unitary thing. Hence the idea expressed by Nancy in the present volume, that the one is a principle of addition, always “more than one”: of excess and of reaching out, and not as much of self-identity (Nancy agrees with Frege and Miller on this point). Translated into social ontology, this principle, in Nancy, draws attention to the primary ontological co-belonging of humans, before any conscious totalization into a social contract or “collective.” This much for a very schematic history of trying to constitute and understand the one. But, it is not surprising that the twentieth century, with its liberal–democratic stance of subverting any dogmatic authority, and with its corresponding philosophical criticism of metaphysics as a doctrine of pre-given transcendent principles, attempted to criticize and “unseat” the primacy of the one. The obvious move was to announce an ontology, and priority, of the many, either in the sense of numerical plurality, or of an infinite continuum newly discovered by mathematicians. The most radical statement and elaboration of this ontological “polyarchy” belong to Gilles Deleuze and his school, while criticism of the One can be found, for instance, in the work of Reiner Schürmann.29 But previously, similar arguments surfaced in social and political thought, and already there, they were formulated in a metaphysical language. As early as in the sixteenth century, witnessing the rise of absolute monarchies, the young French noble Étienne de la Boétie wrote his “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” additionally entitled by his readers “Against the One.”30 His metaphysical republicanism was half forgotten for a while, but in the twentieth century it was revived. La Boétie draws on a paradox, that the “one,” usually considered as a higher principle, is in fact the lowest number. “I should like to understand […] why so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him.” La Boétie thus makes a “forbidden” shift from the ontological to the numerical concept of one, to question the metaphysical foundation of monarchy by Aristotle (which implies a distinction between the two meanings of the “one”). The one turns out to be small and powerless—“just one.”31

One should also mention here Eric Peterson, a twentieth-century German Protestant theologian who argued against C. Schmitt’s “political theology” with an argument that Christianity was not a monotheism, and thus not a political teaching.32 Peterson mobilizes the old Trinitarian doctrine to struggle against the metaphysic of the state. Another German thinker, Hannah Arendt, gave a political twist to

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 28 31/08/2012 13:44


Heidegger’s critique of traditional metaphysics and, unlike Heidegger, was highly interested in the problem of unity and plurality. Her book The Human Condition starts with a philosophical premise that “men, not Man, live on the Earth and inhabit the world”33 and thus, humanity and society are not reducible to a single collective subject; they are rooted in a fundamental “plurality” understood as a network of relationships and a potential of joint action. One other classic expression of anti-monist political philosophy is the work of French anthropologist Pierre Clastres. In his book of 1974, Clastres reconstructs a peculiar metaphysic of savage tribes, where, if we trust him, the One is associated with evil. In fact, continuing an old French tradition and joining it with an anarchic mood of 1968, Clastres makes the South American Guarani tribe into the spontaneous followers of La Boétie:

[…] Guarani thought says that the One is Evil itself. The misfortune of human existence, the imperfection of the world, a unity seen as a rift inscribed at the heart of the things that comprise the world: that is what the Guarani reject; that is what has impelled them from time immemorial to search for another space where they might know the happiness of an existence healed of its essential wound—an existence unfolding towards a horizon free of the One. But what is this not-One so stubbornly desired by the Guarani? Is the perfection of the world to be found in the Many, according to a dichotomy familiar to Western metaphysics? And do the Guarani, unlike the ancient Greeks, place the Good there where, spontaneously, we deny it? While it is true that one finds in the Guarani an active revolt against the tyranny of the One, and in the Greeks a contemplative nostalgia for the One, it is not the Many which the former embrace; the Guarani lndians do not discover the Good, the Perfect, in the mechanical disintegration of the One.34

Instead: “Good is not the many, it is the dual, both the one and its other, the dual that truthfully designates complete beings.”35 Clastres immediately associates this ideology with the actual strategy of these tribes that consisted, he says, in blocking the way to the construction of a state. Moreover, paradoxically as it may seem, he also points at the solitude (a solitary song of a hunter allowing him “the conversion of an individual into the subject of his solitude”) as a condition that allows American Indians to protest and to hide against the regime of the social as such.36 Note how, for Clastres, not just the dual, but the one itself, understood as a state of suspension and ambiguity, serves as a weapon against the one, understood as isolation. This is the logic highly charac-teristic of the political usage of solitude. All of this is a highly original and historically pertinent proposal to reconsider the coordinates of the world we live in. However, the question remains, what the alternative to unity as an organizing principle can be. An apology of plurality sounds simply as an inversion of the former structure and, as any such inversion, it depends on what it inverts. A simple dialectical reasoning shows that the multiple, or even dual, as opposed to the One, is itself the one multiple: the opposition and exclusion suffices to determine and restrain it. So, in Clastres, for example, the everyday life of the tribes is busy with resisting potential unification, through internal war and other mechanisms of dissolution.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 29 31/08/2012 13:44


Alain Badiou, in his book on Deleuze, shows that Deleuze’s multiplicity has a hidden reference to unity because it depends on the defense of the univocality of being.37 It is only when we accept that being is a uniform sphere, that it then appears as an overflowing chaotic multiplicity. Univocality inevitably involves a (transcendental) delimitation of the being as a region.

Society

If we now turn to socio-political experience, we can see that the appeal to multiplicity and critique of a unitary subject, while they do reflect actual social processes, in no way help resisting unity. Yes, unitary states and theological ideologies of submission do to an extent lose ground in the today’s world. But, the resulting “globalization” is leading to a unification of the world that had never been achieved before. This unifi-cation lacks an identitary form, but imposes a unity of measure and mediation. Not a monarchic authority, but a unitary (monetary) measure of money and, more broadly speaking, a unifying quantification of differences (where upper, middle, and lower classes replace, in social self-reflection, the former structural class divisions), are new principles of unity. In this sense, we live in a time of an unheard of realization of metaphysics, where unity, not plurality, is the most adequate slogan of the time. However, the critical side of today’s moment, and a potential for new forms, lies in rethinking the concept of one itself. Thus, if anything specifies the current historical moment, it is the sense of exhaustion of European expansion, and of the extensive growth of the rationalized world. There are no longer blank spots on the map, and the hope/anxiety of conquering “space” has so far ended in a disappointment. Media and transportation integrated the world and contributed to its shrinking, so that neither escape from information nor free space to realize a utopia (like islands or planets) is immediately available anymore. In this sense, the realized metaphysics of the One resulted in the reign of just one. The One is not cancelled, but appears in its negative definition, of a unit excluded from the rest, but excluded in the way that no possible concept of what is beyond it, is available at all. It is a privation of nothing in particular, and an incomplete but fully presented presence. This solitary unity of the “globe” corresponds to the current condition of an individual who, because of the dissolution of large collectives and firm identities, is more individual than before: our societies are increasingly atomized, and the emerging supra-state international entities (such as the EU) fail so far to provide for a sense of belonging and solidarity. This is not to say that a person became self-sufficient: not at all, since the Modern world requires constant attention to changes, it fills free time with information. Rather, s/he exists in the state of a suspended atom with open and changing valences. David Riesman, in the middle of the century, rightly called this society a “lonely crowd.”38 Today, with the presence of TV and the Internet, the media that unite solitaries as such, his analysis is even more adequate. Not even “singular” is a good word here, because singularity usually implies a positive factuality. Rather, we may speak of the “solitary” being, one in the absence

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 30 31/08/2012 13:44


of the other, although we have to extrapolate this concept from the purely anthro-pological to the ontological meaning. The fact that we use it anthropologically is not arbitrary: human experience of the One is solitude, and we have to retranslate it back into ontology, because the previous interpretation had been too pacifying. Heidegger was the first to suggest this operation when he included solitude into the “funda-mental concepts of metaphysics.”39 But he did not elaborate on solitude in this work: it is mentioned only in passing, and usually along with the two other fundamental concepts (world and finitude). Some sporadic comments on solitude from other books help us better understand what he meant (I will deal with them later). Heidegger, like most of the social critics of his time, repeatedly spoke of nihilism as the main historical diagnosis. Let us note the direct relation of alternative between nihilism and solitude, zero and one, as metaphysical-historical concepts. Nihilism is clearer, and is negative both logic-wise and value-wise. Heidegger preferred it, following Nietzsche, Jünger, and some Nazi ideologists of the time. However, the term “nihilism” (meaning that there is void in the place of God, etc.) is inadequate to our condition, even in the sense that Heidegger himself analyzed it. Today, in spite of revolutions and rationalizations, the big concepts of metaphysics and theology are alive and well, they just lost their grand status of first principles and turned into the tools and media of bringing the world together. Empirically, religion is back on the rise, great powers play their chess games—in spite of the fact that they have to appeal to instrumental rationality and/or to national identity instead of the real universals. Moreover, it is hard to accuse of emptiness and nothingness a social form that requires of citizens the increasingly hectic forms of work and offers them countless goals of private enjoyment. Finally, the gloomy promise of dark catastrophe and collapse that was implicit in the concept of nothingness seems suspended, because catastrophes happen each year and will probably continue doing so in the near future. One, not zero; solitude, not nothingness, appears to be the word of the day. It may sound strange that, at the time when the power of the dogmatic unity as unique totality is diminishing, it is solitude and multiplicity that describe our experience. But, we have a proof of this, as the same authors who try to undermine the dominance of the One as a principle, at the same time valorize solitude as anthro-pological experience. Nietzsche, who is often presented, in the school of Deleuze, as a philosopher of “becoming, multiplicity, and chance”40 who presents, for instance, in his late aphorisms, the body as an order of many souls that are united only by force, the same Nietzsche repeatedly writes about the highest value of solitude. For example, Nietzsche himself makes a similar gesture when, in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” he finishes his fierce critique of the state as the “coldest of all cold monsters,” with a call to “Zweisamkeit”—a solitude for two: “Many seats are still empty for the lonesome and twosome, fanned by the fragrance of silent seas.”41

Or, in a fragment of 1880, Nietzsche writes: “1000 deep solitudes build up the city of Venice—hence its magic. An image for humans of the future.” 42 Here the motive of solitude is brought together with a preference for a great number: many solitudes can coexist and perhaps even communicate. Hannah Arendt, for whom the plural essence of a human is fundamental, and who

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 31 31/08/2012 13:44


is also a defender of a collective, public life, also gives solitude an important place in her system. Thus, in the very last pages of the voluminous Origins of Totalitarianism, a book that describes the advent of a “mass” society composed of lonely individuals and deprived of genuine public life, Arendt unexpectedly claims that solitude, as opposed to loneliness, may be a remaining hope (even though totalitarianism threatens it, too). To prove this, she cites Cicero, Epictetus (for whom a solitary man can be “together with himself ”), and, again, Nietzsche who, in the “Songs of the Prince Vogelfrei,” describes solitude as a split unit: “Noon was, when One became Two.”43 Solitude, then, is paradoxically the very condition of a connection, and of duality. And “Life of the mind”: “Wherever there is a plurality—of living beings, of things, of ideas—there is difference (Heidegger’s Differenz), and this difference does not arise from the outside but is inherent in every entity in the form of duality, from which comes unity as unifi-cation […] Solitude is that human situation where I keep myself company.”44

The same is found in Pierre Clastres who depicts in his Paraguayan tribes, not just the prevalence of duality over unity, but equally solitude: thus, songs of the hunters of a tribe which “resists the One” carry in themselves, says Clastres, the “freedom of solitude,” because they represent a kind of egocentric speech beyond communication.45

All of these thinkers can hardly be suspected of a naïve escapist and privatizing gesture, in the face of a political disaster. They mean solitude as a social and political alternative, at the time of the crisis of the One. All of these are not properly ontological arguments; they are rather empirical or ethical comments. Nevertheless, they do refer to logic and even mathematics and, doing so, they run into an apparent contradiction. The One, banished from the sky as a unique totality (God, or transcendental subject), returns as a principle of solitude. Methodologically, it appears to me, following Hegel and Heidegger, that anthropological experience is a key to problems and transformations in ontology and logic, because, when such experience reaches enough intensity and clarity to appeal to an ontological reading, it leads us into the concrete historical substance of which ontology had originally been an interpretation and without which it could be reduced to mechanical and trivial deduction. Thus, one may speak here not just of a phenom-enological, but of a logico-hermeneutic method. Following this method, I will try to systematize what we know of the experience of solitude, from writers, historians, sociologists, and psychologists (relying also, inevi-tably, on personal experience), in the form of irreducible and puzzling polarities.

Polarities of solitude

The void or an inconvenient presence (One and the nothing)Prima facie, solitude appears as a phenomenon of separation. As such, it is intimately tied with melancholia: the construction of melancholia by Freud and his school, for example, derives it from the loss of a beloved object: all melancholia is thus funda-mentally solitude.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 32 31/08/2012 13:44


On this understanding, solitude is also related to jealousy. Both Proust and Benjamin (in his Moscow diary) observe the most intense suffering produced not just by the absence of a beloved person but by the fact that she currently enjoys herself. “The feeling of solitude would therefore seem to be basically a reflexive phenomenon that only strikes us when emitted back to us by people we know, and most often by people we love, whenever they enjoy themselves socially without us.”46

Somewhat more complicated is the theory of solitude expressed by Emmanuel Levinas and, more recently, by Nicholas Grimaldi in his Treatise on solitude.47

These authors suggest that solitude is an obverse side of the formation of a human being as a self-sufficient individual or subject. Identity, autonomy, and responsibility are, they say, paid by the price of being and feeling enclosed, imprisoned in one’s Ego, which provokes solipsistic anxieties of being unable to reach out towards other beings. While these authors rightly pinpoint the ambivalence of solitude, they still consider its effect as purely negative—limitation or privation. They also somewhat hastily identify solitude with an individual (on this more below). More paradoxical is an account of solitude proposed by Melanie Klein. In her essay “On the sense of loneliness”48 she writes, like Levinas and Grimaldi, that solitude is the result of the Ego’s integration rather than its destruction. But the problem with integration is not separation from the world but rather the unwanted presence. A lonely person, she says, is “alone with what seems to him a bad part of one’s ego.”49 It is thus what is here, within the “one,” not what is absent, which makes trouble. Levinas, in spite of his predominant accent on solitude as autonomy of Ego, also associates solitude with presence rather than absence: “My being doubles with a having; I am encumbered by myself.”50

Jacques Lacan synthesizes, in a way, the approaches of Freud and Klein. While he rarely addresses solitude as such, his classical analysis of Antigone in the Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis51 presents the tragic Ego as an (abject) object rather than a subject. The problem lies not in a delimited subjectivity but in the fact that an individual who transcends his/her own borders turns into a materialized remainder of a symbolic structure. The negative subtraction of the symbolic leaves one with a positive presence of oneself as a sheer inanimate “thing.” On a more affirmative side, we can think here, again, of Arendt’s and Nietzsche’s apologies of solitude that we evoked earlier. Both value solitude because it puts a person into his/her own company, thus redoubling the “one” from inside and creating an elementary community and commonality, which is more fundamental than any community of the already established selves.

Excursus: Von Trier’s “Melancholia”To illustrate the “positive” component of solitude, I can refer to a recent movie by Lars von Trier, “Melancholia” (2011). This film is seemingly the story of a total loss of the world by the protagonist, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), an advertising specialist who at some point invents the tagline “nothing.” She lives in an alienated and hypocritical bourgeois society, with empty inefficient rituals and false feelings, which is subsequently presented

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 33 31/08/2012 13:44


as a physical collapse of the world hit by a vagabond planet: “Melancholia.” The film elabo-rates the motifs of Dürer’s “Melencholia” (1514), such as the mysterious star seen from a picturesque seacoast, paralytic immobility of the melancholic woman protagonist, the abundance of optical instruments used to observe the coming planet, and the derision of scientific calculations that predict that the planet would miss the Earth (numbers and calculations are present also in Dürer’s image of the magic square). It also implicitly quotes Freud, in saying that the planet casts its shadow upon Earth (like the lost object casts its shadow on the Ego, in Freud’s account of melancholia). Now, all of this looks like yet another comment on European nihilism and Western depression: clever but banal. But there is in the movie yet another, less obvious logic. “We are alone,” says Justine in the central scene of the movie, where she and her sister discuss the existence of life beyond Earth. She seeks and enjoys a narcissistic solitude, for instance when escaping her own wedding ceremony and taking a bath, and, later, when lying naked in front of the approaching planet and caressing herself. As mentioned, the protagonist has a sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Sisters are very close. The encounter with the sister and the whole family makes the protag-onist lose the desire to marry. There are several scenes where sisters embrace and caress each other. Their mother says to Claire about Justine: “You’re bewitched by her.” The two symmetrical parts of the movie, one realistic, another fantastic, are titled by the sisters’ names: “Justine” and “Claire.” At the end, the two sisters remain alone with the son of the second one, unsuccessfully try to escape (there is no escape from Earth, the film says) and “hide” in a symbolic shelter at the moment when the apocalyptic planet (which is blue, and shown as identical to Earth viewed from space) finally hits the Earth and everything is destroyed.52

This seems to be a story not as much about the severing of one’s connection with an object (Freud’s definition of melancholia), but about overidentification with a sister, which can bring a person into a crisis because of the homosexual attraction mixed with the competition of the two for one identity (a preferred theme of Lacan and René Girard). The melancholia of Justine is caused not by a loss of the world (which she rather desires) but by a suffocating presence of others with their multiple demands, and by the traumatic mixture of narcissism and incestuous feelings toward the sister in whom she sees her own reflection. In the final scene, the two sisters hold each other’s hands, and at this moment the world collapses, as though in a short circuit. This story is mirrored by the story of an apocalyptic encounter of the lonely Earth with its twin, which increasingly casts its shadow upon it. In the scenes where the characters watch the planet approaching through a self-made device where the image constantly exceeds its frame, an additional reference is made to the proximity of objects shown on the huge cinema screen, of art’s ability of rendering close, and even increasingly closer, the distant, and of the traumatic character of this proximity. Which is even more traumatic when art aspires to be a mirror of reality and to show to the public its own image. Telescopes and mirrors as instruments of melancholia in art. Thus, von Trier presents and explains melancholia (or depression) as solitude. And this solitude appears as a narcissistic reorientation of one’s libido towards oneself (with a correlative “reduction” of the rest of the world) which is obstructed by the presence

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 34 31/08/2012 13:44


of one’s own subjectivity in the adored narcissistic image, and by the existence of a double or twin who is the object of identification and love, at the same time. The one turns out to be another one, an alter ego, a discovery that reduces both to zero. 1 1 1 5 0. But at the same time, the very strange fact that a planet is called “Melancholia,” as though by homonymy, gives the loose negativity of depression an object, or discovers its hidden object—the ego and the alter ego. The very naming of the nothing makes it into more than a nothing; the name of the zero is one. The specular structure of the movie, and of the relationship of the two sisters, is a meta-commentary on the aesthetic form of the movie itself. Art is speculum mundi, and as such, like Lacan’s famous mirror image of a child, it is a petrified image of death, and may itself be deadly. Moreover, being a “mere” image, but at the same time a double, it can switch places with the “real” model and return its gaze (thus, in Plato, everyday appearances turn out to be copies of fantastic models; thus in Lacan, the site of the Real is fantasy). Endless assurances in von Trier’s movie, by the husband of Claire, that the planet will “fly by”, are an allegory of a regular attitude to art as harmless entertainment. But the planet does exceed the frame and collide with the spectator: the giant planet fills the screen making one feel its (the screen’s) size, the wave of fire seems to run out of the screen onto the spectator. “Objects seen in the mirror are closer than they appear.” As in Greek tragedy, the spectacle leads the spectator out of his/her alibi, exposes him/her in the very position of the ego that had seemed to be immaterial. And, as in Greek tragedy, this leads to a paradoxical sense of joy felt in destruction and suffering: art liberates one from one’s ego, and converts negativity into being simply by copying and naming it. But this is also why art is dangerous: inherently sacrificial and sadistic. In most of von Trier’s movies, art kills, sacrifices women, but in “Melancholia” it does so in the most complete and joyful way, so that no moral denunciation of art is any longer possible.53

In Hegel’s Introductory Lectures to Aesthetics, he compares art to a boy throwing stones into water.54 Von Trier would add that sometimes this stone unexpectedly returns like a boomerang, and smashes you. One is not a thing but an event, some of my co-authors in this book would say. But this event is still a collapse. One can say that, in it, there collapse all three main senses of the word “one”: solitude of an individual; experience of the totality of the world, in this solitude (located at the front edge of it); and a negative, Heraclitean energy of dissolution which unites all beings. Von Trier’s logic here is that of a classical tragedy, and in fact the end, with a trium-phant, comic (because expected) destruction of the world achieves a catharsis (“Many have tried, but in vain, to express the most joyful; Here at last, in great sadness, wholly I find it expressed”55). Only the irresistible, devastating violence of spectacle, thinks von Trier, opens the subject up to the world and makes him/her fit for a community.

Closure and opennessA solitary person does, as we have seen, at times appear as a self-enclosed monad. S/he abstains from enjoying worldly goods. But experience presents us with an opposite

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 35 31/08/2012 13:44


phenomenon. Solitude is a condition when one is unusually open, vulnerable to every minuscule fact. The writings of nineteenth century Romantics, such as Thoreau, abound in the pictures of solitary people immersed in nature. But natural beauties are not the only objects attacking a solitary consciousness. Pascal, who spends much of his Pensées discussing the solitude of a human being, particularly of a monarch, abandoned by God, in an immense empty universe (even if rarely calling it by name), says:

The mind of this sovereign judge of the world is not so independent that it is not liable to be disturbed by the first din about it. The noise of a cannon is not necessary to hinder its thoughts; it needs only the creaking of a weathercock or pulley. Do not wonder if at present it does not reason well; a fly is buzzing in its ears; that is enough to render it incapable of good judgment. If you wish it to be able to reach the truth, chase away that animal which holds its reason in check and disturbs that powerful intellect which rules towns and kingdoms. Here is a comical god! O ridicolosissimo eroe!

And the next aphorism:

The power of flies; they win battles, hinder our soul from acting, eat our body.56

The nothingness of men is matched here only by the nothingness of flies that obsess them. A classical eighteenth century account of solitude, that by Johann Georg Zimmermann, accentuates its capacity to intensify feelings. “Spirit and heart are magnified, inflamed and strengthened by solitude.”57

Nietzsche, in the nineteenth century, agrees:

One shouldn’t go to solitary places with one’s mother, sister, daughter and other relatives: the sensations, inflamed by solitude, are so powerful that they can for a while prevail even over the wisest one.58

Solitude opens us not just to sensations but to the substance of things. Heidegger, who gave solitude the status of a “fundamental concept of metaphysics” but failed to give a systematic account of it, nevertheless writes in this book:

This individuation (Vereinzelung) is rather that solitariness in which each human being first enters into a nearness to what is essential in things, a nearness to world.59

As we saw in the beginning of the chapter, this thought is later repeated, in a powerful way, by Joseph Brodsky, in his poem “Lullaby to Cape Cod”: “Solitude teaches the essence of things because their essence is also solitude.” Later, Brodsky writes an autobiographical essay entitled “Less than one.”60 The idea of the piece is that he has never been able to form a stable identity and that in his memory the characters of the past, and himself, become indistinguishable. The “less

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 36 31/08/2012 13:44


than one” is not a fraction, but a paradox—to be less than an indivisible minimum, but not to be nothing. The “less than one” is solitude, weakness, and helplessness without borders, which goes down into the infinitely small. Mathematically you can represent this as a segment of a straight line, with its ends carved out. As Brodsky writes in the poem from which I quoted above:

I am writing from an Empire whose endsdescend under the water. Having tastedtwo oceans and two continents, Ifeel the same that the globe feels.That is, nec plus ultra. Beyond –there is a row of stars. And they burn with shine.61

Empire, for Brodsky, is a political condition of unity and solitude (by empires, he means the USSR and the US). This is why he depicts both great powers where he had lived as “empires” which are self-enclosed and substantially identical (like Leibniz’s monads, one could add). This is why both directly push an alienated human being into empty space, but sensibilize it towards the world. As a negative (value-wise) counterpart of this experience, and the one that returns us back to the first “polarity,” one must mention various psychopathologies which are traditionally associated with solitude. An overly attentive solitary person may become a victim of a particularly intense sensation and become obsessed with it. A solitary subject is fascinated by a solitary object: “a unique escapes towards the unique” as Plotinus once wrote, in an ontological sense.62 A philosophical universalization of this experience belongs to Max Stirner who attributes to his solitary “Unique” a tendency to be obsessed with “specters” such as God, State, or Ego.63

The logic of this experience forces us to rethink the One not as a closed totality or a singularity but as a product of an almost complete destruction of hypostasized symbolized world, where the only remaining object is a pure border through which one registers beings.

Solitude as collectivity (One and the many)It seems obvious that solitude is a condition of an individual. In a way, it even produces individuals itself. The paradox, however, is that the individual can be not alone in his/her solitude: it may be shared. This is possible, on the condition that the only thing that the subjects in question share is … their solitude. As we have seen above, solitude does not just close, it also opens subjects to the world, through the privation that an arbitrary limit of Ego produces. As a phenomenon of unity, solitude precedes a numerically unique individual. Phenomenologically, it is rather a condition that reframes the whole world, not just the individual in question. Donald Winnicott, a British psychoanalyst of the mid-twentieth century, suggested that a child must learn to be lonely (to sustain physical loneliness) only if for a transi-tional period his parents let him/her feel alone in their presence.64 This pedagogic

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 37 31/08/2012 13:44


strategy may teach us something about solitude writ large: it may exist in the presence of the other and implies, except for separation, a will to let another person retreat into himself. I have already quoted an aphorism of Nietzsche that projects a utopian society on the basis of a simile with the island structure of Venice. Martin Heidegger evokes this message in a letter to Jaspers, as a proof that a communication between solitary thinkers is somehow possible.65 Earlier, in Being and Time, Heidegger writes:

Even Dasein’s Being-alone is Being-with in the world. The Other can be missing only in and for a Being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with; its very possibility is the proof of this […] Being missing and “Being away” [Das Fehlen und “Fortsein”] are modes of Dasein-with, and are possible only because Dasein as Being-with lets the Dasein of Others be encountered in its world.66

Here he understands solitude as a peculiar case of sociability, emphasizing its privative character: we are solitary when we relate to the missing others via this very lack. But later he speaks even more radically:

The “most solitary solitude” lies before and beyond any distinction of the “I” from the “you”, and of the I and the you from the “we”, of the individual from the community. In this most solitary solitude there is nothing of singularization and separation; it is that singularization (Vereinzelung) that we must conceive as appropriation, where man comes into his own in his self. The self, authenticity is not the “I”, it is that Da-sein in which the relation of the I to the you and of the I to the we and of the we to the you is founded, and from which these relations first and alone may be mastered and must be mastered if they are to become a force.67

Solitude thus appears as a fundamental Stimmung that precedes and grounds both the individual Ego and its social relations. In the essay “On the Way to Language,” Heidegger notes that the German word for solitude, Einsamkeit, used to mean unity as totality, unio: the true meaning of it, one could add, is thus unity tout court, understood as a transcendental condition.68 The reinterpretation of it in the language as solitude has to do with the objective historical shift towards the metaphysics of subjectivity (and with Protestant mystical individualism). But still, history shows that its meaning does not have to do with an atomic individual, but rather with a positive or negative linkage. Solitude appears, then, for Heidegger, as a Stimmung that conveys an intuition of Mitsein, and as a unitary root of the principle of unity that explains the internal split (unity/unicity) of the one itself. As I mentioned above, Heidegger also wrote a book where solitude is mentioned thematically, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The few words that are dedicated to solitude there make us think that it constitutes the thrownness of Dasein into the midst, or proximity, of things, is responsible for the opening up of a thing that the Dasein is, to all others, but this time in a negative connection with them.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 38 31/08/2012 13:44


As I mentioned above, Nietzsche, in “Thus spoke Zarathustra,” opposes to the cold totality of the Hobbesian state “Zweisamkeit,” a solitude of two. The figure of “solitude à deux” is by now a romantic cliché and is normally understood in the sense that two lovers form together a unitary and lonely unit. But there is also a strange way in which solitude and collectivity are tied in a dialectical, paradoxical fashion. This logic is traced, for instance, in the literary work of the great Russian-Soviet prose writer of the 1920s and 1930s, Andrey Platonov. Platonov’s large works of the post-revolutionary period are usually stories of utopian collectives or communes which are extremely poor and try to realize “communism” here and now, not waiting until it comes in a distant future. These communes try to build fantastic machines in order to produce food and water. They usually end up in fratricidal violence or deadly hunger. Platonov’s works are classics not just because of this utopian content but because of a surrealist and at the same time bureaucratic language, recalling somewhat Kafka or Queneau (as distant analoga in the West). One dominant feature of Platonov’s texts is his constant references to melancholia (toska) and solitude (odinochestvo).69 But in Platonov, moods of melancholia and solitude are reflecting not the separation but a communal sharing of his characters. The best reflection of this is perhaps Platonov’s note from a diary:

The mystery of prostitution: union of bodies implies a unity of souls, but in the prostitution the unity of souls is so absent, and it is so apparent and terrible, that there is no love, that from surprise, from the fall, from fear—“unity of souls” starts to emerge. (1931)70

Figure and backgroundThe one understood as principle is inevitably central, it attracts all attention (sometimes, like in Levinas, taking it away from the rest of the world). Moreover, there is, in solitude, the potential of a neurotic or a psychotic obsession. The capacity of solitude of closing up on things, of bringing one in their “proximity” (which was mentioned above on page 36) can bring forward, as a possible dysfunction, the overwhelming of a subject by an object, a fetishistic obsession.71 Pascal, in the quoted fragment on the power of the flies, makes this very transition from attention to obsession: but, notably, this is an obsession by the insignificant. A neurosis of this sort always consists in a conscious or unconscious oscillation between the subjectively excessive and objectively null significance of a thing in question (Pascal’s flies are here an allegory of a human being, who is insignificant but appears as super-important). On the other hand, such an object represses the subject itself, reduces it to nothing, distributing thus the moments of the concept of one into the absolute one (the object) and the absolute zero (the subject). Feuerbach and Stirner, in the 1840s, both showed that religion had this obsessive structure: Feuerbach explained monotheism by the solitude of the human being and the desire to find a partner, but pointed out that the monotheistic God, this “idée fixe” as he calls him,72 before Freud, is solitary itself.73

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 39 31/08/2012 13:44


Stirner, on his part, explained religion and most of human culture (state, money …) as the “possession” of humans by various “specters” (Carl Schmitt later noted the role of solitude in Stirner’s construction, in his Wisdom of a Prison Cell74). The tenacious character of these syndromes of solitude makes it hard to pass from them back to the unstable oscillation between one and zero that characterizes solitude. Nevertheless, solitude is capable of an opposite, non-fetishistic attitude to things: it may obsess, but it may unfocus and suspend, too. Brodsky, in the poem “Lullaby to Cape Cod”, which we have been commenting on as a great text on solitude, observes, reflecting on the meditative style of his own poem: “and there is no one who can focus the gaze.”75

Solitude as a mood may provide the subject with a periphery, non-thematic vision directed at the ground, not the figure.76 This follows from experience: the light of the public sphere underlines, selects objects, while in solitude, objects stay in a state of quiet proximity. Heidegger would say that the first ones are vorhanden, and the second ones, zuhanden. J.-P. Sartre was an author invariably attentive to the problem of figure and background. In his famous analysis of the look of the Other in Being and Nothingness, Sartre notes that this look (gaze) narrows and sharpens our perception, objectifies us and our world, alienates our possibilities and turns them into facts. Solitude, then, is mainly the state of non-thetic perception that the intrusion of the Other destroys.77

Here, Sartre thinks of solitude objectively as of an individual condition. But, dialectically, the introduction of a third one into this play changes the picture—it un-focuses attention back, by making it oscillate from one to another source. “I can in fact apprehend the Third not directly but upon the Other, who becomes the Other looked at. Thus the third transcendence transcends the transcendence which transcends me and thereby contributes to disarming it.”78

This could be a paradigm of a communist action: acting together, but being each individually liberated in a large group which is not a “group of fusion.” Alibi (emerging in a large anonymous crowd) and resoluteness (suspension of all irrelevant choices and identities), at the same time, are two faces of such freedom. Here, I return to Platonov. Olga Meerson traced in his work a trope that she called “non-estrangement.”79 She refers to the famous “estrangement,” a literary technique that Victor Shklovsky, Platonov’s contemporary and interlocutor, named and described. “Non-estrangement,” in contrast to estrangement, consists in a casual mention and description of new surprising events (thus, in Platonov’s Foundation Pit, there appears a bear who works as a blacksmith: this fact is mentioned in just one phrase, as though it has been already introduced; no one is surprised about it, and there is no emphasis on its unusualness). The use of this trope is, I think, tightly linked to Platonov’s utopia of shared solitude. Communism, at least in the post-revolutionary imagination of Platonov, is a community of people who are not shocked by one another but do not ignore each other either. Empirically speaking, Soviet society was different from the Western one in this sense (and this difference still survives in post-Soviet societies): there has been no developed culture of public politeness, so that if one pushes another person on the street, this is not accompanied by any excuses or

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 40 31/08/2012 13:44


comments on either side. People tend to relate to each other as to things (“creatures,” Benjamin would say) rather than persons, thus ignoring Kant’s famous imperative. There is no visible respect for the Other in the Lévinasean sense. But this is not mere savagery: in fact, this is the result of an active historical movement that could be called “communist” (in spite of the fact that it had never reached its desired end state). It is a society that is united, not by a shared respect (Achtung in German is both respect and attention), but by taking the presence of other humans as a normal, everyday occurrence. The danger of this society is of course mass butchery, in which human life has no value. But Western society has its own danger of butchery (as manifested in the Nazi genocides), where some select people (those precisely who teach about respect of the Other) are taken as so “other” as not to count among humans at all. The Stalinist terror, on the contrary, was irrationally indiscrim-inate, and the victims were not de-personified: on the contrary, they had to confess their “crimes” and to be murdered qua subjects of discourse. Torturing someone and making him/her into a slave did not contradict the recognition of this person as a human subject. The suspension of things and humans into the background may be a sign of an apocalyptic and/or utopian expectation, a re-orientation at an absent center (Sartre, in his analysis of searching for Pierre in a café, seems to make this point). Solitude is a negative connection, which may require an ongoing destruction/disappearance of the One as figure. But it may as well be fed by the unstable “triangulation” described by Sartre: the focus on the Other is shattered and decentered by a yet Other.

Conclusion

From the phenomenological analysis above, which was conducted with the help of some key late Modern cultural texts, it follows that solitude (like melancholia) is not a unitary mood, and thus its intentionality is not one, but polar, consisting in a disjunction. However, in this disjunction, one term is, in my analysis, privileged over another. Solitude as a condition of partial presence, of openness, of collectivity and of non-thematic perception is one of the “authentic” or “pure” moods that can attune a human being to a rhythmic and reasoned coordination with other things and with its own parts. However, it is not theoretically separable from its “Others”: the solitudes of nihilism, of closure, of atomic individuality and of obsession, are a constant danger for a solitary person. This phenomenologically demonstrable duality can be rationally understood through the logical duality of one and zero. The one as a quantitative expression of being is analogous to zero, or void, as a quantitative expression of nothingness. Within the numerical universe, both one and zero play the roles of necessary empty operators: one plays the same role in multiplication that zero plays in addition. As for the philo-sophical concept of one, Hegel showed that it does not just use the void as its necessary other, but is itself identical with the void from a certain point of view, and is therefore a form of reflexive movement, a border delimiting a thing from itself.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 41 31/08/2012 13:44


Solitude, as a mood, is closer to this border of oneself than to the one or zero as posited operators. It is the oscillation between one and zero, a mode of existence “at the edge of the void” which Badiou attributes to his “evental sites.” If the void is a concept of absolute negativity, of the total reduction of the world, the concept of one soberly points at the fact that there is always something remaining from this reduction: at least the very act of reduction. And it is this failure of destruction that can further serve as a measure and sign of being. Moreover, the unaccomplished negativity of solitude thus understood constitutes a minimal partial presence that allows next to conceive of an inclusive unity as a self-exceeding, sublime totality—precisely because a totality of all units, or sets, is as inconceivable as the void. It is thus that the force of destruction and negativity active in Modern society is the only potential of its genuine coming together in freedom and solidarity. Through Facebook and/or through a revolt.

Bibliography

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (CreateSpace, 2009).Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and

Company, 1975), 476–7.—The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958).—The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1978).Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924, [rev. edn

1958]).Cathérine Audibert, L’incapacité d’être seul (Paris: Payot, 2008).Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005).—The Clamor of Being, trans. L. Burchill (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota

Press, 1999).Walter Benjamin, “Moscow Diary”, October, Vol. 35 (Winter, 1985).Etienne de La Boétie, “The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” trans. Harry Curz, in The

Politics of Obedience (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1997), 42–86.Joseph Brodsky, Lullaby of Cape Cod, in A Part of Speech ( New York: Farrar, Straus &

Giroux, 1980).—Less Than One (London: Penguin, 1987).Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989).Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Continuum,

1983).Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Boston:

Harvard University Press, 2008).Gottlob Frege, Foundation of Arithmetic (London: Harper Torchbook, 1960).Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004).Nicolas Grimaldi, Traité des Solitudes (Paris: PUF, 2003).G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures in Aesthetics (London: Penguin, 1994).—Science of Logic, trans. G. Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson

(London: Harper and Row, 1962).—Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. D. F. Krell (London: Harper

and Row, 1984).

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 42 31/08/2012 13:44


—The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

The Heidegger–Jaspers Correspondence, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Amhurst: Humanity Books, 2003).

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works (New York: Delacorte, 1975).Jacques Lacan, Seminar 7. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (London: W. W. Norton and

Company, 1992).Gottfried Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique et Correspondance avec Arnaud (Paris: Vrin,

1988).Émmanuel Lévinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne

University, 1987).Artemy Magun, La révolution négative (Paris: Harmattan, 2009).Jean-François Marquet, Singularité et événement (Paris: Jérome Millon, 1995).Olga Meerson, Svobodnaya Vesch. Poetika neostranenia u Andreya Platonova

(Novosibirsk: Nauka, 2001).Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture”, trans. Jacqueline Rose, Screen (1978). Available online at

http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html (accessed 11 December 2011).Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans, A. S. del Caro (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2006).—Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967).Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909).Christophe Perrin, “Levinas et l’autre solitude,” in Philosophie (Summer 2009), 102:

45–62.Erik Peterson, “Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem,” in: Theologische Traktate

(1994), 23–81Plato, Symposium, trans. B. Jowett, Project Gutenberg, 2008. Available online at http://

www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm (accessed 17 May 2012).Andrey Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki (Moscow: IMLI RAn, 2006).David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the

Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Washington Square

Press, 1993).Carl Schmitt, Théologie politique, trans. J.-L. Schlegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).—Ex Captivitate Salus (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2002).Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. D. Leopold (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1995).Amy Taubin, “A Naught so Sweet”, Art Forum, October 2011.Horace Williams, “The One and the Many,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 32, no. 2,

March 1923: 208–11.Donald Winnicott, “The Capacity to be Alone,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis,

no. 39, 1958: 416–20.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 43 31/08/2012 13:44


Leonid Zhmud, Pythagoras and early Pythagoreans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Johann Georges Zimmermann, La Solitude, trans. A. J. L. Jourdan (Paris: J. B. Baillere, Libraire, 1825).

Notes

1 Joseph Brodsky, Lullaby of Cape Cod, in A Part of Speech (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), 107–18, cit. 109.

2 Aristotle, Metaphysics 985b25-986b10. But see Leonid Zhmud contesting the accuracy of Aristotle’s attribution of this idea to the Pythagoreans: Pythagoras and early Pythagoreans (Oxford University Press, 2012).

3 On this key problem of the early Greek thought, see Jean-François Marquet, Singularité et événement (Jérome Millon, 1995), 11–24. The one appears in between the unlimited even numbers and the limit of the odd. As Marquet writes, very precisely and beautifully, about the meaning of the “One” in the Pythagoreans and their distant follower Heraclitus: “It is because he has a reference to the unity of the common (xynon) that the human, alone among living beings, enjoys this community with himself which defines a conscious being (xyniemi, Alkmeon)—but the impossibility to join origin and end of his life condemns him to death. But, as a point of departure of the flux and as a terminal point of return (1=10 …), the One is not a pure simplicity but to praton harmosthen (Philolaos), a knot of the same”, 12.

4 Parmenides, Fragment 8 DK, lines 1; 5–6. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge University Press, 1971), 273.

5 Heraclites, Fragment 41 (Diels and Kranz, further cited as DK), in ibid., 204.6 Heraclites, Fragment 50 (DK), in ibid., 188. 7 DK 33; Plato, Symposium, 187 d. Plato, Symposium, trans. B. Jowett, Project

Gutenberg, 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm (accessed 6 June 2012).

8 DK 108. Absent in Kirk and Raven.9 Aristotle, Metaphysics I. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford

University Press, 1924, [rev. 1958]), 1054a15.10 Ibid., 1052a15.11 Ibid., 1076а5.12 Erik Peterson, citing Nazianzin contra Eusebius. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Théologie politique

II, trans. J.-L. Schlegel (Gallimard, 1988), 173.13 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 11, Section 2 (CreateSpace,

2009).14 Ibid., Section 3.15 G. Leibniz, Correspondance avec Arnaud, 30 April 1687, in Discours de métaphysique

et Correspondance avec Arnaud (Vrin, 1988), 165.16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer (Cambridge University Press,

1999), 245–54 (B129–147).17 G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. G. Giovanni (Cambridge University Press,

2010), 200.18 Ibid., 132.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 44 31/08/2012 13:44


19 Ibid., 133.20 Ibid., 148.21 Horace Williams, The One and the Many, The Philosophical Review, 32(2), March

1923, 208–11.22 Artemy Magun, La révolution négative (Harmattan, 2009).23 Williams, 210.24 Williams, 211.25 Gottlob Frege, Foundation of Arithmetic (Harper Torchbook, 1960), par. 75, 88.26 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture.” Trans. Jacqueline Rose. Screen 18, Winter 1978.

Available online at http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html (accessed December 11 2011).

27 All sets are “founded” on something, that is, there is an element that belongs to them but that does not have common elements with them. Such element is “at the edge of the void,” and all sets have at least the void that founds them. In this sense, the nothing, like in Heidegger, is the ground of all things, and any relation of grounding is construed on the model of the relationship to the nothing. This is the “axiom of foundation.” And, as Badiou says, it “delimits being by the prohibition of the event.” Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (Continuum, 2005), 190. Such is his implicit critique of Heidegger, for whom the nothing is still, in a way, a ground.

28 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford University Press, 2000).29 Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy

(Indiana University Press, 1987). Original title: Le principe d’anarchie (Seuil, 1982).30 Etienne de La Boétie, “The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.” Trans. Harry Curz, in

The Politics of Obedience (Black Rose Books, 1997), 42–86.31 See a similar usage of the “one” in the twentieth century: in 1956 in the USSR, after

Khruschev’s partial denunciation of Stalin, there was a campaign of explaining to the public the new version of recent history. One of the notes received by a lecturer on this issue was preserved in the archives; it reads: “Why does the bourgeoisie have two and more parties which serve it so far as they can, while the working class of the Soviet Union has just one?” Available online at http://urokiistorii.ru/history/soc/1367 (accessed January 21 2012). Thanks to Kevin Platt for drawing attention to this note.

32 Erik Peterson, “Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem,” in Theologische Traktate (Würzburg, 1994), 23–81.

33 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7.34 Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, trans. R. Hurley (Zone Books, 1989), 172.35 Ibid., 173.36 Ibid., 126.37 Badiou, The Clamor of Being. Trans. L. Burchill (The University of Minnesota Press,

1999). But see in this volume the polemic of Keti Chukhrov against this argument of Badiou (51–62), which makes the two authors look much more alike than is usually accepted.

38 David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 1950).

39 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Indiana University Press, 2001).

40 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Continuum, 1983), 190.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 45 31/08/2012 13:44


41 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans, A. S. del Caro (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 36.

42 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW) vol. V-I, 368. Aph. 4157, early 1880 (De Gruyter, 1967ff.).

43 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1975), 476–7.

44 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1978), 184–5.

45 Clastres, 107.46 Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, vol. 35 (Winter, 1985), 9–135.47 Nicolas Grimaldi, Traité des Solitudes (PUF, 2003). See for example 12, where both the

joy and the pain of solitude are derived from the separation from others, and both are presented as purely “negative.”

48 Melanie Klein, On the sense of loneliness, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works. (Delacorte, 1975), 300–13.

49 Ibid., 309.50 Émmanuel Lévinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Duquesne University,

1987), 56. On Lévinas’s theory of solitude, and its transformation, see a fine article: Christophe Perrin, “Levinas et l’autre solitude,” in Philosophie. Summer 2009, 45–62.

51 Jacques Lacan, Seminar 7. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (W. W. Norton and company, 1992), 243–87.

52 The love metaphor between planets is briefly but correctly noted by one reviewer: Amy Taubin, “A Naught so Sweet,” Art Forum, October 2011, available online at http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=29028 (accessed 21 January 2012). “The movie begins with a vision of cosmic amour fou. Two planets kiss, and all life is consumed in the fire of their embrace. This prologue, its images revisited in the movie’s apocalyptic finale, is couched as a prophetic dream and scored to the ‘Liebestod’ section of the overture to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.”

53 See ibid.: “The anxiety of waiting for the end, and the pity one feels for the characters facing the extinction of all life, creates a classical catharsis. One has to marvel when this inexorably grim vision turns release into pure joy.”

54 G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures in Aesthetics (Penguin, 1994), 36.55 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Sophocles” (1801), trans. M. Hamburger.56 Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, trans. W. F. Trotter (P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), # 366–7; 122.57 Johann Georges Zimmermann, Einsamkeit, tr. fr. La Solitude. Trans. A. J. L. Jourdan

(J. B. Baillere, Libraire, 1825), 57.58 F. Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. VIII–3, 361, #12671.59 M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 6.60 Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (Penguin, 1987).61 Joseph Brodsky, Lullaby of Cape Cod, 112.62 Plotinus’s six Enneads are available online, in the translation of Stephen McKenna, at

http://oaks.nvg.org/ennl.html#9 (accessed January 21 2012). I am quoting the sixth Ennead, Treatise # 9, the very last line (in the order of treatises as established by Proclus, this is the very last line of Plotinus’s work/corpus): “This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, the escape of solitary to solitary.” (phyge tou monou pros to monon). McKenna translates: “passing of solitary to solitary,” but this departs from the literal meaning.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 46 31/08/2012 13:44


63 Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. D. Leopold (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

64 Donald Winnicott, The Capacity to be Alone, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39, 1958, 416–20.

65 The Heidegger–Jaspers Correspondence, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Humanity Books, 2003), 171.

66 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Harper and Row, 1962), 156.

67 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. D. F. Krell (Harper and Row, 1984), 24–5; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Neske, 1961), 244.

68 M. Heidegger, Basic Writings (Harperperennial, 2008), 423.69 There are 69 mentions of this word and its derivatives in Tchevengur, 30 mentions in

Happy Moscow, though only 6 in the Foundation Pit.70 Andrey Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki (IMLI Ran, 2006), 166. See also Jonathan Flatley,

Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Harvard University Press, 2008), a book dedicated in part to Platonov. Flatley affirms that melancholia (toska) is for Platonov a device allowing characters to form a community (including a homosexual one).

71 Cathérine Audibert, who gives a psychoanalytic theory of solitude and develops the aforementioned theory of D. Winnicott, interprets solitude, paradoxically, as an “incapacity of being alone” (Cathérine Audibert, L’incapacité d’être seul (Payot, 2008)). Thus, what we usually call solitude is in fact its opposite: an experience of its impossibility. (Think here of Frege and his thesis that the one is a number of an impossible, contradictory concept, a thing not equal with itself.)

“Behind the absence, there is solitude,” says Audibert (54), thus correcting Freud in the direction of Klein and Winnicott. She evokes the infantile symbiosis with mother and defends the “adult” capacity of overcoming it, but in fact is not this adult solitude a fiction that conceals the essential impossibility of being one, and the problematic character of the Two? Remaining physically alone, we can neither be unitary nor be a part of something. Anyway, one can only agree with Audibert when she concludes that an antidote to the traumatic solitude is learning how to be solitary. This implies, one could add, that being truly solitary is only possible with others, as a mutual and reciprocal relation of leaving alone.

Audibert further argues from experience that the (un-)solitary person develops addictions (what we here call “obsessions”), in order to compensate for the impossible solitude that he experiences as a threat of annihilation. One characteristic addiction is hypochondria (193–200): a hypochondriacal symptom is what is truly one; it binds the individual to being while expressing his/her solitude in a displaced form. Philosophers would add that hypochondria is particularly important here because it is a neurosis of reflexion. The transcendental Ego itself is decentered and “captured” into this or that bodily organ. Reflexion, which by definition identifies only through reduplication, suffers quite logically from “the impossibility of being one.”

72 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (Barnes and Noble, 2004), XXIX. 73 Ibid., 69.74 Carl Schmitt, “Weisheit der Zelle,” in Ex Captivitate Salus (Duncker und Humblot,

2002), 79–92; on Stirner see 80–3.

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 47 31/08/2012 13:44


75 Lullaby of Cape Cod, VII, 114.76 On the One as essentially ground (background), an “element,” see Chapter 11 by

Susanna Lindberg in the present volume. Solitude is, in a way, an existential and noetic correlate of the “elemental” taken in this sense.

77 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (Washington Square Press, 1993), 321–3.

78 Ibid., 416.79 Olga Meerson, Svobodnaya Vesch. Poetika neostranenia u Andreya Platonova (Nauka,

2001).

9781441112828_txt_print.indd 48 31/08/2012 13:44

Date post:	17-Jan-2023
Category:	Documents
Upload:	eu-spb
View:	0 times
Download:	0 times

Unity and Solitude (Politics of the One, Bloomsbury 2013).

Documents