circulation within my skull

Jan 24

“ You know what Einstein did in his relativity theory? He started with curved space as the effect of matter. So, let us say that curved space occurs because something brutally from the outside, like a trauma, intervenes into it. Then he turned it around and claimed that it’s the other way; the only thing that effectively exists is the curved space. And that this transcendent matter curving the space is just our misperception of it. In a parallel way I would claim that, in a Hegelian way, the truth of transcendence is a radical gap in immanence. In this sense I would conditionally, if you ask me at gunpoint, be for immanence. But again I have to resist Kant paradoxically as a philosopher of immanence, where the distinction between transcendence and immanence is projected back into immanence itself. I know this doesn’t sound quite clear, but how should I put it? My good friend Alenka Zupancic, in one of her writings, compared how in the distance of a couple of pages of Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy of Morals’ he has two almost opposed epistemological positions. One is how much truth can we endure, this notion of truth as real - my God, we cannot approach us it blinds us - then a couple of pages later you have a kind of post-modern position; this Nietzsche of the will to illusion, celebrating multitude of illusions. I think the task is to think the two together. That is to say, it’s not that everything is just an illusion, but there is nothing outside. What is transcendent is the very eminent gap between illusions themselves. This may sound now unclear but it’s along these lines that I would argue.

S.Z. (2004)