of comfort in fear: counter-text to in praise of risk by dufourmantelle

andrej synkar's counter-text to anne dufourmantelle - in praise of risk titled: of comfort in fear

totally not an introduction

i used to get called out for being overly political, sort of dogmatic or principled you may say, im obviously past that point now, but theres something in basically bashing romanticism to death the way i sometimes do in this countertext that can appear annoying and maybe even overpowered at times, making it seem as if im dissecting not just her corpus but her corpse in a certain way - metaphorically but also allegorically, since this is a work tied to her death in some way, and the conditions of and for not just her life but life itself for all of us. it is true that im denying her fantasy in order to bring it back into shit, but im really not trying to be a stingy cynic in the face of her beauty.

rather what i think is happening is that i went into it expecting a heideggerian deconstruction of contemporary conditions for risk and a wager turned towards life and its possibility, but instead it basically tries to begin that way half the time, but conceptually she isnt able to carry it across most of the time. she happens to be an aesthete, extremely good at naming aesthetic characters, at locating aesthetic categories but unable to construct a valid theory of conflict or ideology no matter how much she tries unfortunately - although seemingly she isnt trying to do that most of the time at all, instead reading like a bunch of poetry that she went back to after already writing, situating it around a middle-tier conceptual scaffold - decent for philosophical readership generally, but maybe not on the level heightened readers expect.

the french in her gets to her before she can do anything, and shes still seen battling psychoanalytic dilemmas and the conditions of her own time, rather than the conditions for time, for our time, more generally, which is what a book like this should be doing, and definitely ocassionally does do. but also, maybe i am the way that i am, that no matter how non ideologically crushing a work is, i'll make sure to come in and add that extra aspect of devastation that most writers would stray away from on account of its incessant character. either way, if you're reading this because you're a romantic who loves sentimental moods and gestures, you can freely skip this work, as all i'm going to be doing to dufourmantelle is interrogating her for not going as hard as she should, as if its on her that i'm reading her instead of maurizio lazzarato and reiner schurmann.

however, i also do believe i'm doing the work a justice, as it is however very much on her for doing this to us, for opening up harsh and ugly questions that she half-dissects, forcing me to have to close them and to ruin her language with dense and cynical formulations in order to faithfully deal with the problem the way we are meant to do. for at least some of the chapters, i tried to compliment her poetic style rather than turning it all into conceptual play.

to risk one's life

risk remains an unquestioned value not just because of calculation, surveillance and speculation in vectorial or networked economies, but more specifically because political realities work by process of eliminating risk-as-ontology and its disruptions. however, risk still remains possible under alternative pretenses, such as kanye's call and question to "fuck in the middle of this dinner table, will we be the life of the whole party?" which shows the fruitless banality of risk-taking activity when divorced from supposed politics and ethics but still ontologically works against predictive mechanisms deployed by the state, or alternate modes of political conjuring such as being a pepper spreyed anarchist in the middle of a protest, total risk by being present, zero gain in being there, no predictive or algorithmic capacity, and just a total exposure to the politically unmediated elements.

the problem that dufourmantelle notices is that risk has been quantified and as such remains ontological rather than intimate, and therefore its political relevancy is tied to the status quos understanding of what risky things are, not that there is an ultimate lack of riskiness, but only that it is relatively surpressed or happens unquestioned and within expectations, or otherwise is simply seen as an unorthodox action that doesnt actually have a built-in political character. or in other words, there are plenty of dimensions that escape ethical and political discourse, in fact most of them do. to experience and have an impact already involves a sense of risk, so it is quite the contrary - risk is everywhere, we are simply not present in it, not that we have somehow swallowed risk ontologically and managed to securitize everything.

the next paragraph is telling, because as the start of the book it diminishes readings that orient the work as sentimental rather than revolutionary, whilst also reading against the idea that the risky event is quantifiable, which also should suggest, contrary to most reviews and understandings of the work currently, that risk is unknowable in character and unreflectable post-tense as an actual concrete reality or event. the risk is a charge, a capacity of action, not an experience. risk exists inside of experience but is not actual experiences themselves nor the motivations that allow you to carry them, risk is a position within a microintimate dispositive event. it also is ironic because in it she states not exactly that risk is to avoid a confrontation with death but more-so to survive it, but she means death likely in the symbolic form of the death of the soul, or the death of the experiences of urban man.

"at the instant of decision, risk calls into question our intimate relationship with time" it does not, anne, on the contrary, it suggests that we don't have a choice but to swamp ourselves through time. the currently dominating romantic reading, seen in popular media such as evanescence's song "bring me to life", the themes of which the singer of the band amy attributes to the moment she met her current husband in a bar who telepathically could feel exactly how she felt, unlocking whole symbolic dimensions for her at the very moment of exposure, suggests that psychological and narrative depth can be achieved by a subject by simply displacing their current state and entering an alternative, richer logic or context, which is done by a mix of drive, circumstance, will, force and a type of pseudoinspirative sudden realization.

this also mimics deleuze's readings on possibility as the virtual ability to recall greater heights of the self in retrospect to the totally unlimited possibility we hold within us to experience greater contexts. however, i suggest to the contrary that time locks us into a struggle against contexts, diluting forcefully our capacities and stripping us of almost everything, turning us into a "nothing we've become" as in evanescence's song. obviously in this context as singer amy points out, you'd need to begin to balance your life against the unknowable other, by letting go of your ideas of yourself you can achieve this greater context. dufourmantelle mirrors this view, calling risk a "secret mechanism, a music with a unique capability of displacement".

dufourmantelle questions why risk is seen as either heroism in a world of algorithmic decadence, or pure madness in a rationally-oriented global society, and she is correct to, functionally supplanting this message with the concept of tracing territories and reshaping manners of being, entering the ontological or heideggerian crux of the question of modes of acting on the world. she suggests that dying today, since having been turned into a banality, must colloquially be resisted so that resisting death itself is resisting our current mode of being, which in turn opens the path not for risk as a process but as an experience, as in, the risky path is the actual walkable path, the domain of risk is the neutral domain we've eliminated rather than being the extra-ficial one.

i will be at my meanest and most unfair, to suggest that even though dufourmantelle is operating with symbolic, burdened, nuanced categories of death and life and not ordinary one's, that her heroic act of saving those children in the water simply wasn't her taking a risk. if anything, the moment of her saving them was precisely when she took least risk, because she both died, leading to her eventual effacement as a being (even though it introduced the world to her for the first but also last time), however, simultaneously, every moment that led her to the possibility of saving them was risky, in that it wasnt clouded by the proximity of death and life as possible acts, but that she was in a zone where she could allow herself to take that safe bet (the safe bet of the trading of her life for theirs). by saying what i am here, i am only paying the highest respects to her philosophy, by thinking of risk the way she would want me to, and not the way the headlines, sentimental people, or otherwise would want me to see it.

the final paragraph in this section is simply beautiful, quite literally, in that her writing style sort of mimics the movements of how i assume philippe petit was swaying her balancing stick between the trade center towers, and i don't mean this in a smug manner i really did get that impression. "➤ not only the future, ⮜ but also the past, ➤ a past behind our horizon of expectations [...] how should we name that which ⮜, in deciding the future ➤ thereby reanimates the past ⮜, preventing it from becoming set in stone ➤" here she models a line of risk, appropriating deleuzian and lefebvrian vocabulary along the way, beautifully reminiscent of the ashes of semiotic poststructuralism.

reanimating a line where the future is rewinded instead of speculated, where the landian future appears from the past to haunt the present, to slightly nudge it in a different direction. she writes here a type of anti-autistic paradigm, to not want to speculate on modelling the future after present gains, to drop the layer of expected consistency, is to suddenly open new lines. this isn't just an ethical paradigm, its also exactly how ontologically new connections are built. you must knock on the ceilings of all possibilities at all time if you want to exist in a different logic. everywhere around us, there are tools and gadgets meant to enforce staleness, because its an expected resource. everyone in the world models themselves around ignoring you and bypassing you if you so wish it, its a choice, unrisky life is a choice that many of us take in order to simulate peace in an unpeaceful world. anne is battling the highest order of demons we have given birth to, she is on the frontline of the symbolic battlefield with this paragraph, the highest battle, luke and anakin on the lava pillars, she is there, staring at us with a stirn look, demanding that we move in some direction.

eurydice saved

"this risk - the risk of being - cannot be envisaged or evaluated. the grand machinery of the economy is what promotes the evaluation of risks. sometimes we have mere moments left before its time. and in the intensity of what's lived in those moments is an infinite surplus of time. a grace, a mercy."

dufourmantelle calls on spinoza, global asceticism, weil's attention-patience complex, eurydice and invocation, jacob's ladder and the mythological call to turn around, to enter the blindspot, go down the rabbit's hole, witness the light, witness time, unquestion being, consider the infinite depth of risk in life, the ability to let the value of the world go unquestioned, the possibility that unhoped for things can or could happen. here she explains that not dying is risky because its beyond choice, that it allows for more loving or living when something like heidegger's being-towards-death, where our held capacity for sustaining our eventual death no longer suffices, and in the machinery of the economy and its infinite predictability, no longer functions to hold the predictably dense option for one final predictable call as the mere functional allowance for living an unsteady and unmanaged life.

it is simply the case that, it's quite possible that this same grand machinery of economy has fundamentally changed the way life and death are operative in the current landscape. we need to think about the way that the very ontological forms that arise as a result of the dominating global ideology at any point in time actually allow for certain metaphysical categories to be activated. sure, risk may be laying dormant in some cage of virtuality ready to be re-accessed when the god of ideology decides hes bored with the current paradigm, but is time even manipulable currently away from stale time?

can a japanese worker really decide, that's it, i'm going to live on the very edge of my life, and actually go and do it, but then actually experience a near infinite surplus of time, or experience the way in which the actual felt moment of the bataillean sacrifice is a lived excess of experiencing your own body's actual death, where the intensity of experience corresponds with the intensity of the metaphysical statement of the body - the corporeal statement? or is it quite possible that the japenese worker does the risky act, but then still feels it in banal time? ideological captures insinuates that, simply and tragically said, for some people the light never shows up.

or more accurately, there are many lights all the time, cute moments that appear and warrant your attention, a call for riskiness, a call for your beinghood to be changed, to enter new spatial and temporal logics, but your body has already been raped by the monster of ideological capture to be untransformable, to simply be inexperienced at the ways of risky life? knowing the way that the world is, the power of the machine of economy is not an original power, but a created monster of all our already pre-existing vested and invested energies.

it refletcs how we behave towards time in real time, it isn't something tying us down more than we are tied to it. the impossible quest for a different logic is one that at every moment is disallowed and disavowed. you could be surrounded by thousands of indigenous monks with a totally different experience of love, value and time, and they could for years berate you on how to change your ways, but your inner core is not simply something you can skate along micro-phenomenal lines away from. this is where deleuze fails, it's one thing to imagine the line of flight, it's another to occupy it. you can be a temporary refuge of accidental logics, you can graze along the pathway of risk, and you could even avoid returning to the same place that keeps you dormant to the apparatus, but even this won't certify you will ever experience infinite time again.

miniscule magical dependencies

for one, neoliberal culture would want dependency to be ostracized, because we have continually been living in a descartian age, where vehicles are the second domestic environment, the primacy of the willing agent and his interaction with the base of the world, the extending substance, the one who wills that change is a necessary detourment, where hiroki azuma unveils the way tourism is correlated to the voltairean era, whwere descartes is independent of the world around him, he is addicted, obsessed with travel, he's on a don quixhotian quest, he's also a dante's traveller, he's berserk on the quest of a higher self, he's here to vanquish the anime-style demons of present-day pharmacopoeia. but on another hand, the status quo is accurate where dufourmantelle doesnt want it to be - dependency connotates an affair more than addiction does precisely where addiction is seen as an excess that can be recalibrated, whereas dependency is seen as a traitor of the model of ethical consistency, the villian-ontology of the risk-worthy life.

consistency demands that the subject sits equivalent to his conditions, that there is paranoic adjustment to the states, and dependency is simply miscalibrated, misfired, non-truncated consistency, its of the same register as banal daily life, every day life demands that its categories are clearly cut. dependecy - yes, we love to be dependent, but we are dependent on a consistent route, there is consistency in consistency, drugs don't get to exist in a cold world essentially. the cold world demands not just speculative predictability but an ascetic promise away from alternate states. an addiction is a trap, a virus, it is exhaustable, removable, vanquishable, it's an attachement, whereas depedency suggests a need, its less clinical, more passive, more demanding and also an active traitorship to piece it all together. we don't demonize dependency, we demonize specific dependencies that aren't a part of the accepted dependants (pendants of dependency).

dufourmantelle returns us to the body of the child as a naturalized equivalence towards dependencies correlating to a non-culturally inhabited adult world, where somewhere along the path of our own body lies dormant a type of primal response pattern that protects our inner most layers and shields them from total supposed capture by the ideological machine, re-activating when the apparatus has taken things to a structural extreme through violent intimacies (derogatory intimacies, surely dufourmantelle would hate the way i've used the word here but its meant in its negative sense)

dufourmantelle toys with the risk of dependency against the idea of securitized but non-risky alternatives. she mentions abusive relationships in the same vain that she suggests that we should "let our dependencies grow" and suggests that we enfriend our own early-dependent bodies by activating a type of complex web of social play that manifests in the world as an investment and impact within spheres of not influence but the expeirence of some type of ontic experience of childhoodity, an extremely risky play from a political standpoint from dufourmantelle, but a fantastic defense against the understanding of intimacy as a trable currency, the idea that the body has to either risk protection from dependency and into solitude so that it can avoid abuse against the idea that the body can risk itself through dependency with the cost of abuse is one of the most traumatological narratives today, a very popular one, and the way dufourmantelle seemingly dismantles it by juxtaposing one after the other without contradiction is either accidentally profound or intentional, but regardless, it shows that the affective fear of investment itself at the very least is supposedly a spook, that dependency itself is, contrary to even what dufourmantelle is implying, but not contrary to what she suggests, that it is quite possible that its a neutral category, that its ontologically in a state of variability with the wider state of the body in its interaction with the expandable or expendible world.

there is a bit of a contradiction in dufourmantelle's use of dependancy as something alternate from resignation, in that it shows what resignation isn't, even if dependancy itself is struggle, it points to the idea that banal consistency is a resigned provocation rather than a resigned destitute, it provokes settings where dependancy is needed in order for love to occur, this is why i use the word interest, interest has connotations of a lack of faith, which is important when considering the interplay between abandonment and obsession. love is being used as both a total announcement of faith (in spite of violence and stupidity) but also as an almost pseudo-algorithmic force of consistuency itself - it constitutes a re-emerging of felt organic pre-banal patterns that later allow some type of connective attachment to "gestures, poises, movements and spacings" to occur. so love is a negative force of self-desertion where dependency allows connection, but its also the constructive force where riskless existence is challenged by an organic domain of alternative logics of being.

however, this contradiction is cut short by her insistence that dependancy is a temptation and a challenge towards risk rather than a lack of it. dependancy cannot be an attachment that leans towards risk, if one is dependent, one can only be dependent towards the tragic condition of the world as that which is able to sustain. sustainability itself requires a stacking of interest which implies a loss of riskability, a loss of striving between life and death rather than striving towards life against death or striving towards death against life which dufourmantelle seems to challenge as not being risky enough in a contemporary age of total banality, which is fair enough on its own, but her account of consistency slightly falters.

dufourmantelle wants to open up dependency as both a striving towards addictions that constitute banal or riskless existence and as a microworld of weak ethics that opens up miniscule bubbles of acquisence that allow for risk-taking manuevers in intersocial dynamics "microdependencies" that resist the urge towards consistency yet within them hold love and security as processes that are experimented upon rather than traded away or declaratively positioned as definitively in the field of choosing either one or/over the other. however, even if all of this is a possible ontological ethics, practically, most of the time dependency is the world-splitter, not the world-opener. this is why when it comes to dependency, those who desire love either turn towards absuive relationships or towards descartian travelling and the dependence towards/of independency, the independent feeling of limited dependencies. why does no one speak of microdependencies? because microdependencies are usually acquaintances and not risky friendships, the banality of the world is positioned in such a way that even affairs feel riskless and increasingly less interesting. the first world has ruined the affective charge of even the secret, and made it dependable on calculable gains. dufourmantelle is not wrong to suggest, but it feels like that's all she does sometimes, suggest without ever considering.

voluntary servitude and disobedience

dufourmantelle asks us how we got to the point where servitude has reached maximal voluntarity. i will propose my answers as follows. why do we will our servility with all our might? bifo explains that humiliation for him is a form of renunciation where the self-image of a group of people politically is unable to be fulfilled in retrospect to their desired position of it when juxtaposing it with the way the future is being carried over so to say, giving the example of first world countries identifying with the label of a white race when not given the ability to plan their own futures in accordance with the way the neoliberal-fascist regime complex has truncated their retrsopective capacity for self-identification both economically and personally. why do we indulgently regard hierarchies?

to be fair, only mentally castrated complexes that in racial constructions that make use of caste systems would do such a thing, the rest only non-indulgently regard hierarchies, due to the way in which they have been positioned as generic contaminants rather than symbolic deterrances, no longer is hierarchy a structural effect of power, but more-so a structural role of power, a natural positioning. and, what about obedience? obedience was seen as honorable, and this idea extends to today, what is not honorable about being obedient to the most regarded of principles? to regard a principle however doesn't require obedience, and so a disregard for whether to regard - the lack of this turns obedience from honor into servitude.

the maid is a title of great worth, as will be argued in the future work "be the maid the world needs", however, it is trivially true that banality has caused a recession of aestheticized terms in favor of beurocratic junk such as assistant, which is a title of both humiliation and decadence and not just instrumentalization, as per baudrillard's understanding in the system of objects that design is as much about cultural affect as it is about function. anne creates a wonderful image of rebellion by juxtaposing gratefulness against singularity, however, producing an ugly off-spring in the much more contested and less believable category of manufactured vs. organic, where she regularly essentializes naturalist metaphors in order to point away from urban decay but with the unfortunate consequence of calling on sentimental rhetoric on an ontological topic, which carries its burdens, this time through annie le brun's alfred jarry.

however, as always with anne, a quick forray into sentimentality reveals a philosophical underpinning that suggests otherwise, where she uses self-obedience to argue against the domination of the subjectivity and the ego to completely construct our identity, instead hoping to pull in varied forces to comprehend the othering at play in the self, much like the requirement of disobedience that points to the ability of obedience, which is a decent shot at the society of transparency. she raises bartlebey's "prefer not to" at the end in order to suggest through the concept of the middle age's heart of hearts that theres an un-further-dividable freedom of the self contained within the ego that enables total subjectivity to proliferate against all constraints. whether this be true or not, she seems to have entirely left out the analysis of obedience as disobedience, preferring the idea that disobedience is a second obedience. metaphysically this is consistent with her vision, but its lacking, where obedience can show disobedience as a logical function. however, the faith of pure obedience is the faith that the apparatus precisely cannot capture the freedom to begin with - to let the apparatus of capture ruin your freedom is a sign of disobedience, but of faith in obedience in the face of multiplicity. consistency has a metaphysical dimension that is post-ethical in so much as we see ethics as the consistent management of the self. dufourmanetelle's rebellious ethics is limited in its vision of consistency, where the plane of consistency itself is sacrificed in order to give the subject yet another voice.

deeper soveirgnity, deeper obedience doesn't even exist at all today. wit is everywhere, wit proliferates, subversion is the ruiling weapon, how does dufourmantelle manage to see lightheartedness-towards-death as a transversal of the current landscape when that literally is the current landscape? the degrees of obedience-disobedience points to the constant struggle to define freedom for everyone involved in increasingly harmful systems, but through the power of rhetorical fascism we can actually come to an understanding of why and how comfort can be found in ineluctability, something anne cannot see due to her frenchness, but that the germans are able to (unlike the italians, which explains why they server-hopped in cruical periods) self-bondage is not bondage at all, freedom is simply a rhetorical device, it is what you use to wager and comrpomise between different violent machineries, it is not the clear through-line passed them. however ethically speaking, the territory of the mind is the device to protect, and here anne is politically on point. the apparatus will attempt to capture every single last one of our thought processes, and in this case a manufacture of souls does happen, but this cant be conflated - this is strictly a positive and not a negative process. a soul is not manufactured into an animated body, it is pre-built without one, a soul cannot be lost and anne is correct in that, so there's no act of emptying. ethically, souls are features, and obedience is a territory, not a decision.

in suspense

in narrative storytelling, the "definition" of suspense is an anxious anticipation of a future events experienced by an audience that is being entertained by a narrative, which is a piggified concept - a state of trashy restlessness and generic domesticity which alienates the moment of decision and endlessly defers it into automated and controlled enviornments and themes. dufourmantelle on the other hand gives us a more classically rooted elaboration of the concept, combining the attentiveness of a weilian instinct with an ascetic principle of serenity, and mixing it with the classic hegelian mediation, sprinkling in also a bit of corporeal imagery, acrobatism, philosophical suspension is equated to skepticism and a general impulse to resist principiality or dogmatism, essentially to never allow configurations to set place.

in the first page, she successfully moves us away from the anxious delirium of contemporary anticipation and into an elaborate mode of suspense as both passivity and activity, or rather, the supposed far eastern version of suspense where the delay of the act is actually no longer an anticipation but a subsumption of activity itself. however, in this elaboration she accidentally but cruically misses the contemporary reason for immediate suspense and post-mediated anticipation that doesnt involve neither states of anxiety nor prolonged meaningful bouts - she asks us what happens when you dont mediate, what do you lose when you prolong both meaningful events and immediate cravings, rhetorically assuming that the reason is that anxiety carries us imperviously into the inability to return to the original moment, essentially that immediacy is a protective shield against a world, however, its quite possible that contemporary suspense exists not to defer knowledge in favor of a concentrated will the way foucault is quoted (suspense is the concentrated intensity of deferred knowledge), but rather that suspense exists precisely due to the fact that ontological intervention no longer exists, that nothing has moving power.

dufourmantelle calls the mover the inner determination that carries the being away, meaning that ontologically shes locating this problem one register lower than me, in the agential->unconscious relation rather than the external mover->agential relation, however i think its precisely inner determinations that have all the moving power towards the agent, and external relations serve to demarcate and territorialize the subject but no longer to move it. the body doesnt actually suffer the consequences of a suspended mind, rather an active mind meets the suspended world, and has to unsuspend itself by-proxy to actually be able to move, so instant integrations happen not because deferrals are resisted due to anxiety the way the negativists would tell you, but much more terrifingly, because immediacy is actually the only form of action with any semblance of gain, where mediation itself becomes meaningless.

online discourse proves this, often showing exactly how banal mediation itself feels in the face of the current hyperimmediate (baudrillard - hyperproximate) world, anticipation is no longer anticipation about nothing the way the sartrean anxious complex works ontologically, but rather anticipation in need of something, call it maybe inspension. inspension, suspensions brother doesnt want to hold its breath and grasp the moment in its hand the way philippe walks the high-wire, rather, inspension is about catching yourself halfway through falling on stable ground. the contemporary subject isnt too rooted on stable ground, its rather floating in comfort, the way dufourmantelle also believes, but the solution isnt to create a fearful sense of groundedless, but to locate the ground, sometimes at the cost of immediacy. and how costly is immediacy? well, dufourmantelle herself shows us by invoking the marriage example, how costly exactly is a marriage that isnt deferred in the way kierkegaard would, but immediately and insuspensively (not inspensively) inserted? naturally, very close, but the sacrifice most subjects in the world feel is exactly this restless moment somewhere halfway through life and death.

moving away from ontology, her epistemology and the ethical vision it holds in this piece is a lot stronger. suspending the faculty of judgement is the skeptics call, this suspension itself is an order below judgement, but not qualitatively, as she inserts it is simply "lighter" in comparison to a principled stance, however with the dilemma of kants aesthetic idea never finding its place in a concept, where the understanding is violated by imaginations power to defer. dufourmantelle does in fact defend the right side, the gnostic side, of history by calling on pascal to claim that imagination produces creation rather than illusion, however shes quickly distracted by ontology again, mingling with fragmentary ideas of the self over consistent ones (micro over macro worlds so to speak), i enjoy this idea much more when its applied in ethics, where micro decisions, even violent ones, arent powerful or intense enough to override the base core of the macro-being, but where trauma is essentially a violent weapon inserted by the masses in order to obsessively conjure an intense attack whereby an outwards imposed self-regulation binds the subject to its own act.

the fact i believe that dufourmantelle, and generally the feminine, never goes to these lenghts is because the feminine itself is a trauma-filled force, unfortunately, and they have a hard time connecting one to the other precisely because the feminine is the earthly, more compensatory, more compromising being as opposed to its binary double, at least when it comes to the gnostic question, and this is why dufourmantelle's idea that the being should fly away from the responsibility of conceptual embedding in favor of a flight of the imagination by way of denying the self-constituve power of the act is cut short, right before it reaches the territory that say, a sade may have walked in on. but the fact we've even gotten this far is wonderful.

however, dufourmantelles ethics shows itself powerful in the last page, where she carefully dismantles manic obsession itself, or rather its biggest problem, irrationality, by defending subjective contradiction over subjective control. i think this strong nietzschean point is essential to consider, that strenght and weakness are divided precisely by this line of consistency where the subject juggles between allowing itself to experience the entire unburdened and untroubled vision of the true world, the scary vision of contradiction, over the regulative potential of, say, the insomniac drive for control that she mentions. however, i have trouble believing that this ontological lightness she describes is purely innocent.

yes, lightness in a certain sense, but in another sense, a future israeli multiethnic demigogue visiting the gaza beach resort fifty years after its genocide also carries a certain lightness to them. im not bringing this example up to be edgy, but to be literal, literally the freedom to be carefree and the care for freedom are in a certain sense the greatest contradiction of them all precisely because every other contradiction depends on how much each subject juggles between the first and second option, and this is precisely what responsibility is about. so when dufourmantelle invokes the personal responsibility towards suspension, there is an element of greediness even in suspension itself, namely, its a luxury to be able to suspend judgement in favor of carefulness, but it also shows that the most careful is both the most powerful and most advantageous. its even funny that we use the word "careful" to describe this state when precisely carefulness towards oneself is carefreeness towards the world, and this idea goes hand in hand, it is ruthless in that sense.

at the risk of passion