Albert Bierstadt, Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (1869)

Albert Bierstadt, Sunlight and Shadow

Sometimes looking back at certain moments reveals a sort of non-linearity of time, there's a sort of discordance between what factually appears and what one feels.

Poems are varieties of creatures, but among their traits is one where they capture very subtly a particular imagery or memory or simply an experience through the beauty that language is. A rhyme, a broken word, a syllable can bring again to mind the same experience as it had during the time of composition. Human language, and in general the structures of the Symbolic, allow for such things to happen, and I believe this is possible only because we as humans never actually fully experience a moment, or fully connect with a word. We miss it in one way or another, and it is repeatedly missing it, that a phenomena of images appears to us, either from memory or otherwise.

Life remains as a recurring attempt to linearize the structure of experience where each attempt fails, and in its failure creates a void that sets the stage for the next attempt. It is in attempting to become and never being that the phenomena of living happens. Or, as Daumal would say:

In desiring to become, you begin to live.

Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (2009)

All classes fear this relentless abstraction of the world, on which their fortunes yet depend. All classes but one: the hacker class. We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or col­orings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such.

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (2009)

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (2009)

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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809)

§ 409.

Habit, like memory, is a difficult point in mental organisation: habit is the mechanism of self-feeling, as memory is the mechanism of intelligence. The natural qualities and alterations of age, sleep and waking, are “immediately” natural: habit, on the contrary, is the mode of feeling (as well as intelligence, will, &c., so far as they belong to self-feeling) made into a natural and mechanical existence. Habit is rightly called a second nature; nature, because it is an immediate being of the soul; a second nature, because it is an immediacy created by the soul, impressing and moulding the corporeality which enters into the modes of feeling as such and into the representations and volitions so far as they have taken corporeal form.

In habit the human being's mode of existence is “natural,” and for that reason not free; but still free, so far as the merely natural phase of feeling is by habit reduced to a mere being of his, and he is no longer involuntarily attracted or repelled by it, and so no longer interested, occupied, or dependent in regard to it. The want of freedom in habit is partly merely formal, as habit merely attaches to the being of the soul; partly only relative, so far as it strictly speaking arises only in the case of bad habits, or so far as a habit is opposed by another purpose: whereas the habit of right and goodness is an embodiment of liberty. The main point about Habit is that by its means man gets emancipated from the feelings, even in being affected by them.

Georg W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Volume III of The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1893)

Slavoj Zizek, Madness and Habit in German Idealism (2009)

The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the only way to account for the emergence of the distinction between the "inside" and "outside" constitutive of a living organism is to posit a kind of self-reflexive reversal by means of which - to put it in Hegelese - the One of an organism as a Whole retroactively "posits" as its result, as that which it dominates and regulates, the set of its own causes (i.e., the very multiple process out of which it emerged). In this way - and only in this way - an organism is no longer limited by external conditions, but is fundamentally self-limited - again, as Hegel would have articulated it, life emerges when the external limitation (of an entity by its environs) turns into self-limitation. This brings us back to the problem of infinity: for Hegel, true infinity does not stand for limitless expansion, but for active self-limitation (self-determination) in contrast to being-determined-by-the-other. In this precise sense, life (even at its most elementary: as a living cell) is the basic form of true infinity, since it already involves the minimal loop by means of which a process is no longer simply determined by the Outside of its environs, but is itself able to (over)determine the mode of this determination and thus "posits its presuppositions." Infinity acquires its first actual existence the moment a cell's membrane starts to functions as a self-boundary.

Back to habits: because of the virtual status of habits, to adopt a (new) habit is not simply to change an actual property of the subject; rather, it involves a kind of reflexive change, a change of the subject’s disposition which determines his reaction to changes, i.e., a change in the very mode of changes to which the subject is submitted: "Habit does not simply introduce mutability into something that would otherwise continue without changing; it suggests change within a disposition, within its potentiality, within the internal character of that in which the change occurs, which does not change." This is what Hegel means by self-differentiation as the "sublation" of externally imposed changes into self-changes, of external into internal difference - only organic bodies self-differentiate themselves: an organic body maintains its unity by internalizing an externally imposed change into habit to deal with future such changes.

Slavoj Zizek, Madness and Habit in German Idealism (2009)

The ‘nothing’ is the void of the subject itself, so that the absence of an ultimate reference means that absence itself is the ultimate reference, and this absence is the subject itself.

Slavoj Zizek, Madness and Habit in German Idealism (2009)