Genuine boredom has not yet arrived if we are merely bored with this book or that movie, with this job or that idle moment. Genuine boredom occurs when one's whole world is boring. Then abysmal boredom, like a muffling fog, drifts where it will in the depths of our openness, sucking everything and everyone, and ourselves along with them, into a numbing sameness. -- Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?
The thought of Brice Parain is disconcerting first of all because it is centered upon some infinitely simple truths and because, almost immediately, even before they are told to us, it offers an account of the impossibility of stating them in a direct way: he must follow the path of error to the end where we completely lost these truths.
The first [of these simple truths] is that man does not exist without
language because language has created him; the second is that in order
to fulfill his purpose or simply to maintain his current state, he must
perform his acts in solidarity with his speech; finally, the third is
that as soon as he transgresses the speech "of his mouth" he destroys
his existence and abandons his human specificity....Parain insists that
individual consciousness is animated by its subjection to the movement
of language and is thereby made only to follow the universal movement
of consciousness." -- Pierre Klossowski, "Language, Silence, and
Communism," in Such a Deathly Desire
I know the truth -- give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look -- it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?
The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.
Or...that all philosophy today begins in gossip:
"There is something further we must reflect upon. Must the killing by the cave-prisoners necessarily result, as it did with Socrates' cup of hemlock, in a physical death? Is this not also symbolic? Is the process of physical death the hard thing? Not rather the actual (actual, I say) constant presence of death before one during existence? And again, not just death in the physical sense of dying, but the forfeiture and rendering powerless of one's own essence? No philosopher has been able to avoid the fate of this death in the cave.
"That the philosopher is delivered over to death in the cave means that philosophy is powerless within the region of prevailing self-evidences. Only in so far as these themselves change can philosophy have its say. Today, in the event that philosophers did exist, this fate would be more threatening than ever. The poisoning would be far more poisonous, because more concealed and devious. The poisoning would happen not through visible external damage, not through attack and struggle such that the possibility of real resistance would remain, the possibility of measuring strength, thus of liberation and heightening of power. The poisoning would happen by becoming interested in the cave-philosophers, such that everyone says to one another that these philosophers must be read, such that one hands out prizes and honours within the cave, such that one gradually creates a newspaper and magazine fame for the philosopher, and admires him.
"Today, the poisoning would consist in the philosopher being pushed into the circle of those who are interesting and about whom one writes and gossips, those in whom, within a few years, certainly no one will any longer be interested. For one can interest oneself only in something new, and only as long as others do so too. The philosopher would in this way be quietly killed, made harmless and unthreatening. While still alive he would die his own death in the cave.
"And he must put up with this. He would misunderstand himself and his task were he to withdraw from the cave. Being-free, being a liberator, is to act together in history with those to whom one belongs in one's nature. He must remain in the cave with the prisoners, and with those who count down there as philosophers. Neither may he withdraw into an ironic superiority, for in this way he would still participate in his own poisoning. Only by becoming master of such ironic superiority would he be able to die a genuine death in the cave.
"Plato attained this high level of existence in his old age. Kant bore something of this highest freedom in himself. Poison and weapons for death are indeed ready today. But the philosopher is lacking, because today there can at best be more or less good sophists, who at best prepare the way for the philosopher who will come." -- Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth
