No More Learning

42 With a clarity that would be an asset to an analytic philosophy of sport, Wurtz declares at the training-theoretically decisive point, referring to the disabled person:
His will thus gives his life an inner gradient if he compares his earlier state of powerlessness with the abilities he has triumphantly acquired, and measures the success he has already achieved against the goal of his regimen. His striving gains a forward drive. Overcoming the earlier sense of powerlessness is simultaneously an ethical victory [. . . J. The carefully mediating character of the education must not be burdened with a fear of excessive strain. [. . . JWe therefore demand a life-affirm- ing attitude in those who educate the handless [. . . ]. 43
There cannot be many statements in recent literature that encapsulate the post-metaphysical transformation of vertical tension - that is, of the inherent awareness of vital asymmetry - so explicitly. For this
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ONL Y CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
gain in explication one has to take a few heroistic phrases in one's stride; in their content, however, they are simply the mask of the athletic renaissance. One can, incidentally, also observe the de-heroi- zation of the trainer's role in the sporting history of the twentieth century. There is, however, a counter-movement in the field of sport - analogous to the developments in the religious field - that could be called the renouveau athletique: here the extreme athlete is raised aloft as the spiritually empty counterpart of the saint.
The philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century ignored the contributions of special education - but nonetheless arrived at related observations from similar conceptual points of departure. With its own means, the anthropology of the ordinary person forged a path to an even more general disability awareness than the special needs educators could have dreamt of - its practical conclusions, however, were diametrically opposed to those of heroic cripple didactics. Its maxim: do not break the crutches under any circumstances! One can already hear this warning in Viennese psychoanalysis, when Freud describes man as a 'prosthetic God' who could not survive without the support of civilizatory provisions for existence. With his Oedipus legend, one might add, Freud managed to incorporate the male half of humanity into the family of clubfeet while diagnosing the female half with genital crippledom in the form of inborn penislessness. One hears the warning call even more loudly in Arnold Gehlen's doctrine of supportive institutions, which states that the delusional boundless- ness of unleashed subjectivity can only be saved from itself through a protective framework of transpersonal forms. Here the crutches reappear as the institutions, and their significance becomes all the greater because the anarchists of the twentieth century - on the left and the right - had called rather too successfully for their destruction. Gehlen was extremely concerned when he witnessed the emergence of a new Without movement among the young people of the West in the 1960s. In his anthropological justification of institutions one finds a culmination of the anti-Rousseauism of the twentieth century, con- densed in the warning that human beings always have much more to lose than their chains. He asks whether all political culture does not begin with the distinction between chains and crutches. This advoca- tion of existence with compulsory crutches reaches its most dramatic form in the statements of biological palaeoanthropology in the work of Louis Bolk and Adolf Portmann: according to them, Homo sapiens is constitutively a cripple of premature birth, a creature condemned to eternal immaturity that, because of this condition (which biologists
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THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
retention IS I n incubators
These highly generalized statements of modern anthropology present a functional explication of the holistic pathos that was char- acteristic of older cultures - those cultures that insisted intransigently on the priority of tradition and custom (the established incubator) over the whims of individuals eager for innovation. Every orthodoxy, whether it draws its validity from religion or from being venerable and ancient, is a system for preventing mutations of the structures that ensure stability. In this sense, the ancientness of the ancients is self-validating. While a tradition, as long as it appears old enough, provides evidence of its viability and its compatibility with other stock elements, a new idea and its subjective deviation must first prove their repeatability - assuming they are interested in doing so. In the anti- mutation traditionalist systems, however, the presupposition is that even permitting the attempt to prove the usability of something new is never worthwhile. Periods with a greater openness for innovation, on the other hand, rely on the observation that even after far-reaching moral revaluations and technical innovations, a sufficient number of stabilizations are still possible in order to redirect our modus vivendi towards a more pleasant state. But the innovations must always be assessed in terms of their agreement with the need for stability in care systems for premature birth cripples (commonly known as cultures).
Wherever humans appear, their crippledom has preceded them: this insight was the chorus of philosophical discussions on the human being in the previous century, regardless of whether, as in psycho- analysis, one speaks of humans as cripples of helplessness who can only hobble towards their goals;45 or, like Bolk and Gehlen, views them as neotenic cripples whose chronic immaturity can only be balanced out by rigid cultural capsules; or, like Plessner, as eccen- tric cripples chronically standing beside themselves and observing their lives; or, like Sartre and Blumenberg, as visibility cripples who must spend their lives coming to terms with the disadvantage of being seen.
Beyond these forms of constitutive crippledom, historically acquired variants also come into view - most of all, if one believes Edmund Husserl, among modern Europeans. In their effects to achieve the intellectual conquest of reality, they have fallen into two dangerously misguided positions of enormous dimensions - in almost pathograph- ical formulations, he calls them physicalist objectivism and transcen- dental subjectivism. 46 Both are modes of thinking being-in-the-world that amount to comprehensive misreadings of the world and reality.
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ONL Y CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE
constitutes smce
one reaches an ironic conclusion: to laboriously acquired mis- conditionings, we chronically confuse the first world with the second world of physicists, philosophers and psychologists. The ageing Husserl had adopted this precarious view of the civilized European as a cripple of world-misreading from his renegade pupil Heidegger, for whom man begins in most cases as a cripple of inauthenticity - and ends in the same state, unless he is lucky enough to happen upon a trainer who will put his orthopaedic data of existence in order. Among the acquired disabilities, the neo-phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz recently uncovered a new one, habitual irony: it robs the ironist of the ability to be fulfilled in shared situations. Here the focus of investigation shifts to a crippledom of distance, emerging from an impairment of the capacity for participation through the compulsion to chronic elegance. And indeed, the role of irony in the history of reality-misreadings has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged.
The implications of these observations are as diverse as the diag- noses themselves. They have one thing in common, however: if humans are cripples, without exception and in different ways, then each one of them, in their own particular way, has good reason to understand their existence as an incentive for corrective exercises.
We recall that in Wurtz's schema of crippledoms, short persons were classified as 'growth cripples'. In later times, the same people were termed 'disabled in terms of growth'. When it even became offensive to speak of 'disability', the small became those who have different abilities in terms of their format. In the 1980s, politically correct Americans found the most up-to-date name for people who often have to look upwards: 'vertically challenged people'. This turn of phrase cannot be admired enough. It constitutes a terminological creation that outgrew its inventors without their even noticing what they had achieved. We can laugh at this formulation twice: once at the correct preciousness of its authors and once at ourselves. We have every right and reason to laugh, for we have an absolute majority in the assembly of those who are challenged by verticality. The formula has been valid since we began to practise learning to live - and, as I am seeking to show, one can neither not practise nor not learn to live. Even being a poor student must first be learned.
In short, people had to speak about the handicapped, the differ- ently constituted, to stumble on a phrase that expresses the general constitution of beings under vertical tension. 'You must change your life! ' means, as we saw in Rilke's torso poem: you must pay attention
59
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mner
yOU! It is not walking upright that it
is rather the incipient awareness of the inner gradient that causes humans to do so.
60
LAST HUNGER ART Kafka's Artistes
The inclination of anthropologists to seek the truth about Homo sapiens among the handicapped, typical of our time, is mirrored widely in the literature of modernity. Our reference to the armless violinist Unthan demonstrates that in certain cases, it is only one step from the existentialism of the handicapped to that of acrobats. It now remains to show why the transition from the condition of the disa- bled to acrobatism was not merely an idiosyncrasy among marginal figures, as Unthan developed in reaction to his innate stimulus, or as evident in Hugo Ball, author of the biographies of Christian ascet- ics, when he attempted to transcend the spiritual deformations of the World War era by 'fleeing from the time'. This revolt against the century brought him into the company of the hermits who had fled their own time 1500 years earlier.
In the following I shall discuss, initially using a literary model and later in a psychological and sociological context, how acrobatism became an increasingly far-reaching aspect of modern reflection on the human condition: this occurred when, following the trail of the ubiquitous Nietzsche, peopled discovered in man the unfixed, unleashed animal that is condemned to perform tricks. This shift of view to the acrobat brought to light a further aspect of the epochal turn that I would describe as a trend towards the de-spiritualization of asceticisms. We have adopted Nietzsche's identification of the ascetological twilight, and assured ourselves that the desirable decline of repressive ascetic ideals by no means occasions the disappear- ance of the positive practising life. It may only be the twilight of the ascetics, as which understand the turn of the twentieth century, that reveals - retrospectively and very differently illuminated - the three- thousand-year empire of metaphysically motivated asceticisms in its
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THE PRACTISING
IS to support
humans will find ascetics, and whoever observes "''''-'-'''. . '
acrobats.
To substantialize this suspicion, whose earliest formulations go
back to the morality-archaeological digs of the other Schliemann, I would like to call Kafka as a witness of the time. Considering his research approach, it is natural to suppose that he had already absorbed the impulse coming from Nietzsche early in life, and internalized it to such a degree that he forgot the origin of his inter- rogations - which is why Kafka's work contains virtually no explicit references to the author of The Genealogy of Morals. He further developed the impulses in the direction of a progressive lowering of the heroic tone, while simultaneously reinforcing the awareness of the universal ascetic and acrobatic dimension of human existence.
To mark the moment at which Nietzsche passed the baton on to Kafka, I point to the well-known tightrope episode in the sixth part of the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Zarathustra takes the acrobat as his first pupil after the latter's ultimately fatal fall - or, if not as his pupil, then at least his first kindred spirit among the people of the plains. He consoles the dying man by enlightening him as to why he has nothing more to fear - no devil will come for him to sour his life after death. Upon this, the acrobat gratefully replies that merely losing his life is no great loss:
'I am not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by being dealt blows and meagre morsels. '47
This statement constitutes the first confession of acrobatic existential- ism. The minimalistic assertion is tied inseparably to Zarathustra's response, which holds up a noble mirror to the victim of this accident:
'Not so,' said Zarathustra. 'You have made danger your calling: there is nothing in that to despise. Now your calling has brought you down: therefore will I bury you with my own hands. '48
The point of this dialogue cannot be missed. It has the meaning of a primal scene, as it describes the constitution of a new type of communio: no longer a people of God, but travelling people; not a community of saints, but one of acrobats; not paying contributors to an insured society, but members of an organization of those living dangerously. The animating element of this - for the time being - invisible church is the pneuma of affirmed danger. It is no coincidence that the acrobat who has fallen from his tightrope is the first to move towards Zarathustra's doctrine. In the final moment of his life, the
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new understood as no one has before - as the being that, even if it was scarcely more than
an animal that was taught to dance, had made danger its profession. After this prologue to the acrobat's novel, it was Kafka who wrote the next chapter. In his case, the dawn of the acrobats is already several degrees brighter and clearer, which is why one can make out the scenery in something close to daylight. There is no need to explain in detail here that Kafka was an advocate of gymnastic exercises, veg- etarian diets and ideologies of hygiene that were typical of the time. 49 In the collection of statements he excerpted from his octavo note- books and arranged in a numbered list (later edited and published by Max Brod under the title Betrachtungen uher Sunde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg [Observations on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the
True Path]), the first entry reads:
The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope. 50
No one would claim that this note is self-explanatory. The two sen- tences become transparent if one reads them as a continuation of the scene opened by Nietzsche - albeit in a direction that markedly deviates from Nietzsche's heroic and elevating intentions. The 'true path' is still connected to the rope, but it is shifted from a high alti- tude almost to the ground. It serves less as a device for acrobats to demonstrate their sureness of step than as a trap to trip them up. This seems to convey the message that the task of finding the true path is difficult enough already for one not to have to climb high in order to live dangerously. The rope is no longer meant to test the ability to keep your balance on the slimmest foundation; its function is more to prove that if you are too sure of yourself, you will fall if you simply walk forwards. Existence as such is an acrobatic achievement, and no one can say with certainty what training provides the necessary skills to master this discipline. Hence the acrobat no longer knows what exercises keep him from falling - aside from constant vigilance. This fading level of artistedom by no means indicates a loss of this phenomenon's significance; on the contrary, it reveals how aspects of the artiste spread to affect all aspects of life. The great subject of the arts and philosophies of the twentieth century - the discovery of the ordinary - draws its energy from the dawn of the acrobats, which ensues in parallel with it. It is only because the esotericism of our time exposes the equivalence of ordinariness and acrobatics that its investigations produce non-trivial results.
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note can assigned to
opments that I call the de-spiritualization of asceticisms. It shows
that the author is part of the great unscrewing of the moderns from a system of religiously coded vertical tensions that had been in force for millennia. Countless people were trained as acrobats of the world above in this era, practised in the art of crossing the abyss of the 'sensual world' [Sinnenwelt] with the balancing pole of asceticism. In their time, the rope represented the transition from immanence to transcendence. What Kafka and Nietzsche have in common is the intuition that the disappearance of the world above leaves behind the fastened rope. The reason for this would be completely opaque if one could not demonstrate a deeper raison d'etre for the existence of ropes, a rationale that could be separated from their function as a bridge to the world above. There is in fact such an explanation: for both authors, the rope stands for the realization that acrobatism, compared to the usual religious forms of 'crossing over', is the more resistant phenomenon. Nietzsche's reference to 'one of the broadest and longest facts that exist' can be transferred to it. The shift of focus from asceticism to acrobatics raises a universe of phenomena from the background that effortlessly encompasses the greatest oppositions in the spectrum from wealth of spirit to physical strength. Here chari- oteers and scholars, wrestlers and church fathers, archers and rhap- sodists come together, united by shared experiences on the way to the impossible. The world ethos is formulated at a council of acrobats.
The rope can only function as a metaphor for acrobatism if one imagines it stretched out; one must therefore pay attention to the sources of tension, its anchors and its modalities of power transfer. As long as the rope's tension was produced with metaphysical intentions, one had to suppose the existence of a pull from the world above to explain its particular form of intensity. Ordinary existence came into contact with this pull from above through the ubiquitous example of the saints, who, owing to efforts that people liked to term superhu- man, were occasionally permitted to approach the impossible. We must not forget that superhomo is an arch-Christian word in which the high Middle Ages uttered its most intense concern - it was first used for the French king St Louis IX in the late thirteenth century! The exhaustion of such an otherworldly pole becomes most appar- ent in the fact that ever fewer people strive to walk the tightrope. In keeping with an egalitarian zeitgeist of neighbourly ethics, one is now content with an amateurish, at best floor-gymnastic interpretation of Christianity. Even a holy hysteric like Padre Pia had so little faith in the transcendent origin of his wounds that, it is alleged, he yielded to
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the to about cor- rosive acids renew them as required.
Since the nineteenth century, the assembly of an alternative genera- tor for the build-up of high existential tension has been on the agenda. In truth, this generator is set up by demonstrating the existence of an equivalent dynamics in the interior of the existence that understands itself correctly. We must once again invoke the name of Nietzsche, for it was he who succeeded in revealing an a priori asymmetry with a strong pull between being able and being more able, wanting and wanting more, and between being and being more - as well as uncov- ering the aversive or bionegative tendencies that not infrequently aim, under the pretext of humility, for the wanting of not-wanting and of always-wanting-to-be-Iess. Talk of the will to power and of life as constant self-overcoming, by now all too commonplace, provides the formulas for the inherent differential energetics of the existence that works on itself. As hard as the circulating ideologies of relaxation might try to conceal these circumstances, the modern protagonists in the search for the 'true path' have not tired of drawing our atten- tion to the elementary facts of the life demanded from above, as they were before being covered up by trivial moralities, humane chum- miness and wellness programmes. That Nietzsche presented them in heroistic codings, while Kafka favoured the lowly and paradoxical figures, does not change the fact that the two were working towards the same cause. Whether Zarathustra says in his first speech that 'man is a rope, stretched between beast and Obermensch' or Kafka has the rope set up close to the ground as a tripwire for the self-righteous - it is neither the same rope nor the same trick in both cases, but the ropes come from the same factory, which has been making equipment for acrobats since time immemorial. The technical observation that Nietzsche tended towards an acrobatics of strength and wealth while Kafka preferred that of weakness and lack does not require further exposition here. This difference could only be discussed within a general theory of good and bad habits and a consideration of the sym- metries between strengthening and weakening forms of training.
Kafka objectified his intuitions about the meaning of acrobatics and asceticism in three tales that have become classics: 'A Report to an Academy' (1917, first published in the journal Der Jude, edited by Martin Buber), 'First Sorrow' (1922, first published in the journal Genius) and 'A Hunger Artist' (1923, first published in Die Neue Rundschau) .
The first of these contains the autobiography of an ape that became human by means of imitation. What Kafka presents is no less than
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THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
a new depiction process perspective
an animaL The motif this transformation is found not in the usual combination of evolutionary adaptations and cultural innovations. Instead, it results from a fatal facticity: the circumstance that the animal-catchers of the Hagenbeck Circus capture the ape in Africa and abduct it to the world of humans. The implied question is not made explicit: why do humans, at the present end of their develop- ment, create both zoos and circuses? Presumably because both places confirm the vague feeling that they could learn something there about their own being and becoming.
The ape already realizes aboard the ship which takes it back to Europe that, as far as its future fate is concerned, the choice between the zoo and vaudeville leaves only the latter as a tolerable option. Only there can it see a chance to preserve some remainder, however small, of its legacy. This legacy lives on within it as the feeling that there must always be some way out for an ape - ways out are the animal raw material for what humans pompously call 'freedom'. In addition, the ape arrives in the human world with its natural mobility impaired, marked by two gunshots fired during its capture - one at the cheek, leaving a scar that causes its captors to call it 'Red Peter', and one below the hip, turning it into a cripple and allowing it to walk only with a slight limp. Hans Wurtz should have included Red Peter alongside Lord Byron and Joseph Goebbels in the class of 'deformity cripples', the limping and misshapen, and partiy also next to Unthan, the armless fiddler, who states at one point in his memoirs that he started limping without any organic cause for a time, but managed to give up this incorrect posture again through intensive training.
Because the vaudeville path is the only one still viable, the ape's humanization leads directly to the acrobatic trail. The first trick Red Peter learns - unaware that it marks the beginning of his self-training - is the handshake, the gesture with which humans communicate to their kind that they respect them as equals. While social philosophers of Kojeve's type attribute humanization to the duel, in which the opponents risk their life on the basis of a feeling that some inad- equately call boisterousness, Kafka's acrobatic anthropology con- tents itself with the handshake, which renders the duel superfluous: 'a handshake betokens frankness'. 52 This gesture is the realization of the first ethics - an ape had to perform it so that the provenance of the ethical from conditioning would become apparent, in this case a conditioning towards similarity. Even before the handshake, Red Peter had acquired a mental attitude that would provide the founda- tion for all further learning - the forced peace of mind based on the
66
LAST
attempting escape worsen its
Having understood that becoming a member mankind is the only way out for the displaced animal, it can do anything it wants - except breaking the crutches on which it limps towards its goal. Between the freedom of apes and humanization lies a spontaneous stoicism that keeps candidates from 'desperate acts', as Red Peter puts it.
The next tricks develop further what was implicit in the first: Red Peter learns to spit in people's faces for fun, and to be good-naturedly amused when they reciprocate. This is followed by pipe-smoking, and finally by dealing with bottles of liquor, which present the first major challenge for its old nature. The implication of these two lessons is clear: humans cannot become what they are meant to represent in their sphere without stimulants and narcotics. From that point on, Red Peter gets through a series of teachers on his way to the heights of vaudeville aptitude - including one who is so confused by his deal- ings with his pupil that he has to be admitted to an asylum. In the end, 'with an effort which up till now has never been repeated', he manages to reach 'the cultural level of an average European',53 which means nothing in one sense, but something significant in another sense, as it opens a way out from the cage, 'the way of humanity'. 54 Summing up, the humanized ape places value on noting that his account is a neutral reproduction of genuine events: 'I am only making a report. To you also, honoured Members of the Academy, I have only made a report. '55
At the next stage of Kafka's vaudeville-existentialist investigations, the human personnel steps into the foreground. In the short tale 'First Sorrow', which Kafka described as a 'revolting little story' in a letter to Kurt Wolff, he tells of a trapeze artist who has become accustomed to remaining up inside the circus dome instead of descending after his performances. He settles in under the tent roof, forcing those around him to look after him up there. Having grown accustomed to an existence far above the ground, he finds moving between the cities in which the circus makes its guest appearances increasingly torturous, such that his impresario does his best to make the shifts easier for him. In spite of this, his suffering becomes ever greater. He can only survive the inescapable travels in the fastest of cars or by hanging from the luggage racks of train compartments. One day, he surprises his impresario with the announcement that he requires a second trapeze at all costs - in tears, he asks himself how he could ever have made do with a single bar. He then falls asleep, and the impresario discovers the first wrinkles in the sleeper's face.
This tale presents fundamental statements of vaudeville 67
THE PLANET OF PRACTISING
into a very
the internal dynamics artiste's existence, starting with the
observation that the artiste increasingly loses touch with the world on the ground. By wanting to settle exclusively in the sphere in which he performs his tricks, he ends his relationship with the rest of the world and withdraws to his precarious height. Such lines read like an earnest parody of the idea of anachoresis, the religiously motivated renunciation of the profane world. Kafka's trapeze artist thus does away with the tension that accompanies a double life as 'artist and citizen', as described in the temporally and conceptually close state- ments of Gottfried Benn and Thomas Mann: he opts for the complete absorption of his existence by the one. His demand for the second trapeze indicates the innate tendency in all radical artistry towards a constant raising of its standards. The urge to go further is as inherent in art as the will to transcend reality in religious asceticism: perfection is not enough. Nothing less than the impossible is satisfactory.
We here encounter a further mental module56 seldom missing from the composition of religious systems: it encompasses the inner operations that present the impossible as achievable - in fact, they assert that it has already been accomplished. Wherever they are carried out, the boundary between the possible and the impossible vanishes. This third building block enables the rehearsal of a hubristic conclusion: the impossibility of x proves that it is possible. In a pecu- liar fashion, the artiste who demands a second bar is repeating the credo quia absurdum with which Tertullian formalized the new syl- logism in the third century. 57 Needless to say, this constitutes the true surrealistic religious module. Its execution involves an inner operation that Coleridge - in an aesthetic context - termed a 'willing suspension of disbelief'. 58 With this, the believer ruptures the system of empirical plausibility and enters the sphere of the actually existing impossible. Whoever trains this figure intensively can attain the mobility in dealing with the unbelievable that is typical among artistes.
Kafka makes his decisive discovery in the form of an implicit clue. He uncovers the fact that there is no artistry whose one-sidedly absorbing training duties do not lead to an unmarked second training. While the first is based on toughening exercises, the second amounts to a course of un-toughening, and simultaneously moulds the artiste on the rope into a virtuoso of the inability to live. That he must be taken no less seriously in this state than in his first function is shown by the impresario's behaviour: he meets his charge's needs in both respects, on the one hand with new apparatus for his high-altitude performance, and on the other hand with all the life-facilitating
68
concern
m moments transition. We now equipment too has the
training devices, devices used by the acrobat to train his increasing remoteness from life. The impresario would have had every reason to be concerned about this second movement towards the limits of possibility. At the same time, however, it proves the artiste's radical artistry - an artiste who remained suited to life would only reveal that he had time for dealing with non-art alongside his art, which would automatically eliminate him from the ranks of the great. Kafka can therefore be considered the inspirer of a negative theory of training.
The author's most significant impulses are to be found in the short tale 'A Hunger Artist'. Here, he augments his observations on the existence of artistes with a statement about their future fate. The opening sentence already makes the tendency clear: 'During these last decades the interest in hunger artists has markedly diminished. '59 The contemporary audience, we are told, no longer derives much amuse- ment from the performances of such virtuosos, while observers were spellbound in earlier times. In the heyday of the art, there were sub- scribers who would sit in front of the cage for days - in fact, the atten- tion of the whole town was fixed on the ascetic, and 'from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted'. 60 While demonstrating his art, the faster wore a black top that greatly emphasized his ribs. He was kept in a cage lined with straw in order to guarantee the full monitoring of his activities. Wardens ensured the strict observance of the fasting rules, preventing him from eating anything in secret. He would never have resorted to dishonest means, however. Occasionally he even had an opulent breakfast served for the guards, paid for out of his own pocket, as a token of his gratitude for their services. Nonetheless, suspicion towards his art was a constant companion.
In better times, hunger performances could be displayed as a self- sufficient sensation in the world's largest venues. The impresario set a limit of forty days for each fasting period - not for the sake of any biblical analogy, but because experience had shown that the audi- ence's interest in large cities could only be held for that long, and began to dwindle if the event continued. The hunger artist himself was always dissatisfied with this temporal restriction, as he felt an urge to prove that he could even outdo himself with 'a performance beyond human imagination'. 61 When he collapsed after his forty-day performance it was by no means because he was exhausted from fasting, as his impresario, confusing cause and effect, claimed, but rather out of frustration that he had been prevented yet again from overstepping the boundary of what was thought possible.
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THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
in art at start the tale began, artist, after some vain attempts to revive the dying genre, decided to dismiss his impresario and join a large circus; here, he knew, he would by no means be a prestigious performer, only a marginal curiosity. His cage was set up near the stalls for the circus animals, so that the visitors who came in throngs to see the animals in the intervals would cast a passing glance at the emaciated ascetic.
He had to face the facts, even the bitterest one: he was now no more than 'an impediment on the way to the menagerie'. 62 True, he could now fast for as long as he had always wanted, because he remained unobserved and therefore unrestrained, but his heart was heavy, for 'he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward'. 63 Concealed among his straw, he set records that went
unnoticed.
When he felt his death growing near, the hunger artist made his
artistic confession to the warden who had found him by chance curled up in the straw:
'I always wanted you to admire my fasting,' said the hunger artist. 'We do admire it,' said the overseer, affably. 'But you shouldn't admire it,' said the hunger artist. 'Well then we don't admire it,' said the overseer, 'but why shouldn't we admire it? ' 'Because I have to fast, I can't help it,' said the hunger artist. 'What a fellow you are,' said the overseer, 'and why can't you help it? ' 'Because [. . . ] I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else. '64
After his death, the cage was given to a young panther that leapt about splendidly. The narrator conveys the essence of its existence by telling us that 'it lacked for nothing'.
I do not intend to comment on this oft-interpreted masterpiece from an artistic perspective. In our context, an anartistic reading that takes the text as an intellectual-historical document is sufficient. What is important is to take Kafka's reflection further and arrive at a general ascetological model. What began as a vaudeville philosophy can now be developed into an explication of classical asceticisms. This is due to the choice of discipline: fasting. It is not an artistic discipline like any other; it is the metaphysical asceticism par excellence. From time immemorial it has been the exercise by which, if it succeeds, the ordi- nary human who is subject to hunger learns - or observes in others - how one can beat nature at its own game. The fasting of ascetics is the skilled form of the lack that is otherwise always experienced pas- sively and involuntarily. 65 This triumph over need is only accessible to
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LAST HUNGER ART
are a master ascetics say hunger God or enlightenment66 must other desire if it is to be sated, they are presupposing a hierarchy priva- tions. The pious language game takes up the possibility of doubling oral abstinence in order to counter profane hunger with a sacred one. In truth, sacred hunger is not a longing to be filled, but rather the search for a homeostasis for which 'satisfaction of hunger' is only a spiritual-rhetorically established metaphor. 67
The decisive aspect of Kafka's asceticism parable is the artiste's admission that he did not deserve admiration, because his fasting was simply a consequence of his innermost inclination - or rather disinclination: all he was doing was obeying his aversion to the imposition of having to consume the food that was available. The statement 'But you shouldn't admire it' is the most spiritual European pronouncement during the last century; we have yet to hear the analogous injunction: you should not sanctify it. What Nietzsche generally described as the negativism of the vitally handicapped now returns specifically as an aversion to nutrition. Hence Kafka's artiste never overcomes himself; he follows an aversion that works for him, and which he only needs to exaggerate. In the final analysis, the most extreme artistedom turns out to be a question of taste. 'I do not like the taste of anything' - thus the verdict pronounced at the Final Judgement on what existence has to offer. The rejection of nourishment goes even further than the message of 'don't touch me' conveyed by Jesus to Mary of Magdalene in John 20:17; it gesturally communicates 'don't enter me' or 'don't stuff me full'. It moves from the prohibition of contact to the refusal of metabolic exchange, as if any collaboration with the absorptive tendencies of one's own body were a depraved risk.
What makes Kafka's experiment meaningful is the fact that he works consistently under the 'God is dead' premise. This enables hunger art to reveal what remains of metaphysical desire when its transcendent goal is eliminated. What transpires is a form of beheaded asceticism in which the supposed tensile strain from above proves to be an aversive tension from within; then the torso is every- thing. Kafka experiments with leaving out religion - to test out a final religion of leaving out everything that previously characterized it: what remains are the artiste's exercises. The hunger artist is therefore speaking truthfully when he asks not to be admired. The withdrawal of the public's interest in his performances comes at exactly the right moment - as if the crowd, without knowing, were following the inspirations of a zeitgeist that wants to speak the final word on the
71
THE
and farmers' republics or followers of a social market economy. What was once the most spiritual of all asceticisms is now, in truth, no more
than 'an impediment on the way to the menagerie'.
Ten years after the publication of 'A Hunger Artist', Joseph Stalin put an end to hunger art by other means when, during the winter of 1932-3, he sent innumerable Ukrainian farmers - counts vary between 3. 5 and 8 million - to their death through a hunger block- ade; they too were untimely, impediments on the way to abundance. 68
Even Stalin was not able to achieve the profanation of hunger com- pletely. The hunger artist actually existed in his time - not in Prague but in Paris, a few years after Kafka's death; not as a man in a black top with bulging ribs, but as a very skinny young woman in blue stockings. She too was an artiste in the field of weight loss for the sake of the entirely other: the greatest thinker of anti-gravitation in the twentieth century, born in 1909, an anarchist of Jewish descent, converted to Catholicism, an insider on all magic mountains of worldlessness and simultaneously a searcher for a rooting in authen- tic community, resistance fighter and defiance existentialist, who wanted to starve alongside the workers in order to ennoble her lack of appetite and humble her nobility. Simone Weil managed to die in British exile at the age of thirty-four of a twofold cause: tuberculosis and voluntary starvation.
72
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PARISIAN BUDDHISM
Cioran's Exercises
The last figure I wish to present in these introductory reflections, the Romanian aphorist Emile M. Cioran, who was born in 1911 and lived in Paris from 1937 to 1995, is likewise part of the great turn that is at issue here. He is an important informant for us, because one can see in his work how the informalization of asceticism progresses without a loss of vertical tension. In his own way, Cioran too is a hunger artist: a man who fasts metaphorically by abstaining from solid food for his identity. He too does not overcome himself, rather- like Kafka's protagonist - following his strongest inclination, namely disgust at the full self. As a metaphorical faster, all he ever does is to show that refusal is the foundation of the great, demonstrating the unfolding of scepticism from a reservation of judgement to a reserva- tion about the temptation to exist.
To approach the phenomenon of Cioran, it is best to take two statements by Nietzsche as a guideline:
Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises. 69 Moral: what sensible man nowadays writes one honest word about
himself? He must already belong to the Order of Holy Foolhardiness. 7o
The latter remark refers to the almost inevitably displeasing nature of all detailed biographies of great men. Even more, it describes the psychological and moral improbability of an honest self-portrayal. At the same time, it names the one condition that would make an exception possible; one could, in fact, view Cioran as the prior of the prospective order imagined by Nietzsche. His holy foolhardiness stems from a gesture that Nietzsche considered the most improbable and least desirable: a rejection of the norms of discretion and tact,
73
THE PLANET THE
to say UVUHHi".
this position once in own work, when he practised 'cynidsm' necessary for an honest self-portrayal in the 'physiological' pas- sages of Ecce Homo - immediately labelling this gesture as 'world- historical' to compensate for the feeling of embarrassment through the magnitude of the matter. The result was more like baroque self- praise than any indiscretion towards himself, however - assuming that self-praise was not a deeper form of exposure on this occasion. The rest of the time, Nietzsche remained a withdrawn prophet who only perceived the disinhibitions he foresaw through the crack of a door.
Whoever, like Cioran, dated themselves after Nietzsche was con- demned to go further. The young Romanian followed Nietzsche's lead not only by heading the Order of Holy Foolhardiness, along with other self-exposers such as Michel Leiris and Jean-Paul Sartre; he also realized the programme of basing the final possibility of self-respect on contempt for oneself. He was able to do this because, despite the apparently unusual nature of his intention, he had the zeitgeist on his side. The epochal turn towards making the latent explicit took hold of him, and led him to commit thoughts to paper that no author would have dared formulate a few years earlier. In this turn, the 'honest word about himself' postulated yet excluded in practice by Nietzsche became an unprecedented offensive power. Mere honesty becomes a mode of writing for ruthlessness towards oneself. One can no longer be an autobiographer without being an autopathographer - which means publishing one's own medical file. To be honest is to admit what one lacks. Cioran was the first who stepped forward to declare: 'I lack everything - and for that reason, everything is too much for me. '
The nineteenth century had only pushed the genre of the 'honest word' to its limits once, in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, published in 1864. Nietzsche's reaction to this work is well known. Cioran worked for half a century on his notes from the attic, in which he treated his only subject with admirable monotony: how to con- tinue when one lacks everything and everything is too much. Early on, he saw his chance as an author in donning the coat offered by Nietzsche; he had already slipped into it during his Romanian years, and never took it off again. If Nietzsche interpreted metaphysics as a symptom of suffering from the world and an aid to fleeing from it, Cioran accepted this diagnosis without the slightest attempt to formulate an opposing argument. What he rejected was Nietzsche's flight in the opposite direction: the affirmation of the unaffirmable.
74
BUDDHISM
For ~ a
who hangs his flag out of the while the world is as unaccept- able as it always has been. Who would speak of the eternal recur- rence, when existing once already means existing once too often?
In his student years, Cioran had experimented for a time with the revolutionary affirmations typical of the time and drifted about in the circles of Romanian right-wing extremists. He took to the fashionable mysticism of general mobilization and to political vitalism, which was praised as a cure for scepticism and an excessive preoccupation with one's inner life. All this invited him to seek salvation in the phantasm of the 'nation' - a close relative of the spectre now active as 'returning religion'.
Cioran abandoned this position - assuming it ever was one - before long. In time, his increasing disgust with its hysterical excursions into positivity restored his clear-sightedness. When he moved to Paris in 1937 to begin an almost sixty-year period of hermit-like existence there, he was not entirely cured of the temptation to participate in great history, but he did increasingly leave behind the exaltations of his youth. The basic aggressive-depressive mood that had always characterized him was now expressed in other forms. During this phase, Cioran succeeded in gaining a lasting foothold in the genre of the 'honest word about himself'.
The impossibility of killing or killing myself caused me to stray into the field of literature. It is this inability alone that made a writer out of me. 71
Never again would he use the language of commitment he had adopted in his Romanian days with the talent of the pubescent imi- tator. The blind admiration he had once felt for Germany and its brutal shift disappeared with it. 'If there is one illness of which I have been cured, it is that one. '72 For the cured man, part of speaking an honest word about his own illness is the admission that he sought to heal himself by dishonest means. Liberated from this evil once and for all, he devoted himself to the task of inventing the writer Cioran, who would set up a business using the psychopathic capital he had discovered in himself as a youth. The figure that created itself in those days could have come from one of Hugo Ball's novels: it presents a 'jostled human', the vaudeville saint, the philosophical clown who expands despair and the disinclination to make anything of himself into a theatre revue.
The secularization of asceticisms and the informalization of spiritu- ality can be observed in Cioran's 'life's work' in the most concentrated
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THE PLANET THE PRACTISING
In case,
ance was expressed not in an existentialism of
but rather in an endless series of acts of disengagement. The ceuvre of this existentialist of refusal consists of a succession of rejection letters to the temptations to involve oneself and take a stance. Thus his central paradox crystallizes ever more clearly: the position of the man with no position, the role of the protagonist with no role. Cioran had already attained stylistic mastery with the first of his Parisian books, the 1949 text Precis de decomposition - translated into German by Paul Celan in 1953 under the title Lehre vom Zerfall (English title: A Short History of Decay]. Cioran had certainly absorbed the spirit of the Without period to lasting effect; the crutches he wanted to break, however, were those of identity, belonging and consist- ency. Only one basic principle convinced him: to be convinced by nothing. From one book to the next he continued his existential- ist floor gymnastics, whose kinship with the exercises of Kafka's fictional characters is conspicuous. His number was fixed from the start: it is that of the hungover marginal figure who struggles not only through the city, but rather in the universe as a homeless (sans abril, stateless (sans papier) and shameless (sans gene) individual. It is not for nothing that his impressive collection of autobiographical utterances is entitled Cafard [Snitch/Cockroach/Moral Hangover] in the German edition. 73 As a practising parasite, Cioran followed on from the Greek meaning of the word: parasitoi, 'people who sit at a spread table', was what Athenians called guests who were invited to contribute to the company's entertainment. The Romanian emigre in Paris did not find it difficult to fulfil such expectations. In a letter to his parents he wrote: 'Had I been taciturn by nature, I would have starved to death long ago. '74 Elsewhere he states: 'All our humili- ations come from the fact that we cannot bring ourselves to die of hunger. '75
Cioran's aphorisms read like a practically applicable commen- tary on Heidegger's theory of moods, that is to say the atmospheric impregnations of the individual and collective 'thymos' that 'lend' existence an a priori pre-logical tinge. Neither Heidegger nor Cioran went to the trouble of discussing the lending and the lender of moods as extensively as the significance of the phenomenon would demand - presumably because both tended to break off psychological analysis and move on quickly to the sphere of existential statements. In truth, Cioran accepts his aggressive-depressive disposition as the primal atmospheric fact of his existence. He accepts that he is fated to expe- rience the world primarily in dystonic timbres: weariness, boredom,
76
PARISIAN BUDDHISM
thing is the case. He frankly diagnosis
the ideals of metaphysics should be viewed as the intellectual prod- ucts of physical and psychophysical illness. By taking the approach of speaking 'an honest word about himself' further than any author before him, he openly admits that his concern is to offset the 'failed creation'. Thinking does not mean thanking, as Heidegger suggests; it means taking revenge.
It was only with Cioran that the thing Nietzsche had sought to expose was fulfilled as if the phenomenon had existed from time immemorial: a philosophy of pure ressentiment. But what if such a philosophy had only become possible through Nietzsche's influence? Here the German-born existentialism of defiance changes - bypassing the French existentialism of resistance, which Cioran despised as a shallow trend - into an existentialism of incurability with crypto- Romanian and Dacian-Bogomilian shades. This shift only came to a halt at the threshold of Asian inexistentialism. Though Cioran, marked by European vanitas, played throughout his life with a feeling of all-encompassing unreality, he could never quite bring himself to follow Buddhism in its abandonment of the postulation of reality, and with it that of God. The latter, as is well known, serves to guarantee the reality we know through a 'last reality' that is hidden from US. ? 6 Though he felt drawn to Buddhism, Cioran did not want to subscribe to its ontology. He not only loathed the reality of the world, but also intended to take advantage of it; he therefore had to accept the reality of reality, even if it was only sophistically. He neither wanted to save himself nor to let anyone else save him. His entire thought is a com- plaint about the imposition of requiring salvation.
One could pass over all this as a bizarre breeding phenomenon in the biotopes of Parisianism after 1945, were it not for the fact that it brings to light a generally significant tendency that forces a radical change of conditions on the planet of the practising. Cioran, as noted above, is a key witness to the ascetologically far-reaching shift that we are thematizing as the emergence of anthropotechnics. This shift draws our attention to the informalization of spirituality that I said we should grasp as a complementary counter-tendency to the de-spiritualization of asceticisms. Cioran is a new type of practising person whose originality and representative nature are evident in the fact that he practises rejecting every goal-directed way of practising. Methodical exercises, as is well known, are only possible if there is a fixed practice goal in sight. It is precisely the authority of this goal that Cioran contests. Accepting a practice goal would mean believing
77
THE PLANET THE PRACTISING to act
This running forwards to the goal is the fourth module of the 'reli- gious' behavioural complex. 77 The anticipation generally takes place as follows: one looks at someone perfect, from whom one receives, incredulous and credulous at once, the message that one could be the same one day. We will see in later chapters how the use of this inner operation set armies of practising humans in motion over millennia. 78 Without the module of running forwards to the goal there can be no vita contemplativa, no monastic life, no swarm of departures to other shores, no wanting to be the way someone greater once was. One can therefore not emphasize enough that the most effective forms of anthropotechnics in the world come from yesterday's world - and the genetic engineering praised or rejected loudly today, even if it becomes feasible and acceptable for humans on a larger scale, will long remain a mere anecdote compared to the magnitude of these phenomena.
The believer's running-ahead into perfection is not Cioran's concern. He certainly has a passionate 'interest' in the religious texts that speak of perfection and salvation, but he will not carry out the believing operation as such, the anticipation of one's own being-ready-later. His non-belief thus has two sides: that of not being able, because his own prevailing mood corrodes the naivete required for the supposition of perfection,79 and that of not being willing, because he has adopted the stance of the sceptic and does not want to abandon this definitive provisional state in favour of a position. His only option, then, is to experiment with the leftovers. He is forced to play on an instrument for which any purposeful training would be futile - the detuned instrument of his own existence. Yet it is precisely his performance on the unplayable instrument that shows the unsup- pressible universality of the practising dimension: for, by practising in the absence of a suitable instrument, the 'anti-prophet' develops an informal version of mastery.
He becomes the first master of not-getting-anywhere. Like Kafka's hunger artist, he turns his aversion into a virtuoso performance and develops the corresponding form of skill for his carard. Even in this form one hears the appeal that returns in all artistedam: 'I always wanted you to admire it . . . ' While Kafka's fasting master waits until the end before uttering the contrary injunction 'you shouldn't admire it', Cioran provides the material for demystifying his art from the outset by revealing it on almost every page as the act of letting
78
P ARISIAN BUDDHISM
~ h~
mood speaking when Cioran '1 am of not suffer- ing. '80 'My books express an attitude to life, not a vision. '81 He felt a contemptuous suspicion towards the possibility of therapeutically modifying attitudes towards life; he lived off the products of his disposition, after all, and could hardly have afforded an attempt to change it.
In contributing to the discovery that even letting oneself go can be art, and that, if it is accompanied by the will to skill, it also requires training, Ciaran helped the Order of Holy Foolhardiness to find a set of rules. It is preserved in his Precis de decomposition, this book of peculiar exercises that, as I intend to show, formulates the true charter of modern 'culture' as an aggregate of undeclared asceticisms - a book that exceeds any binding. The extent of Cioran's own awareness of his role in translating spiritual habitus into profane dis- content and its literary cultivation is demonstrated in A Short History ofDecay (whose title could equally have been rendered as 'A Guide to Decay'), the work that established his reputation. Originally this col- lection was to be entitled Exercices negatifs - which could refer both to exercises in negation and anti-exercises. What Cioran presented was no less than a set of rules intended to lead its adepts onto the path of uselessness. If this path had a goal, it would be: 'To be more unserviceable than a saint . . . '. 82
The tendency of the new set of rules is anti-stoic. While the stoic manner does everything in its power to get into shape for the universe - Roman Stoicism, after all, was primarily a philosophy for civil servants, attractive for those who wanted to believe that it was hon- ourable to hold out in the place assigned by providence as a 'soldier of the cosmos' - the Cioranian ascetic must reject the cosmic thesis as such. He refuses to accept his own existence as a component of a well-ordered whole; it should rather serve to prove that the uni- verse is a failure. Cioran only accepts the Christian reinterpretation of the cosmos as creation to the extent that God comes into playas the impeachable cause of a complete fiasco. For a moment, Cioran comes close to Kant's moral proof of God's existence, albeit with the opposite result: the existence of God must necessarily be postulated because God has to apologize for the world.
The procedure Cioran develops for his anti-exercises is based on the elevation of leisure to a practice form for existential revolt. What he calls 'leisure' is actually a conscious drift through the emotional states of the manic-depressive spectrum unencumbered by any form of structured work - a method that anticipates the later glorification
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THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
life in a state amounts to a practising reinforcement of sense of discontinuity that belonged to Cioran's disposition because of his moodiness. The reinforcing effect is further heightened dogmatically by the bellicose thesis that continuity is a 'delusional idea'83 - it would have sufficed to call it a construct. Hence existence means feeling ill at ease at constantly new
now-points.
The literary form that corresponds to the punctualism of Cioran's
self-observation, which alternates between moments of contraction and diffusion, is the aphorism, and its publicistic genre the aphorism collection. The author establishes a relatively simple and stable grid of six or eight themes early on, using it to comb his states in the drift and move from an experiential point to a corresponding thematic node. With time, the themes - like partial personalities or edito- rial offices working alongside one another - develop a life of their own that enables them to continue growing self-sufficiently without having to wait for an experiential occasion. The 'author' Cioran is merely the chief editor who adds the finishing touches to the products of his typing rooms. He produces books by compiling the texts pro- vided by his inner employees. They present their material in irregular sessions - aphorisms from the blasphemy department, observations from the misanthropy studio, gibes from the disillusionment section, proclamations from the press office of the circus of the lonely, theses from the agency for swindling on the edge, and poisons from the edi- torial office for the despisal of contemporary literature. Formulating the thought of suicide is the only job that remains in the chief edi- tor's hands; this involves the practice on which all further sequences of repetition depend. This thought alone permits, from one crisis to the next, the restoration of the feeling that one is still sovereign even in misery - a feeling that provides discontented life with a minimum of stability. In addition, those responsible for the different themes know what the neighbouring offices are producing, meaning that they increasingly quote and align themselves with one another. The 'author' Cioran simply invents the book titles that hint at the genre - syllogisms, curses, epitaphs, confessions, lives of the saints or guide- lines for failure. He also provides the section headings, which follow a similar logic. In everyday life he is much less of a writer than a reader, and if there was one activity in his life that, from a distance, resem- bled a regular employment or a formal exercise, it was the reading and rereading of books that served as sources of comfort and argu- ments to be rebutted. He read the life of St Teresa of Avila five times
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P ARISIAN
BUDDHISM
m
process the and,
words, form a bundle of interactions to the nth degree.
The 'negative exercises' of the Romanian 'trumpery Buddha' - as he terms himself in All Gall Is Divided - are landmarks in the recent history of spiritual behaviour. All they require now is explication as valid discoveries, beyond the chummy comments about the prevail- ing mood that have dominated the reception of his work thus far. The scepticism attributed to the author in accordance with some of his own language games is anything but 'radical' - it is virtuosic and elegant. Cioran's approach may seem monotonous, but it almost never leads to the dullness that characterizes radicalisms. What he says and does serves to raise his suffering to the level of skill that corresponds to his abilities. Cioran's work appears far less self-contradictory as soon as one notes the emergence of the practice phenomenon - so once again we have 'one of the broadest and longest facts that exist' in an unusual declination. Even if his prevailing mood was that of a 'passive-aggressive bastard' - as group therapists occasionally put it in the 1970s - his ethos was that of a man of exercises, an artiste who even made a stunt out of sluggishness, who turned despair into an Apollonian discipline and letting oneself go into an etude almost classical in manner.
The effective history of Cioran's books shows that he was immedi- ately recognized as a paradoxical master of exercises. Naturally they only spoke to a small number of readers, but resonated very strongly with them. The small band of intensive recipients even discovered in the writings of this infamous author something whose existence he would probably have denied - a brotherly vibration, a hidden tendency to give the 'Trappist Order without faith', of which he play- fully and irresponsibly considered himself a member, a slightly denser consistency. There was a secret readiness in him to give advice to the despairing who were even more helpless than himself - and a far less concealed inclination to become famous for his exercises in escape from the world. While he may have resisted the tentation d'exister more or less resolutely - even in brothels, even in chic society - he was willing, with all due discretion, to succumb to the temptation of becoming a role model. It is thus not unreasonable to see in Cioran not merely the apprentice of an informalized asceticism, but also an informal trainer who affects others from a distance with his modus vivendi. While the ordinary trainer - as defined above - is the one 'who wants me to want',84 the spiritual trainer acts as the one who does not want me not to want. When I want to give up, it is he who
81
are into memories of own
THE PLANET OF THE PRACTISING
it.
provided an form of suicide for numerous
readers - something that is also said of personal conversations with him. Those seeking advice may have sensed how he had discovered the healthiest way of being incurable.