Who are you? Marco. What are you? I am…
Having to state its case, Dasein would not make recourse to being, or assume being, to explain its being… Who/what are you? (simply) Dasein. Dasein is simultaneously identity and substance. Dasein’s concern with its being is concern about that seemingly non-deferrable concern about seemingly needing to expeditiously shrug off concern for beings that appear in their being as beings, not, that is, as Dasein.
Their being is (or, at least, ought to be) their problem.
This concern is formulated as Dasein’s preoccupation with being an other amongst others. This concern is better formulated as Dasein’s concern with Time. In other words, Time is not fatal. Yet, Dasein’s true concern is with the non-fatality of Time. Time is never fatal enough for Dasein. Time as Dasein is ineffective. Dasein does not accept, Dasein repudiates, Dasein reneges, ‘the photographic’. Ontology is not a seen. Strictly speaking, ontology is not even a seeing. Ontology, like the nothing, is a conceptual perception. Ontology, like the nothing, belongs to the probable probabilities of fate. Anything discussed in time is probable, and it is absolutely improbable that the probable should not at some point in time surface as a determined probability. Ontology, like the nothing, is a dead end.
Can a being question a being without referring to its being? Questioning being implicates existence; questioning implicates existence.
The ontology of alterity? Horror of horrors!
Why is Time Time? Visual perception is filmic in nature, but in an inverse manner. Successfully proving that the world is just one static image does not disqualify the essential property of the eye, namely that of being both the locus of continuity and the organ responsible for that very same continuity (permitting continuity while simultaneously reporting to that very same continuity). The film is not projected (in the manner of a projector projecting) in any way out there. It is in the very process of the recording of the image on the retina, with the concomitant refresh rate particular to the eye, that the film takes place. Elsewhere we said that Space is (a dimension of?) Time. Why? Because it takes time. So why is Time Time? Because seeing is always irrespective of. Time and Intention are nothing other than waiting. Time is the only ontology permissible to the Other.
‘The photographic’: perception reduced to the lowest common denominator. The eyes see because of it; the eyes see in order to see it. We don’t always see it. The photograph as product of apparatus, as necessarily product of apparatus, is then simply metaphor, the visualization of a theoretical model of an ambiguous and contrived real. Photography subverts itself, proceeds counter-currently to its cause. Its indexicality makes it lose sight of the indexed.
Indexicality is a metaphor of trace, in that it is (metaphorically) caused by trace. It is not trace.
And art is all about the glittering traces.
And action is necessarily political.
We can theorise about ‘the photographic’ (a hodgepodge of synthetic and analytic judgements), but not through it itself. ‘The photographic’ is not an object of theory. Hollowed, like they say about Being, the vacuousness of ‘the photographic’ can only be the unknown, or, alternatively, the nothing (as long as by the nothing we understand simply that of which nothing can be known).
One becomes indifferent to being. One then lapses into forgetfulness. But this forgetfulness is not prone to any scientific measure which would place it partially or totally under some sort of psychopathological classification. Being simultaneously fully functional and fully comatose, the substance of this forgetfulness cannot be other than the forgetting of Time. Memory surfaces; and in this renewed mindfulness one is tasked with the problem of ontology, which is easily solved: there is no such thing as Ontology; it is always my ontology; and only I can answer to my ontology. Memory is never memory. A memory is a memory in name only.
To know is to know all time. Knowledge of all time belongs within the dimension of memory. If knowledge and memory are identical, what lies beyond the shores of Time? Hence, what can one know anew or what can one keep in memory as a remembrance? The answer to both is: nothing. Hence the reason why ‘the photographic’ ceaselessly pulls one towards origin – as exit.
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Available at: https://artsofthought.com/2021/07/01/platos-allegory-of-the-cave/ [accessed 14 May 2022].
