Royal Holloway University of London, 801.95
Imagine a radical movement which had suffered an emphatic defeat. Worse is to follow. It is disease that makes health sweet and good. It is precisely because creatures are incomplete that they are living.
Language takes precedence. It chases its own tail. It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its time.
There is no question of a fixed, historically immutable relationship here. The lynch-pin of the teaching of Heraclitus, as it has come down to us, is the idea of unity in opposites.
Every man’s life my be best written by himself. As he reads, there is a constant ‘feedback’ of ‘information’ already received, so that he himself is bound to insert his own ideas into the process of communication. You cannot pass this by, nor escape its force. All great writers want to become like Faust.
The commodity, pace Adorno, cannot be its own ideology, at least not yet. So one could preserve one’s ontology without the embarassment of having to pretend that there was nothing to choose between Goethe and Goebbels. The nature of this duplication is essential for an understanding of irony.
The objects are too dissimilar. ‘To generalize is to be an idiot’, but not to draw conclusions from experience is to be something of a fool.