COMMIT MOOSBRUGGER FOR TRIAL

7/1/2018

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REFLECTIONS ON AN IMPERSONAL LIFE

by Emilia Marra

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Introduction

This few pages ask to their readers to express their own judgement on a very particular trial in the courthouse of the absolute immanence. With the aim of present this case in his complexity, I ﬁrstly have to conduce a raid into the theory of immanence, trying to clarify what the assumption of a reflection on haecceities and affects, rather than the one on subject individuations, means and carries with itself. Indeed, if we really want to express what the Deleuzian «a life» is, we should restart from Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s path, which ultimately implies abandoning the more classical theories based on the identity and on the Cogito’s priority. In order to present properly this new ﬁeld without renouncing to show contradictions and dangers related to a similar arena, I will introduce the character of Moosbrugger, one of the most famous Robert Musil’s lonely planet in his own Nietzschean solar system. I would like to show here that this irrational murderer, who I will describe in the third part of this text, offers a faithful representation of what rejecting the classical logical dichotomy between difference as quality and difference as quantity signiﬁes. In my opinion, this last subject is in fact one of the possible starting points we need to investigate in order to understand the oddity that Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze have in common. For this purpose, I would like to present the argument by three steps:

1) ﬁrstly, I would like to start from the ﬁrst chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic, showing how the German philosopher poses the conceptual pairs of quality and quantity, giving logical priority to the ﬁrst against the second;

2) secondly, I will compare Hegel’s position with Spinoza’s propositions, in order to identify by opposition the fil rouge which ties together the tradition that Deleuze calls, in Difference and Repetition, the univocity of being;

3) ﬁnally, I will present Moosbrugger’s example to show practically which kind of life could be approached following this change of perspective, and to understand if it is a sharable position for a political ﬁght or not.

The Being Without Qualities

In the very beginning of his Science of Logic, Hegel explains the necessity of a re-foundation of the entire logic, still based on Aristotle’s directions and not more useful for the Modern Age. The interest in logic as ground of confrontation in philosophy lies on the fact that it is in this ﬁeld, more than in every other science, that, according to Hegel, we have to start from the thing itself. Dealing with the thing itself directly means to follow the old metaphysic, in order to keep together objects and thoughts, exactly the contrary of what Kant had done. If we were not able to represent the world keeping in it not just the ﬁnitude, but also the inﬁnite, the conceptual possibility of the Spirit would simply be unthinkable. It is important to underline that the Spirit, as Musil suggests in his The Man Without Qualities, is always the big maker of alternatives: so that we have essence and existence, thoughts and things, reason and passions. Hegel follows the trend of the thing itself, which is, from his point of view, the dialectic movement, the necessity of passing by the true negation, that is, the determinate one, to reafﬁrm the indissolubility of the one. Therefore, Hegel has to commence his logic with a qualitative difference, which would be solved only in the very end of the self-comprehension of the Spirit. Now, the troubling issue with this choice is precisely that every duality is posed as an incommensurable opposition at the very beginning of every reasoning. This means, on the one hand, to suppose that dichotomy is more important than the inﬁnite graduation existing between the two parts of the opposition, and, on the other hand, the necessity of a strong deﬁnition at least of one peculiar characteristic, to let the thing we are looking at becoming a something. Instead, an empiric approach to the nature tends to suggest that slowing down with the very ﬁrst deﬁnition of a thing in front of something else offers a valid alternative to this position, an alternative that is also closer to the human experience than the dialectical method. Graduation rather than opposition, plurality rather than duality, Spinoza-Nietzsche rather than Hegel. It seems in fact that Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza as Nietzsche’s heir offers the possibility of reading Spinoza as a Hegel’s alternative: if Hegel accuses Spinoza’s system of being motionless, the reproach in now reversed. As Dosse writes:

Pour Hegel, Spinoza est l’auteur d’un système purement théorique et, à sa suite, Kojève considère que l’on ne peut rien faire avec Spinoza dont la philosophie est soutenue par un système mort, excluant autant la liberté que la subjectivité. Or Deleuze sort Spinoza de cet enfermement : « En faisant de lui le grand « héritier » de Nietzsche, le grand vivant, Deleuze retourne complètement les choses »1

It is quite easy here to understand that what is at stake here is a whole different way of thinking immanence. According to Hegel, we have at ﬁrst an opposition, i.e. a logical qualitative difference between essence and existence. Qualitative difference has then an ontological priority over the quantitative difference. As a result, we immediately have to rely on a movement, the dialectic’s one, that, as Hegel speciﬁes, is not an external movement, but the truth of the thing itself. Thus the challenge here becomes to suppose that we may delay the moment of the qualitative deﬁnition. More than this, we also propose that the advantages we have trying to think the quality as a product of a quantitative difference are more than the ones we have supposing an ontological difference between quality and quantity. Therefore, our hypothetical starting point would be a Being Without Qualities, which simply means a being without deﬁnitions.

A Spinozian deceleration

This deceleration offers the possibility of thinking in terms of power: instead of questioning the speciﬁcity of something, we will concentrate on the degree of power this thing has. The very ﬁrst consequence of this way of thinking is that everything could change in anything else. Quoting Musil in one of his description of the average bourgeois man of his century:

He his capable of turning everything into anything – snow into skin, skin into blossoms, blossoms into sugar, sugar into powder, and powder back into little drifts of snow – for all that matters to him, apparently, is to make things into what they are not, which is doubtless proof that he cannot stand being anywhere for long, wherever he happens to be.

It seems in fact that this description is exactly the condition of the contemporary human being; what if, instead of just imagine this transformation, we suppose to retard the moment of the deﬁnition (snow, skin, blossoms, sugar...), trying to reasoning starting by affects and haecceitas, in terms of power, in terms of a real possible modiﬁcation of everything into anything else? If we follow Spinoza we may propose to skip the division between essence and existence restarting from the IV book of the Ethics. In the demonstration of the IV deﬁnition, Spinoza explains that every being is animated by the power of existing, which is a part of the inﬁnite power, i.e. the essence, of God or of the Nature. The difference existing between the power of God and the man’s power is not a qualitative one. It is exactly the same, but in his entire in God, fragmented in human beings.

As we can easily appreciate, Spinoza’s solution to the problem of the very ﬁrst difference supposed in the Hegelian logical system is the introduction of his own ontological building of the power. It is exactly starting from power that we can understand the empiric differences in terms of quantity, because all the elements we have are involved at ﬁrst on the same level, the level of a Being without qualities. Then, we have a progressive stratiﬁcation, a growing transformation of everything into anything else. We found that it is only at this point that we can offer deﬁnitions, useful in our everyday life to communicate each other and to make choices. In theoretical words, we suppose here to take seriously the hypothesis of the real existence of the inﬁnity in act, as Spinoza suggests in his famous letter 11 to Meyer. We also remind that, at the very end of the ﬁrst part of the Science of Logic, the same Hegel suggests that the Spinozian position on inﬁnity is much more interesting than Kant’s one, reversing for just one moment his deep conviction in the progress of the thought in the timeline.

Quality as a consequence of a quantitative distribution of power, power to affect and power of being affected. It seems that it is the only possible way for a pure theory of immanence. It also seems to be a useful instruction in order to start reflecting on an accelerationist theory, where it is at ﬁrst very important to value the techno-social acceleration not just as the other we have to ﬁght, but as something we have to pass through, to exceed in speediness. If we look at the technical acceleration as an augmentation of quantity of makeable actions in the same arc of time, we can easily imagine the entire historical timeline as an augmentation of power. However, if we accept to think in terms of quantities instead of qualities, we seriously risk to fall into a trap, namely the lack of responsibility for every personal action, followed by the collective passive acceptation of every event. The question we may ask at this point is: is there still an I in the Deleuzian “a life”, made of events? Can we still suppose the existence of something like an “ethic of affects” without rejecting all our moral convictions? Instead of trying to give an answer to these controversially questions, I rather prefer to present here, as I announced in the introduction, the Moosbrugger’s case, inviting to take position on the following inquiry: is Moosbrugger the victim or is he the solution to the problem of modernity?

Dreaming Moosbrugger

But who’s Moosbrugger? The carpenter Christian Moosbrugger is a huge, physically powerful man who is something of a simpleton. Moosbrugger has «a face blessed by God with every sign of goodness» but also just happens to be a crazed sex murderer whose trial for brutally slaughtering a prostitute forms one of the many leitmotifs of The Man Without Qualities. In particular, the debate on the mental insanity of Moosbrugger and, consequentially, on the appropriate punishment to inflict to him, is one of the most fascinating threads in the novel, because of the fact that every character has to answer to this question, which is the question of the dark, unconscious viciousness and irrationalism pulsating underneath Kakania’s rancid optimism: «If mankind could dream collectively [als Ganzes]», Ulrich reflects, «it would dream Moosbrugger». During the novel, we have the impression that Musil is asking to his public to take position on this topic. Trying to choose one of the options that the other characters of the novel propose, we deeply understand the impossibility of a judgement on Moosbrugger, which is a clear symptom of the impossibility we have to ﬁnd a deﬁnition of ourselves. As Celine Piser wrote:

Thus the modern city becomes “a realm of alienation” (Jonsson, “Neither Inside nor Outside” 34) for its inhabitants: the modern subject does not know how to deﬁne him or herself or with which abstract government to identify. At the same time, the modern subject feels pulled in even more directions as he or she is suddenly exposed to different countries, traditions, and ways of life. This proliferation of alternatives becomes a crisis for the modern individual. The feeling of fragmentation challenges his or her afﬁnity for continuity, tradition, and stability. Regardless of whether or not these ideals have disappeared in modernity, the illusion of fragmentation prevails.2

In order to understand why Kakania’s inhabitants could think Moosbrugger as an alternative to their everyday life, we have ﬁrstly to underline that this representation is not the one that the giant has of himself. According to his point of view, he is a victim of society. He cannot sufﬁciently defend himself because of his difﬁculties of communication: his alienation starts from the impossibility to give a stable deﬁnition of something, ﬁrstly of his proper analyse of the world, secondly in the any talk with the others. When it happens to him to think that a girl has lips like blossoms, he is not able to really distinguish lips from blossoms, and he feels the desire to cut them off with a knife. Even in mathematic ﬁeld, he refuses to give a unique answer to his judges:

They’d always shoot a question right back at him then: “How much is fourteen plus fourteen?” and he would say in his deliberate way, “Oh, about twenty-eight to forty.” This “about” gave them trouble, which made Moosbrugger smile. It was really so simple. He knew perfectly well that you get twenty-eight when you go on from fourteen to another fourteen; but who says you have to stop there?

Moosbrugger is an alternative because of his capability to feel the sense of possibility, which Ulrich theorizes at the very beginning of the novel. In particular, Moosbrugger’s disturb allows him to feel his body with no separation from the others: he does not feel the difference between the inside and the outside. Slaughtering the prostitute means to kill a part of his own corps, and, as Ulrich explains, there is no more powerful man than the one who does not fear his own death. To ﬁght fragmentation, Moosbrugger strives for unity, surpassing in speediness every Hegelian tentative to reach the entire. He is interesting and fascinating all the other Musil’s characters because of the fact that he has in himself the Nietzschean chaos, and Kakania’s people is wondering if it will be enough to give birth to the dancing star or if he is just a psychotic. Because of his refutation of society’s dichotomies, he is suspended, in society’s eyes, between two worlds, an unexplored space where something like “a life” seems to be still possible, even if just suggests as a fantasy in the middle of the night, when a «punctilious department head or a bank manager would say to his sleepy wife at bedtime: “What would you do now if I were a Moosbrugger?”».

What is sure here is that we can deﬁne Moosbrugger a pharmakon for the modern society. If he is a poison or a medicine, the choice is up to you.

1 F. Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Biographie croisée, Edition La Découverte, Paris 2009, p. 178.

2 C. Piser, «Dreaming Moosbrugger: The Other versus Modernity in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities», More than Thought (Fall 2010), http://morethanthought.community.ofﬁcelive.com, p. 2.

Biography

Emilia Marra

Emilia Marra holds a Master in « Philosophies allemande et française dans l’espace européen » - Europhilosophie Erasmus Mundus (UTM, UCL, BUW), and she is now a PhD student at the University of Trieste with a project on the concept of system between Hegel and Spinoza and their contemporary French interpretations. Her researches mainly investigate the French contemporary philosophy, with a special focus on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. She published in journals such as Esercizi filosofici, Interpretationes, Philosophy Kitchen, S&F, Estetica. Studi e ricerche, La Deleuziana, of which she is member of the editorial board. She also translated Pierre Macherey’s Hegel ou Spinoza (Ombre Corte, 2016).

taken from:

obsoletecapitalism

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