Being Shaken: Ontology and the Event

M. Marder, S. Zabala, M. Marder, S. Zabala, M. Marder, S. Zabala

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137333735
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Being Shaken is a multifaceted meditation by leading philosophers from Europe and North America on ways in which events disrupt the complacency of the ontological paradigm at the personal, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and political levels.

1

Shaking at the Edge

Edward S. Casey

I

Human beings shake on the edge of high precipices. As I once did in Montana, climbing up to the top of a ridge in the Crazy Mountains whose edge was razor-sharp. Peering down into the abyss on the other side, I began to shake. I wasn’t just trembling, nor was I shuddering, I was actively shaking. My body shook with fear – fear of falling into the vast vale that yawned before me and below me. I was fearful of losing my balance, and so falling into the space below. My shaking, though immediate and involuntary, itself contributed to the likelihood that I would lose my balance and fall face forward. I became dizzy, a classical symptom of vertigo. In order to avoid this consequence, I had to draw away from the edge – turn around and crawl back down the face of the ridge I had climbed so confidently. My companions, seasoned mountain climbers, stood their ground at the top, smiling at my retreat with barely concealed contempt.

There are several preliminary lessons to be learned from this incident. One is that the body can shake from a bare glance at a daunting vista. A glance can unleash the vertigo from which I shook. Another is that bodily shaking, though adaptive at the level of becoming alert to a danger, brings its own dangers with it. A third is that shaking is an ambiguous experience: was I literally, visibly shaking such that others could see it, or was my shaking felt inwardly, at the level of kinaesthesias. Was the shaking a matter of overt motion or of privately held feeling, or perhaps both together? Most important is the fact that it was being on an edge that precipitated my shaking, overt or tacit: I was shaking on an edge, right at it. This suggests that between shaking and edge there is an intimate relation. But what about an edge occasions shaking? What is shaking at or on an edge?

Edges themselves are deeply paradoxical things. They are at once beginnings and endings: the beginning of free movement in any number of directions – as one goes away from a given edge – and the ending of whatever material a given edge is composed of, its vanishing into thin air. This suggests that edges are both substance and void: they have physical mass (thus color, texture, weight, volume) up to a certain point, but on the other side of that point they are suddenly nothing – nothing physical. At the edge, a thing becomes a non-thing. Going over an edge, stepping or staring beyond it, is to step or stare into non-being or “void” in Badiou’s term – nothing at all, nothing discernible or palpable. At the most, an edge can cast a shadow into the void that looms beyond it, but in this case it projects something that has no mass or substance, no inherent being.

Everything comes to an edge – eventually. Not only material substance but life itself: death, says Hamlet, is “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” (Hamlet 3.1.78–79). By the same token, everything cultural is edged: paintings are framed, books have endings, even ponderous philosophical treatises come to an end, finally. But each such terminus brings with it the prospect of new initiatives – if not new life, then new ideas, new images, new words.

II

“Everything flowers at the edge,” says Derrida.¹ Even so, everything also perishes at the edge – dies, becomes insubstantial, empties out. The plenary presence of the edge as the locus where a given thing or event comes to a determinate shape, a definitive outline, gives way to the nebulous void of non-presence that has no contour. The first need not be the condition of the second, much less its straightforward cause. No such sequential development has to be at stake. More likely, it is a matter of a juxtapositional pair, an “indefinite dyad” (in Plato’s term) in which like is paired with unlike, odd with even, same with other. Such is the basic sense of “paradox” itself, which juxtaposes one belief alongside another with no effort to trace causal connections between them. So too an edge and what is on the other side of it are juxtaposed in a circumstance of jarring difference. And vice-versa: we move not just from the edge to the non-edge, but the other way round – as when we descend upon an edge from open space, coming to it as if from nowhere in particular.

Given its pronounced paradoxicality, it is not surprising that we shake when confronted with an edge situation. The shaking is not just about falling, as on the Montana ridge. It is also, at a deeper level, about making the transition from being to non-being, substance to void, and the reverse. It is about the abrupt transition from ending one experience (say, climbing the ridge) and suddenly being confronted with the beginning of another – looking into an abyss, imagining oneself falling, turning away to secure one’s foothold ... and shaking. Bounding up the slope, I was unshaken in my confidence; at the top, I was suddenly confronted with a prospect that undermined my presumptive ability to deal with what was before me. My vertigo shook up my premature confidence, leaving me shaking.

As I glanced down, I was shaken up. The nothingness of the gulf opening below me starkly contrasted with the somethingness of my bodily self, its seeming robustness, its solidity: “O that this too solid flesh would melt ... ” (Hamlet 1.2.129), could vanish and become itself nothing in the death that surely awaited me if I were to fall. In this way, I played out within myself a drama parallel to that which every edge brings with it, however attenuated it may be in other circumstances.

A sharp edge such as the razor-back ridge brought to a stark climax the drama inherent in any approach to an edge. This is the drama induced by the juxtaposition of paired opposites, which can play itself out at three levels: that of my immediate surrounding, that of my existential self, and that at stake in ontological description. Each such scenario is characterized by the basic feature of a sudden volte-face from an initially plenary situation engendering confidence to a crisis of confidence as we confront a void – or the reverse. In every such case, we witness, or we experience in first person, an enantiodromia, a sudden reversal into the opposite, in Heraclitus’s word.

In this moment of reversal, we find ourselves poised on the knife-edge of immediate transition in the moment. This moment is an Augenblick of radical transformation. Kierkegaard, the first to single out such a Moment, considers it to be the point of intersection between Time and Eternity – another abrupt juxapositional pair.² The Moment, so conceived, is a temporal edge that is the counterpart of the spatial edge of the precipice that I experienced in Montana. Further, the existential anxiety undergone in the Moment is the counterpart of being shaken up in the bodily way I experienced in the Crazy Mountains. For I can be shaken up in time as well as in space, and both at once in a given place. Such was the situation at the tip of the ridge, where my shaking reflected both the distraught state of a specifically spatial vertigo and that of a temporal crisis – temporal because the very next instant I might misstep and plunge into the abyss. An aberrant move in space occurs in a moment of time that could bring my downfall in place.

III

Human beings also shake on psychological edges, as is conveyed in the conventional English phrase “being-on-edge.” In its milder form, this phrase means being nervous, as if tottering on the brink of being calm. When the circumstance is more severe, we have a situation where someone is about to fall apart – is on the verge of no longer being able to live in a coherent and self-directed way. Such a person is shaken out of the reassuring habitudes of routine self-management; her or his psychic state is split. The psychological shaking is not only from the onset of the schizoid condition but from the very sense that is impending – that it is beginning to happen. The afflicted person shakes not so much from the facticity of an agitated state of mind but more so from the prospect of falling further apart until the dissolution of the psyche is reached. Here, too, a void looms – that of having no reliable psychological ground to stand on. A perceived void in the landscape is replaced by a void opening within the person. Before this psychical void one also shudders and shakes – in diverse ways, many of which are not evident to others but are only felt by the subject from the inside.

Not only abysses without and within lead us to shake but so do certain events. Faced with a major catastrophe – an earthquake, a bombing, a major fire – humans shake from the sense that they might have themselves been victims had they been situated closer to the shattering event at the moment of maximum destructiveness. But an event that shakes can also act by deferred effect. In post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), an earlier experience of being subjected to a trauma is carried forward in the form of a continuing re-experience of the traumatic event: in dreams, in exaggerated phobias, in hallucinatory re-livings of the original scene. A woman whose armored vehicle was blown apart by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan finds she cannot drive on open highways without being seized by an extreme fear of driving off the edge.³ Off the edge: the roadside bomb was located at the edge of the road in Afghanistan, and this PTSD victim is disarmed by situations that are structurally reminiscent of that traumatizing event. She has to stop her car, pull over, and collect herself – all the while shaking uncontrollably. Events that shake up human beings can continue to shake them long after they have occurred. A original shaking event re-shakes (in) the life of the traumatic subject.

It doesn’t take a trauma to link event and edge. As a literal “coming out,” an e-vent is already and in itself an edge phenomenon, occurring as it does at the edge of time and space. In this respect, events are inherently precarious, perpetually decentered – and thus decentering in ways that can make us shake. Already historical in character, they affect the historicity of the human subject, rippling out into the life of this subject – sometimes felicitously, sometimes disastrously, and sometimes with little noticeable effect.

IV

All of this suggests that the vector of shaking, its basic directionality, is at least two-fold. It can stem from something within us, as when we sense ourselves falling apart psychologically. In this case, the vector is from inside out: out to us as the fragile subject of an internal splitting. Or we can be shaken by something before us – spatially as in the sudden perception of a vertiginous canyon; temporally as in an elapsed event that from its pastness continues to reverberate in our current life; or spatio-temporally with an event that confronts us in the present with such force that it will affect us in the future. In these three kinds of case, we are moved from outside in – from a perception or an event that presents itself as located without us even if its ultimate effect is incorporated into our ongoing lives.

We can also be shaken by what is beyond us, as with the religiously transcendent. For instance, by the numinous, the Holy as a mysterium tremendum. The experiences and practices of the Shakers and Quakers, as their very names signify, testify to this avatar. They witness to God’s existence at the outer edge of human life and thought; as situated there, at that extremity, such a Being is capable of moving believers to religious ecstasy – moving them beyond their customary postures and practices: shaking them out of these, shaking into shaking.

In all such instances – whether from within, without, or beyond – all significant shaking (that is, shaking that is not merely involuntary, as when shaking from the cold) arises on, at, or near an edge, whether this edge is spatial or temporal or both. Something about an edge induces shaking, and something about shaking seeks the presence of an edge. The link between Shaking and Edge is very close; the two terms are not merely contiguous (as with the dyad discussed earlier) but deeply congruent.

V

So far, we have been speaking only about humans – myself, yourself, the traumatized woman driver – shaking in the presence, immediate or deferred, of edges. But what of edges themselves? Can they shake? What would this be like – as a phenomenon and as indicating an inherent vulnerability in edges of any kind? We are talking here of the precarity of the edge, to adapt a term from Judith Butler.⁴

This precarity is most obvious when edges show themselves to be fragile in their very constitution. The very top of the ridge on which I was shaken up in Montana crumbles with loose rocks that are further loosened by the buffeting of high winds. Snow, ice, and high rains take a further toll. The ridge is not rigid; it alters with time and season. Hiking humans alter it further. But we need not betake ourselves to such a remote location to appreciate the precarity of edges, many of which exhibit a decided vulnerability in terms of their own make-up. Think only of the vulnerability of our own human skin, where we are subject to abrasions and infections at all times and in all weathers. So, too, we find ourselves especially fragile at the edges of our psyche; it is often there that we are most sensitive to insults, the pressures of unremitting work, the demands of our own ego. Human beings, no less than mountain ridges, are maximally exposed at and in their edges, which stand out from central bodily masses or psychic processes. Edges are the externalization of these masses and processes, their literal ec-centricity. In venturing out from the security of a central identity, edges put people and things out – out in space and time, out too with events (which are already, by their very character, exposed to their surroundings). This feature of edges obtains for entire communities and other collective entities: as we see at city limits, or at the borders of nations where questions of who is permitted to enter come to a head. Indeed, it holds for the Earth as a whole: the biosphere is in effected a banded edge where global warming is massively at stake; it, too, is highl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The First Jolts
• 1  Shaking at the Edge
• 2  Traumatic Ontology
• 3  The Ethical Ungrounding of Phenomenology: Levinass Tremors
• 4  In Any Event? Critical Remarks on the Recent Fascination with the Notion of Event
• 5  Insuperable Contradictions and Events
• 6  Being at Large: The Only Emergency Is the Lack of Events
• 7  Medium and Revolution
• 8  A Vibrant Silence: Heidegger and the End of Philosophy
• 9  What Gives? Heidegger and Dreyfus on the Event of Community
• 10  Truth Untrembling Heart
• 11  Staging the Event: The Theatrical Ground of Metaphysical Framing
• 12  Rethinking the Event: Difference, Gift, Revelation
• Index