On the Aphorism

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aphorism IX, Aids to Reflection

Language, as a means for critical engagement with the world, is in crisis. The very structures of modern language are tyrannical. The oppressive forms of grammar and syntax have become crystallized reflections of Enlightenment thought. The subjective totalization of the object enforced by idealism is entrenched formally into syntax itself; the subject does, and the object receives or is used. Any attempt to deploy conventional prose in order to critique Enlightenment thought ends up in the most blatant form of self-contradiction. Resistance is now mere hypocrisy. To endeavor to expose the ideological content of discourse no longer has meaning as a method of critique. Ideology is no longer a question of content, but of form.  There have admittedly been efforts in literary prose to elude language’s structural ideology. Steam-of-consciousness writing and narrative immediacy, for example, have attempted to liberate language; however, such efforts have, in their obscurity, been rejected as methods of rigorous critique and relegated to the realm of autonomous art. The essay, of course, has always endeavored, as an essai, to allow for a genuine exploration of possibilities of human being. Even the essay, however, has been robbed of its spirit by being reduced to a dead, formulaic procedure—‘point-proof-explanation,’ as it is often taught in schools. In poetry, language has historically been most emancipated; however, poetry no longer belongs to the muses and the masses. It has been coopted by the very class of culture that enforces the oppressive syntactical structures of conventional prose.
The critical form of our age is the aphorism. It has an interpretive flexibility akin to poetry, while yet, like an arrow, deploying the acuity and pointedness of traditional prose. It is the only linguistic form fitted to the destruction of ideology in the current age. Aphorisms force the depth of entire volumes of dense philosophical prose into a few sentences. Importantly, however, they achieve not only this—for this alone would render them totalizing on human thought—but they also exceed the philosophies that they claim to represent. They both represent and destroy the ideas that they embody. They represent by positing. By positing, I do not mean merely stating; I mean articulating in the most extreme, uncompromising form. They are not tempered by conditionals; they are shamelessly extreme. And it is for this exact reason, too, that they destroy the ideas that they represent. By highlighting the extremity of a given idea at the exclusion of all nuances, they express the state wherein the idea is both uncompromisingly self-actualized and, by virtue of this very fact, simultaneously self-annihilated. The aphorism is the embodiment of the Kantian expression that self-destroys in its universality. For many Kantians, these expressions—lies, for example—are contradictory to the categorical imperative because they cannot be universalized without the dissolution of the institutions which they mimic and on which they are dependent for self-actualization. If everyone lied, for instance, lying would be ineffective and meaningless as a practice intended to deceive, since effective lying depends on the intersubjective validation of the practice of truth-telling, in which no one would have faith knowing that everyone lies. Yet, the virtue of aphoristic expression lies—in both senses of the term, dwelling in and deceiving—precisely in its aesthetic. The aphorism lies in its aesthetic.
The aesthetic of the aphorism offers not only its object of critique—the prevailing order—as a sacrifice in its extremity, but it necessarily offers itself as sacrificial substance. In this double movement of aphorism as self-sacrificial critique, it is the only form that has the potential to destroy ideology completely, because it acknowledges that it is itself embedded in and emergent from the very ideology that it destroys. It is the only sincere mode of critique that remains available to us. The aesthetic of its form affirms and radicalizes Adorno’s realization that “every phenomenon is by now so thoroughly imprinted by the schema that nothing can occur that does not bear in advance the trace of the jargon.” Aphorisms are not Platonic Forms that stand above, unpolluted. They are the most polluted. They do not endeavor to salvage themselves; for they are self-conscious that their embeddedness requires their own self-annihilation. The aesthetic of the aphorism is extremity, and that extremity lies in its positing and destroying. Extremity is the aesthetic character whereby an idea is denied all opportunities to qualify itself in its positing. The aphoristic idea, in extremity, lays bare and exposed, unmediated by particulars. And in its unmediated extremity, the idea collapses. The pillars which hold it erect—the nuances, the particulars, the qualifications—are absolutely absent. And thus the aphorism lies in its aesthetic, for it at once is and cannot be.
The aphorism is not committed to the truth of its idea. It rejects all standpoints privileged by the ascription of truth, for it lies in its aesthetic. It is that which comes before. It is the supreme clearing. Aphorisms do not claim to partake in that which comes after, but only to catalyze the destruction, to facilitate the clearing. To know an aphorism is to partake in its self-sacrifice—to experience at once the supreme exaltation of the idea that it represents and, too, the moment at which that idea crumbles along with the entire order from which it emerges. To know an aphorism is a masochistic act in which the very self, as a truth embedded in the objective order that the aphorism destroys, is offered at the altar, but not for the sake of emancipation, for the aphorism promises no such thing. It bears no claims to the postapocalyptic world whose emergence it enables. The aphorism lies. In its lying, it exalts ideology to the altar; it raises it to its supreme height; it posits the whole; it is reified and commoditized in its form. And yet, in the very act of positing, as lying, is its suicide; for the very ideology, stripped of its qualifications, nuances, and particulars—those that permit it to persist—perishes in the extremity of its own naked positing. It is the only sincere sacrifice that escapes the capitalist mode of commodity exchange. The aphorism as self-sacrifice has no exchange value; it is not offered for a reward. It lies, for it eludes commodification in its aesthetic of extremity, while yet appearing reified in form. It escapes instrumental rationality through a sleight-of-hand, for one cannot even say that the sacrifice of the aphorism is done in exchange for, or for the sake of the destruction of ideology. This simple interpretation obscures the twofold, but singular, movement of positing and destroying.
The positing does not precede the destroying. They are one and the same and the distinction is merely analytic. The movement is perhaps better understood as positing-as-destroying, or, equally, destroying-as-positing. The aphorism destroys ideology while positing it, and posits it while destroying it. Therefore, there is an irony in the aphorism, and this irony is precisely its lying. For in positing, it destroys; but, more importantly for this particular point, in destroying, it posits. The interpretation of aphorism as merely the destruction of ideology is thus revealed as itself ideological. The aphorism not only destroys ideology, but equally brings it to its height. The question of which element precedes the other is merely a distortion of the aphorism and its movement. The aphorism is paradoxical. In a single movement, it performs two acts which betray one another; and thus, the aphorism lies in itself. And the aphorism’s lying is explained precisely by the indivisibility and the irreconcilability of its positing and destroying. They are one and the same movement in the aphorism, yet they lie to each other. In the same way that living and dying are inseparable and simultaneous, and yet betray one other even in their inescapable oneness, so too is the aphorism’s positing and destroying. In living, one dies; and in dying, one lives. Even more radically, in death, life it affirmed; for without life, death has no content. Similarly, in life, death is affirmed; for, as Heidegger reveals, time—and thus mortality—is the horizon of being-in-the-world. Death and life contain one another in themselves, as do positing and destroying. In positing, the aphorism destroys ideology; and in destroying, the aphorism exalts ideology. In absolute exaltation, destruction is supremely present; and in absolute destruction, exaltation persists. To ask which precedes or ultimately triumphs over the other obscures the reality that in their antithesis, positing and destroying are a singular movement. They are dialectical, yet their contradiction cannot be overcome in synthesis.
The aphoristic form in its critical mode thus contains within it the core poststructuralist insight—that it is in seizing the chains that one liberates, and that it is in liberating that one tightens the chains. Any critical thought that claims the status of emancipatory by positing itself as opposed to ideology, as utterly distinct from it, is itself ideological. Its blindness and delusion prohibit it from achieving its own goal. Paradoxically, it is only in the acknowledgement of emancipatory thought’s ideological core that critique achieves its aim while yet remaining utterly ideological. The difference between the traditional philosophical critique and the aphoristic critique is not that the former is ideological and the latter is not. Rather, the distinction lies in that the former forever eludes its own aim, for it is blind to its own status; whereas the latter, in its brutal self-sacrifice, achieves its aim while not claiming a false escape. In more lucid terms, the former, formally even if not substantively, clings to a knowledge-power separation, and claims for itself the status of knowledge. The latter formally rejects the knowledge-power distinction as itself ideological, and thus destroys ideology while inhabiting it utterly. The former is Kant; the latter is Kafka. The aphorism, containing this knowledge in its very form and aesthetic, is thus supremely suited to the aim of philosophy as critique. I offer, in this light, an imperative that lies in its aesthetic in its positing and destroying—an imperative that is to be taken as an aphorism itself, as that which both is itself completely, and, too, betrays itself completely:
Philosophy must turn entirely to aphorism, and, in doing so, it must offer itself as a sacrifice on the slaughter-bench of history. Its very maturity demands this of it. The young sciences may yet putter around—their time will come too—but philosophy has over-ripened and it is rotting. It must be sacrificed.