Prelude 11

1.)

Sometimes the use of discourse to heighten awareness of conflicts does not help to supersede them, but simply makes them worse. The solution is to be found in praxis. If techniques were improved and better adapted to practical use – that is, to praxis – then perhaps the conditions for spontaneous vitality could be reconstituted. However there is every indication that before a possible unity can be rediscovered, the disjunction between the self and itself, as well as the disjunction between nature and anti-nature, will have to be lived through… Modernity is doomed to explore and to live through abstraction. …Abstraction perceived as something concrete, anti-nature and a growing nostalgia for nature which has somehow been mislaid – such is the conflict lived out by “modern” man.

How strange the contradiction is between the modern “reprivatization” of everyday life, and the “globalization” which is being thrust into the very heart of private life by mass media. On one side of the picture the horizon shrinks, with everything turned back on the family and the self. Turn the picture, and we see a limitless expanse where the idea of the “world” already implies its supersession. But this “picture” cannot be summed simply as something with two contradicting sides. It is misleading to think that we can look at one side, then the other. The crucial thing is to seize the dramatic and conflictual interpretation of each “side” of the picture. And the picture is just a metaphor for a technical operation, itself abstract, by which the movement from one to other can be grasped.

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There is no greater alienation than the alienation which cannot speak its name.
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This generalized and disjointed determination has to make do with the transformation and abstract transposition of an everyday life which has itself been reduced to a “private” abstraction: verbalism, rhetoric, moralism and
aesthetics.

Whatever we can formulate as thought has been made into a reality “for us” by praxis, and it is therefore not the action of some kind of independent and externalized consciousness which internalizes it; it has been transformed into consciousness by praxis and the movement of praxis.

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2.)

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