Abandon…again

Posted on February 8, 2018 in Uncategorized

Abandon

Abandon/pull-back
Leaving ahead the pulling together, the banding together leaves us in the tzum tsum, the kabbalistic Big Pullback, leaving us enough room to get our shit together, to dance the mess around w/o Big Daddy or Big Momma jammin’ on the brakes, def. Can’t get no satisfaction under those terms, when They’re around then all you got left is to blow yourself up, dig?

“If from now on being is not, if it has begun to be only its own abandonment, it is because this speaking in multiple ways is abandoned, is in abandonment, and it is abandon (which also to say openness). It so happens that ‘abandon’ can evoke ‘abundance'” [6]. Abandoning the body politic not only means leaving behind — or deserting — the military foundations of politics, but it also means a radical opening of the body politic to its own abandon. When the body politic is in abandon, it opens onto notions of the common, the open, the distributed. “What is left is an irremediable scattering, a dissemination of ontological specks.”
Jean-Luc Nancy in Birth to Presence

5 entries found for abandon.
A’·ban’·don tr.v. a’·ban’·doned, a’·ban’·don’·ing, a’·ban’·dons

1. To withdraw one’s support or help from, especially in spite of duty, allegiance, or responsibility; desert: abandon a friend in trouble.
2. To give up by leaving or ceasing to operate or inhabit, especially as a result of danger or other impending threat: abandoned the ship.
3. To surrender one’s claim to, right to, or interest in; give up entirely. See Synonyms at relinquish.
4. To cease trying to continue; desist from: abandoned the search for the missing hiker.
5. To yield (oneself) completely, as to emotion.

n.

1. Unbounded enthusiasm; exuberance.
2. A complete surrender of inhibitions.

Improvisation is never about the impossibility of avoiding risk but the necessity of entanglement with possible catastrophe (another name for risk), another form of abandonment, a non-meticulous pre-shadowing of possibilities (it has to be non-meticulous because otherwise we are constricted again by the ‘bandon’, by the need for the levers, for the banding, the binding to pre-existence needs, like the need to band a refrigerator to a hand truck to get it over the threshold; like the need for these words, these grammars, to bind us all in place, safe for release later on. Given the choice between catastrophe (the always untimely risk of failure, of waiting to be pushed over the edge, a point beyond where decisions can be made, a hazy fork in the road where the paths ahead have been blown up) and abandon, don’t we almost always ‘choose’ catastrophe (even our language begins to abandon us here: how could one CHOOSE catastrophe) over a kind of willing abandonment to alternative trails and forms and grammars and notes and routes and silences and forests and cities? Even the word ‘abandon’ itself fractures into an electrified jelly of ordinances resisting abundance, giving over to a sort of emptiness, but then into an object/noun world of overwhelming, even sublime abundance, beyond the banding restraints of the military body politic (yes, the ‘military’ as a strata which would stretch through all bodies, binding and furrowing and herding and planning) and over into an open shedding, into the commons, the radically distributed, an “irremediable scattering”

To improvise, the only route through any radical open scattering of possibilities, thin, invisibly thin path stretching between catastrophic emptying and ecstatic pleasure beyond measure. O precious speck of open time, momentary threshold enduring beyond, before, behind all reasonable expectations! ‘Get on the good foot’: the only need for getting on the good foot, not because we have found ourselves catastrophically condemned to march to/on the good foot but because the good foot abandons itself to itself, changing even all bad foots into the good one(s). To improvise is abandoned to dance this mess around…