#lingis

To live ethically, I want to suggest, is to not know, to never be in on The Secret, to actively disrupt and unsettle other's claims to know The Secret, and to instead revere the "poor existing individual" as Kierkegaard would have it. Everywhere people claim to have it down, to know what's going on; everywhere people are taking themselves up as fully visible (or mostly visible, which for all intents and purposes tends to look exactly the same), they begin to prescribe from this solidity––inflicting certainties on others, appropriating others without questioning their own grasp on things. Perhaps the only certainty worth serving is uncertainty, an ethical incredulousness, an unwillingness to buy into anyone's attempt to cut the flux, sell you The Secret, even your own secret. The place of communion might be found in letting go, the opening might just be where you begin to unknow. Our grasping lack of foundation can be seen as an opportunity for creativity. With this being said, we continue, we go on. We feel, we orient ourselves, we're affectively tethered––not to The Truth, but a truth. Or, said another way, our feeling into is a ground of meaning, but not a direct plug into the entire Cosmic Operation. A truth is true, but The Truth is always elusive, there's always more, there's always an excess––and if there isn't, I'm arguing that we should take things up this way and I'm okay with being responsible for that should, that ethical proposition. Every world has an evident, a felt sense, but this feeling isn't total or totalizing, isn't final or complete. This isn't to say that felt senses are fickle hauntings, nothing but social construction––it's instead to suggest that one feeling sense is one of a potential many, and that no feeling sense is sufficient to capture it all, there's no way to get all of everything in one breath––doing that would mean that there's a vantage point from which to see and feel everything, and feeling is immersion, submission, vulnerability, and negotiation. A commitment to not knowing is a commitment to endless involutive pedagogy, a willingness to learn, be disrupted, and become otherwise––it's to invite the outliers, the wayward, and the wandering. It's to know that no matter how stable things seem, there's always the possibility that something or someone will come along and open up the closures, challenge you and what you hold dear in some unforeseen way. To allow this openendedness is the challenge, to let the inappropriate unsettle all that you think you own, all that you think you know.