Strategies of Recursivity…the Nemian Lion

O pudor! hirsuti costis exuta leonis
Aspera texerunt vellera molle latus!

I re-came upon this notepad thought pattern, and the two lines of Ovid. There is a certain sense in which we “wear” our philosophies which bristle with affective and protective tensors of sense, constructed recursively, in self-reference, so as to make a coherence, a non-reductive circulation of near degree-zero effects. Perhaps this is why Spinoza’s Ethics  is so satisfying to those that have penetrated it, it exemplifies this fundamental recursion. It resists the eye, our interests, until it broken through (affectively) and is tried on, so to speak. Then the deadened hairs (propositions) start to waver, ripple, in a breeze, and their is a sense of a muscle-work below. Few philosophies manifest this internal, body-making perception so explicitly…but perhaps all have it.

Secondly, it is sometimes noted that ideologies are defeated from within (they are logics of the εἰδός)…from taking their proscriptions literally, too literally. The claw of the lion is the only thing that could cut its Nemian skin. One enters not only philosophical recursion, but all social self-defintion from within, as part of its surface.  The plane which is thought to divide groups, is the skin which allows their sym-phany.

There is a sense as well, that we want to drape our harshest won skins over the softest affects, to create the inconcordance which distinguishes the circulation of the affect of the Law from the indulgence that lay beneath, illicitly, as if the pleasure of the one could bled into (and also contra-distinguish) the pleasure of the other, Eros into Thanatos, and back. This indeed is one betrayal of the lion’s skin, where affective recipricosity is the coin of living exchange. Our philosophically coherent visions are meant for the lives they inhabit.

 

“After Heracles slew the Nemean Lion, he faced the quandry of the fact that the skin was impenetrable. Nothing in the world could cut it. He solved the riddle by using the Lion’s own claw to incise the skin, and strip it from the ribs of the beast. Tautologies are such that they are self-defined. The elements that compose them are produced by their recursivity, and they define themselves. Heracles then wore his slain tautology as a mark of his status, impenetrable. There is no argument here.  

Tautologies have been long thought to be “empty”, simple circulations which tell us nothing about the world. But this is the point, the tautological are not so much as empty, but simply closed. They form bodies. Much as Heracles’ Nemean Lion, their very closure of skin are their strength. The circularity of references actually seem to define life. When Heracles slays the tautological, he drapes it across his body. It becomes the sign of his heroship. Rather than seeing through, beyond tautologies, one enters into them. They become vehicles. Rather than being self-defeating (un-provable, un-foundational), they are self-perpetuating, enduring.”