New Will

The popular dispute on the question of whether the word lightning already expresses something due to its quality as a translatable word gets people excited at regular intervals. Among other things, the argument serves to advance the competition about the most adaptable form of description at the cost of what the lightning promises to be beyond the moment when it is taking place. Always at the moment when the question of the flare and its attendant circumstances becomes almost meaningless in the view of the angry observer, the endangered ideals of a chronically self-doubting society are to be reanimated once again—beyond the technological immortality in which at least the mathematicians of atmospheric tension believe—in order to deliver them from divine punishment. But what happens is merely a hollowing of space which the discharge has just penetrated like nothing: no word could ever have wanted— and been able—to say more! The flash of lightning that has now expired is the supposedly ostracized or even feared message of an author who is also declared to be superfluous, who insists on himself in secret, and who possibly suffers from delusions of grandeur. The self-referentiality of the pointed finger set in opposition to that, however, causes the message to implode on the battlefield, until a new will awakens on the fallow land which the thunderstorm plough finally prepares for sowing.
      The allegorical image of lightning becomes, within the withdrawal battles over its proper description, the epitome of an anachronistic idiom that resists its self-dissolution in a downright heretical way. Very annoying. The mentioned de-objectification of the event, however, under a clear sky offers the image the possibility to reveal the delusional structures of a de-authorized text—as the remnant of an unclear history of freedom. He who has something to say now must say it on the open field, i.e., in a closed room. From the end of a (hi)story that does not want to end, the gaze penetrates a poisoned outside world whose transparency detaches the random moment of a lingering death from the physical context. The reverse side of the exploded White Cube, whose ideal intends the sublation of the term lightning against its reality, progresses with increasing confusion from one dog-ear to the next, until the babble of voices, on reaching the enemy, causes the dragon seed of the denied author to germinate. This seemingly unplanned withdrawal of the idealistic drug becomes possible only through the illusionistic effects of a web that no longer contradicts the will that invents it and tears it apart: damned paint on damned canvas, and yet no matter that might explain the fit of anger. And what about the form that wants to finally be freed from the circle of its psychosomatic rabies? In the heat of battle amongst monologists, it is an advantage not to lose a word about the cause and significance of such activity, because immediately one crackpot gets so close to the other crackpot that they become blurry to one another. How then does the one act who is, without sentimentality, proud of his ignorance? Can he make up for the loss of instinct which becomes a problem in the abreaction of a moment? The answer requires yet another turn: lightning denotes that moment when an enemy unexpectedly gives up his cover, while elsewhere the good beekeeper collects his honey.

Halcyon Days, Cologne 2013, p. 168