I wrote a blog some time ago on “visceral intellect” (https://jimkanaris.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/visceral-intellect/). The point was to annex—clumsily I admit—an experience I was having as a philosopher with a certain kind of training, which I won’t get into here. I’m not writing this second take to eliminate that clumsiness. Were that the case, I should probably abstain from writing altogether. No, my only hope is to write what continues to elude saying. I take my inspiration here from Jacques Derrida. “Ce qu’on ne peut pas dire, il ne faut surtout pas le taire, mais l’écrire.” It is important not to silence that which cannot be said, but to write it.

Bringing these two words together, “visceral” and “intellect”, opened a space to saturate thinking, which is usually reduced to knowing. But what else is knowing but a thinking? I’m not going to muddy the waters and argue against that possibility. My aim, rather, is to consider another possibility that, sadly, has become unpopular these days, if my philosophy Twitter feed is to be trusted (I do and I don’t). Perhaps we all feel the fatigue of Heideggerian Destruktion and its Derridean parallax. However, if nothing else, their thinking reminds us of an integrity to thought that must pause for thinking. We are all confronted by, let us call them broadly, “epistemological languages”, languages that force otherwise honorable agendas on us. And even if they are languages, the aim often is to supply the right judgment to dispel the allure of a particular language. The allure of languages. What academic has not tussled with this leviathan? And yet how are we to cope? How can we negotiate a path between this Scylla of knowing and the Charybdis of emancipatory languages? Heidegger and Derrida, inter alia, have provided aid. I myself have been improvising one in deference to their individual gestures. (My book is on the horizon!)

Visceral intellect suggests that thinking has sinews. Thinking is all those things that philosophers, rightly or wrongly, have associated with intellect. It is also, I want to argue, organic, that is, “sensitive awareness”, a peculiar rational self-consciousness (self-critical reflexivity, if you prefer), that accompanies “the logic of grammar”. I release these terms from the constraints of eliminativism and those of the logician. I do so, not because the insights they imply are necessarily wrong. You would have reason to take leave were that the case. No, I release these terms (“sensitive awareness” and “the logic of grammar”) from these specific discourses precisely because their role as discourses is what’s at issue here. Philosophy begins in wonder, as the ancients say, but wonder is inextricably complex, an interplay of language and wonder, wonderers. As such, wonder has an orientation that the logic of grammar, discourses, epistemes, and what have you, simultaneously upholds and uproots—a kinetics of knowledge. It is to this pragmatic use that I put these terms.

It’s the organic vicissitudes of this orientation that interests me. Language as instrument, which a stable subject manages or directs, is obviously not at play. Visceral intellect, like Spiderman, crawls from strand to strand in the language web. It reacts because it feels certain things as it grips and cuts strands along its path. That the sensibility is real, visceral, needs about as much argument as noting the behavior of someone bewildered, excited, or agitated while making an argument or pitching a primary difficult task. We may quibble with explanations offered to explain the behavior, but this presupposes what needs no argument. Someone is viscerally engaged. As diagnosticians, we may disagree. And yet, even diagnosticians need to get their bearings from time to time.

Enecstasis is the term I coined to indicate this complex of relations, of language to subject, of system to thinking. Visceral intellect signals the peculiar form of agency enecstasis presupposes, which, in this modality of thinking, is more artistic than intellectual in the traditional knowledge, system-building sense. It seeks to realign the visceral with the intellectual, providing a space (khora) for the former to catch up with the latter. When faced with a logic, a discourse, depending on one’s investment and horizon, reactions will vary. It’s not always the case that one will be challenged or disrupted by the logic in question, which shouldn’t mean, of course, that enecstatic engagement is unnecessary for that reason. It may actually be more necessary for that reason! In any case, the dynamic of the interaction is basic, an assumption. It tends to surface especially when one feels cornered or uncomfortable or disrupted against one’s better judgment, leaving aside for the moment whether that judgment is sound. The point is that the release, that “aha!” moment, should not come as a result of following the logic, connecting the dots, as it were, or understanding the ins and outs of the discourse. The space opened up by the logic provides opportunity for enecstatic engagement. Am I afforded the integrity of disagreement? Am I agreeing because I feel coerced, the alternative making me out to be backward or inane? Perhaps the disruption/appropriation is required? Is my horizon too narrow? Should I welcome the disruption, accommodate it somehow? What’s at stake in my self-development? These kinds of negotiating questions are pretty crucial, if one honors the work of intellect. The affective side of the visceral is clear enough for the purposes of this blog. What about that aspect I dubbed artistic?

The artistic side is tricky. What it means to subtend is the truncation implicitly at work in an intellectual horizon guided by certain principles of admission and exclusion. While necessary perhaps, the process is procedurally limiting. If the moment of enecstatic engagement is to be open, it ought to render itself vulnerable, even if momentarily, in its encounter with “the other”. This isn’t the cheap, neo-liberal sort of openness rightly criticized by Slavoj Zizek. If the other is to be appreciated, it must be recognized in its irreducible otherness. To be clear, I should delineate negative and positive functions to the artistry. Negatively, visceral intellect, like the artist, gropes for what seems and often is new, other, different, strange, etc. It does this, however, to avoid closing itself off to the other as other, perhaps even as threat. Positively, the engagement, in devising some open form of interaction, takes leave of the other, in Derrida’s precarious sense of unconditional hospitality. The gap bridged, in other words, is not between the self and the other in proximity to itself. It is between the intellect viscerally engaged and its othered self in dialectical, artistic relation to the other. It’s a peculiar form of rapport sans rapport, a recurrent scheme of the visceral catching up with, while intermittently disrupting, the intellectual. More anon.