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Subject Matter

The Anaesthetics of Habit and the Logic of Breakdown

Part of Short Circuits

Author Aron Vinegar
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Paperback
$29.95 US
The MIT Press
On sale Nov 28, 2023 | 216 Pages | 9780262546362
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A theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive and unsettling qualities rather than its mediating, adaptive, and stabilizing functions.

Subject Matter offers a bold counterpoint to prevalent conceptions of habit characterized by bodily fluidity and ease, as the stabilizing foundation of an emerging subjectivity, or, more negatively, as a numbing and deadening force. Instead of facilitating the coordination of action with goal and self with environment, habit appears here as a disruptively recursive operation with extreme ontological implications that are often more quotidian than exceptional. Vinegar theorizes habit’s more perturbing aspects, from repetition compulsion to kenosis to breakdown, through an encounter between Hegel’s philosophy (of habit), psychoanalytic dimensions of repetition, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, and Omer Fast’s feature-length film interpretation of the novel.

Vinegar starts with the premise that habit is an “unhappy mediator,” a disturbance of the very medium and milieu that is constitutive of the subject. Subject Matter pays close attention to those aspects of habit that are usually considered deviations from, or potential threats to, habit proper and that generate a logic of breakdown: automaticity, mechanization, thingness, inertia, and fixity. By plotting a topology of habit’s unbearability through detailed accounts of its manifestation in writing, art, aesthetics, and visuality—and through an attentiveness to the unbalanced nonrelations between mediation and immediacy, being and having, fixity and fluidity, vanishing and overflowing, abbreviation and excess, beginning and ending—Vinegar exposes habit’s failure to mediate and inhabit. In doing so, he offers new and counterintuitive insights into how habit generates the unruly grounds it is supposed to settle, thus allowing us to ask how we might break down differently.
Series Foreword vii
 INTRODUCTION: HABIT— THE UNHAPPY MEDIATOR 1
Habit without the Fly- Wheel 1
Fixity, Fluidity, and Superfluity 6
A Crack in the Mirror, a Rent in the Veil 9
The Anaesthetics of Habit 11
No Footlights— On Staging the Set- Up Error 13
Habit, Hegel, and Remainder 14
A Logic of Breakdown 19
Subject Matter and Habit 20
Kenosis and the Stained Soul of Habit 22
(Chapter) Breakdown 24
1 FALLING STUFF 29
Falling Stuff and the Destitution of Subjectivity 29
Repetition, Habit, and the Speculative Sentence 33
Satz at the Heart of Setzen and the Failure to Ingrain 38
The Fixed Subject 40
“Unhappy Tristram!” 45
Habit, Anxiety, and the Overproximity of Being and Having 47
Habit’s Death Drive and Dead Time 49
“Kerr- thunkk!”/“thump! kadump!” 52
2 PER- SEVERING HABIT AND THE DESEASE OF
THE FLUID BODY 57
Rattling Off— On Chains and Streams 58
Fixity and Fluidity 60
“This being- at- home- with- oneself we call habit” 61
Bruised, Bloodied, and Stained 65
Expunging the Beautiful Soul (Porifera) 68
Compulsive Machinic Exteriority 75
Being- That- Is- Deposited 76
Understanding and the Aesthetic Ideology of Habit Change 80
Verstand and Vernunft in Habit 85
Death- Dealing Matter and Forensic Analysis 89
The Magic and Cunning of Habit 93
A Short- Circuiting Anaesthetics of the Infinite Judgment 96
3 BUFFETING AND BEING SECOND- HAND 103
Michelangelo’s Artichoke 103
The Static Logic of Habit 109
Buffeting and Being Set Adrift 112
Tingling and the Tinnitus of the Body 116
Fulgurating Lightning Rods 118
The Recoil of Vergreifen in Begreifen 121
The Ego- Function of an Organ is Impaired 123
“Not a Member is Sober” 129
Grasping at the Principle of Carrot and Stick 130
Joan of Arc’s Gaucherie and the Stained Soul of Habit 137
4 PIECES OF (FIGURE) EIGHT AND THE CRUX OF
THE MATTER 141
Habit and “Un- Matter” 141
A Kenotic Anaesthetics of Habit 144
Vanishing, Vaporizing, and Overflowing 145
Pieces of (Figure) Eight 147
The Disinhabiting Ring of Habit 150
Autopilot, the Not Yet, and Remainder’s Nonending 152
Acknowledgments 155
List of Abbreviations 157
Notes 159
Index 199
Aron Vinegar is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Oslo. He writes and teaches at the intersection of art, architecture, visual studies, aesthetics, and philosophy.
Aron Vinegar View titles by Aron Vinegar

About

A theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive and unsettling qualities rather than its mediating, adaptive, and stabilizing functions.

Subject Matter offers a bold counterpoint to prevalent conceptions of habit characterized by bodily fluidity and ease, as the stabilizing foundation of an emerging subjectivity, or, more negatively, as a numbing and deadening force. Instead of facilitating the coordination of action with goal and self with environment, habit appears here as a disruptively recursive operation with extreme ontological implications that are often more quotidian than exceptional. Vinegar theorizes habit’s more perturbing aspects, from repetition compulsion to kenosis to breakdown, through an encounter between Hegel’s philosophy (of habit), psychoanalytic dimensions of repetition, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, and Omer Fast’s feature-length film interpretation of the novel.

Vinegar starts with the premise that habit is an “unhappy mediator,” a disturbance of the very medium and milieu that is constitutive of the subject. Subject Matter pays close attention to those aspects of habit that are usually considered deviations from, or potential threats to, habit proper and that generate a logic of breakdown: automaticity, mechanization, thingness, inertia, and fixity. By plotting a topology of habit’s unbearability through detailed accounts of its manifestation in writing, art, aesthetics, and visuality—and through an attentiveness to the unbalanced nonrelations between mediation and immediacy, being and having, fixity and fluidity, vanishing and overflowing, abbreviation and excess, beginning and ending—Vinegar exposes habit’s failure to mediate and inhabit. In doing so, he offers new and counterintuitive insights into how habit generates the unruly grounds it is supposed to settle, thus allowing us to ask how we might break down differently.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword vii
 INTRODUCTION: HABIT— THE UNHAPPY MEDIATOR 1
Habit without the Fly- Wheel 1
Fixity, Fluidity, and Superfluity 6
A Crack in the Mirror, a Rent in the Veil 9
The Anaesthetics of Habit 11
No Footlights— On Staging the Set- Up Error 13
Habit, Hegel, and Remainder 14
A Logic of Breakdown 19
Subject Matter and Habit 20
Kenosis and the Stained Soul of Habit 22
(Chapter) Breakdown 24
1 FALLING STUFF 29
Falling Stuff and the Destitution of Subjectivity 29
Repetition, Habit, and the Speculative Sentence 33
Satz at the Heart of Setzen and the Failure to Ingrain 38
The Fixed Subject 40
“Unhappy Tristram!” 45
Habit, Anxiety, and the Overproximity of Being and Having 47
Habit’s Death Drive and Dead Time 49
“Kerr- thunkk!”/“thump! kadump!” 52
2 PER- SEVERING HABIT AND THE DESEASE OF
THE FLUID BODY 57
Rattling Off— On Chains and Streams 58
Fixity and Fluidity 60
“This being- at- home- with- oneself we call habit” 61
Bruised, Bloodied, and Stained 65
Expunging the Beautiful Soul (Porifera) 68
Compulsive Machinic Exteriority 75
Being- That- Is- Deposited 76
Understanding and the Aesthetic Ideology of Habit Change 80
Verstand and Vernunft in Habit 85
Death- Dealing Matter and Forensic Analysis 89
The Magic and Cunning of Habit 93
A Short- Circuiting Anaesthetics of the Infinite Judgment 96
3 BUFFETING AND BEING SECOND- HAND 103
Michelangelo’s Artichoke 103
The Static Logic of Habit 109
Buffeting and Being Set Adrift 112
Tingling and the Tinnitus of the Body 116
Fulgurating Lightning Rods 118
The Recoil of Vergreifen in Begreifen 121
The Ego- Function of an Organ is Impaired 123
“Not a Member is Sober” 129
Grasping at the Principle of Carrot and Stick 130
Joan of Arc’s Gaucherie and the Stained Soul of Habit 137
4 PIECES OF (FIGURE) EIGHT AND THE CRUX OF
THE MATTER 141
Habit and “Un- Matter” 141
A Kenotic Anaesthetics of Habit 144
Vanishing, Vaporizing, and Overflowing 145
Pieces of (Figure) Eight 147
The Disinhabiting Ring of Habit 150
Autopilot, the Not Yet, and Remainder’s Nonending 152
Acknowledgments 155
List of Abbreviations 157
Notes 159
Index 199

Author

Aron Vinegar is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Oslo. He writes and teaches at the intersection of art, architecture, visual studies, aesthetics, and philosophy.
Aron Vinegar View titles by Aron Vinegar

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