FIELD GUIDES

To lose the horizon, to experience it's collapse upon itself - Zu Grunde gehen - one must not simply fall apart. One must "go to one's ground". Emotional breakdown, unbearable anxiety - madness - leads us to "one's ground". The absolute recoil (I might go out on a limb and call it a re-birth) is the reflexive formation of a new subjectivity, or at least radically reformulated. Not Identity (not yet, anyway), but the "subject position of enunciation". In the midst of breakdown, of radical loss, of collapse, I cry out - I (you) literally cry out in horror, or sadness, or grief; or I (you) light a fire and burn the recognizable world/things that suddenly seem to have no place; or I (you) eventually make art (or talk) about it. Crying out = to posit (and ties us in to all that "self-sublating/self-positedness" stuff Hegel talks about) ...and all that stuff is about me (you) regaining a sense of self (the healing self, or self that is healing), reclaiming an essence that "went to its ground" in despair, in pain and in grief. To emerge from that night of the world is "to be", and to become is to issue forth (to posit) a new horizon.