(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It is almost with a trembling hand that I write these lines Asbjørn Aarnes, not only because he was the most decisive event in my life as a young person, but also because Asbjørn Aarnes is for me in a sense "invisible", as he himself used to say about the poetic phenomenon around which his whole life revolved.
However, Asbjørn himself pointed out that it was of the utmost importance to be able to speak of the 'invisible' or 'unspeakable', as long as one does not masterfully try to express it and hold it firmly in a grip, but instead circles around it, approaches it with a language that in its speech carefully tries to hold it forward more than the understanding tries to hold it firmly.
Asbjørn Aarnes was, as he himself often expressed, unfinished, along the way "weakly incarnated", as he himself could say – and there were always signs left to interpret, things and events that might tell him something, and around the corner there was perhaps a person whom he had never met before, but who would possibly change his life and perhaps make him see something he had never seen before. On the way, he had indeed gathered some decisive experiences and insights, and these were for him in a certain sense absolute – they had clear evidence, even if, paradoxically, they were neither obvious nor evident in the Cartesian sense – but at the same time these experiences were and the insights are not properties of the sovereign consciousness, but linked to different forms of indictment, which spoke to an organ other than that of cognition.
Landmark experiences
The first of these defining experiences was the appeal of the invisible in poetry. The poem speaks for itself, he liked to say, and it is not created with ideas, but with words, words that come together to sing and which in this song of words mean, without one fully understanding why they mean or what they mean.
Another defining experience for Asbjørn was the encounter with Franz Kafka's work. For Asbjørn, Kafka's world was a world of his own metaphysically unrest, where one is not the master of one's own life, and where preparedness and preparation are powerless against the unforeseen that intervenes in life. It was a world where answers are required, but where you don't get to know the question, where signs and hints are given but no manual to decipher them, where a goal is given but no way. However, Asbjørn was no stranger to Kafka's metaphysical uneasiness, he knew it to a certain extent himself, but without perhaps being aware of it, at the same time he already sensed peace's answer to this uneasiness, and this answer was to become a new surprise of recognition in the decisive meeting with Emmanuel Levinas' works.
When Asbjørn relied on Levinas's philosophy late in his life, it was for him nothing less than an epiphany. Just like the meeting with Kafka, Levinas's work was an event that took him by surprise and hit him in his heart, an experience that he could not have foreseen, but which nevertheless offered a recognition that nevertheless came as a surprise. Levinas talked about it Another's face who implores me, who stops me in my striving to be, pulls me out of myself and makes me responsible. On the face is written an ethical demand, a command not to kill, but this demand is not a message to a reason that can take the demand up for discussion and assessment, but a vulnerability that is so vulnerable and so weak that it demands, and which – not with power, but impotently – breaks into the self and disturbs self-satisfaction, and sobers the self drunk on self-pleasure. The self is no longer in the nominative, it no longer occupies the first place, but is in the accusative, accused by the Other, sobered by an infinite responsibility for almost which is not choice, but selection. With Levinas, just as with Kafka, it is not possible to close in on oneself and entrench oneself in a self-sufficient interiority of self-awareness.
With Levinas, a responsibility is demanded for the Other who, in the face of the accusation, tells me who I am and why I am in the world.
In Levinas, too, the self is exposed to announcements from elsewhere that call and invoke. But where in Kafka's world one is called upon without being told why, demanded an answer without knowing the question, in Levinas one is demanded a responsibility for the Other who, in the indictment of the face, tells me who I am and why I am in the world: I am my "brother's keeper" and I were born to take care of my neighbor. Levinas's philosophy thus became for Asbjørn an answer to Kafka. In both Kafka and Levinas one is taken out of control, but where in Kafka a goal is given but no way, in Levinas one is given a height measure in the face that indicates the direction. The metaphysical uneasiness of Kafka thus acquires meaning in Levinas. It is still uneasiness, but it is not the uneasiness of the arbitrary, but the uneasiness of responsibility, which on its face nevertheless heralds peace. Levinas's philosophy also shone a kind of explanatory light over Asbjørn's own life. For Asbjørn, the surprise of recognition in the encounter with Levinas's philosophy and work consisted not least in the fact that it became obvious to him that the most important thing in his life had always been connected to faces and encounters.
From the others
For Asbjørn, what was important ultimately never came from himself, but always from outside and from elsewhere, from the others. It is therefore not strange that his own thinking is almost inseparable from those he thought with, from the thinkers and poets who made such an overwhelming impression on him. At the same time, he undoubtedly also became himself in this responsiveness to others, no matter how weakly incarnated he himself thought he was, and even though he was alien to any idea of coming to terms with himself. One senses the contours of a way of thinking where the unfinished stands higher than the finished, where letting go is more important than squeezing cognition and understanding out of all things, as he used to say, and where , thought ultimately thinks better and more than thought.
See MODERN TIMES' editor's short film with Aarnes.
