© Tobias Kruse, The Parting, school leaving examination year 2007 of Carl-von-Ossietzky-Gymnasium, Berlin Pankow, on the graduation trip at Lake Balaton, Siofok, May 2007, Hungary.
“Alcoholism extends the impersonal and transcendental event of the ‘crack up’ across a life by way of a caesura of time. Alcoholism, Deleuze writes, ‘hardens’ the present (Deleuze 1990: 158). In Fitzgerald, alcoholism’s temporality is that of the past perfect – I have-acted, I have-broken, I have-touched – where the present auxiliary is the hardened present and the past participle the volatile, churning real it extends across and holds in its entirety: a volcano held in porcelain. Still, in alcoholism, the ‘I have-drunk’ collapses the near past of the last drink with the distant past of sobriety (Deleuze 1990: 159). Hardness becomes indifference and the present loses its hold on the past without ceasing to enclose it; lava turns to dust. Further, each drink is always already a drink I have-drunk, faded into the past at the same time that the past is washed out by the indistinction of its points. For the drink to break through the present is for the undifferentiated past to break upon the present and wash over it. The crack becomes a wound as the drunk meets her alcoholism and becomes an alcoholic, and no longer a sober companion to another self who has drunk. The self collapses into a single ego, no longer split into the actual event and a double that might ‘counter-actualise’ it.”
in From the Archive, Introduction to Günther Anders’ ‘The Pathology of Freedom’, by Katharine Wolfe
N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 