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ニュースや報道の類いを意識的に目にしない生活に転じてから二か月近くになった。その以前でも、テレビのニュース番組をあえて時間を割いて視聴するようなことはほとんどなくなっていたけど、二か月前に友人宅でふと思い立ってからは、ネット上のニュースへ何気なくアクセスするようなこともなくなった。これまで一日一時間以上を費やして漫然と収集に努めていたニュースの流入がまるごと失われたことになるが、幸か不幸か、そのことで不便を被ったことは以来一度もなかった。考えてみれば当たり前の話で、戦争や革命が始まりでもすればいくら部屋に閉じこもって耳を塞いでも知らずに済ますことはできないだろうし、それほどの一大事ではなくても、松っちゃんの結婚話など僕にとって本質的に重要な情報は、周りの人間が親切に教えてくれる。逆に友達からの便りはいくらテレビを眺めていても決して届かないだろう。知るべきことは遅かれ早かれ知らしめられる。それで足りなければ、図書館へ行くなり検索エンジンを使うなりして追加的に調査すればよい。
そんなわけで今日のニュースも起きがけに携帯ニュースを見た妻から知らされた。"I'll be there"や"Man in the Mirror"もいいけど、僕としては思い入れの強さから14才時の名曲"Happy"を推したい。
Happy came smiling up at me
Sadness had no choice but to flee
I said a prayer so silently
Let Sadness see what Happy does
Let Happy be where Sadness was
なんてまるでスピノザのようではないか！
Spinoza means something very simple, that sadness makes no one intelligent. In sadness one is wretched. It's for this reason that the powers-that-be [pouvoirs] need subjects to be sad. Agony has never been a cultural game of intelligence or vivacity. As long as you have a sad affect, a body acts on yours, a soul acts on yours in conditions and in a relation which do not agree with yours. At that point, nothing in sadness can induce you to form the common notion, that is to say the idea of a something in common between two bodies and two souls. What he's saying is full of wisdom. This is why thinking of death is the most base thing. He is opposed to the whole philosophical tradition which is a meditation on death. His formula is that philosophy is a meditation on life and not on death. Obviously, because death is always a bad encounter.
Another case. You are affected with joy. Your power of acting is increased, this doesn't mean that you possess it yet, but the fact that you are affected with joy signifies and indicates that the body or soul which affects you thus affects you in a relation which is combined with your own and which is combined with your own, and that goes for the formula of love and the digestive formula. In an affect of joy, therefore, the body which affects you is indicated as combining its relation with your own and not as its relation decomposing your own. At that point, something induces you to form a notion of what is common to the body which affects you and to your own body, to the soul which affects you and to your own soul. In this sense joy makes one intelligent.
( "Spinoza" / Gilles Deleuze )
