22 August 2013

by virtue of the absurd


     It is said that faith is needed in order to renounce everything. Indeed, one hears what is even more curious: a person laments that he has lost his faith, and when a check is made to see where he is on the scale, curiously enough, he has only reached the point where he is to make the infinite movement of resignation. Through resignation I renounce everything. I make this movement all by myself, and if I do not make it, it is because I am too cowardly and soft and devoid of enthusiasm and do not feel the significance of the high dignity assigned to every human being, to be his own censor, which is far more exalted than to be the censor general of the whole Roman republic. This movement I make all by myself, and what I gain thereby is my eternal consciousness in blessed harmony with my love for the eternal being. By faith I do not renounce anything; on the contrary, by faith I receive everything exactly in the sense in which it is said that one who has faith like a mustard seed can move mountains. It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never renounce—it is a self-contradiction. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith. By faith Abraham did not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac. By virtue of resignation, that rich young man should have given away everything, but if he had done so, then the knight of faith would have said to him: By virtue of the absurd, you will get every penny back again—believe it! And the formerly rich young man should by no means treat these words lightly, for if he were to give away his possessions because he is bored with them, then his resignation would not amount to much.
     Temporality, finitude—that is what it is all about. I can resign everything by my own strength and find peace and rest in the pain; I can put up with everything—even if that dreadful demon, more horrifying than the skeletal one who terrifies men, even if madness held its fool's costume before my eyes and I understood from its face that it was I who should put it on—I can still save my soul as long as my concern that my love of God conquer within me is greater than my concern that I achieve earthly happiness. In his very last moment, a person can still concentrate his whole soul in one single look to heaven, from whence come all good gifts, and this look will be understood by himself and by him whom it seeks to mean that he has been true to his love. Then he will calmly put on the costume. He whose soul lacks this romanticism has sold his soul, whether he gets a kingdom or a wretched piece of silver for it. By my own strength I cannot get the least little thing that belongs to finitude, for I continually use my strength in resigning everything. By my own strength I can give up the princess, and I will not sulk about it but find joy and peace and rest in my pain, but by my own strength I cannot get her back again, for I use all my strength in resigning. On the other hand, by faith, says that marvelous knight, by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd.

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Hong & Hong, 48-50)

15 August 2013

religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all


     According to Patočka [in his essay "Is Technological Civilization a Civilization in Decline, and If So Why?") one can speak of religion only after the demonic secret, and the orgiastic sacred, have been surpassed [depasse, also "outstripped," "outmoded"]. We should let that term retain its essential ambiguity. In the proper sense of the word, religion exists once the secret of the sacred, orgiastic, or demonic mystery has been, if not destroyed, at least integrated, and finally subjected to the sphere of responsibility. The subject of responsibility will be the subject that has managed to make orgiastic or demonic mystery subject to itself; and has done that in order to freely subject itself to the wholly and infinite other that sees without being seen. Religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all. Its history derives its sense entirely from the idea of a passage to responsibility. Such a passage involves traversing or enduring the test by means of which the ethical conscience will be delivered of the demonic, the mystagogic and the enthusiastic, of the initiatory and the esoteric. In the authentic sense of the word, religion comes into being the moment that the experience of responsibility extracts itself from that form of secrecy called demonic mystery.
     Since the concept of the daimon crosses the boundaries separating the human, the animal, and the divine, one will not be surprised to see Patočka recognizing in it a dimension that is essentially that of sexual desire. In what respect does this demonic mystery of desire involve us in a history of responsibility, more precisely in history as responsibility?
     "The demonic is to be related to responsibility; in the beginning such a relation did not exist" (110). In other words, the demonic is originally defined as irresponsibility, or, if one wishes, as nonresponsibility. It belongs to a space in which there has not yet resounded the injunction to respond; a space in which one does not yet hear the call to explain onself [repondre de soi], one's actions or one's thoughts, to respond to the other and answer for oneself before the other. The genesis of responsibility that Patočka proposes will not simply describe a history of religion or religiousness. It will be combined with a genealogy of the subject who says "myself," the subject's relation to itself as an instance of liberty, singularity, and responsibility, the relation to self as being before the other: the other in its relation to infinite alterity, one who regards without being seen but also whose infinite goodness giver in an experience that amounts to a gift of death [donner la mort]. Let us for the moment leave that expression in all its ambiguity.
 

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (1995: 2-3)

10 August 2013

a kind of incredible, marvelous, but inaccessible dream

     Our holidays – be they civil, military, or religious – designated by the same name as holidays of the distant past, seem, however, to have only a formal connection with previous holidays. True, we only know these archaic holidays through film, holidays during which frenzy is the rule and, with no ritualized structure, real furor is attained. Yet to the most sensitive among us, it is enough to find ourselves in front of a moving image of such frenzy to know that it corresponds to a nostalgia enduring within us and that this nostalgia, at least in this form, survives in depression. Our civilization links us to these necessities: nostalgia, no doubt, signifies something unattainable to us; we cannot even for a moment dream of recovering a richness whose loss we are only able to measure while deploring it.
     But when we seek to understand the possibilities from which we escaped long ago, violent impulses cannot fail to disturb us, impulses that henceforth cannot deliver us but that offered extreme exaltation to those who preceded us. Something is lacking in us, something that we do not understand clearly but that in its absence distinguishes us from the crowds who, in great tumult, danced and leaped for joy, lost  consciousness in their half-divine, half-demonic intoxication.
     We were driven out of this half-paradisiacal intoxication! We know we have fallen! Can we claim a naïveté without which we henceforth have only the sense, the certainty of having lost this intoxication? Evidently, when faced with a vision of these archaic peoples – brought to us sometimes by a film, by a trip, even through stories – we cannot doubt that as a whole we are separated from them by an impenetrability within which our world disappears completely (this real world of factories, machines, science, and conflicts of interest). Such is the vision, the intervision, of a kind of incredible, marvelous, but inaccessible dream.
      We know that we cannot attain this world without denying, without suppressing what we are. But in catching sight of it, we are led to forget its real spirit, its horrible tribal wars, its tortures, its massacres; or, in a less primitive civilization, the reduction of an unfortunate group of conquered men to slavery, men transported by force, under the lash, toward unspeakable markets.
     Only by dint of grievous lies can we conceal the accursed truth of history. There is something frightful in human destiny, which undoubtedly was always at the limit of this unlimited nightmare that the most modern weaponry, the nuclear bomb, finally announces.
    Only the first period, that of man's initial effort – ascending to consciousness in the Paleolithic era – seems to have escaped the horror that war and murder, both contemplated and generalized, then slavery, introduced. Only these – most distant – times escaped, times when man, with a perfect slowness, disengaged himself from animality through work, attained consciousness by degrees, made works of art, and, from that moment at least, came to resemble us in every way, having both our skeleton within and our seminude, furless skin without.
    It is at the beginning of the so-called Upper Paleolithic that, in this way, the fundamental revolution took place, the revolution from which man emerged fully formed. Completed man? On two levels at least: biologically, this man already had the same characteristics that all men from various races have today; as for his mental astuteness, he had the power – and the desire – to make a work of art, and he so perfectly had this power that the most famous of contemporary painters, speaking on this subject, has asserted that since then we have done nothing better. No doubt magical – utilitarian – intentions were associated with the superficial joy of reproducing, and rediscovering, in a way grasping, the objects of continual preoccupation: hunted animals, sometimes deities, and then all of a sudden the obsessive aspects of the human race.
    In the darkness of the caves, by the flickering light of grease lamps, objects of momentary desire and of long-held obsession were composed. These vast, successive murals have a meaning that may be outdated but anticipates that of festivals. Insofar as the animals represented are there so that the hunter, for a fleeting instant, can have them in his grasp, the paintings are situated far from a different representation, far from the neighbouring reality of the festival. It was at the end of the Upper Paleolithic that these themes appeared, enriched, beyond the immediate reality of the hunt, by the more composite reality of the festival. In Les Trois-Frères – in the Ariège department – these different themes appear all jumbled up: from an immense crowd of animals, figures that are half-human and half-animal emerge. They lead, it seems, a musical tumult, a dance of deliverance into intoxication. The straightforward animal figures were those of the hunt, but these strange – human yet animal – figures were in fact divine: for the undeveloped men, the animal, being essentially man's double, had something of the divine, the very thing he no longer attains except in the prodigious effervescence of the festival.
      The strangest thing is that during this harsh era, when human life was fragile – men usually lived past fifty, women on average lived much shorter lives (we know how old the skeletons were when they died; their burial preserved them) – war, which opposes men in inexpiable combat, was not apparent. If men killed other men, they were of a different species. Thus Upper Paleolithic man had to hunt, and it seems he was as capable of killing the Neanderthal man as he was of killing his prey. Actually, the line separating man from animal was not as clearly delineated as it is today. The first men, as well as some very primitive savages today, think they are really animals: because animals are, in their mind, the most holy, having a sacred quality, which men have lost. Thus, according to the simplest among us, animals, not men, are gods: animals alone have retained these supernatural qualities, which men have lost.
      Of course it is hard for us to think that we are becoming completely wretched!
      And yet . . .
      We might have a sublime idea of the animal now that we have ceased being certain that one day the nuclear bomb will not make the planet an unlivable place for man.



Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity (2009: 175; first appeared as "Terre invivable?" United States Lines, Paris Review, "For a World Festival," summer 1960)

31 July 2013

the life of a free man needs the presence of others

     Freedom as a political phenomenon was coeval with the rise of the Greek city-state (the polis). Since Herodotus, it was understood as a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy, whose outstanding characteristic among the forms of government, as the ancients had enumerated them, was that the notion of rule (the 'archy' from -αρχξιν in monarchy and oligarchy, or the 'cracy' from -κρατξιν in democracy) was entirely absent from it. The polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy. The word 'democracy', expressing even then majority rule, the rule of the many, was originally coined by those who were opposed to isonomy and who meant to say: What you say is 'no-rule' is in fact only another kind of rulership; it is the worst form of government, rule by the demos.
     Hence, equality, which we, following Tocqueville's insights, frequently see as a danger to freedom, was originally almost identical with it. But this equality within the range of the law, which the word isonomy suggested, was not equality of condition - though this equality, to an extent, was the condition for all political activity in the ancient world, where the political realm itself was open only to those who owned property and slaves - but the equality of those who form a body of peers. Isonomy guaranteed ισότης (equality), but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature (φύσει) not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its νόμος [law] would make them equal. Equality existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private persons. The difference between this ancient concept of equality and our notion that men are born or created equal and become unequal by virtue of social and political, that is man-made, institutions can hardly be over-emphasized. The equality of the Greek polis - its isonomy - was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth. Neither equality nor freedom was understood as a quality inherent in human nature, they were both not φύσει, given by nature and growing out by themselves; they were νόμφ, that is, conventional and artificial, the products of human effort and qualities of the man-made world.
     The Greeks held that no one can be free except among his peers, that therefore neither the tyrant nor the despot nor the master of a household - even though he was fully liberated and was not forced by others - was free. The point of Herodotus's equation of freedom with no-rule was that the ruler himself was not free; by assuming the rule over others, he had deprived himself of those peers in whose company he could have been free. In other words, he had destroyed the political space itself, with the result that there was no freedom extant any longer, either for himself or for those over whom he ruled. The reason for this insistence on the interconnection of freedom an equality in Greek political thought was that freedom was understood as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human activities, and that these activities could appear and be real only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them. The life of a free man needed the presence of others. Freedom itself needed therefore a place where people could come together - the agora (the market-place), or the polis (the political space), proper. 


Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1990: 30-31)

26 June 2013

the tombs of forgotten kings

    Privacy and affection, separately or together, never come cheap in the crowded city. Public displays of affection are not necessarily encouraged in Delhi, and only the well-to-do can afford the luxury of seclusion in love. Rooftop apartments with independent entrances in family-owned town houses, love nests in hotels, the back seats of capacious SUVs, weekend getaways in hill stations and guest-houses, or keys to the flats of pliant friends are conveniences that few can access. And those who can also go to clubs, bars, and parties where public displays of affection do not lead to instant assault. The public that displays its affections to its own charmed circle finds ways to do so behind high walls, high cover charges and high gates with vigilant watchmen in attendance.
   This public does not carve love letters on the tombs of forgotten kings. They do not tarry at the milk booth to catch someone's eye, or make small talk across rooftops in a squatter settlement while hanging out clothes to dry. They do not take long rides on the afternoon bus that takes them nowhere close to where they live, work, or study, where the space of the bus ride is also the only time in which to have a conversation, uninterrupted, veiled by an invisible film of brace indifference that guards against the mocking stares of co-passengers.
   The abandoned cenotaph, the river-front walkway, the downtown underpass, the ruined urban fortress, the crowded or empty bus, the broken-down playground, the shade of a generous tree, the derelict back street of a commercial complex, the corner seat in the cinema that only shows B movies, the street corner snack stall, the park bench, the dank corridors of public toilets, and the steps of a public library. These spaces, rife with presence, riddles with curious gazes, and awash with the traffic of millions of human beings, become theatres of urban intimacy for millions of people in cities like Delhi. Here, public and private life become contagious, contiguous, continuous facets of the same messy reality. Public architecture and the accidents of urban planning yield themselves to the steadfast pressure of private life.

   People fall in love, have sex, are born, defecate, cook, eat, sleep, work, play, read, sing, dance, pray, curse, quarrel, fight, riot, go mad, get possessed, enter trance states, cry, laugh, fall sick, get drunk, get arrested, get shot, get run over, and die on the street. The street is heaven and hell, factory and prison, morgue and nursery, market and office, boutique and salon, club and bar, library and university, high court and parliament, shrine and brothel, school and playground. The street is the city, the world, the bed you take your lover to. The street is the epic that people narrate their life into. The street is cruel and generous and indifferent and curious and concerned and hostile. The street is the hyphen that conjoins every public stance to every private longing. The street redeems every privation, hears every prayer, and kicks every dream into the gutter. It should come as no surprise then that often the most intensely emotional, even melodramatic moments in Hindi cinema are precisely those that get to be staged on the street. Here, in full public view, the most intense desires, the most painful humiliations, the darkest anger, the greatest joy, the strongest love, and the most profound loneliness find their fullest expression. The street is where the public act and the private motive get to know each other.
   A phone tap of a conversation on a crowded Delhi street between a Kashmiri lecturer in Arabic at Delhi University and his stepbrother in Kashmir about why his wife is not going back to her maternal home for a few days becomes evidence in a terrorism show-trial and the cornerstone of proof of a so-called conspiracy to attack the Indian parliament that prompts the largest military mobilization since the second world war. Its words, which point to banal domestic issues, are twisted and mistranslated to mean justifications of a terrorist attack. A very private conversation gets construed, retrospectively, as a very public statement.
   A call centre worker in India, when catering to North American customers, is often expected to take on a different "private identity." Sunita becomes Susan, her places of work and residence glide over time zones. The weather report on her computer tells her of the climate in another part of the world, which she makes her own as she slips into a different accent to deal with her client. In the course of her conversation, she invokes her client's credit history, purchase decisions, and other private information.
   The shift between one private identity and another and negotiating the contours of an "other's" (the client's) private life is the ground on which her public persona as a worker in the service sector of the global new economy is constructed.

Raqs Media Collective, Public Privations (found in Public 39: 2009)

14 June 2013

the law of indifference

From the external and visible world there comes an old adage: "Only one who works gets bread." Oddly enough, the adage does not fit the world in which it is most at home, for imperfection is the fundamental law of the external world, and here it happens again and again that he who does not work does get bread, and he who sleeps gets it even more abundantly than he who works. In the external world, everything belongs to the possessor. It is subject to the law of indifference, and the spirit of the ring obeys the one who has the ring, whether he is an Aladdin or a Noureddin, and he who has the wealth of the world has it regardless of how he got it.


It is different in the world of the spirit. Here an eternal divine order prevails. Here it does not rain on both the just and the unjust; here the sun does not shine on both good and evil. Here it holds true that only the one who works gets bread, that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest, that only the one who descends into the lower world rescues the beloved, that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac. He who will not work does not get bread but is deceived just as the gods deceived Orpheus with an ethereal phantom instead of the beloved, deceived him because he was soft, not boldly brave, deceived him because he was a zither player and not a man. Here it does not help to have Abraham as father or to have seventeen ancestors. The one who will not work fits what is written about the virgins of Israel: he gives birth to wind—but the one who will work gives birth to his own father.

There is a knowledge that presumptuously wants to introduce into the world of spirit the same law of indifference under which the external world sighs. It believes that it is enough to know what is great—no other work is needed. But for this reason it does not get bread; it perishes of hunger while everything changes to gold. And what in fact does it know?
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear & Trembling

04 June 2013

Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers

I walked the unwalked garden of rose-beds
In the public park; at home felt the want
Of a single rose present to imagine
The garden's remainder in full paint.

The stone lion-head set in the wall
Let drop its spittle of sluggish green
Into the stone basin. I snipped
An orange bud, pocketed it. When

It had opened its orange in my vase,
Retrogressed into blowze, I next chose red;
Argued my conscience clear which robbed
The park of less red than withering did.

Musk satisfied my nose, red my eye,
The petals' nap my fingertips:
I considered the poetry I rescued
From blind air, from complete eclipse.

Yet today, a yellow bud in my hand,
I stalled at sudden noisy crashes
From the laurel thicket. No one approached.
A spasm took the rhododendron bushes:

Three girls, engrossed, were wrenching full clusters
Of cerise and pink from the rhododendron,
Mountaining them on spread newspaper.
They brassily picked, slowed by no chagrin,

And wouldn't pause for my straight look.
But gave me pause, my rose a charge,
Whether nicety stood confounded by love,
Or petty thievery by large.

Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (1981: 103-04)

28 May 2013

the vision of things as "disenchanted"

The Epicureans and Sceptics achieved a notion of self-definition by withdrawal from the world; their weapon was scepticism about cosmic order, or a plea for the irrelevance of the Gods. By contrast the modern shift to a self-defining subject was bound up with a sense of control over the world - at first intellectual and then technological. That is, the modern certainty that the world was not to be seen as a text or an embodiment of meaning was not founded on a sense of its baffling impenetrability. On the contrary, it grew with the mapping of the regularities in things, by transparent mathematical reasoning, and with the consequent increase of manipulative control. That is what ultimately established the picture of the world as the locus of neutral, contingent correlations. Ancient sceptics while denying our ability to know the nature of things, had claimed that men had enough immediately relevant grasp on their situation to go about the business of life. While sometimes taking up the same formulae, the seventeenth century changed their content radically. The immediately relevant knowledge which was not to be compared with knowledge of final causes came to enjoy a higher and higher prestige. It came to be understood as the paradigm of knowledge.

This control over things which has grown with modern science and technology is often thought of as the principal motivation behind the scientific revolution and the development of the modern outlook. Bacon's oft-quoted slogan, 'knowledge is power' can easily give us this impression, and this 'technological' view of the seventeenth-century revolution is one of the reasons why Bacon has often been given a greater role in it than he deserves, alongside Galileo and Descartes. But even in Bacon's case, when he insists on the nullity of a philosophy from which there cannot be 'adduced a single experiment which tends to relieve and benefit the condition of man', we can read his motivation in a different way. We rather see the control as valuable not so much in itself as in its confirmation of a certain view of things: a view of the world not as a locus of meanings, but rather of contingent, de facto correlations. Manipulability of the world confirms the new self-defining identity, as it were: the proper relation of man to a meaningful order is to put himself into tune with it; by contrast nothing sets the seal more clearly on the rejection of this vision than successfully treating the world as object of control. Manipulation both proves and as it were celebrates the vision of things as 'disenchanted' (entzaubert) to use Max Weber's famous phrase.

Technological progress has so transformed our lives and produced so many things we could barely do without, that we easily think of the 'pay-off' of the seventeenth-century revolution in terms of these benefits (if such they unambiguously are). But in the seventeenth century itself, this pay-off was very slim. For Bacon and the other men of his time, control was more important for what it proved. In the very passage quoted above where he speaks of relieving and benefitting the condition of man, Bacon says: 'For fruits and works are as it were sponsors and sureties for the truth of philosophies.' And later he makes an explicit comparison of the relative importance of the two considerations: 'works themselves are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts of life'. We have no reason to think of this as false scientific piety.

Bacon later defines this goal which 'is in itself more worthy than all the fruits of inventions' as 'the very contemplation of things as they are, without superstition or imposture, error or confusion'. My suggestion is that one of the powerful attractions of this austere vision, long before it 'paid off' in technology, lies in the fact that a disenchanted world is correlative to a self-defining subject, and that the winning through to a self-defining identity was accompanied by a sense of exhilaration and power, that the subject need no longer define his perfection or vice, his equilibrium or disharmony, in relation to an external order. With the forging of this modern subjectivity there comes a new notion of freedom, and a newly central role attributed to freedom, which seems to have proved itself definitive and irreversible.

Charles Taylor, Hegel, 7-9

26 May 2013

Confucius, Lao Tzu, & Buddha

ONE day Confucius, Lao Tzu and Buddha, the founders of the three sects of religion professed in China, were talking together in fairyland of the want of success which attended their doctrines in the world, and proposed a descent to see if there were any right-minded persons who might be commissioned to awaken the age. After travelling for some days, they came at length to a desert place where the smoke of human habitations was not visible. The three sages, being weary with their journey and their lack of success, looked about for some place where they might quench their thirst, when suddenly they espied a fountain, and an old man sitting by it on guard. They concluded that they had better ask him for a little drink, and consulted together upon whom the task should fall of soliciting the favour.

"Come," said the other two to Buddha, "your priests are in the habit of begging, you go forward and ask." Buddha accordingly put the request. The old man asked: "Who are you?" "I am Shikayamuni," replied Buddha, "who formerly appeared in the west." "Oh, you are the celebrated Buddha, then, of whom I have heard so much; you have a reputation of being a good man, and I cannot refuse you a drink; but you must first answer me a question, which, if you do, you may have as much water as you please; but if not, you must go empty away." "What is it?" said Buddha. "Why," said the old man, "you Buddhists constantly affirm that men are equal, and admit neither of high nor low; how is it then that in your monasteries you have abbots, priests and novices?" Buddha could not answer, and was obliged to retire.

The sages then deputed Lao Tzu to ask for water, who, on coming up to the old man, was asked his name. "I am Lao Tzu," was the reply. "Oh, the founder of the Tao sect," said the old man. "I have heard a good account of you; but you must answer me a question or you will get no water." "Pray ask it," Lao Tzu answered. "You Taoists talk about the elixir of immortality; have you such a thing?" "Yes," said Lao Tzu, "it is the partaking of this that has rendered me immortal." "Well then," said the old man, "why did you not give a little to your own father, and prevent his decease?" Lao Tzu could not reply and was obliged to retire, saying to Confucius, "Come, brother, you must try your skill, for I can make nothing of the old man."

Confucius therefore advanced with the same request. "And who are you?" said the ancient. "I am Confucius," said he. "Oh, the celebrated Confucius, the sage of China; I have heard much of your discourses on filial piety, but how is it that you do not act up to them? You say, When parents are alive do not wander far; and if you do, have some settled place of abode; why then have you strayed away to this uninhabited region?" Confucius was unable to reply, and retired.

Upon this the three worthies consulted together about the old man, and came to the conclusion that he was so intelligent, they could not light upon a better person to revive their doctrines, and spread them through the world. They therefore made the suggestion. But the old man replied with a smile; "Gentlemen, you do not seem to know who or what I am? It is the upper part of me only that is flesh and blood, the lower part is stone; I can talk about virtue, but cannot follow it out."

This, the sages found, was the character of all mankind, and in despair of reforming the world they returned to the aerial regions.