Thoughts from a Forest of Fallen Trees : The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Side of Existence

Phantom Limb Sabotage

2008-12-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

Phantom Limb Sabotage
Marko Zlomislic

For S

Has Mother Earth become Humanity’s Phantom Limb?
Paul Virilio, Open Sky

“If you’re caught in the dream of the other, you’re fucked”
Gilles Deleuze

The blue layers, retina that separates the full from the Void, but the fullness of the earth is overflowing with waste. Pollution that we layer into subdivisions. To dig and disturb the underground that props up our lives. Another world is possible but the same flavor is re-gifted.

We will become responsible for our own erasure when the earth will glow like a sun.
Then the horizon will vanish and along with it the zones of human after taste.
But the real will still be taken, a burr that hitches itself to a Data Suit sabotaging the birth of the event.

The phantom limb our Cartesian heritage, the ghostly effect that affects what remains.
What was there though cut off is still felt to be there. The no longer there is still here.
We are Virilio writes, in a state of perpetual dependence on the unseen but still felt.

The imaginary is the human domain, the gap where we find the still bleeding wounds of our dead gods. The shock of the crumpled future if Nietzsche is correct, can be received with a joy that shatters the test sites of global consumption.

Satellite networks of the monstrous Leibnizean monad, windowless, unable to see the other screaming. It is the uneven that cannot be tolerated. The surface jagged with the new and unique must be planed down, flattened on Procrustes’ bed. Taste what is at the core of the empty space occupied by the Master. He baits you with Coke Zero and aspartame delight.

To see with the same Oedipal eye is already an imposed mutilation.
To cauterize the bleeding is to unplug from the network.
To get off from the grid rather than to get off on the electronic satisfaction it provides.

St. Jerome declares, “ The world is already full and no longer holds us”.
So we remain dependant on the Master’s promise of digital lobotomies.
Corbusier claims, “The house is a machine for living”. He wants to fix the standard and with passion, “create drama out of inert stone”.

Wittgenstein wants the method that is, “the strictly correct one”. These rectal desires want the straight edge to be secured such that we live in the tension of two orders of ethics
Correct as the right heart, correct as the rectal heart, that eliminates the foreigner with murderous discontent.

Fake a prayer in the face of death as the nameless African children are posted, offered up to keep the pennies in the Halloween UNICEF boxes rolling into the Hague. Bailout for the capitalists who cannot live by the rules of their own game.

Hunger and famine for the third world. They are filmed but not fed. We wish to leave the confines of this paralysis to find the primordial encounter. But this is a trip into Nature, into the predatory chaos.

Cry to heaven as the ground beneath your feet spirals into trauma. Worn down by the glacial grind, a skateboard trick that defies gravity, that seeks escape velocity from the funbox ramp. My son is five, he is on his board without fear. He is free gliding on wheels, turning on the half pipe without a cord.

Some await the drunk messiah who splits the sky with a jagged impulse. Ahab’s leg in the belly of the whale becomes the prosthetic, multiplying its monstrosity onto dry land.
Only a Hancock can save us now, while Hannibal continues to feed.

The digital focus of the viral eye chipped from Descartes spirit leg. Embalm it like Bentham’s corpse to preside over the meetings of the World Bank. Civil lies, civilize. This system a train wreck with built in safe guards to fund its own mistakes.

Who is appointed Lord and Head? You anoint him with your labour only to be baptized with fear. The still birth of your madness is too feeble to reverse the gears of the pyramid machine that grinds its progeny into the bricks that structure its walls.

Animated it exalts itself. Apparatus of the Rector’s war machine
The smooth space. Marble surface. Where we will have been ground down
To have our ashes as the only mute witness.

Self-Portrait at African Lion Safari

2007-06-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

Acrylic on Canvas. 2007

Philosophy Bored With Itself

2007-06-13T21:05:00.000-07:00

Acrylic on Canvas. 2007. Private Collection.

Reading Francis Bacon

2007-06-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

Acrylic on Canvas. Private Collection. 2007

Self-Portrait

2007-06-04T21:32:00.001-07:00

Mixed Media on Canvas. 2007. Private Collection.

Noah in the Park

2007-06-04T21:29:00.001-07:00

2006

Simulacra of my SouthPark Replica

2007-06-02T20:46:00.000-07:00

My Death is it Possible?

2007-05-27T21:44:00.001-07:00

I am five years old. My goldfish does not want to swim anymore. I bring it to my mother. It’s very tired she says. It is there that I make the connection between death and sleep and become afraid to fall asleep.
Psalm 89 asks: Who can live and never see Death? Psalm 103 informs us " As for mortals, their days are like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone". What is it in these ancient Hebrew words that troubles us? Has anyone of us actually seen Death? Is it possible to see Death? I have seen living things die: plants, animals, humans but I have never seen Death. Why does the word "gone" frighten us so much?
In his text the Phaedo, the Greek philosopher Plato recounts the conversation between Socrates and his friends in the death cell during the last hours of his life. Socrates begins to explain why it is that a philosopher should look forward to death: "Other people don’t seem to realize that those who pursue philosophy in the right way are actually working at readying themselves for dying and for being dead". The true philosopher, Socrates declares, strives to free himself from subjection to the pleasures of the flesh. He strives to separate body from soul: to purify his mind from the distorting influences of pleasure and pain. Socrates points out, that there is no hope of our attaining to knowledge of anything until we are liberated from the body by death. So long as we live, if we are serious seekers for truth, we must engage in a determined process of purification.
Philosophy for the Socrates of the Phaedo is a systematic self liberation from the influences of pleasure and pain . He has transcended the fear of death and has freed himself from attachment to physical things. Liberated from the obsessive and deluding powers of pleasure and pain, the philosopher can face the worlds as he knows it to be, freed from the desires and fears in which most of humanity are trapped.
Socrates defines death as "simply the departure of soul from body". Being dead, "consists does it not, in the body having been parted from the soul and comes to be by itself, and in the soul having been parted from the body, and being by itself". The body is a hindrance to the attainment of truth. Socrates states: "While we are alive we shall, it would seem, come nearest to knowledge if we have as little as possible to do with the body, if we limit our association therewith to absolute necessities, keeping ourselves pure and free from bodily infection until such a time as God himself shall release us. And being thus made pure and rid of the body’s follies we may expect to join the company of the purified, and have direct knowledge of all truth un-obscured".
To fear death is to be a lover of the body: "Then if you see a man about to die complaining, is not that good evidence that he is not really a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, but what we may call a lover of the body? And probably he will be a lover of riches too, or honors, or maybe of both".
Socrates asks, "What must come to be present in a body for it to be alive?" The answer is: SOUL. The soul always brings life along with it to anything that it occupies So when death approaches a person, his/her mortal part dies, but their immortal part gets out of the way of death and takes its departure intact and indestructible. The soul which is the life principle cannot become its opposite; the death principle.
According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, to live is not something that one learns from either life or from oneself. The question, "How should I live?" does not receive an answer from life. How should I live is never taught by life. The question to this answer arrives, "only from the other and by death". Why only from the other and by death is this question answered? Learning to live is never something one does alone, all by oneself. Following Derrida, learning how to live would involve,
To learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company and companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better….And this being with spectres would also be, not only, but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.
For Derrida, it is essential that these ghosts are welcomed. I will consider two definitions. The first is taken from The Ear of the Other. In this text Derrida defines the ghost as "the effect of another's crypt in my unconscious". Derrida provides a rough schematic of how this crypt within me may be formed. For example, if I lose a loved one and fail to mourn properly, the dead person would continue to live inside me, "but as a stranger".
In "The Deaths of Roland Barthes", Derrida provides another definition of the ghost. There he writes,
Ghosts: the concept of the other in the same, the punctum in the studium, the dead other alive in me...
The word punctum taken from Barthes' text Camera Lucida is that which "pierces, strikes me, wounds me, bruises me, and, first of all, seems to look only at me". The studium is my "haunted space", where the punctum of the other resides in me. To be haunted is to be possessed, burdened or in other words to live with accountability and responsibility for the dead other. The punctum according to Derrida, "points to me at the instant and place where I point to it...". The punctum, according to Barthes is that which is "poignant to me". Poignant: intense, powerful, passionate: the eruption of and blaze of the dead other in me, as my mourning is composed together in words which remember.
What takes place in the communication of a funeral oration? It is of course written for the dead other, but according to Derrida, "this is of course a supplementary fiction" precisely because, "it is always the dead in me, always the others standing around the coffin, who I call out to". Calling out to the dead, to the dead in me, to the others who have their dead in themselves, what may be heard except the sound of tears and talk that flow freely? This grave side talk is supposed to teach us the ethics of how to live, finally. Yet how?
In Section 51 of Being and Time the German philosopher Heidegger points out that death understood in an everyday manner is "known as a mishap which is constantly occurring- as a 'case of death'". In our everyday way of being, and through idle-talk, they understand death as something indefinite, in other words, as something that did occur to others whom we read about in newspapers or notices but not something that can or will occur to me now. This inauthentic understanding of death ignores that, "death is a way to be, which Dasein or the being which is there ( which is Heidegger’s definition of human being) takes over as soon as it is.' As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die", according to Heidegger. Furthermore, in this inauthentic way of talking about death through our idle-talk, "death is understood as an indefinite something which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is not yet present- at- hand for oneself, and is therefore no threat". Thus, the dying which is essentially my death and my dying "is perverted into an event of public occurrence which the "they" encounters". Furthermore, according to Heidegger, "the dying of Others is seen often enough as a social inconvenience, if not even a downright tactlessness, against which the public is to be guarded". Even if one knows that death is certain, often, we are not "authentically certain" about our own death and dying. In other words, we live inauthentically in our fear of death.
In Section 47 of Being and Time, Heidegger makes a distinction between the deceased, (Der Verstorbene) and the dead person (dem Gestorbenen). Another distinction is made between perishing (Verenden) and ending. We turn to the first distinction between the deceased and the dead person. According to Heidegger, the deceased is that which "has been torn away from those who have remained behind". The second distinction concerns perishing and ending. We never experience the coming-to-an-end of the deceased. We only experience the loss of the loved one. However, according to Heidegger, "in suffering this loss... we have no way of access to the loss-of-Being as such which the dying man 'suffers'" In a certain sense, when another dies we can only be "there alongside". At the moment of watching and waiting and crying we will eventually encounter a corpse, which according to Heidegger is "something unalive, which has lost its life". What remains behind according to Derrida, are memories, impressions, traces, photographs, and the ash of mourning.
In Aporias, Derrida explores the question "My death- is it possible?" He asks whether death can "be reduced to some line, crossing, to a departure, to a separation, to a step, and therefore to a decease?". Derrida asks, "What, then, is it to cross the ultimate border?". Death is precisely an aporia or the impossibility of what cannot pass. Death is the non-passage, the uncrossable border. Throughout our tradition, death has been defined as a border or limit. In Hamlet's words death is "the undiscovered country, from whose region no traveler returns...". The Tibetan Book of the Dead employs the technical term bardo to describe the experience which slides between death and birth. Bardo is a gap. The word bar is defined as that which is in between, while the word do designates an island. What if we are the bardo? Or the landmark which stands between two things? If so, death would be nothing more than losing one's ground. Death means to become ungrounded. To become spectral; to live-on spectrally. Death would be the space without a ground; where no path exists because no path is required to exist.
If Derrida defines death as the aporia as the possibility of the impossible, there might be another definition of death, of being-human, and of living-on. Such a definition would show us that death is not the aporia, we are the aporia, we are the impossibility of what cannot pass-away. We who live spectrally. We who are both guests and ghosts, held hostage in each others arms through our universal mourning. Not the corpse that will have been.
In terms of the physiological self we can notice the following things. Our life is fragile. We do not worry about the present moment. We worry about the future. Perhaps we should develop this attitude. I will die. I do not know when. I do not know how. Death is unavoidable. Nothing lasts. No matter where we look in this world we find nothing that is permanent. Life does not wait. It is like a waterfall that is continuously flowing. Every moment we are drawing closer towards death. We can understand this intellectually but we do not live it. We are like a tree that appears to be growing but is decaying on the inside. We could keep this thought in mind. I have to do something worthwhile. I cannot waste my time. It is a miracle that we wake up each morning. It is said that the difference between being alive and being dead is a single breath. If you exhale and you don’t inhale, you are dead. My death, is it possible? No one can experience their own death. No one can experience the other’s death. We experience our living which is a dying, perhaps.

Womb/Tomb/Fetal Crypt:

2007-05-27T21:29:00.000-07:00

The main moral problem of abortion is under what conditions, if any, is abortion morally justifiable? The conservative view holds that abortion is never justifiable or at most, it is justifiable only when it is necessary to save the mother=s life . The liberal view holds that abortion is always morally justifiable regardless of the reasons or the time in fetal development. The moderate view holds that abortion is morally acceptable up to a certain point in fetal development.
At issue is what sort of entities fetuses are and whether such entities have rights. These two questions are known as the ontological and moral status of the fetus. The ontological status of the fetus considers whether the fetus is an individual; whether the fetus is biologically a human being; whether the fetus is psychologically a human being and whether the fetus is a person. Complicating these questions is the meaning of the expression 'human life'. Human life can refer to the biological characteristics that distinguish us from other species for example, a human is not a cat. Human life can also refer to psychological abilities such as the ability to think or to use symbols. Whether one claims that the fetus is an individual organism, a biological human being or a psychological human being or a person, one must specify at what point in its biological development does the fetus attain this status.
The conservative position argues that the fetus has full ontological status from the time of conception. The liberal position holds that the fetus never achieves ontological status while in the womb. The moderate view holds that the ontological statu of the fetus falls somewhere in-between conception and birth. Abortion is simply said to refer to the termination of a pregnancy.
These issues and questions are difficult and complicated. To be ethical we must further complicate the issue and not be content with providing simple answers. Issue will be the word from which we begin our analysis of how to conceive an abortion.
The word issue comes from the Latin exire which means to go out. To issue is to emerge or to exit. Issue is a means or way of going out from something. An issue is a discharge from the body such as blood, tears, sweat, urine, feces. To issue also means to make new currency or money available. That is why money is always dirty even as it is crisp and shines. We wait for the next issue of a magazine. But our waiting for the next issue of a magazine is very different from our waiting for someone to solve the issue or problem. The volcano issues smoke and fire and lava. To issue is to make available. The dead fetus issues forth from the woman's body to be used or thrown away just like a tissue. The issue here is what kind of tissue the fetus is and what is the human?
Human is related to humus which means earth or ground. In this sense all things in the world are human insofar as they are from the earth. Only the human sees itself as being above the ground and so treats other human animals as inferior creatures. What does it mean to be human when the embryo that becomes wrapped in a blue or pink blanket develops through stages that resemble amphibians, fish and mammals until it finally appears as something we name Sally or Johnny? Life is defined as the period from birth to death. With this modern definition anything unborn does not have life. When does life begin?
The issue of the moral status of the fetus asks what rights if any does it have? The conservative view holds that from the moment of conception, the unborn has the same rights that any person has. In this case, abortion denies the unborn not only the right to life but the right to live its life. Liberals would deny the fetus any moral status. According to this view abortion cannot be compared to killing an adult person. In the liberal view abortion is simply the removal or organic material from the body of the woman. Its removal raises no moral problems. Just as no one protests against the removal of an appendix or a gallbladder so too no one should be protesting the removal of fetal tissue. Indeed in this liberal view having an abortion would be similar to blowing one's nose.
We have begun to complicate the issue.
To conceive an abortion- how is this possible? Do not the words conception and abortion disagree with each other like nails upon a chalkboard? To conceive means to become pregnant; to cause, to begin. To conceive always means to think. Many go through their lives without thinking, that is to say without conceiving anything new. The same garbage is recycled in new packaging.
Conception means beginning. In the beginning was the concept. Conception is also related to the word heave which means to rise or to swell. To heave is to struggle. To heave is to vomit. Conception tells us about the struggle involved both in giving birth to tissue and the struggle involved in giving birth to ideas of thought.
Abort means to stop in the early stages. We say the mission to Mars was aborted. The Latin abortus means to disappear. Abortive means to fail to develop completely. Aborticide is the act of destroying a fetus within the uterus. The womb which sustains life also becomes the tomb that can take it away.
An abortion can also refer to something that is misshapen or monstrous. Thus the fascination of birth scenes in science fiction films such as Alien or more recently in the Lord of the Rings where Orcs arise from the womb of the earth. We are fearful of the monster that breaks out of our own bodies. To conceive an abortion- how is this possible? We are abortive. We walking, talking, eating, drinking abortions. We conceive the abortion when we fail to become fully human and not just when we murder what issues forth from the womb, monstrous or otherwise.

Reason and Logos

2007-05-27T21:25:00.000-07:00

The Greek word Logos means Word or Reason.
Logos from the word Legen means to lay down or lay before. Legere is where we gather to rest. To lay is to place one thing beside another. To lay your cards down on the table is to show the layers of your luck or skill. To lay down the law is use force. To lay yourself down is to rest.
Legen as lay is also to gather. At harvest time we gather fruit from the soil. We gather grapes from the vine. Gathering belongs to collecting but it points us to what is known as sheltering.
A mother gathers her children to shelter them from the storm.
A shepherd gathers his flock to shelter them from the wolf.
Lovers gather to each other to shelter themselves in an embrace.
We gather to witness a game, to watch a movie, to hear a lecture, to have a drink together in the shelter of our conversation.
Saying and talking lays the world before us.
We are gathered to what is addressed.
The world which is before us is undressed as we address it.
To gather is to see the world as it is and as we are, namely naked.
The cosmos does not need to be dressed with our superstitions.
We need to undress the superstitions from ourselves; to be freed from absurd claims.
To learn to say, to talk, to read, to write, to think what Logos reveals is to communicate where we stand in the cosmos.
The German philosopher Heidegger showed that thinking is a thanking. In Old English thinking (thencan) and thanking (thancian) are related. We are thankful for having been given thinking. The ancient word thanc is what lies within the heart. Thanc gathers all that concerns us. It gathers all that we care for as human beings and can never be reduced to the limits that mere reason or ratio imposes upon us.

Medusa and Narcissus: Porno-Graphology

2007-05-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

Medusa was Queen of the Gorgons and daughter of the earth goddess. Medusa was portrayed as a female with wings. She had a round face and flat nose. Her tongue was extended and her large teeth barred. Her hair consisted of live snakes. Medusa had the power of turning all who looked upon her into stone. For Freud, Medusa represented female sexuality that turned men hard and turned them into stone. To be turned into stone is to be petrified. Jesus says to Peter, AYou are the Stone upon which I will build my church@. Peter was petrified. He was so afraid that he betrayed Jesus three times. We are fearful of stones especially if we have ever passed one through our body.
Stone is defined as calculus- a small stone used in calculating. The stone is used in counting. Stone is also a hard material growth found in animals- testis. What does the stone testify? How can stone be witness? The spirit leads Jesus into the desert. There he will be tempted by Lucifer. Forty days and forty nights without food. Jesus was hungry. Lucifer comes to him and asks for a sign: " If you are God's son, order these stones to turn into bread". Jesus ignores the stones and prefers to speak of bread and words: : The scripture says, 'Man cannot live on bread alone, but need every word that God speaks'". The message is that we need words that speak the truth. Words that speak the truth are like bread to a hungry person. Words that lie are like stones that sink to the bottom of the ocean even if they can be skipped on the surface for a brief time. Freud=s reading of Medusa links the erotic (eros) with the spiritual which is linked with death (thanatos). As humans we are always between stone and water; trying to link the two together with our sexuality and spirituality.
Narcissus was so struck by his own beauty that he could not take his eyes away from his reflection in a pool of water. Wanting to be closer to his reflection he fell into the water only to drown. The moral of this story if there is one is that the image and the imaginary; how we imagine ourselves to be, while forgetting what is real and natural can have tragic consequences.
The technology of the image deals with what is captured. The image presents what is otherwise than it is. This will be our definition for the image. The real on the other hand is defined as that which is what it is.
The French philosopher Sartre in his play No Exit describes how the look of the Other, who looks at us through eyes that have no eyelids captures our freedom by reducing us to an image. In this sense all images are pornographic insofar as they reduce what is real to an image. This and this alone is the definition of pornography. Pornography has nothing to do with sex, with the fetish, with abuse, with subordination, domination or animation. The image does not smell like the real thing. It smells like the chemical used to draw it out onto the photographic paper. The image does not give us a pure or immaculate perception, rather it shows us a pure or immaculate deception. The image, especially when it is touched, re-touched or airbrushed covers up the stains and stinks of everyday life.

The French psycho-analyst Jacques Lacan distinguishes between the eye and the gaze. The eye that views the object is one the side of the subject. The gaze is on the other side of the object. Lacan says when I look at an object, the object is always gazing at me, from a point which I cannot see it. The question is when we view pornographic images what are we looking at? To gaze at something is to exercise power. Through the gaze we become masters of what is looked at. The image which gazes at us, masters us. We are reduced to a passive observer. The gaze is that which baits us; that which hooks us as we give our freedom to the image. In other words, the porn viewer becomes the porn star. The one who imagines is reduced to an image. This is the perversity of pornography. This is one way we should understand Jesus' words stressed in the Gospels, "They have eyes that they might not see." Might not see what? That things are looking at them; trying to capture and bait them; images trying to make them believe that they are masters when in reality they are only master-baiters, baited by the master image and the image of the Master.

Ant Warfare

2007-05-27T21:11:00.000-07:00

Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal and suffering…For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.
Epicurus

Physicians and philosophers excel at writing scripts. These scrawls, scribbles and often illegible marks can often only be interpreted by specialists. In medicine it is the pharmacist who deciphers the marks of the physician and then prepares the remedy. This pharmaceutical mixture produces the practical effect of reducing suffering. In the case of philosophy, it is the scholar who professes mastery of obscure passages and difficult texts saying clearly what the philosopher had difficulty expressing. While the physicians’ script tends to alleviate suffering, the script of the philosophers and the sub-script of scholars does not seem to have any practical-existential value. Immersed in the intellect philosophers and scholars fail to grapple with human-animal misery.
Living exclusively in a world of ideas may shut one off from the reality of everyday living. This reality includes such normal activities as earning a wage, paying bills, mowing the lawn, planting flowers, cooking dinner, changing diapers, raising a family, paying off loans etc. This is not to say that such questions as Who am I? What is the nature of the universe, and where does it come from? How ought I to live my life? What are the fundamental principles of knowledge, truth, beauty, morality and religion? are irrelevant. Such questions require direct and exact answers but these answers have either been understood by a select few or have been impractical and nebulous.
Impracticality and conflict have been shouldered with philosophy from the time of its origin. The history of philosophy can be read as a series of conflicts without any final resolution. The history of philosophy can be read not as the birth of wisdom but as the birth of conflict. By wanting to know the truth about the becoming of all things, or in other words why is there something rather than nothing, the pre-Socratics conflicted with the mythologists. Each of the pre-Socratics conflicted with each other over the arche or source and telos or end. Struggle, contest, strife, mourning and grief seem to be unavoidable to the point that one has to agree with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus when he declares that war is the father of all things.
Our time has witnessed a renewal of hatred, the re-building of walls and barriers, the destruction of houses of worship, warfare and genocide. More persons have been killed or continue to die of disease and hunger in this most scientifically acquainted and ‘civilized’ era than ever before. In the midst of this discontent there continues to be a great resistance in learning how to live in a state of compassion without fear, anger and anxiety. Can philosophy be a way of life that actually revitalizes the way one lives, acts and reacts?
This question came to mind last year while I was in Toronto helping my brother renovate his newly purchased home. There on the ground covered with bits of grass, broken brick and plaster, two army ants were fighting to the death. I was a solitary witness to this event. From my perspective it appeared that this conflict was insignificant. Of course, from the point of view of the ants, the crumbs they were fighting over represented their entire world. The ants were risking their lives for a fragment. What struck me about this event was the thought that humans are really no different. We fight over control of land, resources, air space and outer space while allowing 40,000 children to die of hunger each day. Our skyscrapers and our theories are as high as the dead are deep but our compassion remains run over on the criss-crossed and crossed-over roads that our philosophy, science and spirituality have invented. The sight of the ants struggling for supremacy forced me to consider whether or not philosophy had any practical value. Could philosophy provide a way out of discontent? Can philosophy have more than a negligible role in solving real life grievances and problems?

Jacques Derrida's Aporetic Ethics (Contents)

2007-05-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

Prefacing the Antiphon: Towards an Animal Theology

Introduction (Aporetology)

Chapter I
Aporia and the Decisions of Undecidability
Derrida's Logic of the Paradox and the Question of Violence
(Only where there is Undecidability can there be Decisions)

Out of Socrates' Aporia: Beyond Shaming

Out of Plato's Pharmakon: Beyond Scapegoating

Out of the Dangerous Supplement of
Levi-Strauss' Writing Lesson: Beyond Bordering

Out of Levinas' Totality and Infinity: Beyond Warring

Chapter II
Aporia and the Responsibilities of Dissemination
Derrida's Metaphysics of Excess and the Question of Responsibility
(Only where there is Dissemination can there be Responsibility)

From Husserl's Signs
To Responsible Givings Madness and Impossibility

From Heidegger's Times
To Responsible Givings Oblivion and Mourning

From Hegel's Prefaces
To Responsible Aleatory's not Binding and not being Bound

From Nietzsche's Perspectives
To Responsible Givings Surprise and Generosity

Chapter III
Aporia and the Ethical Subject of Differance
Derrida's Psychology of the De-Centered Subjectile and the Question of the Person
(Only where there is Differance within the Ethical Subject
can there be a Responsible Choice-Making Person)

From Heidegger's Dasein to Derrida's Person:
The Spectral Subject

From Nietzsche's Will to Power to Derrida's Person:
The Responsible Subject

From Freud's Unconscious to Derrida's Person:
The Scryptal Subject

From Saussure's Arbitrary to Derrida's Person:
The Messianic Subject

Chapter IV
Aporia and the Justice of Deconstruction
Derrida's Epistemology of Embracing Uncertainty
and the Question of Given Justice
(Only when we have constant Deconstructions of Theories and Laws
can we be moving towards Justice)

Mourning the never enough of precedents:
Pregnant Impossibility

Waiting for the never enough of time:
The Monstrous Arrivant

Wandering in the never enough of knowledge:
Abraham beyond Ulysses

By choosing to decide in the urgent instant:
Aporetic Nativities

Chapter V
Aporetic Scapes
(Towards a Derridean Theology)

Without Caputo's "Without"

Wholly Other than Critchley's Derrida
(Beyond Žižek's Apropos)

The Unlimited Responsibility of Spilling Ink
(Attending to what Searle can teach us )

Tasting the Scape of Ipseity
(Derrida’s Hopkins)

Conclusion: Aporetic Faith

Bibliography 339

Poverty Article

2007-04-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

People must feed poverty of mind
MARK ZLOMISLIC
Cambridge TIMES (Apr 13, 2007)
The impoverished in our region live in misery and deprivation. They are caught in a vicious circle from which there seems to be no way out. Their lives are without the very things that make life worthwhile. Yet, the good news continues to sound.
We are told that Waterloo Region has a strong economy. This alone should make us proud. It is the fifth fastest growing region in the country. Farmland is being parcelled off to make way for subdivisions of asphalt and concrete bliss.
The media routinely praise the region for being home to high-technology industry, along with having a highly skilled labour force. Yet, it is well known that these highly skilled workers are not earning what they deserve, given the fact that the corporations they work for are making extensive profits from the skills and expertise of this same labour force. Corporate CEOs congratulate themselves on behalf of the collective efforts of the working poor.
Statistics Canada also gives a glowing report by informing us that the region has the second lowest rate of poverty in the country. The government wishes us to cheer collective slogans of congratulations. However, the fact remains that the economic disparity between the rich and the poor is greater in Waterloo Region than the rest of Canada.
The region has approximately 47,450 persons living in poverty. Imagine an entire city of people living in poverty while being surrounded by those who have wealth. These numbers are unacceptable, because each number represents a real person in our community who is suffering from want of necessities.
We have also been given the information that the rates of child poverty in Waterloo Region are lower compared to the rest of Canada. Yet, one in five children in the region live in poverty. These glowing statistics do little for the individual who is starving and has a host of other problems that stem from poverty, such as depression, family conflict, housing problems, health problems, etc.
Given the overwhelming wealth in the region, should we not focus on how to equalize the economic gap between persons? Should we not be focusing on immediately stopping the neglect of families and children by the current federal government so that children do not go to bed hungry and that parents and guardians have the opportunity to earn a decent salary? Given the billions of dollars in surplus generated by the government, is it not apparent that some of this money should be used to eliminate poverty?
It is sobering to know that Canada's child poverty rate is almost three times higher than most other major industrialized nations. The only conclusion that one can draw from these facts is that poverty in Canada is legislated by the government. It has given its democratic mandate - received from the people - over to global corporations. Such legislated poverty in the form of pensions and welfare assistance that barely cover the essentials of food and shelter are a sad testament to a region that is bloated in stock options, BMWs and $3-million homes, while the children of Lazarus beg for crumbs on the same streets that are supposedly paved with gold.
The other poverty is a poverty of mind that has had its values reversed from a very early age.
The way we meet others with hospitality and generosity shows our richness or poverty. The poverty of mind must be transformed into the richness of learning how to help others. Perhaps this is the first step involved in eliminating economic poverty that surrounds many in our region.

Soren Carter

2007-04-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

Soren Carter.2007

Mixed Media on Canvas.

Private Collection.

The New Album from Soren Carter

www.sorencarter.com

My Derrida Book

2007-03-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

My New Book Published with Lexington Books, 2007

Exile

2006-12-21T18:15:00.000-08:00

Rust Paint and Acrylic on Canvas. 2000

Grave at Vukovar

2006-11-04T18:17:00.000-08:00

Mixed Media on Canvas, 1999. Destroyed.

Three at the Grave

2006-11-04T18:15:00.000-08:00

Acrylic on Canvas, 2000. Private Collection.

Ouch! (Words from the Cruci-Fiction)

2006-11-04T18:12:00.000-08:00

Acrylic, Marker on Card, 2000. Private Collection.

Mass Grave Hard Drive: Requiem for Vukovar

2006-11-04T18:10:00.000-08:00

Mixed Media, 1999. Destroyed.

History of Tito's Communist Yugoslavia (Locksmith with Corpse)

2006-11-04T18:07:00.000-08:00

Watercolour, Ink on Paper, 1999. Private Collection.

Matador, Bull and Snake

2006-11-04T18:05:00.000-08:00

Watercolour on Paper, 1999. Private Collection.

Self-Portrait

2006-11-04T18:01:00.000-08:00

Acrylic on Cardboard, 2000. Private Collection

Suzanne

2006-10-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

Ink on Paper, 2000.
Private Collection

Ljubica and Vinko

2006-10-07T19:49:00.000-07:00

Ink, Marker on Paper, 2000.
Private Collection.

Mass Grave Face II

2006-10-07T19:46:00.001-07:00

Ash, Charcoal, Glue on Paper, 1999.
Private Collection

Jesus Walks Underneath the Water, but His Fisher-Man Disciples are Not Amused

2006-10-07T19:43:00.000-07:00

Rust Paint on Paper, 1999.
$1000

Mary's Sorrow

2006-10-07T19:40:00.000-07:00

Oil, Marker, Devotional Card on Paper, 1999.
$1000

Self-Portrait with Glasses

2006-10-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

Acrylic, Salt on Paper, 2001
$2000

Kundalini

2006-10-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

Acrylic, Crayon, on Paper, 1999.
$1000

Adam Stands Before God

2006-10-07T19:34:00.000-07:00

Tempera on Paper, 2000.
$1000

Self-Portrait

2006-10-07T19:22:00.001-07:00

Acrylic, Marker on Paper, 2000.
Private Collection

Reading St. John of the Cross: Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachtani

2006-10-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

Ink, Marker on Paper, 1999.
$1000

St.Augustine Tries to Kick the Habit

2006-10-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

Rust Paint, Marlboro Light Tobacco, Glue on Paper, 1999.
$2000

Self-Portrait

2006-10-07T19:18:00.000-07:00

Food Coloring, Marker on Paper, 1999.
Private Collection

Portrait of Picasso

2006-10-07T19:16:00.000-07:00

Ink, Salt, Food Coloring, Marker on Paper, 1999.
$3000

Me at Three

2006-10-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

Mixed Media on Board, 1999.
Private Collection

Golgotha: Jesus and the Roman Soldier with Elohim watching.

2006-10-07T19:12:00.000-07:00

Oil on Board, 1999.
$3000

Supplicant: Unknown Whatever Who Art Unknown Hallowed be thy Unknowness

2006-10-07T19:10:00.000-07:00

Rust Paint on Paper, 1999.
$2000

Self-Portrait

2006-10-07T19:08:00.000-07:00

Ink and Marker on Paper, 2000.
Private Collection

HoneyComb

2006-10-07T19:06:00.000-07:00

Rust Paint on Bubble Envelope, 1999.

$1000

The History of My Croatian Depression

2006-10-07T19:03:00.000-07:00

Photograph of Zagreb Cathedral. Empty Slivovitz Bottle
filled with Effexor and Lego Character. 1999.
Private Collection

Marcel Duchamp Dressed as an Elephant Rides his Ready Made to Versailles

2006-10-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

Acrylic on Paper, 1999.
$2000

Blue Baby in Mass Grave at Vukovar

2006-10-07T18:58:00.000-07:00

Ink on Paper, 1999.
$2000

Self-Portrait

2006-10-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

Blood and Ink on Paper, 2000
Private Collection

X Marks the Stop/Spot: At Vukovar

2006-10-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

Mixed Media on Paper, 1999.
$1000

Slither

2006-10-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

Rust Paint on Sandpaper, 1999.
$1000

Study for a Cruxi-fiction

2006-10-07T17:21:00.000-07:00

Metal, Wood, Towel. 1999.
Dismantled

St. Francis

2006-10-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

Mixed Media on Paper, 1999.
Private Collection

Noah's Painting II

2006-09-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

Noah's Painting

2006-09-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

Mass Grave at Vukovar

2006-08-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

Acrylic on Paper 2000.
$5000

Self-Portrait Death Mask

2006-08-29T13:54:00.000-07:00

Photocopy on Paper. 2000

Private Collection.

Self Portrait as Van Gogh with Torn Corner

2006-08-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

Acrylic on Paper. 2000

$1500

Remembering OKA: Or Who Stands on Guard for What?

2006-08-29T13:46:00.000-07:00

Rust Paint. Sponge. Maple Leaves. 1999

$5000

Stalin's Gulags and the Death of the 60 million or Why Zizek and Badiou are Silent.

2006-08-29T13:43:00.000-07:00

Photograph.2000
$5000

Lenin and the Truth of the October Revolution

2006-08-29T13:40:00.000-07:00

Photograph.2000
$5000

Reading Van Gogh's Suicide

2006-08-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

Mixed Media on Board. 1999
$1500

Branimir Cilic Paints the 33 Crosses

2006-08-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

Mixed Media on Canvas. 1999.
$2000

Reading Nietzsche: The Last Pope

2006-08-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

Rust Paint on Paper. Private Collection

Death Reclines in a Rainbow Room after a Hard Day of Reaping

2006-08-29T12:40:00.000-07:00

Rust Paint on Paper. 1999.
$1000

Hegel Dressed in an Owl Custome Attempts to Climb the Staircase Dialectic Only to be Thrown Down by the Aufhebung

2006-08-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

Rust Paint on Paper. 1999
Private Collection.

Lacan and Intellectual Games

2006-08-27T11:07:00.001-07:00

http://www.richardwebster.net/lacangoestotheopera.html

"Jacques Lacan was a phenomenon of the extraordinary intellectual life of France which grew up during the late 1960s. Almost unheard of for most of his life and a virtual nonentity within the international psychoanalytic movement, he was suddenly elevated to the rank of a maître penser at the age of 65 with the appearance of Ecrits, a large volume of his papers on psychoanalytic themes. In these writings, and throughout his career as a charismatic intellectual prophet, Lacan proclaimed himself as the leader of a ‘return to Freud’. Although Lacan’s self-proclamation as Freud’s true heir was credulously and eagerly accepted by many Parisian intellectuals, some early readers of Ecrits were puzzled. In the first place Lacan’s work apppeared to be a chaotic amalgam of the ideas of Hegel, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and others which, while presented under the cover of psychoanalytic terminology, bore scarcely any resemblance to the original theories of Freud. In the second place (and it was this which made it difficult to pin down Lacan’s astonishing divergence from Freud) Lacan’s writings were frequently opaque to the point of incomprehensibility. Even Lacan’s own followers will often readily admit that they find large portions of his work quite unintelligible. The situation was perhaps best summed up by an advertisement for a psychoanalytic magazine which appeared in France shortly before Lacan’s death in 1981: ‘January 1980. There are thousands of people who do not understand Lacan. In 1950 there were only twenty or thirty.’

During his lifetime Lacan became notorious not only for the obscurity of his prose but also for the shortness of his treatment sessions. Latterly these sessions lasted between three and ten minutes with one of Lacan’s patients paying £110 for a session which lasted barely a minute and was conducted at the entrance of his apartment through a door barely ajar."

"The ultimate emptiness of the mysteries which Lacan expounded in his seminars, and of his entire intellectual enterprise, is perhaps best conveyed by his last major project – in which, having already reduced human psychology to a series of pseudo-algebraic linguistic equations, he set out to discover the mathematical formulae (‘mathemes’) to which he believed all human psychology could be reduced. As equations, ratios, arrows and diagrams of complex knots covered the blackboard in the three-day meeting on mathemes which took place in 1976, many members of Lacan’s audience felt guilty at understanding nothing or very little of something that, as one of them put it, ‘everyone important seems to feel is so crucial’."

''on the one occasion when Lacan appeared on television, he said that he would not alter his notoriously impenetrable style because he simply did not care to speak to idiots: my discourse, he said, is for those who are not idiots.''....''if his theory has validity, one should be able to articulate it with clarity and precision,''.

Lacan on his Own Stupidity or What does Lacan Want?

2006-08-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

The following quotes are taken from Encore, Book XX. Lacan writes,

"My sole presence is my stupidity". I should know that I have better things to do than to be here....It's stupidity because I myself obviously collaborate in it".

Speaking of his Ecrits he writes, " I thought they were not meant to be read".

Of his unreadability..." I won't tell you to read Phillippe Sollers, who is unreadable, like me as a matter of fact...."

What is incredible...is that Lacan's stupidity has been taken to be the truth of psycho-analysis. In short, Lacan, like Zizek is dependent upon, terms and concepts of which he has not the faintest understanding.

See the wonderful article found at www.dylan.org.uk/lacan.pdf

For My Love of Lacan

2006-08-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

This is a post for anonymous who dares not to reveal his/her identity. By his own admission, Lacan states that his writings are anti-thetical and therefore without an argument. Lacan was not a philosopher. This is evident given his misreadings of Hegel, Kierkegaard and Derrida. Pop culture does not underpin the very forum of this discussion. Technology provides the underpinning. I have nothing to learn from Zizek or Badiou, especially when they fail to acknowledge the crimes committed by their beloved Lenin and Mao.

Let us continue to educate anonymous. Lacan, even within the psychoanalytic movement was very much a minor figure, an eccentric psychiatrist with a taste for surrealism who had made no significant contribution to psychoanalytic theory and who was known, if he was known at all, for his stubborn refusal to conform to the therapeutic guidelines laid down by Freud. I follow the following critics: François Roustang, in The Lacanian Delusion, called Lacan's output "extravagant" and an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish". Noam Chomsky described Lacan as "an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan". In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of "superfical erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts he does not understand (e.g., confusing irrational and imaginary numbers). .... In short, Lacan's writings are largely indecipherable as the contradictory, that is why they find a home here in the Blogosphere supported by failed assistant English professors, righly denied tenure.

With Mom in Rakitno, 1967

2006-08-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

Reading Charles Scott or Van Gogh at Walmart

2006-08-19T16:02:00.000-07:00

Acrylic on Board. 2003. Private Collection

Kristeva's Eurocentrism

2006-08-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

Stop- sufferer, stranger, you must not trespass!...
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

Introduction

How to understand the foreigner, the alien and outsider in our time is both a political and ethical question. How various states and traditions have dealt with the foreigner is the focus of Kristeva's book Strangers to Ourselves. In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva advocates an ethic of cosmopolitanism and a recognition of the foreigner, both in the other and in ourselves.
In what follows, we will examine Kristeva's appropriation of cosmopolitanism and her critique of nationalism from the framework of the Biblical, Enlightenment and Psychoanalytic traditions. The first section addresses the general question of the history of cosmopolitanism. Here we will focus upon Kristeva's discussion of biblical cosmopolitanism, Pauline ecclessia, Augustinian caritas and stoic oikeiosis.
The second section extends the discussion of cosmopolitanism by shifting to the landscape of political cosmopolitanism via the insights of the enlightenment tradition. Kant and Montesquieu will be the focus of our concern and a distinction will be drawn between Volkgeist and esprit général. It is here that Kristeva's critique of nationalism is centered.
The third section shifts the analysis to examine what could be called a psychoanalytical cosmopolitanism. Most of this section is devoted to Freud's notion of the Unheimliche, that allows us to detect the foreignness in ourselves.
The fourth section will focus upon the practical implications of Kristeva's theories. I shall argue that Kristeva's overall position can be described as a Cosmopolitan Nationalism that embraces a Eurocentrism.

I
Preparatory Analysis:
A History of Cosmopolitanism

The old man went away, but returned at once and offered Zarathustra bread and wine... Whoever knocks at my door must take what I offer him. Eat, and fare you well.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "Zarathustra's Prologue"

Kristeva selects various moments in the history of our civilization and argues that an ethic of cosmopolitanism can be seen in the pronouncements of the Old Testament Prophets, the Pauline ecclesia in which a community of foreigners emerges, the Augustinian notion of caritas which emphasized the union of stranger with stranger and in the Stoics concept of oikeiosis, or universal conciliation.

Biblical universalism

Kristeva examines the Old Testament and the Talmud where she locates a "biblical universalism" . Kristeva cites the following passages:

You must not molest the stranger or oppress him, for you lived as strangers in the land of Egypt.

If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must count him as one your countrymen and love him as yourself.

Kristeva is impressed by the universalism of the prophets from Amos to Jeremiah who asserted that "all mankind is respectable in its intrinsic dignity". The poor, widows, orphans and strangers are treated with equal justice. Kristeva cites the Book of Job:

If ever I have infringed the rights of slave or maidservants in legal actions against me-what shall I do when God stands up ? What shall I say when he holds his assize ? They, no less than I were created in the womb, by the one same God who shaped us within our mothers....No stranger ever had to sleep outside, my door was always open to the traveller.

Kristeva argues that "in the spirit of Judaism, the complete integration of the foreigner in the Jewish community is the counterpart of the idea of the "chosen people". Being chosen is "accessible to any individual, at any given moment".

Ecclessia and the community of foreigners

According to Kristeva St. Paul adapted the word of the Gospels to the Greek world. In bringing the word to the Greeks, St. Paul formed a ecclessia or "a community of those who were different, of foreigners who transcended nationalities by means of faith in the Body of the risen Christ". The ecclessia challenged the political structures of the Greco-Roman world. The framework of the ecclessia challenged the foundations of the polis by creating " a new alliance cutting across the political community", while at the same time, inheriting, the "cosmopolitanism specific of late Hellenism". According to Kristeva, the Pauline Church " emerged as a community of foreigners, first from the periphery, then from the Greco-Roman citadel, united by a statement that challenged the national and political structure". In his Letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes:

Do not forget, then, that there was a time when you who were pagans...you had no Christ and were excluded from membership of Israel, aliens with no part in the covenants with their Promise, you were immersed in this world, without hope and without God. But now in Christ Jesus, you that used to be so far apart from us have been brought very close, by the blood of Christ... So you are no longer aliens or foreign visitors: you are citizens like all the saints, and part of God's household.

For Paul, the member of the ecclesia was no longer a xenoi kai paroikoi ( an alien or foreign visitor), no longer Greek or Jew, but a new creation. As Kristeva argues

Ecclesia conflicts with the Greek word laos (people). Of course, pagan ethnic groups and nations were already distinct from the people. What mattered to Paul, however, was a new opposition: the nations and the people refashioned so as to constitute an original identity: the Church. The well known messianism of the Jews was changed into a messianism that includes all of humankind.

This messianism culminates in the figure of Jesus, who is not of this world. In this account, the foreigner would identify with Jesus who defines himself as a stranger on earth. As Kristeva adds, "the foreignness of Jesus would thus have been the basis of Paul's cosmopolitan ecclessia".

St. Augustine and Caritas

Moving on through the Biblical landscape, Kristeva discovers the respect that St. Augustine had for the foreigner. This respect is the foundation of caritas. Caritas embodies the notion of Christian love. Its cognates include the word carus or dear, which is akin to the Old Irish word carae or friend. It is affiliated with the Sanskrit word kama or love. Caritas may be defined as a benevolent goodwill toward or love of humanity; as a generosity and helpfulness toward the needy or suffering. Charity engages the question of the relationship to the other. Charity refers to the individuals approach to that which confronts him. How does one welcome a friend or stranger? The attitude we adopt in addressing friends, strangers or enemies, who wish to seek admission into our economy reflects our interpretation of the call to embrace a positive tolerance and to be charitable towards the other. St. Augustine captures the spirit of caritas when he writes:

You are alone, and your neighbours are many. Indeed, mark this well, your neighbour is not only your brother, your relative, your marriage relation. Any man's neighbour is any other man. One considers oneself close between father and son, son-in-law and father-in-law. But there is nothing closer to man than another man.

For Augustine, the identification with Christ, brings foreigners together. He writes:

Your soul is no longer yours alone, but it belongs to all your brethren whose soul also become yours, or rather whose soul and yours constitute just a single soul, that is to say, the unique soul of Christ.

The meaning of charity is found in the relation that I have with the Other, and the demand that is placed upon me by the Other. Charity is a question of how we meet the Other. Do we meet the Other with the charity of the open hand or the imperialism of the closed fist and of the equally closed mind ? Charity relates to the question of the toll. A toll is a fixed charge to travel across a bridge or road. This question engages the discussion of customs, debts and borders. It opens the question of admission and who is allowed to cross over the border.
Stoic Conciliation

Kristeva argues that the ancient Stoics (Zeno and Chrysippus), " considered that every living being was supported by the principle called oikeiosis, a complex notion that might be translated as "conciliation". Oikeiosis was rendered by Cicero as conciliatio and commendatio and as committo by Seneca. In commenting on the notion of oikeiosis, Kristeva writes:

that original conciliation binds us not only to ourselves but also to the concentric spheres that would represent the arrangement of our fellow men-starting with close relatives and ending up with the whole of mankind... in reverse, by tightening the circles, we succeed in absorbing all men, of whatever race or blood, into ourselves. That human universality, which is asserted in such a manner for the first time, was founded on the community of reason.

This universalist ethic, founded on oikeiosis and conciliation, according to Kristeva, "leads one, on the political plane, to challenge separate city-states and substitute a tolerant cosmopolitanism". According to Seneca, the distinctions between Greek and barbarian, free men and slaves, men and women, citizen and foreigner are meaningless, since, we are all " a part of God, and the Whole that contains us is also God: we are his associates and his members".
Kristeva sees a danger in the cosmopolitanism that issues forth from biblical universalism, Pauline ecclesia, Augustinian caritas and stoic oikeiosis. For Kristeva the question that arises is whether the cosmopolitanism expressed by these schools of thought are only a religious reality, "without ever being capable of becoming a political reality". The problem is how the ideals expressed by, biblical universalism, Pauline ecclesia, Augustinian caritas and stoic oikeiosis can be translated into the demands of realpolitik.
Though Kristeva is critical of Stoicism to the extent that its "universalism rested on the pride of the wise stoic, separated from the remainder of humanity that was incapable of the same effort of reason and wisdom" , she nonetheless believes that stoicism universalist breakthrough, "continued to make progress up to Locke , Shaftesbury , and Montesquieu... and did not die out but rather took on a new orientation with the Freudian discovery of our intrinsic difference".
The discoveries of Freud, according to Kristeva allowed us to " better approach the universal otherness of the strangers that we are- for only strangeness is universal and might be the post-Freudian expression of stoicism". Before moving on to Freud, we will take a detour through the Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism of Kant and Montesquieu.

II
Kant and Montesquieu:
Political Cosmopolitanism

Shatter, you enlightened men, shatter the old law-tables !
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, " Of Old and New Law-Tables"

Kristeva argues that Kant formulated "the internationalist spirit of the Enlightenment in political, legal, and philosophical terms". In Perpetual Peace, Kant writes:
Since the earth is a globe, (men) cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerates one another's company. And no-one originally has any greater right than anyone else to occupy any particular portion of the earth. The community of man is divided by uninhabitable parts of the earth's surface such as oceans and deserts, but even then, the ship or the camel ( the ship of the desert) make it possible for them to approach their fellows over these ownerless tracts, and to utilize as a means of social intercourse that right to the earth's surface which the human race shares in common.

The wandering of those looking for work in other countries, the influx of immigration and the technology of mass communication, ensure that it is no longer possible for individuals to remain isolated or for nations to remain homogeneous. To be a foreigner and to live in exile has become commonplace in our time. Given this reality, an ethic of cosmopolitanism for Kristeva is the only viable ethic.
According to Kristeva, Montesquieu "protected the rights of man beyond the rights of the citizen". The esprit général endorsed by Montesquieu is more favourable than Volkgeist , "whose origins have been traced back to the ambiguities of the great Herder and that is mystically rooted in the soil, the blood, and the genius of language". For Kristeva, the danger of Volkgeist is due to the fact that it can degenerate "into a repressive force aimed at other peoples and extolling one's own". Kristeva uses the insights of Montesquieu to formulate the general spirit of a cosmopolitan ethic. Montesquieu writes:

If I knew something useful to myself and determental to my family, I would reject it from my mind, If I knew something useful to my family but not my homeland, I would try to forget it. If I knew something useful to my homeland and detrimental to Europe, or else useful to Europe and determental to Mankind, I would consider it a crime.

Montesquieu's hierarchy of self/family/homeland/Europe/Mankind is workable only if one is steeped in the traditions of Europe. But what of those for whom a European identity nullifies their own national identity ? Montesquieu's slogan presumes a French national identity that is precisely European. Derrida might say that Kristeva pays homage to the superiority of French/European capital.
As a solution to the problems of nationalism, Kristeva argues that Montesquieu's slogan should be engraved on the walls of all schools and political institutions. The ABC's of cosmopolitanism should be "commented and elaborated upon, it could become a touchstone for anyone wishing to participate in the French nation understood as an esprit général". For Kristeva, nationalism is the embodiment of the Volkgeist that aims at neutralizing the esprit général. If a cosmopolitan ethic is to take hold, one spirit, one Geist, one esprit must prevail over the other. Kristeva writes, " Tomorrow, perhaps, if the esprit général wins over the Volkgeist, such a polyphonic community could be named Europe".
Kristeva a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst ends up sounding like a liberal. She writes,

I am a cosmopolitan... I maintain that in the contemporary world, shaken up by national fundamentalism on the one hand and the intensive demands of immigration on the other, the fact of belonging to a set is a matter of choice. Beyond the origins that have assigned to us biological identity papers and a linguistic, religious, social, political, historical place, the freedom of contemporary individuals may be gauged according to their ability to choose their membership, while the democratic capability of a nation and social group is revealed by the right it affords individuals to exercise that choice. Thus when I say that I have chosen cosmopolitanism, this means that I have, against origins and starting from them, chosen a transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries.

Kristeva is dogmatic in her claim that we are all foreigners within ourselves and in relation to others". For those of us who may not accept the insights of Freud or Lacan, Kristeva's assertions ring hollow.
The coupling of Montesquieu with Freud is a strange move. Kristeva pairs Montesquieu with Freud, since according to her, both can be classified as neo-stoicists. While this may be the case, Montesquieu and Freud operate from different traditions. For example, the word "Enlightenment" signifies a move from the darkness to the light. The Enlightenment project was marked by an emphasis on rationalism that sought to leave the past with its ignorance and false opinions behind. To this extent, the term "Enlightenment" can be connected with the Platonic image of the Cave. For Plato, acquiring true knowledge meant escaping from the shadows of the Cave and journeying to where the Sun illuminated all things. By contrast, Freudian psychoanalysis focuses on the power of the irrational and dark aspects of ourselves. Freud's project might be called an En-nightenment . Kristeva's attempt to derive an ethic of cosmopolitanism by coupling Montesquieu with Freud leads to contradictions in her position. The question posed in simple terms is how can Montesquieu's Enlightenment be blended with Freud's En-nightenment? In other words, how can Montesquieu's esprit général become compatible with Freud's insights concerning the unconscious ? Kristeva might argue that in psychoanalytic terms, the esprit général is precisely the unconscious. Having examined Kristeva's appropriation of Montesquieu, we now turn to Freud.

III
Freud and the Unheimliche:
Psychoanalytical Cosmopolitanism

Uncanny is human existence and still without a meaning...
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "Zarathustra's Prologue"

According to Kristeva, identity is formed on the basis of exclusion. This psychoanalytic insight has a political correlative. In the case of psychic identity, it is necessary for the individual to distinguish himself from the other. The nation-state must also distinguish itself from other nation-states to form its identity and to mark out its distinguishing features. But there is a boomerang effect that issues forth from exclusion. The individual must learn how to deal with the return of the excluded other, just as the nation-state must learn to deal with elements it has excluded, especially when those elements reside in the nation-state.
For Kristeva the ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics. In other words, psychoanalysis locates what is strange and foreign, not in order to exclude it but to welcome it. According to Kristeva,

The ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics: it would involve a cosmopolitanism of a new sort that, cutting across governments, economies, and markets, might work for a mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious...

Freud attempted to show that alterity, difference and otherness is within each of us. If we can accept this alterity and strangeness in ourselves, we can also accept the the strangeness of the other.
The central feature of Kristeva's discussion of Freud has to do with his understanding of das Unheimliche, literally, "unhomely". After tracing the etymology of das Unheimliche through various languages, Freud concludes that " the German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning 'familiar'; 'native', 'belonging to the home' ". Strangely, the word heimlich can be understood in two ways. The first meaning designates that which is familiar, while the second meaning designates that which is concealed or kept out of sight. In Greek das Unheimliche, would be rendered as ξέυoς (foreign or strange). According to Freud,

we can understand why the usage of speech has extended das Heimliche into its opposite das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.

Within the framework of Strangers to Ourselves, Freud remains an important figure for Kristeva, not because Freud spoke directly about foreigners but because he "teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves. That is perhaps the only way not to hound it outside of us". Through Freud, we learn that we are disintegrated. We learn to welcome the Unheimliche in ourselves and in others. In Kristeva words, "the foreigner is within me, hence we all all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners".
Strangely though, this sounds all too Hegelian. Recognition is achieved between individuals when they understand foreignness to be their interrelatedness, in other words, the I that is we and the we that is I. Respecting difference requires not attempting to assimilate what is other as one's own. Kristeva's analysis remains a classic Hegelian example of how the recognition of identity through difference, is a privileging of identity over difference, so that the foreigner is not foreign at all. Kristeva offers another Aufhebung, whereby the foreigner is assimilated, reduced and swallowed up. While criticizing narcissism from a psychoanalytic postion, politically Kristeva seems to adopt a position whereby "the Same mistakes itself for the Other" . In other words, since I am a stranger to myself, the Other must be just like me. The foreigner must be transformed according to my needs and desires.
If we are all strangers to ourselves, it would appear that we suffer from the same affliction. Holding such a position would merely be a re-telling of the dominant stories of our Jewish/Greek tradition, namely the fall of Adam and the crime of Oedipus. How can we infer from the myth of the fall, that Adam's sin founds our sinfulness, or that Oedipus's complex is THE Oedipus Complex? These symptoms drawn from literature can only be understood as individual cases and cannot be appropriated as general symptoms of humanity.

III
Baptizing the New Nationalism ?

No herdsman and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "Zarathustra's Prologue"

Kristeva argues:

Stemming from the bourgeois revolution, nationalism has become a symptom-romantic at first, then totalitarian- of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now, while it does go against universalist tendencies (be they religious or rationalistic) and tends to isolate or even hunt down the foreigner, nationalism nevertheless ends up, on the other hand, with the particularistic, demanding individualism of contemporary man.

It is precisely within this individualism that one locates "incoherences and abysses" that may lead to "promoting the togetherness of those foreigners that we all recognize ourselves to be". According to Kristeva, the foreigner:

lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns "we" into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamendable to bonds and communities.

The foreigner does not count, is not counted. If s/he is greeted, it is with suspicion and hostility. The foreigner is an irritation on the skin of the state. The foreigner should be grateful for simply being tolerated and if he does not agree with the toleration given he should go back where he came from. The phrase, which I have often heard, "If you don't like it here, go back to where you came from", becomes unsettling. But according to Kristeva, only fools asks questions about origins. Even if the question is asked, the answer is already framed before it is given. The question of origins can never yield an answer to what one is. We cannot be so easily framed within pre-fabricated conclusions. According to Kristeva, the foreigner:

has fled that origin-family, blood, soil- and, even though it keeps pestering, enriching, hindering, exciting him, or giving him pain, and often all at once, the foreigner is its courageous and melancholy betrayer. His origin certainly haunts him, for better or for worse, but it is indeed elsewhere that he has set his hopes, that his struggles take place... Elsewhere versus the origin, and nowhere versus the roots... He is a foreigner: he is from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. Do not send him back to his origins.

For Kristeva, the adoption of the esprit général of Montesquieu and the insights of Freud that we are all strangers and foreigners, "within ourselves and in relation to others" , would be a way of combatting nationalism. Kristeva writes:

It is a fragile ideas but nevertheless one bearing a chance of incomparable liberty, one that today happens to be challenged by wounded, therefore aggressive, nationalisms of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, but one that might be, tomorrow, a resource in the search for new forms of community among individuals that are different and free.

For Kristeva, nationalism is fundamentally antidemocratic, anticosmopolitan, chauvinist and racist. But has Kristeva moved too quickly to condemn nationalism as chauvinist and racist? Edward Said, has noted that "nationalism is a word that has been used in all sorts of sloppy and undifferentiated ways". For Said, nationalism, "still serves quite adequately to identify the mobilizing forces that coalesced into resistance against an alien and occupying empire on the part of peoples possessing a common history, religion and language". The problem with Kristeva is how to reconcile what she says about respecting the foreigner, with her Eurocentric attitudes. To quote Edward Said:

At the heart of European culture during the many decades of imperial expansion lay what could be called an undeterred and unrelenting Eurocentrism. This accumulated experiences, territories, peoples, histories; it studies them, classified them, verified them; but above all, it subordinated them to the culture and indeed the very idea of white Christian Europe... And it must also be noted that this Eurocentric culture relentlessly codified and observed everything about the non-European or presumably peripheral world, in so thorough and detailed a manner as to leave no item untouched, no culture unstudied, no people or land unclaimed. All of the subjugated peoples had it in common that they were considered to be naturally subservient to a superior, advanced, developed, and morally mature Europe, whose role in the non-European world was to rule, instruct, legislate, develop, and at the proper times, to discipline, war against, and occasionally exterminate non-Europeans.
Though Kristeva defends the virtues of cosmopolitanism, her vision of the esprit général remains Eurocentric. In an autobiographical article entitled My Memory's Hyperbole, Kristeva relates her vision of Judeo-Christian Europe in alliance with the United States against the Third World:

While the Latin American or Arab Marxist revolution is brewing on the doorsteps of the United States, I feel closer to truth and liberty when I work within the space of this challenged giant, which may, in fact, be on the point of becoming a David before the growing Goliath of the Third World. I dream that our children will prefer to join this David, with his errors and impasses, armed with our erring and circling about the Idea, the Logos, the Form: in short, the old Judeo-Christian Europe.

Here the Third World is compared to Goliath, while the United States with its nuclear weapons and smart bombs is a small David. The Third World is precisely the stranger that Kristeva asks us to embrace in Strangers to Ourselves, yet here, the Third World is established as that against which Judeo-Christian Europe must establish its identity; its Volkgeist.
The high ideals expressed in both Strangers to Ourselves and Nations without Nationalism, have revealed themselves to be just another form of political rhetoric. The antidotes to xenophobia, racism, chauvinism and nationalism in terms of welcoming the foreigner, because in doing so we recognize the foreigner in us, is a simplistic solution. Kristeva's policy suggestions consist of according foreigners political rights to the extent that their home countries reciprocate. Kristeva argues,

One might imagine, for instance, a "double nationality" statute that would give those "foreigners" who want it a number of rights- but also the political duties specific to natives, with a reciprocity clause giving the latter rights and duties in the countries of origin of those same foreigners. Such a rule, easily applicable within the European Economic Community, could be tempered and adjusted for other countries.

Where does one begin to criticize the political naivety of such a policy ? Is the problem of foreignness so simple, direct and immediate as to propose a foreign exchange, in other words, a process of settling accounts or debts between peoples and states ?
Having argued that foreignness is our historical condition, Kristeva reverts to putting the word foreigners in quotation marks. Would there then be a double meaning attributed to the word "foreigner"? I do not mean the regular renderings found in the dictionary such as, "situated outside a place or country" or "alien in character".
The word foreigner is linked to the Latin word foris or outside. Foris is etymologically connected to the word forum. A forum is a public meeting place for open discussion. It would appear however, that Kristeva's discussion of the "foreigner" has taken place in the foreigner's absence. Kristeva is speaking from the position of a French intellectual and not as a Bulgarian exile. The issue of foreignness cannot be resolved by calling on some higher authority, whether it is a political or psychoanalytical institution, in order to impose a "cure".
The foreigner remains both outlaw and outcast. That is, one who is deprived of the protection of the law and one who is refused acceptance. If the foreigner is granted political rights, he is no longer and out-law. If the foreigner's home country reciprocates, the foreigner is no longer out-cast. The foreigner, therefore would no longer exist. The foreigner would have become neutralized for the sake of unity or either domesticated and assimilated in order to prevent potential threats to existing political systems and political alliances.

Kristeva tells us that "recognition of otherness is a right and a duty for everyone". The issue is centered upon recognition, but do we recognize otherness in order to welcome it or cancel out its effects ? Recognition can lead either to acknowledgement or annulment. Ulysses is still tied up, this time his ears are plugged with wax, in order not to hear the Siren's song and the call of the Other.

LIBERALISM, COMMUNITARIANISM AND THE ECONOMY OF TOLERANCE

2006-08-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION
The word tolerance is related to the Latin and Old English terms meaning "to lift up" and "to bear" "to put up with" or "to support". Based on its etymology tolerance can be understood in a negative or positive manner. Within a negative framework, tolerance is interpreted as a burden and partial acceptance of the other, whom we "put up with". Within a positive framework, tolerance can be interpreted as a supporting and fostering of otherness, plurality and diversity. In what follows, I want to examine the different types of economies which have emerged from the different approaches to tolerance. I want to argue that certain types of liberalism (represented by Locke and Mill) and certain types of communitarianism (represented by MacIntyre ) are restricted and intolerant.
The paper is structured as follows. In Section one, I shall disentangle a number of different conceptions of tolerance; a failure to distinguish them has meant a serious incompleteness in the arguments of those who have claimed that tolerance is either a communitarian or a liberal virtue. In Section two, I examine whether or not liberal and communitarian proponents violate the imperative of tolerance. In Section three, I argue that liberals must have a better defense of tolerance if they wish to retain the concept. Drawing on insights from the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, I develop a model for a "postmodern liberalism", which shares an affinity with Rawls conception of "political liberalism".

I
THE ETYMOLOGY OF TOLERANCE

In a remarkable study, Preston King points out that "there is something intolerable about the concept of 'tolerance'. For King, the fundamental question concerning tolerance has to do with "the legitimacy of the advantage which the tolerator may enjoy"(T,9). Framed in this manner, tolerance does not promote equality, but inequality. According to King, "the proponents of tolerance...normally fall into two classes. On the one hand, there are the poor, the oppressed, the unfortunate, who, hard-pressed as these always are, beg for indulgence. On the other hand, there are the wealthy, the powerful, the fortunate, who, the better to protect their advantage, make marginal concession to those over against whom it is held"(T.9-10). For King, toleration is linked to the question of power. According to King, "toleration of an item presupposes some form of power over that item"(T.14). Mere tolerance is subversive because it protects the interests of the powerful who are content with their advantage over others. The means of tolerance is determined by those who hold power and decide what will be included in and excluded from their economies. This type of tolerance allows only those practices to flourish which do not threaten the internal purity of the system.
In his study, King examines the differences between three English nouns, namely, tolerance, toleration and tolerationism. King points out that the discussion concerning tolerance has ignored these grammatical distinctions. Rather than focusing on the distinctions between tolerance, toleration, and tolerationism, I want to emphasize the distinctions within the word tolerance. To this end, I will examine five definitions of tolerance.
The first definition of tolerance, is the action or practice of enduring pain or hardship. Here, tolerance is defined as putting up with that which we dislike. This definition presupposes that once we overcome the pain and hardship which is inflicted from the outside, things will be better.
The second definition of tolerance is the power acquired by becoming immune to the effect of large doses of active drugs or resisting the action of poison. This definition points out that the agent being tolerated can be harmful but not fatal; that a certain degree of immunity can be built up over a period of increased and controlled exposure to the "harmful" agent.
The third definition of tolerance is the small margin within which coins when minted are allowed to deviate from the standard. Here, the question of the model or form is brought into question. Only a small degree of deviation from the model is tolerated. Once the deviation exceeds acceptable limits, intolerance becomes "the norm".
The fourth definition of tolerance concerns the allowable amount of variation in the dimensions of a machine or part. In this instance, variation is allowed as long as it resembles the original.
The fifth definition of tolerance is allowing practices to take place without authoritative interference. This definition presupposes that an authority has already granted that diversity can exist, provided that these practices are acceptable to the authority.
All of the above definitions determine tolerance as a "negative virtue". Tolerance becomes the practices of "putting up with" what is not actually approved. As King points out: "In the tolerating conjuncture we discover elements both of objection (dislike/disapproval) and of acceptance...when we tolerate x, we accept it in the sense either that we associate with it or do not interfere with it in some limited sphere, in some limited degree."(T.52). According to King, there is a "tension internal to tolerance"(T.35). This tension occurs in that space where objection intertwines with acceptance. King points out that "the objection is... a matter of degree"(T,51). A total and comprehensive objection would signal the end of tolerance.
Tolerance understood as "putting up with" sketches a restricted picture of what it means to be human while outlining the kind of existence that is essentially good or virtuous for the human individual. Tolerance, in the restricted and negative sense of "putting up with", presupposes a moral high-ground for the person who is in a position to tolerate the other.
In each definition of tolerance, there is a source, standard or model, in relation to which something is judged to be tolerable or intolerable. Thus, the problem of tolerance is opened by putting into question the value of the arche (source, origin or center). The arche provides stability and unity at the expense of arresting the profileration of differences, such that a restricted economy ensures the arche is used to orientate, balance and organize its accounts, while limiting plurality. A restricted economy must prevent the profileration of differences in order to insure itself against loss or instability.

As we have seen, the word tolerance is caught up in a chain of significations. In "An Early Essay on Toleration", Harriet Taylor, argues that toleration "implies the existence of its opposites" Taylor points out that " while we can be conscious that we tolerate there must remain some vestige of intolerance... not to be charitable is to be uncharitable" (EET.116). I want to argue, that it is inadequate to conceive of tolerance as arising out of a that series of oppositions; that is cannot simply be assigned a site which is understood in terms of those oppositions. In order to rethink the economy of tolerance in a liberal society, we must prevent ourselves from trying to comprehend tolerance on the basis of opposition. As King argues,
one cannot praise an individual, sub-group or government simply because they are tolerant. They may be tolerant of cruelty and genocide. Nor can one condemn agents simply because they are intolerant. They may be intolerant of cruelty and genocide. In this sense, therefore, everything must turn, not around tolerance and intolerance, but around the objects of tolerance and intolerance, and the consideration whether they are properly objects of the one rather than of the other(T.68).
Herbert Marcuse argues that tolerance is of two kinds, namely passive and active. Passive tolerance, according to Marcuse is in fact partial to "entrenched and established attitudes and ideas even if their damaging effect on man and nature is evident". Tolerance, on the other hand is active in that "it refrains from taking sides"(RT.85). This type of tolerance may still be a form of prejudice because through its neutrality, it "actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination"(RT.85) (e.g. "tolerance" of minorities by means of segregation or assimilation). Marcuse correctly points out that "when tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society... then tolerance has been perverted"(RT. 111). Instances of this distorted tolerance occur both in the liberal and communitarian traditions, (e.g. ignoring the specific needs of minorities). According to Marcuse,
the tolerance which is the life element, the token of a free society, will never be the gift of the powers that be; it can, under the prevailing conditions of tyranny by the majority, only be won in the sustained effort of radical minorities, willing to break this tyranny and to work for the emergence of a free and sovereign majority-minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression(RT.123).
The question of tolerance becomes relative once we examine, who is tolerating what. Normally, neutrality has been thought to be the foundation upon which tolerance could exist. Taylor links tolerance with neutrality, by arguing that "to tolerate is to abstain from unjust interference, a quality which will surely one day not need a place in any catalogue of virtues"(EET.116-117).
In The Restoration of Tolerance, Steven D. Smith raises the issue of neutrality and tolerance and argues that the choice which faces a liberal society is not between intolerance and neutrality, but between tolerance and intolerance. Smith argues that "the prevailing conception of liberalism, which is committed to the ideals of neutrality and equality, is incapable of supporting a viable liberal community" . I share Smith's views that a state which is committed primarily to neutrality can be repressive, stagnant or even impotent insofar as it wants to neutralize change itself. According to Smith,
a healthy political community must stand for something. If it does not, then it becomes a mere aggregation of jarring individual atoms; politics and government becomes a battleground... A community's values, especially in a pluralistic society, may not constitute a unitary or cohesive philosophy. But a state which asserts that in principle it is simply neutral among competing values, like an individual who denies that he believes in or is committed to anything, is not likely to command one's respect.. Thus, the liberalism of neutrality in fact impoverishes the very community that it promises to enrich (RT.328, 329).

Smith argues that neutrality is not an alternative to intolerance, and I agree that neutrality can be co-extensive with intolerance. However, I disagree with Smith when he argues that the true alternative to intolerance is tolerance. As we shall see, tolerance defined as "putting up with" is in fact intolerant because it suppresses differences. The choice, as I see it, is between two types of tolerance, namely, tolerance as "putting up with" and tolerance as "supporting or fostering otherness".

II
RESTRICTED LIBERALISM, COMMUNITARIANISM
AND THE QUESTION OF TOLERANCE

John Rawls describes toleration as "liberalism's own principle" and Will Kymlicka characterizes tolerance as "one of the fundamental liberal values" . On the other hand, Glenn Tinder, argues that "where there is full community, no tolerance is necessary". Both the liberal and communitarian traditions operate according to a certain level of tolerance and charity. Liberals claim to be tolerant in theory, but based on individual and egalitarian principles, liberal societies have, in practice often suppressed differences, i.e. have been intolerant. Communitarians on the other hand, think that a homogeneous community does away for the need of tolerance, which, of course, can come dangerously close to tyranny, dictatorship or fascism. In this section, I want to mark out the limitations of both liberalism as represented by Locke and Mill and communitarianism as represented by MacIntyre. By examining liberal and communitarian positions we will be able to determine whether or not liberal and communitarian proponents violate the imperative of tolerance and charity. In this manner, the dangers of a certain kind of liberalism represented by Locke and Mill and a certain kind of communitarianism, represented by MacIntyre, will become apparent.
In A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke argues that, "those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. According to Locke, the " liberty of conscience is every man's natural right equally belonging to dissenters as to themselves and that nobody ought to be compelled in matters of religion either by law or force" (LT.47). Locke goes on to argue, "it is not the diversity of opinions, which cannot be avoided; but the refusal of toleration to those that are of different opinions, which might have been granted, that has produced all the bustles and wars, that have been in the Christian world, upon account of religion"(LT.52). The gist of Locke's argument is clear. While variation in belief is not immoral and should be tolerated, those who hold no theistic beliefs (i.e. atheists), should not be tolerated because they are immoral. Ironically, Locke failed to recognize that intolerance was only an issue for those who believed in a deity and not for those who rejected theism.
John Stuart Mill also develops a puzzling attitude towards tolerance. In the opening section of On Liberty, Mill argues that some people may be more fit for despotism than liberty. Mill argues that "...Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end may be their improvement..." . In this instance, tolerance towards the barbarian does not apply. The other is already described as a "barbarian" who must be improved by becoming "a good European" perhaps. While restricted liberals like Locke and Mill argue for tolerance, their interpretation of "tolerance" rests on intolerance and a denial of otherness. As we shall see, communitarians like MacIntyre do not seem to provide an alternative position. It is clear that, within the restricted liberal and communitarian paradigms, those who are tolerated are only those individuals who belong to a specific group. Those outside the group, who hold radically different beliefs(i.e. deviate too far from the standard), are not to be tolerated.
A certain form of tolerance exists within the communitarian tradition . I agree with Steven D. Smith, who points out that "tolerance is a virtue in Alasdair MacIntyre's sense insofar as it is a prerequisite to the kind of cooperation that marks members of communities"(RL.339). MacIntyre argues that the liberal individual " is a citizen of nowhere, an internal exile where he lives... Modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection". According to MacIntyre the liberal individual is isolated and egoistic,
To cut oneself off from shared activity in which one has initially to learn obediently as an apprentice learns, to isolate oneself from the communities which find their point and purposes in such activities, will be to debar oneself from finding any good outside of oneself... our pluralistic culture possess no method of weighing, no rational criterion for deciding between claims based on legitimate entitlement and against claims based on need (AV.240,229).
In order to combat liberal isolation, MacIntyre tells us, that what we need, " is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us"(AV.245).The type of community envisioned by MacIntyre, is a community in which the other is avoided and in which the stranger is excluded or exploited. Such exclusion is not only characteristic of communitarianism but shares an affinity with restricted versions of liberalism.
Liberals may argue that the comminitarian principles of unity and coherence play an unnecessarily exclusionary, repressive role. Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves argues that,
community is a term associated with strong identities, fixed by custom and tradition and rooted in history and/or collective memory. Tolerance, on the other hand, suggests more flexible identities, less rooted in history and collective memory and more open to the acceptance of difference, of plurality and of alternative lifestyles.... in the modern age it would seem, therefore, that those who uphold the principle of tolerance have little in common with those who uphold the principle of community. How is it possible to defend tolerance if one is a bearer of an identity rooted in history and fixed by tradition, afraid of being assimilated or displaced by other identities ?
The question of tolerance cannot be reduced to a simple either/or equation. d'Entreves seems to be saying that community is hostile to the principle of tolerance because it takes difference as something that exists only outside the (homogeneous) community . On the other hand, the heterogeneity of individualism, would, according to d'Entreves, provide a space for tolerance. Both classical liberals such as Locke and Mill and communitarians like MacIntyre, want at all costs to maintain the boundary line between the inside and the outside. I want to argue that the questions of tolerance will never be answered if it is simply reduced to a choice between either community or individuality. In both cases, tolerance can be understood merely as "putting up with" the other, rather than "supporting" and fostering the alterity of the other.
In the next section, I will attempt to make a case for a new tolerance which escapes the confines advocated by communitarians such as MacIntyre and liberals such as Locke and Mill. Drawing on the insights of Jacques Derrida, I argue that liberals must have a better defense of tolerance if they are to retain the concept.
III
THE NEW TOLERANCE AND
CHARITY OF POSTMODERN LIBERALISM
It is important to note that the synonym of tolerance is charity. Charity engages the question of the relationship to the other. Within the context of our discussion, charity refers to the individuals approach to that which confronts him. How does one welcome a friend or stranger? The attitude which the individual adopts in addressing friends, strangers or enemies who wish to seek admission into our economy reflects our interpretation of the call to embrace a positive tolerance and to be charitable towards the other. The concept of charity, its cognates and their genealogies, comport a plethora of antithetical senses. Charity is a cognate of the Latin caritas, suggesting dearness, costliness, high price(the cost of a gift), and carus dear, valued, esteemed, beloved. The concept of charity is also affiliated with the Sanskrit word kama, the old Irish world caraim (love) and the Slavic word kamata which means both debt and the interest payment calculated on a loan. Construed in the light of its etymology, charity, resonates with significations of not only giving gifts but it also of being indebted to the other.
I want to suggest that tolerance should be rethought on the basis of charity. The charity which is being described here is a complex charity that cuts across differences . Rethinking tolerance on the basis of charity will allow us to leave behind the negative definition of tolerance as "putting up with" and adopt the positive definition of tolerance as supporting or fostering diversity.
As we have seen, liberals such as Locke and Mill and communitarians such as MacIntyre, call for a denial of otherness, that is, a denial of alternative perspectives which fail to cohere within their own conceptual schemes. Within the restricted liberal and communitarian schemes, the existence of alternative practices, world views, or ways of life are incomprehensible and hence candidates for intolerance. Restricted liberals and communitarians fail to cultivate the power of the question. Their unnecessarily restrictive paradigms of unity, close off the possibility of questioning. Subscribers to both restricted liberalism and communitarianism are guided by the demand for a unified horizon and are mandated to develop an interpretive posture which fits with, rather than breaks from, the story told by their traditions. Both operate according to an exclusionary policy. Alternative positions which depart too far from the story that the tradition tells, positions which simply fail to cohere with the dominant paradigm or model, are swiftly excluded from consideration.
Postmodern liberalism should seek an alternative approach which will overcome the unnecessary, reductive properties of both restricted liberalism and communitarianism. I am aware of how startling the phrase" postmodern liberalism" might seem here. Postmodernism and deconstruction are usually associated with a destruction of ethical values. Richard Rorty argues that while deconstruction is important on a private level it is "pretty much useless when it comes to politics" and is "largely irrelevant to public life and political questions" . In a recent interview Ronald Dworkin expresses the view that postmodernism "is silly, indeed incoherent".
I interpret postmodernism as an event which revises the restricted understanding of ethics and the relation of self and other. The task of postmodern liberalism calls the citizen forth with a radical responsibility and tolerance which is based on charity. Postmodern liberalism will permit hitherto excluded positions to be heard. It will offer an alternative to unequivocal hegemony of one unified metanarrative over other narrative.
A postmodern liberalism will interrogate those forces that have made dominance and intolerance a central part of their agenda. Postmodern liberalism will reveal that within the codes and rules of restricted moralities, there has always been an intolerance. A postmodern liberalism will cultivate plurality and alterity, rather than suppress it.
The postmodern liberalism which I am developing here, shares an affinity with Rawls conception of political liberalism and justice as fairness, which is not metaphysical . Rawls argues that,
the aim of justice as fairness as a political conception is practical, and not metaphysical or epistemological. That is, it presents itself not as a conception of justice that is true, but one that can serve as a basis of informed and willing political agreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons... in a society marked by deep divisions between opposing and incommensurable conceptions of the good, justice as fairness enables us at least to conceive how social unity can be both possible and stable.

Rawls concedes that although political liberalism is "neutral in aim" it may "affirm the superiority of certain forms of moral character and encourage certain moral virtues"(PL. 194). The virtues which Rawls enumerates are "the virtues of fair social cooperation such as the virtues of civility and tolerance, of reasonableness and the sense of fairness"(PL.194).
In Force of Law, Derrida describes that deconstruction, "operates on the basis of an infinite idea of justice". This deconstructive justice is "owed to the Other before any contract."(FL.965) Deconstructive justice is committed to responsibility and to Otherness. Derrida argues deconstructive justice "always addresses itself to singularity, to the singularity of the Other"(FL.955). Deconstructive justice examines the phenomena of injustice that has oppressed, marginalized and excluded the Other. A deconstructive justice exposes the violence inherent in all restricted economies. Within a restricted economy, the metaphysical blanket protected dominant forces, while systematically smothering and eliminating Otherness. A restricted economy operates according to a metaphysical(i.e. comprehensive) and totalitarian metanarrative, that formulates laws in order to suppress Otherness. In short, a restricted economy employs a resistance to Otherness, whose final aim is the total elimination of Otherness.
A restricted economy, has always been threatened by the forces that have upset its order. The response to these "threats", has been to contain them in one place, i.e. the clinic, the prison, the "safe haven" or the concentration camp. A restricted economy maintains purity by excluding difference. Such exclusion is based on intolerance.
A restrictive tolerance which merely "puts up with the other" maintains its oppressive dominance. The tolerance of postmodern liberalism, on the contrary, should be linked to charity and should adopt an openness to Otherness. Otherness is cultivated, rather than suppressed. A postmodern liberalism would provide a sobering account of the intolerance of certain restrictive communities to intrusions.
Restricted liberal and communitarian strategies for containing undecidability, shelter individuals from options that might otherwise appear. Postmodern liberals recognize that decisions must be made in the face of a set of equally compelling alternatives.
Plurality increases both the difficulty and liberty involved in decision making. Postmodern liberalism allows for a series of rival divergent choices. In giving individuals more options and no independent basis for ultimately selecting from these options, postmodern liberalism calls for an increase in responsibility. In Derrida's words, " each case is other, each decision is different and required an absolute unique interpretation, which no existing coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely"(FL.947).
According to Derrida, "undecideability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities... These possibilities are themselves highly determined in strictly defined situations (for example... political, ethical, etc.) They are pragmatically determined". The task of the postmodern liberal is to invigorate these highly determined contexts in order to open up more possibilities than would otherwise be generated by the restricted liberal or communitarian program.
A postmodern liberalism will support the imperative of stating and maintaining the liberty of the question. Maintaining the liberty of the question allows individuals to choose between various forms of life without protest or interference. The deference to the demands of coherence excludes other world views and reduces the liberty of the question. Tolerance as political, incorporates a responsibility both to the other and to the liberty of the question. Maintaining the liberty of the question, to borrow Kymlicka's words, "is the first step in starting a dialogue" .
A dialogue involves an interplay between self and other. How we respond reflects the tolerance we show toward the Other. Our response towards any question can take the form of "yes"or "no". As Derrida points out, " One always has, one always must have, the right not to respond, and this liberty belongs to responsibility itself, that is, to the liberty that one believes must be associated with it. One must always be free not to respond to an appeal or to an invitation- and it is worth remembering this, to remind oneself of the essence of this liberty"(PO. 15, my emphasis).This responsive "no" recognizes a limit to what is "tolerated". David H. Jones, argues that,"citizens with liberal civic virtues must recognize limits to tolerance and that their loyalty to liberal institutions will sometimes require them to repudiate and even combat some of the more robust forms of illiberal community"
V
THE TOLL: CONCLUDING REMARKS

A postmodern liberalism will be attentive to the question of what kind of community will emerge from the new tolerance. Will it be "a community that builds on the resources of difference and diversity that begin to emerge with pluralism" or a community which "sets out to annihilate the communities that do exist". (ML.179) In examining the question of tolerance, Susan Mendus asks," what are the requirements of toleration... does toleration require more than merely letting alone? Does it require assisting and nurturing?" (TLL,17). We are now in a position to answer, that tolerance does require more than "merely letting alone". The tolerance which is being outlined here answers Cain's question with a "yes". Tolerance understood in terms of charity is a supporting of the other. But this support is not without criticism. The citizen who dwells in the polis is one who responds, questions and criticizes responsibly.
Let us recall that tolerance relates to the question of the toll. A toll is a fixed charge to travel across a bridge or road. This question engages the discussion of customs, debts and borders; of admission and who is allowed to enter; of what is allowed to cross over of what is acceptable; of what and who is allowed to pass over to the other side.
Ultimately, the meaning of tolerance is found in the relation that I have with the Other. and the demand that is placed upon me by the other. Tolerance is a "problem of human relations"(T.21). Tolerance is a question of how we meet the Other. Do we meet the Other with the charity of the open hand or the imperialism of the closed fist and of the equally closed mind ?

Derrida and the Ethics of Community

2006-08-12T18:15:00.000-07:00

http://labyrinth.iaf.ac.at/2001/Zlomislic.html

Khora-Nation

2006-08-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

(For Al Lingis)

Four quotes, and four corners to lead us into an exploration of coronation, queens, grounds, crowns, glory and falling down:
The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, the new sown seed that grows and swells insider her.
Aeschylus, The Eumedides

Be not anxious, great King! said the Brahmans, “a child has planted itself in the womb of your queen...he will become a Buddha and roll back the clouds of sin and folly of this world.
Jataka, The Birth of the Buddha

The angel said to her, “ Do not be afraid, Mary for you have found favor with God”...and Mary said, “ My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed...he has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.
Luke 1. 30:46

And yet the discourse on khora, conducted by a bastard reasoning without a legitimate father is inaugurated by a new return to the origin. Philosophy cannot speak philosophically of that which looks like its “mother”. “nurse”, “receptacle”, or its “imprint bearer”. As such, it speaks only of the father and the son, as if the father engendered it all on his own.
Jacques Derrida, Khora

Noah is sixteen months old. I enjoy taking him to the park. He teaches me how to play and how to look at the world in an fresh non-philosophical way. There we are on the ground playing with wood-chips. Wood-chips can be dangerous. Once a little boy fell from the swing face first. The wood-chips embedded themselves in his mouth. Fun and play had turned into crying and bleeding. The play-ground had become a pain-ground.
This same ground was also used by midnight lovers and drug addicts. Used condoms strewn on the grass, cigarette remains, ash and the faint impressions of bodies were the presents left behind to let fall on the ground. Noah does not see these things which are being swept up by the groundskeepers.
We make our way to the bridge past the ducks and squirrels. Noah stops to chase them until he spots a dog. “Doggie, woof, woof”, he cries out in delight. Here too the ground is littered with muck and excrement though it is different from the cat litter that I clean every day and even different still from Noah’s four pound diapers.
Throughout our lives we find ourselves on different ground. The ground that supports us can also cause us to sink and fall. The ground can yield its secrets, corpses in mass graves, artifacts and treasure and though they do not bloom as the tulips and lavender in the spring, they might yet rise from the ground and resurrect. In standing on one ground we are always on a many layered ground so hospitality would be the imperative to follow as we take our steps across sidewalks, boardwalks, roads, bridges, streams and deserts. This is what Lingis has taught me.
Fall is my favorite time of year. The colors sweep across the landscape. Crown is said of a fire when it sweeps through the canopy of a forest. In the backyard, fenced in, the leaves are changing color. Fall explodes with vibrancy, echoing with an intensity that only Van Gogh or Tom Thompson could capture. Fall time is the time of the fall when colors crown and then tumble down, cascading in an almost waterfall rhythm.
Noah and I are playing with the leaves. I am trying to rake them into one pile but soon give up this game of uncover the ground. Ground cover consists of various plants used to fill in space along walk-ways and highways. To provide ground cover in times of war means to put up a moving wall of bullets so that nothing alive is left standing.
Suzanne, Noah and I are walking into Zehrs. It’s grocery day. Outside the sliding doors a crowd has gathered. It watches as three security guards throw a man to the ground. He stole some Listerine. Later the police officer tells me that he’s a heroin addict. She tries to justify the excessive force used by the law and security students. But somehow it is no use convincing her that the man’s gashes and gouges and bleeding skull bounced off the concrete wall are a terrible punishment to pay for a minor infraction. The law walks on violent ground. I did speak up as the three looked at me proud of their accomplishments. After-all they did protect the market and saved a bottle of Listerine from falling into the wrong hands. However, the man suffering from addiction could have been apprehended in a more gentle aikido way.
On week-ends after I have finished teaching philosophy I work for a demolition contractor. Such work is quite refreshing and fits nicely with my deconstructionist background. Lingis writes, “I now do not feel I am really a man unless I get my hands dirty. Cleaning out the cellar, the garage, that is a man’s job”. I can relate to Lingis’s description of work as “endurance, capacity to suffer, responsibility to family that bends one to harsh labour, comradery, loyalty to one other”. My father taught me how to work. My mother taught me how to pray. Last Saturday I was demolishing storage lockers with a group of Cubans who speak very little English. In between the swings of crow-bars and sledge hammers the thought occured that its perverse to enter someone’s fantasy space in this manner. I stopped for a moment. The Cubans thought I was tired and they were making fun of me . I reamained mute. Unable to tell them why I disagreed with Slavoj Žižek’s theories. I knew a line was being crossed and that I was tearing down space and standing on a ground that I had difficulty comprehending. You ask what obsessed this person to collect Third Reich paraphenalia, pornography, children’s toys and pictures of his grandmother? Let’s not jump to hasty conclusions such as the grandmother was really a secret agent posing as a porn-star who finished her career at Toys-R-Us. I would later learn that the man whose storage locker I was tearing down had tried to kill himself. But he only jumped from a four storey building. At that height which is no height at all, the ground did not have a chance to rush towards him. No terminal velocity was achieved. The jumper was grounded. The ground bounced him back like a stone skipped on the surface of a calm Nothern Lake. For some sorrow is such that it consumes all traces of joy, pleasure and receptivity.
Ground is never gained or lost. At best one can manage to leave a faint imprint but that disappears as well. The question becomes how to ground oneself on ground that is never stable; on ground that quakes. The plane is grounded. The ship runs a ground. The meat is ground. The human full of disaster and catastrophe never seems to be grounded.
I don’t know where I am going with this. But I know that I wanted to travel some ground with you, to expose my thinking to you, to ground myself in some concrete examples and along the way to pay homage to Al Lingis.
In 1992 as I was beginning my Ph.D. thesis I was told by my advisor not to trust what Lingis had to say because his thinking was dangerous. Of course, the analytic tradition would find Lingis dangerous. After- all he made philosophy exciting, exotic, visceral, photographic and above all, honest. His writing was impressive because it impressed itself on the one who was drawn into a world of lived experience. Lingis showed the hospitality that was at the heart of being human as he shared his food, medicine and money with street kids and with the wretched of the earth whom analytic philosophy has forgotten.
Lingis is to the practice of philosophy what Francis Bacon was to painting. Bacon portrayed human flesh saturated with pain, dis-ease and affliction but he also found room for joy and abandon. Bacon focused on heads, crowns, gaping wounds and screaming faces; flesh trapped in geometric cages. Watching the man with the addiction being beaten down his blood stained flesh mixing with brick I saw the extent to which the consumer cage surrounds us.
In one of his last interviews before he died in 198? Bacon expressed that he had only wanted to paint the human smile. But I could understand why Bacon’s attempt at a smile could only resemble the Joker’s grimace that kept Batman on edge. Flesh is meat and Bacon learned from Rembrant how to expose a carcass and make it glow with glory. From Velasquez, Bacon took the papal throne and turned it into a caged toilet; a space for toil; a spoiled space where the dropping weight of glory could shine, purple, yellow, brown and vermillion. Bacon like Lingis shows us what is royal in the pageantry of things.
In the Timaeus, Plato speaks of the khora as a receptacle, as a nurse and as a mother. The khora is that from which spectacle, space and display flow forth. It is what Hopkins would describe as a gush of juice and joy. Khora births us. Khora allows us to stand on the earth and to fall back into it. Following Plato we might say that we are Khora-Nated or birthed from a source we cannot name. Khora crowns us to become human and to assume our place. But the history of our species shows that we have not taken our human place. We have become something other than human, monstrous without innocence. Crown from the Latin corona means garland or wreath. Corona can also mean anything curved like the tip of a bow, the stem of a ship, the curve of a hip, lip breast or phallus.
The word crown relates back to the Sanskrit word kridati or he dances. To dance is to turn and bend. In this dance of glory, life bends us with pain but there can be pleasure in the bending, in heading, jumping and turning to fall asleep. Once Noah was dancing with a belly full of breast milk and he threw up all over Suzanne. He kept on dancing and laughing oblivious to the nausea that was overtaking us.
To crown means to finish off and to climax. Crown can also mean to inflict a blow and to bruise. In childbirth to crown means to appear at the vaginal opening or to be taken out of the womb. All of us have been crowned so we are royal, majestic and sovereign. I remember when Noah was pulled out of Suzanne’s womb. He was bloody, glistening in muscous. He was glorious and beautiful.
Related to the word crown is the word coroner. A coroner was an officer in Englad whose duty it was to keep a record of the pleas of the corwn and guard the royal revenues arising from them. Lingis reverses this lawerly order. Lingis coronates what the rest have forgotten, overlooked, hidden, discarded or are afraid to speak of. He becomes a universal or catholic coroner who brings to our attention the pleas of the lowly while teaching us how to turn sorrow into a glory filled joy.
Crown refers to the highest quality or state of something. In Catholicism Mary as the mother of God is crowned with glory not because she was sweet submissive, silent and subordinate. This dehydrated and theological Mary is not the mother of Jesus. When my mother taught me to pray she never presented Mary in a bland manner. In my childhood home Mary was not floating in the clouds waiting to be spotted by NASA satellites. She was grounded, in the flesh, in our daily living. If the word was made flesh, the flesh was the Mothers’. Devotion to Mary is shown through the rosary; a devotional excercise marked by the use of beads. She is said to be a rose. A rose is a woman of great charm, excellence, virtue and vitality. Mary as Khora exists as a manifestation of life which is always maiden, youthful and new. What is full of life can be described as “quick”. The word quick means marked by the presence of life; not dead; charged with passion and action. In the Magnificat Mary sings a song of bold affirmation, revolution, and reversal of values which was already recorded in the Old Testament Books of Sirach and 2 Samuel: “The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers, and enthrones the lowly in their places...he will find gladness and a crown of rejoicing” and “ He raises up the lowly from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princess and inherit a seat of honor”. Mary sings a song for the oppressed and expresses her hope that the unjust structures of society can be changed. I see Lingis carrying on this Marian mission of bringing hope to those without hope; to those without a foreseeable future. Such work is perhaps beyond philosophy. The work of overturning is the work of the stomach. Disgust happens when one’s stomach is sickened. The stomach turns, churns, tightens and weeps with an ever greater urgency that demands action.

Prefacing the Antiphon: Towards an Animal Theology

2006-08-04T10:01:00.001-07:00

(The Preface to my book, Derrida's Aporetic Ethics)

Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares
knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there
words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through
all the earth,
and their words to the end of
the world.
Psalm 19

Antiphon: 1. A devotional composition sung responsively as part of a liturgy. 2a. A short liturgical text chanted or sung responsively preceding or following a psalm, psalm verse, or canticle.

Your story, please.
Plato, Phaedrus

We do not wish to be spared by our best enemies, nor by those whom we love from the very heart. So let me tell you the truth!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Of War and Warriors’

A foreword is not necessarily provoked or provocative, to be sure. But a provocation will always resemble a foreword.
Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi

In For What Tomorrow Derrida speaks of “the compulsive and often pathetic efforts, desperate or fearful to discredit at any cost- and not only my work, of course, but an entire configuration to which it belongs”. How is this violence to be addressed? Why have so many of Derrida’s disciples remained timid and silent for so long? What is to be done?
One very good answer comes from John R. Searle who appears to have recognized the earlier pathology of his own efforts to discredit Derrida’s work. Searle writes, “When it comes to intellectual pathologies, once you can accu-rately name them you are a long way toward understanding them, and once you understand them, you are well on the way to overcoming them”. Searle also adds that such intellectual pathologies are, “self-refuting, and simply quoting them is often refutation enough”. For the sake of analytic rigor and responsibil-ity, I wish to push past what is enough. Following Searle’s advice I will not only quote, I will also name, describe and analyze some of these intellectual pathologies that have chosen to attach themselves to Derrida’s work.
Stated clearly, the criticisms against Derrida’s work are ill informed, ignorant, and pathetic. For example, Johann Hari, writing for the Independent (London) writes:

The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among aca-demics is hard to understand except as a symptom of deca-dence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the humanities (and any coher-ent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation. As he is buried this week, it is time to ask whether his ideas - and the long, agonising postmodern intellectual spasm - should be buried with him….Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language, reason and the attempt to tell big sto-ries about how we became as we are. All we are left with - if we accept Derrida's conclusions - is puzzled silence and irony.

I can find no finer example of journalistic ignorance and incompetence. Hari’s article is full of falsehoods, rhetorical banalities, and culture dope metaphors.
Derrida’s vocation of patiently and closely reading the canonical texts of our tradition is described as ‘trashing’ the humanities by Hari. He could have easily consulted the recent collection of essays published by his alma mater entitled, Jacques Derrida and the Humanities. Hari could have also read Der-rida’s essay Of the Humanities and the Philosophical Discipline. The Right to Philosophy from the Cosmopolitical Point of View (the Example of an Interna-tional Institution). One would expect someone with a first class degree from Cambridge to produce better work, but Hari (once again) exhibits his own philosophical illiteracy. Has Cambridge become a diploma mill? Is it in need of yet another Wittgensteinian rescue? What conclusions can be drawn from this?
Hari shows that journalists can say whatever they wish about subjects they know nothing about, while believing themselves to be educating their public. Hari criticizes Derrida’s supposed relativism only to reveal his own relativism and ignorance on full display in the pages of the Independent. The problem can be formulated as follows : journalists who know nothing about the subject matter they are writing about disseminate their views with the help of newspapers with a massive and international distribution. Derrida has already informed us what is at stake. He writes,

Hegel was right to remind the philosophers of his time to read the newspapers every day. Today, the same responsibility also requires us to find out how the newspapers are made, and who makes them, the dailies, the weeklies, and the television news. We would need to look at them from the other side: from the side of the news agencies as well as that of the teleprompter. And let us never forget what such a statement implies: when-ever a journalist or a politician appears to be addressing us di-rectly, in our homes and looking us straight in the eye, he (or she) is actually reading a text that was produced elsewhere at another moment, possibly by other people or even by a whole network of anonymous writers.

Journalists who cannot decipher, evaluate or support their claims will not be able to understand the call to responsibility and vigilance that Derrida evokes here.
Following Hari in another massive display of journalistic aberration and irrational prose is Mark Goldblatt who in his review of the documentary film Derrida writes, “ Derrida is not now, nor has he ever been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather an intellectual con artist”. Goldblatt continues, “Jacques Derrida, has made a career out of playing whiffle ball in his own backyard, with half the humanities professors in the United States watching and doing color commen-tary.” Goldblatt displays an attitude that is harmful to the spirit of philosophy and truth. I would expect someone steeped in historical and philosophical analysis to define their terminology. Such rigor should be expected from an assistant professor of Educational Skills who teaches “Religion and Religious Dissent in American History to the Civil War” and “Ancient Greek Philosophy” courses at The Fashion Institute of Technology. Simply put, Goldblatt is not qualified to comment on Derrida’s writings. Indeed, those with little knowledge of Derida’s works and writings are often the first to make fashionable noise concerning Derrida’s so called “relativism”. To use Kant’s language, such individuals engage in “quibblings about things they do not understand” .
To counter this slide into error and to be vigilant against journalistic mendacio perhaps a new itinerary could be constructed for those wishing to become journalists. I propose that journalists declare an unlimited commitment to the pursuit of truth rather than an unlimited commitment to fraud and simplic-ity. This would require a rigourous education, first of all, in philosophy, history, literature and science so that they could, with a public promise, make a pledge of responsiblility. As if this is going to happen. Philosophers then, must reclaim their role. They have fallen into a slumber so deep that they have forgotten their commitment to action, resistance and dissidence.
Notice how Goldblatt’s writing reveals a failure to follow institutional mandates. In other words, he destroys his own position. We read,

So what exactly are educational skills? Essentially, they are the skills you need to get the most out of college courses. Reading comprehension, grammatical correctness, language fluency, listening and note-taking - these are the foundations of a liberal arts education. Educational skills are also life skills - the ability to gather ideas from what you read and hear, to express your own thoughts in clear, effective speech, to write crisp, compe-tent sentences. It's difficult to overestimate how crucial these skills are to leading a well-rounded, intellectually rewarding life.

This is not the first case of a professor, who fails to follow the educa-tional guidelines they set up for their students. How can someone teach the essential skills of reading, writing and argumentation only to engage in a jour-nalistic drivel that breaks all the rules of critical thinking? The simple answer is that such individuals are incapable of reading philosophically demanding texts. Rather than stating this obvious fact, Derrida’s critics resort to play ground name calling. Rather than blame themselves for not being able to understand Der-rida’work they blame Derrida for not being understandable. The latter game is far easier as it avoids knocking up against the problems and aporias that Derrida has located.
Goldblatt could have first defined the meaning of the words, intellectual, con and artist while attempting to show us how the three words fit together. He could have informed us that a con-artist is a person who uses dishonesty for financial gain. A con artist often works with one or more conspirators called shills, who try to assure the “mark” by pretending to believe the trickster. How has Derrida exactly “swindled” Goldblatt? How has Derrida used deception and fraud? I find Goldblatt’s comments to be offensive in their self-evident ridicu-lousness. Goldblatt’s mistake is not only verbal to use Ayer’s language, it is a factual error as well.
The issues raised by Derrida cannot be swept under the analytic carpet simply because one is incapable of understanding them. Hari, Goldblatt, Smith and Hagen have not tried to meet the arguments put forth by Derrida. Instead they insist on the superiority of their own non-positions. In Hegel’s words from his famous preface, “ not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes”. Reading and under-standing Derrida’s writings require work, labor and intimate knowledge of the history of philosophy. Those who criticize Derrida’s work are lacking in all these areas and yet they continue to defend their ingenious ignorance.
For example, L. Kirk Hagen proclaims, “ Derrida never made any ef-fort to improve his prose. And yet, over the years hordes of converts took to aping his impenetrable rodomontade’s in article after article, dissertation after dissertation, book after book…..Derrida was no great shakes as a writer or philosopher. (my emphasis) Hagen’s attack is simply preposterous bluster and outright untruth. If Derrida’s prose is “impenetrable” how can Hagen even say a word or stage a proper critique? Indeed how can he even begin to write any-thing about Derrida’s work? Hagen has simply shown his inability to read and to understand Derrida’s writings while adding one more entry to his list of “published works”.
Having spent many years of my life immersed in Derrida’s work I can-not allow such comments to pass without a proper Swiftean response. I do not know if they will be understood by Derrida’s critics. Are they capable of under-standing especially when they are caught in a vicious and strange auto-immune response? Derrida’s worst critics remind me of the seekers of fame on the Next American Idol, unable to sing Madonna’s Like a Virgin, or Led Zeppelin‘s “Going To California” they complain the loudest when they are not chosen to proceed further. Not swayed by the truth of the instant replay they criticize those who really do know how to sing opera and hold a credible note.
In the spirit of charity, I would like to follow Barry Smith’s own criteria on what constitutes a meaningful life. Barry Smith spear-headed a smear cam-paign against Derrida when he found out that Cambridge wanted to grant him an honorary degree. In an essay entitled, “Luck, Responsibility and the Meaning of Life”, he writes, “Whether a person leads a meaningful life depends in every case not on that person’s, or other people’s beliefs or feelings, but on what the person did as a consequence of his or her own decisions, as evaluated (actually or potentially) against the relevant public measures of success.” From his own admission, Derrida did lead a meaningful life and Smith’s criticism is null. Here is the proof. I quote Smith again: “Whether a person leads a meaningful life depends on every case ( my emphasis) not on that person’s (Derrida) or other people’s beliefs or feelings (Smith) but on what the person did as a consequence of his or her own decisions ( please refer to Derrida’s CV). One can only conclude that Smith’s vicious reaction against Derrida’s work rests on a founda-tion of jealousy or to borrow Smith’s words this jealousy could be considered to be “a pathological continuant entity”. I do not recall Derrida writing a letter to the editor when Smith was awarded the Volkswagen prize. On the other hand, perhaps Smith is angered because Derrida never quoted his work or devoted a long footnote to one of his papers. Citing jus in bello, I have taken on the task of defending my teacher and wish to remedy the injustice by devoting a very long endnote within a endnote that was converted from a footnote to Barry Smith as I continue with my analysis of other matters.
What is to be done?
Socrates had an easy time explaining geometry to the enslaved boy of the Meno. At least he was willing to be lead by the Socratic maietuic as Plato looked on and took careful footnotes.
What is to be done with those individuals not fully trained in the history of philosophy and theology, who display an inability to analyze, understand, elucidate, discuss, give evidence and read? Such learned ignorance coupled with extreme arrogance and an inability to detect or appreciate irony and humor is a deadly combination.
What is to be done as one reads the mountains of papers criticizing Der-rida’s work, other than rub one’s eyes in disbelief while waiting for an answer to arrive from the non-human world. Rather than evoke Hagen’s ape or Kant’s billy goat, I will defer to Leopold Bloom’s cat.
Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses together with Hegel’s Phenomenology, while waiting for Canada’s Next Top Model to return and wondering why the Maple Leafs never win the cup, I happened upon the following paragraphs. The first is from Joyce, the second is from Hegel:

O, there you are, Mr. Bloom said, turning from the fire. The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writing table. Prr. Scratch my head. Prrr….They call them stupid. They un-derstand what we say better than we understand them. She un-derstands all she wants to.

Even the animals are not shut out from this wisdom, but, on the contrary, show themselves to be most profoundly initiated into it.

Following this Joycean/Hegelian wisdom, the question I posed to my cats was as follows: “How do individuals educated at the best schools, manage to obtain degrees and doctorates- become journalists or professors, publish books and articles, write plays, obtain grants and prizes yet criticize Derrida’s work and the history to which it belongs without offering a rational discussion or valid arguments about a specific topic, sentence, word or text?” Maggie, Gilles and Ellie meow in unison. Is this ad bestia permissible? I can only imagine how smart Derrida’s cat must be.
What is to be done?
How do I retrieve an answer? Can I use the same tactics used by Der-rida’s esteemed critics from the journalistic academy? I continue wondering what Aristotle really meant by his phrase “rational animal” as I pose further questions to various cats from the neighborhood: Spartacus, Guy, Marat, Mao, Lenin, and Che. I carefully listen for their response. ME-OW! they cry in unison. Now I understand! Derrida’s critics feel wounded and hurt. His writings have caused them pain. Imagine spending a lifetime researching whether Achilles really had a heel or whether mountains really exist; imagine devoting one’s career to answering the question, “Did Confucius read Nietzsche?”, only to have someone state very clearly, “Nietzsche was born in the 19th century”. Imagine working for thirty years attempting to unravel the real meaning of the word “and” only to be told by Google that “the "AND" operator is unnecessary -- we include all search terms by default”. Such a revelation must be earth shattering. In Nietzsche’s words, such scholars “ were playing on the sea-shore- then came a wave and swept their playthings into the deep: now they cry”.
Is it best then, not to speak, especially when a logical explanation of Derrida’s work will not be understood? I have struggled with this question like Jacob wrestling the angel, as I read and interpret the words of Jesus’ animal theology in the Gospel of Matthew: “Do not throw your pearls before swine or they will trample them under foot and maul you”. The “swine” is the con-temptible person who would take more than his or her share. Of course, it is not a literal description but a quality of mind. For example, the Buddhist tradition makes use of animal imagery in its psychology. Chogyam Trungpa in Tran-scending Madness states,

The animal quality is one of purely looking directly ahead, as if we had blinkers. We look straight directly ahead, never looking right or left, very sincerely…the animal realm is asso-ciated with ignorance….Whenever there is falseness or some devious way of relating to things, you begin by convincing yourself that it is the right thing…..the idea behind that is that the pig supposedly does not look to the right or to the left or turn around, but it just sniffs along….it goes on and on , with-out any kind of discrimination, a very sincere pig…..We may be dealing with all kinds of extremely sophisticated topics and intellectual concepts of the highest standards- but still, our style of working with that sophisticated world is that of a pig….you are not able to look at yourself, you are unable to relate with the mirroring quality of the realms and of your life. There is no sense of humor. There is no way of being willing to surren-der, willing to open, or willing to give, at all.

What can be said to the omnivorous animal that cannot read but makes paper? A hog according to the OED is “an agitator for mixing and stirring pulp in paper making”. A hog is also a machine with a revolving cutter for reducing bulk materials as waste lumber. Critics of Derrida’s work would like it to disap-pear. The task here is not as simple as the prodigal son leaving the swinesty to rush back into the protective arms of his father.
To throw from the Latin terere means to rub and to grind. To throw is to propel, to cast, to get rid of, and to unseat. To throw is to make oneself dependent upon some thing or other. It is to give oneself up without resistance. To throw is to allow an opponent to win by losing intentionally. Throw is an undertaking that requires risk, danger and dislocation. To throw away is to discard and squander what is precious, rare, relevant and reverent. In being thrown there must never be a throwback, a reversal or backward deviation from the path or course, however aporetic. The soccer ball like the idea must be thrown-in after it has gone into touch.
What must be done?
How to throw off; to free oneself as Derrida writes, from “ a more stubborn aggression” without throwing up or admitting defeat even as one is thrown out and abandoned? What would be a through road in this ethics of resistance that must learn how to protect and yet at the same time share with an unconditional hospitality the pearl, that which is precious, fine, noble, rare; a small round globule that forms from the infinite tear drops that come from learning how to live and navigate this one life.
Jesus alerts us to the trample- the heavy repeated tread of many feet. To tread is to follow a habitual course of action while learning to be like a machine. The treadmill first used in prison discipline was a device that allowed for the continuation of a wearisome routine. Somehow, this treadmill found its way into the University system. To trample is to tyrannize. How to stop the tyranny of the Absolute Rule that stultifies, represses and suppresses the liberty of the question? This is the work of deconstruction which as Derrida reminds us, never proceeds without love?
The risk of being mauled will always be present. Maul from the Latin molere relates to the word meal and means to grind. The cannibalism within that which is called human being is never far away. To grind is to reduce something to powder. Recall Nietzsche’s characterization of scholars as those who grind. To grind down is to repress harshly, to keep rigidly under control or in a state of submission, much like the archives of electronic records. Against such grind-ing down that often takes place within the University that proclaims its support of academic freedom while doing otherwise, a singular response will always be necessary if only to not allow these forces of repression to proceed unchecked.
I had wanted to talk to you about grounding and being-grounded and what takes place in the grind of work; in the process of being ground down though never run aground. The groundwork for this project began in one institu-tion, where certain members of the department of philosophy attempted to ground it to a halt like the Avro Arrow almost sending it into an abyss without hope of return. It was finished at another institution which allowed it space to breathe and grow to completion. I am grateful to both institutions for different reasons.
After having completed coursework in Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Rawls and Kymlicka and after having successfully passed comprehensive exami-nations in the history of philosophy, I submitted a thirty page thesis proposal under the title “Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics”. I was not allowed to even defend the proposal. Judged without a trial by those not competent to judge, I experienced first hand what is meant by intellectual censorship and administrative violence, along with the pettiness, anti-democratic nature and small-mindedness of departmental politics. At that moment, I finally understood what Derrida meant by repressive structures growing out of intellectual traditions.
What can be done?
What proposal would make sense as I dream of organizing a Derridean Council of Nicea? Proposal is a rich word. It relates to the orchestral overture or opening. Propose means to put forth; to make an offer of marriage. What I put forth here is hardly an offer of marriage even if it resembles a declaration of love for that which I call philosophy. Many in the academic tower had wanted to throw it out and to keep it in the projects. Perhaps it provoked and issued a challenge while evoking what was at stake in terms of ethics, much like a Catho-lic and Franciscan Luther nailing his theses to the church door in Wittenberg, “Ich kann nicht anders”.
What will be done?
Here are a few snap-shots, some film stills resembling a work still in progress. I do not pretend to be able to analyze these issues fully but I can point out things that might count as a fragment to an answer. You are invited to sift through the memories as ghosts gather to embed themselves in these inherited archives as I attempt to avoid the Hegelian preface.
The scene is staged. You are in a courtroom or a theatre of law. You have come to visit Kafka’s man from the country that is waiting for the door-keeper. You want to ask him: “Why do you continue to wait?” I manage to go past the other sentry, after-all this door belongs to me and no one else. Final arguments are being presented. The jury is sleeping. The judge is dis-ceased. Someone is speaking. Perhaps it could be me: “If physicians were as negligent as interpreters of Derrida’s work have been, they would be subject to malpractice suits. Some would even lose their license to dispense healing. No such fate awaits the negligent “philosopher” trained in the vulgarity of ignorant responses, which are often times published in respectable academic journals.” Does the lawyer win the case to emerge triumphant on the balcony of a Boston penthouse smoking a cigar and drinking cognac? What would win here exactly mean? Who would be convinced? Would the conviction stand or would the hemlock once again be mixed and dispensed?
What should be done?
More than ever, deconstruction is required in order to save the humani-ties from the dogmatists and keep philosophy alive and accessible to all. Here are Derrida’s words:

Philosophical teaching must continue to develop, one must con-tinue to read, the relation to tradition must be as cultivated as pos-sible: from this point of view, let it be said in passing, those who see deconstruction as a threat to culture and even to academic cul-ture and to its canon, those who try to denounce its “barbarism” are the barbarians: most often, you know, it is they who have not read enough, especially of the so called deconstructive texts. De-construction presupposes the most intensely cultivated, literate re-lation to the tradition. Thus, it is a matter of keeping the field of tradition open, of making things such that the access to philosophy remains open to the greatest number of people: one must pursue the critical project of philosophy as far as possible.

Notice Derrida’s emphasis on philosophical teaching, reading and culti-vating the tradition. Who would find this stance objectionable, if not those who do not know how to teach philosophy, how to read and cultivate the tradition? In addition to being an exemplary philosopher, a generous and kind man, Derrida was a distinguished teacher who related thinking to action. He writes, “I have always thought that thinking is acting….there is no thought of the future that is not at the same time an engagement with the question, “What should I do”.” I am sure that posthumous texts will emerge from the archives that will continue to teach us.
What have I done?
The intellectual risks involved in defending Derrida’s work, especially in the inhospitable and dominantly analytic environment that is called “North American philosophy” has been high, personally and financially but I could not have proceeded otherwise. It never occurred to me that I should ‘play it safe’ and betray what was so evident, namely that Derrida did have an ethic and that this ethic was in place from the beginning of his authorship. Here are Derrida’s words. Please read them carefully:

But what I am proposing here is not meant to suggest any more than were my earlier allusions to responsibility, hospitality, the gift, forgiveness, testimony etc.—some “ethical turn” as some have said. I am simply trying to pursue with some consequence the thinking that for years has been engaged with the same apo-rias. The question of ethics, of rights and politics has not sprung forth unexpectedly, as from a bend in the road.

In other words, Derrida did not make an ethical turn. He was always al-ready dealing with the ethical aporia.
What has been done here?
The work I have written brings out the aporias that Derrida has been dealing with since the beginning of his authorship. In it I explore the traditional areas of philosophy such as Metaphysics, Logic, Epistemology and Ethics and show how Derrida re-reads the tradition for the sake of a responsible decision.
I was drawn to Derrida’s work because it displayed a search for wisdom that was credible. I believe that his work exemplifies a passion and a courage that is rarely practiced by intellectuals. His idea that “deconstruction never proceeds without love.” is exemplary. Derrida’s work transformed my thinking and gave me a new appreciation for the history of philosophy, literature, poetry, architecture, aesthetics and psychoanalysis. Unlike others, I did not want to begin my career by writing books on Kant or Aquinas (however necessary and worthwhile), only to sneak Derrida in the back door twenty years later when it would be safe to do so and no one would take much notice. What I have been outlining here leads to the question of the role of the university and the role of philosophy within the university. Derrida has devoted considerable effort to making philosophy accessible to all those who wish to study it. This is one reason his work has done so well and reached so many people. He released philosophy from its unnatural academic restrictions.
The university writes Derrida, ‘professes the truth, and that is its pro-fession. It declares and promises and unlimited commitment to the truth”. One would think that this would be the case especially in departments of philosophy where wisdom, truth, knowledge and enlightenment are said to be valued. At least this is what their brochures claim. Derrida continues, “ This university without condition does not in fact exist, as we know only too well.” If this university without condition which will have been founded on the “unconditional right to ask critical questions…. in which nothing is beyond question” does not exist what stands in its place? The answer according to Derrida is “research institutions that are in the service of economic goals and interests of all sorts”. What is required writes Derrida “ is not only a principle of resistance, but a force of resistance- and of dissidence”. I would like to think that this work has taken Derrida’s insights to heart.
What is still to be done?
I have often asked myself; why there is so much hostility to Derrida’s works? One simple answer is that detractors of Derrida’s work have failed to follow their own methods. . Adherents of the analytical, phenomenological and hermeneutic schools of philosophy have failed in their task to uphold their own methodological procedures. Following Plato, we could ask, how can these experts engage in discourses full of error unless they are in a state of ignorance? Or, is it the case that these guardians of morals really know what Derrida is saying and cannot accept the consequences? Is one scenario worse than the other? Perhaps another answer is that detractors of Derrida’s works have finally realized the restrictive and reductive nature of their methods and instead of abandoning their paradigms and procedures, they have no other recourse than to recoil in resentment and attack everything Derrida stands for.
Derrida has shown that “to lie one must know what the truth is and distort it intentionally”. The lies against Derrida have been increasing since his death. Is it a case of simple negligence: of hurrying to a judgement in order to affirm at all costs that Derrida is a nihilist? What is the excuse? What alibi do these thinkers, theorists, academic philosophers and scholars have to offer us? Perhaps the simplest answer, that would of course, require at least one book for each infraction would be: incompetence, lack of analytical lucidity, ignorance, error, lies, jealousy, thoughtlessness, journalistic simplicity.
I find it disconcerting that philosophy professors still insist that Derrida has nothing to say about ethics or responsibility when the evidence is clear and distinct. To profess writes Derrida,

is to make a pledge while committing one’s responsibility… Philosophiam profiteri is to profess philosophy: not simply to be a philosopher, to practice or to teach philosophy in some pertinent fashion, but to pledge oneself, with a public promise, to devote oneself publicly, to give oneself over to philosophy, to bear witness, or even to fight for it. And what matters here is this promise, this pledge of responsibility.

I hope I have produced a rigorous inquiry. At the same time, I ask my-self; in the end what is the point? Derrida has been defending himself for many decades. Many of the best Continental philosophers and thinkers to whom I remain infinitely indebted have been defending Derrida. and still the chorus of negligence continues to sing on without respite.
In answering the question, “What’s the most widely held misconception about you and your work?”, Derrida responds,

That I’m a skeptical nihilist who doesn’t believe in anything, who thinks nothing has meaning, and text has no meaning. That’s stu-pid and utterly wrong, and only people who haven’t read me say this. It’s a misreading of my work that began 35 years ago, and it’s difficult to destroy. I never said everything is linguistic and we’re enclosed in language. In fact, I say the opposite, and the de-construction of logocentrism was conceived to dismantle precisely this philosophy for which everything is language. Anyone who reads my work with attention understands that I insist on affirma-tion and faith, and that I’m full of respect for the texts I read.

I must stop here (jus ad bellum) out of compassion for my opponents. I am reminded here of Joseph Beuys' most famous performance work “How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare” (1965), in which he walked around a gallery with his face smeared with honey and covered in gold leaf, carrying a dead hare to whom he talked, explaining the pictures. If Beuys could explain pictures to a dead hare perhaps there is hope in explaining Derrida to those illiterate in the history of philosophy, critical theory and theology while nonetheless teaching in departments of philosophy. Is it too much to hope that patient analysis and the display of evidence can counter obtuseness?”

Love in the Ages of Technology

2006-08-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

On the lower hem of the robe they made pomegranates of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen.
Exodus 39. 24

When human beings have finished, they are just beginning, and when they stop, they are still perplexed. What are human beings, and of what use are they?
Sirach, 18.7:8

He looked around them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart.
Mark 3:5

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is magnificent, but these organs have not grown on him, and they still give him trouble at times.
Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents

Like taking blood from a vein long concealed from view I want to see what I can draw out of this title. To draw out may mean to extract. If love exists or resides within technology then there is no need to disturb it, unless of course, it has fallen asleep. The Gospel of Mark indicates that anger can lead to grief especially if one’s heart hardens. When the heart is hard, technology couples itself with hatred. When hatred attaches itself to technology, it is difficult to dislodge it. Such a coupling has already resulted in monstrous acts perpetuated against the earth, animals and humans.
To draw out is to extract or excise. To draw out means to treat diseased matter. Is it possible to extract what is diseased within technology by excising the hardness from the human heart? A draw is said in terms of a battle or match that is undecided. The battle has been between love and hate and as long as hate remains attached to technology its weapons will be drawn to coil and recoil in a drawback that will always be a hindrance and disadvantage to genuine progress.
To draw also means to attract. Technology draws us to itself, perhaps in an act of love but as Freud shows, technology also redraws us insofar as it makes us into prosthetic beings. The prosthetic is the artificial add-on. It is the dildo instead of the phallus. The prosthetic is like the twisted linen that the Book of Exodus weaves into a robe. To twist is to spin two or more strands of yarn into thread. The twist combines two into one. The twist forms a union. Technology as prosthetic joins things together; machine or flesh. A twist is the flat part of a hinge. The twist of technology is such that it joins what is human to what is unnatural; such that technology can hold us hostage much in the same way that a door is held hostage by the attached to a wooden frame.
Twist also means to distort, to contort and to go awry. Many examples show how technology has caused things to go awry. The list includes genetic mutations, socio-political and environmental degradations. The technological garment with which we have adorned ourselves has been ill fitting and strict. The Latin strictus means to draw together tight. What is drawn tightly becomes rigid as it strains under the breaking point. Such is the action of hate. To contract also means to draw together. Can there be a contract between love and technology without the strain of stricture and without the rigidity and rigor mortis of the machine? Can hate be strained out of the human heart so that it is no longer twisted? Twisted evokes that which is perverse and peculiar. Can love twist technology away from hate? Would such a move be peculiar? Peculiar from the Latin peculiarus means one’s own property. It is related to the word pecu meaning cattle. Peculiar not only engages what may be monstrous it also questions what may be appropriate and proper? Is it proper for human beings to be treated as cattle; in other words, cultivated and prepared to receive what corporations deem necessary?
Technology as it slides on the scale between love and hate forces a choice to either be possessive or compassionate. Technology strips down and lays bare. As it strips down and lays bare, technology can either have the attitude of love or hate. Both love and hate lay bare and expose what is in the human heart. Hate strips down in order to destroy whereas love strips down in order to build up. Technology is the stripping down that adds auxiliary organs. As Freud points out though these auxiliary organs make us appear magnificent, they give us trouble. The Book of Sirach expresses this trouble nicely, “When human beings have finished they are just beginning, and when they stop they are still perplexed. What are human beings, and of what use are they?” Technology promises a finishing but as long as technology is without love and compassion, the question of what human beings are will never be answered, discovered or uncovered. What will be discovered is the extent to which human beings can be used like cattle. This use places technology within the sphere of hate.
To take measure of love and technology, to measure its length and circumference, hollows, planes and surfaces is already to play the card of abstraction. To speak of love is to already assign a limit to that which is beyond any limit; that is, if the mystics can be believed.
To speak of love is to be confined within the technology of speech and writing; to be ground down in the gears of discursive machine that travels too fast. To understand the relationship between love and technology requires slowing down and taking time so that the landscape can be surveyed.
The band of their opposition binds love, hate and technology to each other. Can these ands be unbound so that we finally learn what love is without having to refer to hate? Can this opposition lead us to re-think love and technology according to what Jacques Derrida calls the aporia of the no-way-out? The aporia is the place where we are halted at the same time being the place we must move beyond. For example Derrida shows that if forgiveness exists it must forgive even the unforgivable. In the same vein it may not be a question of learning to think what love is by excising hate from it. Rather the aporia of love may direct us to the startling phrase already spoken by Jesus, namely that love must love what is most hateful if love is to exist. This is the Christian legacy worth retaining.
Tied to the passions of both ignorance and hate as Plato has taught us in the Symposium and Phaedrus love remains the dearest and most obscure of words. Dear, because it is the word we long to hear even if love may cost us all; obscure, because we do not known what we mean when we use the word. Here I think that analytic philosophy in the Carnapian tradition can teach us very little other than to say that love contains four letters. Can the poets or playwrights provide us with any insight? Shakespeare writes these lines:
Here’s much to do with hate but more with love. Why then, O brawling love, or Loving hate. Romeo and Juliet, Act1. Sc.1. 180

Love as Shakespeare shows is linked with hate. Can love stand on its own without referring to examples of hate that have made the earth into a mass graveyard with the help of technology?
In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant wonders about the radical “perversion of the human heart” (Book 1, Sec 3). But this is old news. Countless examples show that what has been done in the name of love has perverted the essence of love. We can read of these examples in the newspaper and watch them on the evening news. For example, a father who is supposedly a good husband and family man suffocates his infant son because the child would not stop crying. A gang professing to love its own guns down eight of its members.
In this preliminary study I want to explore the relationship between love, hate and technology by utilizing the insights of theology, psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. I do not pretend to be able to analyze these issues fully. But I may point out things that might count as fragments of an answer. To give these questions a preliminary answer, section one, will explore and explain the theological concept of “embeddness.” Section two, will analyze the psychoanalytical notion of Being-Stripped-Down. Section three, will investigate the philosophical concept of “nakedness” in an extended analysis of the prosthetic in terms of what is added on, what is taken away, and what is left over.
I wish to understand whether or not a certain aporetic love and faith might engender a technology that allows for a universalizable culture of singularities. In other words, would such a love following Jacques Derrida lead to the emergence of an event that would puncture every horizon of expectation?
I
Being-Bedded

One day, however, when he went into the house to do his work, and while one else was in the house, she caught hold of his garment, saying, Lie with me! But he left his garment in her hand, and fled and ran outside.
Genesis 39. 11-13

Upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves.
Song of Solomon, 3.1

They went to bed, for they all were weary because the banquet had lasted so long. But Judith was left alone in the tent, with Holofernes stretched out on his bed, for he was dead drunk....Soon afterwards she went out and gave Holofernes’ head to her maid, who placed it in her food bag.
Judith, 13.2:10

And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
Matthew 8.20

Jesus’ techne or art of love confronted the technology of the Roman Empire. Empires are built through power, domination and hatred. Jesus confronted the technology of the pharisaic law and was executed by the technology of the Roman Empire. In his age of technology he teaches a new way to love. The carpenter’s son, who through both his father’s, has become an expert on surfaces, depths, textures and joining will preach “ Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you...If you love those who love you what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them”. (Luke 6. 27:32) Here Jesus shows the aporetic love that must love one’s enemies if it is to be love.
The concept of being-bedded travels on the fosse-ways of both sexuality and spirituality. The fosse-way was one of the four great Roman Roads of Britain. These roads had ditches on either side. The Latin for ditch shares an affinity with the Greek word bothyros or pit. Bed originally meant a sleeping place dug in the ground. Here we see the link between beds and graves; between empires that caused many fall into graves and religion which promised a rising or bodily resurrection from the grave.
The bed can be a site of love or a place for discord and violence. The bed can be a space for rest, sleep or dream or a space where nightmares, anxiety and terror keep one from achieving rest. The bed as Lacan shows is the place where we “squeeze each other tight” (Encore, 3). Squeeze is related to the word queasy, which means, "to wound, hurt, make uneasy”. Lacan is here implying that there is no love without hate.
The quotes chosen for this section all point to the complex notion of being-bedded. For example, his Egyptian master’s wife lures Joseph to bed. He leaves his garment behind as he es-capes (literally to leave one’s cape behind). The lover in the Song of Solomon longs to bed the one whom her soul loves. Judith severs Holoferenes’ head as he lies on his bed drunk and asleep. The Gospel of Matthew shows Jesus lamenting his lack of bed. How should we read this lament? Soldiers and mercenaries have ditches to sleep in hide in during times of war. Foxes have holes and birds have nests. Yet, there is no place for Jesus to rest his head. He will tell Pilate that his kingdom is not of this earth. With his spiritual technology, Jesus promises an end to all bodily embeddedness. In geological terms, the word embedded refers to fossils in rocks. Jesus promises the end of bodily fossilization through the resurrection of the body. No longer will bodies implant themselves on the earth to be fixed and set securely in the bed of the earth; they will take their place to occupy the many rooms that Jesus has prepared in his Father’s house. Here we see Jesus as a spiritual architect that can build mansions for resurrected bodies in a heaven we cannot see.
Turning to our ancient Greek heritage from where the techne or art of thinking was first brought-to-birth in the Western world, we can examine Logos and its relation to the word Legen which means to “lay down” or “lay before”.
Legere is where we gather to rest. This word leads us to ask, What does it mean to lay and to be laid? To lay is to place one thing beside another. To lay your cards down on the table is to show the layers of your luck or skill. To lay down the law is use force. To lay yourself down is to rest.
Legen as lay is also to gather. At harvest time, we gather fruit from the soil. We gather grapes from the vine. Gathering belongs to collecting but it points us to what is known as sheltering. A mother gathers her children to shelter them from the storm. A young girl in the mountains of Hercegovina gathers her flock to shelter them from the wolf. A young father gathers his family to fly off to a land of freedom.
Lovers gather to each other in a 21st storey apartment to shelter themselves in an embrace. We gather to witness a game, to watch a movie, to hear a lecture, to give adoration to our teacher, to have a drink together in the shelter of our conversation. We are gathered to what is addressed.
The world that is before us is undressed as we address it. To gather is to see the world as it is and as we are, namely naked. The cosmos does not need to be dressed with our superstitions or with our mimetic devices. We need to undress the superstitions from ourselves; to be freed from absurd technological claims of immortality through cryonics or cloning. Both technological and religion give the promise of rest. Jesus declares himself to be the ultimate bed, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest”. (Matthew 11. 28:29). Jesus shows us that love leads to rest while the technology of the Roman Empire with its restless quest for power engenders hate that strips us down.
II
Stripping Down

So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; and they took him and threw him into the pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it.
Genesis 37.23:24

But morals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they? As waters fail from a lake and river wastes away and dries up, so mortals lie down and do not rise again.
Job, 14. 10:12

All human toil is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not satisfied.
Ecclesiastes 6. 7

The law of the heart, as I have said is a bigger nuisance than paranoia.
Jacques Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious”

One can strip down to engage in acts of sex and love; sadism and torture. Hate can strip us of our humanity but this supposes that altruism is the foundation of our being-human. To strip is to plunder, to despoil and to unclothe. Joseph and his brothers show us what is at stake. Full of jealousy and hate they throw him into a pit. Joseph is naked. There is nothing to add on. The prosthetic robe given to him by his father is gone. In his abandonment he learns what love means and that forgiveness must forgive the unforgivable. Joseph is stripped and thrown into a pit. His brothers did this to him. They were jealous and full of hate. Long before Aristotle’s apostrophe, “ O my friends, there is no friend”, the Book of Genesis developed the aporia, “ Oh my brothers, there is no brother”.
Strip is also a narrow piece of cloth or band that is used to constrain. The Book of Job laments that the fossilization effect is the fate of mortals who are “laid low, and do not rise again”. To be laid low is to lie flat. Both sleep and death flatten the body. The word low from the Old English hlowan means to make noise like a cow. Job in his suffering resembled an animal that was tormented by loving God in league with hateful Satan. The work of Job’s hands and loins was taken away. Deprived of sleep and mental peace he was rest-less. His Sabbath or day of rest was over-taken by his God. To be stripped down is also to lose faith. To loose faith means to question how a loving God can inflict suffering on his creation and then answer that such a thing is not possible. A loving God cannot inflict suffering. A loving God cannot hate. The Book of Job shows otherwise. Job was laid low when he lost all but he did not remain lying down in his despair. Love makes Job rise again. It makes him satisfied. Love is not an appetite to be filled.
It is simplistic to suggest that freedom of the will is responsible for suffering, evil and misery. This is precisely the suggestion found in Ecclesiastes where we read, “ All human toil is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not satisfied” (6:7). The word toil means to labour but it also means hunting, snare, cloth and web. This leads us to ask the question, in what sense is human work and technological invention a toil that snares. How is the work of creation or God’s work to be understood differently? Human toil according to Ecclesiastes is for the mouth. The mouth is like a cave, cavern or pit that devours what is placed in it. Because the mouth must devour and the stomach digest and the anus excrete, human appetite is not satisfied.
Lacan shows us that appetites are a nuisance. He writes,

I can tell you a little tale, that of a parakeet that was in love with Picasso. How could one tell? From the way the parakeet nibbled the collar of his shirt and the flap of his jacket. Indeed the parakeet was in love with what is essential to man, namely his attire. The parakeet was like Descartes to whom men were merely clothes (habits)...waking about...clothes promise debauchery when one takes them off...But this is only a myth.... To enjoy a body when there are no more clothes leaves intact the question of what makes the ONE, that is the question of identification. The parakeet identified with Picasso clothed. The same goes for everything involving love. The habit loves the monk as they are one thereby. In other words, what we call the body is perhaps but the remainder (reste) I call object a. (Encore, p.6)

Lacan here shows how love can be misdirected and seduced when it is caught up in a prosthetic trajectory. Think here of how one “falls in love” which is basically a falling for or identifying with what the person is not. One can fall for the woman who wears a pearl necklace or for the man who wears black. One can fall for a fragrance rather than love the man or woman who wears it. Lacan attempts to show that the person stripped bare is rarely loved. Having fallen for the prosthetic simulacra there can be no falling for what remains to be authentically loved.
Appetite from the Latin adpetere means to go to, to seek out, to have desire towards. This type of un-ending desire is a nuisance as Lacan rightly points out. The cycle of seeking out, obtaining, becoming bored, seeking out again is what the Buddhists call samsara. Technocracies call it innovation while the religions of the Book promise a time in which there will no longer be toil, provided of course that our appetites of drives be directed toward God.
We may be driven out of paranoia. Para-noos means beyond the mind. Love may be such that is leaves us beside ourselves or outside our right mind. Lacan shows that the other is turned into an image, an idea, and an object to be enjoyed in a certain way. We treat the other as breast or phallus. We set the stage for an oral love affair where the other becomes an object to cling to, to suck, to demand, to reject, to lick, to play with and spit out. We adopt an anal approach to the other when we fall or drop in love. We flee once the object of our love reveals itself to be something that smells, complains or withholds.
We become blinded by the prosthetic image when we are love struck. We remain deceived as we continue to deceive others through manipulative games, language and letters. We reduce the other to a voice that groans or screams ecstatically or otherwise. When this voice remains silent, we are under the compulsion to hear it just one more time (encore) as if on an answering machine. Such a love risks the danger of being delusional especially when on falls in love with the object or with what is added to the person. Such a love is delusional because it is misleading. A delusion is false belief accepted as true. This prosthetic love driven by technology strips the person of body and transforms them into and image that speaks on the telephone or types on the Internet. This delusional love can become a nuisance. Nuisance from the Latin nocere means injury, hurt and harm. Related to nuisance is the word noxious from the word nex or slaughter. In Greek neks is a dead body. Such a delusional love kills. It devours to leave no trace of its presence. What is it that we love? The sparkle of the eyes, the radiant glow of a made up face, corpse like fresh? We love the image and the imaginary with the outcome that the singular person is not loved.
Lacan writes, “It is clear that in everything that approaches it, language merely manifests its inadequacy” (Encore,45) In other words the saying, “I love you” for Lacan, is already an abstraction to which one could respond “until when?” or “so what” or “I love myself through you”. In Lacan’s words,
We see in what sense these effects agitate, stir things up and bother speaking beings.... It must with the help of this feeling lead, in the end to the reproduction of bodies. But isn’t it possible that language may have other effects than to lead people by the nose to reproduce yet again in the body to body. (Encore, 46)

There is deception and agitation within the body to body fusion; but two has never become One. Thus for Lacan the problem is “how can there by love for an other?” since, “the ONE everyone talks about all the time is, first of all, a kind of mirage of the ONE you believe yourself to be” (Encore, 47)
The ONE you believe yourself to be, is not the ONE that you are since you are an Other reduced to what the Other wants you to be for them. So the remainder or the leftover, which is what remains REAL is ignored; in plain view but not seen, as it circulates between these two trying to become ONE. For Lacan, it is best to avoid the declaration of love since that for which we seek cannot be found in the Other’s body.
III
Without a Stitch

And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife and he clothed them
Genesis 3.21

I have sowed sackcloth upon my skin, and have laid my strength in the dust...Even when I cry out, “Violence!” I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice.
Job 16. 15, 19.6-7

Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil.
Song of Solomon, 6.7

A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.
Mark 14.51. 52

The fall into flesh beginning with Adam and the resurrection of the glorified flesh of Christ’s offers an occasion for reflecting on the concept of skin as we weave between Old and New Testaments. We have seen how technology strips down the body in an effort to attach prosthetic devices onto it. While Technology does help to cover the body, its coverings are simulacra. Love according to Proverbs, “covers all offenses” (10:12) The covering that love provides is one of forgiveness and protection. Love is the sheer garment that gives nakedness without shame and fear. The stitches of technology add bits of prosthetic clothing and devices to the body in an attempt to hold death at bay. These devices can be pacemakers or simple nitroglycerin patches.
The stitch knots, binds and fastens. A stitch is also a sudden stabbing pain. Stitch from the Old English stician means to pierce, to stab, to remain embedded. As technology continues to stitch itself onto flesh, it is harder to dislodge. The stitching of technology tattoos the flesh. It covers, hides and conceals while declaring that such a state must continually advance until all flesh is eliminated and replaced by cybernetic mechanisms. This is the view of Donna Haraway. We can contrast technological stitching with Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew where he speaks of the nakedness without shame:
Consider the lilies of the field; how they grow, they neither toil nor spin yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you- you of little faith. (6:28:30)
The clothing that God will provide is the new glorious body without organs to be given at the resurrection.
St. Paul in his Letter to the Philippians admonishes “beware of those who mutilate the flesh” (3:3) With Christ the believer can be naked, bare and complete. There is nothing to be hidden. With love, we become sheer and absolute. Sheer means exempt or free from guilt. Such a love is Absolutus because it sets free, loosens and acquits. Jesus performs what love does. He acquits and forgives: “Your sins are forgiven” (Matthew 9:2) Jesus’ techne of love makes all things new and sets things free, “ Woman you are set free from your ailment” (Matthew 13:12) The becoming new by setting free is in direct opposition to what technology does to the body. Technology takes what is new and attaches it to what is old. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives his criticism of the prosthetic stitch:
No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins, otherwise the skins burst, and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed, but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved. (9, 16:17)
I read this quote as a criticism of human ingenuity that fails to think things completely through. Our best inventions are half measures and are ill thought out as “putting new wine into old wineskins. Perhaps we err due to the hold that hatred has on us. Hold from the Gothic word Haldan means to tend, to keep and to watch over cattle. Again we see the reference to live-stock. Technology has a hold on us. Plugged into the Internet, living virtually in electronic domains on the World Wide Web our signatures are under constant surveillance. We are like cattle in the field. Technology holds us on a leash. We assume that we are held up and buoyed, but the hold of technology differs from the hold of love that does not choke, suffocate or drown. Psalm 119 cries out, “ Hold me up, that I may be safe”. (117)
It is in the domain of the thinking mind where love can guide the techne or art of thought. Perhaps then communication can become communion and information can become transformation.
In our age, technology reduces the word to bits and bytes and data streams. These streams struggle to control, to dominate earth and sky, space and time.
The trajectory of compassion that both Jesus and the Buddha taught is taken over by the trajectory of satellites that can link up with so called smart weapons aimed to destroy weapons of mass destruction only to end up tearing off the limbs of children; to multiply prosthesis upon prosthesis. In this new but old cruelty, technology spreads death and unleashes destruction in the name of both God and love.
The passion of ignorance is allowed to spread with the result that we use things without really knowing how they function. As prosthetic beings, we know how to manipulate things in the world. Our manipulation always stated in the name of progress reveals itself in a cascade of scientific and ethical incompetencies. Not bothering to think for ourselves, our minds are handed over to so called technological gurus in an act of faith. These experts tell us how great the future will be. Our now is being eroded but this matters little as we are enclosed in virtual reality systems in the so called safety of our homes which are no longer sanctuary’s but show-cases for the latest Liquid Crystal Display Televisions, DVD players or camera phones.
This technological interiority leads us to the question of listening, surveillance and what is veiled and surveyed. To survey is to extend the interior to the exterior in an attempt to destroy the secret. Submarines exists that tap fibre optic cables on the ocean floor, presumably not to decipher the conversations of dolphins. Space is therefore policed around this policy of limitation.
To become responsible within the space of domination is to see the home as haunted. The word haunted comes from the Old English word hamettan- which means domicile and from the Old Norse word heimata or to bring home. To haunt is to visit often. To haunt is to linger such that it can also mean to trouble. Love has troubled us. We have invented words and images to deal with our troubles.
The pomegranate is chosen as the fruit that symbolizes love. The poet in the Song of Solomon compares his lover’s cheeks to halves of pomegranates. Pomegranate literally means the apple with many seeds. While symbolic of love the pomegranate is the fruit whose seeds resemble fragmentary bombs. Within the human being there is always the possibility for either love or hate; for either a hateful love or a loving hate. The Gospels teach that love or hate depends on what kind of seeds is sown. It is a question of what we will bring to fruition; what the fruits of our labour will turn out to be. Frui means to enjoy while uti means to use. Will this distinction developed by St. Augustine continue to pit us against each other? To pit is to set against. The pit is the hard seed or kernel. The pit is where cock fights and dogfights were held; the cockpit of a fighter plane that drops fragmentary bombs full of jellied gasoline to incinerate those below.
Jesus speaks of fruits and seeds and declares, “ You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns or figs from thistles?” (Matthew 7:16) In our time, the genetic engineer will answer “but of course, we can manipulate the gene so that grapes can be gathered from thorns and figs from thistles”. With technology, seeds that are sown on rocky ground can take root. This transformation into monstrosity is done for the lure of wealth alone but always under the guise of compassion. Jesus has a take on what the monstrous heart creates, “ Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.” (Matthew 15 17-18) We can be haunted by what has come out of the human heart. To be haunted is to be afflicted, troubled, and restless; to be visited by apparitions. It is love that haunts us: “But when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out, for they all saw him and were terrified”. But this love that haunts replies, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid”. (Mark 6.49:52).
Haunting concerns how we go living on in the midst of our difficulties and anxieties. How do we go living-on (survivre) once the crypt or mass grave has been unearthed? What worth do foundations, corner-stones, places, sites, families, guests or strangers hold when the room becomes the tomb and the house becomes the death site? This question is one of compassionate vigilance.
How do we remain vigilant? To keep vigilance is to prevent ourselves from sleeping. Vigil comes from the Latin vigilia or watch on the eve of a religious festival. Vigilia is akin to the Latin vigere- to be vigorous or to flourish. To keep vigil is to keep watch. To keep vigil is to spend time in prayer and devotion. It is to keep awake at times when sleep is customary. The vigil must never become an oppressive observation like the all-seeing video eye which is only a vigilante or guard. The vigilance I am tracing here, to develop further one day, would be the way a mother watches her child as it falls asleep. The mother’s vigilance goes beyond Plato’s guardian in a trajectory of absolute compassion.
The mother’s vigilance is the vigia or the mark made on a nautical chart indicating a dangerous rock. Vigilance leads us to uncertainty and undecidability but it allows us to carry on in the abundance of steadfast love. Within these states without border, we are called to keep care and to be careful. When technology has taken hold of us can anything be done to lessen its grip? Can we escape its negative effects to run off naked like the young man in the Gospel of Mark?
To escape means to get out one’s cape or to leave a pursuer with just one’s cape. Technology promises more than it delivers and perhaps this excessive promise is what links technology to religion. New technologies such as cryonics promise to overcome death. Jesus promises that death will be overcome when the body is resurrected. Neither technology nor religion can accept the finality of death. In a pessimistic passage reminiscent of Schopenhauer the Wisdom of Solomon declares, “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end, and no one has been known to return from Hades.” (2:1) Is it enough to learn to abide in love? Will this abiding help us to face the tragic sense of life that Unamuno so eloquently describes?
Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians states, “ The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (15:26) Technology attempts to defeat death through innovation. Religion attempts to defeat death through faith. We see Paul continually using his talents to strengthen the faith of the early Christian communities. Where they also filled with a great doubt? He upbuilds the community in Corinth with these words, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (15:12-15) Paul continues, “ But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead” 15:20) Paul speaks of seeds and sowing, “ to each kind of seed its own body” (15:38), “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable” (15:42) Paul then makes the following distinction, “ If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” 15:44) Paul is the Christian technologist who would have us place faith in the virtual while ignoring the actual.
Paul continues, “ Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (15:50) In the same way, technology and its virtuality will transform the future. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the future because they are perishable. Since the flesh is perishable our becoming a cyborg body-without-organs is the only option.
The dead according to Paul “ will be raised imperishable….For this perishable body must put on imperishability and this mortal body must put on immortality” (15:53) Notice here Paul’s reference to putting on new clothes which are designed by the religious technologist who sews the prosthetic garments for the resurrection that will happen “ in the twinkling of an eye” (15:52)
The religious believer can declare, “ Death has been swallowed up in victory”. But of course, the evidence indicates otherwise. We can gather for Easter Service to sing the praises of Jesus who supposedly resurrected. Yet all we can do is to point at an empty tomb which following Lacan is the object a. The object a like the empty tomb is the void- perverse, enigmatic and inadequate. It is the impasse and aporia that halts us in our tracks, constricts our throats and makes us choke. Notice also the reference to swallowing. Faith is said to take away the sting of death. Is this too much to swallow? In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians we read, “ For the love of Christ urges us on…(5:4) Urge from the Latin urgere means "to press hard, push, drive, compel. It is related to the Greek ergon or "work," and to the Greek word orgia or "religious performances”. The etymology of urge leads to an interesting association of words such as O.C.S. vragu "enemy;" Gothic wrikan "persecute," the Old English wrecan "drive, hunt, pursue”. What is the urge if not to overcome death? Both religion and technology drive us, push us, compel us to work for the day when death will be overcome; for the day when death will no longer be the enemy that persecutes, drives, hunts and pursues us. We are taken hold by this desire to live forever. Hold from the French word prise means a taking, seizing, holding. Can there by a sur-prise that releases us from the hold of both faith and technology and the mirages they have engendered? Sur-prise means an unexpected attack or capture," "a taking unawares”. Perhaps this is the faith that avoids all declarations of war: let there be a rapture of the real which we would name true love.

Tasting the Scape of Ipseity

2006-08-03T17:57:00.000-07:00

To explore the being of the person who is responsible and says “I” Derrida turns to the poetic insights of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Derrida asks, “what taste could this je, this I have?” and “what does it mean for an I to feel itself” By turning to Hopkins’s notion of Selftaste, Derrida shows how the responsible person is affected by the scope and scape of ipseity. While Hopkins’s poetry is said to deal with nature and its landscape the primary focus given Hopkins’s Catholicity is on the person and how this person tastes, feels, touches and senses the various scapes of haecceity in all things. Derrida writes,

In Hopkins extraordinary lexicon, what comes to effect, identify, think, proves this selfhood, in truth that by which selfhood affirms, affects itself, “selves” itself operates on its own selving as Hopkins will say is not thought, consciousness or reflection but taste.

Taste from the Latin gusto is the faculty by which a flavor of a thing is discerned. Gusto relates to the Sanskrit word jus, which means enjoy and be pleased. Taste and touch are related. The Middle English tasten and the Latin taxere both mean to touch. When we touch and tax, we assess and estimate the worth of something.
Close to St. Francis, Hopkins not only tastes the landscape but all the inscapes of being human that range from joy to deep despair. Selftaste can have no final assessment because its worth is without price and beyond the cost of calculative accounting. This Selftaste to follow Derrida is priceless (san prix). “What is absolutely precious, the other in his or her own dignity, has no price.... every one is worth as much as the other, precisely beyond all value: priceless”
Flavor is the smell or odor that gives rise to savoring or relishing. Relish from the Old French word relais is that which is left behind; it is the something that remains in a scent, smell or after-taste. That which is tasted is consumed. We consume what is produced. Things are produced so that we can consume them. Rather than a pure product, we consume the left overs of things. In other words, this fine fruit, this medium-rare steak, this Merlot wine, this Cuban cigar, this exquisite body is always already a by-product of some other thing. Taste and smell is what is left behind. Taste automatically engages the question of mourning.
The question of taste for Derrida engages the issue of the cannibalism within mourning; how the other is incorporated, remembered, retained in the crypt of memory; bound together in what Kierkegaard in Works of Love calls “the kinship of death”. The crypt as Derrida reminds us in Glas, “organizes the ground to which it does not belong”. While it will always be possible to taste the thing, the taste of the thing never yields its Selftaste. Even when one says, “ I love the way you taste”, Selftaste remains elusive and cannot be caught or contained by the palate.
Related to the word flavor is the word smolder. Smolder means to burn and smoke without flame. We can taste this smolder in the fall, in the decay and excretion of things, in the spring which the freshness of flowers, trees, grass and green boils over the landscape. Hopkins will write,

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

While the natural world according to Hopkins, “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell, the flavor can never be exhausted for “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things”. In “Pied Beauty” Hopkins raises the issue of responsibility when he declares “ all things counter, original, spare, strange”. Spare from the Old English sparian means to refrain from harming, to allow to go free. Strange means alien, foreign, from elsewhere, unknown and unfamiliar. We are close and yet strange to ourselves. Following Kristeva we are “strangers to ourselves”.
Vigilance calls us to protect the person bound in a bond of singularities, by not harming, by guarding freedom so as not to reduce the person to a force or a maker of systems. To protect the uniqueness of persons Derrida argues,

The responsibility of what remains to be decided or done (in actuality) cannot consist in following, applying or carrying out a norm or rule. Whenever I have at my disposal a determinable rule, I know what must be done, and as soon as such knowledge dictates the law, action follows knowledge as a calculable consequence: one knows what path to take, one no longer hesitates. The decision then no longer decides anything but is made in advance and is thus in advance annulled. It is simply deployed, without delay, presently, with the automatism attributed to machines. There is no longer any place for justice or responsibility (whether juridical, political or ethical).

In order to protect the uniqueness of the person we cannot be satisfied with a neutral, and conceptual analysis that reduces the difficulty of our situation which is ultimately irreducible. Such systems deal with homogenization and calculability and “close themselves off from this coming of the other.” If we take seriously the uniqueness of each Self which according to Kierkegaard is “a work of the most faithful love” then we are necessarily involved in an excessive responsibility of which we cannot be absolved not even in the moment of death where according to Kierkegaard “all ways meet”. In Paul Celan’s haunting words, “ The world is gone, I must carry you”.
The various flavors of nature are meant to provide an awakening so that the fading fire of the Self can be mended. In Hopkins’s words from his poem “The Candle Indoors”,

Come you indoors, come home; your fading fire
Mend first and vital candle in close heart’s vault.

Is our taste so bleared and smeared that it requires mending with the help of salt? Salt is that which gives life or pungency. The pungent is what is sharp and poignant. Death is such a point. Once we realize that it is for the Self that we mourn how do we overcome the finality that “it is the blight man was born for” ? In Derrida’s words from a beautiful essay that analyzses the works of Gadamer and Celan we read,

For every time, and every time singularly, every time irreplaceably, every time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only one end among others, the end of someone or of something in the world,....death marks every time, every time in defiance of arthimetic, the absolute end of the one and only world, of which everyone opens as one and the only world, the end of the unique world....for an unique living being, be it human or not.

Following Hopkins we can ask how things in the world touch us, seize us, take possession of us as we seek, visit, inquire and pursue what beseeches us? The Latin tactus relates to the word tangent. Tangent is a meeting point. It is the point at which responsibility is engaged or ignored as the Self meets/meats itself and others in a singularity and uniqueness that cannot be levelled off. In Hopkins words,

I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself of I and me above and in all things is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive that the smell of walnutleaf or camphor and is incommunicable by any means to another man.

Though incommunicable by any means to another person, we nonetheless attempt to communicate. Though Selftaste cannot be communicated through lips, mouth and tongue, it can be witnessed.
Is this communication of what is incommunicable and yet witnesses, called poetry? Hopkins used unusual combinations of words, unusual word order and sprung rhythm in an attempt to explode out of traditional poetic confines. The poem attempts to testify Selftaste. The poem testifies but not in the order of cognitive reason. Hopkins poetry, following St. Augustine’s formulation veritatem facere does the truth by attempting to be a testimony of love. In Derrida’s words, “this love is “without jealousy that would allow the other to be”. The poem reveals the instress of Selftaste which is the energy which creates and sustains 'inscape' of the person.

Naming the Unnameable

In the phenomenological tradition, ” Mearleau-Ponty uses the language of Hopkins but unlike Hopkins seems to think that expressing what cannot be expressed is only a matter of knowing how to grasp the roots of language. Merleau-Pony writes, “language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave.” However, Merleau-Ponty argues, “the philosopher knows better than anyone that what is lived is lived-spoken”. It is a matter of knowing “how to grasp it with all its roots and all its foliation- the most valueable witness to Being.
Is Hopkins expressing a mystical principle that eludes rational and emperical analysis? Such a proposition troubles the analytic system because it seems to embrace an “occult quality” to borrow a phrase from Leibniz. For the analytic tradition, an event that cannot be expressed is disturbing. Analytic philosophy cannot comprehend the aporia. There can be no unconditional or conditional secrets, only problems whose knots must be dissolved. Leibniz writes, “ the fundamental principle of reasoning is that there nothing without a reason, or, to explain the matter more distinctly, there is no truth for which a reason does not subsist”. Reason cannot communicate Selftaste yet according to Hopkins Selftaste is a truth of the person’s inscape. Is Selftaste the unfathomable ground?
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes “that the world is my world shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language of which I alone understand means the limits of my world.” In Wittgenstein’s world, the solipsistic circle encloses the tongue to make it mute. However, this is not what Hopkins means by incommunicable. Can a new language be invented so that the Self can speak its taste; can express the taste of the aporetic situation? Can it name that which language cannot name, can come close to naming but never quite able to do so? Samuel Beckett’s words in The Unnamable express this aporia nicely. Beckett writes,

I’ve no objection, those are words, open on the silence, looking out on the silence, straight out, why not, all this time on the brink of silence, I knew it, on a rock, lashed to a rock, in the midst of silence, its great swell rears towards me, I’m streaming with it, it’s an image, those are words, it’s a body, it’s not I, I knew it wouldn’t be I, I’m not outside, I’m inside, I’m in something. I’m shut up, the silence is outside, outside, inside, there is nothing but here....I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Beckett expresses the aporia that provokes us. We must and we can’t but we must. Other poets and religious thinkers develop the same theme. For example, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “Being-silent. Who keeps innerly silent, touches the roots of speech”. Thomas Merton develops a number of interesting reflections on the nature of silence and language. He writes,

Man cannot understand the true value of silence unless he has a real respect for the validity of language: for the reality which is expressed in language is found, face to face and without medium in silence. Nor would we find this reality in itself, that is to say in its own silence unless we were first brought there by language.

Would Merton’s analysis provide us with a solution that the logical positivists have ignored namely that language brings us to silence? According to Merton, this silence is not the silence of death but “the silence of infinite life” Merton’s point is that “we can no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality”. Far from placing Merton in an irrational stance, his reflections show that silence is “the mother of Truth”. Silence for Merton allows for a communion with reality. In silence, we see the nakedness of both inscape and landscape and this scape is related to love. For Merton silence brings knowledge of self and God. He writes, “by penetration to the mystery of my true self which is beyond words and concepts because it is utterly particular opens out into the silence and “subjectivity” of God’s own self.”
For Hopkins Selftaste is ultimately known by God but if two can commune in this silence, this Selftaste can be communicated otherwise than through language. Perhaps such a thing if we can call it a thing has been felt by us when face to face with a lover who astounds you on the staircase during a goodnight kiss or when you are holding your child in your arms. Such a thing can never be contained within the limits of reason alone. If one really believes in the haeccitas of Scotus then the universal cannot comprehend the singular. This is what Occam’s nominalism shows us as it protects the unique name of the person.
The Selftaste that constitutes selfhood is an auto-affection that according to Derrida “consists in touching oneself in taste of tasting oneself in Selftaste” But this auto-affection can also be hetero-affection even as it is a homo-affection. My Selftaste can by touched by the other such that I can love the other’s inscape. The inscape of the self is the unique pattern that following Duns Scotus and Derrida can be described as the univocity of being with a haeccitas or this-ness that is differance. Though incommunicable, this Selftaste can still be communicated in its unique strangeness of being-queer. Derrida re-writes Scotus’s doctrine of “this-ness” into the formula, “ to be is to be queer” In Hopkins’s words, “ All things counter, original, spare, strange.
The inscape of such unique self and thing requires that justice be given as we witness “each mortal thing”. Hopkins describes the person as Nature’s “clearest-selved spark”. Once the person disappears her inscape is lost to the world forever. Following Hopkins’s phrase “ the just man justices” Derrida will wonder how to do justice to the person, to the specter, to all the inscapes of the Self, to memory, to mourning, to friendship and to democracy-to-come that cannot be calculated according to existing models or rules or reason and which cannot be reduced by ontology or a phenomenology of presence.
In Hopkins words, “when I compare myself, my being-myself with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness.” This unlikeness is another word for Derrida’s differance. As Derrida writes, in “The Deconstruction of Actuality”,

differance marks a re-lation ( a “férance”)- a relation to what is other, to what differs in the sense of alterity, thus a relation to alterity, to the singularity of the other- it also relates, precisely because of this, to what comes, to what arrives in a way that is inappropriable, unexpected and thus urgent, unanticipatable: precipitation itself. The thinking of differance is also, therefore, a thinking of urgency, of what I can neither elude nor appropriate because it is other. The event, the singularity of the event- this is what differance is about

The scape is the scenery view of the Self that is unlike all other selves. It is impossible to get out of this cape or to gather the other into a self-identity. To escape the inscape, to leave a pursuer with just one’s cape is an impossibility here. However, this is precisely what is required if we are to put into motion a new thinking of the possible. A further reason that Derrida appreciates Hopkins is that he is developing an ethos of taste that goes beyond the aesthetics of taste developed by Hume and Kant. Though we cannot treat these rich texts here in the entirely a few remarks will suffice for what is being attempted here.

Taste Ex-Humed and Re-Kanted

In his, Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion Hume makes a distinction between the delicacies of passion that makes us sensitive to joys, sorrows, and the delicacy of taste, which makes us sensitive to the arts. Hume argues that the delicacy of taste improves the delicacy of passion. Passion must be remedied by taste if possible. In Of the Standard of Taste, Hume attempts to show how there can be a universal recognition of greatness if there is “a proper functioning of taste”.
Our taste functions properly if our conclusions are consistent with the experiences of other nations and ages. The way in which taste is developed is through practice or by observing many works of art and making comparisons. Taste is perfected once it is free of prejudice. Hume further claims that “ the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature” though he acknowledges the variations in how taste is applied. Given Hume’s “academic” and “skeptical” philosophy, there is no room for justification of substance and of selfhood. The issues that Hopkins and Derrida deal with would be dismissed as unapproachable by Hume whose thinking in this area is reductive.
Hume argues that a higher and more refined taste “enables us to judge of the character of mean, of composition, of genius, and of the production of nobler arts”. By cultivating this taste, “we shall form juster notions of life”. Hopkins does not reduce taste to sentiment. Hume’s insights are very different from the Fransciscan inspired Hopkins who affirms “the just man justices”. In other word, it is not a matter of cultivating a culture of taste so that we can form “ juster notions of life” . In this scenario, taste would be the springboard into justice. One can of course have a taste for Shakespeare and still be a serial killer or have a taste for classical music and think nothing of executing millions of innocent persons.
In thinking of Hume’s reflections of taste and its cultivation I am reminded of the Island of Dr. Moreau where the dog-human, the canine-man does indeed recited W.B. Yeats poem The Second Coming while all the while being driven by the need to-be-canine. Taste reduced to sentiment and palate can never become a witness to Selftaste.
For Kant, the judgement of taste has a number of characteristics and combinations that seem incompatible. The judgement of taste is made from a subjective basis. For example, we take pleasure in contemplating an object or a work of art. We view Warhol’s portrait of Mao, Chris Ofili's “The Holy Virgin” Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Tabac” and trust that others will find our taste to have a universal validity. Kant argues, “the judgement of taste is aesthetic” However, this subjective judgement must have a universal validity. To call something beautiful is to demand that others find it beautiful.
Kant’s problem is to explain how this combination is possible. While scholars have devoted considerable energy to dissolving this problem, I will not add to their efforts here. The problem as I see it is not a demand to take pleasure in an object or to even attends to that object. The demand is to attend to the person who cannot be placed within any kingdom of ends that would level off Selftaste into a bland and tasteless uniformity. Kant argues that when we call an object beautiful, “we believe ourselves to be speaking with a universal voice and lay claim to the concurrence of everyone”

Tasting with God’s Tongue

The event that perhaps unifies taste while still making it unique for each person is death. In “Countersignatures”, Derrida writes, “ I run to/on death. In other words, I run towards death, but also I run on death like a fuel, as an engine runs on petrol. I run on death, death is what makes me run”. Fuel from the Old French word feuaile means bundle of firewood. It relates to the Latin word focus or hearth. The secret of Selftaste is this fire or spark within each unique selved spark that gives us fuel and focus. Our Selftaste converges on Death. Here I can only trace the trajectory that such a reading would take. Our tongues would taste two testaments, old and new.
Job asks, “Can that which is unsavory be eaten without salt?” Psalm 34 commands, “ O taste and see that the Lord is good”. Psalm 119 declares, “ How sweet are thy words to my taste! Sweeter than honey to my mouth”. Luke 9 declares, “ But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Kingdom of God.” What salt will bring taste back? What taste will be finally able to discern the perverse so that the verse of God can be tasted with a sweetness that surpasses honey? Is this all that is required- a simple refinement in taste; a tasting of the right words so that we shall never taste death? How do we switch our taste for his taste so that the taste of death is avoided?
As always, St. Paul will have the last word. In his letter to the Hebrews he writes, “but we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.” He tastes death for every Selftaste. He consumes it, swallows it completely so that no Self has to taste it. However, doesn’t this imply that we can now taste it all without fear of final death? His tasting has transformed the Selftaste of our tongue by giving the Real thing back to us without its poisonious after-taste. We can taste the fruit of the other’s Selftaste without fear of bad-taste. Is this what Christ’s sacrifice on the cross actually gives us?
How to travel, stretch toward and find direction towards this mute Selftaste that resembles a wound that I want to learn from you by heart? In Derrida’s words from Che cos’ è la poesia? “ You will call poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you, from you, I want to learn by heart”. Here we find ourselves on the trajectory of Selftaste without any final tasting. This is the aporia of this thing we pursue here. In Derrida’s words from Signsponge (1976), his tribute to the poet Francis Ponge we read,

Thus the thing would be the other, the other-thing which gives me an order or addresses an impossible, instransigent, insatiable demand to me, without and exchange and without a transaction, without a possible contract. Without a word, without speaking to me, it addresses itself to me, to me alone in my irreplaceable singularity, in my solitude as well.

Does not Derrida here sound like a Fransciscan philosopher of the highest order who keeps the task of responsibility open; who keeps thinking with the aporia in order to avoid dogmatism? Derrida like Hopkins shows us the sharpness of the aporetic necessity we must follow for the sake of the other. When “thoughts against thoughts in groans grind”

No wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess,
The selfless self of self, most strange, most still
Fast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes.

That what we seek in Hopkins words will also be “yonder”. It will always be elsewhere than the pre-determined site that our reason believes it to be. This Selftaste announces the messianic. Derrida explains that the messianic

can arrive at any moment, no one can see it coming, can see how it should come, or have forewarning of it. The relation to the other is the absence of horizon, of anticipation, there where the alterity of the other is an absolute surprise. If one can be prepared for an absolute surprise, then one must be prepared for the coming of the other as an absolute surprise- that is what I understand by the messianic.

The coming of the other arrives on a non-horizon which does not mean the absence of horizon. It is where the horizon would be punctured by the other; always open and without saturation.
To touch is to also reach the heart or secret of a thing. This secret and the secret of Selftaste will remain mute and incalculable. It will remain the most difficult to determine. Death is one tangent of the Secret. When Derrida speaks of the secret he does not mean conditional secrets such as professional secrets, military secrets, manufacturing secrets, state secrets, the secret ingredients in grandmother’s apple pie. The Secret which is the secret of Selftate is the perhaps the Secret that

Remains silent, not to keep a word in reserve or withdrawn but because it remains foreign to speech, without our ever being able to say in that distinguished syntagm: “the secret is that in speech which is foreign to speech”. It does not answer to speech, it does not say “I” the secret”, it does not corresponds, it does not answer: either for itself or to anyone else, before anyone or anything whatsoever.

Mute from the Old High German word mawen means to cry out. To be mute is to be unable to speak because of shock. The must is what is felt or experienced but not expressed. A mute is one hired to attend a funeral as a mourner. Will we not one day all become mutes? Do we not already mourn? Here we are on the verge, on the edge or border as we attempt to speak and communicate Selftaste without becoming absolutely mute.
Following Hopkins, this Selftaste will always be yonder; farther removed and yet closest to us. So close that we can taste its tang- it’s sharp and distinctive flavor, its point or sting. The honey-poison of the bee-sting that perhaps will not make us swell but will untie our tongue (solutio linguae) as we are detached to deliver this gift of Selftaste to the ones who both hate and love us much like Jesus on the cross refusing to taste sour wine and vinegar because his tongue had not only already tasted the tang of death but had always tasted the landscape of the kingdom come flowing with milk and honey, here, now.

A to Ž: Beyond Lacan and Zizek's Apropos (Discarded Ab-stracts From a Foreign Alphabet)

2006-07-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

But I must ask you, Socrates, what do you suppose the upshot of all this? As I said a little while ago, it is the scrapings and shavings of argument, cut up into little bits.
Plato, Greater Hippias 304a

What then does it mean to deceive? It means that one does not begin directly with the matter one wants to communicate, but begins by accepting the other man’s illusions as good money.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Report to History

I shall enlighten you, my amiable friends, as to why such disaster overtook you.
V.I. Lenin, “Left Wing Childishness”, May 5, 1918

Today’s most famous Lacanian, Slavoj Zizek argues that “stupidity is a key category of ideology”. iek arrives at his conclusion through a reading of Lacan (who informs us that stupidity must be nourished) and Robert Zemeckis' Forest Gump. I wonder whether Zizek can see the irony of his own vaudevillian position insofar as everything can be explain through Lacan?
Lacan tells us that the ethics of psychoanalysis involves not compromising your desire but Lacanianism becomes the ultimate form of ideological stupidity which says, ““do not try to understand, obey my desire so that I will succeed”. Zizek explains that the maxim, “do not cede your desire”, means,

avoid as much as possible any violation of the fantasy space of the other, i.e. respect as much as possible the other's “particular absolute”, the way he organizes his universe of meaning in a way that is absolutely particular to him. Such an ethic is neither imaginary (the point is not to love our neighbor as ourselves, insofar as he resembles ourselves, i.e., insofar as we see in him an image of ourselves) nor symbolic (the point is also not to respect the other on account of the dignity bestowed on him by his symbolic identification, by the fact that he belongs to the same symbolic community as ourselves, even if we conceive this community in the widest possible sense and maintain respect for him “as a human being”). What confers on the other the dignity of a “person” is not any universal-symbolic feature but precisely what is “absolutely particular” about him, his fantasy, that part of him that we can be sure we can never share. To use Kant's terms: we do not respect the other on account of the universal moral law inhabiting every one of us, but on account of his utmost “pathological” kernel, on account of the absolutely particular way every one of us “dreams his world”, organizes his enjoyment”.

I do not want to be like the hard line Marxist professor, who simply rejects a theory because it is not Marxist. I do however believe that using Lacanian theory to analyze culture is equivalent to using Dora the Explorer to explain Hegel’s system. At best, it is an exercise in uselessness. I imagine an interesting thesis could be written that could compare Freud’s Dora with Dora the Explorer, showing how imperialistic hegemony is at the heart of the capitalistic pysche. Dora’s adventure with the monkey in red boots goes through thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis to arrive at another repetitious aufhebung: Forest, Lake, Really Big Hill. Dora sings a triumphant song at the completion of her triadic task: “We did it, We did it”. Hegel would be so proud.
While Zizek believes in the tremendous emancipatory potential of Hegel’s thought, I tend to side with Kierkegaard and think otherwise. Here is Kierkegaard’s refutation of Hegel and Zizek from the Postscript: “One learns something from Christianity, misunderstands it, and in new misunderstanding uses it against Christianity… as if Christ had been a professor and as if the apostles had formed a little professional society of scholars.”
Watching Thomas the Tank Engine with my son, I rub my eyes in order to truly see the discourse of the big Other- Sir Topham Hatt (whose formula for utilitarian success is “usefulness before cleanliness”) as he chastises his favorite tank engine Thomas, who struggles to remain number One, while proving himself to be “ a really useful engine who does not cause confusion and delay”.
I cannot address this topic here in an exhaustive manner. The trend among some scholars seems to be to find connections between philosophers and psychoanalysts where no such connections exists in order to stake out a territory of research concerns that goes beyond the recognizable borders of comparative philosophy.
In Zizek’s many repetitious and recycled texts , Hitchcock is the ultimate Lacanian or Lacan is the ultimate Hitchcockean. Zizek takes a director’s vision of reality and then claims that this is the way reality functions. Just because Kieslowski’s films portray a Gnostic universe does not mean that the universe is Gnostic or that Hitchcock posing as the Ur-philosopher has really plugged his camera into L’ origine du monde , showing us the way things really are. If Hitchcock is already a Lacanian why read Lacan or Zizek?
Zizek’s pattern of constructing his text is as follows: First he takes an obscure passage from Lacan and attempts to explain it with a reference from a Hitchcock film most typically Vertigo. Then for twenty or so pages there will be an obscure quote from Hegel, or Schelling which is explained by analyzing a David Lynch movie or some event from pop culture (for example, Coke Zero and how we are actually consuming “the nothing”).
Next, there will be a reference to Slovenia when it was part of the Yugoslavian Socialist Federation. Here a joke will be explained that has some bearing on the essence of the political and religious and finally there will be a return to Lacan or Marx followed by an explanation of the final scene of a recent movie.
The success of Zizek’s method is evident. He has become quite successful in using Lacan to analyse film, horror stories, science fiction, politics and pop culture. It is as if the philosopher from Slovenia (to cite an old joke from Hercegovina) “is selling testicles as if they were kidneys”. Since no one has paid much attention to Zizek’s market practices, I will attempt such an undertaking. My thesis is simply this: Zizek is a comedian pretending to be an impenetrable political theorist/revolutionary pretending to be a comedian, pretending to be Hegelian who has read Derrida and postmodernism very badly.
Zizek makes it appear that Lacan was there before the world began and that everything can be explained through him. Lacan holds currency. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan argues, “when a thing is current it creates currency”. I wonder how Zizek fights against the noxious material effects of global capitalism when his book sales contribute to the expansion of such capital? Is such an argument legitimate? What can be done about the cruel market reality especially when oil prices were known to rise in North America because of Saddam’s abdominal distress, especially now that he is on a hunger strike?
How can we re-configure our being into something radically new? Where are we to look for the Event? Surely not in a repeat of Lenin or Adam Smith. Will the Truth-Event be resurrected with laws, police that persecute rather than protect, bureaucracies and educational systems that serve the needs of the state? Where is justice in all this talk of Events? The designs of Bauhaus that were to furnish the Socialist Utopia became the choice for the skyscrapers of capitalist Amerika. These paradoxes are difficult to think through because they involve no thought.
Perhaps the combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist theory to lead us out of the confines of the New Sophists and New Age obscurantists is a noble undertaking only if Lacan is first analyzed for being obscure. In The Fragile Absolute- or why is the christian legacy worth fighting for, Zizek asks,”How is a Marxist, by definition, a ‘fighting materialist’ (Lenin) to counter this massive onslaught of obscurantism?” My answer to Zizek is simple: stop engaging in an onslaught of obscurantism. Forget Lacan and his Viagra theorizing such as “Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance [ecstasy], not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the -1 of the signification produced above”. Surely this is a joke. Lacan might have also said that E=mc2 can be used to measure the thrust of the erectile organ as it finds its jouissance in the gaping lack of the Real. As a master Lacanian, Zizek might explain some of the following cryptic remarks made by Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis and On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Encore) :

In other words- for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking. That’s what it means. Indeed, it raises the question of whether in fact I am not fucking at this moment.

and

One of the following two things is true: either what I write has no meaning at all- which is, by the way, the conclusion of the short book(discussed earlier), and that is why I beg you to have a look at it- or when I write xx, a never-before-seen function in which the negation is place on the quantifier, which should be read, “not whole”, it means that when any speaking being whatsoever situates itself under the banner “women,” it is on the basis of the following- that it grounds itself as being not-whole in situating itself in the phallic function.

and

The vacillation psychoanalytic experience reveals in the subject regarding his masculine or feminine being is not so much related to his biological bisexuality, as to the fact that there is nothing in the dialectic that represents the bipolarity of sex apart from activity and passivity, i.e., a drive versus outside-action polarity, which is altogether unfit to represent the true basis of that bipolarity.

While I attempt to digest what Lacan says here I will continue with my criticism of Zizek’s arguments and excuses. In his reply to Geoffrey Harpham, Zizek reveals that he “was not allowed to work in (his) domain, philosophy, until 1990”. Zizek writes, “that after years of jobless existence, I had to work on marginal sociological research with no connection whatsoever to my theoretical interests in order to survive?” Here Slavoj confesses that he had to cede his desire and betray Lacan’s teachings. When it came down to the choice between loving Lacan with jobless hunger or “marginal sociological research” he chose on the side of the Yugoslav Big Other: Marshall Josip Broz Tito. Hegel’s heroine Antigone would be very disappointed. Should we be thankful for this choice? Zizek’s books have given many graduate students a rest from what passes as critical theory in North America. No doubt, he is fun to read. He is extremely entertaining as a lecturer. He even manages to make fun of himself. Here is Zizek being humorous: “We Slovenes are no one, are backwards, copulating with sheeps (sic), animals. I don’t have any illusions about us Slovenes.” and “if there ever was an honest liberal I think it’s Richard Rorty. Of course, I disagree with him, of course when we take power he will go to the gulag, but I will provide for him a nice cell with a double ration of meat every day”. Here Zizek would need to answer Kierkegaard’s question from the Postscript, “ But why does a busy thinker like that talk and think so disrespectfully of himself?”
My thesis, which will be broken into several uneven parts is that Zizek’s claims are vague, contradictory, inaccurate and banal. This describes Zizek at the height of his analytic powers.
Here is what I imagine as I think of Hitchcock while reading Lacan with my left eye and Zizek with my right; you might read it as a film script entitled, “Zizek wants to be Lacan with real power”. Here are the breakdown of scenes. Read them as discarded abstracts from a foreign alphabet:

A

Decades of engaging in meaningless Yugoslav sociological research and looking at huge portraits of Marshall Tito teach him the art of patience as he listens to Beethoven, Mozart and Lai-Bach, watches Hollywood films and crafts books with witty titles. He battles with the ghosts of his parents- both committed to the cause. He hears the voices of his professors urging him to read more Marx and actually cite him in his thesis while he prefers to watch more Hollywood movies. Somehow he manages with the imposed universalism of one type of laundry soap, one flavor of ice cream, and one kind of coffee. Shall he star in a new Groundhog Day to become a repetition of the weatherman who must decide whether his life needs a Pauline renewal?

B

He buries his manuscripts in the floorboards of his State funded apartment until the day that Slovenia will emerge from ex-Yugoslavia (where did it go?) to finally become free of Tito’s self-management terror. The joke was “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." Should we read Zizek the way Stephen King describes his work? King writes, “My works are the literary equivalent to a Big Mac and French Fries”. It’s only a burger. But billions and billions of assistant English professors in the United States are served.

C

Slavoj whose name means “glory” finally explodes on the scene of the capitalist West to save us from Chomsky, Rawls and Habermas as he emerges as “a startling critic of great daring”. We ask, where was his daring and courage while Slovenia was still in the Yugo-Serbian dominated Federation? While he was a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party, Žižek did not stand up for his Lacanian principles. This would have meant a one way trip to Goli Otok (the Naked Island) where Tito imprisoned the politically correct. Imagine Lenin teaming up with the Dog the Bounty Hunter to capture elusive capitalists hard at work playing golf while their stock options diversify.

Č

My Lacanian question to Zizek in clear Croatian is, “Zakaj ste (why did you), Slavoj cede your desire?”He might answer, “ I was not ceding my desire. I was seeding my desire by writing speeches for the Party, reviewing films that I had never seen, writing reviews for books that were never published”. In the Communist era the government paid the salaries of theater companies and athletes. Box office prices were low. Everyone could afford to go to the theater, movies, the opera, the ballet, or sporting events. What a blessing! Comrades were allowed to make their own whisky. The reasoning was simple: A drunk populace numbed on slivovitz cannot revolt.
Stripped of his Kierkegaardian wit, jokes, references to Hegel and pop culture, interesting book titles, what is Zizek actually saying? Can he be pinned down? Can his writings, following Baudrillard’s fine phrase, be read as a “trans-aesthetics of banality”? Think here of the Prada Spring 1999 collection: handbags adorned by the faces of Mao and Lenin.

Ć

Shall we meet him next to the Louvre pyramid together with Tom Hanks to pay tribute to Christian materialism, Courbet and Magdalene’s “holy grail?” to ponder how God’s babies kick the wombs of mortal women? Indeed, one wonders what Lacan was actually saying as we attempt to read him through Jacques-Alain Miller’s reconstructions. Here is Hegel from the Phenomenology of Spirit speaking dialectically about Zizekian theory:

The knack for this kind of wisdom is quickly learned as it is easy to practice; once familiar, the repetition of it becomes as insufferable as the repetition of a conjuring trick already seen through……It would be hard to decide which is greater in all this, the causal ease with which everything in heaven and on earth is coated with this broth of color, or the conceit regarding the excellence of this universal recipe: each supports the other. What results from this method of labeling all that is in heaven and earth with the few determinations of the general schema, and pigeon-holing everything in this way, is nothing less than a ‘report clear as noonday’ on the universe as an organism, viz., a synoptic table like a skeleton with scraps of paper stuck all over it, or like the rows of closed and labeled boxes in a grocer’s stall.

In other words, Lacan explains everything. Everything in heaven and on earth is coated in the same broth of color. Let us therefore eat from the excellence of this universal recipe. Look Hamlet, here is the skeleton of the decentered Self. To understand the inner workings of this Self, paste post-It notes inscribed with the words: Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, vel, lamella, objet petit a, sinthome, gap, etc,.

D

Here I can quote Zizek from his book The Ticklish Subject, which I take to be the final word. Here Žižek (the Slovenian philosopher) is criticizing Zizek (his American lamella) ” One should reject such insights as banalities unworthy of being objects of thought”. What is worthy of being an object of thought as we pursue the Lacan’s Real? Whereas Hegel argues, “The True is the Whole” Lacan argues the Real reveals the hole. The Real is the grimace of reality. For example, excrement with toilet paper on it. Butter with broccoli. A dead raccoon with asphalt supporting it. The black spot on Jack Sparrow’s palm in Pirates of the Carribean, opening into a mouth, is a sign of traumatic excess. The noumenal shines through into the phenomena like bananas on the black market in Communist Yugoslavia. Where is the anamorphosis? An anamorphosis is a deformed image that appears in its true shape when viewed in some "unconventional" way.
Đ

I have to be serious. I confess. I am reading Zizek reading Lenin and listening to Beethoven's appassionata after having listened to Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”. I wonder why Zizek calls for a REPEAT of Lenin which according to him does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin? Zizek claims that- to repeat Lenin is to accept that "Lenin is dead," that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. How do we pass judgement on the executioner who performs his duties with angelic conviction? Let us listen to Hegel describing Lenin and Stalin:

The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit…..It therefore speaks of the universal order as a perversion of the law of the heart and its happiness, a perversion invented by fanatical priests, gluttonous despots and their minions, who compensate themselves for their own degradation by degrading and oppressing others, a perversion which has lead to the nameless misery of deluded humanity. In this its derangement, consciousness declares individuality to be the source of this derangement and perversion.

Here, Hegel makes so much good sense.

E

I cannot take Zizek seriously especially when he writes, “To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities.” Let us allow Lenin to speak,

But we say in reply: 'Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the white guards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious white guard elements.'

and
We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession.”

Here we can imagine Lenin as the Energizer Bunny that “keeps going and going; leading us to the jaws of the wolf.

F

What did Lenin exactly fail to do? Should he have continued with his terror within the Lacanian refrain in his ear: “Do not cede your desire”? Did he fail to make proper use of his average intelligence? Should we follow his tireless energy, indomitable will and native political genius into the utopia that Zizek has prepared for us? Should we follow the Lenin that wrote horrible prose and willingly–even eagerly–turned to murder, terror, and brutal repression? Should Lenin father of the Soviet terror be repeated and called Abba? Is Zizek advocating a kinder, gentler state sponsored terrorism: Lenin with an excessive generosity; Paul without the throwing of stones at Christians? Mad Max lives to ride again together with John Wayne down a burnt out Australian highway looking for the gasoline of the apocalypse while we wait for our bids to be accepted on E-Bay.
G

While Zizek wants to retain Lacan’s theories without exception, he picks what suits him from other theorists without giving us a complete understanding of their works. For example, Lenin the father of Soviet terror is to be “resurrected” for his utopian ideals. St. Paul is to be retained for his “militancy” against the pagans, etc. An unbeliever who cannot give up Christian hopes is a bad Heideggerian. This is the main reason Zizek’s claims are preposterous, vacuous and foolish. This finally explains why do many are drawn to hear him speak: great comedians draw large crowds. But so do bull-fights, soccer matches and evangelical Lacanian preachers.

H

On the one hand, I read Zizek for the entertainment value and nothing more. I know such an activity is not very productive. It is comparable to watching re-runs of Star Trek or Maximum Exposure. I know I should be reading more analytic philosophy. On the other hand, I find in his writing an obscurantism that needs the lucidity of a deconstructive catholic critique. In the Fragile Absolute , Zizek argues,

One of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern era and its so-called ‘thought’ is the return of the religious in all its different guises: from Christian and other fundamentalisms, through the multitude of New Age spiritualisms, up to the emerging religious sensitivity within deconstruction itself…..How is a Marxist, by definition, a ‘fighting materialist’ (Lenin), to counter this massive onslaught of obscurantism?….Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new spiritualisms- the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks.

Zizek is wrong to put Derrida’s deconstruction in the same camp as “fundamentalism and New Age spiritualism”. I agree that we must be on guard against fundamentalism as long as we have first taken the fundamentalist log out of our own eyes. Is there a laser surgery that could accomplish this? Put bluntly, Lacanian psychoanalysis cannot provide the foundation of a new political practice because it is ridiculously inadequate for the task of being responsible to persons in their unique singularity. Lacan’s theories are therapeutically and politically ineffective.
If Zizek claims that a psychoanalytic ethic should not “encroach violently upon…intimate fantasy space!” then should we not respect the fantasy space of the fundamentalist who is seeking not to compromise their desire? Should we be Lacanian and declare, “Yes, you blew up our Towers, but that’s OK since we already ravaged your land when we followed our desires without respite.” Or, is it otherwise? Are the innocent victims only the innocent victims of my nation-thing? Between 1917 and 1959 over 60 million people were murdered in the Soviet Union. For the Left these numbers are acceptable because following Badiou and Zizek, they were a necessary outcome of the “Truth-Event known as the October Revolution”.
Zizek’s call to fight on the baracade not only violates the ethic that Jesus develops but it also violates the psychoanalytic ethic that allows for the creation of new fantasmatic spaces; even when such spaces show the “unbearable ideal couple of a male ape copulating with a female cyborg”. Zizek considers Lacan to be an enlightenment thinker but he fails to answer the question, what is the knowledge that can immunize us against ignorance? How does psychoanalysis excise the pathology within reason and the pathology within spirituality?

I

On one level, Zizek is right to criticize New Age Spiritualism but he should include his own writings within that camp. It is one thing to watch TV evangelists for their entertainment value and yet another to actually believe them and “tuck in a love gift” as you wait to receive your miracle spring water that will cure your cancer along with your acne and fix your finances as you finally manage to find meet the Lord while travelling 240 km/h in the fast lane of the 401. You have seen the signs: “CH CH. What is missing? UR. Come in we are prayer conditioned. This Son will not burn you.” The interesting paradox is that cultural theorists actually believe “in” Zizek.
The rider that never appears in fine print of Zizek’s book might read, “Of course Christianity and Marxism should go together, that is, if and only if Christianity is understood as a stripped down materialism”. Who needs this? A secular version of Christian ideas are like cyber-sex. There is no point. Watching Extreme Make-Over Home Edition illustrates the materialism at the heart of religion. A family becomes poor after the death of their preacher-father. The generous trades-persons trained in video appeal, arrive to erect a 5000 square foot luxury home. The family with tears of material bliss rolling down their cheeks cannot believe their good fortune. Their faith is assured. God does provide for his needy flock. Here is what Kierkegaard writes in his Journals:
Preaching of the Gospel
Parson: Thou shalt die unto the world. The fee is one guinea.
Neophyte: Well, if I must die unto the world I quite understand that I shall have to fork out more than one guinea; but just a question: Who gets the guinea?
Parson: Naturally I get it, it is my living, for I and my family have to live by preaching that one must die unto the world. It is really cheap, and soon we shall have to ask for considerably more. If you are reasonable you will easily understand that to preach one must die unto the world, if it is done seriously and with zeal, takes a lot out of a man. And so I really have to spend the summer in the country with my family to get some recreation.

Should we collectively cry out, “Roll back that bus!” When will the Void be revealed for what it is? Does Lacan or Schelling actually lift the veil so that the truth can finally be seen? Does R.D. Laing come closer to the truth when he asks, “How do you plug a void plugging a void? How to inject nothing into fuck all?” Is the Real really unformed ghastly matter so that there is something in God that is not-yet-God, not yet fully constituted reality? Such speculation can lead into a discussion of Mad Max. God does not send his avenging angels to destroy the evil people who happen to enjoy fast cars, free apocalyptic gasoline, leather and a little pillaging. God does not send his angels to help the people dressed in white, guarding their oil, decked out in hockey gear armor. God sends Mad Max his other son. Perhaps Nietzsche announces it best when he writes, “there is much filth in the world; so much is true. But the world itself is not yet a filthy monster”. Didn’t Max come to realize this point? He wanted some gasoline and in the process gets turned inside out. His trials do not make him angry. He can smile even as he realizes the absurdity of his situation. He drives a truck whose great tanker is filled with sand. He thinks its filled with gasoline. The veil is lifted. The truth is known. It’s only sand that pours out; the sand of time keeps flowing. The sun keeps shining perhaps telling us that its never too late to learn to live and how to be human. But Max does not get on the bus where the gasoline is stored safely away. He knows to beware of the Magic Bus and its Leninist driver who tells his passengers that he has a map to the promised land and that he knows the way there because he has a stack of post-card images and bolshevik trading-cards.
Zizek’s reading of Christianity is no better than the TV evangelists who chastises his virtual congregation for writing checks that their souls can’t cash. Or in the words of one evangelist, “ Jesus does not like bounced checks”. This sounds precisely like Lacan who with his suspect reading of Freud and others in his seminars coupled with a two minute psychoanalytic session that allowed him to see at least eighty patients a day, became very wealthy. Apparently, Lacan did not cede his desire. Perhaps what is needed is a thorough understanding of rhodopsin, the compound in the pigment of our eyes that enables us to see. If only philosophy could corner the market on this pharmakon.

J

What Zizek’s fails to observe and this is symptomatic of his prodigious mis-readings (of Christianity and Derrida) is that the message of Christ is not the message of Coke Zero. Think of Jesus on the cross being offered Vinegar-Zero.(Drink it and your crucifixion pain will be numbed) Of course, Jesus refuses. Alain-Miller is right to claim that Coke claims it is IT though it never actually is it. Christ claims he is IT. He claims to be the Real Thing; believe at your own risk. Zizek is correct to claim that with Coke the more you drink, the thristier you get. Christ says the opposite. “Jesus replied, "I am the bread of life. No one who comes to me will ever be hungry again. Those who believe in me will never thirst”. (John 6:35) Zizek gets Christ wrong because he relies on Lacan for his theological insights. Simply put, either Jesus is the real thing or we are once again embracing fictions and illusions. Today, the rockets slammed into Nazareth. Beirut is burning. Iran is going nuclear. Bush vetoes a bill expanding support for stem cell research. He states, “ This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect, so I vetoed it”. The civil war in Iraq continues to spread. The Chinese Government is harvesting organs from Falun Gong prisoners. There is torture at Gitmo. Jack Bauer endorses the “truth-serum” of a Glock on 24. Morality seems to be a convenience used in normal times. The rest of the time there is state sponsored murder in the name of progress. Tragedy does not begin with Homer. It begins with the bubbling up of the cosmic soup from which we arose.
Trapped in the desert of the real in the Capitalistic desert of consumer dissatisfaction is it possible to take solace in Psalm 63:1 which states, “God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water”? Is the dry and weary land where there is no water but only Coke to be called Amerika or –the-former-Yugoslavia? In Yugoslavia, the so-called Marxist cadre could offer graduate courses in how to be good capitalists, while those not convinced of Tito’s gentle hand, i.e. the workers and those forced to be Gastarbeiters, recited verses from Lamentations , “Because of thirst the infant's tongue sticks to the roof of its mouth; the children beg for bread, but no one gives it to them”. Those upholding the virtues of socialism in Yugoslavia were living like rich industrialists. We conclude that socialist economics failed because of its inherent inadequacy to meet the needs of its citizens.
This is a good description of the Yugoslavia my parents and I were born into but it could just as easily describe the hardship experienced by the children of Marx. I mean not only Karl Marx’s children who went hungry and died of disease while he failed to work and labor for them and lived from Engelian charity, but all the children of Marx from China, Africa, Latin-America, Cuba and Europe who continue to suffer. This is an ethical argument and explains my dissatisfaction especially for the so called Marxist theorists in North-America and Europe who drink Coke in the air-conditioned offices of their English departments, while collecting their tenured salaries, wearing Marxist T-Shirts made in third world sweat-shops, while telling us how the petit bourgeois capitalistic system is an abomination because of its inherent oppressive nature. Who is being fooled here? Though I am in solidarity with a certain spirit of Marxism ( i.e., its Tommy Douglas Canadian New Democratic version), applied “Marxism” in its various guises (Leninism, Stalinism, Titoism, Maoism) has been an experiment of disaster. Is this the fault of Marx or just a case of bad reading on the part of those who really had no business interpreting Marx such as the locksmith Tito and the failed priest Stalin?
What made so many follow the blunderings and violence of such individuals? While travelling through “Yugoslavia” in the late 1980’s I was struck at how absurd everything was. Massive portraits of Marshall Tito, train porters throwing garbage out of the train window as we passed into the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, soldiers asking me for my passport with their AK47’s pointing towards my chest. My nationality erased. My village forced to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. My religion persecuted. Perhaps the only way not to go mad in such a mad environment was to embrace the absurdity of situation by making sure to have enough packs of capitalistic Malboro Reds and Kents to buy freedom if needed. Perhaps the only thing that made sense in the mad Yugoslovenian world was Lacan.
K

Zizek continues, “The key to this disturbance, of course, is the surplus-enjoyment, the object petit a which exists ( or, rather persists) in a kind of curved space- the nearer you get to it, the more it eludes your grasp” The more you drink the more you want is not the slogan of Christ. Though the Yugoslav faithful would declare from a very young age, wearing red pioneer scarves, “Comrade Tito, We pledge our allegiance to you”. Tito was the object petit a that held the faithful in his grasp even from the grave. After Tito’s death the slogan recited by the Party was “After Tito, Tito”. This is the Yugoslav version of repetition. It is the repetition Zizek favors: “After Lenin, Lenin encore.” A repeat of Lenin would be nothing more than a retread. Tires that are retreaded blow up quickly sending flying debris onto the windshields bank-owned vehicles. In World War I retread was Australian slang for "a re-enlisted soldier. Imagine brining Lenin back to life. Aquinas writes, “useless repetition is vain”. Zizek should listen to Aquinas.
While Zizek bemoans art that exhibits, “frames without paintings, dead cows and their excrement” he fails to realize that this is precisely the materialistic leftover and as art is much better than portraits of Marshall Tito hanging in the bedrooms of the communist cadres . Da, druže! ( Oh, Yes Comrade!).
The sublime evidence of “Leninism” lies in the materiality of its corpses. Zizek writes, “ the sublime Grail will reveal itself to be nothing but a piece of shit”. As a “fighting materialist” what else does Zizek have to offer us? Christ without the resurrection is just another rotting corpse that does not smell any better when sprayed with an Unamunian perfume. What if Adam and Eve had committed suicide? How would the scene have played out? The Rifleman rescues his son from the Wildman Buffalo hunter. The Rifleman does not want to play the Wildman’s game of ‘Kill me or Die’. He waits for the grizzly to attack. In the new wilderness overcome by the technology of the repeat rifle the Wildman could no longer be a one shot hero.

L

Zizek seems to think we can have Jesus without Christ, Lenin without Lenin, Stalin without Stalin, Uncle Joe without the sixty million corpses, full of Marxist wisdom, warmth and generosity. Cultural Theorists of the world….you can been duped. You have nothing to lose but bad theory. Many seem to have swallowed Zizek’s theories whole not realizing what they are eating: the thick gooey, slightly brown paste served in the film Brazil. Dope from 1807 American English is, "sauce, gravy," from the Dutch word doop "thick dipping sauce."
Zizek wants a repeat (encore) of what Lenin failed to do. Of course cultural theorists in the United States are excited. They can have yet another tool from which to carry out an analysis of things already analyzed to death, i.e., “Lenin’s “Utopia” and Little Red Riding Hood as an example of the struggle to overcome class distinctions”. Conferences will be organized. Lenin’s corpus will now be re-examined. His brain studied again to locate the site of his “genius”. The Western Canon will now be interpreted anew through the repetition of what Lenin failed to do. New courses with titles such as “ From Lenin’s cap to Khruschev’s shoe to Van Gogh’s Pipe to Castro’s cigar” will be taught. Dissertations with such noble titles as “Lenin’s Pauline theology as an overcoming of the pagan drives inherent in spirit's implication in the political opposition of Weltgeist and Weltanschauung with reference to Marx’s "all that is solid melts into air” and Hegel’s spirit is bone” will be written . I hope that I am not the only one who recognizes the utter uselessness of such intellectual auto-fellatio that continues to be published at an unprecedented pace. Bacteria swim towards sugar and away from acid. How can humans learn this wisdom?
Zizek continues,

One of the rumors about Kim Yong II is that he actually died in a car crash a couple of years ago, and that in recent years a double has replaced him in his rare public appearances, so that the crowds can catch a glimpse of their object of worship- is this not the best possible confirmation of the fact that their ‘real personality’ of the Stalinist Leader is thoroughly irrelevant, a replaceable object, since it does not matter if it is the ‘real’ Leader or his double, who has no actual power?

The obvious counter-argument here is: so what? Recall Seinfeld’s comment that people who read tabloids deserve to be lied to. Shall we adopt the same attitude and argue that those who hero worship and have no skills of independent reasoning, who are easily fooled by the double-hero-Master-leader who is nothing more than a failed-priest- locksmith turned “revolutionary”, with no formal education and yet can espouse the finer points of Hegelian dialectic, supported by the West to become their puppet in a strange cult of personality, deserve their leader?
100 million people were killed this century by communist regimes. This is solid evidence against its repetition. Yet, despite all the death and destruction left in its wake, communism still is viewed by Zizek and Badiou as a noble cause, the murder committed in its name simply an oversight. Thus Lenin and Mao (and presumably Stalin and Kim Jong Il) are good. Having witnessed evil several times in my life I recognize its face. I saw what Leninism, Titoism, Milosevicism, amounted to when I saw the mass graves at Vukovar. Simply put, it is a lie that Lenin dedicated his life to one thing and one thing only--the establishment of a society free from all forms of oppression. Lenin like other dictators from across the Left –Right spectrum filled graves.
I urge Zizek and Badiou and the rest of the Lacanians to visit Lenin’s tomb and help the embalmers who periodically change his suit and bathe his body in a special chemical preparation to prevent tissue decay. Nikita Mikhalov, an eminent film director and chairman of Russian Cultural Foundation, says that vast funds are squandered away every year to maintain a 'pagan show'. I will not be the puppet that bows to and sustain the drive of the proverbial puppet-master. This puppet-master is, of course, Lenin and must be--the true target our democratic criticism.Lenin crowd surfs while the tanks fill Tiananmen Square. Seattle could only offer us drug overdoses, unorganized protests, bitter coffee and flannel.

Lj

Let’s be really serious as we turn the dialectical wheel. We speculate. Christ dies and does not resurrect but Paul takes his place. But no one really notices. So Christianity leads to materialism which is “the permanent production of piles of discarded waste” The bodies continue to fill the earth. The Master is the only one who profits. The rest of us remain as victims of death. So Freud’s formula, “Wo es war, soll ich werden” ( Where it was, I shall come into being) is to be understand as “Where it was, I, Lacan shall be”. However, the Master Lacan cannot lead us to liberation. Just as the fundamentalism of Paul, who desires to be the Master and asks us to obey his orders as we repress our inner urges, can only offer us dead letters.
Zizek does not seriously consider the real legacy of Christianity. He writes, “ the authentic Christian legacy (Paul’s fundamentalist militancy from the Corinthians) is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks” Which fundamentalist freaks? He weaves through Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Toyota cars, cell-phones, Coke, Khruschev, Courbet, NAFTA, NATO, Films: My Best Friend’s Weddding, Woman in the Window, Blue and Vertigo only to conclude with how fragile the Absolute is:

What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeing experiences- say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude: in such miraculous but extremely fragile moments; another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded; it slips all too easily through our fingers, and must be handled as carefully as a butterfly.

Let us be serious, really. Let us contrast Zizek’s version of this mundane Absolute which can be found in any gentlemen’s strip club, with the version that Jesus’ proposes in Matthew 6:19 "Don't store up treasures here on earth, where they can be eaten by moths and get rusty, and where thieves break in and steal.” Here Jesus warns us against following the fake revolutionaries who desire nothing but power and do nothing to remedy injustice. A repeat of Lenin? I imagine Lenin training for the demise of capitalism dressed like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Lenin-become-anarchist who tells us that the culture industry offers only the illusion of genuine transformation much like Bo-Tox and collagen used to lure a potential partner.
The question is: Does one have to be bad in order to rescue what is good? Is a little terror a good thing? The film Taxi Driver seems to answer this question. In Biblical literature we see God destroy the earth in order to rescue what is good. Psalm 137 declares, “ O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” We see Jesus being crucified as a criminal so that the good can be retrieved. Job suffers evil and is rewarded with an increase of what is good. Evil is portrayed as a politician with many people campaigning on his behalf. The politicians who ride in the taxi cab are no different than most of the pimps, prostitutes and business people that DeNiro’s character drives around for a fee; cleaning up the traces of their jouissance from his back seat. The movie takes place in the Big Apple that is New York. It has become a city filled with sin, slime and sewers. The taxi driver before his Mohawk transformation sees himself as cowboy confronting a hostile wilderness and like all good Westerns there are guns, girls and whisky. He prepares to make his stand. His mission is to save the girl, the little red riding hood from the bad wolf pimp. Not satisfied with his tour of duty in Vietnam the taxi driver wants recognition for cleaning of the streets. As he goes back to save the girl, he murders the pimps and gangsters and gets badly shot. The police arrive to witness the scene of the savage super-hero with a mohawk haircut bleeding. The newspapers turn him into a hero. The newspapers can turn bad into good as long as it is a good story. Enter the October Revolution. The invasion of Iraq and The World Cup.

M

The crucifixion is not a happy event as Zizek claims. This is why it is part of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. The Resurrection is the happy event. Perhaps this is the ultimate objet petit a. The task has been accomplished but there is no proof of its accomplishment; except an empty tomb.
Zizek writes that Christianity asks us, “ to disengage ourselves from the inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we were born into”. So by all means, cut yourself free from Lacan and speak without him. He continues, “ It is this Christian heritage of uncoupling that is threatened by today’s fundamentalisms especially when they proclaim themselves Christian”.

N

Zizek’s writings show us what happens when dialectical exuberance gets the better of kulak common sense. When I read Zizek, Lenin, Mao or Lacan, I recall the question the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers posed to Paul: “ What does this babbler want to say?” As Zizek addresses the audience of philosophers, bored liberals, theorists, film junkies and disillusioned communists, I imagine him saying

My fellow Leninists and Lacanians I see how extremely per-verse and obscure you are in every way. For as I went through the city and look at the objects of your desire,, as I located your sinthome within the Borromean knot of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, I found among them an altar with the inscription “to an unknown god”. What therefore you worship as unknown thus I proclaim to you as the objet petit a.

The applause of English professors and failed Christians becomes deafening. Let us locate the Paul that Zizek would find appealing, the Paul without Paul, the Saul of Paul, the Leninist revolutionary that mothered a religion, now into its third millenium. Here are some sentences from Paul’s letters that I hope to return to, in my old age.

1. Greet those workers in the world.
2. I urge you brothers and sisters to keep an eye on those who cause dissension and offences.
3. Now I appeal to you…that all of you be in agreement and that there are no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.
4. Not many of you were wise by human standards but God choose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.
5. I feed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food.
6. I appeal to you then, be imitators of me.
7. For the kingdom of God depends not on talk but on power.
8. Make no provisions for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
9. Drive out the wicked person from among you.
10. I wish that all were as I myself am.
11. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.
12. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.
13. Greet one another with a holy kiss…. let anyone be accursed who has no love for the Lord.
14. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true.
15. Do not be mismatched with unbelievers.
16. Indeed we live as human beings but we do not wage war according to human standards, for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human but they have divine power to destroy strongholds.
17. I am talking like a madman.
18. I have been a fool! You have forced me to it.
19. Friends, I beg you become as I am, for I also have become as you are.
20. My little children, for whom I am in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.
21. Remember my chains.
22. Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.
23. For if someone does not know how to manage his own household how can he take care of God’s church?
24. Teach and urge these duties; whoever teaches otherwise and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ….is conceited, understanding nothing, and has a morbid controversy and disputes about words. From these come envy, dissension, slander, base suspicion and wrangling, among those who are depraved in mind.
25. No one serving the army gets entangled in everyday affairs.
26. Avoid profane chatter for it will lead people into more and more impiety, and their talk will spread like gangrene.
27. Obey your leaders and submit to them.

These twenty-seven sentences point to a universalism that fails to respect singularity. It is no wonder that theorists like Badiou return to Paul. We can follow Zizek’s Pauline materialism by substituting a few words in order to create a Leninist speech that would make Stalin and Mao envious. Here is the result:

Greet those workers in the revolution. I urge you comrades to keep an eye on those who cause dissension and offences. Now I appeal to you…that all of you be in agreement and that there are no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose. Not many of you were wise by human standards but the Party chooses what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. I feed you with milk from the farm, not solid food from the Big Box Stores, for you were not ready for solid food. I appeal to you then, be imitators of me. For the revolution depends not on talk but on power. Make no provisions for the flesh, to gratify its desires. Drive out the wicked petty bourgeois from among you. I wish that all were as I myself am. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the proletariat. Greet one another with a materialist kiss…. let anyone be accursed who has no love for the Party. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true. Do not be mismatched with unbelievers. Indeed we live as human beings but we do not wage war according to human standards, for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human but they have materialistic power to destroy strongholds. I am talking like a madman. I have been a fool! You have forced me to it. Friends, I beg you become as I am, for I also have become as you are. My little comrades, for whom I am in the pain of childbirth until the Party is formed in you. Remember my chains. Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For if someone does not know how to manage his own household how can he take care of the State? Teach and urge these duties; whoever teaches otherwise and does not agree with my sound words is conceited, understanding nothing, and has a morbid controversy and disputes about words. From these come envy, dissension, slander, base suspicion and wrangling, among those who are depraved in mind. No one serving the army gets entangled in everyday affairs. Avoid profane chatter for it will lead people into more and more impiety, and their talk will spread like gangrene. Obey your leaders and submit to them.

Paul like Lenin argues against dissension and individual expression. He wants imitation, not of Jesus, but of himself. Paul’s gospel, which Nietzsche was correct to criticize in the Anti-Christ (because it forgot the message of the generous evangelic Jesus) may be summed up with the slogan, “ No critique, or your eternal life”.

O

The notion of Denkverbot runs through Paul’s gospel and a repeat of Lenin as Zizek suggests is a return to not being allowed to think. Yes, Zizek is correct to argue that “today, actual freedom of thought must mean the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democratic post-ideological consensus- or it means nothing. However, Zizek forgets that such a questioning is the foundation of a liberal-democracy. A repeat of Lenin is already a repeat of intolerance and repression. What Zizek sells to the liberal academy as radical chic, “ Well, I have run out of ideas…. so let’s repeat Lenin”, is easily recognized by the most uneducated peasant as poisoned wine, pig in a poke political delirium that requires a medicine not yet invented. On the other hand, Derrida argues that it is possible to pay respectful attention to singularity. This makes him more Kierkegaardian than Hegel’s Zizek.
P

Zizek continues, “ to put it in Kierkegaardian terms, the Lenin we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-beoming”. Zizek wants to repeat, “the Leninist gesture of retrieving the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism” so that “we obtain the right to think again”. Here I rub my eyes in disbelief. I wonder how such utter nonsense manages to pass through the peer review process? Are American editors this ignorant of history? My only answer is that perhaps the editors understood that that Zizek’s paper would be on Lennon. Lenin pronounced in “Serbo-Slovene” sounds like Lennon. Listen to the chorus of the Lennonist revolution: “Imagine there's no countries/It isn't hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too /Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man I hope someday you'll join us/And the world will live as one”. This universalism of all voices on one line singing as one voice on the line is incapable of thinking personhood.

R

While Zizek calls for a repeat of Lenin, notice how he downplays the crimes against individual persons committed by Stalin and Mao. Zizek writes, “ In spite of all its horrors, the great Cultural Revolution in China undoubtedly did contain elements of such an enacted Utopia” and “ The Stalinist….terror was a gesture of panic, a defense reaction against the threat to this State stability” . We have heard this type of “Yes…But” logic in defense of Fascism and here Zizek repeats it for the monsters of the Left. Zizek wants to retain the Leninist “Utopian spark” but what he fails to realize is his quest for a universal truth is the spark that lit the fires of misery and oppression. Lenin is more relevant than ever in our “era of postmodern relativism” since “truth is by definition one-sided”. Notice here that liberal democracy is so oppressive that one can write bad articles (“A Plea for Leninist intolerance”) that can still be published in excellent journals (Critical Inquiry). In Lenin’s time, good articles (criticizing Lenin) did not have a chance to be published in bad journals. The writer was murdered. No obituary was published. This is the Leninist universal that contains no variety within it. A single chorus on the line. We have been prepared for this universal through pop culture propaganda where the characters speak the same language, with the same tone and inflection.
Only a repeat of Lenin can save us now. We would be like the silkworm once again laboring for the State while dying of our labor. Today, the silkworm moth, like many workers lives only in captivity. Silkworms have been domesticated so that they can no longer survive independently in nature, particularly since they have lost the ability to fly. All wild populations are extinct. If the animal is allowed to survive after spinning its cocoon, it will make a hole in the cocoon when it exits as a moth. This would cut short the threads and ruin the silk. Instead, silkworm cocoons are thrown into boiling water, which kills the silkworms and also makes the cocoons easier to unravel. Often, the silkworm itself is eaten. One cocoon is made of a single thread about 914 meters long. About 3000 cocoons are needed to make a pound of silk.

S

Zizek continues his Leninist observations in “Human Rights and its Discontents”. The absurdity of his position escalates. The Lenin who liquidated those who disagreed with him is now the Lenin who would save us to think. Lenin is now to become an educator. In Russell’s words, “Such education does not aim at producing any mental faculty except that of glib repetition….From such an educational system nothing of intellectual value can result”. Glib repetition is the repetition that Zizek would have us return to which is evident from his misunderstanding of Kierkegaard’s position.
Russell describes his meeting with Lenin in 1920. Russell writes, “ Lenin was cruel. Lenin had no respect for tradition. Lenin considered all means legitimate for securing the victory of his party…. He thought the world was governed by dialectic, whose instrument he was. Lenin seemed to me at once a narrow-minded fanatic and a cheap cynic. He explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, “and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree- ha! ha! ha!” His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold”. I prefer Russell because he speaks the truth here. A repeat of Lenin would be a repeat of broken promises, stolen liberties, and Stalinist idiocy. One more turn to the dialectical wheel of fortune as the revolution is revolved. Instead of Vana White we have Zizek choosing letters on a loaded board that spins out the same message night after night: R E P E A T L E N I N. The contestants and viewers have no hope of thinking anything new or challenging the preachers of nonsense with their lame and impotent conclusions. Nietzsche showed us that Christianity was already emptied of the message that Jesus proclaimed so that the skeleton that Zizek would like to construct would be fleshed out with Lenin’s nicely refrigerated Moscow corpse.
Š

Zizek’s reading of Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition cannot be bent dialectically in order to make Lenin into something new. The repetition that Zizek argues for is “a repetition of the wrong kind”. Repetition as understood by Kierkegaard occurs in the realm of the religious. Repetition points towards Religiousness B. Kierkegaard’s example is Job who “despite everything is in the right” This cannot be said of Lenin, no matter how the dialectic is used by Zizek. Lenin was in the wrong. Zizek’s new Lenin is not Job who was blessed and receives everything back twofold. The new Lenin recollected and already repeated is to be found in North Korea testing missiles over Japan.
In his Journals, Kierkegaard argues, “ And what is it we now call “humanism” It is a vaporised Christianity, a culture-consciousness, the dregs of Christianity….. One ought to say to the humanists: produce ‘undiluted humanism”. Zizek and Badiou go to Christianity in order to dilute it of its power. They then proceed to inject it into an ideology that has been discredited. Such a coupling like Frankenstein’s monster is perhaps entertaining but useless. For example, Zizek writes,

So although St. Paul’s particular message is no longer operative for us, the very terms in which he formulates the operative mode of the Christian religion do possess a universal scope as relevant for every Truth-Event; every Truth-Event leads to a kind of ‘Resurrection’- through fidelity to it and a labor of Love on its behalf, one enters into another dimension irreducible to a mere service des biens.

In Kierkegaard’s words, “ You cannot with justice call it yours in opposition to Christianity”. Lenin and Zizek find a home on American university campuses.

T

The most profound expression of repetition according to Kierkegaard is “atonement” To atone is to reconcile; "to bring together again”, “to make reparation”. How would Lenin ever atone for the crimes he committed? How would he make amends? Or was that already done by Gorbachev with Perostroika? Zizek wants Lenin to be saved and redeemed. As such, there can be no reparation for Lenin’s victims but only for Lenin himself. The tone of such atonement does not ring very well because it is fall back into un-freedom. Kierkegaard argues,

In the individual, then, repetition appears as a task for freedom in which the question becomes that of saving one’s personality from being volatilized and, so to speak, in pawn to events.

Unlike Kierkegaard’s single individual, Zizek’s Lacanian subject of the gaping Real is an expression of the tormented psyche that can find no rest. It seeks to fill the gap of its misunderstanding with obscene pathological fantasies. Singing soprano, in a hail of bullets; while following one’s desire into the professional arms of one’s sex-starved sex therapist; while a nip tuck of the borromean knot finally yield happiness for all the desperate housewives as they ride their youthful gardeners on waves of valium induced suburban bliss, while their emasculated husbands perform further Abelardian self-surgery is one lesson of pop culture. This obscene underground domain cannot be transformed by a repeat of Lenin, especially when Lenin’s so called utopia became a nightmare whose blueprint still stains the ground in current-world-events. A repeat of Lenin might resemble the world portrayed in Star Trek the Next Generation. For example, the Secret Police of internal affairs, the abolition of property rights, no personal wealth, no money, a spartan lifestyles, no stock-market, state seizure of transportation, big brother recording all movements, new age mysticism, state seizure of industry, no logos, no corporations=freedom. At least Captain Kirk’s Star-Trek served real alcohol while Spock played the Vulcan harp.

U
Zizek’s theories are insufficient to formulate a clear project of global change because they do not take the person into account as Derrida does. Emancipatory politics has fateful limitations, not because of any hegemony in the present global petty bourgeois capitalistic system, but because it sets limitations on how the person is to be understood.
A repetition of Lenin would mean the putting into action of a violent orbit; a loop of supreme crime that repeats (not in the Kierkegaardian sense) its failure to achieve a respect for individual persons. Let us allow Lenin to speak. Here he is from the ever inspiring work, “ The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat it”. Lenin writes,

Unavoidable catastrophe is threatening Russia….Yet nothing is being done. Six months of revolution have elapsed…Absolutely nothing of importance has actually been done to avert catastrophe, to avert famine. We are nearing ruin with increasing speed.

Here is a kernel of truth that we can pop in our capitalist microwave. If only Lenin had stated, “Yes, we are responsible for causing this catastrophe and now we will help to avert famine”, he would have been worth repeating. However, Lenin raises the stakes of the dialectic. He increases the catastrophe. He aids in prolonging the famine. He turns up the volume on ruin while turbo-charging the speed of terror. What the young Marx described as the horrible working conditions of England, equally apply to the Leninist state:

the fantastic rags of the….poor, and the withered wrinkled flesh of the women consumed by work and poverty; children lying in filth; monstrous creatures produced by overwork in the monotonous mechanism of the factories! And the most delightful final details of practice: prostitution, murder and the gallows!

Point 11 of Marx’s “Points on the Modern State and Civil Society” declares “ The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it.” Point 12 might read, “ The philosophy that thinks it can change the world by ignoring the single individual needs to be changed before there can be any change”.
Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism not only tolerated the plight of millions of human beings who were grossly deprived of bread and water, equality and freedom, they aided and created the disaster. When Zizek and Badiou urge a repeat of Lenin, their call is obscene and unwanted by those who know what suffering is. Their ideology was an enemy of democracy and an enemy of humanity. What could we expect especially from comrade Stalin who began his career as a bank robber and extended his talents to secure funds for Lenin?
Here is the wisdom that Alain Badiou in his love for Mao and Lenin would have us embrace. In his essay, “One Divides into Two”, Badiou writes,

Our duty, supporting ourselves on Lenin’s work, is to reactivate in politics, against the morose obsessions of our times, the very question of thought. To all those who claim to practice political philosophy, we ask: what is your critique of the existing system? What can you offer us that is new? Of what are you the creator?

Lenin who is critical of the social democrat Karl Kautsky, for upholding the right to vote, accuses Kautsky of making “litter our of theory”. However, it is the case that Badiou and Zizek are making theory out of litter. We can answer Badiou. A repeat of Lenin is a morose obsession that can only result in catastrophe, collapse, sickness, squalor, abuse, hate, violence and murder. This ideology or ideas translated into values must be fought against, especially in remembrance of the 100 million victims who were murdered as a result of Leninist ideology. Badiou offers us nothing new. He is not a creator, though he would have us become children of Lenin, our mother, who would raise us on an ideology of hatred. Perhaps we could recite this prayer on honor of Lenin, our mother,

Hail Lenin,
full of hate
the proletariat academics are with thee
blessed art though among revolutionaries
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, terror.
Holy comrade,
mother of many Stalins
Pray for us,
Now and at the
hour of our internment in your Gulag.

The requests for our politics are simple as I take my bearings from the prophet Isaiah: to eat, to be clothed, to have shelter, to be able to work, to be loved, to be cared for,to live in peace is finally to find compassion that overcomes competition, money and power. This politic would finally liberate us from Fascism, Communism and Capitalist servility.
Here is what Badiou offers us. I quote from his essay, “The Political as a Truth Procedure”. Badiou writes:

Every political event in particular proceeds to its own post-event prescription under the power of the State: it is< in substance< the creation in the wake of the swell of the event< of the political function …. one writes, ( ())= 1 to desiginate the reduplication of the political function….what a thought declares to be a thought, on condition of which it thinks that which is a thought.

Like Zizek’s Parallax view, Badiou’s view is a Para-Ex-Lax view. I advise readers to consult Princeton University professor emeritus Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit” for a thorough explication.
As Derrida has taught us the present form of democracy remain inadequate to the democratic demand that calls for a respect of singularity. The current threats to our liberty must be fought against by maintaining the liberty of the question. Such threats include the powers of the electronic network that files our identities into easily retrieved bits of data to be used by police networks, bank, health and insurance agencies. These virtual networks extend the powers of theft, falsification. The choice is no longer between the right kind of papers but what is contained on the magnetic strips that carry our information. That is why he calls for a democracy-to-come which will always remain aporetic in its structure and not capable of being contained within the system of calculable knowledge. Derrida writes,

Yes, like searchlights without a coast, they sweep across the dark sky, shut down or disappear at regular intervals and harbour the invisible in their light. We no longer know against what dangers or abysses we are forewarned. We avoid one, only to be thrown into one of the others. We no longer even known whether these watchmen are guiding us towards another destination, nor even if a destination remains promised or determined. We wish only to think that we are on the track of an impossible axiomatic which remain to be thought. Now, if this axiomatic which withdraws, from instant to instant, from one ray of the searchlight to another, from one lighthouse to the next (for there are numerous lighthouses, and where there is no longer an home these are no longer homes, and this what is taking place: there are no longer homes here), this is because darkness is falling on the value of value, and hence on the very desire for an axiomatic, a consistent or presupposed system of values.

The truly different may not arrive as the good, the beautiful and the just, but their exact opposite: the real good, the real beautiful and the real just. The repetition that Zizek urges is old territory. There is no hope of redemption in the structures created by Lenin and Stalin. Delivered from Fascism we cannot allow ourselves a return to Leninism in the name of a false democracy. We cannot be content with what today passes for democracy. We must sweep across the dark sky, towards another destination perhaps following St. Paul when he declares in Romans 8.24: “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience”. Let us prepare to leave Zizek’s fantasy space while we return Lenin to the anorexia of Barbie’s world. Here the mythic revolutionary and embalmed hero could join with the thin, long-legged, luxuriously blond bleached buxom plastic beauty to teach China how to really make great leaps forward.

V

To keep up with this screenplay argumentation, I turn to Kierkegaard’s Postscript to show how Johannes Climacus answered Zizek and Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro in 1846.

The observer, world historically catches a glimpse of the play of colors in the generations, just like a shoal of herring in the sea- the individual herring is not worth much… He hangs up curtains systematically and uses people and nations for that purpose- individual human beings are nothing to him.

and

Therefore the Hegelian cannot possibly understand himself with the aid of his philosophy; he can understand only what is past, is finished, but a person who is still living is not dead and gone. Presumably he consoles himself with the thought the if one can understand China and Persia and six thousand years of world history, then never mind a single individual, even if it is oneself.

Is it really still necessary to explain these quotes to the Hegelian-Maoist-Lacanian-Leninists? Should I request a suitable remuneration for my meritorious service of finding a suitable quotation to help liberate them from themselves? What is the going hourly rate? Would they be capable of paying? Should we line up in front of the Superstores to claim our share of “free goods”? The shopping flyer is advertising a new Shampoo. Buy the 750ml container and get 250 for free. How would it be extracted. Bring your measuring cups. Who will answer the psalm of the peasants: “Lenin took, and Lenin did not give, Cursed be the name of Lenin”? While Job, according to Kierkegaard was an example of repetition and took his place at “the outpost of humanity”, Lenin can only be seen as an example of inhumanity. To treat human beings as worms, is to assert that all they need is the dirt of materialism. This is Leninism. His regime was a criminal enterprise. Maxim Gorky contends, “Lenin and Trotsky don't have any idea about freedom or human rights. They are already corrupted by dirty poison of the power, this is visible by their shameful disrespect of freedom of speech and all other civil liberties for which the democracy was fighting”. Lenin's 1919 letters to Gorky contain threats: "My advice to you: change your surroundings, your views, your actions, otherwise life may turn away from you."
Karl Kautsky in “The Moscow Trial and the Bolsheviki”, (1922) answered Lenin with great clarity. His criticism are correct:

There is no difference between a tyrant who lives in a palace and a despot who misused the revolution of workers and peasants to ascend into the Kremlin. The Bolsheviki maintain that their policy constitutes the only genuine application of Marxism, that it constitutes a strict application of the principles of the class struggle. But the oppression and persecution of workingmen, belonging to another current of Socialist thought, and for no other reason than that these workers prefer to interpret Socialism in a manner different from the Bolsheviki, is in sharp contradiction with these class-struggle principles. The Bolsheviki were first to use violence against other Socialists. They dissolved the Constituent Assembly not by way of resistance against any violence on the part of the Socialists-Revolutionists and Mensheviki but because of their realization of their own inability to obtain the support of the majority of the peasants and workers by means of free propaganda. This was the fundamental cause of the Bolshevist coup d’etat against the representatives of the revolutionary workers and peasants. Hence, the abolition of all rights of all other Socialists who refused to submit to the crack of the Bolshevist whip. …misery and poverty will continue to reign in Russia for many years and will continue to fan apathy and despair, on one side, and uprisings, provoked by the despair of the masses Never did the Bolsheviki descend to their present low level. Time was when we knew many of them as honest fighters and idealists. But the coup d’etat of 1917 placed them in a false position, which was bound to lead consistently to their inevitable and ever-growing perversion. From the very beginning, they founded their power upon falsehood and violence directed against the proletariat, upon the principle that the end justifies the means. This principle always and inevitably leads to the degeneration of the party applying it, for it perverts the party and paralyzes those who do not oppose this perversion. But the Moscow trial is merely one of the episodes incident to the world-wide, historic conflict conducted by Bolshevism. Out of this conflict it will emerge discredited and condemned. A regime like that of the Bolsheviki has already grown rotten-ripe for destruction. It is impossible to foresee yet when and how it will fall but one thing can be said now and with absolute certainty: Bolshevism will fall in shame and disgrace, bemoaned perhaps only by the speculators of the capitalist world, but accompanied by the curses of the entire world proletariat struggling for emancipation. That is the lesson and the historic significance of the Moscow trial.

Z

In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Davy Jones is portrayed as a cross between a man and an octopus, with a wriggling beard of tentacles. He becomes the Octopus-Man who commands the Kraken and a crew of undead sailors. Davy Jones' Locker is the bottom of the sea. It is the resting-place of drowned seamen (No Freudian slip intended).
Davy Jones is the sea Devil in search of souls. He pursues a life of violence but his heart is locked in a treasure chest that beats for the love he lost. If only Davy Jones had not lost his love. Love lost turns not into hate but a love of hatred. If only Lenin’s brother was not murdered, would many have been spared the infliction of terror? How different from Christ who died so that many individuals could be saved. But saved from what? Death?
Elizabeth Swan must choose between three swords while Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and the Lieutenant must choose between three caskets. Our Hegelian choice is between the Real Pirates of her majesty’s East India Trading Company , Sparrow’s Pirates or Davy Jones’ undead crew. How to answer the question, “Who is the fiend?” Is it Jones who presides over the evil spirits of the deep? Is it the King for whom one gathers all the gold? Or is it God? In the song "Run Silent Run Deep", by Iron Maiden, there is the sentence "The tar black smell of burning oil all the way down to Davy Jones". Here Iron Maiden helps us to understand how submarines contribute to the rising cost of oil. Theory can be found in the most unlikely of places. In the Old Testament Jonah is swallowed by a whale spending three days and three nights in its belly. In the Christian tradition this is a prefigurement of Jesus' sojourn in the abode of the dead and, implicitly, of his resurrection. At the end of the movie, Jack Sparrow leaps into the toothed vagina of the Kraken. Shall he resurrect for yet another movie?
I am in front of Walmart. A man sits on the curb smoking a cigarette next to the Propane Cylinder Exchange Station. I wonder if he can read the “No Smoking” sign and if he can make sense of the slogan “Spark something fun”? As I wonder why I am thinking about these things so close to witnessing a potential explosion, I want to ask him if he has read Lenin or Zizek. I wonder if this is how revolutions really begin- with great stupidity, out of great ignorance. Yes, I should have told him to stop smoking. One spark can spark something fun: soccer, death or the resurrection? Who is the fiend? The Buddhist say “desire” and “ignorance”. On Stalin’s birthday, prisoners would send him congratulatory telegrams from the gulag. Flour bulked up with sawdust in Ceauceascu’s Romania was his Stalinist gift to his people.
Overcome with misplaced emotion, two fans of Les Bleus hold each other in a mournful embrace. They look as if their world has ended after a round a dreaded penalty kicks. Soccer is war and religion by other means. One fan states, “ My grandfather, before he died, said the Azzuri would win. Today, I said a prayer…it came true. I know he’s watching” the 25 year-old said, tears running down his face”. Another fan “even imported a sheep- which he painted red, white and green- from his home town in Calabria to cheer on the team. The animal, named Spitucci, will be eaten in a celebratory feast later this week”. Would Zizek be there as well?
Who will be the Antigone that will finally bury the body of Lenin? Will Zizek and Badiou use their intelligence to attempt a Jurassic Park DNA retrieval. Failing this event, perhaps his body could be sent to Niagara Falls to be housed at the Wax Musuem or to Tibet for a sky-burial. Lenin’s corpse, part of the undead who keep watch over those who keep watch over them. Let us gather around the crypts created by all human ideologies, preparing fore the democracy, birthing it beyond its current confines.

Ž

What is the message of Christ? Let me venture a few remarks before closing this essay as I gather mustard seeds in order to move mountains.
The Gospel of Matthew shows Jesus lamenting his lack of bed. How should we read this lament? Soldiers and mercenaries have ditches to sleep in hide in during times of war. Foxes have holes and birds have nests. Yet, there is no place for Jesus to rest his head. He will tell Pilate that his kingdom is not of this earth. With his spiritual technology, Jesus promises an end to all bodily embeddedness. In geological terms, the word embedded refers to fossils in rocks. Jesus promises the end of bodily fossilization through the resurrection of the body. No longer will bodies implant themselves on the earth to be fixed and set securely in the bed of the earth; they will take their place to occupy the many rooms that Jesus has prepared in his Father’s house. Here we see Jesus as a spiritual architect that can build mansions for resurrected bodies in a heaven we cannot see.
Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians states, “ The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (15:26) Technology attempts to defeat death through innovation. Religion attempts to defeat death through faith. We see Paul continually using his talents to strengthen the faith of the early Christian communities. Where they also filled with a great doubt? He upbuilds the community in Corinth with these words, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (15:12-15) Paul continues, “ But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead” 15:20) Paul speaks of seeds and sowing, “ to each kind of seed its own body” (15:38), “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable” (15:42) Paul then makes the following distinction, “ If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” 15:44) Paul is the Christian technologist who would have us place faith in the virtual while ignoring the actual.
Paul continues, “ Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (15:50) In the same way, technology and its virtuality will transform the future. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the future because they are perishable. Since the flesh is perishable our becoming a cyborg body-without-organs is the only option.
The dead according to Paul “ will be raised imperishable….For this perishable body must put on imperishability and this mortal body must put on immortality” (15:53) Notice here Paul’s reference to putting on new clothes which are designed by the religious technologist who sews the prosthetic garments for the resurrection that will happen “ in the twinkling of an eye” (15:52)
The religious believer can declare, “ Death has been swallowed up in victory”. But of course, the evidence indicates otherwise. We can gather for Easter Service to sing the praises of Jesus who supposedly resurrected. Yet all we can do is to point at an empty tomb. It is the impasse and aporia that halts us in our tracks, constricts our throats and makes us choke. Notice also the reference to swallowing. Faith is said to take away the sting of death. Is this too much to swallow? In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians we read, “ For the love of Christ urges us on…(5:4) Urge from the Latin urgere means "to press hard, push, drive, compel. It is related to the Greek ergon or "work," and to the Greek word orgia or "religious performances”. The etymology of urge leads to an interesting association of words such as O.C.S. vragu "enemy;" Gothic wrikan "persecute," the Old English wrecan "drive, hunt, pursue”. What is the urge if not to overcome death? Both religion and technology drive us, push us, compel us to work for the day when death will be overcome; for the day when death will no longer be the enemy that persecutes, drives, hunts and pursues us. We are taken hold by this desire to live forever. Hold from the French word prise means a taking, seizing, holding. Can there by a sur-prise that releases us from the hold of both faith and technology and the mirages they have engendered? Sur-prise means an unexpected attack or capture," "a taking unawares”. Perhaps this is the faith that avoids all declarations of war: let there be a rapture of the real which we would name true love.
If I had the time I would have examined all of Lenin’s letters to his mother. I would have wanted to find the kernel that led Lenin to create his sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror. In one of these letters Lenin writes, “Please send me some money, mine is nearly at an end”. Here the father of the Soviet Union asks his mother for money. I would have read this request together with Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money” to form a thesis about Counterfeit Regimes. Along the way I would have also examined Lenin’s question, "How can you make a revolution without executions?” and his fine article, “Beat – But Not to Death!”. Recall Hegel’s words, “Here shoots a bloody head-there another white ghastly apparition…one catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye into a night that becomes awful.” What better description of totalitarian states and of the traumatic encounters that humans engender as they turn spirit into bone? Zizek writes, “For Lacan,…..a Truth-Event can operate only against the background of the traumatic encounter with the undead/monstrous Thing.” Is this not an excellent description of Lenin’s refrigerated corpse? What is Zizek’s Lacanian lesson? Do not cede your desire- You may. You are ordered to be free. Dare. Dare from the Old English word durran means “to brave danger”. To dare is to be bold. It means to challenge and to defy, especially when stupidity masks itself to perform a stunt of great theory. A mother at MacDonalds teaches her toddlers to say “Please”. She on the other hand did not ask her children if she could spend their baby bonus check on liquor and smokes. In Hegelese, “ She makes this wisdom an object of derision for raw and irresponsible youth….”
If the world is Lacanian, then the history of our species shows the pathological everyday stains of living in what is named and remembered of the last century when we say Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Auschwitz, Gulag, democracy, fascism, communism; philosophy without an aporetic ethics.
I am polite towards them as towards every small vexation; to be prickly towards small things seems to me the wisdom of a hedgehog.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra