night is also a sun

Movement

Benoît — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:22:43 +0000

I apologize to those who’ve been following me, but for administrative purposes I’ll be moving to a new location. WordPress’ overhead makes a writing a chore. I’ll only be importing a few posts from here, those I’ve deemed most indicative of what I’m thinking about. This address will be deleted sometime near the end of August. I’ll update you with the new address soon.

Sane

Benoît — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:43:32 +0000

It is rarely assumed that not wanting to live; or finding one’s life – or as it is usually generalized in such states of mind, finding life itself – unbearable may, in certain circumstances, be the sane option, the utterly realistic view.

Adam Phillips (via)

Chalcedon

Benoît — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:57:00 +0000

Official Christian orthodoxy is defined by the Confession of Chalcedon. Yet the only correct opinion it draws has to do with the nature of the incarnation, or, what Jesus Christ is.

Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.

With this, the great christological debates that began at the end of the first century were mostly quelled. What had sparked them was gentile dumbfoundness at the prospect of a god becoming flesh; and the only language at hand for understanding such an idea was that of Greek philosophy, obsessed as it was at the time with substance or ὑπόστᾰσις (hypostasis). For Jewish thought in the period of the Second Temple the question of Christ’s nature, his substance, was a non-question. What was essential for the members of this Jewish sect was who Christ was, not what he was made of. Who Chris was enabled redemption there on the cross. Who Christ was lent the utmost significance to his final words as found in the gospel of Mark: “Father, father, why have you forsaken me?!” You cannot understand these words if you are obsessed with substances and their transubstantiations, realms, their boundaries and traversals. Indeed, Western mind has thrived on fabricating distinctions where simplicity is due. Why have you forsaken me? This is a simple question.

Tagged: chalcedon, christianity, hypostasis, jesus christ, substance

Summa

Benoît — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:05:36 +0000

In the final analysis it’ll have proven to be some genetic deficiency, a recessive trait allowed dominance by the laws of probability. It’d likely been inherited from my mother’s side since they have a history of mental disorder; my father should’ve asked these questions before conceiving me. Or perhaps it’ll be something much more accidental. I did fall down those concrete steps at my Grandfather’s home, the ones that led to his basement from outside. The scar looked like a dinosaur in the mirror. The neurological damage has made a dinosaur of me. Now I’m an atavism, a silly herald of another time, another place. Out of time. Out of place. Here, now, my placement must follow necessity (I’m on this train to get to work, I’m live in this apartment to save money), my time must be spent accordingly (I need to sleep enough hours to perform my work, I must work enough hours to pay my rent, I must spend enough time with friends to keep them, etc), and my problem is a disposition averse to fragmentation. I see the whole thing. You can only want the whole thing once seeing it. But is this thing me, bigger and better? Fame and wealth are illusory: that I have the means to everything isn’t a purchase on the whole thing, the gossiped lives of celebrities have taught us that much. Fair enough. Perhaps I can know this whole thing: but the nature of knowledge isn’t simplification but complication. No, I can only see it. And I’m trying to describe it to you.

Sight

Benoît — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:17:32 +0000

Philosophy is a visionary thing. It is not merely speculative, trying to see in a mirror darkly. It sees the thing itself. It sees clearly. It sees in anxiety and destruction. It sees in the midst of the destruction that dialectic has laid all around. The philosopher has gone through to the blindness that is sight to the visionary spirit. Or he sees nothing.

Gary Smith

Stupor

Benoît — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:00:41 +0000

“One of the more distracting things about capitalist culture is that there is no stupor, no time to vegetate. What I would suggest is more time wasting, less stimulation. We need time to lie fallow like we did in childhood, so we can recuperate. Rather than be constantly told what you want and be pressurized to go after it, I think we would benefit greatly from spells of vaguely restless boredom in which desire can crystallize.”

Adam Phillips (via)

Tagged: boredom, capitalism

Solace

Benoît — Sun, 30 May 2010 00:22:27 +0000

I work. I commute on a train. I sit in front of a computer, surfing the internet. I have a drink or two with friends. We do something. I sleep. I work.

From all sides engagement. Friends, family, work, and even leisure oblige. Where is solace? Where that solitude bearing one the ease of a feather in the air? To be without distraction. But having found our cave we discovered that we did not flee engagement but ran up to its most intensive avatar. It is dark here. Night.

One cries for solace from engagement. One seeks, and finds, solitude. Night. And then!… well anything at all really, and so everything. Not less engagement, rest, but the utmost. This one will oblige completely, but oblige us to be anything and everything. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” Out of the night, alone like God, suddenly, light. Everything follows. It cannot be any other way.

Tagged: bible, creation, god, night

Night

Benoît — Sun, 30 May 2010 00:17:53 +0000

We’ve misread Genesis: there is a light prior to God’s creation of the sun. God calls forth light, of course, but only several verses later does the sun step forward into creation. And what’s more, God separates this light from darkness. Their opposition and alternation make for night and day, but again, without any notion of the sun. Is this day and this night what we understand as the alternation of sun and moon? It cannot be. Do you not see? Night is also a sun.

Tagged: bible, christianity, darkness, genesis, god, light, night

Gone

Benoît — Sat, 08 May 2010 15:58:45 +0000

It’s really a passing thing, this. Tumbleweed. It’s one of those universes created for a single instant for the sole purpose of housing a proton drifting between realities, yet it takes on the life of its own with ardor. “Dixitque deus fiat lux et facta est lux” – it’s just that easy. This is writing for me: something out from nothing. And then it’s gone.

Tagged: writing

Shit

Benoît — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:35:02 +0000

“Let us at once add that, on the other hand, the fact that there was on earth an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, meant there was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and full of the future, that with it the picture of the earth was fundamentally changed. In fact, it required divine spectators to appreciate the dramatic performance which then began and whose conclusion is by no means yet in sight—a spectacle too fine, too wonderful, too paradoxical, to be allowed to play itself out senselessly and unobserved on some ridiculous star or other! Since then man has been included among the most unexpected and most thrillingly lucky rolls of the dice in the game played by Heraclitus’ “great child,” whether he’s called Zeus or chance.* For himself he arouses a certain interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if something is announcing itself with him, something is preparing itself, as if the human being were not the goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise…”

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Now I have you! Certainty stands behind me: the walls are getting smaller. I know this because the distance between the toilet and the bed is less than it was yesterday. If there were a window to this room I could use the position of the light to calculate more precisely but they’d taken even that luxury away from me. So, yes, I can’t say for sure how much they’ve moved, but I know that they did. God is benevolent, he wouldn’t deceive me. And for what? Such a small joke, the smallest in fact? They’d already taken the window, so why this? Why even this? Or what if nothing’s moved and the joke’s on me? If only they’d give me a window I could precisely calculate the distance using the position of the light!

If, running as fast as you can, you inadvertently run into a wall, or any structure really, and you splatter yourself against it, then it has changed you. For the better? Worse? You know now to watch for walls when you run, but little bits and ounces of you remain on the floor where you fell; these have learned nothing, they simply remain. So you now also know that besides the sheer sense of your running as fast as you can there is an inside to you as well. Watch for walls or you’ll splatter your delicate insides. But under and below your newfound awareness are the bits and ounces you’d originally splattered all over the floor. They’re still there.

Every expenditure necessarily leaves behind a wasteful remainder, whether it be sweat, heat, or a toxic cesspool. So the construction of a city should always figure into its architecture the creation of a ghetto – such an intent has never taken place. Anyone who’s strolled through a modern ghetto, say, the west side of Chicago, knows first hand of the stretches of undeveloped land, boarded-up buildings, and people slowly strolling nowhere in particular. Left behind in the global movement of capital, a movement whose triumphs produces an increasingly disproportionate remainder, the only thing that remains for the membership of waste is to ensure they don’t get out of hand, that they don’t take on a life of their own.

This last principle can be illustrated rather simply: if you shit in the middle of your kitchen, and leave it there, you shouldn’t be surprised if maggots are birthed and fungi find a habitat. This invitation extends onwards to other consumers, and upwards to their predators, until an ecosystem has situated itself around the feces you left in the kitchen. And perhaps it now becomes improper to speak of the kitchen as your kitchen, but rather as a home, a world.

This illustration also sheds light on a well-known conclusion of both Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud: that the “depth” of the human psyche is a product of an animal homo sapiens finding itself material for figuring by the exigencies of civilization; that in the movement and mechanism of the psyche, our inner turmoil, the roots of cognition, is the waste of processes unknown to that cognition. So the purpose of moral Law, the super-ego, is to ensure that this waste product take on no life of its own. Spontaneous generation is the theory of life that permits life to take root even in the lowest recesses, shit in particular. The quotation of Nietzsche which prefaces this writing could thus be understood as a revitalization of spontaneous generation, now less a strict theory of biological reproduction than the preservation of the possibility that life become whatever else without precedent.

Tagged: biology, freud, ghettos, law, morality, nietzsche, spontaneous generation, thermodynamics

Mouth

Benoît — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 05:57:47 +0000

“…I don’t have another life. I don’t exist as another person, somewhere else doing something else with other people. There is no other me. There is no clocking off.”

Morrisey, Interview in The Times Magazine

“ Whatever they may think and say about their ‘egoism’, the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them; – as a consequence they all of them dwell in a fog of impersonal, semi-personal opinions, and arbitrary, as it were poetical evaluations, the one for ever in the head of someone else, and the head of this someone else again in the heads of others; a strange world of phantasms…”

Nietzsche, Daybreak

Do I even have a voice? Have I heard myself speak? Open the mouth. It looks seedy in there. It’s Dora’s mouth. In his dream Freud looked into his patient’s mouth and glimpsed repulsion itself; the opening was disgusting. At which point, three doctors, his colleagues, storm in with clouds of babel, diagnosing her with words serious like clowns. They speak foolishness with scientific exactitude. Most times I can’t hear myself speak over the foolishness, the clowns, Zarathustra’s arch-foe, the ape-fool; I have to hear self, my speech. And it is festering and repulsive, like Dora’s mouth. Keep looking. Open the mouth.

I’m not sure whether you’ll find some programme here. I know that I’m going in. The mouth. I’ll hear something – a voice? But not my voice, nor anyone else’s for that matter. It’ll be a cacophony, a congregation of phonemes doused in holy spirit, dancing wildly out from the throat, now in front of me, passing me by, out the mouth. And what did Saint Paul have to say of those who spoke in tongues? That they “do not speak to other people, but to God; for nobody understands them since they are speaking mysteries in the spirit.” The speakers did not wait for judgment, wait for what was to come, wait for Paul even. That would’ve meant waiting for instructions, for means, a plan. There’d have been formalities, protocols, and a waiting room – yes, Christianity as waiting room. But they didn’t wait. They were going in. The mouth.

We’ll follow their lead. Speaking in tongues was a gift of the holy spirit, it shared in the same body as all the others. But it didn’t disseminate itself amongst the idiotes , rather it returned to the source, to the share, the body of Christ, God. A tautology if ever there was one. God opened his mouth and let forth, “let there be light!” And so it was, and it was good. He opened his mouth again; it was, and it was good. Now it opens again! Is this mine, God’s? It makes no difference. We’re returning to the share, festering like Dora’s, cacophonous like God’s. The mouth.

Tagged: christianity, freud, glossolalia, saint paul

Fire

Benoît — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 05:49:06 +0000

I have a very busy schedule, so I like to take some time out of my day to set myself on fire.

There is nothing but a widening gulf between writing and written, the process and its product, which is just a new process, a new dance; it’s unfortunate you showed up so late to the ball.

I enjoy the idea of being eaten alive; I smile as I’m tossed and turned through the digestive track; I cannot yet write what sensations abound at excretion. But then it’s all over, and I remain Benoît.

If I can sneak in a quick sacrifice while I’m at work, my entire day is redeemed. This is what it is to write for me: sacrifice, or useless consumption as Bataille understood it. Your reading this doesn’t prevent the fall of the blade.

Tagged: bataille, sacrifice, writing

Something

Benoît — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 05:46:00 +0000

Etymology tells us that English “do” possess a primordial signification of placement – “to do” is to-set-in-place. This place, the space of this place, cannot exist prior to the setting or else an absolute determinism would reign and the flame of possibility would be extinguished. Instead, what is set, its setting, and the place where something is set are simultaneous: hence, to-set-in-place. Thus, doing, any doing, eternally returns us to the metaphysical question par excellence, “how does something come from nothing?”, to which our discovery of simultaneity should be replied. The void of nothing is indissolubly there together with every something in all doing;each new doing both obliterates what was prior and refounds it; time is mistaken for a linearity when it is a repetition. Eternal Return, as Bataille rightly defines it, is the terrible freedom of each and every moment, the name of their singularity.

Tagged: action, bataille, determinism, eternal return, etymology, metaphysics, nietzsche, nothing, time

Speaker

Benoît — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:14:00 +0000

An ancient tradition declares that the possession of a speaking voice separates one from the beasts. Though this dictum points to a commonality amongst all speakers, all speakers do not speak the same. Indeed, the ancient Greeks, from whom this thought is inherited, looked down upon their neighbors as adults to foolish children: “Their speech… more a bark than words; all I hear is ‘bar bar bar’,” says the Athenian of antiquity. And though we continue to discriminate against foreign tongues even today, the ancient Greek context bears an important distinction. Emphasis in Ancient Greek, unlike this English you read and repeat in your head, came from pitch rather than stress, so that to our modern ears it would effect that ‘sing-song’ character most resembling Cantonese. Ancient Greek was like a song; all the Greeks heard from the coarse, stressful tongues of their neighbors was “bar bar bar.” And so, though far enough from the beasts to qualify as men, the foreigner was regarded slightly below the civilized status of the native Hellene.

How could Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle Paul, not have inherited this tradition, being a Hellenic Jew raised in the diaspora of a major center of Greek learning and culture? His share in this heirloom of his Greek neighbors is evinced in his first epistle to the congregation in Corinth. On the one hand, speaking in tongues is a spiritual gift, a manifestation of the holy spirit, and so shares in an equality amongst all gifts in so far as all emanate from the same body, that of God. But on the other, speaking in tongues is, well, unintelligible; “[...]those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people, but to God; for nobody understands them since they are speaking mysteries in the spirit.”¹ The speaker of tongues speaks, but in an ecstatic language foreign to all intelligibility, a language that only God understands; ergo, speaking in tongues will be allowed in congregation but only if there is someone to interpret. So significant is this decision on the part of Paul that the Patristic age, the time of the erection of Christian orthodoxy that will follow two hundred years later, will only faintly know of the practice of glossolalia. The rest is history.²

Translation into local vernacular was a crucial element of early Christianity’s success; the good news must be intelligible. Yet lurking in the shadows was glossolalia, the ecstatic tongue understood by God. Neither the bare vocalizations of need belonging to animals, or a lower form of speech as designated by ethnic prejudice, nor the intelligibility of speech as such, glossolalia presents an interesting enigma in the ethico-theological considerations of Christianity made all the more intriguing by Paul’s refutation of it:

Now, brothers and sisters, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I speak to you in some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching? It is the same way with lifeless instruments that produce sound, such as the flute or the harp. If they do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is being played? And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle? So with yourselves; if in a tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is being said? For you will be speaking into the air. There are doubtless many different kinds of sound in the world, and nothing is without sound. If then I do not know the meaning of a sound, I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker a foreigner to me. So with yourselves; since you are eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for building up the church. Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive.

How Greek of Paul to align intelligible speech with mind, knowledge, and productivity! And the edification of the church as well! It is no wonder that it is to early Christianity that the reformers looked to in translating the Bible into the local vernaculars of Europe rather than permit its confinement to archaic Latin. But what does it say when spirit, the very kernel of faith, points to futility (no project, like the expansion of a church, can be built upon it), singularity (it is a language belonging to no community, not even a Christian one), and a danger to the church itself (and there is no other reason Paul directs his concern towards it), and yet arguably be the most intimate gift of God?

The crux of the matter is that intelligibility, meaning according to Paul, is marked by distinguishable sound, and so mind, and so productivity. If “nothing is without sound” then spirit, in refusing intelligibility in it’s barest manifestation, the gift of speaking in tongues, the very address of God itself, is on the side of everything rather than certain things. This would be a supplemental dimension of Christian universality if not for the antagonism between mind and spirit Paul establishes. Instead what is revealed to us is the decision between a life of ekstasis and a life of intelligibility, and the two are never reconcilable: the indifference of ekstasis annihilates³ intelligibility; intelligibility can only relate to ekstasis as superiority⁴.

The speaker, by virtue of the gift of a speaking voice, is distinguished from the beasts, but who says speech must refer to a particular, intelligible language? What is speech itself? Perhaps this is the true mystery, of the spirit even, whose answer thus far has only been in the ecstatic language of the speaker of tongues.

notes

¹1 Cor 14:2. All citations belong to the NRSV translation of the New Testament.

²I’m not at all interested in discussing the revival of this practice in the Pentecostal movement. Moreover any connection to what is discussed in 1 Corinthians would have had to endure nearly two millenia of obscurity.

³What does it mean that ecstasis “annihilates” at all, for surely it cannot be the case that it destroys anything or makes anything impossible (remember that it is marked by futility)? ‘Annihilate’ may even be the wrong word to use here. Perhaps ‘displaces’ would’ve been more appropriate, but I prefer the force of ‘annihilation’.

⁴Intelligible speech, and the community that gathers around it, neccessarily subjugates what is discards to the nether realm of nonsense. Minority is inevitable.

Tagged: christianity, ekstasis, glossolalia, language, paul, reason, speech

Peak

Benoît — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:29:00 +0000

Since all time poets had spoken of life and their own soul. But not philosophers. And saints had always lived their life and that of their own soul. But once again, not philosophers. Yet here there arrived a man who knew his life and his soul like a poet and obeyed their voice like a saint, and yet he was a philosopher. It almost doesn’t matter today what he philosophized about. The “Dionysian” and the “Übermensch”, the blonde beast, the eternal return – Where have they gone? But he himself, who, in the metamorphoses of his figures of
thought, himself metamorphosed, he himself whose soul did not fear any height, but who followed in his climbing the madly daring mind of mountain climbers, up to the sheer peak of madness where there was nothing beyond, it is he whom none who must philosophize can henceforth bypass.

Franz Rosenzweig on Friedrich Nietzsche, The Star of Redemption

Tagged: nietzsche, rosenzweig

Hand

Benoît — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:59:00 +0000

Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange tempting, dangerous ideal to which we should not wish to persuade anybody because we do not readily concede the right to it to anyone: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively – that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance – with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom those supreme things that the people naturally accept as their value standards, signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion; the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often appear inhuman- for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody – and in spite of all this, it is perhaps only with him that great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Tagged: ekstasis, freud, glossolalia, lacan, nietzsche, paul, rosenzweig, writing

Drift

Benoît — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:06:00 +0000

This will be my… frankly I don’t know what number I’m on, but know that this is my most recent attempt at blogging. I flirt with it as a boy untrained in the ways of courtship, which is to say that I largely run the other way once I realize there really is some Other here. It is of course not the format or scope of a blog that evokes trepidation (however much I’d like to localize such cause) but writing itself. Writing ruins me.

A friend writes:

Knowledge and wisdom are both a show. They are a presentation of gestures. A man of knowledge, of wisdom, speaks in a certain way, sits in a certain way, dresses, stands and walks in a certain way. Civilization has spent thousands of years developing all the little, nuanced movements that indicate knowledge and wisdom. And we are all impressed when it is done well. It is no more than that. Ask a learned man about Plato and he will fumble and grunt and look here and there giving those fine signs of breadth and depth of spiritual and cultural understanding. That’s enough. He is impressive.

What does writing ruin exactly? Why am I its secret admirer (and only that)? I will be as straightforward as possible: I have it in my head what I will appear as as a philosopher; the writing has nothing to do with it. What does this suggest? That some trieb (I prefer Lacan’s nomenclature for Freud’s German here, drift) concerns itself with the form of a philosopher but not their content. So it finds writing to be a solvent, something acidic, and commands, “and here no further!” And most of the time there is compliance, the manifold drifting which I am understands the syntattein this implies. This is how Nietzsche understood the psyche, as the drives’ jostling for position, for the right to command and call the army into array. This accomplished, all living and alteration of the word thereof is only an effect of the presiding arrangement. So an image of myself as a philosopher comes to mind, moving his hands this way and that, speaking in that relaxed tone of voice we all remember from our undergraduate philosophy courses. The image is comforting; I am comforted.

Why then write now? The answer is obvious: The arrangement has fallen apart and I’ve drifted elsewhere. It is unknown to me how long this little leaf will be allowed to blow in the wind, but for the time being I am delivered over to ruin. When I drift into writing, I do not write like a philosopher, which is to say a scholar. I write with my eyes closed and then open them to whatever world has been brought before them. The general’s horn is blown and the manifold drift knows its syntattein. For however long this arrangement stands, the gestures are different, the effects are different, the living is different. I am different; I am ruined.

Tagged: freud, lacan, nietzsche, writing