Foiled Again

On Sunday night K. and I were roaming around Glasgow, to and fro, from the Tall Ship to the Necropolis did we go. On our way back, we ran into somebody who undoubtedly has read these. K., because she is far more kind and tolerant than I, accepted one of his pamphlets, entitled Frequently Asked Questions In the Glasgow City Centre, but then promptly put it in my jacket pocket upon walking away. I finally read it this afternoon while eating lunch:

(1) Who Made God?

Would you expect a dog to buy and read a daily newspaper? No! [Yes, the exclamation point was his.] That is not because a newspaper cannot be understood, but because it is beyond a dog's understanding.

In like manner, God is bigger than anything a mere human can grasp. If I could understand Him, He would not be God and I would not be a man!

God had no beginning and will never end. Everything we know begins and ends, but God is greater than that. He is everlasting. God's word to us, the Bible, teaches that God is absolutely holy, with no sin in Him at all. He is just, and loving. He has all power. He is everywhere. He knows everything, and never changes.

God is creator of all things. All design has a designer; behind everything made, there will be a maker; creation must have a creator. This is God. Because He is our maker; we are responsible to Him. He knows what is best for us.

Is it just me, or is this God, the one described here if nothing else, which 'no mere human can grasp', is really quite graspable after all, maybe even a little too much so? I understand the notion of the Bible as 'revelation', but nobody has yet adequately to explain to me how we, again as 'mere humans', can deal with the implications of or interpret said revelation. That is, if it, the revelation, is supposed to point toward something beyond our feeble, consciousness-laden mushy minds, can we really articulate what the revelation is said to reveal?

I was all prepared to inquire about this, in hopes that I might rehearse the section of my thesis on Fichte's notion of Anstoss -- i.e., the unlimited activity of the I's self-reflection via the not-I -- and Schelling's exploration of Freedom. Namely -- how does it happen that God pronounces the Word and thereby discloses himself, appears to himself? Which is to say, how does the In-Itself Freedom of God split from itself, in such a way to be able to identify itself as 'itself'; how does it acquire a distance toward itself and thus clear the space in which it can appear (to itself)?

So, yeah, I was all prepared to go on about this; but, as it was, K. was hungry. Silly woman.

'Mememormee, mememormee . . .'

BEWARE THESE HOOLIGANS TWO.

That's More Like It

Consider this a follow-up to my previous post.

Better Things To Do With $10, Isn't There?

Recently I was asked for an opinion on Mel Gibson's sequel to Braveheart (okay, maybe not), The Passion of Christ. More specifically: 'Do you think it will be anti-Semitic?' My reply did not directly answer the question, mostly because I'm a very poor listener; but, in hindsight, I think it might have done so pretty concisely. My basic response was, and is:

Does the world, Christian or otherwise, really need another literal re-telling of Jesus' death, as depicted in the Gospels?

I mean, really, hasn't this story been done to death already?

I've nothing against religious liturgy, or even believing in the salvific or symbolic importance of Jesus' death, but prattling on about the historical details of such a death at some point borders on a weird, kind of sick voyeurism. The obvious objection to this is that artists have for centuries depicted the passion narratives, and yet I've not yet whined about any of them. The difference is, at least for the best art, is that the literal details themselves are not, in the end, the point. One gets the impression, in fact, that they could have been painted, in full faith, without any knowledge of such details at all. They are usually iconic, sometimes ironically, inasmuch as they beckon an infinite gaze that can never nail things down (pun intended).

I do not get the impression this is the intention of Gibson's film, any more than it was for DeMille's King of Kings, Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, or Lean and Steven's The Greatest Story Ever Told. There's nothing wrong with something not being 'artistic' (i.e., in the way that I privileged above), but purveyors of historical-minded Christological kitsch should not be too surprised or appalled to find it branded as anti-Semitic. Quite simply, it is difficult to tell the story, as depicted in the Gospels, without putting some Jews in a very bad light. By the time the Johannine community was reading the Gospel of John, they've probably been thrown out of the Temple (and thus out of Judaism as such) and, thus were no longer protected from Roman edicts against unsanctioned religions. One might be a little surprised, I suppose, if a little animosity wasn't harbored and comeuppance foreseen. However, in light of the present situation, with history having reversed the roles on several occasions, in dramatically violent sweeps, one would be even more surprised if many contemporary readers did not anachronistically uncover a fair bit of anti-Semitism. Expecting these latter readers to simply 'return to the original context' is the near equivalent of telling victims of trauma to 'forgive and forget'.

I'm not saying the Passion narratives are necessarily anti-Semitic, but neither am I saying that they ought not be read as such. The burden is on the purveyors and guardians of the narratives to find a way to affirm their value in light of their historical abuse. Which is why I ask again:

Does the world, Christian or otherwise, really need another literal re-telling of Jesus' death, as depicted in the Gospels?

Surely one would do far better by watching its horrific retelling, of a sort, in Lars Van Trier's Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. But then again, the adults who will soon be lining up to see The Passion, perhaps even taking their kids, in hopes that the death rattle of Christ will compel them away from sex and evolution, are likely the very same people who signed petitions against The Last Temptation of Christ.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Why should I say anything at all, when I have a kitten and foul-mouthed hedgehogs [that last one, by the way, is not safe for work] can say everything for me.

Happenings

To tell the truth, I'd kill for you
It's sick I know, but after all
My definition of the word:
Love is blind, love is good. ('Love', The Twilight Singers)

I've been telling people, anyone who will listen really, that I dislike Glasgow, that I'm ready to leave this forsaken city for sunnier skies and greener vegetables, that it is time to return to the country that needs me most, that it is time to go home. A part of me thinks it is the weather. Winters here are, in two words, a bitch. Not too cold. Certainly not too sunny. Just the same: day in, day out . . . the same. It's no wonder these people drink themselves to an early grave, or that I very likely have shaven a few off my own life. Or, then again, maybe it's just the really lousy exchange rate. After all, over the past couple of months, the value of my dollar has decreased by about 10% every thirty days; in fact, since arriving a couple of years, it's lost about 45% of its overall value. If I were just buying food every now and then, I might not even notice the hit. But when there's tuition to be paid, it's kind of difficult to be nearly so obtuse.

And yet . . .

It is Valentine's Day, no? If I'm not necessarily going to be any better boyfriend to Katrien, I should at least be a more amiable person in general. With that in mind, I'm not going to mull on these details. There are, for now, more important things to tell you about. Namely, The Twilight Singers. As I mentioned in a previous post, I got a chance to see them in action a couple of weeks ago; what I didn't mention, however, was that for about two hours, they made me absolutely forget not only my present dislike for Glasgow but, oddly, all the intervening years from when I was twenty years old until now. Those college years of mine were spent listening to the Afghan Whigs, thrashing about wildly at their concerts in Cincinnati and Columbus, oblivious to everyone and all. They were, and still are, the best live band I've ever seen. When they broke up in 1999, I decided that was the sign that it was time to put college things behind me -- to move on to more sophisticated things. To a bit of jazz. To classical. Hell, even an opera or two. On January 30th, though, at the King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, I hit a worm hole or something such, and found myself back in 1997, held in complete awe by a pudgy, unremarkable looking gravely-voiced, bourbon-drinking former Afghan Whig frontman named Greg Dulli.

The Twilight Singers are not as good as the Whigs at their height -- the intuitive mix between the band members just ain't there. But the energy, oh yeah, they got that in spades. Greg Dulli on stage is rough sex incarnate: sweaty, grunty, and a little jiggly. He thinks he is the coolest, sexiest thing in the room, and everybody at some point during the show, even if only for a moment, believes it. In the ensuing frottage of singer and audience, you can't help but start feeling the same thing about yourself. People who never dance bootylicious-style, like me, who never scream 'Fucking Aaaaaaaaaa' at the top of their lungs, unlike me, do so. Every room Dulli's bands walk into becomes a party, an intoxicated saturnalia whose hangover you'll greet with a wink and a smile.

You think I'm exaggerating, I know. I'm being hyperbolic, to offset the pissy mood this city sometimes puts me in. The only way you can be sure, though, is to check this band out when they come to your town or a town near you. Do so, and I promise you'll be kicking a boot in any television showing MTV-2, because you will have been truly reminded what rock music could and should be.

Rested. Though Not Yet Ready

January 30th?? Has it been that long since I've graced the halls of Silentio. One hundred apologies to all who've come and have seen little of note. Only one apology to those of you who have come to expect little of note but who come regularly anyway. The reason for my silence, outside of having very little to say, is that I've been hosting a couple of good friends from the States. I've a few things to say, post-trip, but they will have to wait a few more hours at least.

Incidentally, said friends will, we can hope, arrive safely home sometime tomorrow. Upon reading this I have a message, though really I guess it is for you all, even those I don't know because I'm just that kind of guy: Miss you terribly.

Busy Busy

Life has had to take precedence over blogging the past couple of days. Apologies to the newcomers -- the old hands, they know the program, so no apologies necessary for them. I decided that, what with it being my final year here in Scotland, that I really ought to have a current curriculum vitae. Those suckers are hard work, particularly when you are as unspectacular on paper as I am! Not sure how much'll get done this weekend, either, since I'm going to spend much of tomorrow readying my ass to shake at the Twilight Singers gig later that evening. But, we'll see.

Hope you Midwestern / Northeastern Americans stocked up sufficiently for the winter.

Eh?

A Name to Remember

Harold Ford, this is a name to remember -- he may very well be the future face of Democratic politics. Savvy, centrist, pragmatic. And, yes, black.

Need something to attach to his name?

Imagine an America where a 13-year-old girl attending a struggling public school logs on to the Internet or turns on CNBC every day to check her stock portfolio before her parents come home from work. Sound far-fetched? Not if you live in Britain, where Tony Blair's government has established child trust funds for every newborn Briton, beginning with an initial deposit of $400 to $800. The accounts grow with compound interest and with tax-free contributions. When a child reaches 18, the money is hers.

Meanwhile, here in America, President Bush plans to unveil his own series of proposals to create a new "ownership society." But his plan, unlike his British counterpart's, does little to help build the assets of those who have none. At least one-quarter of Americans are considered "asset poor" -- meaning they could survive no more than three months without a source of income.

[. . .]

The president's plan focuses on creating new tax shelters for existing wealth. A wiser policy is to help more people become investors. For $40 billion over the next 10 years -- less money than the president's plan -- we can build upon the British model and establish an "American Stakeholder Account," seeded with $1,000, for every child born in America. Children living below the poverty line could start with $2,000. Additional contributions would reward children for performing community service and completing high school. Upon graduation, the young adult could use accumulated savings tax-free to pay college tuition, purchase a home, start a business or invest for retirement.

[. . .]

Building assets is not about combating inequality. Rewarding hard work, risk-taking and initiative is the American way. The problem is that too many low- to middle-income Americans are accumulating no real wealth despite working harder for longer hours. Without ways to reward work with an asset base that grows over time, it will be nearly impossible for these families to provide a better future for their children.

A true "ownership society" is one where all Americans have a stake. At the same time as we improve education, we should give every family the tools to achieve its financial aspirations. We should give every child an ownership stake in America's future.

You don't even need to agree with the entire editorial to be impressed with the rhetoric -- i.e., a very clever co-opting of Bush's so-called 'Ownership Society' -- and the clarity and specificity of actual, holy hell you mean there' smore than just re-election politics(????), policy. All of which give us something to think about. When is the last time we could say that of Preznit (who pissed off God and got us stuck with this guy?) Bush?

Deeper, Baby! Deeper!

The Congressional Budget Office released its new deficit projection numbers yesterday and, well, it ain't erotic poetry, but it does paint a picture of something squishy, deep, and penetrating to the core. (Yes, I'm just trying to boost my hits with that sentence.) This is, of course, on the hells of Bush's assurance to his Republican constituents (everybody else knew he was lying) in last week's State of the Union address that he was going to cut the deficit in half in the next five years. I don't guess the CBO got that memo.

Max explains:

Around the end of this period [2014], the Baby Boom retirements are revving up and we could transition from trouble to deep doo-doo, as redemptions of Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund assets soak up more income tax revenue.

At that point, President Neil Bush might as well redesign Old Glory to depict Chiquita Banana. That's the shape we'll be in. Or perhaps he will request that the U.S. be annexed as a new province of the Peoples Republic of China. If you don't like it, you must hate America.

For more, see Krugman.

Echo . . . Echo . . . Echo

It may seem repetitive to say the same thing the same thing the same thing over and over and over again. Indeed, it undoubtedly is repetitive. But in an age of digitally shared files and interactive technology, but more importantly in a country where the dominant media has to be shown up by a comedian, repetition is not just a necessary evil, the way the game's played: it is the game itself.

With that prologue out of the way, take it way Mr. Soros:

Even today, many people believe that September 11 justifies behaviour that would be unacceptable in normal times. The ideologues of American supremacy and President Bush personally never cease to remind us that September 11 changed the world. It is only as the untoward consequences of the invasion of Iraq become apparent that people are beginning to realise something has gone woefully wrong.

We have fallen into a trap. The suicide bombers' motivation seemed incomprehensible at the time of the attack; now a light begins to dawn: they wanted us to react the way we did. Perhaps they understood us better than we understand ourselves.

And we have been deceived. When he stood for election in 2000, President Bush promised a humble foreign policy. I contend that the Bush administration has deliberately exploited September 11 to pursue policies that the American public would not have otherwise tolerated. The US can lose its dominance only as a result of its own mistakes. At present the country is in the process of committing such mistakes because it is in the hands of a group of extremists whose strong sense of mission is matched only by their false sense of certitude.

This distorted view postulates that because we are stronger than others, we must know better and we must have right on our side. That is where religious fundamentalism comes together with market fundamentalism to form the ideology of American supremacy.

As Vaara points out, there's a reason the right wing elite hate this guy -- which seems as good a reason as any, I think, for everybody to read his latest book.

Sometimes Things Are Alright

When he walked in on him in early December, he put on some Glenn Miller and then he bent over and said to Mr. Grossman, "Lew, when you're up in heaven with your friend, Roy, and you will be in heaven, you've been in purgatory down here, how would you like to be remembered? I'm a lawyer and I can do anything you need to have done. But tell me, how do you want to be remembered?"

Mr. Grossman looked up at Mr. Keating and whispered, "I want to be remembered." He tried to stop himself from crying.

"You will be remembered," said Mr. Keating, his eyes damp too. "I will always remember you. People ask me about you all the time. And I say, You're a fabulous person. Knows more about music than anyone I know. What else should I say?"

"I don't know," Mr. Grossman said.

"Well, I know. I'm lucky to have you as a friend."

"Yes."

"You mean an awful lot to me."

"You mean a lot to me."

"I know I do. Let's listen to Ella Fitzgerald, shall we?"

The invention of solitude, friendship, and the coping with death. It's all here.

My Nightmare

A German woman married to a Brooklyn schoolteacher had been told that she had all her papers in order when she took a quick trip to show off her infant daughter to her parents in Germany.

But her return home in late December turned surreal and terrifying when Homeland Security officials at Kennedy Airport rejected her travel documents, confiscated her passport, then detained her and the 3-month-old overnight in a room with shackled drug suspects. They let her go only after ordering her to leave the country no later than tomorrow.

After a month of desperate efforts by her American husband, their lawyers and legislators, late yesterday a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department said that the woman, Antje Croton, 36, would be granted a last-minute reprieve. But Mrs. Croton said she had received no written notification. "I'm in a nightmare," she said as she packed yesterday afternoon, having abandoned hope of straightening out the problem. "I feel like I'm in the wrong movie."

[. . .]

He pointed out that other foreigners with fewer resources have been caught in the same kind of bureaucratic confusion ever since the Immigration and Naturalization Service was absorbed by the Department of Homeland Security last year.

Mrs. Croton has lived in Park Slope for five years, and her application for a green card has been pending for nearly two. When her sister urged her to visit Germany, she wanted to take no chances. So in October, she said, she asked immigration officials at 26 Federal Plaza about getting a new travel permit.

According to her account, an immigration official, C. E. Herndandez, insisted that her old permit was still valid, though it had a July expiration date, because it bore a stamp saying "April 2004." Reassured, Mrs. Croton departed on Dec. 9. "I did everything by the rules," Mrs. Croton said.

But on Dec. 22, when she returned to Kennedy Airport at 9 p.m., exhausted after a 10-hour trip alone with her baby daughter, Clara, front-line border security officers barred her way. They said the immigration official had been wrong: the July 2003 expiration, not the April 2004 stamp, applied, and she could not enter the United States.

They interrogated her until 2 a.m., she said, as she wept, tried to nurse her baby and pleaded with officials to call her husband, who was waiting without word in the terminal.

K. (a Belgian national, for those of you not keeping score) and I aren't married or anything yet, but, still, this kind of thing scares the hell out of me.

Our Dear Leader Speaketh

In spite of my better judgment, I just read the transcript from last night's State of the Union address. I am truly baffled, perplexed, completely fucking gobsmacked by the fact that any self-respecting, halfway intelligent person would vote for him in November. I know (and even like!) several Republicans, and even they emailed to say they were cringing last night -- the only thing that got them through the sad incoherent nothingness of the speech (perhaps he's embraced Zen, I wonder) was chanting their fight song: 'War on terror, cha cha cha, foreign terror, choo choo choo . . .' When the biggest selling point of a president is something that most Democrats readily support, albeit in a different, more rhetorically & diplomatically measured form, I really don't see the point of thinking this guy a good buy for your electoral money.

There isn't too much of substance in the speech, and what's there aren't really, in the most technical sense, lies. To use a crass metaphor: I guess it's more a matter of an inmate whispering to you, as his tattoo-scarred cadre of buddies grab your arms, 'I dropped my soap near your feet, can you pick it up for me.' If you don't know the disingenious set up by now, well, you very well will soon. In the case of this administration, it seems, most people who vote for Bush won't realize the effect until after he's gone, where they will then blame whichever Democrat has taken office.

There is, though, a particularly loathsome juxtaposition towards the end. Sets my blood ablaze:

A strong America must also value the institution of marriage. I believe we should respect individuals as we take a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization. Congress has already taken a stand on this issue by passing the Defense of Marriage Act, signed in 1996 by President Clinton. That statute protects marriage under federal law as a union of a man and a woman, and declares that one state may not redefine marriage for other states.

Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage. (Applause.)

The outcome of this debate is important -- and so is the way we conduct it. The same moral tradition that defines marriage also teaches that each individual has dignity and value in God's sight. (Applause.)

Every individual has dignity and value in God's sight, just not the right to legalized love and companionship, insurance coverage, tax benefits, et al. Thanks for the dignity and value, God. As always, you come in handy once again.

A Note

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

Whoooooo . . . jokes about bombs at airports, they sure are funny, aren't they?

A note to every maturity-stunted young adult out there who gets a giggle out of scribbling bomb threats in airplane lavatories or snickering about explosives in carry-on luggage, whereever you may be, your crime is not suspected terrorism -- yes, your weeping parents are right, you are not Osama Bin Ladin. No, yours is something else: it is a crime against humor. When the only person liable to laugh at a joke is you, then it probably ain't worth saying. Jokes are, by their very nature, participatory -- even when they're at somebody else's expense. Otherwise, you are on par with the homeless drunk who tells you the same incoherent funny every day.

In the case of this young Brit, I'm sure her fellow inmates in Miami have a few jokes for her to take back home.

Stream. Of. Conscious

Michael D. and I are trying to talk this guy into speaking at our conference in May as a replacement for Douglas Rushkoff (who, by the way, is conducting a very interesting looking -- FREE!! -- online course called "Theoretical Perspectives on Interactivity" starting Wednesday afternoon).

A Poem For Record Players

The scene changes

Five hours later and
I come into a room
where a clock ticks.
I find a pillow to
muffle the sounds I make.
I am engaged in taking away
from God his sounds.
The pigeons somewhere
above me, the cough
a man makes down the hall,
the flap of wings
below me, the squeak
of sparrows in the alley.
The scratches I itch
on my scalp, the landing
of birds under the bay
window out my window.
All dull details
I can only describe to you,
but which are here and
I hear and shall never
give up again, shall carry
with me over the streets
of this seacoast city,
forever; oh clack your
metal wings, god, you are
mine now in the morning.
I have you by the ears
in the exhaust pipes of
a thousand cars gunning
their motors turning over
all over town.

(John Weiner, from his Hotel Wentley Poems [1958])

I attended a really interesting lecture yesterday on the poetry of John Wiener, and I've walked away a fan. Track this book down today, and get it on one of the best kept secrets of American poetry!

Another Letter to a Young Theologian [Part 2] (the last one, I promise!!; or A Post That I Suspect Only Two People Will Want to Read

In the Christian tradition, the theologian's desire to 'know' God has often taken on the sexually euphemistic notion of 'knowing'. In his study on depictions of the Crucifixion in medieval Europe, Richard Trexler notes that it was customary for Jesus' crucified body to be regarded as a 'volume to be penetrated' ('Gendering Jesus Crucified' [1993], 108-09). Thus one might find Jesus appearing and quickly embracing Rupert von Deutz in a dream, kissing him, and then opening his mouth, 'so that I could kiss him more deeply'. Battista Varani is even more literal with his desired penetration when he expresses the wish to wriggle into Christ's dying body in search of his Saviour's heart.¹

To further consider the character of theology, death as such, of course, is never the end. The character eyes death, but, in order to remain a character, can never make the step beyond. 'Dying is not an event', Martin Heidegger points out. 'It is a phenomenon to be understood existentially' (Being and Time [1962], 284). The 'being-towards-death' that identifies one as an individual, then, is an impossible gift and destination, namely because 'every relation to death is an interpretive apprehension and a representative approach to [one's own] death' (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death [1995], 45). Unwrapping this 'gift of death', we end up only playing with its bows and strings.² '[O]ne never dies now', we hear from beyond the grave, 'one always dies later, in the future -- in a future that is never actual, that cannot come except when everything will be over and done' (Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature [1982], 164-65). The grave matters, then, because this 'beyond' is within, we are forever separated from ourselves, from our beginning and ending.³ That which once seemed familiar or present has actually always been foreign and absent, ever-'becoming' itself in relation to an infinitely other. Consequently, 'identity, which we attempt to support and unify under a mask, is in itself only a parody; it is plural; countless spirits dispute its possession, systems intersect and compete' (Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' [1977], 161). This, however, inevitably leads us to one further question.

Who is the character of theology? Which of the character 'I's steps into character on theology's stage? Its self-imposed split, the 'I Am that I Am', this tear has pained theology beyond measure. 'But what is pain?' Heidegger wonders.

Pain tears or rends. It is the tear or rift [Riss]. But it does not tear apart into dispersive fragments. Pain indeed tears asunder, it separates, yet in such a way that it at the same time draws everything together to itself. Its rending, as a separating that gathers, . . . draws and joins together what is held apart in separation. (Poetry, Language, Thought [1971], 204)

Similarly, theology's character is not, nor has it ever been, transparent. If, as Frank Kermode has suggested, there is 'a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end', all presence is a presentation whose 'subject' is only ever 'becoming' (Sense of an Ending [1967], 4).⁴ This is perhaps what I have been trying to say all along, that this redemptive self-presentation is a necessary fiction, one that I cannot help but regard as thoroughly, albeit peculiarly, theological, as it is being constructed in and as an impossible narrative that is never sure how to begin.

******
¹ Also see Jean Wirth, L'image m?di?vale: naissance et d?veloppements, VIe-XVe si?cle (1989), 323; and 'La naissance de J?sus dans le coeur: ?tude iconographique' (1989), 149?58. Citing Wirth once more, Trexler also notes: 'Long before modern psychoanalytic insights, the genital implications of such penetrations were clear among late fifteenth-century German printmakers, who might, for instance, provocatively place the crucified Jesus' pierced, externalised heart over the space where his genitals belonged' ('Gendering Jesus Crucified', 109).

² Notably, Derrida's title, The Gift of Death [Donner la mort], equivocates between the ordinary meaning ascribed to donner, 'to give', and the idiom, 'to put to death' (as in se donner la mort, 'to commit suicide').

³ Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas (1943), 35. Most of Blanchot's best writing comes when he attempts to reflect on the implications of his own insights. For instance, apropos to the realisation above he reflects:

But what is 'humanism'? In what terms can we define it without engaging in the logos of a definition? In those terms that will remove it farthest from a language: the cry (that is to say the murmur), cry of need or protest, cry without word, without silence, ignoble cry where, perhaps, the cry writes the graffiti of high walls. It is possible, as one likes to state, that 'man passes away.' He fades. He even has always already passed, faded, to the extent that he has always been suited for his own disappearance. But, in passing, he cries; he cries in the street, in the desert; he cries while dying; he does not cry, he is the murmur of the cry (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation [1993]).

⁴ It should not be surprising that Kermode goes on to suggest that 'we may call books fictive models of the temporal world' (54). Cf., '[W]e experience the "fictionalization" of history as an "explanation" for the same reason that we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author. In both we recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the world it seeks to inhabit' (Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism [1978], 99).

One Good Turn Deserves Another

In response to this post, dedicated to me as it is, I in turn dedicate this article to Pat.

A teaser:

Theory is a way of problematizing, of wondering about what we are saying and doing, about what we think we are saying or doing, and whether that is what is really being said or done, or whether something else has silently crept over us and turned it into something else altogether. In theory of the deconstructive sort, one could put "quotation marks" or "scare quotes" around each and every word or fragment or sentence, practice or institution, and problematize it, ruminate over it, worry over it. The trick lies not in knowing when to do that—you always can—but to know when not to do that. It depends upon a Socratic demon that warns us to leave this or that alone for the time being because it would represent a more strategic intervention to worry about something else instead.

Theory is endless suspicion and mistrust. But it is not the jaundiced eyed mistrust that believes nothing and does nothing and that slanders everyone who tries, but the kind of felicitous mistrust that somehow finds a way to cohabit with faith, which mistrusts the present in the name of the future. Theory, and the theory astir in deconstruction in particular, doubts the present because of its faith in the future, its love of the à venir, of what is always and structurally to come, so that the Messiah never actually shows up, since if he does, then he is no longer what is to come. What deconstruction will have done, and the way that it will live on, after Derrida, after deconstruction itself, lies in its insistence on the future, on what is coming, and on the courage it takes to keep the future open. Theory is the endless problematizing of our beliefs and practices, the bottomless suspicion that our current beliefs and practices are unworthy servants of the future, unfaithful to the open-endedness of the future, the anxiety that the present tends to ensconce itself in its presence and to close off what is coming. If there were no theory, there would be no future, just the endless repetition of the same. Resistance to theory is reactionary. To resist theory is to resist the future in order to cling to the present. Theory pries the present open to the future, making possible the coming of the impossible, in the name not of doubt but of faith, not of contempt but of love. To understand the future of theory would require understanding the future of love.

I will, later this week, write a bit more about this.