Thursday, June 12, 2008

"Redemption"

I will always share that poignant disagreement with a certain colleague, on account of my faith and her lack thereof. She preaches a freedom that albeit difficult, in the size of the grand narratives, is not necessarily practical and leads by default to an acute shortage of world-time, even if still we share the common bond of time elsehow being shortened, opening wide the mouth of the wolves - the gate of Apocalypse; with the dismiss of our philosophical traditions we are always creating (therefore not acting) from a certain point between zero and infinite, a cosmic point of departure between one nothing above and one nothing below.

While this perspective is not one of Nihilism, its danger lies on the extension of its boundlessness. One is being reflected from the perspective of time´s belatedness, or backward position, like philosophizing from behind the Sun. The less space there´s in the world, the less time there´s to live, such a simple empirical observation.

Redemption could not become a practical state, a "mood" of praxis like that which turned Marxism´s utopian ideal into a murderous creature, not entirely innocent from the perspective of the tradition of metaphysics though. The legimitation and legibility of those philosophies culminated in trains that departed East, instead of simply wandering aloof in the train stations like all Moderns.

Messianism, like Modernity, retains a liquid quality in its own givenness, a flow of arguments and events; thus the Messianic isn´t translated into freedom (differentiating freedom from liberties), but is a condition thereof. The essence of Messianism isn´t to be free eo ipse, but to become reconciled. In the dialectic of mere forgiving (and foregoing) as not taking revenge and taking revenge as not forgiving there´s no freedom. Atonement isn´t penitence and purgatories, neither forgiving nor reconciliation, if only, it´s fixing a world different from the immanent eternal universe above us of olden days; it is a world broken as a natural state of decay and not because of Christian damnation but by the forces of nature and the hand of men in the plural.

Thus the statement "something like this shouldn´t be possible in the world". In this sense, atoning and reconciling are acted in the world as miracles, something that acts out the impossible, that is, to undo something, a miracle at the most basic ontological level. Messianism can´t be a philosophy or a socio-political arrangement (like the modern arrangement and the discussion over justice and human rights); those at best could be Messianistic representations, or reproductions when we´re unable to represent to ourselves.

Messianism is a broken narrative, the ability for speech at any point, the ability to tell a story whichever from any experiential cluster, a story to be legitimated not as history nor by praxis or necessity, but by truth. Messianism in philosophy isn´t soothsaying about the future like in Fortgeschichte; it is a knowledge of the future as Marxism would say, but only as the hope for reconciliation, everything else is but gnostic witchcraft.

Redemption isn´t the reconciliation after the end of times, but the possibility to become reconciled with anything at any point not just in history but in the life one lives above all, in the truth one has agreed upon; the extrememost possibility to accept the world and its horrors with more irony and often melancholy than with wrath and revenge. The reconciliation isn´t just an act with a temporal locus to be dully acted out and repeated ad infinitum; but more of a world-attitude yet unlike others, it´s an orientation such as ethos in being.

Reconciliation denotes particularly (like thoughts and truth that are only particular) responsibility, the ability to respond. Thus the potential of this miracle isn´t political but also therapeutic. The creation of spirit devoid of superstition out of the tissue of reality, namely, out of the impossibility to live in the horizon of time in its absolute essential meaning (like the Neoplatonic only-present), for essentiality demands to be filled with a content unavailable without a particular reality, a reality with psycho-social content.

Thus we understand that the absolute correlation between subject and object is one of those futile eternal fallacies of metaphysics and Idealism; man alone is a stranger in the world precisely because the world is a construct in the temporal horizon made at least by two men, neighbour or not. Therefore to appear in the correlation of objects of the worlds as being it is necessary first and foremost a correlation between at least two human beings. In a godless world, reconcilation is this very bridge to make the correlation possible.