Katechon

“Katechon”[1]
To Ivan Kellmer, busy with halting the End of Times

"Thus as Kafka puts it, there's an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement [to Max Brod] really contains Kafka's hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity[2]"- W. Benjamin


μναθεναι τινα φαμι και υστερον αμμενων[3]

I

26th December 1804

My dearest F,

It is a real that pity I was unable to return into England as I had promised you over Easter last year but the situation with the poet is remarkably sad… “Now if one were to step into this unfortunate man's house, he certainly would not expect to meet a poet who had merrily wandered along the Ilyssus with Plato; but the house is not ugly, it is the dwelling of a prosperous carpenter; a man who has an uncommon degree of culture for a man of his standing, and who speaks about Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, Tieck and others[4]” not because I regret his wandering moods but because he has been recklessly useless and as his mind deteriorates day after day he has not written one single line in years “… The saddest sight I've seen during my stay here was that of Hölderlin… since this unfortunate journey, his spirit has become completely disturbed, and although he has proved capable of a few works, such as the translations from the Greek, he is otherwise thoroughly absent of spirit.[5]” Oftentimes I stare into him for rather lengthy periods of time and I think about how much is the God of history weaving into his thread for our Europe nowadays as it had been never imagined or imaged by any of our thinkers, not even the most far-fetched theologians and painters of the times 'To this point the world spirit has got now. The last philosophy is the result of all earlier ones; nothing is lost, all principles are conserved. This concrete idea is the result of the exertions of the spirit through almost twenty-five hundred years'[6] –the French revolution seems to be the lowest momentum of European law as inherited from Rome and the academies prefer to dwell in the lies of the French philosophers than to truly educate the public in the only thing they need to know in order to enter both the world of philosophy and the kingdom of God –some little poetry and Greek literature. The Germans have been always vulgar and tasteless but good Christians so that no poet had any grudge against them while they were entirely left out from German poetry in the spirit of all times and replaced by Germanic idols that most likely knew Latin before any German at all and that could have never lived here or in the new and greater Berlin but in lands that could be occupied only by Swiss farmers and not Greek gods. I am then of the belief that this town and the whole of Europe could use much better a poet to save them from the disgrace of their own making than the mayor of Tübingen could use a librarian –being this a place where only clergymen or revolutionaries of the lowest kind are gifted enough for reading anything beyond anti-Semitic pamphlets and Luther.

And it is perhaps a fact of this world that the only remarkable poet of this nation that is not boring to death as of today and with the sole exception of Heine, shall debate himself in between municipal politics and infrequent but total insanity in order to save himself from the catastrophe that he himself forecasted for this continent and that in Germany has started years ago with the division of the kingdom of God into some stupid polities controlled by a mass of uneducated farmers that received their authority from the very same Gutenberg press that meant the beginning of a new Europe… “Hölderlin, however, is extremely upset; he receives such visits with the greatest displeasure and is always more disturbed afterwards[7]”, at the cost of a little unfashionable Protestant chapel where not even hunger comes around in fear of dirtying in anyway the long white benches over which sermons are to be heard in the cold dark every Sunday noon while it is sunny and beautiful outside; “The sight of him was unsettling to me: he neglects his appearance to the point of repugnance, and though his speech is less suggestive of madness, he has taken on the outward mannerism of those in such a condition. There is no hope of being able to restore him to health here…[8]” I think it is but a great time to be an Englishman and even in the dull solemnity of the middle lands I am of the belief that you find in yourself some trust about the venture of conquering the world and throwing the whole of mankind to the seas like your nation has taught you, whereas Germany remains convinced that it is a loftier enterprise to defy the authority of God than to challenge a dot in anything proscribed by the Prussian authorities. For your own perusal do remember Kant saying that there’s a need to deny reason –an absurd theism in reverse, in order to make space for faith coeval with the fact that it was easier to challenge the truth of the divine order than the fates of Prussia as commanded by the Emperor-in-Chief.

But returning to your friend, I feel sad about Europe that he does not write but am glad and tranquil about him because he no longer seems a witness of what takes place here… “He wrote a lot at first and filled every sheet of paper which was handed to him. There were letters in prose or in free Pindaric metrics addressed to his dear Diotima, others more frequently in alcaics. He had adopted a thoroughly peculiar style, the contents of which were: remembrance of the poet, struggle with God and celebration of the Greeks. As for his current train of thought, nothing has appeared yet…[9]” for this land has the ability to remain green and quiet even after outrageous massacres and devastations… “But it was the pretty little garden house which I lived in on the Österberg which pleased Hölderlin the most. Wieland penned the first fruits of his muse in this same house. Here, one had a view overlooking friendly, fertile valleys, the city spread out on the Schlossberg, the bending of the Neckar, many enchanted little villages, and the chain of the Alps. It is now more than three years since I spent a pleasant summer here in the midst of the green with such a refreshing view, almost entirely in the open air. At that time, unfortunately, there was such an oppressive weight upon my spirit that even the delight of this friendly nature was not enough to strengthen and cheer me up[10]” I only wish that he shall not jump out of a tower or drown in a river, at least not before each one of us shall have done the same, but he is not himself anymore and whilst there is nothing demonic about him the tranquility to be found in his poems is nowhere to be found even as a clue in any of both his eyes… “I provided him with snuff and smoking tobacco, which he enjoyed quite a bit. I could completely cheer him up with a pinch, and when I filled up the pipe and lit it for him, he praised it and the tobacco most spiritedly and was completely contented. He stopped talking, and since he was then feeling his best, and it would not have been good to disturb him, I left him alone and read something[11]” Maybe demonic is too strong a word for a gentle man like him, erratic is more like what he is feeling, and I think that he is not staying alive for himself but only for others because this is what people do, isn’t this true too? At the same time his sickness is devastating for all of us here because it makes our lives seem too trivial and entirely exiled from the threads of history. “But he can immediately add, "I, my dear Sir, no longer bear the same name. Now I'm called Killalusimeno. Oui, Your Majesty, so they say, so they declare! Nothing's wrong with me.” Generally speaking, I heard this last comment from him often. It is as if this were his way of affirming and soothing himself; by keeping in mind, "there's nothing wrong with me.[12]"

I think that when he joined the army he also saw during the quiet springs of Königsberg the wars that would follow and not just that, but the foul and folly that would make them happen, and whilst I feel devastated myself in his own state I wish for him not to come back, but if at least he could write one more line to guide us! “The content throughout his letters is a struggling and grappling against God or Fate, as likes to call it. A passage in one of them reads, "Heavenly Godhead, what was it like beneath us when I won several battles from you and a few not insignificant victories!" I found a terrible, mysterious passage among his papers. After many laudatory exclamations - the things he says about Greek heroes and the beauty of the ancient gods - he begins: "Now I only understand man when I am far away from him and living in solitude.[13]" Or if not, I wish he could dress himself alone or come out to see the sun. Perhaps the sun of Greece and of Sophocles shines brighter for him than does the European winter, it would be good right now to be an Englishman like yourself and think about the conquest of the whole earth instead of drowning into the most beautiful waters helplessly. What a horrible situation it is to look at history without looking at life, that is, to look right through the end of history structurally without having the slightest clue about its content, it is a theological tragedy because you are in fact bringing the end of times without knowing what this means at all but its advent is yet ineludible, exactly like a twilight when seafaring very far away; “But it would be pointless to look for coherence here. If he makes an effort to say something abstract, he gets confused, becomes enfeebled, and in the end is forced to express himself in unusual figures of speech…[14]” Maybe it is time for me to leave this pathetic town, but it is of no avail because the world looks all the same from here onwards… “My garden house became so dear to him that he still asked about it years after I was no longer living there, and whenever he went with the carpenter's wife into the nearby vineyard, he would climb up to the door and positively insist that Herr von Waiblinger lived there. Nature, a good walk, the open sky always did him good. It is fortunate for him that from his little window he can savour the cheerful view of the Neckar which washes against his house and a lovely patch of meadow and mountain scenery. A multitude of clear, true images flow over from this view into the poems which he writes when the carpenter gives him paper…[15]” It is as if a Gnostic god would have passed a message for an unbeliever to carry through the world, like the Gospel of Marcion… “What is then Marcion’s point? Precisely that Jesus Christ’s father cannot be identical with the creator of heaven and earth[16]”. As if I were condemned to these silent hours for an eternity. “If from the distance, now that we're through/ I am still familiar to you, yesteryear, to you/ O you partner in my sorrow, / something good I can point out to you...[17]”

Yours ever,
A.



II

26th December 1944

Ma’am K,

One hears everyday stories about Europe here in American soil that I wouldn’t like to share with you… “But the fabrication of corpses has nothing to do with enmity anymore nor can it be attached to any political categories whatsoever. In Auschwitz there has opened an abyss before us into which all of us will be thrown when we attempt to stand before it[18]”, but I guess emigration is always in the company of terror specially about not remembering the world as one knew it once, there’s even the risk to forget things about oneself… “…writing in the mother tongue…even though it is the only return from exile that one cannot even banish from his own dreams… but we Jews are not in exile or at least no longer and possess to such dreams no right at all[19]”. There’s a right in praxis to everything or so preach certain legal theories that pretended not too long ago there was more space on earth than there actually could be seen… “Historical forces and energies do not wait, however, for science, just in the same manner that Columbus did not await for Copernicus. Each time that by means of this historical impulse, new lands and waters are incorporated to the visual sphere of men’s collective consciousness; the spaces of their historical existence are thus also transformed. There then rise new proportions and dimensions of historic-political activity, new sciences, a new world-order, new life of new peoples or of peoples that come to life again.[20]” Somehow the facts of our world have drifted the attention of my younger years over the fate of politics and obscured it… “Political action, no matter how destructive, should always reveal itself as messianic. Benjamin's historical materialism can be hardly severed from political Messianism[21]” …it has instead been turned over the fates of universal histories and demons of sizes larger than our little planet and I guess it is something natural to the old age of this planet itself… “The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d'etre in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage...[22]” I am also under the supposition that only when such world facts have run wild and lost the sense they used to make for us, it is time to overcome them even if it means to deny absolutely any claim to the present… “Men are usually granted to imagine the most distant future when the immediate present under their feet is collapsing and suffocating them[23]”. At times to overcome doesn’t even mean to deconstruct as in the Russian literary theories that set in motion the mood for the beginning of this ailing century, but also to destroy, to obliterate as to obligate these facts into the back room of history “Obsessed for the logic of this complot, Schmitt deploys the whole of his demonic intelligence in the discovery of the hidden and elementary forces that guide the destinies of universal history[24]”–this is what European philosophy has done since the German revolutions of the 19th century and this means something exactly coeval with the great conceptual world of Hegel, a world whose geography went beyond the limits of the human eye and whose map is but a totally new human condition on earth. “It is quite conceivable that the modern age –which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity –may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known[25]”. Marxian, Martial or Martian?

In this spirit of alienation, I would like to say that you were right from the beginning in that it was from the miser Walter Benjamin that we learnt to wear off the grandeur of literature as a whole… “The harrowing effect of Schulz’ prose is to construct the world anew, as from fragments that exist after some unnamable disaster[26]” …that means in fact to create the world not from the beginning of times and direct the course of events but rather to create it from the perspective of its own end and wait patiently for the order of things to fall into place anew; "Does Karl Kraus stand at the threshold of a new age? Alas, by no means. He stands at the threshold of the Last Judgement"[27]. This is a process likely to resemble someone pretending to write like the author of the Bible and dropping all existing models in literature since Classical Greece –returning to a canon that will restitute “conversation” as a valid expression of representation in letters; the only problem involved here is that it is precisely this ideal what necessarily relies on the wonder and world innocence of the Platonic philosophers to open its free way… “Benjamin sought a concept of experience that would explode the limitations set by Kant and regains the fullness of the concept of experience held by earlier philosophers[28]” …and the innocent are not adult enough to distinguish evil until he is within home. The method remains bullet-proof: A book written entirely of quotations and annotations from an impersonal narrator, as if a work of art composed entirely of street advertisements picked up randomly…”An understanding of Kafka's production involves, among other things, the simple recognition that he was a failure[29]”. Odds are that the only book written this way successfully was the Bible; “...For Benjamin to quote is to name and naming rather than speaking, the word rather than the sentence, brings truth to light. As one may read in the preface to the Origin of German Tragedy, Benjamin regarded truth as an exclusively acoustic phenomenon: Not Plato but Adam, who gave things their names, was to him, the father of philosophy...[30]” Benjamin was not the first to try a hand at this, for I believe there is this impressively well-written book of Hannah Arendt about Rahel Varnhagen and mainly thousands of pages by Karl Kraus, but both will be soon forgotten and only Benjamin will make a dead name and survive as an aesthetician because he framed the theory in the fullest awareness of the historical eschatology this would bring about to the whole of the literary history of modernity when looked at from the end of times “Time is but frozen[31]”, which is from now on, all times that are not remembered yet, or all possible times that we refer to as “right now”. “...This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of the despair -not the despair of a past that refuses to throw its light on the future, and lets the human mind wander in darkness as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it; hence their power is not strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy...[32]”

Perhaps it is true that history is necessary as a phenomenon or category of thought because no matter how much we are obligated to live necessarily and only in the present, this in itself lacks all possible value because in its indeterminate qualities and quantities it cannot be remembered or thought or known in anyway…”What in later existential thought became the notion of the auto-production of man’s mind we find in Hegel as the “auto-constitution of Time[33]: man is not just temporal; he is Time. Without him there might be movement and motion[34], but there would not be Time. Nor could there be, if man’s mind were equipped only for thinking, for reflecting on the given, on what is as it is and could not be otherwise; in that case man would live mentally in an everlasting present. He would be unable to realize that he himself once was not and that he one day will be no more, that is, he would be unable to understand what it means for him to exist[35]”. That is perhaps why one often lies mostly about his present actions or his past actions seen in a “just past” present and there is no lying about the future that is not called “false prophecy”[36], or perhaps one is granted to lie about the future when drunk, but no time else...”Time finds its truth in the future since it is the future that will finish and accomplish Being. But Being, finished and accomplished, belongs as such to the Past. This reversal of the ordinary time sequence –past-present-future is caused by man’s denying his present: he says no to his Now and thus creates his own future[37]”. We are lacking now all our ability to interpret what has happened to Europe, precisely because it is still happening and we do not understand the depth of this giant’s sin, not yet at least. I wouldn’t like to share the stories about the old country because I still refuse to believe it and because the country is no longer ours or anybody’s. Benjamin’s suicide was one of the highest peaks of the lie that we must interpret in order truthfully in the course of its due time…”The refugees were supposed to return to France by the same route the next day... During the night Benjamin took his life, whereupon the border officials, upon whom this suicide made an impression, allowed his companions to proceed to Portugal. A few weeks later the embargo on visas was lifted again. One day earlier Benjamin would have gotten through without any trouble, one day later the people in Marseilles would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible"[38]. I did know that fame was always anonymous and often a very late comer, but the opposite of fame should never be called despair, because glory doesn’t come at the expense of defeat –not even in the Greek tragedy. It is only on this ground that I refuse to read what you write to me now, because you are looking infinitely into the past through an eternally unfinished present…”But in Hegel this nunc stans is no longer temporal; it is a nunc aeternitatis, as eternity for Hegel is also the quintessential nature of Time, the Platonic “image of eternity”, seen as the eternal movement of the mind. Time itself is eternal in the union of Present, Future and Past.[39]” And that lens can only lead to melancholy, so that I wish I could drown in an ocean far away from this all and not in a little river where the noises of this silent hour of mankind ring from just this close! We have thrown ourselves feet up into the abyss without the faintest clue about it. "But it seems to me now that the real danger was not disregarded by Walter Benjamin during that night in Port-Bou; it was just that his real danger, his reality, differed from ours. He must have met again the little hunchback in Port-Bou… his very own, the Benjamin hunchback, and he had to come to terms with it...[40]"

Sincerely,
A.

PS. Thank you very much for the newspaper excerpts but I am afraid they are of no use at the moment… "A report from Vienna dated summer 1939, saying that the local gas company had stopped supplying gas to the Jews. The gas consumption of the Jewish population involves a loss for the gas company, since the biggest consumers were the ones who did not pay their bills. The Jews used the gas especially for committing suicide"[41]… Any chance you might send next time a book whichever from before the war?



III

26th December 2001

Dear F,

I have been to the theater in Jerusalem many times as of late and have always seen the same performance, thereby I notice in our age something inexistent in the classical theater and it has to do precisely with the fact that we have adopted the idea of reproduction in and of society instead of the sheer fact of creation, like God has taught us once! “And in this same way, iron construction and glass architecture are transfigured in the arcades because the century could not match the new technical possibilities with a new social order[42]. It is a very but very small stage almost at the same height of the public so that sometimes it is difficult to see the characters that at times vary from dull to stupid and how sad their sense of humor but equally strenuous is their laughter."She would stroll about the city of Jerusalem like the spirit of poetry walking along the street[43]".

At the view of the public the stage is very narrow but it runs very deep and the walls to the sides are inscribed with many colors and messages that are difficult to read; in spite of this depth that is furnished with carton tables and chairs occupied by mannequins in everyday clothes and they have been beheaded, the empty space of their sights is replaced by flat paper faces with smiles and eyes drawn in a childish manner, there seems to be a loud talk in between them but lastly you find out it is only the background sounds, the noises made by the spectators in the public as they drink their sodas and chew their snacks but there’s no conversation at all going on in between them. “God desired to have a dwelling place in the lower realms[44]”.

Day after day the play is rehearsed again on and on so that it looks as an almost monotonous landscape, like traveling through the city during peak hours –dense but very slow, like oil dripping from the bottom of a glass bottle...”Thus the world is like an oil press: under pressure. If you're the dregs of the oil you're carried away through the sewer; if you're genuine oil you will remain in the vessel. But to be under pressure is inevitable. Observe the dregs, observe the oil. Pressure takes place ever in the world, as for instance, through famine, war, want, inflation, indigence, mortality, rape, avarice; such are the pressures of the poor and the worries of the state: we have evidence of them... we have found men who grumble under those pressures and who say: 'How bad are these Christian times!'... Thus speak the dregs of the oil which run away through the sewer; their colour is black because they blaspheme: they lack splendour. The oil has splendour. For here another sort of man is under the same pressure and friction which polishes him, for is it not the very friction which refines him?[45]” Every performance is like a rehearsal, without us knowing much about it… This well reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s concept of experience as opposed to Kant’s -for Benjamin experience is the immediate result and historical counterpart of narration whereas for Kant in the phenomenal sense language is independent of metaphysics and knowledge… “Philosophy is absolute experience, deduced in the systematic-symbolic context as language[46]” This only recreates the opposition between the mathematical-physical world of Kant and the consciousness world of Benjamin’s Modernity, that is, of Kant’s heritage so that he himself wouldn’t know: “The enlargement of the mind plays a crucial role in Kant´s Critique of Judgment. It is accomplished by comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgment of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man. The faculty which makes this possible is called imagination[47]”… Thus “Our heritage has come to us by no means as a testament”[48].

The movement of the mannequins is a sheer there-ness, a geographical trick to gain depth, and a useless trick. The conversations take place right up front at two large tables very near the public. There’s this care of friendship between them, but with the reckless independence of the mercenaries that seek out for themselves in order to survive their own lions’ den... "Do other people manage to have peace and quiet? I'd like to know the answer to that[49]" Their drunkenness is often more like sinking than celebrating but it is by no means sad, this is only a wild guess, because none of the conversations can be fully heard; only single words cut off from their original contexts just as in the photography of nature come to mete out the requirements of our lasciviousness, our unquenchable thirst to undress the unreal, to lift the veil of the lie, reveal the vessel.

There’s so little you can learn about them with a sole exception: Most successful relationships are based on lies and deceptions because since that is the place where most relationships end, it is but a natural place to begin. This is just the background; the moral here is that often relationships based on truth and on telling the truth are very difficult and not very happy… “For years, however, he stubbornly expounded the strange thesis, to me and to others, that there was no such a thing as an unhappy love - a thesis that was so decisively refuted by the course of his own life...[50]” The truth is not unlike Benjamin’s experience: an individual but very strong sense of personal narration, the know-how of telling one’s very own story. I feel dread about the silent hours they spend together before this large audience, about the ill madness that takes over, but there’s an astonishing beauty to this, something that doesn’t seem personal, it doesn’t even seem to resemble love. “They fought against Jewish society because it would not permit them to live in the world as it happened to be, without illusions[51]” It is more like a “community of believers”; “the church is the community of God in the future eternally dissatisfied with the present”[52]. It is my belief that they await the Jewish Messiah. “…And the day when they say that on this day the Messiah will come, it is certain that on that day the Messiah will not come[53]”.

“The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance--namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future…”It were better for man never to be born who thinks about four matters: what is above and what is below, what was before and what will be afterward[54]”… The Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb which turn to the soothsayers for Enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter"[55]. I remember this passage of Benjamin because having been the past strip of their temporal index as to link it to us, the future remains as the horizon upon which we are oriented, or not us, but the drunk young men I see in the Jerusalem play, and I also say this because they seem people from another time, from a few years later in a different city, perhaps the nowhere in the city of God. “The time is out of joint! O cursed spite that I was born to set it right![56]”

“Leviathan et Behemoth existent[57]” restlessly as it appears engraved on the doorpost of a certain room.

Had the wise men of the Renaissance seen these young men at the theatre they would have thought to have seen Leviathan and Behemoth “The night I was born, I wish it had been cursed by the sorcerers who have mighty power over Leviathan” [58]and God said to Job “Take a look at Behemoth, a creature of mine such as yourself”[59], they would have broken in hysterical laughter, as the only possible expression of their trembling fear over what they could have seen in them[60]; “Only by looking at Leviathan anyone faints from fear”[61]. As in the dry and collapsed Messianic world of Kafka they had no names, but initials as to designate them before the creation of the world. P, F, A. As if the world could no longer name anything without venturing into the dangerous nothing of the space. Remember what they said, that Kafka’s world resembled St. Paul’s, there was no tree or river to be seen, no images of nature, unless it is a dog pissing perhaps or a dead tree[62]. The dry empty night of the space… “The angel showed me a clean river, of life’s waters. It was clear as crystal and sprang from the throne of God and his lamb. In the middle of the main street of the city and to each bank of the river, grew the tree of life whose fruits are ripe each month, that is, twelve times a year; and the leaves of the tree are to be used healing the nations of the earth. There will be nothing anymore set as a curse. The throne of God and his lamb will be in the city, and his servants will bow before Him. They will see Him face to face, and will carry His name on their forehead. There will be no night anymore, and those who will dwell therein will be in no need of flashlight or sunlight because God will lighten for them, they will reign through all the centuries.[63]” Would you like to join me to see them in Jerusalem once? Fear not, if after all history is just one fucking thing after the other[64]…”Time is just one thing after another. Time and Space are similar in that in space some things are next to another, whereas in time they are behind another[65]”… “I see no temple in the whole city of Jerusalem, because the Lord, almighty God, is its own temple”[66].

At the end of the performance the chairs are always left empty and it is rather odd to me because the nameless characters are still on stage but no longer sitting. "If someone comes and declares "This will be the historical redeemer of mankind, I know its name" - then we might easily identify him as the prophet of the false Messiah. The prophet of the true Messiah remains silent. He does not know. But he knows one thing - that one should not say that the Messiah will never come. One should never let the empty chair be occupied by a pretender (and every occupant is a pretender), but it is better if one does not remove the empty chair. My conviction, or rather my feeling, suggest that I leave the chair there, in the middle of the room at the head of the table, where it remains all the time exposed in its emptiness. The chair speaks to denizens of the absolute present honestly only in its emptiness. My intuition suggests that only emptiness is fullness for the moderns, that there is no other kind of "hope beyond hope", at least not for those who assume the position of reflected post-modernity”[67]. Do you have any clue in so far as what this really means? Is their Messiah a never arriving figure? 'I know that unrest, it decomposes everything... I believe it's that which feeds one with so much urgency in life, but if one doesn't tend it properly, it does kill[68]' Is it a parallel time or a concept thereof? I am sure you could enlighten me a little on this.

Yours,
K.




IV

26th December 2008

"The priest desires. The philosopher desires
And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
It is desire at the end of winter, when
It observes the effortless weather turning blue.....
It knows that what it has is what not
And throws it away like a thing of another time
As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.[69]"


Dear K,

A long time has elapsed since I answered your last letter and so many more I have received in the meantime, it wasn’t that I kept myself too occupied or to myself even “never is man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself[70]” …but rather it is what the apostle St. Paul said, that a surplus of time is the beginning of all evil[71]! I have frequented the company of crooks that are not as yet thieves but could very well be… Ah, so appalling their beauty at night, by no means lesser than the lack of politesse in their language –their inner polity… they are like a church and cannot bring themselves to spell two sentences correctly, so that at times even the commas and the spaces they use could be taken for lies, the chasm that strays between commandment and reason –the commandment to enjoy tonight and the reasoning that it could kill you too. “Gentz gave himself to the world immediately and directly and it consumed him. His hedonism was only the most radical way open to him to let the world consume him[72]”.

Since my return from Jerusalem, there’s really so little life in me, so little I’ve found on my own spiritual resources and the intelligentsia seems undistinguishable from the privileged class… “Ambiguity is the manifest imagining of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia, and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish[73]”, what becomes highly anathematic for my fragile mind. I don’t know for how long more I will bear it, since it was my only choice to return here at a time when the decision was not only motivated by a bad health, but by the narrow line between bad health and death “I am always surrounded by doctors informing me of my own interest… I wish I could live in this quiet but I am dying in this place… If it means to live in Richmond or to die in London, I rather die[74]”.I can’t bear the company of fouls and of folly, of these complacent smiles paid for by corporations…”There’s no such a thing as having, there’s only being: that which breathes to the last moment until choking[75]”… There’s nothing wrong in them, it is just what my friend said, “Sometimes I feel like I come from another world[76]”. It is just unlikely to be me, this sheer there-ness of occupying a cluster in the geological history of the earth…”Walter Benjamin knew that the break in the tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he has to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of 'peace of mind', the mindless peace of complacency[77]” …So far I’ve come to terms with the rather ugly truth that the problem is more theological than biological therefore unfit for interpretations without ambiguities of sorts –ambiguity as a new sense of world-orientation perhaps and I wish I could clear from my vocabulary the word “perhaps”, and this immanence resembles more an imprisonment of the spirit than the rest worthy of culminating a long journey. I’ve come down here only half way through my journey and the claustrophobia is maddening senseless. “If truth as correspondence is defined as the harmony between and idea and the object it represents, then, strictly speaking, we can never come to know whether an idea agrees with its object[78]”.

I could as well spend more than little time with myself… “Arendt made the political distinction between solitude and loneliness, one is chosen but the other is imposed and by no means an easy situation to live with[79]” …or with others prescient of that understanding that we have so often discussed “When others have understood precisely the way I did, then I feel at home in the world[80]”, the commonality of world-views and the unwillingness of having lived “death is the price we pay for having lived[81]”; yet it is not enough and that is why there is this fearful element of decay in all my activities…”Great though Benjamin's life may be in every sense - the only case near me of a life being led metaphysically. It nevertheless harbours elements of decadence to a fearful extent[82]”… it is not as if I were trying to take my own life out in small installments but it is more of a step leading to the very gates of the eschatological world, as to be a witness, but not one single step more…”Right to the threshold but not even one footstep ahead[83]” …I have read Virginia Woolf as of late, and have found impressive in her the idea of living “free of wantonness” because I don’t believe that suicide is brave in anyway in itself although the decision does take much courage, the decision alone is irrelevant to the nature of the work we carried out in the world… "When I was in Tel Aviv I had a small book in my hand, it made me very angry at the same time that I was fascinated. It included a series of male Jewish writers of the fin-de-siécle like Weiniger and Calé who committed suicide at an early age. I hated the book because it just presented their deaths in tragic ways and not their work; moreover what should this be? Anthology of Suicides? But if I find correspondence of Calé... that's another matter.... We can never divine life and work of a poet, but his death is always outside to me. Yet these curious and intromissive creeps are greedy on these erotic touchy stories... Well... this is disgusting in the sense that they reduce Calé to the writer who committed suicide. They don't read his poems as poems but as if they were the embassies of his later suicide... but it is such a vulgar and sentimental reduction![84]“In the other hand I don’t think either that people should stay alive for others, this is sheer mediocrity, joyful triviality… “People stay alive for each other, that is what people do[85]”. Some people write the books and are unable to live, some others live and read the books but are unable to live their own lives so that they prefer other narratives than their own, and lastly others live without getting to know the books, the latter are in my opinion perhaps the most miserable of all. “There are four kinds of people: those who long for an infinite number of anonymous eyes, those who need to be looked at by many eyes, those who need to be constantly before the eyes of the people they love and those who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present[86]”. This is important to mention because “life” strip of all the remaining components of a “story” is but a heroic and rather ridiculous enterprise to undertake, something proper of Greek heroes alone. “In polytheism Gods cannot love men but only heroes… In monotheism no matter how much men know God, they are always to remain men[87]” This “life” on its own terms is but a biological innuendo and valueless its pathos because it is entirely subject to the laws of nature. “Life in its biological meaning and the conservation of life rather than action has been constituted as the ultimate good[88]”.

I’ve avoided the news about the Orient through the whole week for it is sad to say that all Gnostic demons have been let out of their dungeons and have meddled themselves with people in such a way that it has become impossible to distinguish them from the everyman. The future of Israel is so uncertain that it seems as if it were already written in the Bible… “Offspring of Jacob! Families of the whole Israel, hearken to the word of God. The Lord said: What have you found worthy of censure in your forefathers that you strayed apart from me? You went after Gods that are but nothing, and into nothing were yourselves turned[89]” , but that is a book that somehow journalists are not too familiar with unless they belong to some Bible-belt sponsored Biblical-Zionist crusade for Italian TV and not different in anyway from those of the most glamorous cardinals. In a way I look at this world stage with the lens of the philosopher of history –that is with the cruelest lack of attachment to the events in course…”The main thing is to learn how to think crudely. Crude thinking, that is the thinking of the great[90]” …On second thought, perhaps not all prophets are Biblical, or perhaps it is a totally different matter altogether: It could be that prophecy only requires the common sense of understanding general things about the world, the first thought-virtue lost in our age…”Already in 1948 Arendt foresaw what now perhaps has come to pass, that Israel would become a militaristic state behind closed but threatened borders, a semi-sovereign state from which Jewish culture would gradually vanish[91]” …That is at least for those who agree with the proposition that nor science or technology is prophetic. “From a certain point there’s no return. This is the point that must be reached[92]”.

What is evident with this new war is not only the endless number of civil victims –this is not new, but rather the theatrical aspect conferred on the history of the world… “Naturally, the world that Zweig depicts was anything but the world of yesterday; naturally, the author of this book did not actually live in the world, only on its rim… Since the world had undeniably acquired a theatrical air, the theater could appear as the world of reality[93]” …the war of God against the gentiles, this is not even theo-political but theo-poetic: the Messianic apocalypse as the final art work of Western mankind and its own Archimedean point of departure, as Baudrillard would love to express it. “For Rosenzweig the ultimate sense of what’s real is formulated beyond the dwellings of wars in world history, that’s to say, in the eschatological time of religions, absolute time[94]”. And how many of the greatest books of the age were written during wars or even during holy wars? The point here is that there’s such great sadness in that God that seems to me now more Gnostic than I had let myself believe through the years I spent under the burning sun of Jerusalem –the sadness is not from above, or from below, it is almost spatial and coeval with the time upon which our lives rely to recognize themselves. It is a bearer of all the sufferings… “Suffering and disgrace is always anonymous for it takes away from people their quality as subjects and turn them into objects, into mere things[95]”.

And because this war isn’t just anonymous we’re not speaking only about suffering, but also about the social question but strip of all possible politics. "Dear Mill, I thank you for your beautiful card, it is here the time: Rain (Regen) but one day sunshine 20 grad, other day the sea from the sky. Here now all good. We all people very good, the Englishmen all gentlemen. I have momentan picture Austellung. A gentleman here has given me extra money for a travel through Palestine. Still one moment I go to Baghdad and Damascus and Beirut and one day to Cairo. One day from here for a Pfund to travel. But I'm very sorry for the world. All the men which dead now. Write soon again, yours, Yussuf[96]". Politics of love at best, and they mean to free the oppressed from the first page in the news, not from bondage and that public relations strategy is the most widely known secret of reactionary revolutions.

The end of times is no longer an exclusively apocalyptic idea if we were to refer to apocalypse as an entirely religious concept in the pre-modern sense… “Never since the sun had stood on the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man’s existence centres in his head, that is, in thought… This was a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch… a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the Divine and the Secular was now first accomplished[97]” …thus understood as Biblical, whereas today every TV channel has news with sections devoted to the un-future of the economy, society and the environment, “Running start for suicides, as though he were obeying an order that says 'you have to earn your grave[98]”. The end of history has become a journalistic theme par excellence -“The experience of the eschaton or the ultimate “deadline” is however today beyond doubt, a disturbing experience, and together with the contingent threat of the world’s annihilation by hand of the atomic powers, it has turned universal. Each and every hint from the news point out to the fact that there’s not much time left. All that is presented in such a way as if Noah’s ark were the only place left for us to shelter. If generally speaking we would think in ancient or pre-christian terms we could say that we have at our disposal all the time in the world to take care of the problem. However, from the Christian point of view and to the opposite view, we’re running out of time, because the Kingdom of God is near. In this affirmation that the “Kingdom of God” is near what is at stake is not knowing what this kingdom is, but the possibility of its being-close-at-hand. Whoever thinks that can think in Christian terms and he can do it without a final eschatological term, he is absolutely insane[99]”. This is not even a philosophical problem anymore, but one central dilemma of mankind: the idea that the origin of history is the future.

If we are living on the assumption that this world will not last and that these are the last generations before the primal flood, while altogether remain secular, it means that we have lost all legitimacy over our own existence,-legitimacy as analogous to authority. “The present world is eminently important for the denizens of this world, not because it is better or worse than any other worlds, but because this is the world in which we are in charge of certain people and things. The sense of being in charge is incipient in the reflected post-modern consciousness.[100]”It is perhaps the only argument of weight to halt the katechtonic times. “It is about knowing again, albeit in different manner, if the Messiah is coming and that he is coming and withal, “the form of this world will pass”, that is, will be turned into another[101]”. We must prepare, that is, for the continuation and not for the end, for we have inherited a world where “war is the continuation of politics[102]”. And clearly not the end, as Hobbes’ Leviathan knew very well.

“Kairos” or the collapse of time is coeval with the end of historical mankind and not of mankind itself, historical meaning here “able to remember the past and imagine the future”, and kairos is not contingent because the Gods alone cannot bring it without human intervention, without a spatial revolution, without defeating Leviathan and Behemoth from the air space. To say “no” to one’s now is to close the gates of heaven before us because it is only disappointment –and modernity knows this well, what sets this world as entirely distinct from God’s and thus free on its own right and self-standing...”He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing[103]”… The ultimate fact here is that no matter what the spirit of the age says the world will last until the natural resources will be done away with, and as long as there is a planet like this or any other physical space the human condition might be shattered but never entirely wiped out from earth, “it is perhaps becoming to train the last partisans of this world for survival after a nuclear hecatomb, and the survival in whichever way is almost factual, no matter under which conditions[104]”. The conditions of our survival are in all possible ways, different from those of the human world whose political principle was world-less-ness, because it would not last[105]. Death in all its forms doesn’t exempt us from the given-ness of life, not even under the conditions of illness… “There is no remedy for death; not even health. A healthy man, however, has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear. In health, even death comes at the proper time. Health is in good terms with Death. It knows that when the grim reaper comes he will remove his stone mask and catch the flickering torch from the anxious and weary and disappointed hands of Brother Life; it knows that he will dash it on the ground and extinguish it, but it also knows that only then the full brilliance of the nocturnal sky will brightly glow. It knows that it will be accepted into the open arms of Death. Life's eloquent lips are put to silence and the eternally Taciturn One will speak: 'Do you finally recognize me? I am your brother[106]". The time is close, not for the end but for recognizing that the fact that this contingent all-extended world of modernity will not just collapse one day under the present conditions but that will rather deteriorate ad infinitum, and that the position of world citizen is unlike that of paradise, we must live in a world of ambiguity and therefore of disappointment as spiritual positions much stronger than metaphysics. “The immeasurable Godlessness of our world today in which the doubt about God is the normal position to assume in an entirely unlimited and value-freed context, this situation could be turn out to our advantage in opening from the depth of the nightly world a gate into an advent for a completely new epoch in historical philosophy”[107]. Our hope is not simply a Blochian dream, but a different understanding of our fullness and capability, an understanding of leaving the chaos-politan world of Carl Schmitt in order to realize a utopia that we might never be able to finish at least within the limits of history because in terms of theology and politics the discussion between the Godly city of Christianity and the universalism of the Jewish faith is but irreconcilable and regardless of the closeness or distance of the End of Times, we must, must choose to live with this very fact[108]…”St. Francis’ followers were ready to let the Franciscan spirit escape from Christendom as the Christian spirit had eclipsed Israel[109]” Theologically we must give up on the claim of having a home whatsoever, but politically we must fight against St. Paul’s letter to the Romans[110] when he says that we are ought to appear as likeable to our neighbor and not to ourselves, because at this our will in so far as it is necessary to support the enterprise of the world, is futile and useless. “The Socratic γνωθι σεαυτον receives a two-fold meaning: Firstly know that you’re only one and thus can have only particular knowledge; you ought to know that you’re only a man and not a God. Secondly, chase this particular, find its truth and therewith, your own. Take hold of both things, so you’ll have your truth, human truth, without forcing it on others[111]”.

On Christmas night I went walking around with a certain friend, until we reached a well where people throw their disappointments only in order to pick somebody else’s, firstly we discussed the fact that Christmas and the Birth of Jesus should not encounter one another the same day and this is precisely because the sufferings of the Cross are tantamount to the Day of the Atonement in the Jewish calendar...”In Paradise there is a palace known as the Palace of the Sick, where the Messiah comes in to visit all sickness, all sorrow, all suffering, inviting them to take possession of him. They do this and the Messiah suffers all punishment that Israel deserves. If the Messiah wouldn’t have taken on himself all the punishment that Israel deserves no one would have been able to take the sufferings of the world. But the Messiah takes all the suffering of all mankind[112]”.

My friend refused to pick up any disappointment for himself and just occupied himself in throwing his own, as his energies waxed he began to spit and his spit was turned into blood, and the well was entirely full with his blood, as if all the sufferings of mankind were interchangeable for a refusal to pick up our own disappointment, what makes our world different from God. “Am I my brother’s keeper?[113]””A hundred and thirty-five years ago Rahel Varnhagen jotted down the following dream: she had died and gone to heaven, together with her friends Bettina von Arnim and Caroline von Humboldt. To relieve themselves of the burdens they had acquired in their lives, the three friends assigned themselves the task of inquiring into the worst things they had experienced. Rahel thus asked: Did you know disappointed love? The other two women broke into tears, and all three thus relieved this burden from their hearts. Rahel asked further: Did you know disloyalty? Sickness? Worry? Anxiousness? Each time the women said yes, they cried, and again all three were relieved of their burdens. Finally Rahel asked: Did you know disgrace? As soon as this word had been spoken, there was a hushed silence, and the two friends took their distance from Rahel and looked at her in a disturbed and strange manner. Then did Rahel know that she was entirely alone and that this burden could not be taken away from her heart. And then she awoke[114].”

The new nomos of the earth is calling for restitution but this doesn’t entail a destruction of the old one as St. Paul meant. The Rabbis said that “Jerusalem was destroyed not because of baseless hatred but because it was judged according to the whole Torah[115]”, the new nomos is not a destruction of the old world, but an understanding of the whole as if it were fragments… precisely what modern philosophy has done without realizing its own project, nor as restitution or final destruction, and it has become more imaginative than cognitive. Which isn’t after all such a bad sign, “Rabbi Zeira said: This book does not contain any ordinances about purity and impurity, no prohibitions or permissions. But then why would it be written at all? In order to teach you, how great is the reward to whomever acts out of love”[116].

…”You can never have peace in life by avoiding life, you must look at life always in the face, know it for what it is, to love it for what it is[117]”…And this naked encounter with divinity and biology at the same time is perhaps the only thing that secularity and time (as secular time) could mean after all. “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past[118]”…One could add that one is never granted the fullness of his emotions whenever he’s granted himself a full break with the past, his own particular and the past in general, because without these fragments of a particularly loose present would be taken away from us into a monism, and then all claims to having lived our own life would be entirely futile. “All our existence here compared with the past eternity, that was before we were, and also compared with the future immortality that will be only after we will have been, is sheer presence[119]”. Our existence is not empty time, nor is it only the historical unfolding of nomos, it is also a life of Eros and that is why history has been moved by more than complots, but also by passions and thoughts. It is not an empty ontological basis, “On the base of the security of the household provided that it also guarantees freedom from self-consumption and dissolution within temporality, something altogether different is rising: A life freely determined so that it might continue also in the future, self-determined freely and independent from this base of the household. Hereby life isn’t just received like that, thus it’s transformed by the very base, and it is a turning back about itself[120]”. This freedom is perhaps the only health insurance against disappointment, whereas against the fates of history, the only insurance is death and that is not even insured by truth... “Are you willing to suspend your prejudices and judgements? Are you willing to confront and essay a vitality that overflows the bumble mix of average well-being and ill being…? For what people seem to find most daunting in me, I discover, is not my illness or possible death, but my accentuated vitality…[121]” What I had in my days learnt from Hegel and Gillian Rose “this logic is Hegelian but what Gillian found in this logic was passion, faith and failure[122]”, a friend wrote it to me once: “But we, my beloved companion, have life, useless hope, true friends and fire consuming our souls... the most important thing I learnt from you and that has brought me much peace is: contradictions are the only way we can understand life[123]”. “This, above all, was Gillian’s risk: to seek places in scholarship for love and life[124]”. Messianic times are in due course not from above or below, but from each member of mankind. “His laughter was the only thing he had to protect himself against reality, his laughter and the naked courage behind it[125]”.

Hoping to see you soon again,

A.

“I think... I won’t be able to tell anybody in words what you meant to me, and the time we spent,
I will only be able through paintings…[126]”



[1] Eschatological concept used twice by St. Paul (and the dialectical counterpart of “Eschaton”) in the 2nd Letter to Thessalonians which is referred to as a “force that deters” or a “force that withholds”, meaning it as the force that contains or deters or halts the coming of the Antichrist, the so-called “mysterium iniquitatis” and therefore the end of times. It is identified in Early Christianity (Tertulian, St. Augustine and the Church Fathers) with the Roman Empire. The two opportunities where it occurs in St. Paul’s letter are “And now you do know what it is that which halts him, so that he will not appear before his time is due” (2 The. 2, 6) and “For the secret plan of evil is now set in motion; it is only remaining that he be left free from that one who is deterring him now” (2 The. 2, 7).
[2] Walter Benjamin, letter to Theodor Adorno, 1940’s.
[3] “Men I think will remember us hereafter”, fragments of Sappho.
[4] Wilhelm Waiblinger, “Hölderlin’s Life, Poetry and Madness”, 1830.
[5] Schelling, letter to Hegel as of July 1803.
[6] Hegel “Lectures on the Philosophy of World History”.
[7] Wilhelm Waiblinger, op cit
[8] Schelling, op cit
[9] Wilhelm Waiblinger, op cit
[10] Op cit
[11] Op cit
[12] Op cit
[13] Op cit
[14] Op cit
[15] Op cit
[16] Jacob Taubes, “The Political Theology of Paul”, ch.2, drawing on a Harnack’s book “History of Dogmatics” (1924).
[17] Hölderlin, “Diotima”, fragment. Written erratically during the years of his madness, the original texts runs as such: An Diotima / Wenn aus der Ferne, da wir geschieden sind, / ich dir noch kennbar bin, dir Vergangenheit, / o du Teilhaber meiner Schmerzen, / einiges Gute bezeichnen dir kann. This follows on from the theme of “Hyperion” with his letters to Diotima, a female interlocutor appearing in dialogues of Socrates as a philosophical character and perhaps the first Gnostic philosopher in the classical age. . . .
[18] Hannah Arendt, “Zueignung an Karl Jaspers” in “Sechs Essays”, 1948
[19] Op cit
[20] Carl Schmitt, “What is a spatial revolution?” in “Land and Sea”, 1942
[21] Gerschon Scholem, “Walter Benjamin”, 1982
[22] Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin”, in “Men in Dark Times”, 1970
[23] Emmanuel Levinas on Leon Blum.
[24] Franco Volpi, “The Power of the Elements” (on Carl Schmitt), 2002
[25] Hannah Arendt, “The Human Condition”, 1958, pp 295
[26] John Updike, Introduction to Bruno Schulz’ “Street of Crocodiles”.
[27] Walter Benjamin, “Aphorisms”.
[28] Rolf Tiedemann, “Benjamin’s Dialectics at Standstill”.
[29] Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gershon Scholem.
[30] Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin” in “Men in Dark Times”, 1970
[31] Jacob Taubes drawn from Plotinus
[32] Hannah Arendt, ibid.
[33] Hegel, “Jena’s Real-philosophy”. Quoted by Alexander Koyré.
[34] As in Aristotle and Pre-Socratic philosophy.
[35] Hannah Arendt, “Hegel’s solution: the philosophy of history” in “The Life of the Mind”, 1982, vol.2
[36] Idea from Hans Blumenberg. Prophecy is not soothsaying about the future but a totalizing of the present.
[37] Hegel, “Philosophy of Right”.
[38] Hannah Arendt, ibid.
[39] Hannah Arendt, ibid. Quoting Hegel from Koyré.
[40] Lisa Fitko, Diary about the escapade through the Alps with Walter Benjamin.
[41] Walter Benjamin, correspondence.
[42] Walter Benjamin, “Passagenwerk”.
[43] Leah Goldberg on Else Lasker-Schüler.
[44] Midrash Tanhuma, Nasso, 16
[45] St. Augustine, Epistles on the Gospel of St. John.
[46] Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gershon Scholem.
[47] Hannah Arendt, “Excerpts from Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy”, in “The Life of the Mind” 1982, Appendix.
[48] René Char
[49] Walter Benjamin, conversation with Gershon Scholem.
[50] Gershon Scholem on Walter Benjamin.
[51] Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin” in “Men in Dark Times”, 1970.
[52] Ernst Bloch, “Atheism in Christianity”, 1970
[53] Rabbi Nachman of Breslau, unknown reference.
[54] Babylonian Talmud, “Chagigah”, 2. Quoted by Hans Blumenberg. The insert is mine; it speaks about the warning issued by the Jewish community against any kind of speculation, provoked by Gnosticism. From Arendt’s discussion on St. Paul’s and the impotence of the Willing faculty.
[55] Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", B, 1942
[56] Shakespeare, “Hamlet”.
[57] Ernst Jünger from his novel “Heliopolis” of 1980; This is referred to the “Leviathan” and “Behemoth” that appear as the beasts that control the waters and the dry land respectively in Book of Job and that have appeared as symbols of political power in theology and philosophy, e.g. Hobbes and Schmitt. The author had been a pen-pal of Carl Schmitt and Jacob Taubes, regardless of his involvement as an officer in Nazi Germany.
[58] Book of Job, 3:8
[59] Book of Job, 40:15
[60] Idea taken from Carl Schmitt’s “Land and Sea”, unknown reference.
[61] Book of Job, 41:9
[62] Jacob Taubes, “The Political Theology of Paul”, 1997
[63] St. John’s Apocalypse, 22:1-5
[64] From the film “History Boys”, Allan Bennet, England, 2005.
[65] Christian Wolff (1679-1754), “Principles of Philosophy”.
[66] St. John’s Apocalypse, 21:22
[67] Agnes Heller, “Theory of Modernity”, 1999, c.1.
[68] Katharina Olschbaur, Letters, 2007.
[69] Wallace Stevens, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (poem). I am indebted to Avivah Zornberg for this reference.
[70] Cato, Roman poet. Closing sentence of Arendt’s “The Human Condition”.
[71] From Hans Blumenberg, “Life-Time and World-Time”.
[72] Hannah Arendt, “Friedrich Gentz” in “Essays in Understanding”.
[73] Walter Benjamin, “Passagenwerk”.
[74] Virginia Woolf to her husband Richard Woolf.
[75] Kafka, “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”.
[76] Felipe Fergusson.
[77] Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin” in “Men in Dark Times”, 1970.
[78] Diana Cohen, “The Logical Impossibility of Suicide in Spinoza’s thought”, (Spanish) 2000.
[79] Agnes Heller, Interview, 1996.
[80] Hannah Arendt, Interview, 1960.
[81] Hannah Arendt, Philosophical Journals.
[82] Gershon Scholem on Walter Benjamin.
[83] Carl Schmitt, Letter to Alvaro d’ Ors, 1951.
[84] Katharina Olschbaur, Letters, 2007.
[85] Clarissa to Richard, from Michael Cunningham’s novel “The Hours”.
[86] Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.
[87] Hermann Cohen, “Judaism out of the sources of Reason”, 1912.
[88] Hannah Arendt, “The Human Condition”, 1958.
[89] Jeremiah, 2:4-5
[90] Bertolt Brecht.
[91] Jerome Kohn, “A Jewish Life: 1906-1975”, in Arendt’s “The Jewish Writings”, 2007.
[92] Kafka, “The Blue Octavo Notebooks”.
[93] Hannah Arendt, “Juden in der Welt von Gestern: Anläβlich Stefan Zweig” in “Sechs Essays”, 1948.
[94] Immanuel Levinas on Franz Rosenzweig.
[95] Simone Weil, “The Unhappy Love of God”.
[96] Else Lasker-Schüler, Postcard to Emil Raas, Jerusalem, Hotel Vienna, 1940 (unpublished).
[97] Hegel “Lectures on the Philosophy of World-History”.
[98] Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin” in “Men in Dark Times”, 1970.
[99] Jacob Taubes (1987’s interview), “Messianismo e cultura. Saggi di politica, teologia e storia; 2001 (Italian).
[100] Agnes Heller, “Theory of Modernity”, 1999, Intro.
[101] Giancarlo Gaeta, “Taubes, Messianism and the End of History”.
[102] Carl von Clausewitz, “Political Writings”, 1922.
[103] Chesterton, “The Testament of St. Francis”.
[104] Carl Schmitt, “Theory of the Partisan”, 1962.
[105] Hannah Arendt, “Love and St. Augustine”, 1929.
[106] Franz Rosenzweig, “On the Understanding of Healthy and Sick Man”. .
[107] Margarete Susman, “Ernst Bloch: Geist der Utopie. Rezension. In “Das Nah- und Fernsein des Fremden –Essays und Briefe”, Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 1992, pp 22, ed. I. Nordmann.
[108] On this there is the amazing work of Tristan Storme, “Carl Schmitt et le Marcionisme: L’impossibilite theologico-politique d’ un ecumenisme judeo-chretien?” 2008.
[109] Chesterton, “The Testament of St. Francis”.
[110] Romans, chapter 15.
[111] Hannah Arendt, Philosophical Journals.
[112] The Zohar.
[113] Genesis: 4-9
[114] Hannah Arendt, “Juden in der Welt von Gestern: Anläβlich Stefan Zweig” in “Sechs Essays”, 1948. From the letters of Rahel.
[115] Talmud Sanhedrin.
[116] Midrash Ruth Rabba, 15.
[117] Virginia Woolf, Journals.
[118] Virginia Woolf, unknown reference.
[119] Hannah Arendt, Philosophical Journals.
[120] Jan Patocka, “Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History”, commenting on Arendt’s “The Human Condition”.
[121] Gillian Rose, Love’s Work, 1995.
[122] Nigel Tubbs, “What is Love’s Work?” (On Gillian Rose) 1998.
[123] Guilel Treiber, Letters, 2007.
[124] Nigel Tubbs, op cit.
[125] Hannah Arendt, “Randall Jarrell” in “Men in Dark Times”, 1970.
[126] Katharina Olschbaur, Letters, 2007.

The Silent Years

This essay is dedicated to my friends Katharina Olschbaur and Felipe Fergusson in deepest gratitude


“The Silent Years”
An experimental essay on God and history

By Arie Akermann-Amaya


“Do you know then, -she interrogated me, do you know
then what you yearn for, what is missing in you, what you
seek like an Alpheus his Arethusa, over what are you so
sad with such sadness? It is not about the years that
passed, one could never say that, or about what happened
there or what is happening here, it is but about what there
is in you, the problem is in you. What you look for is a
time more beautiful than this. Only that new world which
is old because there you were with your beloved friends
in that world”. –Friedrich Hölderlin, “Hyperion”.

O
ften would Virginia Woolf begin one of her many letters with a statement of the kind “and yet one night alone, but never in peace” no less than would Ingeborg Bachmann finish a certain less known poem with “always night and never day”, though be this inappropriate for a conscious essay writer or a would-be at least, this is not entirely unlikely for someone who always meant to write his essays to somebody and in the present tense –in the form of an unfinished conversation, a foul play convincing enough to want to copycat the Bible, and that is somewhat like sending off a letter, in which case needless to say the opening statement could not hold out of uttering something so generally universal as to render writing unnecessary. This is not just a common everyday scenario of speaking “untruths”, but as in the obvious business of religion and faith, the content of these truths no more often sheds an immediate light than it does obscure its own subject matter so that the truth and of a lone individual might never hold as a testimony not even at heaven’s court except at the fulfillment of the promise that it shares the knowledge necessary to foster an understanding of something albeit it constitutes in itself by no means the target hypotheses, no less than what is achieved by someone telling any good story, Joyce and Homer or any one journal from a certain forgotten war.

The root of the matter lies precisely in that this understanding belongs to the kind that prevents men from gathering conclusions, as is paradoxically the nature of all understanding of truth. The statements of great poets are never accused of lacking truth for themselves or in-themselves as Hegel would have it, it is just that they in their category of people have been granted permission to read into the spirit of any age they happen to belong to and therefore produce expressions of universal feelings – production which sadly is not our domain as people of flesh and bone and for whom these generalities are likelier to pass unnoticed in their obviousness. For this very reason we are usually not given licenses for universal enterprises –a rather complex problem in the arena of philosophical thought as we are obligated to leave the business of philosophy when we have ceased to wonder, and are henceforth obligated at least in the world of prosaic intellectual production to recreate the world by means of our knowledge, of our stories or a combination of both; this being said counter to the theory that runs around there with the everyman since Hegel that the world is no longer poetic but entirely prosaic and disenchanted, what might as well mean that this problem of not having license to be the spokesman of mankind could be a lawsuit filed against every denizen of this world even beyond the rare and rather corky crowd of intellectuals, if there be any around still. This could be filed even against modern poets too.

In this state of affairs, producing a work of our own is the only redeemable accruing for immortality available nowadays that heroes have been out of business for just too long and their darling Gods have seemly closed down their temples for long-term renovations; at this a certain Israeli author mentioned in his memoirs that it would be better to be a book than a writer, because writers are easily done with but books are bound to survive by chance somewhere even the fiercest of fires. There are two arguments counter to this: Firstly, work or production, albeit not necessary for survival (what is fundamental for the survival of the species is the activity of labor or better said, the production of the means necessary for survival only) but for permanence in this world and therefore for transcending through it, for reaching beyond the limits of the world imposed by nature and somehow overcome them (that is, to create a history for oneself) is by no means the most fundamental activity of man, whilst neither survival would be at the basic ontological level. Production in any form is only a partial activity, whereas acting and thinking constitute life in its entirety. Secondly, said in all honesty immortality is perhaps the least of all the political and economical preoccupations in the upheaval of our times and I should even dare go further to say that the true nature of those preoccupations (precisely because they are literally previous to action and not yet “occupations”) remains unknown to us as we wander aloof in the dark.

In this same spirit, a lot of the illuminati and Enlightened of our times and even from times brighter and prettier have misidentified the “darkness” we walk within with other phenomena such as poverty and strife, environmental devastation and hunger, or the greatest Hollywood actress of our times – forced migrations and enforced emigration. These things are most definitely a fact of our world and not just one mere topic of conversation, so that as facts they do not constitute a mere situation “we happen to be in” in any sense whatsoever, so that as such our entire life is surrounded by them and all common talk about eradicating these “evils” as they are portrayed in the multimillion-dollar-enterprise of mass media is something as futile as the medieval discussions about the body of the eternal God, two laconically contradictory lexemes. Whatever had been once the domain and province of the painter and bard to represent has been nowadays entrusted to the news broadcaster, yet if these facts by themselves were the entirety of the “darkness” then of course no painting or poem would be gifted enough for representing anything – all speech and images would be very much alike, pegs wandering in the silence of dark canvas and empty pages and thus rendered useless. Darkness means for human production what mortality does for philosophy or genesis for politics: The palette of colors.

The theories that rose with the modern world and that constitute it can explain away the “lies” and “deceptions” that led to this “darkness” and this is as a matter of fact a concept far more comprehensive than speaking of “a bad year of famine in Egypt”. Many from among the experts and professional diagnosed the dark times in their heyday with surgical precision; Marx for example was truly concerned with the role that the capital and exploitation of the labor force played in all historical momentum, not satisfied at that he proceeded further to discover the “rules” that govern the structure in order to “make aright” the “wrongdoing” and “one beautiful day” to truly humanize the world before the astonished eyes of mankind; and of course ran once this beautiful day which lasted for so long in the disguise of an extended night when the mad thirst of freedom ran free nightly and ransacked the home of the everyman and prevented him from seeing the sun, quite the opposite of what Hesiod predicted for the children born in the end of times. This metaphor wishes by no means to hide what extermination camps were and are: The funny and happiest final stations of freedom, the glad tidings from heavens that were to bring the darkness on earth to an end and not even from above falling down like the angels of John’s eschatology but elevating the whole world in a worldview so religious as to mock religion, and therefore end the horrible cycles of labor, production, exploitation and so on. The lies and deceptions have little if anything at all to do with the darkness, or at least no more than they have to do with the fact of human existence on earth. Darkness is more akin to what Sophocles felt in the play of his old age quoting a poet from the archaic times, “not to be born is the greatest gift, but once it has happened – that you were born, the best is to return whence you came from as swiftly as possible”, tantamount to the Hebrew prophets that calmly awaited for their deaths in their beds without much of a haste or even others a little less patient like the authors of the Proverbs and the Psalms.

To be clear a lot of commentary is needed, first that Marx or Hegel did not discover the dark nor were the poets of the universal, neither did they murder anybody or are faulty for the great catastrophes of our age (and saying this might be more dangerous than it is stupid, the silly talk about the “tradition that gave us Auschwitz as a grand finale”), no ideology can be found universally guilty for anything since it is only individual people who are to be found individually guilty for any action at all or for non-action, both of which our modern legal systems have sometimes framed in the category of crimes –individual commission and individual omission. To be even clearer, upon reflection it surfaces that there is not any statement here or elsewhere that I am aware of where it is explicitly stated foolproof that freedom is not good or that darkness is not bad; but it is sustained by all post-metaphysical thought that the great narratives of history are no longer binding (perhaps poetry might be the last narrative to be called in any way a philosophy of history and at that with reservation) because it is the personal story remembered by a community what finally constitutes the original and reliable tissue of history even in the light of national consciousness of histories. Stories are told too, so runs one that a certain Bolshevik revolutionary came to the home of an intellectual and gun-pointed at him with the demand to join Moscow’s regime and this intellectual in turn demanded askance a reasoning from his captor, to which the villain responded that he had been obligated to make the intellectual free because he was unable to achieve it on his own merit. The problem with the great narrators of history is that they have never entrusted anything to everyday people but to grand heroes and when grand heroes are no longer that, they never tend to become everyday people but grand villains instead.

The beautiful gospel here for us is that sadly freedom, just like philosophy and life (three words analogous and only seldom sympathetic to one another) cannot be taught or learnt ever by anybody. There are schools of thought, lifestyles and models of freedom –see the American constitution and the many French republics, but this is something for which there is no possible learning, and two statements support my idea: First that putting a banister between thinking and living is an impractical pleonasm and not just a terrorist tool of the Cartesians, second (the most important) is that once you have chosen yourself as a philosopher (and perhaps this applies only to philosophy – what I do) you are as good a philosopher as you could ever be; you can learn more, be a runaway through the material, give conferences and teach lectures, but you never improve upon the decision – the decision to be a philosopher makes you as good a philosopher as you could ever become. The same decision that makes you free or alive, that is in a dynamic social arrangements like ours, for nothing could run more counter to the opinion of Greek citizens and feudal lords. Of course this all relies upon the tissue of contingency against teleology, but that is a subject to be touched upon later on.

Freedom and darkness become here coeval in that they constitute the two most frustrated promises of the modern age; darkness because the modern world would release us from it in the city without God (the City of God had been only a capitol of suffering in the middle of the desert like the early Fathers would have it lovable) and freedom because it was freedom who would carry out the assignment in the modern age for man, the freedom that would absolutely conquer the natural world and alas did not. Darkness could not absolutely vanish because it would make humanity vanish withal and freedom could not absolutely take over because otherwise the open space between neighbor and neighbor would be impossible to bridge, thus we would be so very unchristian and unworldly, -barbarians. Modernity left too many unfulfilled promises because it is part and parcel of its functioning; disappointing belongs to its dynamic as the cast that protects a man-made-only world – what could allegedly separate this world in whatever form from God’s if not disappointment. We were unable to conquer the whole world (i.e. nature) because once we ventured into the universe, the space to colonize happened to be millions of times larger that had been ever imagined by the medieval scientists in their playful count of starts, conquering the world through the eye of Columbus was feasible, but from Copernicus’ was not – needless to remember the fact that the full conquest of the living space of nature could mean nothing but the shattering of the human condition and the end of the condition of labor – the most fundamental assumption for the survival of the species.

By reaching out to the universe barehanded we understood finally the Biblical simile appearing early in the Book of Genesis where it is spoken about the giants whose heads reached as far as the top of the skies –a strange species watched over with curiosity by the mortals descending from Adam and Eve and rarely mentioned only once in the canon; we were those giants until we reached the universe, and the great ideals of humanity cultivated by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were cruelly shattered as we diminished our own stature to the point of becoming invisible –the paraphrase of Kafka, “he was commanded to find the Archimedean point only under the condition that he shall use it against himself”. Not everything here is the damnation of purgatory or the twilight of poets, for once bereft of our original stature in the creation the wonder before the giants was to become the rare curiosity that did away with Aristotelian and medieval science (the last possible secure dwelling for men, -eternal immanence) and threw a hand into the outer space, the major enterprise of mankind as a whole but perhaps the very worst and greatest as if a great tragedian wrote it together with Adorno. The consolation of Lessing is left still when he wrote that had God consulted him over choosing the right hand with all the truth or the left hand with not only the lack of truth but an unquenchable thirst to obtain in, he chose but over the left hand because the truth belonged to God alone. So far so pretty, but shall not suffice for those thrown into the precipice.

The precipice and the darkness are analogous in that they open the same gate or in words of Gillian Rose “keep your mind in hell and despair not” but the precipice, the deep abyss of our times contains facts that albeit inseparable from humanity such as the extermination camps and other no-return points of history are not as wholly defined as the darkness. Contemporary philosophy has become all too engaged with the idle talk prompted by the field of Holocaust studies about the “dark times” and “the end of philosophy” missing a point completely; as if those terrible facts of history would constitute in their terms a philosophical history or a philosophy of history for the man of the world without traditions for a stronghold (and therefore a grand narrative for times without grand anything but some lone poets). We are definitely thrown into that abyss that without us being much aware built the walls that inextricably separate one age from another, but this is not the darkness that I mean to handle because history seen as a pathway of mankind is only a little peg in the dark alley.

New paths have opened in the footsteps of philosophical thinking that are neither original nor new but do reveal something often elusive to the naked eye and it is the notion of history as the totality of the limits set off by the interplay between the world of thought and the arena of actuality. There are no dark times as we learnt them because firstly time is an absolute horizon to exist therein and not a mere chronological measurement, and second the dark has been there since the creation, since the night was up there even before the day, it is the tiles on top of which the carpet of happy lives settles. So runs the saying in popular culture that a man never returns home from the war because his innocence and the basic grounds on which his values were oriented in the world became shattered in the battlefield; the important lesson here is that there are many wars to be waged and that there is a war with oneself too, sadly noticeable since the greatest philosophical discovery of the modern age, -the Self (and the true opposite of Christ, a rather vacuous friend this self thing). Regardless the wars, there is no homecoming and there is no homecoming even to oneself precisely because living in the world is very different from occupying a place on earth.

The world is meant here as the totality of the relationships between thinking beings, the bonds between neighbors that receive actuality only in their temporality. The natural world or earth has little involvement with the above because the earth as the Greeks found it is eternal and eternity is not a temporal tense because eternity is really a very long time and since time is built not of the continuity of the future but in fragments of the present, time is necessarily a series of intervals in which existence is possible, -existing totally, that is, indefinitely over continuous time is as paradoxical as living forever, who could bear it?. The fragility of human bonds is precisely the foundational stone of our humanity and making the bonds eternal or bulletproof is tantamount to shattering them. There is no home in the world for man because the world is not a home but a relationship and the earth is not a human place, something that religion did know thousands of years (despite the obvious chasm between morality and religion, between divinity and the forces of nature) before modern philosophy discovered the independence of the nature from the man-made world. This is why the homecoming is never happy for humanity, a homecoming like the Enlightenment and freedom for example. We have been always in the dark, and that is the only assurance of our happiness, -a rather fragile one. The only home for man is the fragile bonds of human relationships, the there-ness of being with others and this obviously inextricably intertwinted with the most worldless of feelings, -love, or perhaps should we say “earthless”? Could a something that shatters the space between people take away not only the human condition of being earth-bound but also the social world? This is a question that remains as open today as it does in the old theology but it is a question by no means political.

The problem faced here today is that we have come to understand the dark as a lethargic silence like that present over graveyards where no graves are to be seen and this is the principle of Nihilism and the real tragedy that means the end of understanding when the comedy of life and the tragedy of philosophy are turned into absolute values and even virtues. Understanding the darkness as silence is not living but mourning and understanding all knowledge of the past as fatal mistakes, - and nothing could be more mistaken precisely because knowledge also unfolds historically, it has an archaeology. This happens when Aristotle made us forget our Plato, in that this “thinking business” is circular and that no conclusions are drawn from it because it does not constitute any particular knowledge as in the sciences but only generally and that is why wonder and curiosity is necessary; from this follows that the end of philosophy is not an end for thinking but a momentum in which the homecoming to ourselves has become unlikely. Not coming home to ourselves means the end of wonder, the adulthood of mankind that means perhaps not something all that good anyways. Never coming home is the ultimate loneliness and has little in common with the intimate solitude of the philosopher because the former could hardly be thought of as a choice.

Political philosophy contended at some point of the 20th century with an old Platonic argument albeit in up-to-date form that it is no one but God the sole witness of my good deeds so that basically ethics is attached to a certain form of solitude but not from myself; because I am the person with whom I live and the two-in-one, who I am and what I appear like must coincide in me, otherwise it means that I am not able to live myself and there is an obvious divorce between my essence and my presence, -the situation of our times and a rather grave position to be in. But coinciding within me means also that I am not bound in any of the pieces of me by the rules that governed history in the universal so that I am not being thrown into the future as the Christian metaphysicians aimed to, because this future was empty of content since the greatest reward was the eternity and we moderns have never seen or experienced eternity so far. I am able to coincide only in the present tense with me and myself complying with the premise that I know I have been randomly thrown into this world and I cannot possibly change but I do have the possibility to choose this contingency and turn it into my destination, that is as radical as freedom can grow because we ourselves are most possibly the only thing in the world that we can change. And lastly freedom once again is not entirely foreign to the darkness, because freedom as the sole foundation of our society and cultural struggle is never a secure foundation or even a foundation at all because this freedom as referred to the absence of limitations in general (and this includes historical limitations, that is, the boundaries of personality and identity as the pre-modern world knew them) is not as many mistakenly thought a constitution of civil and political liberties, whose struggle is older than modernity and than Christianity, -the struggle of culture. A double-bind in the imagination, to the left Auschwitz and to the right modern art, this is the problem with the absence of limitations in general, an unsolvable paradox.

The darkness is not the chains of Prometheus but the possibility that we can promise inner freedom to ourselves in so far as we do not instrumentalize life for the pursuits of happiness and freedom but self-contain it as something to be lived for its very own and unique qualities,-the metaphysical enterprise to make subject and object coincide is entirely futile when opposed to the triad of life, freedom and philosophy. This promise is the only faith available to the man who did not return home from his own war (and there are many other who did not return to and thinking of politics is this commonality, a theory of modernity that assures the stability of family, society and institutions as Hegel glimpsed it in his Philosophy of Right) and understanding this promise can grant us no salvation other than the reconciliation with the facts of history that have become abysmal to the human condition and have prevented the coincidence between ourselves. We have inherited the years as a deep sadness only because we have not remembered that at any point in the universe life is only a fleeting moment and little else, the broken second of temporality, of the Sabbatical sun. That is why it has come a time for people and specially for those who struggle to coincide with themselves, to turn the silent hours of our histories into the possibility to tell a story in a time when no longer immortals dwell who can write. This is our only promise, that even at the risk of not fulfilling it is the only one we can make. There is no home in this world for us because the only home is God and if there be any home it is ourselves in the plural space, and hitherto we have turned disappointment into the dressing room where the distance of Simone Weil between God and God lives and other Gnostic monsters too, being this now a fact we are not obligated to erect a mourner’s tent. There is a home, but it is not heaven or earth, only a little station in between. All these thoughts cannot be anything but true because they are particular and because philosophy cannot be counterfeited like money or science. Lessing quotes St. Augustine in the opening of a certain work from his soliloquies with “In the same sense that these things are all true, is the same sense in which they are all false”.

"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.

Fragments

One of the most important questions of the Romantic movement was whether is it possible for man to be at home in the world, this questionable search has lost all relevance for me. It belongs in the plurality of Mehrwuerdigkeiten typical of our age and this possibility of homeliness isn't an ontological situating, meaning that it isn't inherent to the fundamental horizon of humanity in this same world (understood as a totality of facts, the sum total of experiences in time); it doesn't belong in the totality of facts of the world and its limits, the limits of historical men theretofore. The question does have a solipsistic value that undeniably demands an horizontal withdrawal and consequently the loss of experience, which is the most fundamental conditio for historicity after the demise of epistemological prismas which rely on a possible view of the totality that is enabled only in an entirely trascendental universe, namely, that with a telos of futurity. Modernity has denied this possibility, least it were to deny itself. Nonetheless the total loss of experience, replaced by mood and representation, is also one of the political facts of our age. For this reason, this home in the world is primary a question of politics, theo-politics and onto-theology.

Daydreaming

The anger of the night-dawn always overtakes me, in moments when looking back presents a Janus face that embodies the past as it looks toward the future through an empty cube. Interlocutors of times past dwell in the most remote silence and the hours of the day are all vested in such angry and unorderly despair; we no longer enter the churches, taking infinite pleasure in the politics of oblivion as though religion would be more a matter of loosening one's memory to an unfinished thread, thence all experience blurs into conspiracies, into theologoumena that represent merely syntactic paradigms of finite completion, utterances in the void of time, that clash in between the tenses that the present causes to all those who attempt so vanely to get hold of its arms.

Day-dreaming of a future so transparent that it might never possibly come without the amount of contigency necessary to disappear into the fragments of the present, the Messianology is always an unattainable aim, reason for which it remains so clearly the greatest source of consciousness; the myth starts in the future and then cuts through the past in order to land in the bitter thirst of the present. Remembering is an act of aggression, the politics of that having a place in the world. This such worldliness is always finding a place to stand, the safe ground that is always taken away by any possibility of absolute freedom. Absolute freedom never means to overturn the Will, but rather the mere experience of limitlessness, both conceptual and structural. In the flux of constant change, of human existence itself as this motion (and not time hereby) in its variegating opposition to human essence; for weren't we created "once" and "all the same"? Day-dreaming isn't imagining, it is the making of history itself insofar as history fulfills an unhistorical function in the sense that it remains a human artifact every so often perfect for self-knowledge; for the preposterous capability to trace one's origins through the delimitation of one's end whenever a trascendental project is given up. Daydreamin is memory, awakening is distinction and representation, aesthetics and axiologies of time; sleep is reification of consciousness, burgeoise instrumentalization of reality and dreaming itself is history.

Letter to Ivan

Dear Ivan,

I write you this letter from Tel Aviv, in the most distant of all exiles from all possible truth that there be in this world but at times it seems to me as though this isn't so bad after all, truth is a murderous alphabet that fills the space with so much anger, with so much Angst - the Angst of having lived so to speak. It is very strange to be far from Jerusalem after those long months that counted more than a thousand days and that, even when insignificant in the count of a person's life seems to be enough to realize how how much not at home man is in this world and perhaps that's his ideal position; from religion one at best learns that man is in practice very much alone in a very large world, a little peg in the largesse of the universe yet very much on his own.

Miracles never happen in Tel Aviv, except for the new large buildings that extent their arms into heavens like a Tower of Babel, perhaps hoping that one day we'll manage to reach far enough and then we'll crown ourselves into kings of the universe. The beauty in the spaces reflects everything so untruthfully, at best faint representations of something already old and uninteresting. One can be really that alone in Tel Aviv among very large crowds, without speaking to anybody and not wanting to in any case. What one misses the most is the true friends, those that would help one wander through the days of the apocalypse, that shared their bread with the stranger and that drank together the bitter waters of life, until they became entirely drunk as to be able to escape the terrible facts of truth : that there're no facts and history is but a word. That we're all in boat leading specifically nowhere and that the awareness of being such Noah, with all the fragility and insecurity that it implicates, is all what can be called faith in an age like ours when every possible concept has been turned into its radical opposite, or into its negation or into a joke.

The faith of Tel Aviv is otherwise, for people truly believe in the Tower of Babel and as though it were our taks to bring the eschaton with our hands, they make strenous efforts to embrace life all the most, as though one had the option in this world as it is to embrace anything but his own death and that of the others. As though one had a chance to accept the conditions of this world as it is, yet without negating them or wanting a better one not in the far-away Redemption but in the absolute present of our life today. I find this faith admirable, but certainly not mine. I walked into the church today, not for too long... and it made me very happy that those who can't believe in anything still can flee from this overdose of "knowing everything" into a cold space where one knows that there's little up there to pray for, and that is the only reason why one should pray in any case. To leave the chair empty not for the Messiah, because every Messiah that will come and occupy the chair is a false one... simply leaving the chairs empty for all those tired from the intensity of living, to rest from life if just a little... that's all what my Messianic feeling is about.

Warmest regard, friend of the true places
Miss you

At "The Little Prince": Emigration Journals

Yet sooner than expected one would find himself at home in certain places, or as Eveline's son would put it... not at home in more than one place. A cafe-bookstore and a tavern, both imported from the heavenly Jerusalem, the most dreadful and deadening of all places on earth... "The Litte Prince", that's the name of that such place... Unreadable and old Hebrew books furnish the walls and all the students chatter with each other on books and matters of the day, and how I wished to be part of those conversations! The urgency took over me again, proving that the outside is always troubled with me, but perhaps it's no willy-nilly, it isn't the catastrophic finances even, but more like that enormous fear of arriving in Jerusalem tonight, to close a deal with that awful place, to grant her a divorce. Bringing all my books and papers to the great misery ("t'aluva") that composes the landscape here. Most often I don't wish to leave the house, as of usual fearing accidents and more troubled environments, entanglements with new people that might just make matters worse than they've been until now. Emigrating to this new city is like changing one's name, everything suddenly turns so comfortable and familiar yet only because of that priceless gift of anonimity.

The conclusion is that one can't live with any situation and that's why they're so bearable even at the point when one's lost all courage. Changing the city or the country doesn't alter anything, it's like taking up citizenship in a foreign country, you can't care that much. One just can't survive in any city, because the bags don't differ between geographical loci, the language doesn't change and in this loneliness I only wish I were among those old friends, complaining about our miser situation with all possible virtuoso performance, as though on a stage. Only the songs save one from losing the language so entirely, when all the languages one writes in are foreign and untouchable. You might have fled leaving others on their own, without exit visas, betraying a little so to speak and this, despite the totality of the experience, doesn't contain any moral worth; yet one's attempting to overcome the curiosity of Lot's wife and by tour de force, becoming one another Noah in his boat, turning the waters upside down. The appalling distance from all living material that one gains in exile is nauseating at times, so that you run and hide in yourself, only in order to become so frightened as to eliminate all desire to survive again. Years passed by since I spent those awful hungry nights in the north of Tel Aviv writing those ridiculous musings and little stories that would save me from collapsing. By then, I had almost forgotten all Greek, except for the parts strictly necessary to remain alive yet one day more... in the hometown there were always friends to help and conversations, free hot meals and warm beds, counsels and a lot of empathy... Here it all seems so far, and you embrace your security as though it were at all, but those of us who have spent years in the abyss know this to be otherwise. Only the little pasts with those moments of truth can help one not to collapse at every juncture of the hour. It's about time to unlive the truth for a while, to work on oneself and to be rehabilitated for life, we'll live again, she said to me... and I hope for those days only because I want to believe they're distant from the here and now that has already fallen into a black hole where only remembering can provide any solace, can erase the towers and dry the sea, to reveal the Judean desert again, only that can hush the parties to let those angry godless prayers be heard, only that can dissipate the securities in order to show how much we fear. In exiles language is always turned around, it's never lost... simply translated, and that's what causes a little pain sometimes. With a little Greek I arrived home, and with that same little Greek I left.

Emigration - Meinwärts

Passing the mark of a thousand nights, I emigrate again... Not into a place unknown before but yet so uncommonly strange and so well separated from language and foe, so terribly not gemütlich but altogether possible to be lived; in the great distance from all the truth in the world one wanders through the street without experiencing anything as his eyes are always busy with something else, trying to cope with the amazement in its most un-Greek form. The music plays from the most varied locales, but you know it's all a permanent silent inertia as though eternity could be in one place - history is destroyed afresh with the impressive towers that aim to reach the sky one day, so that the poor-spirited can dwell there, to relieve themselves... But sometimes in the streets there're accordeonists like those we used to know back home, they beg for money just like we begged for death, for an irretriveable divorce from every word of truth, for a distance... And those beggars, it's their laughter what impresses me so deeply, a laughter that overcomes all sadness and that becomes a flag in the paviment for the passer-by's to identify themselves with, as though it were an embassy issueing temporary passports for refugees, for those fleeing the estrangement.

There's yet something poetic but harmless about those warm nights, the eventless noise and the lax smell of a very thin light. You can sit and write, but then that isn't really telling your story and therefore you walk down the street with those heavy bags, from city to city, from person to person, throwing books sometimes and picking up rags... You just can't leave them anywhere, and even the children seem so burdened carrying those heavy bags from their own history; only in the early evening, at those very small cafeterias, one can open his bags and organize a garage sale every night, with accordeonists around playing so kindly as to sooth the thickness of one's own skin as not to seem hairsplit. But there're no customers, except for other emigrees... with so little money to buy anything from your heavy bag, so that they only exchange one item for another, tell their own stories, add a piece from somebody else or delete a chapter in their own and trade it for a cup of coffee with a stranger. No dreams of return harvest in you, while you don't plan on staying either and the cafes become stations, train stations, with temporary lockers for your bags, they rent the lockers for hours only and at the end of the day you must bring your suitcase back to your room, in the dampness of the air and the stillness of the hours.

You feel divorced from the pain you felt every morning, the anger, the anguish... your hands become a little spoiled as there's no need to look for the bread of life, Jesus is nowhere to be found around here, except in a Filipino church around the corner and there he's no friend or conversator, he remembers not his way back into the Street of the Prophets... he takes the buses all day long asking for directions, and in the end he winds up in the same garage sales. Looking for a tourist, for a foreigner... who will speak another language and listen to the story with delight and in his mind he will imagine Jerusalem as the palace of a King so full of empty chairs, and he will not notice the graves that always welcome you in. It's strange to tell people that nights are so silent here, so quiet... because it isn't factually true, but the emigrees know it well. There's so much we have forgotten, debts we didn't pay and friends that will no longer call. In the late afternoon you despair in your table, drink the bitter coffee with the slowest depth of your body and look into the abyss... It isn't deep enough, you know it well. But emigrating is a way to live, to continue living and not drunken from glasses of water, from letters and from the burden of the stones, you yourself having become one of them. You prefer not to leave your room, there's just such lack of desire! But remember this is just a train station, and like all stations it leads nowhere while at the same time it never leads back.

"Vom Sinn der Liebe"

Such was the title of a rather strange book published almost a hundred years ago in Jena by a young essayist named Margarete Susman, who had just a decade before and at the very turn of the century made a name among the bohème of Berlin with a little book of poetry titled "Mein Land" that saw three editions before the end of the Weimar Republic - an honour bestowed on few, certainly not on the greatest titans of the German-Jewish poetry like Else Lasker-Schüler and Walter Calé, her contemporaries. One of her poems, "A maiden sings in the plains', was turned into a symphony by Jan Sibelius as early as 1906. Today there're just very few who can remember the name of Margarete Susman, especially in an age when the categories and standards bestowed upon us to "remember" have uplifted their veils and thrown us into decay. For Margarete Susman, religiosity (intimately close to love) was a very different experience (and not merely phenomena) than it had been for most of the Jewish theologians of the time; for her this meant the intensive quality of language, the intensivity of speech... This religiosity didn't speak the language of myth any longer but interpreted itself and 'was become' through the intimate lyric of the "I". It is this intensive quality of speaking as a means to overcome the lack of pre-representation typical of burgeoise property relations and the age of commercial reproduction, the ethos of the flaneur; the dialogical and unsolipsistic nature of understanding as metaphysics itself - the step beyond the theology of the "Deus absconditus" that troubled the philosophers since the middle ages and in particular, since Scottus' ontological argument for the existence of God and accordingly, and contingent necessity of a concept of religiosity intimately bound to rationality and therefore hierarchies and ultimately unspeakable dogmas. Unspeakable not in the sense of having overcome language through the religious experience but out of not being inter-clusterical enough as to engage directly in the diaporias of human language; all theology (in particular with reference to Thomism and Orthodox Lutheran theology) was in that sense pre-linguistic, and therefore mythical only in negative terms, only by means of antinomies.

Saydreaming

I

The mornings of the world are dreaming,
With the murderous solitude of twilight
The Orphic calm of the waves, of feather...
They unfold nightly, with wide open arms,
Coated in milk of coal and hell, yet so cold.
Venturing to bruise the delicate skin of the glass
Illuminating a very poor street, naked from the music
Undistinguishing cinnamon and prophecy
As though both were a white body, made from soothing oaks.

II

The nights are not jealous, they pray orgiastically
To heal the nausea of the morning, the sun's eyelid
And the worlds move their lips inwards,
Not to bespeak the taste of the bitter bread.
Unclean abyssmal theodicies, offered so kindly
To passerby's and enemies, denizens, strangers...
In strenous efforts to halt the mighty rivers
That lead to the silent despair of Shabbat,
But the morning is so helpless! With her wooden stockings...

III

One might want to be free, like a broken clavicord,
Or a bruised accordeon, yet the air sings so solidly!
That one chokes from the light and the hairs
Filtering through the little cracks in the canvas.
The mornings of the world are in danger
Unable to cleanse the thrill of the night.
The days are mere sweet passengers
Resting from their loves, on a bed of cactuses.
On their way to the frenzy of the night.

Skin of Cinnamon

The skin of cinnamon
Neatly wrapped in Athenian bricks
Unfolds across the skies of Jerusalem
Falling out of enmity
But also out of friendship
Encountering a vacuum
Filled with so many lies
With so many lines
Bought from the book-market
And in the foreign news

Along the little alleys
Ugly as they are
Strolled nightly
The lovers of hatred
With chemicals in place of words
A rift suddenly, a breach
From an untrusted conversator
Enveloped by a lustless fear
Of being recognized once again
In the eyelid of a blind accordeon.

Turning away from madness
Into sadness, into luck
Into faith of the eye-glassed kind
Outreaching to touch a faltering hand
That would betray the night
With the wealth of belief
The speech of a deer
Mumbling a sad German song
From the plains of Ain Kerem
Having forsaken having a world.

The rain, the breach

...After the rain, the breach...
That falls from the very ground
Back into the firmament
The thrill of a shattered drawing
Vanishing just as easily
As a night spent in Rome
In the solace,
Of solitary wooden stockings...
Unconcerned with past rhymes
Writing under the colours of sulfur
With hands of another essence
Less protracted, from journeys
Into the lands of other nearby embrace
Forgiveance, without oblivion
Without the secret betrayal of indifference
But more conceited too
Less given to the watery shadows
Of moodlight woes
No longer afraid, no longer despised...
...After the rain, the breach...
The silence, and a very little unquenchable thirst
For the same old hyssop, left hovering around
Without being left past the hinges
In order to water
The death of nature...
Only opening the windows
In order to water down
Very old letters

Jewish Politics and Love - Part III

That brief conversation couldn't have too much meaning, I thought for a fleeting moment - we were already onto some serious matters after all. But I found this to be a lie immediately thereafter, to a great extent I couldn't care, I'm a European-educated guy, perhaps more provincial than cosmopolitan and not as failed as I would like to be, so that it couldn't matter to me any less 'in a way'. After all, I had had my own affairs with diplomats and Catholic clergy, as a leading socialite of the strange and invisible expat world of East Jerusalem to which I had belonged for sometime, despite endless warnings of friends in the Western side telling me "Watch out, you do look very Jewish after all". I had worked for a German Catholic organization, and knew the Christian community from head to toes and a great extent of the diplomatic one, at least from the European missions. I wasn't interested in influences or power, in fact my intentions were radically apolitical, I was just trying to satisfy my aesthetic sense with materials by far not available in the whole of Jewish Jerusalem. With all this in mind, what could be wrong with a nice Arab boy? Well that's something which needs a long answer. After the revelation nothing apparently changed, except the fact that paradoxically I could turn immediately to English and speak both languages simultaneously, being someone in English and someone else in Hebrew but playing both acts as good as I could. He felt ought to leave and tried to convince him otherwise, although I did want to leave that hole of filth where we had been crumped.

Thinking of it, it was highly typical of me to be with him in this rather fancy bar and then in those loopholes, because as sort of bohemian and declared enemy of the burgeoisie (to which I deliberately belong as though it were a fact of natural law) I could only find myself in places that are either of the very highest standards or of the very lowest, with nothing in the middle but the game of a broken middle whose lines I have refused to play since I became an adult. Finding it to be extremely boring and playful... And it is in those places, the best restaurants and cocktails just like in the filthiest bars and clubs, where Bohemians and Arabs meet. Then I convinced him to join me for half an hour to an even lousier place that I've grown too fond of, and encountered one of my painters on the portico, then followed by other people. At this point the conversation was quite intense and it reached the level of aesthetics I had sought and broke it asunder, aesthetics had become passion but in the most burning sense of the word. Being able to speak English made me a little free, not only grammatically, but in the sense that there was a shared sense of foreignness. Altogether, everything seemed extremely alright, which is always a very bad symptom, I always say. Eventually he decidedly had to go and I walked him over to his car, that is very very different from G. or J.'s, perhaps different by at least twenty-thousand dollars. So we kissed again perhaps in the best possible way - playing with both aesthetics and lust, and of course he had to be an educated Arab to understand that, a concept as foreign to Israelis as the idea of aristocracy. Then he brought me to my friends again and I left quite touched, unhindered and a little bit vexed.

I sat by myself and couldn't even drink, just played with my thoughts and remembered the one more painter sitting next to us, smiling with our conversation and drawing a man that danced in a chiaroscuro of green flashes. Then of course the curious friendly public couldn't wait to be furnished with all the information, and I replied basically by saying no more than "Well, some guy I happen to have dated a few times and who turned out to be an Arab". The first response is an absolute silence of ten minutes on the part of everybody, and then one young man interjects with a "Didn't you know it before?", to this I responded only with a nod. A very well-meaning friend just wanted to 'improve' the situation by saying "Oy Leo... there're some good Arabs you know!". This absolutely murdered the situation, but it would be only an appetitzer of what would come later. I had been a little bit jumpy because after all that date had been also the assassination of an old ghost, overall it had been a perfectly drawn night, and there my suspicion started that would be confirmed only ten minutes later.

My dear B., called me incessantly over the course of an hour, time during which in the middle of a tribunal made of ten young Israelis scorned my public shame, when I realized this a great deal of text messages had arrived already and I set myself to respond. In fact, my dear B. had been extremely "offended" by our meeting, which I had considered to be extremely normal and very successful, first of all because as an Israeli-born Arab, raised up in a villa in Ein Kerem, driving a car twice as expensive as anyone else's I know and studying medicine at the Hebrew University, he had to "accuse" me of "belonging" to what he termed the Ashkenazi Zionist burgeoisie, of course... me from all people! The most radical of all anti-burgeoisie that fights with his own burgeoise attitudes more than a little. But the judgment day didn't end there, it was also an attack set upon me and an statement of the impossibiliy of our "chemistry" because he's allegedly a Communist, who of course knows by heart the menus of all international restaurants to be found in this city! Finally it was significant enough to say that the root of the matter is that "I'm an Arab and you're a Jew". Proceeding onto adding that "When I told you I was a Christian it was only half the truth, in fact I'm half Muslim". "We believe in different things altogether". So that I was fairly enlightened by the content of this lesson: That love, ideology and chemistry are equally synonimous and interchangeable terms!

Of course a whole providence of self-defense of someone who's never been attacked. Perhaps my friend does want to be an Arab in his heart, but in his whole attitude and language he's entirely one of us... although, almost none of my friends would agree. He's by no means a Palestinian, but an Israeli Arab that could certainly pass easier for an Israeli than myself that at best am able to pretend being a third-rate European in exile. Something makes me think that these experiences are not the mainstream (or at least I want to believe it so) and that among less 'cultured' segments of both our Jewish and Arab societies, these encounters are not so abnormal and that happen in everyday situations, something that we 'intellectuals' aren't too fond of because it's difficult to quote that way. It is interesting to give oneself such political legitimacy, but not at the price of love in whichever form it comes, but matters aren't so easily resolved.

Conversation

"Oy... what a drama! But how real? The guy leaves although he's so interested, because I'm a burgeoise, a Jew and because I seemly am in love with another guy".

"I think you still have your other one in the heart, but you could never have such wonderful evenings with him"

"He also thinks that I can't love him at all because my other one is a Jew and that he's an Arab. I can't believe the world to be divided between Jews and Arabs. I don't accept it!"

"But he's right, isn't he? Yet he doesn't understand the meaning of the evening you spent together...The horror of it is that the politics and the ressentment and divisions fill all parts of the most private feelings, there's no corner left free, not even love."

"The night was so mad! The "Arab" came to my house this morning, he explained once again that he's a Communist and I'm an elitist burgeoise, then we stopped and had a pretty good time, it all seemed OK. Then he left and called me again to say it can't work out... because of the Jew-Arab thing!"

"My dear Leo, it is a dilemma when one's own life is so mad and crazy, the artist's imagination is so useless, because there's no distancing, no need of evoking anything or inventing figures, stories or drama. How to survive, how to create, but seeing the everyday life as a parable... but how? When everything is at the highest risk, everything is extreme, devotion?"

"That's a serious problem, so that living and therefore dying is the only possible art, the kind of savoir-vivre. Everything is fragmentary representation, broken pieces... no distancing, just creation and therefore destruction".

"To call this a serious problem is already a step to help not getting mad. It's a good joke as well, because IT IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM! I start writing you a letter, we have to talk about love and politics, I'll call you tonight".

Nothing could have seem more normal than such encounter, taking into account our age, and well his, slightly less than three years under my already weighty twenty-three summers. But looking back, and it is important to notice how different the perspective is now, I can clearly see why B. would be so offended about this apparently unnatural meeting, not one of a bad context even as most of those encounters between our peoples that one hears about. It's not a matter of being too much of anything, or too little.. I simply feel that in my unrelenting trust that he was in fact an Israeli, I can't imagine how many millions of things I might have said whereof he might not have heard in his whole life... the revelation came to me as a shock and I refused to give it much importance, although I did feel that at the very moment he said he was an Arab, something did change in me and what had been the most natural feeling of 'tolerance' turned by now into hatred indeed, from both sides. It's a sad but strong anger you can't really describe, and especially that it is felt among two groups as unconventional in their ways as Jewish and Arab homosexuals... it's even perplexing, but somehow I guess as I said before, this is a sin of intelligent people, just safeguarding my sanity in the hope that the masses might think and most definitively act differently. I think now that I could have lied, and just say that it doesn't matter to me at all whether I have a Jewish partner or not, but I didn't so it's irrelevant, what is of importance is that, had I lied, perhaps I could be enjoying myself in a very neatly packed lie of love and deceive, although some of those are necessary sometimes, brutal reality is simply unbearable. It is a problem for our secular world, it can't manage to deal with itself, the abyss is too close and the ends-of-the-end drawing nearer and nearer in our age, either toward Enlightenment in the Kantian sense or plain destruction.

It was my duty to tell the truth, and even being an hypocrite I could say that lying didn't even seem possible then because I had the absolute security of being among 'my own'; and the things I said, oh God! Only he knows how bad it sounds when put into context. There's a conversation going on between human beings, there's a connection... but at a certain moment one turns around and sees the reality, and our realities aren't the same so that there's no possible conciliation, only vengeance in the short time and oblivion in the longer one. We both saw that reality in the moment when that discussion took place, and now it seems as though it happened a million years ago but it didn't. That look of reality was a frightening declaration of alterity that escapes all definitions, and it is indeed only the second chapter of the story with the children, it is an open declaration of what my friend said, the total politics of the space, even the most private feelings are invaded and filled with emptiness, the political is everything and therefore, nothing at all. This isn't without ground, to be an homosexual in Arab society (in Israel or anywhere else) is not just a dialectic of accept or reject as in Israel, where unfortunately some people are indeed thrown out of the house for coming out of the closet, but the tendency has changed significantly. It is a narrative of family life that the modern acceptance of the awareness of homosexuality has seriously threatened, and for an example we have a very nice story shared by our former policewoman: A certain guy is found out to be gay by the neighbours and soon thereafter is found dead, a police investigation in course: An Arab family, everybody is questioned... the end result: The father confessed to have ordered the older sons to murder the homosexual brother, and the youngest brother confesses to have seen how they soaked a piece of cloth in chemicals used for floor-cleaning and asfixiated that certain brother with it. They told the police that he was in the shower, had fallen upon the cloth with the chemicals unconscious already and inhaled it to death; quite a difficult story to believe matter-of-factly. This is the wonderful end!: The father expresses how much he loved his son, but as well how unable he was to live with the fact that his son is an homosexual!. Maybe his father could have loved him a little bit less and respected his sacred humanity a little bit more? Am I sounding too heartless? This is already what Postmodernity would define as a political murder, and no less.

My dear B. can't help his liking of me, it's all too clear.. but as long as I remain a Jew in this country it all seems impossible, no matter how contradictory his position is and mine too. How many times I spent long nights in the white Vienna with Egyptians and Lebanese, discussing Israeli politics? Or how many times I visited Sonia's father, that old guy from Tulkarem in Amsterdam? How often did I scorn Israel? Well, in Europe it was just too easy, and too irresponsible too. I might have developed already some un-love for my dear friend, who somewhere in the dark that has posed its wings upon one generation more, remains questioning the nature of the world at large and whether we need politics so much. I hear horrible stories about relationships with Arabs, most of them quite true, from all different kinds of people. It was clear to me that whatever he is, he undeniably belongs into the intelligentsia of this country... we can never have a double-state and we can never end this conflict, at least in this generation while enmities are just this fresh. Perhaps one could do like my dear Ursula Rosenzweig, to try and build a new intelligentsia in which Arabs and Jews will work together in building a country, but somehow I know this is bound to fail, because it is my country and not theirs, and I'm not even a Semite, I'm a stranger, a foreigner, imported from the West but I just know how much this country is mine.

This exercise has taught me that my intuition is right, the connection between love and politics in our age is beyond repair and it must be examined, I feel grateful that I've examined it in reality and no less, but at times the price of it seems an all-times-high one. Maybe I'll see him again in one of those expensive restaurants where we used to meet, just to remember that he's a Communist and I'm a pathethic burgeoise, no? And perhaps even beyond that, because our similarities are so striking that we might never be able to accept each other... but this love turned into politics and politics turned into love can only be negatively portrayed by a dictum of Augustine, "Love is as strong as death", and this, the father of a young man murdered by his brothers, could easily sing to himself in the tranquility of his heart. This love is murderous indeed, and perhaps we might find a way in which we could be a little bit more free by using less politics in between people and less love in between nations as the only viable alternatives of coexistence. That this exercise was taught me, in the course of such a wonderful night of a gift of grace, but only because this is so, the lesson is extraordinarily rude and noisy. A few years ago even, I felt so comfortable in the foreignness of East Jerusalem, but things have changed, the Levant has replaced Europe in many of my ways, but by no means all so that perhaps I have some space for reflection, the worst of all curses one might have in days when despair creeps in so easily and action is limited to the definition of whom we hate or love, if only on the principle of difference. I remain aloof in the madness of this dead city, and trying to come to terms with myself from the storm of political loves, I send a whole bunch of lies to an old friend, telling him how much I've spent the last two days resting from my books and my madness.... how untrue could it be? And then he replies callously telling me how he's been working in the garden. How much I envied him then. But yet not. We're all made of different material, and apparently so, of different politics and policies.

Jewish Politics and Love - Part II

On Thursday, while looking for some material that could aid J. in her work, I came across a certain book by a teacher of mine, 'Biopolitics' and although the title didn't so far attract me, after reading the first page I couldn't leave it at all, for it spoke already about the broken promises of Modernity - something I consider to be a living reality and of my most devoted interest. I came across a chapter titled 'Sexual Politics', criticizing the 'politicization' of life as a whole, of the body, of justice, in fact or every possible human concern. With the reading I came across certain points, albeit they seemed exaggerated to me but I did take them into account. The feminists would evaporate themselves by achieving their goals, the homosexual liberation grew tired already and has nothing to do with social concerns anymore, the degree of political 'sexism' will lead eventually to a redefinition of all what we've thought about sex, so that there's as much radicalism in being a puritan today as there was in being a public whore in the 60's, both with as much lack of aim. All the issues raised did interest me, but again I must state, I didn't think them to be so relevant for me at least. I settled down the matter and moved onto other concerns. In telling my nicely wrapped story I owe to return once to the week before.

B. and me knew each other from a certain café I had visited with a tourist whom I felt obliged to guide around Eim Kerem upon request of a friend. I always loved going there, especially alone... to enjoy the pastoral sight still soaked in the religious frenzy of good Christianity and secular Judaism. The tourist and me sat in a restaurant and had a sound meal, visited some churches and were instructed by one of my Franciscan friends about the shortcuts available to make it to certain church on top of the hill. I couldn't be any less positive about joining him so that I decided to sit in a cafe, write in my journal, pass the time.... almost not living and have a drink or two. B. sits close by and enjoys a rather large breakfast, glimpses the newspaper here and there... all of a sudden 'accidentally' his whole cup of coffee split onto my lap and in a very impersonal calm I settled the issue by starting a conversation. He was perhaps not one of those magazine idols that homosexuals dream about, to my utter despise... but there was a truly cultured Oriental beauty about him and a captivating one. My tourist took longer than expected in returning so that B. and me would just go for a stroll and in my unintended innocence I start to fall into an abyss from which one despair would lift me up. Suddenly I understood B. wasn't just friendly, but flirtateous too... in a way I hadn't been accustomed to for so long, because I no longer live in Vienna, and because the accordeonist and me play similarly, but with the very disapassionate logic of truth. I had somehow grown used into those brief love affairs of a day or two (not even of a night) with passer-bys and strangers, knowing that it would be so shortlived and just taking advantage of it for myself, for my creativity and poems, for my thoughts... stealing fragments from the skin of so many travelers. But this was different, one of the 'natives' would treat me for an excursus into the world of speech that I couldn't recognize in myself most of the time while I live here and interact in the Hebrew language; this is something you're allowed to do in German, but never in Hebrew. So eventually I was invited for a 'cup of coffee and a Belgian waffle', not knowing how much I detest those sweeties, even in the spiritual sense.

After my return to the central madness of Jerusalem's lack of reality, I became oblivious of this unprecedented encounter just too briefly, painters and accordeonists in my life, bad philosophers, lawyers, etc. But he wouldn't, and soon enough on a certain warm night I'd find myself drinking coffee, lying and explaining to very amiable personality, my distate for sweets. I couldn't say it wasn't thrilling, but there was a certain reticence, a certain mud... although this is what it looks like only now. The conversation wasn't really too overwhelming, studying medicine, living in Ein Karem, my book, my madness, our humour, etc. In perspective it was also the kind of conversation that only very idiosyncratic Israelis could have, the typical half-foreigner young man, pretty well educated and doubtful in between things. I went home without a second thought, it couldn't have been more normal than this. Then it was followed by a second meeting, stage at which I was informed this meeting had been called a 'date' by my singular companion. Things didn't change much, I simply couldn't bother, just go, talk, get out of the house a little, away from friends... you can play a little and hide a lot, because you're not amidst your own tent and someone living in Ain Kerem couldn't have an idea of the kind of everyday misery so typical of those living in the very center of the city. Nothing changed at this point. On Friday I had spent a lot of time outside, newspapers, coffee, humus, like a typical Friday before Shabbat, something I hadn't experienced for just too long. Then that certain 'participative democracy' of education that didn't come around without surprises, planning the next revolution perhaps, although I was happy at least it didn't happen in some pricey restaurant. Then back to the cafés, turning again to politics, the state, the Arabs, I don't know... whatever came to mind. I was thoroughly enlightened by the conversation, and also came to agree with myself (a rarity indeed) that the accordeonist is wrong in some accounts. But overall I didn't pay too much attention, was tired, not even melancholy... just feelingless, empty in a way. Silence and bed could be the only solution, in such a state of weariness from the public eye, I couldn't write or think one bad thought even, so that I grab a book and in the next minute I fall asleep with it.

I wake up nearing the beginning of the night, and find myself uneasy at being alone yet wanting it much... No efforts to communicate with friends or to send messages that might be probably unresponded for the next twelve hours. Opening my phone, trying to locate someone's number (to call another day) I find out not to have erased B's number and without offering an apology for having been a brutal pig two days before, I simply text him in order to say hello and just continue my reading. After the first response I knew there would be follow up and in the end he agreed to my idiosyncratic ways in and out and asked me to see him in the next half an hour in the city, actually in a very mild place, full of smiling people and quite boring too... but out of my weekend's lack of fondness with anything I simply fell through as though not really thinking about anything. I go to encounter my faith, because fate is something I wish I didn't have to see so often. The beginning is strange, entering an unknown bar (this doesn't happen too often) and sitting, talking about 'you and me', nothing too concrete although everything on the whole pretty 'nice'. Then a lovely conversation about nothing, in the best of British style, that kind of talk that would have been impossible with my painter or my accordeonist; so at least I felt that the Romantic spirit of such evening wasn't wasted at all even if it were to be resultless.

Then a suggestion to change places, 'looking for less noise', and then we're headed on my account, to a certain 'quiet' please where the burgeoisie atmosphere choked me as it always does and then we headed onto a place where 'a fag could be free', as though it meant anything for the time being. Then the trouble starts (not the real one): Going into a gay bar is an asffixiating experience, especially out of the excess of familiarity with all the postmodern lust, the lack of youth, and the desire to be something you can't, somewhere you might never reach. We couldn't talk too much, because instead of less we received much more noise, but we did talk a little. In fact I felt very pleased by the fact that I was having a real date, as strange as it sounds to anyone who knows me. Kind of having achieved the normality un-sought for, but not entirely convinced of it, happy that no one recognized me around and that all my troubles with myself had ended for one beautiful night, like so many other beautiful nights where I was for a few hours entirely immortal. It all starts off and moves forward just so slowly and a certain point there was a little kiss and then another and another, so in fact I had found myself in a date, despite myself... I also knew this to be a date because we didn't run to bed immediately. This is part of my philosophical problems! I want pleasure and certainly male lust is no little pleasure, but I want to fight with aesthetics, so that I prefer to sacrifice pleasure in a Christianmost way, if for the sake of aesthetics. Accordingly, so many passing and brief but lustless love affairs, even for a few hours... This of course coming from somebody whose life's work is to overcome aesthetics, no little joke! In this moment I felt sublated, because there was an incredible amount of aesthetics (despite the horrible lack of it in the milieu) together with a very shy and diminished amount of lust. This all sounds like a very boring dating journal entry, except for a very meaningful event.

-"Leo, tell me, would you like to have a boyfriend that is Jewish?"
-"Well, in the past I didn't use to think about it, but now perhaps it's become somehow important"
-"Oh I wanted to ask, because I'm not Jewish"
-"So what are you?"
-"I'm a Christian, an Arab"
-"Oh well... let it be" (I kept myself from saying 'it's ok')

This is where my problems began!

Jewish Politics and Love - Part I

To Katharina and Juli, with whom I gained the inspiration to write down these days through absurd conversations.

"I have a blue piano at home
And yet I know, not one note.

It stands in the darkness of the cellar's door
Since then, when the world turned mad.

Four hands of the stars play it
- And the Lady Mood sang once from a boat -
Nowadays only the rats dance with the tune.

Oy! The keyboard is broken....
And I mourn the dead blue....

Ah! A beloved angel opens
- I ate from bitter bread -
Opens for me the heavenly door of life -
Even against all prohibitions."
-Else Lasker-Schüler,
"My Blue Piano", transl. by Leo.

Once, when I had been to Paris at the tender age of fourteen I had been flabergasted in my disappointment regarding the lack of accordeonists in the street, so that I found one of my own in a little alley of Jerusalem almost ten years later; he wouldn't play so swiftly and in fact he wouldn't play at all... but the accordeonist was a figure as necessary in the writing of one's life as a flaneur could ever be. And after my timely discovery I realized through reading some old journals, that I had perhaps seen that accordeonist before and that Plato could be eventually right in one thing. Of course listening to an accordeonist that can't play one single note, is doubtless an act of love, but so were the sufferings of the Lord on the Cross and Abraham's murder attempt against his own son. In the case of Cain, I'm not so sure of what the legal opinions could be, but I'm inclined to rely on more lust than love... it's almost a pagan ritual like that in which Pentheus is sensually devoured by his mother - yet this sounds too easy, for extremes, as Lessing said, are just too easy to represent... so that the painting of the tragedy could be only achieved if one were to draw it the second before the murder, when the eyes of the mother are still loving and graceful. It is not altogether feasible to sketch a painting before the moment of love, but no less, it is impossible to restrain oneself from puncturing the canvas in the fleeting hereafter of love but right before the hero is dead. Otherwise one would indulge in too much compassion, not in the nature of the artist and allegedly a devise antagonistic in essence to the demands of aesthetics.

This can also remind me of what a certain Hebrew writer said (and perhaps the only thing she ever said about her own writing) about narration, that the richness of details often manages to murder a good story, it is only in the talent of the narrator to make the characters come real with the least amount of information necessary, one isn't too much concerned with the 'biography' so to speak, than with the essence of a moment. For a philosopher of history, this is perhaps the only possible solution out of the problem of not telling history as though it were philosophy of history. So that my story starts when reading a certain book called "The Land of the Hebrews", and what a lame rhaetorical devise is to start a story with the reading of a book, but for me holds truer than anything else; in that book there's a certain faintly story about Jerusalem and its people, about the age of God that allowed me to play wistfully in Hebrew with the name of a beloved foe, a Hebrew poet himself, the devise is impossible in any other language, so that I must warn in advance that this is in fact a story written in Hebrew, therefore it cannot be translated into any language but that. In the little book one kind of sees Jerusalem from the eyes of heaven, and not even that... from the vantage of the heaven before heaven, so that somehow one would never really want to make it there. The writer sees the city from a little window in a hotel around Shekh Jarra, nowadays a wealthy Arab neighbourhood where the local parvenus often visit to let themselves treated to the indiscreet eyes of diplomats and Christian old-aristocracy as to gain a confirmation of their own ability to live in respectable society if only for the sake of metaphysical clarity, for such is nowhere to be found in the greater perimeter of the city.

I saw the city from higher up, looking out a window in Mt. Scopus wherefrom I could catch a glimpse of the whole of the little Arab houses that I could only imagine from the accordeonist's little home nearby, however, outside his kitchen there was (perhaps also imagined) a laundry thread and that was already part of the Arab house. I sat opposite that window many hours, realizing my loss... being inside the cleanest building in the whole of East Jerusalem, gazing into the tiny Arab houses with their green lighthouses, admiring the beauty of the whole landscape - such an unnatural one! Disjuncted houses, crumbled with each other and following the movement of the sand in the deep Judean desert, at the same time despising the Oriental reality just so much! Thinking it could at best make a great painting, but never a good theology or a political ideology. I also gazed into the houses at night and from much closer during my walks with the young Christians and then returned into the city via the Mt. Olives, visiting some well-known graves of anonymous people, stopping at a certain restaurant forbidding myself to fear, after all it all looked so natural, the houses, the children, the cars, the misery. In the night I could hear the green lights of the mosques, and felt less love than mere aesthetic "acts of contrition" before the fading sights.

That certain day when the tale of love and politics broke free, I had not expressed or experienced any disappointments, in fact I had felt quite happy about myself, spending long hours in a library looking out toward the opposite direction of the city, the mumbling of the few tall buildings and the invisible individuality of remaining houses, their dead... From the library a great part of the city-sight was occupied by a very large cemetery and I mused to myself that in a city like this there's really no place for one if he's alive, one must be dead to become a citizen... In another location, returning from Tel Aviv the day before I stare in amazement at the entrance to the city... only the endless graves greet us! Not one voice is heard, lest it comes from an Arab house or from the murder of a death, the laughter of life or anything else that has been forbidden by the imperial laws unknown to all the residents. But that time, in the late afternoon, I did hear noises, from the bodies of people - nothing connected to their souls, their lips moved orgiastically and I could find no solace in such madness of speech, I spent the long half of the day musing on whether I should move in one direction or the other... it is difficult to move when you recognize yourself just being one stone more in the city, a stone that any tourist can pick up and that any concern of the wind can place in one neighbourhood or the other. Then friends, or in fact a friend and such wonderful present that would throw me into the blackest mood of a German forest for an entire weekend, oh those letters, they're so true! They can never be read more than once. Following, all were known faces that distanced from the imperial buildings with disdain and me in particular with the hypocrisy of reluctance, at the end of a very brief walk the Arab houses were visible again, but particularly unnoticed until we reached the car and started to find our way into the greater hospital - the city center, where the Messiah comes across a few times a day, but he's reocgnized to be a false Messiah because he's not Jerusalemite at all, moreover he's come either too early or too late. While turning around the corner we, the Hebrew conquerors of this land (me less than the others, a strangely familiar attitude I adopted, perhaps because every Hebrew is in essence a Catholic so that I manifest my preference for the latter and for long have acquired a distaste for the word 'Jew') spot the most innocent of all natural spectacles: Two Arab children ride their bikes, coming from their little village and surrounding our imperial building, and one of the two falls in a side of the street and his foot is unable to find release from the engine.. the second child is helpless watching.

Obviously, being the young imperialists that we're, we halt the motion of the car in the middle of the road nonwithstanding the danger and step out of the car at once, advancing towards the troubled villagers. "Social concerns cannot be too tainted by politics, they're acts of love", I thought to myself, in the second while this movement took place, only to be replaced by an innate disappointment before the facts of our 'reality'. The Arab children, no older than 10, immediately fell upon themselves in the most natural fear, the fear of violence and death, the fear of danger, before four Hebrew conquerors, one more pathetic then the other, worn from smoke and books, poorer than the graves of Mamilla and each one less convinced of their collonial might, than the others. Of course it is an awkward situation, because rationally speaking there's a slight barrier of imagery between two homosexuals and two women coming out of a car more worn out than God's pocket and the already sexually violent attitude of a bunch of oriental negroids, members of the chosen people either by passport or by the orders of a white woman sitting idly in Tel Aviv, coming out of a green truck to arrest deliberately passers-by in Tulkarem. J. was the closest to be in touch with this reality, a former policewoman (and by chance of fate and curse, a political scientist) who could remember a word or two in the language of Maimonides, and we could make ourselves understood as being 'non-enemies' instead of 'friends', a position even lower than that of peace activist who attempt to save the world out of a resolute impossibility to save themselves, a long-established tradition since the Jew Marx, and once that has come not without a lot of terror and manipulation. I for one have given up salvation and truth, in a Roman fashion, if only for the sake of the world. We're then speedily understood and in our despair, return to the car after having indulged in such 'graceful overcoming of nationalist prejudices on the part of children twice as young as we're'. Our speech turns away from the philosophers of the political into the politics of illness. It's difficult to make oneself so much at home in a world like this, whereby children remember that of course we are an imperialist power doubtless ready to murder and destroy by any means. They remember things that we never knew, and that of course are never taught inside our imperial buildings where instead, we're instructed in the much necessary skill of coffee-triggered self-murder and political 'talking'. Really, it is a pleasure to realize how close we're to take the necessary steps to redeem the Middle East from the most futile war, which is in fact the most important of all.

But I forgot the incident too quickly, I had been asked to join the accordeonist to unlisten music in our conversations, sitting idly but not without thrill in one of those big restaurants that I wouldn't visit too often myself, quite boring and lacking in charm... nothing similar to be said about my companion though, and once again we would have such pained discussions about the nature of things, returning back and forth to discuss ourselves, and then project onto things once again.. those conversations about something that you want to escape from the start but are so unable to. Quite different from the ways my life's spent nightly, but no less vivid. I had a letter to read and some quasi-hyeroglyphic journal to plunder into with the violence of a voyeurist philosopher. The idea that children were afraid of me only slightly touched me, the memory did come in some conversation about politics, but it wasn't anything of theological ever-lasting value, mere pegs in an already lost world. That restaurant would be the last place I'd visit with my companion before the lights turned dark in between me and myself, so that often I'd just make a great effort to avoid such pleasures. But weeks later we found each other in the presence of a certain respectable host destroying a conversation about a certain dead woman philosopher into a political rant of sorts, the kind of talk that only Jews that have never moved a bed from one end of the room to the other, might be able to have. Of course a heated debate about the Mideast peace process, what should one do in Gaza, and what about the refugees... do we give back this or that? As though peace were something that had to do at all with rationality. I disagreed with his views that I even attacked as naive, but perhaps he's right in so many accounts... that I refuse to acknowledge reality as it is and therefore have never taken responsibility for much else but my own craziness and life (and who could acknowledge reality so much in a place like this where there's so little space not just for air, but also for death?) and secondly that I come from 'somewhere else', and that the apocalypse of German history of the 19th and 20th century is but the same period of the greatest glory of the so-called Israeli history. Yeah, we should work for the sake of peace, we should give them this and that, odds are that no matter what we do, we'll always be wrong... like we were that day months ago when the rain caused a flood in the Gaza strip, for which obviously we were held responsible by our cousins and the whole of the 'free' world.

I was to be a convinced Zionist at the age of 16 already when I had thought about coming here, and that for me meant of course some religious values and the unconditional support of the State that soon turned into a very rightish position to be in, like most people that have never been in this wonderful land. Then being a part of the intelligentsia forced me by decree to turn to the left, and only after a short trip to the whole of the West Bank with a French engineer, I understood that no positions could be taken here at all, that one had to make up his mind everyday on all possible accounts. Yes, it's pretty postmodern, the age of absolute doubt and of untruth... reality lies shattered generations before our own, we're just confronted with the puzzle much better than them. What I didn't think during this discussion, and that I don't think on a daily basis, is that social concerns as acts of love are deliberately political here, so that one cannot dare loving without hating and receiving the same feelings from others. I read extensively on this subject, and even have treated the issue of love as one secondary to none in importance as a political scientist of disreputable intellectual background. Then this past week I discussed this for a whole day with J., and did my homework, read some essays and started to ponder on how seriously could one take the relationship between sex and love in one hand, with politics and thought in the other. Isn't this some kind of Postmodern reflection out of the sources of meaningless despair? Sure it is. I found my answer during the weekend, a real, naked and happy answer. The theoretical answer is of course that Arendt was right, when everything is political, nothing really is political at all, but this isn't all what there's to it. I have a story to tell.

Arendt, Postmodernismus und zur Frage des ethischen

Gab es schon in den vierziger Jahren und ohne Zweifel auch bei uns, keineswegs man als 'Weltburger' zu bezeichnen, ohne gegenstandlosen Pessimismus, sei kulturelle oder politisch. Auf Arendts Kritik (und mit gutem Recht) nach dem jüdischen Kleinburgertum in Deutschland, die Weltbürger sind so früh nach der Krieg, die neuen 'Weltreisenden' geworden, mit allem touristischen Agonie. Unsere Realität (ohne der Wahrscheinlichkeit oder reinen Offenlichkeit der Wahrheit) ist die, der als grenzenlos und ziellos Spieltheater gebaut wurde, eine Spiel der vielfältigen öffenliche Einsamkeit, ebenso nicht jetzt noch Einsamkeit sondern 'Alleinsein'; das Alleinsein im Publikum. In Postmodernismus ist solche Zweifelhaft-heit die niemals ohne Verzweiflung, das 'Raum' par excellence der neuen Öffenlichkeit, daß zwischen den 'Welten' (so viele vielfältigkeit kann noch am tiefsten und privaten einfältigkeit sichtbar darzustellen) heißt auch als bei Heidegger, Geschlossenheit und Verschlossenheit - eine absolute Auslösung zur Auflösung, d.h. aufgehobene vielfältigkeit und folglich, Wahrheit. Eine Welt die grenzenlos und folglich apolitisch, Ur-geschichtlich und unerreichbar, eigentlich wird. Weimarer Weltbürger sind jawohl, den neuen Nirgenwo-gehendes-oder-besuchendes un-angehöriger geworden. Grenzenlose Welt/Moderne (Ausdruck von Voegelin) meint auch im phenomenologischen Sinn, Verhältniss mit keinem Ort, locus. In diesen Verhältnisse, schon bekanntmacht, das aufgehobene 'Selbst', in Unterschiedung von 'Menschen'. 'Selbsentdeckung' ist noch ein Versteck, als die totaler politik und politisierung (von Frauen, körper, sex, Erziehung) würde ganz apolitisch gestellt. Scheint mir auch wie, Ethik ist nicht nur noch eine Frage des politischen, sondern auch und wie, eine Frage der Sprache aber in konfrontierung mit Arendt und Benjamin, keineswegs, die Frage zur Poetik - Politik, die ursprüngliche und eigentlich, eine Griechische Frage ist.

Blog's poem

A wonderful poem written by Lara to me, on ocassion of the recurrent 'disappearance' of the already very old blog. At least if one public achievement I can count in these rather diremptuous pages, is to have a housewife among the permanent readership.

Where oh where did your little blog go?
Where oh where can it be?
With its poems so short
And its posts so long
Where oh where can it be?

After Lifta

On the car, Mt. Scopus, J. drives to the city, I stare into the oriental broken landscape I used to see from my window at the Mandel building....

אוי ירושלים... היא בהרים, נקודת מבט שלפני השמים התחתונים ומחשכים, בתוך לילה שבוער כשמש המתעוללת באפל, בעור של אנשים קטנים יותר, הם מפשיטים כל יופי פנימי רק למען האמת והעכבר מת. אה ירושלים... פניך אל תוך האש, האדמה, הכעס, האיש.

The first hour of June, after la bohème...

For a change in my routine, my cotidianité, I do enjoy to be all by myself tonight, in the most public of all possible kinds of loneliness, I can't be all too bothered by the taste of death in my mouth, a diremptuous recognition of life, seremdipitious as it is. As a Jerusalem Dichter this is perhaps the greatest sin of glory I could ever indulge in. My body beings to fail at me, and Oh! Lord of Israel!... such tiredness, but one's at times like this only, unable to give up, the language's failed all too often... so that I falter and wander in between the callous knowing smile of a stranger, only because he's stranger and his lips as callous as the warmth of a decaying metaphysical embodiment of disquiet could ever be. Perhaps I've put a end to my plights with Biblical poets, yet I know the previous phrase to be false and the subversive untruth of his unlove might find me again, hunt me, haunt me down... even in my most desperate Platonic attempt to equate beauty with truth and the jocous refusal to dwell on mere representation as a category of philosophy, as though it were to fall within the limits of a literary gender. This beautiful lonesome evening reminds me of that religious serenity of language to be found only in my black protracted adolescence, my flaneur living at 'Il Pommeriggio', writing on vexed blocks and devouring little chunks of soda for an entire night... perhaps I'll never write all what my heart demands, and like she said... Palestine also makes strenuous demands, she's like a person, that might never grant you refuse her the everyday miracles of discontent and discoursiveness. A naked forest, my mind is... with less lust than surprise.

Childhood

אה ירושלים... היא מתבקשת, מבקשת, מתוכחת, אלמת שלומו ושלומי גם. אין בה פחד כלפי המתים איך שרק כלפי החיי... כל ילד ירושלמי הבין שהננה! כלומר, שהבקשות החיוביות בספרי קודש שלנו אינן נלחמות עם האמת או עם המת, אלא רק בתום, תהום, נאום, קיום, נימוק. אוי אלזה! איך אני הרסתי את חרוזיך! מפני שאני ילד עברי, ולא פחות גם זקן מהריין. אני שהוויתי את כל המקומות ההם, למה אני עלול לאנוס את כל בית בחרוזיך? אני השומר עם שם של חיה טורפת... כינור בעור אבן... ילד עברי מהצפון העולם, המחייך למוות ומתוערר כשהחיים מרים, מראים... אולם שאני לא משורר עברי, כאיוב, כאויבי האהוב... אני עומד בשוליים, במרוביות, יחד עם השתיקה. אצלי הבריאה מחרישה והבריא מחשיך מעבר אורים נודדים מהכניסת העיר... שום משורר עברי אבל קצת משוחר. ברוח תהומי אני קורא את חרוזיו, הם ערומים לפני ואני מסוגל להאמין שהם נכתבו בשפת אשכנז ומול ירח שגם נשרף מסוף הקיץ. הקין של אלזה והקין של גילאל, הם לא אותו ב"א, אף-על-פי שהיא שואלת ב"ארץ העברים" מהו גיל האל? והבחורי ישיבה לא יעדו, לפיכך היא שאלתה לנזיר בנדיקטוס בהר ציון והוא מבסיר שגיל האל, הוא כמפורש מילולית, בעצם שמחתו. הגל-אל הוא שהקב"ה הצעיר ביותר בעולם, וגם הזקן היותר... כאתונה למחרת הביקור של נוח. בהמשך כתיבתה, קין לומד דיניי קניין במסכת קידושין, להדריך את הבל, אחיו, לגבי אשתו. אבל קין עדיין מקנה, מידרשיו הם רק בהבל פה, הבל הבלים - תהום מול קרבתם של אחים אוהבים. למרות זה, על האדמה העייפה, אהבתי את שניהם עד קצה שבו, פניי השינא משקרות, מחשקות באומתם של ילדים עברים בהר הצופים. בניגוד הקיר, אני עדיין ילד עברי, אבל גם עיוור קצת.