Journal 10.05.10

Z.B.: A yet darker foreboding gnawed at philosophers´ hearts: that people might simply dislike being free and resent the prospect of emancipation, given the hardships which the exercise of freedom might incur.

Important reading: “Odysseus und die Schweine: das Unbehagen an der Kultur”, by Lion Feuchtwanger.

Herbert Sebastian Agar: “The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear”

Z.B. on Marcuse: Other popular addresses for similar complaints have been the “embourgeoisement” of the underdog (the substitution of “having” for “being”, and “being” for “acting”, as the uppermost values) and mass culture (a collective brain-damage caused by a “culture industry” planting a thirst for entertainment and amusement in the place which – as Matthew Arnold would say – shall be occupied by the passion for sweetness and light and the passion for making them prevail).

Adorno & Horkheimer: Enlightenment is a project of “sinister potential”

Z.B.: Being modern came to mean, as it means today, being unable to stop and even less able to stand still.

Ulrich Beck: “How one lives becomes a biographical solution to systemic contradictions”

Z.B.: The modernizing impulse, in any of its renditions, means the compulsive critique of reality. Privatization of the impulse means compulsive self-critique born of perpetual self-disaffection: being an individual de jure means having no one to blame for one´s own misery, seeking the causes of one´s own defeats nowhere except in one´s own indolence and sloth, and looking for no remedies other than trying harder and harder still… The table so to speak has been turned: the task of critical theory has been reversed. That task used to be the defense of private autonomy from the advancing troops of the public sphere, smarting under the oppressive rule of the omnipotent impersonal state and its many bureaucratic tentacles of their smaller-scale replicas. The task is now to defend the vanishing public realm, or rather to refurnish and repopulate the public space fast emptying owning to the desertion on both sides: the exit of the interest citizen, and the escape of real power into the territory which, for all that the extant democratic institutions are able to accomplish, can only be described as an outer space.

Adorno: Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated… Exile is to the thinker what home is to the naïve; it is in exile that the thinking person´s detachment, his habitual way of life, acquires survival value.

Adorno & Horkheimer (Dialectics of the Enlightenment): “The history of the old religions and schools like that of the modern parties and revolutions teaches us that the price for survival is practical involvement, the transformation of ideas into domination”.

Kojève: The truth of philosophy might be indeed unaffected by history, but it does not follow that it can steer clear of history… As long as the gap between the truth of philosophy and the reality of the world remains unfulfilled – the state takes the form of tyranny

Z.B.: …Not only does the individualization appear to be a one-way-street, but it seems to destroy as it proceeds all the tools which could conceivably be used in implementing its erstwhile objectives.

Z.B. on Daniel Cohen and Microsoft: The passengers of the “Light Capitalism” aircraft, on the other hand, discover to their horror that the pilot´s cabin is empty and that there is no way to extract from the mysterious black box labeled “automatic pilot” any information about where the plane is flying, where it is going to land, who is to choose the airport, and whether there are any rules which would allow the passengers to contribute to the safety of the arrival.

Tony Blair: Politics has been diminished to a gossip column

Z.B.: As I argued in “Life in Fragments”, postmodern society engages its members primarily in their capacity as consumers rather than producers. That difference is seminal.

Z.B. on Health: Health, like all other normative concepts of the society of producers, draws and guards the boundary between “norm” and “abnormality”. “Health” is the proper and desirable state of the human body and spirit – a state which (at least in principle) can be more or less exactly described and once described also precisely measured. It refers to a bodily and psychical condition which allows the satisfaction of the demands of the socially designed and assigned role – and those demands tend to be constant and steady. “To be healthy” means in most cases to the employable: to be able to perform properly on the factory floor, to carry the load with which the work may routinely burden the employee´s physical and psychical endurance.

Camus: “Everyone tries to make his life a work of art”

Z.B.: The meeting of strangers is an event without past. More often than not, it is also an event without a future (it is expected to be, hoped to be, free of a future), a story most certainly “not to be continued”, a one-off chance, to be consummated in full while it lasts and on the spot, without delay and without putting the unfinished business off to another occasion.

Journal 09.05.10

Finkielkraut (sobre el Internet): Entonces, muy pronto quizá ya no exista el derecho a borrarse o a existir sin dejar rastros. Habremos conquistado todos los derechos y perdido el derecho a la discreción… La escuela, desde Platón, es la confrontación de aquello que no merece ser dicho con discursos admirables, es la intimidación del palabrerío. La escuela es, o mejor, era el aprendizaje de la inhibición previa a toda palabra digna de ser expresada. La escuela o la conquista de la escasez… Lo que nos espera quizá sea la disolución, la pulverización del mundo común, el pasaje del broadcast al pointcast.

Paul Claudel: “Cada vez que el hombre intenta imaginar un paraíso en la tierra, de inmediato se genera un infierno muy conveniente”

F.: En el pasado, el pensamiento técnico desencantaba al mundo. Hoy en día, vivimos en el encantamiento de la técnica.

Paul Soriano: A ese mundo, a ese anti-mundo posible, lo llamaremos mundo cero: cero demora, cero stock, cero memoria, cero cultura, cero identidad, cero institución, cero política, cero real… Pues, aún con genoma constante, la vida en red afecta nuestra experiencia íntima de los fundamentos de la existencia humana, a saber, el tiempo, el espacio, la memoria, la identidad, las instituciones, la vida y lo que todos convienen en llamar “lo real”… Un mundo sin duración

A book I should definitely peruse: “La frivolité de la valeur. Essai sur l´imaginaire du capitalism”, written by Jean-Joseph Goux (Blusson, 2000)

P.S.: Por lo demás, reivindicar la propiedad de nuestro cuerpo quizá ya sea un modo de engañarse respecto de lo que realmente está en juego. Anticipándose, como siempre, a los juristas, un artista, Larry Miller, se ha percatado de que no somos legalmente propietarios de nuestros genes: entonces, a los visitantes de su sitio Web les propone editar un certificado de copyright de su propio genoma, para así llegar a ser un Certified Original Human Being. De esta manera, tal vez lo real no desaparece del modo en red, pero, como el territorio, se encuentra devaluado, porque ha vuelto indefinidamente producible y reproducible. Esta devaluación de lo real afecta incluso a aquello que, hasta el día de hoy, considerábamos como lo más real en lo real: nuestro propio cuerpo.

Another book I should read: “Histoire de l´utopie planetaire. De la cité prophétique á la societé globale” written by Armand Mattelart (La Découverte, 1999)

Paul Valery: So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

Zygmunt Baumann (Liquid Modernity): …Techniques which allow the system and free agents to remain radically disengaged, to by-pass each other instead of meeting. If the system of the systemic revolutions has passed, it is because there are no buildings where the control desks of the system are lodged and which could be stormed and captured by the revolutionaries; and also because it is excruciatingly difficult, nay impossible, to imagine what the victors, once inside the buildings (if they found them first), could do to turn the tables and put paid to the misery that prompted them to rebel.

Five basic concepts of the human condition challenged by “private modernity”: emancipation, individuality, time/space, work, and community.

Note: The division between time and space is the beginning of modern philosophical reflection, for earlier anthropologies of man, their difference was undistinguishable.

Z.B.: Travelling light, rather than holding tightly to things deemed attractive for their reliability and solidity – that is, for their heavy weight, substantiality and unyielding power of resistance – is now the asset of power.

Journal 07.05.10

Lukács: I have never succumbed to the error that I have often noticed in workers and petty-bourgeois intellectuals who despite everything could never free themselves entirely from their awe of the capitalist world. The hatred and contempt I had felt for life under capitalism ever since my childhood preserved from this. Mental confusion is not always chaos. It might strengthen the internal contradictions for the time being but in the long run it will lead to their resolution… Above all I was absolutely convinced of one thing: that the purely contemplative nature of bourgeois thought had to be radically overcome… And the neo-positivism of our own day aims at removing every question about reality (the thing-in-itself) from the purview of science, it rejects every question about the thing-in-itself as unscientific and at the same time it acknowledges the validity of all the conclusions of technology and science

Title for another essay: “On the Philosophy of the Bourgeoisie”. Writing, not philosophy, writing, that is my irreligious fervor.

Lukács on bourgeois philosophy: …The task was made even more important by the fact that bourgeois philosophy at the time showed signs of a growing interest in Hegel. Of course they never succeeded in making Hegel´s breach with Kant the foundation of their analysis and, on the other hand, they were influenced by Dilthey´s attempts to construct theoretical bridges between Hegelian dialectics and modern irrationalism.

What is Heidegger´s philosophy? The bourgeois attempt at a cultural criticism that would aim to convert an essentially social alienation into an eternal human condition

Lukács: This can be seen above all in my polemic against an idea that had a wide currency among both vulgar materialist Communists and bourgeois positivists. That was the notion that technology was the principle that objectively governed progress in the development of the forces of production. This evidently leads to historical fatalism, to the elimination of man and of social activity; it leads to the ideal that technology functions like a societal natural force obedient to natural laws.

Alain Finkielkraut (“La Derrota del Pensamiento”): Pillando a contrapié su propia etimología (nascor, en latín, quiere decir “nacer”), la nación revolucionaria desarraigaba a los individuos y los definía más por su humanidad que por su nacimiento. No se trataba de devolver la identidad colectiva a unos seres sin coordenadas ni referencias; se trataba, por el contrario, de afirmar radicalmente su autonomía liberándoles de toda adscripción definitiva.

Joseph de Maistre: Una asamblea cualquiera de hombres no puede constituir una nación. Una empresa de ese género merece alcanzar un lugar entre las locuras más memorables… En el mundo no existe el hombre. A lo largo de mi vida, he visto franceses, italianos, rusos. Sé incluso, gracias a Montesquieu, que se peude ser persa; pero en lo que se refiere al hombre, afirmo que no le encontrado en toda mi vida; si existe, no es a sabiendas mías.

Finkielkraut: El dinamismo que da vida a las comunidades humanas puede ser calificado de divino precisamente porque es anónimo, porque es un proceso sin sujeto… Ya basta: como el pensamiento, el arte y la vida cotidiana se han sumido en el desenfreno, hay que hacerles sufrir de nuevo los saludables tormentos de la inquietud religiosa; es preciso que el más allá vuelva a ser el horizonte constante de todas las actividades humanas. Pero – paradójicamente – ese retorno a la religión pasa por la destrucción de la metafísica.

Postmodern ego: Religion without metaphysics, Ethics without Law, Philosophy and Writing instead of life, Films instead of Experience of Reality

Finkielkraut: A la vehemencia de De Maistre y de Herder suceden los sarcasmos de los eruditos y, mediante una irónica inversión, la filosofía experimenta la suerte humillante que infligía a la religión: su visión fantasmagórica del mundo –escribe Taine con desprecio- supone hombres nacidos a los veinte años, sin padres, sin pasado, sin tradición, sin obligación, sin patria, y que, congregados por primera vez, por vez primera también van a tratar entre sí.

Renan: El día que Francia decapitó a su rey, cometió su suicidio

שלום אליכם, שלום אליכם... ארצה עלינו, ארצה עלינו

Lucidity implies both sadness and knowledge or the amalgamation of both into reckless irony. It´s a funny exercise to read philosophy while one´s listening to the Barry Sisters singing in Chassidic Yiddish and New Yorker at the same time. We all have different arguments and resources to remind ourselves of that mode of infinite past that is supposed to contain all the information required to sail safely through life but from which altogether we´ve been severed half-way by the precondition of our own self-standing existence on earth; thus we´re then condemned to decipher glyphs in ancient human and divine tongues to the extent that the quest for the remedies of and against life becomes an ailing part-time job, all our activities are at the same time directed toward this task with mediocrity and intensity – the mediocrity of having the live our own lives and the intensity that comes with the fragile certainty of a foundation. Whatever my grudge against Zionism is, I can by no means deny how it filled so much life into my comatose barely ripe blood and how the possibility of the actuality of this idea became a principle both positive and negative. Israel came to mean at some point in my life the avoidance of the crude uncoveted reality that in so far as we surrender to the constraints of time, we´re unable to find ourselves at home – our unhappy consciousness and the complacency we display towards it at the same time precludes us from the geographical happiness of the pagans. The Jewish home is displaced and scattered and splattered between what sends us forth into foaming infinitude and at the same time holds us chain to a never ending strife of love and wars – the argument of Empedocles; this home becomes a bitter-sweet reality in the streets of the golden and suicidal Jerusalem with its alleys occupied not only by colonial powers but also by shame and litter, by truth and violence, by self-assertion and fear of the other. Whoever walked undistracted through the streets of Jerusalem and even there was witness to scenes of love between people, scenes of discernment between eternally held philosophical truths and the raving madness of commandments that disrupt the natural course of time in order to summon the Jews home for the Shabbat. Whoever refused to let himself deluded into the fancies of the world and instead chose for himself a verse of truth from within the screeching silences of yellowing presences, how can this person not be at home? But how fragile is the home!

J. Talmon: The beautiful idea of Volkgeist is suddenly revealed (to Renan) as the most dangerous explosive of modern times

Finkielkraut sobre Levi-Strauss: Embriagados a un tiempo por el desarrollo del conocimiento, el progreso técnico y el refinamiento de las costumbres que conocía la Europa del siglo XVIII, crearon para describirlo el concepto de civilización. Significaba convertir su condición presente en modelo, sus hábitos concretos en aptitudes universales, sus valores en criterios de juicio y al europeo en dueño y poseedor de la naturaleza, el ser más interesante de la creación. Esta visión grandiosa de un ascenso continuado, de una razón que se realizaba en el tiempo y de la que Occidente era en cierto modo la punta de lanza, recibió en el siglo siguiente la caución de la naciente etnología.

Finkielkraut: Cultivar a la plebe significa disecarla, purgarla de su ser auténtico para rellenarla inmediatamente con una identidad prestada, exactamente de la misma forma como se hizo que, gracias al colonialismo, las tribus africanas se encuentren dotadas de antepasados galos. Y el lugar donde se ejerce esta violencia simbólica es precisamente aquel que los filósofos de las Luces erigieron como instrumento por excelencia de la liberación de los hombres: la escuela. Un ejemplo: en la inmensa masa verbal que produce nuestra sociedad, sólo pocos discursos se exponen a la admiración general y acceden al estatuto de objeto de enseñanza. A esos discursos se las llama literarios. ¿Por qué esos en lugar de otros? ¿Por qué se les suponen propiedades específicas, una superioridad palpable y reconocida por todos, una belleza que les ensalzaría necesariamente por encima de la palabra media? El análisis estructural descubre (o, por lo menos, cree descubrir) que no es así y que todos los relatos del mundo –estén marcados o no con la estampilla literatura- se refieren a un sistema único de unidades y reglas. Conclusión: la definición de arte es una baza de la lucha entre clases y si tal o cual texto es sacralizado y ofrecido al estudio, es porque a través de él el grupo dominante prescribe su visión del mundo al conjunto social. La violencia aparece en el fundamento de cualquier valorización… En el siglo XX, el redescubrimiento de las sociedades sin escritura invita a poner en duda, ya no a Dios, sino al propio hombre.

Modern culture = Volkgeist

Lichtemberg: Today they attempt by all means to extend knowledge, who knows if within some centuries from now there won´t be universities to restore the old ignorance.

A great phrase: “So then, Herder is present all over” (for philosophers of history, for apocalypticians, theologians, skeptics, heretics, dilettantes, life-searchers, for Susan Sontagians and Hannah Arendtians: Only not for philosophers and not for universities) I´m gladly accused of “Sontagisme”

Another statement: “Pedagogy of Relativity (-ism)

Finkielkraut: Lo que diferencia a las grandes novelas de los simples archivos es que no son únicamente materiales para los historiadores sino también formas de investigación del mundo y de la existencia.

Kundera: En los tiempos modernos, cuando el Dios medieval se convirtió en Deus absconditus, la religión cedió el sitio a la cultura, que se convirtió en la realización de los valores supremos por los que la humanidad europea se comprendía, se definía, se identificaba.

Finkielkraut: En realidad, ser francés consiste precisamente en saber apreciar más cosas que las estrictamente de Francia… Dios ha muerto, pero el Volkgeist sigue fuerte… Precisamente la crítica de la tradición constituye el fundamento espiritual de Europa, pero eso es algo que la filosofía de las descolonización nos ha hecho olvidar persuadiéndonos de que el individuo sólo es un fenómeno cultural.

Grand finale of A.F.: Es innegable que la presencia en Europa de un número creciente de inmigrados del Tercer Mundo plantea problemas inéditos. Esos hombres expulsados de sus casas por la miseria y traumatizados, además, por la humillación colonial, no pueden sentir respeto al país que les recibe la atracción y la gratitud que experimentaban, en su mayoría, los refugiados de Europa oriental. Envidiada por sus riquezas, odiada por su pasado imperialista, la tierra que les acoge no es una tierra prometida. Sin embargo, hay algo indudable: no será haciendo de la abolición de los privilegios la prerrogativa de una civilización ni reservando a los occidentales los beneficios de la soberanía individual y de lo que Tocqueville denomina la igualdad de las condiciones, como nos dirigiremos hacia la reabsorción de estas dificultades.

…Pero ¡ánimo! Incluso aquel que tiene la desgracia de nacer en un país de una gran literatura debe escribir en su lengua como un judío checo escribe en alemán, o como un uzbeco escribe en ruso. Escribir como un perro que cava su agujero, una rata que construye su madriguera. Y, para ello, encontrar su propia jerga, su propio tercer mundo, su propio desierto.

…Menos radical que su protagonista, Musil escribió los dos primeros volúmenes de El hombre sin atributos. Hoy parece recompensado por esta perseverancia. Nadie, en efecto, niega ya su genio: muerto en el olvido, tiene su lugar en las exposiciones, en las reediciones, en los estudios universitarios que demuestran la fascinación del público contemporáneo por los últimos años del Imperio austrohúngaro.

Journal 07.05.10

G.R.: The inversions of pure culture culminate in the experiences of the German Reformation and the French Revolution, or satisfied Enlightenment and unsatisfied Enlightenment respectively. The Enlightenment in Germany brings about a Reformation without a revolution, while the Enlightenment in France brings about a Revolution, without a Reformation. The abstract spiritualism of the German Enlightenment and the abstract materialism of the French Enlightenment both continue to deny and not to re-form ethical life. They are themselves re-formed by the ethical life which they fail to acknowledge, and recreate and reaffirm the blind faith which they sought to transform. These re-formations are the last and grandest cultures

Hegel in the Phenomenology: …pure being, is not something concretely actual but a pure abstraction.

G.R.: We are left with the realization of the barbarism of our abstract culture, of how we have reproduced that barbarism by denying the ethical, by fixing the illusion that we are absolute or pure consciousness in our moral law or in the law of our hearts. We are indeed admonished, contrite, but not ethical: for the possibility of becoming ethical does not depend on our moral decision nor on our words. It does not depend on our Fichtean will.

Being according to Hegel´s Logic: Being means absence of determination or characteristic. The concept of being is achieved by abstracting from all characteristics, and is therefore empty and formal.

From Kant´s Prolegomena: There is a distinction between a boundary (Grenze) and a limit (Schranke). A boundary presupposes a space to be found outside a determined and determinable space which encloses whatever is inside the boundary. A limit is quantitative and does not imply any specific or determinable space beyond the limit, but implies a mere negative, a quantity of series which is not complete. A limit does not imply something beyond the limit which is qualitatively attainable, which is unavailable to knowledge, but knowable as such. It implies simply an absence of any expectation of completing an infinite series in any inner progression. According to Kant, mathematics, for example, recognizes limits, while it is the task of metaphysics to lead to the boundaries of knowledge and to determine them without being able to determine what is beyond them.

From Hegel´s Logic: “What is thus found only comes to be through being left being” (This is the argument against Fichte´s positing of the absolute) For Hegel there´s no positing or dissolution of the Absolute without reflection

According to Hegel, Fichte´s system is one in which every relation is one of domination and being dominated precisely because life has given itself up to servitude (remember life as a grave or what Arendt wrote about Benjamin: you have to earn your own grave). Reflection dominates it and has gained the victory over reason. According to Hegel “this state of indigence is stated to be natural law”. It remains ever so indeterminate.

G.R. Grand Finale: Hegel´s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought. If we cannot think the absolute this means that it is therefore not our thought in the sense of not realized. The absolute is the comprehensive thinking which transcends the dichotomies between concept and intuition, theoretical and practical reason. It cannot be thought (realized) because these dichotomies and their determination are not transcended.

When Hegel speaks about the end of art, religion and possibly philosophy he doesn´t mean that they cannot continue, but perhaps that it is their telos what can no longer run free. They have to self-constitute themselves, legitimate themselves in autonomy and avoid any ambition to be truly universal consciousness because the universal can only be posited by the abstract and thus, it is limited to begin with as far as the abstraction anticipates something. Anticipates the movement toward which it crawls and stand ultimately after the positing and as an a priori as well.

Question: Why is Hegel so opposed to representation? It is perhaps something that has to do with a solipsistic opposition to symbols and by tour de passage to archetypes? Maybe this in itself holds the secret of why Voegelin called him “magician” and held such distaste for him; in fact more than he held for anyone else, Heidegger included.

Phenomenology = Education for Politics (Isn´t this precisely what Plato meant by “theology”?)

Why Lukács, Adorno and Benjamin weren´t Orthodox Marxists? Because they attained what Marx didn´t which has been so extensively explicated in Derrida and Kofman; they understood Marxism as a culture and instead of severing the dialectical laws inherent to this positing they reflected on Marxism because they understood it as a Method. What might be flawed here is that (at least according to G.R.) they learnt their Marx from scientific sociology and by detour, from Neo-Kantianism, meaning that they could never bridge the gap from Kant to Hegel and stayed behind the banister of philosophical identities instead of speculation and in that sense the Absolute might have escaped them through the main gate – the gate from which the Messiah would enter, to paraphrase Benjamin.

About teachers: My problem is that what I am looking for is not a university but a teacher; but constantly I find those hiding behind the apologies of bureaucracy. I´ve hoped to find the teacher and then at last to begin studying philosophy but the deceitfulness of this enterprise is boundless. It´s not accurate to say that people most likely learn philosophy from books and from life, and maybe this is the actual reason why I´ve diverted so much from my original plans and have taken a step back from philosophical speculation in order to hold onto my own life and not risk it at the price of being wrapped into the Christian nothingness. There´s definitely a Christian instinct in me, even a Gnostic one – I am completely defined by renunciation to life really, and this has to do not only with philosophy but so much more with the concrete facts of my life that I´m as yet quite unable to internalize. It was very disappointing to receive a letter as such from Nigel Tubbs, since he had been a pupil of Gillian Rose and I was expecting if anything at all, that someone like him would do a little more than merely compliment me on the interesting path of life; interesting has become for a me a word tantamount to “in palliative care”. Perhaps it does take from philosophy to be at the very end of life in order to appreciate to some extent the personal qualities that philosophy in itself not only declares but that as an attitude, demands as well. My greatest fear is that there will be yet another year of stagnation in this miserable orphanage called “home”. Should my plan be as radical as I am expecting to be, the churches and the monasteries is by no means a mediocre option but it would be futile to try to avoid the realization that it is a completely escapist choice; and no more than I am willing to grapple with a permanent situation of illness, I am to put up with comatose Christianity but should the need arise, I must be prepared for everything. I don´t know what any other options there might be, since the prospect of facing real life would mean to accept openly that there´s absolutely nothing else to me than this computer, two pairs of shoes, two books and a filth cave. I feel ought to write some letters to Florence, Marc and Hope but I´m still somewhat reluctant to do it because it would be to blend in greatness with pity and my experience has demonstrated that such reckless movements often go unrewarded. Why do we insist so much on reading the books written by dead people? Perhaps because the fact that they are dead grants us license to do away with their misgivings and failures as teachers and instead focus on the only resource available to us: the greatness of their works and the even greater unprecedented failure of their enterprises. The engagement is just too solitary. For the most part I hold this grudge against bourgeois society only because I´ve spent years and years in the intellectual confinement to libraries and spiritual mediocrity only because I´m unable to pay for an education better than this, and I guess that situating the project psychologically, this is ultimately the root of all possible radicalism; this coactive impossibility to become. Yet the years go by and I still refuse to accept this as a fact, I just pretend to see everything as a temporary obstacle, as something that will wane as soon as I get lucky, as soon as I get a “bisl mazl” for myself. The irony is just translated as insurmountable sadness and the effort is univocally a law in itself: The tragic attempt to avoid defeat at any price, even if it is at the price of loss or death. Univocally a law because mourning becomes the law, the price to be paid in order not to do away with the “good life” cleaning it from the burden of the law; I´ve nearly exhausted every possible instance but I´m not even close to becoming tired. By the first day of June I must be out of this cow shed, or absolutely certain that I will be. At this point the destination is irrelevant – church, university, street… What matters is to live up to one´s own law.

Someone wrote this about G.R.: Rose writers explicitly of her opposition both to Athens (the Greek polis) and to Jerusalem (the Judaic model of polity). In the case of Athens, on her reading, the existing law is taken as transcendent, unquestionable. In the case of Jerusalem, all law is opposed in order to follow the direct word of God which is taken as transcendent, unquestionable. Instead of either city, Rose calls on us to critically engage with the world as it is, not to accept it or seek to escape it. This reminds of what I read of hers once: “New York, Jerusalem, Auschwitz… My three cities of death”

From Marx´s Capital: The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than table turning ever was.

From Sarah Kofman: The camera obscura, in the technical sense of the term, seems to me to be contaminated by more ideological, more unconscious connotations, carried simultaneously by the notion of camera/chamber and that of obscurity. In ideology, ideas are put under lock and key in a room, cut off from the real material base which alone can confer upon them light and truth. The dark chamber is a hole an inch in diameter to which one applies a glass which, letting the rays from external objects pass onto the opposite wall, or onto a curtain held there, allows what it outside to be seen inside. Note: If an ideology appeals to the unconscious - is that the reason why philosophy is ought to be so self-aware?

S.K.: Thus, the camera obscura isolates consciousness, separates it from the real; enclosed, the latter constructs a sort of neoreality, analogous to that produced by psychotics. Marx characterizes this world as ghostly, fantastic, phantasmagorical or even fetishistic… The camera obscura is the unconscious of a class, of the dominant class which, in order to maintain its domination indefinitely, has an interest in hiding from itself the historical character of its domination, indeed all that is historical, the process of genesis, the divisions of labor … indeed, difference itself.

S.K. on Rousseau: The camera obscura enables Rousseau to write a book, the Confessions, which is no longer a book but a painting, a portrait. It allows him to cast upon himself the point of view of God himself. “I will be truthful; I will be so without reservations; I will tell all: the good, the evil; in the end, everything. I will comply rigorously with my title, and the most fearful among the devout will never undertake a better examination of their consciences than that for which I prepare myself; never will they lay before their confessors the innermost recesses of their souls more scrupulously than will I lay mine before the public”.

S.K.: Are Leonardo, Rousseau, and Nietzsche not all linked by the same homosexual structure, by the same desire, the same fear of seeing and knowing, by the same look cast upon an unbearable truth? Have not all three been petrified by the mother?

Journal 06.05.10

Question: Where is sexuality left in Christian friendship? Especially, homo-erotic friendship

The origin of law in the Roman world is necessarily bound up with notions of force and coercion, that is, with violence

Hegel on being at home: “…But for this reason the individual is not at home even in his immediate environment, because it does not appear as his own work. What he surrounds himself with here has not been brought about by himself; it has been taken from the supply of what was already available, produced by others, and indeed in a most mechanical and therefore formed way, and acquired by him only through a long chain of efforts and needs foreign to himself” Note: From this can follow naturally that Jews in the most general sense and modern men in abstract sense can never be at home. They were thrown into a world which they didn´t receive of their very own will but had yet to surrender to the contingency and attempt to transform the configuration of that world, whether they like it or not, into a temporary station where life and other activities, biological and cultural, take place. Of course in this sense “a world as it is” could never be a fact one may accept or not accept; there is a permanent strife in which criticism is the modern surrogate for building a word, the bridges are all psychological and thus the only possible engagement would be, to find the closest grave around.

Poetry and Prose as forms of political and social organization: Poetry has access to the whole, whereas prose is a form of abstract reasoning based on a distinction between means and ends.

Hegel: We have to follow not the path of self-enlightening doubt (Zweifel), but the path of despair (Verzweiflung). This does not demand that established truths should be suspended until they have been tried and tested. It is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the unrealized concept. Note: Are then we not supposed to be enlightened? An utterance as such couldn´t be adopted philosophically without much needed critical irony. This contradicts the whole of Hegel´s system, it un-allows the philosophical pedestrian to find a place to lay his head in the present and thus legitimate it.

On being antinomian: This is to flee from life and its law, to make life the enemy – “their love was to remain love and not become life”

“The rejection of rational law and ethical life by the Church was enshrined in the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The vow of poverty meant the denial of work and productive activity. As a result of this vow the Church accrued great riches because people who wished to live in penance bestowed their wealth on it. The vow of chastity demeaned the natural ethical life of the family and gave rise to an obsession with physicality and sexuality divorced from the meaning of natural ethical life. The vow of obedience amounted to the justification of acceptance of blind, external authority. It prevented the realization of the concept of freedom and reinforced the prevailing arbitrary dependencies”.

Journal 06.05.10

“Love and education represent relative identities between lack of identities in which intuition dominates the concept (love), and the concept dominates intuition (education)”. –Hegel´s System der Sittlichkeit

The Master-Slave relation arises when there are no other channels of mediation between people, and Hegel refused to objectify this, that is, to make bourgeois private property the proper mediation.

Rose on Hegel: How can there be any reference to absolute ethical life in a society based on bourgeois private property, on lack of identity, on relative ethical life, where the real totality can only appear to these isolated individuals as abstract and unreal?

Hegel on Art: “Art in bourgeois society, whether it represents love, romantic adventures or divine comedy, denies the present and is an absolute, impotent longing for the past of for the future” –S.d.S.

Rose on Hegel: Instead of uniting concept and intuition religion debases real social relations even more than art. For art remains in the contradiction between intuition and concept. Religion, however, reconciles concept and intuition in another world, and thus makes our relation to both the world beyond and the real existence one of impotent longing. Religion, unlike art, maintains the image of intuition, the promise of a real transformation, but at the same time, prevents its actual development.

Rose: As long as the absolute is represented as God, it is inconceivable as the absolute.

A common notion of God = Un-freedom, inconceivability of the Absolute. Does then God reveal himself through private revelation (as in Christianity) or in public discourse (as in Judaism) in order to constitute himself as an un-common place, a stumbling block; God as an object in itself or a phenomenal thing that can be subsumed under the same standards we apply to the criticism of art and literature… Sometimes I have this perception that people who allegedly don´t believe in God, have believed at some point in their lives, and that their struggle with non believing is a strife so paralyzing as the sleep inducing effect of modern theology to step out of the natural boundaries of dogmatics without actually shattering the whole world and the way we live in it. In thought, to depart metaphysically from the idea of God is necessarily tantamount to throwing oneself into the bucket of freedom´s waters without knowing actually how to swim – by this I don´t mean people shouldn´t do it, it is perhaps necessary to drown. For those who are able to think systematically, it could be true that emptying the seat of God in the hierarchy of the absolute and in the metaphysical superstructure of the universe is equated to something like completely de-centering the world and expect each of the fragmentary pieces thereafter to function like autonomous centers in full awareness of their condition as “second-hand” capitals of faraway counties. Thus the center of the world isn´t completely dissolved, it just happens that the place for the absolute, for the metaphysical center, remains void. The question remains whether it is possible to live a life under the conditions of seamless freedom while being aware of the void at the very center. Modernity has been all about examples of how this experiment is possible: Paris in the 19^th century and New York in the 20^th century – yet their claims for the de-centeredness of the world have been so much vain as they have been narcissistic, for they as geographical aggregates of forms of absolute and relative aspects of life have stood themselves in lieu of imperial Rome. The cultural anxiety over the temporal nature of these surrogate metaphysical centers of the world understood geographically, culturally and politically, is very intense because palliative care is offered in a two-fold manner to the denizens of this world: They apply the intensity of time to the claim of eternity and also suffer from the tenselessness of eternity in the course of the experience of time. Precisely because the absolute can´t be reached in the traditional orientations of man in flat historical space, the movement has begun upwards and downwards: Babel and Atlantis. That´s the history of modern architecture; to break out of the two-fold tension of man within the circumscription of his limited physical capability, he is ought to head upwards not into heaven but into the outer space and downwards not into hell but into the depths of the Ocean and closer to the center of the earth which is not the center of the world neither the metaphysical place left absent.

More Gillian Rose: The cost of keeping religion within the bounds of reason is that rationality becomes inexplicable, and God or the infinite well unknowable. (Criticism leveled by Hegel at Kant and Fichte in the divide between theoretical and practical reason)

G.R. on Aufhebung: Aufhebung is usually understood to refer to a consecutive and higher state in a developmental sequence, for the experience of difference or negation, of reality identity, of a contradiction between consciousness´ definition of itself and its real existence which is mis-cognized ad re-cognized at the same time. The philosophy of history is thus the speculative reading of how substance became subject, or, how absolute ethical life became religious representation, or, how the state and religion became divorced. It is especially concerned with the religion which forced that divorce on representation, and which, read speculatively, is the idea of absolute freedom, the speculative Good Friday. Christianity is this religion, “the absolute religion”. It is the religion in which the absolute is represented as subject.

From Hegel´s Philosophy of Religion: The religious freedom from the real world cannot be maintained. If the real world is denied, then God can only be represented as a negative, in opposition to the finite world. The basic Christian experience is not of Christ, the mediator, of freedom, but of spiritual bondage to a dead God. Christ´s resurrection and Christian love should restore the unity and freedom of human and divine nature, but they can do so only if God is known as trinity. However, reconciliation in religion always remains implicit and abstract, because it is only achieved as religion, as a spiritual and not as a worldly community. Christianity thus cannot realize the reconciliation between the human and the divine which would be freedom. It can only repeat the dreadful experience that God has died, God is dead – this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that all that is true is not, the negation itself is found in God; the deepest sorrow, the feeling of something completely irretrievable, the renunciation of everything of a higher kind, are connected with this.

Note: When Christians discovered the nothingness together with the disruption of time in medieval philosophy, they found a way to make the Infinite relative and subject to matters of personality and thus not a concern of politics or culture. They found shelter in this nothingness and therefore freedom; as a consequence they sent political freedom “home to roost” and began their witch hunting all over the place. Subjectivity is a symptom of finitude, not of the infinite.

Question: Does Judaism NOT have a concept of freedom?

“The Phenomenology is not a success. It is a gamble”

About the death of God (G.R.): Absolute ethical life (…) is first presented according to its relation as the unhappy consciousness. This consciousness results from the loss of substance, and is characteristic of the pre- and post- Christian as well as of the Christian epochs. It is a dualistic consciousness for which God is dead. The death of the God may refer to the death of the Greek Gods, or to the characterless and hence and hence unknowable modern God, or to a God who is imagined (represented) and imaginable (representable), but who dwells beyond concrete existence and is therefore absent… The unhappy consciousness arose out of the experience of the death of the Greek Gods. This death does not have the significance of the death of Christ, of a particular individual become universal, nor does it have the significance of the death of Christianity, of the end of religious representation. It means the death of life as divine and gives rise to the denial of existence and of transformative activity and hence of actuality. Life is experienced as the grave.

G.R.: …Yet, the more these activities are debased, the greater the importance which is in effect granted them as isolated acts. Before thanks are rendered, they are unsanctified. Life if worse than a grave; it is hell, a perpetual agony: Consciousness of life, of its existence and activity, is only an agonizing over this existence and activity, for therein it is conscious that its essence is only its opposite, is conscious only of its own nothingness. (Quotations from P.d.G.)

Journal 05.05.10

From David Barr: Far from being a fantasy of what will never be, the Apocalypse represents a reality that already existed, creating a social world that provided both community and individual identity to its audience.

Some texts invite the participation of the reader in the production of its meaning

Writing: At this point the internet is my only contact with the outside world; the limited geography of my entanglements and movements has ceased to resemble a world in any possible version of the world that there might be and now it seems more of a theatre stage – the lines rehearsed are the same day after day as if we had run out of all creative impulse needed to participate actively in life. Writing has become a surrogate for living thus the writing gains in unpremeditated intensity and the living surrenders into a permanent state of slumber; there´s no possible way to write as good or as bad as any other person – people can only write the way they´ve written. I´m wondering about the particular details of my attraction toward Fridirik; it has to do perhaps only with the fact that all my associations with life are so loose at present that the faintest clue of approximation to another human being might stand in lieu of the whole world, of all possible seamlessness of experience through which writing, reading and life come under the spell of the same rubric. I think the beauty of his countenance as such and in itself shall suffice for more than a mediation exercise; there´s a certain scarcity of speech by means of which the trap of anxiety reveals more secrets and more urgency than what the distance of silence wants to conceal.

Gillian Rose: Scientific sociology is only possible as a form of Neo-Kantianism that bars access to the philosophy of Hegel. That´s how the sociology of Durkheim and Weber has been misunderstood by ignoring or overlooking the transcendental structure

About Rose´s mother: Gillian Rose describes her own mother as faithless. The Holocaust claimed the lives of fifty of her mother´s relatives, yet her mother lives in denial. Her mother claims that the loss caused no suffering, yet this only masks the depth of the suffering which has been left unresolved. Her mother´s refusal to “live in hell” results in melancholia, in an entrenched despair which will not budge because it is denied. Her mother appears content, she wears a smile, yet she has an “all-jovial” unhappiness. The trauma is not worked, in Rose´s idiom, because it remains unthought.

About the importance of objects: The production of objects may equally well be said to be the production of their reality, not of their appearance. (Rose)

…If the thing in itself in unknowable how can it be called a thing?

Kant postulates God, since without this hypothesis morality is unintelligible

Phenomenological reduction brackets out the question of existence

Simmel´s definition of culture: The content or forms of life (art, law, religion, technology) which are created in historical time, but which attain an independent validity once created which may render them inaccessible to their creators.

Rose on Hegel: “But the absolute is not an optional extra, as it were. As we shall see, Hegel´s philosophy has no social import if the absolute is banished or suppressed, if the absolute cannot be thought”

Our concept of the infinite is our concept of ourselves and our possibilities

Thinking must make the transition from identity to speculation

Journal 05.05.10

I woke up less tired and pained than it is usually the case; the headaches seem to recede a little bit before the plain sight of my inability to surrender to them. Still my sleep is very thin, almost deprived from the cessation of brain activity while my body is at rest; I spend almost all of my sleep hours concentrating even more upon the activities of the day and also the lack thereof. All night long I insist on all my incomplete dreams, on the daytime preoccupation to release myself from exile, the endless letters I write and the dreams I plow and sow but can´t harvest, the great places I might want to see, the kind of life I could have – at least any one life different from this which is not a life but a mediocre biological circle of sleeping, eating and complaining with limited ingestion of food and sexual gratification and no entertainment at all. I had dreamt with being something of a Hebrew scholar, perhaps at some American university. Not that this one of my actual life dreams, but something that lapse in between sequences of truncated fulfillment…

This time none of my letters were answered, which means that perhaps the world is growing tired of them; the problem of personal letters is that they address people and not just fulfill criteria demanded by application forms. This afternoon I am going to send a letter to Nigel Tubbs, who is a professor at the University of Winchester, a former pupil of Gillian Rose and someone who writes very interesting philosophy. I am drawn to it not only because I am desperate (I checked out what it would take to study theology in Ireland, or to take a 3-semester long Swedish course or Arctic biology in Norway!) but because he builds on an idea that I´ve held for a long time… That the education of the university, or even before that, of the “arts-college” is based on a relationship between the pupil and the teacher and not on research, not on results, which is an untimely consequence of the newfound practice of science understood as primary methods and ultimate results. I wonder if someone like Mr. Tubbs would ever be interested in my ideas, person and accomplishments; at least he seemed to be so years ago when I contacted him.

Gillian Rose´s reading of Kierkegaard: According to Rose, a relationship with God is one that we can never fully achieve but must ever fail towards (“The Broken Middle”), “failing towards form”; this form goes from the aesthetic (his style and writing form) to the ethical (the implications of writing) and then ultimately to an absolute that must entail a failure in worldly matters and a leap to love or God. I guess one now makes sense of what she means with “the absolute is not an optional extra”. Our only resource then is to react to this “broken middle” with nothing but anxiety. Rose´s demand: To engage critically with the world as it is, not to accept it or seek to escape it. What then would Taubes say to this? A question on Rose: Can we speak of a secular faith grounded in social practice?

From Lloyd: To master a language is to be able to say things which have not been said before, to combine words in new ways which, despite their novelty, will not result in reprimands by one´s community. Only then can it be said that an individual is a competent language user: freedom consists in the possibility for new performances enabled by the mastery of a framework of norms… For Rose, writing shows the fecundity of the tension between social practice and norms.

Gillian Rose´s description of writing: “mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond our control”, “if I knew who I were or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless and I am able to write only where the tradition can offer me a discipline, a means, to articulate and explore that anguish” (I had read this years ago but somehow I had mingled it with something that Arendt said, or perhaps did I think that Arendt herself wrote this).

…For Rose modern Christian and Jewish thought is trying to mend the world, which in turn has the effect of betraying the hard work of living. They lack faith, so that they opt for easy ways out. I would that they not only try to mend the world, but they also do it with mendacity.

Lloyd on Rose: Anxiety is experienced any time one truly grapples with the law. To live life without anxiety would be to shut oneself off from a central feature of the world; it would be to live in delusion. Living life without anxiety is like living life without freedom; possible, perhaps, but only when one understands social norms to be absolutely rigid and static.

“Keep your mind in hell and despair not” (Silhoan)

Rose: Despite the similar phenomenologies of writing and love, writing is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving… Love involves temporary suspension of the law. Gillian Rose: “Do you believe in eternity? Definitely. It´s the only thing I believe in. If there´s eternity, then it´s Now… Time is devastation. You can´t believe in time. Time is going to destroy you. So you have to believe in eternity”.

Richard Hull: We must say radical, not critical – this is too much associated with Kant

Journal 05.05.10

Today I sent more letters… Despite my stubbornness it seems that it will take a lot more than nice letters to get out of this imprisonment; my hunch is that I might have to do some otherworldly kind of physical word. I sent a letter to Harvard Divinity School which is supposed to recruit the most outstanding minds in so far as the Kingdom of God, or the lack thereof, is concerned. I am all for a kingdom of God, a bit anarchist both in the political sense and in the sense of what it could mean to be without “founding principle” in philosophy; the kingdom of God would be certainly universal but without that modern universality, without theology, without philosophical assumptions, certainly without church. How to think about God without theology? It is like thinking about truth without philosophy; it is certainly possibly but it is steadily risky… You may be completely right, so you might be then also completely wrong. If you are right, it might just be a very difficult movement to make, and if you´re wrong, then it´s hell and it smells of Auschwitz. If I were an atheist or a humanist, I don´t know of what kind I would be because even if my faith is not wrong, it is still dialectically powerful and undialectically harsh. The other difficult point is that I certainly have too little faith in mankind and my imprecations about the stature of man are more humorous than they´re serious preoccupations; so humorous that my preoccupations are just too important to care about saying them out loud, to care about turning them into political mantras, to care about selling them as truths. I share Jesus point of view – morally pessimistic and culturally optimistic at the same time. No matter what I do, whom I write about or what the object of my grumpiness or else bad feeling is, I am always oriented toward the Kingdom of God. But I don´t think I want a simple kingdom… My idea of the kingdom is at once bloody, physical, religious and technologically secular. It could be that I will have to agree with Kierkegaard that there are no Christians yet, no Christians of Jesus; there´re only Christians of imperial Christianity. I am not sure whether I am able to utter a similar statement for the truths of Jews that I´ve so blatantly decried with avowed intensity over the course of my adult life; I´ve certainly lived up to the prophetic and rather apocalyptic idea of living in the world without a world at all but yet profiting sensually from the world in so far it has been possible.

My idea of the world is fully charged with apocalyptic images bereft of saintliness, so that my whole experience of the world is an eschatological conundrum; with much deference to historical events but completely unconcerned with the results as if viewed from the ultimate perspective of an unredeemed and yet final momentum of history. This eschatological image is not only a historical situatedness but also a full-fledged spiritual fuel with an ultimately future orientation. What I thought yesterday when in the company of Mario is that my ideal of beauty in human beings is not only riddled by morbid physical and aesthetic beauty but also irreversibly coupled with a demonic intelligence that in practice is very, very unhappy. The unhappiness of the infinite that endlessly aims at finding a home in a legitimate present that the spiritual attitude itself is so bent on destroying, qualifying it as untrue and overtly complacent. Kierkegaard said that the most pure form of love is to love the person who made you unhappy. I want to turn myself to love the world with an attachment so passionate that it borders on burdensome deflection; as if one were to love only the world that has been ultimately destroyed to begin with, as if the whole purpose of bourgeois beauty were precisely to be shattered when confronted with the facts of this ever so future orientation. The practical implications of this spiritual attitude are very obvious: the mere wait, deprived of anything to hand on to the next generation as if it were the very last. It seems to be an impractical spiritual exercise pursued only in order to prove beyond rationale that this same world to which we attach ourselves in the praxis of love is none to be attached to, a dearth of place and a dearth of silence even, over which one is to claim only the power of abandonment. I want to aim at the concretion of philosophy and theology, of thought in general, to define the concrete objects of reality, to deprive discourse from intellectual exercises but yet so completely trapped and defined by traditions of speculation and of imagination written over centuries of constant relentless and powerless aesthetic contemplation. I want to walk out on abstraction all the time, but the safe shelter of if not metaphysics, then of speculation, seems to be the only safe alternative to remain lucid in sight of the crushing madness of a reality on which one has drawn himself as an actor, even if fulfilling the role of an agent provocateur, of an inciter, of a witch hunter. This lucidity is supposed to mean at last to encounter the world without sorceries and ultimately the spiritual fuel of this enterprise is completely burnt when the actor finds it by himself completely impossible to live with the map of navigation through reality without consolations that he has himself drawn. To speak for a godless secular world driven by science and progress seems an alternative yet too easy, an alternative sober sorcery in which the thrust is thrown back at the actor as if he himself were to play the good God again and thus, ride the horses of the apocalypse with the flag of perpetual peace and social consensus – it is but another shelter from unmediated being in the world “as it is”; as if there were ever a world “as it is” for anyone or at any given point in history.

I can´t deny that there´s a lot of laziness and who not accept it, mental illness, in my whole project of thinking and of a life; but there´s also this component of contempt, this lustful drive to astray from the whole idea of representation, from the production of symbolic thought as an hierarchical array of representations. As if to refrain from reading and writing at all could mean something like an spiritual attitude in which remaining silent would be constituted into a more masterful and accurate discourse than what “words” about “things” could reflect. But how important things are! Everyday objects stand as a masterfully-handcrafted icon against the illusions of mourning and trauma, of illness and disappointment, because in so far as they stand within the most elementary correlations of the world proper, they are meant to avoid any possible way to circumvent the radical indeterminate nature of human experience. The everyday objects of fine arts and of literature stand against the very course of human life and as works they represent a step forward from cosmogonies and delve already into the life of the present as temporalities inside which there is already contained the mortal wish to not let biology follow its course unmolested. Abandoning the production of objects and the settings of representation is an unlawful Rimbaudean movement – we go to Abyssinia or else we enter the cloisters or choose to spend our lifetime days without any deference to world time, serving as advocates in a notary or as nurses in the war. Intellectual life however, does everything in order to avoid these movements or silence and when silence is appropriated by a creator, this silence is not absolute; it is not the cosmic silence of the universe where the lack of oxygen precludes any physical interaction in between particles of sound, but rather the mortified silence of patience. The silence of Rimbaud is not indifferent to life or the world but it is rather so consumed by it that it can no longer utter a word, it is suffocated by everything that needed to be said at once and the world of representation in its figurate speech of sequences and orderly thoughts or symbolic associations, precludes the authoring from. This silence is too desperate, in need of ailments and a proper burial that in being so much alive for itself, can never demand from the spectators that have also been blinded and deafened from the experience of the spectacle so that they prefer to witness in the same fashion of silence the slow and painful death of the artist, than lend him a hand to dig a proper grave. He has to be conformed with being watched digging down his own grave while his nails fall off from the flesh and as he loses the sensibility in his fingertips; the earth and the mud and the life and the death and the stone and the art and the world and the sound and the sight become one: perpetual silence. The world ah! This ultimately invisible arena of performing arts!

Hugo was thrown out of home by his father because of his homosexuality; to some extent I wish that the same would have happened to me, but after my own likings, I´ve been punished only with silence and in my obvious spiritual mediocrity I´ve offered him sound advice on how to properly deal with adult life. I very hope he won´t take one single opinion from me. Today I´ve seen the face of Fridirik, and I think his countenance has unparalleled beauty, so much as his soul showcases a complete lack thereof and I´m rather elated at the prospect of turning my loyalties over to his morbid beauty and life sense of unwholesomeness, to his complete lack of virtue. Love appears to me (dokei moi) as a distant island perfectly fit for an eventual shipwreck and then followed by the rescue efforts of teams from all over the world that stand in awe before the captive´s reluctance to be saved. They would rather burn their own books instead of letting go. It is not only that they would rather; they have already burnt their own books. I can´t make up my mind about the country where I want to live when I “grow up”; the only internal consensus is that I won´t live in mine, even if that can only mean to have my ashes transferred and spread over the Judean desert. That will be good enough. Just not here! I remember Agnes Heller now: the place we choose is free; the place not chosen is not free. But don´t we always get to the point in which we get the impression that we don´t choose our destinies or their geographies? It seems a natural state of affairs that I should be deprived of sexual gratification. Just a blank statement.

לקיארטן, בני

מותר לי לכתוב זמרת

בשפתיי הנוזלות

בדם תחושתי

שיסלח לי אבל

הבדתי את העט

עת שחלמתי בשפות רחוקות

מחוץ מכנען

במהלך מסע

בלתי נבחר

לארץ תואה

החוסרת גוף מגע

קיארטן, אחיו הליינור

גיבור קטן ורזה

עניים של זכוכית

עובד אלילים

בני, הערל

בית יפת, אוהל שינר

בגופו צלב

חזה רחב שרוף

מתחת חושך האיי

אל תוך בית נייר

בלי גדר

סביב אויביו