The meaning of what was considered "Wakefulness" has now taken on the import of "Sleeplessness".
The meaning of the Alertness of the Blond Beast has now inverted into the import of the Zombie - a creature that cannot close its eyes, although it is literally brain-dead.
The Sleeplessness of the Zombie is the epitome of Modern Oblivion - Lethe,,, from which derives the word Lethargy.
The Vitality of the Blond Beast is everything that is opposed to every kind of Modern Lethargy. According to Nietzsche, it was Xt. that Was and ushered in the religion of Lethargy, of comfort, of security. Truth as Security, as Stiffness, as the Safe-unshakeable otherworldliness - all expressions of Zombie Lethe-argy..., or even to rhyme with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], we might say, of Vampire Lethe-Orgy. 24 hour malls..."
Satyr wrote:
Hannibal's unemotional empathy is rising to confront the cultural anesthesia of culturally produced dullness.
Silence of the Lambs...
Kierkegaard wrote:
"Often the examples mentioned in psychologies lack true psychological-poetic authority. They stand as isolated notarialiter [notarized facts], and as a result one does not know whether to laugh or to weep at the attempts of such lonely and obstinate persons to form some sort of rule. One who has properly occupied himself with psychology and psychological observation acquires a general human flexibility that enables him at once to construct his example which even though it lacks factual authority nevertheless has an authority of a different kind. […] Hence he ought also to have a poetic originality in his soul so as to be able at once to create both the totality and the invariable from what in the individual is always partially and variably present. Then, when he has perfected himself, he will have no need to take examples from literary repertoires and serve up half-dead reminiscences, but will bring his observations entirely fresh from the water, wriggling and sparkling in the play of colors. Nor will he have to run himself to death to become aware of something. On the contrary, he should sit entirely composed in his room, like a police agent who nevertheless knows everything that takes place. [The Concept of Anxiety]
Quote :
"Empathy is the capability to share and understand another’s emotion and feelings. It is often characterized as the ability to “put oneself into another’s shoes,” or in some way experience what the other person is feeling.
Emotional contagion is the tendency to catch and feel emotions that are similar to and influenced by those of others. It is a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes.
So Empathy is the ability to stand in one’s own perspective, while at the same time, possessing the ability to shift perspectives and see through another person’s eyes, as it were. It is a process of understanding and sharing the emotions of another person from a dual perspective with a multilateral self-awareness.
While Emotional Contagion is much more of an automatic process, rather than a conscious one, which relies on non-verbal communication and even, at times, telecommunication (ie., online emails, forums and chats). People who catch this type of ‘social virus’ tend to mimic the facial expressions, vocal expressions, postures, and instrumental behaviors of those around them, and thereby “catch” another person’s emotions as a consequence of such facial, vocal, and postural feedback."
"In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the entire emotional system is alerted and intensified: so that it discharges all its powers of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transmutation, every kind of mimicry and play-acting, conjointly. The essential thing remains the facility of the metamorphosis, the incapacity *not* to react ..." [TI 'Expeditions' 10]
Nietzsche wrote:
"The condition of pleasure called intoxication is precisely an exalted feeling of power - The sensations of space and time are altered: tremendous distances are surveyed and, as it were, for the first time apprehended; the extension of vision over greater masses and expanses; the refinement of the organs for the apprehension of much that is extremely small and fleeting; divination, the power of understanding with only the least assistance, at the slightest suggestion: "intelligent" sensuality -; strength as a feeling of dominion in the muscles, as suppleness and pleasure in movement, as dance, as levity and presto; strength as pleasure in the proof of strength, as bravado, adventure, fearlessness, indifference to life or death..." [WTP, 800]
Nietzsche wrote:
"...intoxication... the feeling of enhanced power; the inner need to make of things a reflex of one's own fullness and perfection... the extreme sharpness of certain senses, so they understand a quite different sign language - and create one - the condition that seems to be a part of many nervous disorders - extreme mobility that turns into an extreme urge to communicate; the desire to speak on the part of everything that knows how to make signs -; a need to get rid of oneself, as it were, through signs and gestures; ability to speak of oneself through a hundred speech media - an explosive condition. One must first think of this condition as a compulsion and urge to rid of the exuberance of inner tension through muscular activity and movements of all kinds;... a kind of automatism of the whole muscular system impelled by strong stimuli from within -; inability to prevent reaction; the system of inhibitions suspended, as it were. ...This is what distinguishes the artist from the laymen (those susceptible to art): the latter reach the high point of their susceptibility when they receive; the former as they give." [WTP, 811] (cf. Daybreak 549)
The sense organs of the Empathetic-Dionysian are so acutely refined and strong, it is able to pick up the smallest fleeting things and urges itself to speak on its behalf. It dis-poses itself. And then figures in a new pose. And then dis-poses itself again, etc. "Life is not the adaptation of inner circumstances to outer ones, but will to power, which, working from within, incorporates and subdues more and more of that which is "outside". [WTP, 681] This "metis" - mobility - is the opposite of Lethargy.
The Lethargic 'not to react' of the zombie-herd cannot dis-pose itself, because it is always predominated by "preserving itself", and therefore lack all empathy and only understands 'emotional contagion', 'sympathy', 'pity' -
Nietzsche wrote:
"The starting point is where great force is, where force is to be discharged. The mass, as the sum of the weak, reacts slowly; defends itself against much for which it is too weak - of which it can make no use; does not create, does not advance." [WTP, 863]
Nietzsche wrote:
"It is a sign of a broken instinct when man sees the driving force and its "expression" ("the mask") as separate things - a sign of self-contradiction, and victorious far less often. Absolute innocence in bearing, word, affect, a "good conscience" in falsity, the certainty with which one grasps the greatest and most splendid words and postures - all this is necessary for victory. ...when one has extreme clearsightedness one needs the genius of the actor and tremendous training in self-control if one is to achieve victory." [WTP, 377]
The Dionysian type re-acts, not reacts.
It re-acts from such a trained, extreme self-control and certainty of self; that's why the discharge of its exuberance takes "form" in the type of gestures, dance movements, etc. - there is inner measure here. It 'breaks into form'. It is not a mindless reaction, but the work of an "intelligent sensuality."
Nietzsche wrote:
"I desire for myself and for all who live, may live,... an ever greater spiritualization and multiplication of the senses; indeed, we should be grateful to the senses for their subtlety, plentitude, and power and offer them in return the best we have in the way of spirit. ... like Goethe, one clings with ever-greater pleasure and warmth to the "things of this world" - for in this way he holds firmly to the great conception of man, that man becomes the transfigurer of existence when he learns to transfigure himself." [WTP, 820]
When measure becomes master, such a type becomes less, almost never hesitating; not to react as in spontaneous action - a-lethargic metis.
Nietzsche wrote:
"A great man - a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style - what is he? ...he is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of "opinion"..." [WTP, 962]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Mastery. - One has attained to mastery when one neither goes wrong nor hesitates in the performance." [Daybreak, 537]
With the refinement of senses, it can pick up the slightest gestures, intuit them and instantly transfigure itself, adorn new poses.
The opposite to this is preserving, and deifying Virtue; note here, natural motion is inhibited, whereas in the Dionysian type, its the resistance to natural mobilia that is suspended. Defensive energy is an expenditure. Constant defense can make man brutal and at the same time, can weaken him. Unhesitancy is a noble self-trust and a sign of the master;
Nietzsche wrote:
"I have forbidden myself all measures of security or protection ..."[EH, Wise, 5]
Nietzsche wrote:
"The "Christian ideal": staged with Jewish subtlety. ...attempt to make the virtues through which happiness is possible for the lowliest into the standard ideal of all values - to call it God: the instinct for preservation in the least vital classes... Artifice: to deny all natural mobilia and to transfer them to the spiritual realm beyond..." [WTP, 185]
In WTP, 279, "herd inertia" is characterized as a completely different kind of "not to react"; the Xt. Lethargy is a "better to submit than to react"! herd-motto... (cf.AC 30. )
This is essentially what the Zombie stands for - "if you cannot beat them, join them".
In EH, 2 N. describes 'He Who has Turned Out Well'. Included amongst his attributes is this;
Quote :
"He reacts slowly to a stimulus ... he is far from going out to meet it".
The truly com/passionate or dionysian state is unhesitant - like the empathy of Hannibal who incorporates it from Will.
The modern obsession to turn empathy into a tautology with sympathy only exposes a lack of imagination which can detach from anxiety/fear, or any emotion derived from it or evolved to cope with it.
To put yourself in an others place can come in two forms:
1- You sample personal experiences directly, finding similarities in the present situations of an other.
2- You project yourself in the others circumstances, imagining how you would (re)act.
Both draw the alien other closer - making him/her an intimate. The quality of both methods is dependent on the quality of the mind using them. Like with evaluating personal behavior a level of detachment is required for a more objective understanding to come enjoyed. The detachment produces clarity - the mind perceives its own culpability in all events. Only such a mind can then project self into other, and perceive the others culpability with cold clarity.
Using the first method is simpler, easier, and what most people do. It's why most need the others accounts, their side of the story to get into the the situation, when they've nothing personal to draw understanding from.
Using the second method is more risky, but also more efficient. I would not need to burn my hand to know what this might feel like, by watching an other burn his hand. The power of the imagination, dependent on the quality of the mind, may also be able to disassociate self, from otherness, by perceiving not the similarities but the differences. I can imagine myself in the others place, but not entirely myself - I can imagine self, if I were other-than, in the way I've perceived the other to be different from I. Now my projection is not I, in this others circumstance, but I, if I were like this other, in that circumstance.
The modern obsession to turn empathy into a tautology with sympathy only exposes a lack of imagination which can detach from anxiety/fear, or any emotion derived from it or evolved to cope with it.
To put yourself in an others place can come in two forms:
1- You sample personal experiences directly, finding similarities in the present situations of an other.
2- You project yourself in the others circumstances, imagining how you would (re)act.
Using the first method is simpler, easier, and what most people do. It's why most need the others accounts, their side of the story to get into the the situation, when they've nothing personal to draw understanding from.
Exactly. This is emotional contagion like pity, that needs and focusses on similarities to relate to; not empathy.
Quote :
Like with evaluating personal behavior a level of detachment is required for a more objective understanding to come enjoyed. The detachment produces clarity - the mind perceives its own culpability in all events. Only such a mind can then project self into other, and perceive the others culpability with cold clarity.
Using the second method is more risky, but also more efficient. I would not need to burn my hand to know what this might feel like, by watching an other burn his hand. The power of the imagination, dependent on the quality of the mind, may also be able to disassociate self, from otherness, by perceiving not the similarities but the differences. I can imagine myself in the others place, but not entirely myself - I can imagine self, if I were other-than, in the way I've perceived the other to be different from I. Now my projection is not I, in this others circumstance, but I, if I were like this other, in that circumstance.
Right.
Empathy is "intelligent sensuality" as in the quote;
Nietzsche wrote:
"The condition of pleasure called intoxication is precisely an exalted feeling of power - The sensations of space and time are altered: tremendous distances are surveyed and, as it were, for the first time apprehended; the extension of vision over greater masses and expanses; the refinement of the organs for the apprehension of much that is extremely small and fleeting; divination, the power of understanding with only the least assistance, at the slightest suggestion: "intelligent" sensuality -; strength as a feeling of dominion in the muscles, as suppleness and pleasure in movement, as dance, as levity and presto; strength as pleasure in the proof of strength, as bravado, adventure, fearlessness, indifference to life or death..." [WTP, 800]
Divination and the Imaganitiave faculty of the brain is sharpened, able to fore-see more, penetrate more with the slighest gesture, as contrary to popular opinion, the apollo-affirmative-dionysian Intoxication, the self-abundant condition, is a state of heightened Clarity where visions and images appear like stark truths, not the drunk stupor that is commonly associated with intoxication.
As seen in the Aesthetics thread, real Detachment is a pathos of self-fullness;
Lyssa wrote:
Scientific objectivity is the disciplined employment or application of every power of the senses to discriminate and observe an entity from the fullness and engagement of one's being. This kind of Objectivity AS Self-assertion is a sense-augmentation.
The ability to stand at a distance from oneself when the senses are sharp, powerful, and so able to disregard values of pain/pleasure impressing itself as evaluatory-factors in judgement;
Quote : "Objectivity" in the philosopher: moral indifference toward oneself, blindness toward good or ill consequences: lack of scruples about using dangerous means; perversity and multiplicity of character considered and exploited as an advantage. My profound indifference toward myself: I desire no advantage from my insights and do not avoid the disadvantages that accompany them.- Here I include what might be called corruption of the character; this perspective is beside the point: I use my character, but try neither to understand nor to change it-the personal calculus of virtue has not entered my head for a moment." [N., WTP, 425]
Heidegger affirms this in his remark;
"The dark light of the wine does not take away awareness; rather, it lets one's meditation pass beyond that mere illusion of clarity which is possessed by everything calculable and shallow, climbing higher and higher toward the loftiness and nearness of the highest one. The intoxication is that sublime elevation of mood..."
Lethe-argy is a dulling and blunting of the senses and self-fullness that goes for "objectivity" today - as we saw in Phoneutria's blunder. That kind of 'objectivity is not Empathy. You had given an excellent definition of this elsewhere;
Satyr wrote:
"Emotion is how the nihilist divides his reality. Once completed, or accepted as part of a shared cultural reality, the world-view can be detached from, and only engaged with passionless abandon. He has removed himself from his own projections. He is free, as he is free of the past. His passion, has already been expunged in the emotional projections, where anything that confronts him is ascribed a negative, thymotic, emotion and everything that comforts him is ascribed a positive, erotic, emotion. The emotion has been externalized, leaving behind an empty, husk, void of most passions: dull. To deal with such a cripple, a zombie, one must become passionate, in the libidinal sense, yet emotionless.
He defines the world emotionally and then detaches from it. His usage of the term refers to something outside himself. He has depersonalized his own emotions. They become something mystical or mere words used for practical purposes. Once they have been removed from himself, distanced, they can become anything. They are now codified: mere symbols referring to abstractions."
So this "taking on the form of the other" is not Empathy, but Emotional-Contagion.
In this regard to the mummified self-preservationists who fear pain and dis-posing themselves like the Emphathetic or dionysian actor, N. says, what matters is not life, but liveliness. Liveliness. The shaking off lethe-argy. Oblivion.
Empathy is Intelligent Sensuality.
The power of intoxicated/inspired clarity, of 'Divination' about the other belongs to the Daimon. One kind of Madness discussed by Plato.
From Aletheia to Ale. Among the Germanics, Ale was the rune of memory. Wotan was the god of ale/mead and poetic inspiration. This has a deeper history and esoterism among the Indo-Germanics and the science [sapia] of the soul is called "Madhu-vidya" - Mead-Knowledge, just as among the Greeks nek-tar etymologically meant "Overcoming[tar] death[nek]. Honey was the food of the Gods... the food of immortality. The thick concentrate sap was regarded as stored in the highest seat of the head - hence the worship of the Sun-head in the sky, and many decapitated gods among the I.E.s.
Hannibal feeds on the liver, fava beans as well as the Ale - the Chianti.
The Liver is the most regenerative organ which the I.Es attributed under Jupiter. Thriving on the Liver signals his Immortality, his God-Likeness.
To the Pythagoreans, beans symbolized the spirit of one's ancestors, and eating them was a grave error. To feed on them perhaps hints at giving birth to one's own self. "My action is my womb." [Buddha]
Ale is a re-membering. Ale-theia...
Memory is the perception of a pattern, a design. To devise a design is a Metis - which has its roots in memory.
But what Metis is characterized by is a quickness, a dexterity, a flexibility, the Oblique, adjusting itself to a world of Becoming... This Robust vitality that typifies Hannibal or the Blond beast is the opposite of all Lethe-argy and Lethe-orgy.
It is the possession of Great Health, of Laughter - merry Ale-theia,, a sanguine A-letheia.
"Men drank to each other, as the saying went in the olden days; just as one drank wedding to a woman and thus drew her into one's own circle, so also one drank to one's neighbor, in such wise as to reach him, obtain him, and draw him into one's frith." [Grombech, Culture of the Teutons]
Quote :
"Two antagonists can wash away the feud in a common drink, because there is something strong in the horn, which heals all disharmony and quenches all thirst for revenge, and more than that; something which cherished a new feeling. They quaff the goodwill directly. Therefore the law must deny a man right to seek restitution from his opponent when he has of his own free will shared house and food with him. Like everything else in the world, the drink has its peculiar luck, a concentrated essence of the hamingja belonging to the house and its family. If a bride, on her first stepping forward to the door of her new home, or her first crossing of the threshold, was offered a taste of the food and drink there housed as was the custom in later times it was in order that she might be initiated and received into the spirit which ruled in that home, and become minded of one mind with the house. In Sweden, and possibly also elsewhere, it was not enough that bride and bridegroom emptied the wedding cup together with their kin in the bridal house; after the bride had been handed over to her husband, the whole party moved off together to the husband's house and there celebrated a wedding. At the first place, the agreement was drunk fast in all those concerned; at the second, the bridal pair was initiated into its new existence." [ib.]
Quote :
"The home-brewed ale was an elixir vitæ which imperceptibly created the minds day by day in peasant's homestead and king's court. In it frith was born."
Quote :
"With a word expressive of wish and promise the horn was emptied, and on passing on to the next man, was again filled, that he might do his duty and pass it on. From man to man it has to pass, going round with the sun, none of those present being suffered to show preference for any particular companion at table; any attempt at passing by one's neighbour and drinking forward beyond him, amounted to an affront to the one so passed, and was a serious breach of the sacred law." [ib.]
Quote :
"If the ale were not good, then the fault lay in the luck, which was slipping away from the house, and all feasting was then in vain. In the days of benighted heathendom, men would probably have fled from such a house of ill-luck." [ib.]
Quote :
"The Middle Ages had need of the toast to create order, both as a means of ascertaining that the brother fulfilled their obligation this is the ancient feeling and as a preventive against their doing too much beyond what was demanded of them." [ib.]
Quote :
"The horn was the heart of the feast; the hours were held together and made a living whole by the horn passing slowly round from hand to hand. The life of the blot was concentrated in some great toasts in which holiness was strained to its highest pitch. These principal cups gathered the details of the blot into a festival rhythm, and it is possible that the mediæval tendency to find rest in a triple chord of minnis was rooted in an ancient respect for the triple as perfection, even though perhaps it might have been strengthened by Christian ideas. 8. The toast gave the blot feast its character. Uniting as it did all those taking part, it gathered the spirit of the whole company into one." [ib.]
Quote :
"The effect of emptying the cup was first and foremost a community of feeling for harvest and peace, runs the wish of blessing. Men drank together and drank themselves together, as the old saying goes, in the ancestral brew of power. The assembly was made one, and this unifying force of the drink is expressed in the ceremonial which requires that the horn shall pass from man to man round the hall; the chain must be unbroken, and close upon itself again the assembly should be made one. He who refused to answer a toast or passed over his neighbour was guilty of a serious offence against the latter, treating him as a child of evil spirits; but in the person of the offended party, he injured the whole company, by destroying the blessing of the feast. If Hakon would not eat and drink of the holiness with them, then he was not of their frith, and who could then trust him to share and answer for their luck and honour? His refusal was a scornful challenge, because the refuser, by sitting there as a dead spot in the circle, broke its cohesive force, and placed the goodwill of the rest one towards another in the greatest peril." [ib.]
Quote :
"The holiness of the feast is a result of the common change which took place in the kinsmen through their sharing the same divine drink and regenerating the hamingja in themselves. It is indeed inherent in the character of frith that the effect of the power of sacrifice was not restricted to community of kin, the intense concentration of fellowship was identical with a re-inforcement of the entire hamingja. By drinking from the horn, the friends grew luckier, stronger to beget and to fight; their memory and the words on their tongue, luck in harvest and luck in spinning, hands of healing and victory, as Sigdrifa puts it, watchful sternness in feud, and inviolable peace among themselves, all were strengthened and enhanced. It was the soul itself which was renewed, it was the human feeling which was saved from slipping away into the dissolution of nidinghood. Without the great renewal of frith which lay in the blot, existence would come to a standstill; men would forget who they were, and their dead would die the second death." [ib.]
Ale was used to capitalize on the power of an unbroken Circle on both the physical and symbolic plane... The unbroken circle is a re-membering together in remember-ing together. Ale-theia was an A-letheia.
"The configuration of a heuretic generator appears at this point, with the emergence of the circular pattern structuring the Classical Greek world-view. The context of the NeoPlatonic metaphysics of avatar — the round trip of descent, abiding and return already documented — sets the measure for the Greek stance in every sphere (so to speak), anchored on the Odyssey as the allegorical journey of homecoming (epistrophe). This circularity extends to the craft of metic (practical) reason. Detienne and Vernant abstract from the mythological and historical archives the curving dynamic of Metis. The general frame for metis is the play between aporia and poros, the capacity to ensnare or to escape traps. As logic, circle-thought is able to turn upon itself, to mean the opposite of what it says, or to be the opposite of what it seems. Detienne and Vernant abstract the metic art to the interaction of the two powers of bond and circle."
"The essential features of mêtis revealed by our analyses—pliability and polymorphism, duplicity and equivocality, inversion and reversal—imply certain qualities which are also attributed to the curve, to what is pliable and twisted, to what is oblique and ambiguous as opposed to what is straight, direct, rigid and unequivocal. The ultimate expression of these qualities is the circle, the bond that is perfect because it completely turns back on itself, is closed in on itself, with neither beginning nor end, front nor rear, and which in rotation becomes both mobile and immobile, moving in both directions at once. These same qualities find expression in the almost systematic use of the terminology of the curve to describe mêtis. ...the properties of the circle: because, through its continuous curve which closes on itself, the circle unites within it several opposites each one giving birth to its opposite, it appears as the strangest, most baffling thing in the world, thaumasiotaton possessing a power which is beyond ordinary logic." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
The design of the circle had the power of a metis, of a cunning intelligence, that the custom of toasting and drinking ale tried to preserve in weaving frith, in "Bonding".
So this "taking on the form of the other" is not Empathy, but Emotional-Contagion.
In this regard to the mummified self-preservationists who fear pain and dis-posing themselves like the Emphathetic or dionysian actor, N. says, what matters is not life, but liveliness. Liveliness. The shaking off lethe-argy. Oblivion.
Empathy is Intelligent Sensuality.
The power of intoxicated/inspired clarity, of 'Divination' about the other belongs to the Daimon. One kind of Madness discussed by Plato.
The use of imagination in hunting projects the hunter's spirit, using his understanding of the other, to feel its essence, and to predict its behavior. The hunter has done this through observing and connecting what has been observed to what is most intimate to him: his own self. The degree of honesty in the hunter's self-awareness, will determine the accuracy of this process. The hunt "enters the prey's head" not to help it but to kill it.
In the modern practice of empathizing, the similarities are focused on. The distinctions that necessitate this process of projection, are ignored. In pattern recognition a similarity is perceived making it predictable, but the observer does not defer self, as a pattern other than, to the pattern it perceives as possessing similarities it (re)cognizes. The hunter see similarities to himself, in his prey, but does not confuse it for himself, because the differences is what distinguish him from it. The more similar to the man the other is all the more he can confuse himself for other, immersing himself in othersness to escape self. The others pain is his pain...but he can flee from it whenever he wishes. This option is what he feels as the condescension of the one who pities for the pitied. Many become obsessed with this sensation of feeling the others pain, precisely because they can flee from it - the sense of power - whereas their own pain is inescapable - sense of vulnerability.
Many become so engulfed in this empowering sensation of feeling the others pain, to avoid their own, that it becomes, for them, an identity. The majority of Moderns use this process as a validation of their humanitarian oneness - the similarities overpowering all differences, under the pressure of the selfish motive to survive, which they then deny to purify the need.
Some can say "I am not like you" as if they are saying something profound, and noble. The focus here is on differences to distance, to flee, to disassociate. But nobody is exactly like anyone else...but only more or less similar. When we are comforted by the others persona we focus on the similarities (erotic); when we are dismayed by it, we focus on the differences (thymotic). In anti-race, ant-sexism, anti multiplicity, we find this oscillating process in practice. Tell a simple modern that to know the other you must know yourself and he will assume that since all know themselves more than any other can, that all projections are equally precise, or they assume that because self is used as a standard to understand other that this automatically means sympathy, kindness, benevolence, because they have such a self-serving sense of self that their projections are all goodness and positivity.
With Hannibal empathy is that of the hunter. More honest, and detached. He feels the other, and so he understands him more than the other understands himself, but he remains clear about the differences, because the similarities do not take over to confuse him. He does not want to escape himself, but only to reaffirm himself, via the other.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
So this "taking on the form of the other" is not Empathy, but Emotional-Contagion.
In this regard to the mummified self-preservationists who fear pain and dis-posing themselves like the Emphathetic or dionysian actor, N. says, what matters is not life, but liveliness. Liveliness. The shaking off lethe-argy. Oblivion.
Empathy is Intelligent Sensuality.
The power of intoxicated/inspired clarity, of 'Divination' about the other belongs to the Daimon. One kind of Madness discussed by Plato.
The use of imagination in hunting projects the hunter's spirit, using his understanding of the other, to feel its essence, and to predict its behavior. The hunter has done this through observing and connecting what has been observed to what is most intimate to him: his own self. The degree of honesty in the hunter's self-awareness, will determine the accuracy of this process. The hunt "enters the prey's head" not to help it but to kill it.
In the modern practice of empathizing, the similarities are focused on. The distinctions that necessitate this process of projection, are ignored.
Many become so engulfed in this empowering sensation of feeling the others pain, to avoid their own, that it becomes, for them, an identity. The majority of Moderns use this process as a validation of their humanitarian oneness - the similarities overpowering all differences, under the pressure of the selfish motive to survive, which they then deny to purify the need.
Some can say "I am not like you" as if they are saying something profound, and noble. The focus here is on differences to distance, to flee, to disassociate. But nobody is exactly like anyone else...but only more or less similar. When we are comforted by the others persona we focus on the similarities (erotic); when we are dismayed by it, we focus on the differences (thymotic). In anti-race, ant-sexism, anti multiplicity, we find this oscillating process in practice.
In the same quote on synergy I just cited you in the Thermodynamic thread,
Satyr wrote:
"In modern systems heterogeneous peoples are forced into cohabitation, and into cooperative (inter)actions. To exploit the synergy of each, by reducing the lost energies produced by the frictions between them, the system must reduce the individual’s appreciation/awareness of its past; it must detach it from its heritage, from the trunk it has grown upon; it must lower self-identification to a level where all can find commonality within the all-encompassing, all levelling fold; it must redefine individuality and free-will, associating it with behaviors and activities and thoughts that increase service or that increases actions which produce a surplus of energy the centralized agency can then exploit…and direct. By defining freedom in a way which is antithetical to its nature, turning dependence into independence, the system brainwashes generations of minds, turning them into willing, happy, servile automatons, content to find self-worth in communal appreciation, and forever measuring their own quality by using the popular standards.
Any residual free-will present within a unity can only decrease the unity’s overall synergy, as this individual will, not being totally subdued by the central Will, may withhold or deny, in whole or in part, what aggregate energies are in its control. This loss represents a loss of internal efficiency. The reduction of free-will is necessary if the parts participating in the sum are to provide, as close to total, the surrender of their individual synergies, in this way increasing the synergy of the larger unity."
We see how one-to-one operation on emotional contagion focussing on similarities alone is large-scale reduction of all to the lowest-common-denominator.
A culture of eros that thwarts thymotic expenditure is really a wealth-depleting. Hoarding turns into the opposite of well-being.
Baudrillard wrote:
"Only in destruction are objects there in excess and only then, in their disappearance, do they attest to wealth. At any rate, it is clear that destruction, either in its violent and symbolic form (the happening, potlatch, destructive acting- out, both individual and collective) or in its form of systematic and institutional destructiveness, is fated to become one of the preponderant functions of post-industrial society.
`Smash up your car, the insurance will do the rest!' Indeed, the car is without doubt one of the main foci of daily and long-term waste, both private and collective. Not only is it so by its systematically reduced use-value, its systematically increased prestige and fashion coefficient, and the outrageous sums invested in it, but -- without doubt much more deeply than this -- by the spectacular collective sacrifice of sheet-metal, machinery and human lives in the Accident. The Accident: that gigantic `happening', the finest offered by consumer society, through which society affords itself in the ritual destruction of materials and life the proof of its excessive affluence (a proof a contrario, but one that is much more effective in the depths of the imagination than the direct proof by accumulation).
The affluence of rich societies is linked to waste, given all the talk of a `throwaway society' and the fact that some have even envisaged a `garbage-can sociology': `Tell me what you throw away and I'll tell you who you are!' But the statistics of waste and rubbish are not interesting in themselves: they are merely a redundant marker of the volume of goods on offer, and their profusion.
All societies have always wasted, squandered, expended and consumed beyond what is strictly necessary for the simple reason that it is in the consumption of a surplus, of a superfluity that the individual -- and society -- feel not merely that they exist, but that they are alive. That consumption may go so far as consumation, pure and simple destruction, which then takes on a specific social function. In potlatch, for example, it is the competitive destruction of precious goods which sets the seal on social organization. The Kwakiutl sacrifice blankets, canoes, etched `coppers', which they burn or throw into the sea to `maintain their rank,' to assert their value. And, again, it is by `wasteful expenditure' that the aristocratic classes have asserted their pre- eminence down the ages.
The notion of utility, which has rationalistic, economistic origins, thus needs to be revised in light of a much more general social logic in which waste, far from being an irrational residue, takes on a positive function, taking over where rational utility leaves off to play its part in a higher social functionality -- a social logic in which waste even appears ultimately as the essential function, the extra degree of expenditure, superfluity, the ritual uselessness of `expenditure for nothing' becoming the site of production of values, differences and meanings on both the individual and the social level. Within this perspective, a definition of consumption as consumation -- i.e. as productive waste -- begins to emerge, a perspective contrary to that of the `economic' (based on necessity, accumulation and calculation) and one in which, by contrast, the superfluous precedes the necessary, and expenditure takes precedence in terms of value over accumulation and appropriation (even if it does not precede them in time).
The principle of analysis remains as follows: you never consume the object in itself (in its use- value); you are always manipulating objects (in the broadest sense) as signs which distinguish you either by affiliating you to your own group taken as an ideal reference or by marking you off from your group by reference to a group of higher status.
Yet, this process of status differentiation, which is a fundamental social process by which everyone takes their place within society, has a lived aspect and a structural aspect, the one conscious, the other unconscious, the one ethical (the morality of social standing, of status rivalry, of the ladder of prestige), the other structural. One is permanently governed by a code whose rules and meaning-constraints--like those of language-- are, for the most part, beyond the grasp of individuals.
The consumer experiences his distinctive behaviours as freedom, as aspiration, as choice. His experience is not one of being forced to be different, of obeying a code. To differentiate oneself is always, by the same token, to bring into play the total order of differences, which is, from the first, the product of the total society and inevitably exceeds the scope of the individual.
The collective `improvidence' and `prodigality' characteristic of primitive societies are the sign of real affluence. We have only the signs of affluence. Beneath a gigantic apparatus of production, we anxiously eye the signs of poverty and scarcity. But poverty consists, says Sahlins, neither in a small quantity of goods, nor simply in a relation between ends and means: it is, above all, a relation between human beings. The basis for the confidence of primitive peoples and for the fact that, within hunger, they live a life of plenty, is ultimately the transparency and reciprocity of social relations. It is the fact that no monopolization whatever of nature, the soil, the instruments or products of `labour' intervenes to obstruct exchange and institute scarcity. There is among them no. accumulation, which is always the source of power. In the economy of the gift and symbolic exchange, a small and always finite quantity of goods is sufficient to create general wealth since those goods pass constantly from one person to the other. Wealth has its basis not in goods, but in the concrete exchange between persons. It is, therefore, unlimited since the cycle of exchange is endless, even among a limited number of individuals, with each moment of the exchange cycle adding to the value of the object exchanged. It is this concrete and relational dialectic which we find inverted, as a dialectic of penury and unlimited need, in the process of competition and differentiation characteristic of our civilized, industrial societies. Where, in primitive exchange, every relationship adds to the social wealth, in our `differential' societies every social relationship adds to individual lack, since every thing possessed is relativized in relation to others (in primitive exchange, it is valorized by the very relationship with others).
It is not, therefore, paradoxical to argue that in our `affluent' societies abundance is lost and that it will not be restored by an interminable increase in productivity, by unleashing new productive forces. Since the structural definition of abundance and wealth lies in social organization, only a revolution of the social organization and of social relations could bring those things; about. Will we return, one day, beyond the market economy, to prodigality? Instead of prodigality, we have `consumption' forced consumption in perpetuity, twin sister to scarcity. It was social logic which Brought primitive peoples the `first' (and only) affluent society. It is our social logic which condemns us to luxurious and spectacular penury.
`The goal of the economy is not the maximization of production for the individual, but the maximization of production linked in with the value system of the society' (Parsons). The truth is, not that `needs are the fruits of production', but that the system of needs is the product of the system of production. This is quite different. By system of needs, we mean that needs are not produced one by one, in relation to the respective objects, but are produced as consumption power, as an overall propensity within the more general framework of the productive forces.
Like violence, the forms of seduction and narcissism are laid down in advance by models produced industrially by the mass media and composed of identifiable signs (if all girls are to think they are Brigitte Bardot, then they must stand out from the crowd by virtue of their hair, their mouths or a particular feature of clothing -- that is to say, necessarily the same thing for all of them). Everyone finds his or her own personality in living up to these models..." [Consumer Society]
The meaning of what was considered "Wakefulness" has now taken on the import of "Sleeplessness".
The meaning of the Alertness of the Blond Beast has now inverted into the import of the Zombie - a creature that cannot close its eyes, although it is literally brain-dead.
The Sleeplessness of the Zombie is the epitome of Modern Oblivion - Lethe,,, from which derives the word Lethargy.
The Vitality of the Blond Beast is everything that is opposed to every kind of Modern Lethargy. According to Nietzsche, it was Xt. that Was and ushered in the religion of Lethargy, of comfort, of security. Truth as Security, as Stiffness, as the Safe-unshakeable otherworldliness - all expressions of Zombie Lethe-argy..., or even to rhyme with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], we might say, of Vampire Lethe-Orgy. 24 hour malls..."
-
Hannibal wrote:
"A discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me. Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude." [Hannibal, 2.12]
Lethe-argy is an Un-attentiveness. Dis-Orientation is like trying to fit or respond to a circular hole with a square peg. Lethargic Un-attentiveness is a discourtesy.
The inevitable dis-proportion of a mal-fit is an Ugliness.
Heidegger wrote:
"'Using' does not mean utilizing, using up, exploiting. When we handle a thing, for example, our hand must fit itself to the thing. Use implies fitting response. Proper use does not debase what is being used - on the contrary, use is determined and defined by leaving the used thing in its essential nature. ...only proper use brings the thing to its essential nature and keeps it there... safe in its essence."
A-symmetry is a disturbance in Harmonie [*ar - best fit, skilled], and setting a dis-Order upon an other is an invasion and a Rudeness.
The Last Man suffers from Lethargy and is Rude.
Evola wrote:
"The elimination of any inner form, of all character, of all integrity, in a word, the decline or absence, in the individual, of that central power which the Ancients termed egemonikon. And this, not only on the ethical plane, but also in the domain of everyday behaviour, on the plane of individual psychology and of existential structure. The result is an ever-growing number of unstable, formless individuals, an invasion of what we may call the race of the fleeing man. This is a race which deserves to be defined more closely than we can do here, without hesitating to use scientific and experimental methods.
The kind of man we are talking about is not only recalcitrant to all inner discipline, is not only horrified at the idea of facing himself, he is equally incapable of any serious undertaking, incapable of following any precise orientation, and of proving his mettle. We can say that, in part, he does not want to, and in part, he is not able to. In effect, it is interesting to note that this instability is not always in the service of a personal and unscrupulous interest, and is not always the instability of he who says : “We do not live in an age where we can afford to have character.” No. In a number of cases, this type of behaviour acts to the detriment of those in question. Furthermore, it is significant that this weakened human type also appears in countries whose race and tradition are least favourable towards it (we are thinking especially of Central Europe and the Nordic countries, and to a certain extent, England), as well as in such classes as the aristocracy and the artisans, whose representatives kept, until recent times, a certain inner form.
The decline of all “professional honour” – an honour which had been, on a practical level, a precious manifestation of moral consciousness and even of a certain nobility – is in effect due to the same process of disintegration. The joy of producing, according to one’s art, by giving the best of oneself, with enthusiasm and honesty, gives way to the most immediate gain, which does not hesitate to stoop to bad workmanship or fraud. To give one characteristic example, from among many others: alimentary fraud, more widespread and cynical than ever, which has less to do with criminal irresponsibility than with shady dealings, the fall of inner level, the lack of all sense of honour, this sense of honour which, in other times, was possessed by the humblest of guilds. (In another domain, we see, in parallel to industrialisation, the proletariatisation and social blackmail of the “working class”, of those who are but mere “sellers of labour.”)
We have said that this phenomenon does not concern the moral domain solely. This instability, evasiveness, smug irresponsibility and casual impropriety, is manifested even in everyday banalities. One promises to do one thing – to write, to telephone, or take care of something or other – and does not do it. One is not punctual. In some more serious cases, even the memory is not spared: one forgets, one is distracted, one has difficulty concentrating. Some specialists have noticed a weakening of memory among the younger generations : a phenomenon which has been explained by all manner of bizarre and secondary reasons, but whose real cause is the modification of the general atmosphere, which seems to provoke a veritable alteration of the psychic structure. If we recall what Weininger aptly wrote on the relationship which exists between ethics, logic and memory, on the higher meaning of memory, not purely psychological, (memory being closely linked with the unity of the personality, by the resistance it provides against dispersion in time, in the flux of duration; it has thus an ethical and ontological value, and it is not for nothing that a particular reinforcement of the memory is part of the disciplines of high ascesis, such as in Buddhism, for instance), we shall seize the deepest implications of this phenomenon.
Moreover, falsehood, gratuitous lies, without any real goal, are naturally part of the style of the fleeing man; we are here in the presence of one of his specifically “feminine” traits. And if we point out to a representative of this race of the fleeing man such behaviour, this individual is surprised, since such behaviour is natural to him, or else he feels slighted and reacts in an almost hysterical fashion. For he does not want to be “disturbed.” Everyone will notice, in his circle of acquaintances, this sort of neurosis, if he wishes to pay attention. And we can also notice how certain people we were under the illusion to consider as friends have become today, after the war, utterly unrecognisable. As to the world of politicians, with its schemes and the corruption which has always characterised parliamentary democracy, but which is especially obvious today, it is not even worth mentioning, so much has the race of the fleeing man, identical beyond all labels and parties, found his place. It should be noted, in effect, that, very often, those who profess ideas of the “Right” are no exception, because, with them, these ideas occupy a separate place, without any direct relationship and without any compelling consequence on their existential reality. It is more worthwhile to note a certain widespread corruption, in the sexual domain notably, spreading throughout the “emancipated” youth, and which is more or less in relation to “la dolce vita.” It corresponds in no way to anything positively anti-conformist; it is not the affirmation of a higher freedom, of a more pronounced personality. It is the effect of a mere “laisser-aller”, of passivity, the banal drop in level – so many things to which we shall have occasion to return, when we shall examine the backdrop of certain ideological currents presently advocating “sexual freedom”. The throne where the “inner sovereign” ought to sit, eventually to oppose the pure law of its being to any external law, to any hypocrisy and to any lie (Stirner, Nietzsche, Ibsen) – that place is empty. One lives from day to day, in a stupid manner, in sum. Whence, in those rare moments of awareness, disgust and ennui." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
The Vitality of the Blond Beast is everything that is opposed to every kind of Modern Lethargy. According to Nietzsche, it was Xt. that Was and ushered in the religion of Lethargy, of comfort, of security. Truth as Security, as Stiffness, as the Safe-unshakeable otherworldliness - all expressions of Zombie Lethe-argy..., or even to rhyme with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], we might say, of Vampire Lethe-Orgy. 24 hour malls..."
What has vitality is free-flowing and spontaneous.
And with regard to how the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], the lethargy of that Xt. was qualified by Arnold's essay too on the relation between [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] as one between Consciousness and Conscience;
Quote :
"The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience."
Quote :
"At the bottom of both the Greek and the Hebrew notion is the desire, native in man, for reason and the will of God, the feeling after the universal order, — in a word, the love of God. But, while Hebraism seizes upon certain plain, capital intimations of the universal order, and rivets itself, one may say, with unequalled grandeur of earnestness and intensity on the study and observance of them, the bent of Hellenism is to follow, with flexible activity, the whole play of the universal order, to be apprehensive of missing any part of it, of sacrificing one part to another, to slip away from resting in this or that intimation of it, however capital. An unclouded clearness of mind, an unimpeded play of thought, is what this bent drives at. The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.
Christianity changed nothing in this essential bent of Hebraism to set doing above knowing. Self-conquest, self-devotion, the following not our own individual will, but the will of God, obedience, is the fundamental idea of this form, also, of the discipline to which we have attached the general name of Hebraism.
Both Hellenism and Hebraism arise out of the wants of human nature, and address themselves to satisfying those wants. But their methods are so different, they lay stress on such different points, and call into being by their respective disciplines such different activities, that the face which human nature presents when it passes from the hands of one of them to those of the other, is no longer the same. To get rid of one's ignorance, to see things as they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in their beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out before human nature; and from the simplicity and charm of this ideal, Hellenism, and human life in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with a kind of a‘rial ease, clearness, and radiancy...
As Hellenism speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve, so Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, of awakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of this kind. It is obvious to what wide divergence these differing tendencies, actively followed, must lead. As one passes and repasses from Hellenism to Hebraism, from Plato to St. Paul, one feels inclined to rub one's eyes and ask oneself whether man is indeed a gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a noble and divine nature; or an unhappy chained captive, labouring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death.
Of two disciplines laying their main stress, the one, on clear intelligence, the other, on firm obedience; the one, on comprehensively knowing the grounds of one's duty, the other, on diligently practising it..."
"For the Greek hero, to be unsung is to be as good as dead.
Nowhere does this equation seem to be more true than in the Odyssey, where a major theme is the equation of anonymity with nonexistence. Not only must Odysseus escape physical destruction on his way back from Troy; he must also avoid being permanently trapped in various kinds of namelessness that the poem portrays as death. This imperative is in keeping with the dominant perspective of the story. “Everybody knows” that Odysseus lives only to get back home to Ithaka. In the Odyssey, we see him first on the shore of Calypso’s island, looking woefully to sea, longing to see his wife and family. And homecoming will restore him not only to the roles of king, husband, father, and son but to his identity in an existential sense. By killing the suitors he emerges from anonymity to become “Odysseus” again." [Nortwick, Unknown Odysseus]
Amnesia is the result of drinking from the waters of Lethe for the beginning of a new life. In ancient Greece and Rome, "memory sanctions" were placed on the criminals and the traitors and obliterating them from the memory of society was an enforcement of memetic exile from the space of civic community. To become invisible, to have vanished was as good as dead.
"People shape their memory according to their present experience", said Thucydides [2.54].
Orwell shows how this practice has evolved in the modern day as a cultural repression and erasing of a whole past, where the victors and those in power get to manage and orchestrate public memory:
Orwell wrote:
"Its counterpart in literate societies is the willful destruction of commemorative symbols (documents and monuments), including the burning of books, the destruction of inscriptions (damnatio memoriae), and the rewriting of history as described, for example, by Orwell in 1984. There is (as far as I can see) no comprehensive term to denote these acts of intentional and violent cultural oblivion. They seem to correspond, on the individual level, to repression, whereas structural amnesia corresponds rather to forgetting. “Cultural repression” might therefore serve as a term for the various forms of annihilating cultural memory."
In ancient Greece, "memory sanctions" were feared deterrants in their power to pass down through the generations;
Quote :
"The attitude of the Greek city-states to memory sanctions is primarily revealed in their laws and statutes. The internal stability of the individual cities depended on their being able to deal with threats, whether real or potential, from errant citizens who might disrupt the community or even overturn its government, sometimes seizing power and imposing a tyrannical regime. Such threats could be just as real as the danger of war with neighboring communities, and the two could and often did go together. Political strife (stasis) was endemic to Greek politics, and patterns of repeated tyrannies or oligarchies were vivid in the collective memories of many cities. Disaffected citizens might also join foreign enemies, such as the Persians. Even in the earliest times, sanctions against traitors and tyrants are attested in many Greek communities.
A Lokrian law of the late sixth century B.C. demonstrates the regular use of severe sanctions against the worst lawbreakers, such as murderers or violators of other communal civic agreements.
Such sanctions included the confiscation of property and the razing of the transgressor’s house, which thus spelled the expulsion of the individual and of his family from the community. The razing of the house was a widely attested penalty, which the Greeks themselves dated back to mythical times in the story of the revenge taken on those guilty of the murder of Hesiod.5 Although not mentioned in the Homeric poems, its place in myth underlines the symbolic significance of such a penalty in the Greek imagination. Greek tragedies often speak of the gods’ destruction of the houses of the wicked, and many villains of tragedy were portrayed as tyrannical rulers who misused their power in relation to men or to gods, even as they brought disaster on the cities they were supposed to be leading.
Such destruction was used at Corinth to mark the end of the reign of the Cypselids. At Sparta the houses of individual kings were destroyed, even though the monarchy itself was never in question as an aspect of the traditional system of government.6 The razing of the house symbolized the ruin of the family and of its position in society. Even in the historical period, the gods were thought to enact their own form of this penalty against particular offenders. Glaukus the Spartan, for example, dared to ask the Delphic oracle whether he could swear a false oath in order to keep a deposit of money that had been left in his care. Although he never actually committed the perjury he was contemplating, Apollo still punished him by making his family and house disappear from Sparta, where he had formerly enjoyed a reputation for justice and fairness.
An archaic sanction that carried distinct religious overtones, the razing of the house went far beyond mere symbolism. It literally destroyed the economic status and social position of the whole family, or at least of the branch that lived in the house in question. The result was that the offending individual would no longer live there, nor would his descendants and relatives. The implication was that this family could no longer coexist with the community at large. In most cities outside Athens, the confiscated land seems simply to have been reused for another purpose, so that all traces of the erasure itself were also removed. Presumably, the whole incident might eventually be forgotten. Although the razing of a house was not primarily designed as a memory sanction, it could and often did carry this secondary effect.
Additional penalties could be associated with confiscation and destruction of property. Equally severe was the restriction of burial within the territory of the city. Most often this penalty would apply to the offender himself, but it could also involve his descendants (those now going into exile) and even sometimes his ancestors. In the latter case, graves might be dug up and the remains cast out beyond the borders of the community.
In this case, it seems fairer to speak of denial of burial as a true memory sanction, especially when a whole family group was affected. The presence of the family in the city was marked by the house of the living and by the graves of the dead. In cases of treason, tyranny, or other egregious violations, a whole family might be removed from the community as if it had never been a part of it. Such a removal could involve an elaborate series of public events, including the razing of the house and the ritual of exposing a corpse, or the digging up of family graves and the casting of old bones over the border. It seems probable that the expulsion of ancestors was more likely to involve prominent families and to represent a much more politicized erasure of family power and influence than the unceremonious casting of a common criminal into a pit reserved for those who had been crucified." [Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture]
In contrast to threats of Oblivion and obliterating memory, Remember-ance of criminals and making sure they were never forgotten was also practised as an apotropaism. This method is what we see today with the Holohoax Industry and gripping people in the bond of never forgetting, and every amnesia punished, criminalized and reinforced even more stringently;
Quote :
"What made Athens different from the point of view of memory was its practice of publicly recording the names of traitors and other notorious offenders on stelai that were prominently displayed in the city. By providing examples (paradeigmata) of individual villains, such inscriptions ensured that their memory would be perpetuated in a negative way that served the purposes of the Athenian democracy. Far from erasure and oblivion, the Athenians’ system of memorializing notorious offenders helped to protect the city by describing the individuals who posed the most serious threats to its way of life.
Consequently, Athens redefined the worst offenders as outlaws who had lost not only their citizen status but also their physical place within the community, both in life and after death. The implied, albeit usually silent, consent of the community of citizens as a whole was an important part of this rhetoric of punishment. Oblivion remained the more common lot of the lowly criminal. The notorious elite offender, however, especially the traitor or aspirant to tyranny, was memorialized as such by having his name and deed advertised through special inscription(s). If his house was destroyed, its former location was marked rather than being simply consigned to the vagaries of collective memory. From its earliest days the Athenian democracy arrogated to itself the practice of labeling and controlling public memory in order to preserve its political system, communal values, and way of life." [Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting]
If that can be called Modernity, then Postmodernity can be observed in the final method deployed by ancient Greco-Rome. From Amnesia, derives the word Amnesty.
Amnesty International and the UN International Human Rights court all attempt to undo the remembrance severely enforced by modernity and freeing them of all accountability. The past pardoned and erased and allowed to be re-invented like nothing every happened. History fictionalized as just one other "interpretation" among the many narratives equally valid. Relativism in the name of liberty and self-fashioning retarding any trace of maturity and responsibility to a juvenile cosplay of conscience;
Quote :
"The Athenians, and other Greeks also, developed another practice that was a type of deliberate memory sanction, namely an amnesty. According to the terms of an amnesty, a reconciliation was made between two sides in a conflict, whether within a community or between two rival Greek cities. The new settlement was based on a pledge to put aside past differences and not to pursue old grudges.
Such a pledge was usually made by both sides in the conflict by means of an oath taken by each person in his own name. Each person would make a personal pledge to reconcile and to make a new start. This practice reveals much about the construction of political memory within the Greek city, as well as between cities. In the Greek view, political relations took place within the memory space specifically created by the community, and the role of the past in determining the future was clearly acknowledged. A new start was made by promising not to use the past as a political weapon. The standard term used in Greek for the oaths was ou mnesikakein, “not to remember evils from the past” or even “not to misuse memory.”
In other words a special verb was created to express the recalling of previous wrongs, presumably nearly always with a view to seeking some kind of personal vengeance or to provoking political unrest. Rather than using a verb of forgetting or of reconciling, the Greeks expressed an amnesty in negative terms, literally as a sanction against certain types of or uses of “memory.” This was not a general ban on the act of remembering itself, but rather a specific agreement about the public use of certain kinds of memories. The agreement relies on memory and presupposes that people will and must inevitably recall the past in order to obey the law.
An alternative term was a verb of “being angry on the basis of memory” (mnasicholesai). In this case the individual would swear not “to be angry in remembering the past.” The connection of anger with vengeance and strife is a time-honored Greek concept that goes back to the anger of Achilles in the Iliad. Similarly, the Odyssey ends with an exchange of oaths and a pact between Odysseus and the families of the suitors whom he has killed. The word “amnesty” was also a Greek term (amnestia) but is only attested later, for example, in the alliance between Miletus and Heracleotis of about 180 B.C.
The practice of banning such memories of evil was current in the fifth century, as attested in the reconciliation between the Athenians and the Bottiaians in 422 B.C. Other examples include the reconciliation of Athens and Iulis (362 B.C.) and the amnesty decree from Aliphera in Arcadia (late third century B.C.). The practice is also celebrated in myth by the reconciliation of Poseidon and Athena after their contest over who should be the principal protective deity of Athens.
The myth was depicted in sculpture on the monumental west pediment of the Parthenon. According to Plutarch, Poseidon was happy to share a temple with Athena, and there was an altar dedicated to Lethe, goddess of Forgetting, at the Erechtheium. Each year the Athenians apparently omitted the second day of the month Boedromion because that had been the day of the contest between Poseidon and Athena. By contrast, the Furies (Erinyes or Eumenides) were characterized as goddesses who kept alive the memories of evil and whose constant quest for revenge was based on memory, linked to grief and pollution. In Aeschylus’ Eumenides the goddesses become the protectors of the city by agreeing to accept legal arbitration of blood feuds and by taking on an official role as guardians of memory." [Flower, The Art of Forgetting]
Quote :
"An effective limit was put on revenge and bloodshed by elevating a law of reconciliation (and consequently also the legal system in general) as an authoritative tool to put an end to disputes between citizens. At the same time, the lawcourts served as venues for exploring and controlling the bitter memories of the past. Athenian legal speeches continually recalled the past rather than keeping silent, but this practice seems to have served to reinforce rather than to undermine the effectiveness of the amnesty decree. Open discussion in the courts of its limits and consequences helped to shape its practical details and to give the community ownership of the new political order. The price of peace was for all to step aside from their past roles, whether as defeated oligarchs, victorious democrats, or fearful citizens who had simply tried to stay out of the conflict.
At the same time, the collective guilt and reproaches for what had happened could be virtually transferred to the notorious Thirty, who could serve as scapegoats for the whole community. Their small and precise number suggested that most other Athenians had been their victims and that the unity of the community had essentially remained intact. As a result, the new democracy could be closely associated with the old, even as the constitutional break of 404 was isolated and relabeled. Meanwhile, all citizens who remained in the community were to be on an equal footing and hence to emerge as the victors from the conflict.
The amnesty of 403 B.C. was appropriately celebrated in its own right as an expression of Athenian civic values and as a basis for shared political life. It recalled ancient pledges of an end to blood feuds and a respect for laws that brought to mind Solon and the first establishment of a stable political system. Yet it also inaugurated a new style of democracy and a renewed appreciation for the value of the law as the true basis of the political community. The importance of controlling the memory of the past for the future of the community was acknowledged and brought home to every citizen in his personal taking of the oath. Control of memory ultimately belonged to each citizen in his own person, rather than to any representative group or body within the city. The conception and success of this amnesty became celebrated throughout the fourth century and helped to establish the image of Athens that was familiar to successive generations." [Flower, The Art of Forgetting]
1.Traditionalism: Obliterate into Oblivion by Memory Sanctions as a Memetic Exile and Purging out without a trace from the whole community for the entire future.
2. Modernity: Remembrance and Memory Enforcement and Criminalization of any Amnesia of the standard narrative.
3. Post-Modernity: Amnesty and Granting Pardon to Erase Past History and Reboot a New Start.
All three were described by Nietzsche as the grounds of pre-moral, moral, and amoral society;
Nietzsche wrote:
""His conscience? . . . We can presume, in advance, that the concept 'conscience', which we meet here in its highest, almost disconcerting form, already has a long history and metamorphosis behind it. To be answerable to oneself, and proudly, too, and therefore to have the prerogative to say yes ' to oneself - is, as I said, a ripe fruit, but also a late fruit: - how long must this fruit have hung, bitter and sour, on the tree! And for even longer there was nothing to see of this fruit, - nobody could have promised it would be there, although it is certain that everything about the tree was ready and growing towards it! - 'How do you give a memory to the animal, man? How do you impress something upon this partly dull, partly idiotic, inattentive mind, this personification of forgetfulness, so that it will stick?' . . . This age-old question was not resolved with gentle solutions and methods, as can be imagined; perhaps there is nothing more terrible and strange in man's prehistory than his technique of mnemonics.
'A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory' - that is a proposition from the oldest (and unfortunately the longest-lived) psychology on earth. You almost want to add that wherever on earth you still find ceremonial, solemnity, mystery, gloomy shades in the lives of men and peoples, something of the dread with which everyone, everywhere, used to make promises, give pledges and commendation, is still working: the past, the most prolonged, deepest, hardest past, breathes on us and rises up in us when we become 'solemn' . When man decided he had to make a memory for himself, it never happened without blood, torments and sacrifices: the most horrifying sacrifices and forfeits (the sacrifice of the first-born belongs here), the most disgusting mutilations (for example, castration), the cruellest rituals of all religious cults (and all religions are, at their most fundamental, systems of cruelty) - all this has its origin in that particular instinct which discovered that pain was the most powerful aid to mnemonics.
In a certain sense, the whole of asceticism belongs here: a few ideas have to be made ineradicable, ubiquitous, unforgettable, 'fixed', in order to hypnotize the whole nervous and intellectual system through these 'fixed ideas' - and ascetic procedures and lifestyles are a method of freeing those ideas from competition with all other ideas, of making them 'unforgettable'. The worse man's memory has been, the more dreadful his customs have appeared; in particular, the harshness of the penal law gives a measure of how much trouble it had in conquering forgetfulness, and preserving a few primitive requirements of social life in the minds of these slaves of the mood and desire of the moment." [GM, 2.3]
1. Memory Sanction - His whole family and house razed to the ground, and Hannibal in turn Takes Away from them their Humanity, their mask, and stripping them off their re-cognition as a human being. They become swines. His personal purging exiles them from the domain of the human.
"A discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me. Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude." [Hannibal, 2.12]
2. Remembrance - The whole criminalization of Hannibal as a Monster, that must be made an example of. Society must never forget the brute, the beast, the Free-Spirit. He must be hunted down and incarcerated. A scape-goat for public hypocrisy. Psychoanalysis itself the whole criminal arm of the system trying to pattern him into a convenient code.
"Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviourism, Officer Starling. You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants – nothing is ever anybody’s fault."
Any sympathy or amnesia towards this monster, this fall-guy are punished or mocked or coerced back to stay within the standard narrative. This develops a split, a bad conscience in the ones caught between their will and the system's. Hannibal for his part can never forget the scars. He is unwilling to forget the scars. There is no forgiveness to the Rude who treat him un-Attentively, Lethe-argically like he/his sensitivities did not exist. His Memory Palace is his mnemonic technique. He never lets another forget it either.
"My (memory) palace is vast. Even by medieval standards. Suvine and beautiful and timeless. With a single reminder of mortality... a skull, graven in the floor. " [Hannibal, 2.13]
"If I am ever apprehended, my memory palace will serve more than just a mnemonic system; I will live there. All the palace chambers are not lovely, light and bright. In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. There are holes in the floor of the mind." [Hannibal, 2.13]
"Everything that was ever said. Listen. What do you hear? A melody. The orchestrations of carbon. You and me." [Hannibal, 2.13]
He is not only a constant mirror to the swines, but also reminds Clarice of her racial heritage and status and background that she has polished and accentuated with accents - not only gestural/physical but also the fake accent in the manner of thinking... trying to penetrate him with Behaviourism and such modern psychoanalytic methods that aim to code and set the cast.
3. Amnesty - Hannibal helps Clarice grant amnesty to herself; he tries to liberate her from the shadows of her past and of the system's. He helps her purge her nightmares to start a new beginning.
"Moving on is a rebuke. Show them how strong you are. Survive them." [Hannibal, 2.12]
Yet, Hannibal cannot grant pardon. There is no Amnesty.
The Han spirit of neither Hannibal, nor Hamlet, nor Achilles can grant Amnesty to the Rude.
Its too late to Apologize...
Hannibal cannot forget, although the system may grant him a kind of Amnesty and Re-Invent him as a pyschologist who can help catch criminals and redeem himself by helping the system. Hannibal for his part returns swines into Blank States with his cannibalism, and Re-Invents them as much as Himself as cuisine, as art, and Renews their life and his with new beginnings, and re-communing into society. Taking credit for his acts and holding feasts is his way of granting Amnesty, reconciling conflicts. Burying past grudges with re-socialization - commune-icating with the common. Re-sewing the animal, the beast back into the human. As he does with Will. In this sense too,
If Rudeness is a crudity, a barbarism, Hannibal domesticates and re-civilizes them through Design.
Hannibal, a 'Cautious Prometheus'?
Latour wrote:
"Design occurred by adding a veneer of form to their creations, some superficial feature that could make a difference in taste and fashion. Even if design could be greatly admired, it was always taken as one branch of an alternative: look not only at the function, but also at the design. This dichotomy was true even though the best design was one that, in good modernist fashion (as it did in “functionalism”), approximated function as closely as possible. “Design” was always taken in this “not only… but also” balance. It was as if there were really two very different ways of grasping an object: one through its intrinsic materiality, the other through its more aesthetic or “symbolic” aspects.
A second and perhaps more important implication of design is an attentiveness to details that is completely lacking in the heroic, Promethean, hubristic dream of action. “Go forward, break radically with the past and the consequences will take care of themselves!” This was the old way - to build, to construct, to destroy, to radically overhaul: “Après moi le déluge!” But that has never been the way of approaching a design project. A mad attention to the details has always been attached to the very definition of design skills. And ‘skill’ is actually a term that is also attached to design, in the same way that design is associated with the words ‘art’ and ‘craft’. In addition to modesty, there is a sense of skilfulness, craftsmanship and an obsessive attention to detail that make up a key connotation of design. The reason why this is a point worth remarking is because it was unthinkable to connect these features of design with the revolutionary and modernizing urges of the recent past. To the contrary, a careful attention to detail, craft and skill, was precisely what seemed reactionary as this would only have slowed the swift march to progress.
The expanding concept of design indicates a deep shift in our emotional make up: at the very moment when the scale of what has to be remade has become infinitely larger (no political revolutionary committed to challenging capitalist modes of production has ever considered redesigning the earth’s climate), what means to “make” something is also being deeply modified. The modification is so deep that things are no longer “made” or “fabricated”, but rather carefully “designed”, and if I may use the term, precautionarily designed. It is as though we had to combine the engineering tradition with the precautionary principle; it is as though we had to imagine Prometheus stealing fire from heaven in a cautious way!
Design is a task that follows to make that something more lively, more commercial, more usable, more user’s friendly, more acceptable, more sustainable, and so on, depending on the various constraints to which the project has to answer. In other words, there is always something remedial in design.
To design is never to create ex nihilo. It is amusing that creationists in America use the word “intelligent design” as a rough substitute for “God the Creator”. They don’t seem to realize the tremendous abyss that exists between creating and designing. The most intelligent designers never start from a tabula rasa. God the designer is really a redesigner of something else that was already there —and this is even truer for His Son as well as for the Spirit, who both are sent to redeem what has been botched in the first place… If humanity “has been made (or should I have said designed?) as the image of God”, then they too should learn that things are never created but rather carefully and modestly redesigned.
There is always something slightly superficial in design, something clearly and explicitly transitory, something linked to fashion and thus to shifts in fashions, something tied to tastes and therefore somewhat relative. Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing, or breaking with the past. It is an antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings, and radical departures." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
"Human are to be handled with infinite precaution from the womb (natural or artificial) in which they are grown (Sloterdijk defines philosophy as a kind of obstetrics!) all the way to the place where they survive and die. What is so important in the extended metaphors that Sloterdijk pursues to the bitter end is that they begin to accomplish exactly what I was asking for in the first part of this lecture. How can we reconcile the entirely different sets of emotions, passions and drives triggered by the two alternative Great Narratives of modernity – the one of emancipation (the official story) and the one of attachment (the hidden one)?
When you check on your space suit before getting out of the space shuttle, you are radically cautious and cautiously radical… you are painfully aware of how precarious you are, and yet simultaneously, you are completely ready to artificially engineer and to design in obsessive detail what is necessary to survive. Whereas modernist or anti-modernist philosophies of history are always considering only one narrative (that of progress or the failure of progress), Sloterdijk is the rare thinker who shows how the stories of both emancipation and of attachment are a single story. This unification is possible provided that you deeply modify what it is to be “in the world”: the cosmonaut is emancipated from gravity because he or she never lives one fraction of a second outside of his or her life supports. To be emancipated and to be attached are two incarnations of the same event, provided you draw your attention to how artificial atmospheres are well or badly designed.
The concept that is key for reconciling those two sets of passions and for inventing this strange role of a precautionary Prometheus, is that of explicitation. Explicitation is a consequence of the concept of envelopes. The envelope is a term that will surely draw the attention of architects and designers: we are enveloped, entangled, surrounded; we are never outside without having recreated another more artificial, more fragile, more engineered envelope. We move from envelopes to envelopes, from folds to folds, never from one private sphere to the Great Outside.
Modernism, in the hands of Sloterdijk is no longer a concept. It is a place, a design, a style. It is a very specific type of architecture to which the whole second volume of SPHÄREN is dedicated: that of Globes. A modernist is someone who lives under a vast dome, and who sees things as though sitting under a huge architecture, the Globe of Science, the globe of Reason, the globe of Politics. For the modernist, the humanist is the one who reads a book under a lamp or who sits clothed in some sort of Roman toga on the stairs of a huge amphitheatre under the painted fresco of some immense dome… except that in the modernist architecture, the life supports necessary for this Dome or this Globe to be sustainable have not been explicitated. A modernist takes for granted that there will always be air, space, water, heat, for the development of his or her “global view”. But there is nothing global in globalization. Global is always a lot of globaloney, a lot of hot air. And of course, blowing hot air also requires a mechanism of some sort, a pump, a hairdryer — a designed hairdryer! What happened in the second half of the last century is that modernism disappeared in the exact measure where the life supports were made more explicit, one after the next. Ecological crisis, in such a view, are the slow and painful realization that there is no outside anymore. It means that none of the elements necessary to support life can be taken for granted. To live under a huge inflated Globe you need a powerful air conditioning system and powerful pumps to keep it inflated. Yes, modernist Globes have been deflated; modernism’s fate has been somewhat the same as that of those dirigibles, like the Zeppelin or the Hindenburg.
So you see, what was called the “modernist style” in history of design should now be given a much more profound signification and a much longer life span. The very ways in which things have presented themselves as matters of fact which are now visible as a style –and a style that is changing under our very eyes. The aesthetics of matters of fact have always been precisely that: a historically situated aesthetics, a way to light objects, to frame them, to present them, to situate the gaze of the viewers, to design the interiors in which they are presented – and of course the politics with which they are (they were) so strongly associated.
What I find so important in the notion of explicitation, of folding envelopes into envelopes, is that it is a powerful way of retrieving science and technology by completely modifying what is meant by a sustainable artificial life. It is really in that sense, that Sloterdijk is THE philosopher of design. If earlier I have been correct in defining the five reasons why the notion of design was such a powerful substitute to the notion of making, building and constructing, explicitation might allow us to understand that it is possible to rematerialize without importing with the notion of ‘matter’ the whole modernist baggage of ‘matters of fact’. This is exactly what Sloterdijk does. No contemporary philosopher is more interested in materiality, in engineering, in biotechnology, in design proper, in contemporary arts, and in science more generally. Yet when he deals with materialities it is not as if these were so many matters of fact that would inject indisputable natural necessity as the final word in some social or symbolic questions. Instead, when he adds materiality to a site he is rendering another fragile envelope into which we are even more entangled, explicit. This entanglement is as relevant for the envelopes of biotechnology as it is for space stations.
This is exactly the reason why Habermas could not accept Sloterdijk’s argument. For a good old modernist humanist, when someone begins to talk about life support, about the necessary conditions to “cultivate human beings”, about the air-conditioning to have them breathe safely, this is a tantamount to a plea for an Orwellian world, for eugenism. What Habermas has entirely missed, however, is that when humanists accuse people of “treating humans like objects”, they are thoroughly unaware that they are treating objects unfairly. A humanist cannot imagine that objects may be things, that matters of facts might be matters of concern, that the whole language of science and engineering might be portrayed as anything other than the boring carriers of the indisputable necessities that modernism has rendered popular. Humanists are concerned only about humans; the rest, for them, is mere materiality or cold objectivity. But Sloterdijk is not treating humans matter of factually as humanists claim. Rather, he treats both humans and non humans as “matters of grave and careful concerns”. By treating human life supports as matters of concern, we pile concerns over concerns, we fold, we envelop, we embed humans into more and more elements that have been carefully explicitated, protected, conserved and maintained (immunology being, according to Sloterdijk, the great philosophy of biology). This little shift in the definition of matter modifies everything. It allows practitioners to reuse all of the notions of materiality and of artificiality by freeing them from the restrictions imposed by the older style of modernist matters of fact.
In other words, we can have science and technology without implying naturalization. Not only has nature disappeared as the outside of human action (this has become common wisdom by now); not only has “natural” become a synonym of “carefully managed”, “skilfully staged”, “artificially maintained”, “cleverly designed” (this is true especially of so called “natural” parks or “organic foods”); but the very idea that to bring the knowledge of scientists and engineers to bear on a question is to necessarily resort to the unquestionable laws of nature, is also becoming obsolete. Bringing in scientists and engineers is quickly becoming another way of asking: “How can it be better redesigned?” The bricolage and tinkering elements always associated with design have taken over nature. Actually, they are inherent in nature if we take Darwinian ways as a clever form of bricolage, of “intelligent design”… albeit a blind one.
It is somewhat understandable that when Sloterdijk raised the question of how humans could be “designed”, that is, artificially nurtured, this invokes the old phantasm of eugenic manipulations. But the similarities between these two projects prove to be completely superficial when submitted to a close examination. They are similar only in the same way that two trains can both be moving ahead even though they are at an intersection that will lead them toward completely different destinations. Habermas missed the switch, the bifurcation that is so important for us to locate. Yes humans have to be artificially made and remade, but everything depends on what you mean by artificial and even more deeply by what you mean by “making”. We have returned to Prometheus and to the question of Creation. Are we able to be the God of intelligent design? This is the heart of the matter. This is why it is so important to talk of design and not of construction, creation or of fabrication. To design something as I indicated earlier, allows us to raise not only the semiotic question of meaning but also the normative question of good and bad design. This is true of DNA manipulation, as well as of climate control, gadgets, fashion, cities or natural landscapes, a perfect case of design from beginning to end. Artificiality is our destiny, but it does not mean accepting the modernist definition of an artefact as the invasion of matters of fact over the softer flesh of human frailty forever. To put it even differently by alluding to another line of more fashionable thought: there is nothing necessarily post human in enveloping, folding, veiling humans into their life supports. Humanists as well as post-humanists seem to have no other repertory for speaking of science and technology other than the modernist idiom of matters of fact.
The great importance of Sloterdijk’s philosophy (and I think the major interest of a designer’s way of looking at things) is that it offers another idiom. The idiom of matters of concern reclaims matter, matters and materiality and renders them into something that can and must be carefully redesigned. This might be far from the humanists’ limited view of what humans are, but it is every bit as removed from the post human dreams of cyborgs. What is clear is that the collective definition of what artificial life supports are supposed to be becomes the key site of politically minded investigation. Nothing much is left of the scenography of the modernist theory of action: no male hubris, no mastery, no appeal to the outside, no dream of expatriation in an outside space which would not require any life support of any sort, no nature, no grand gesture of radical departure —and yet still the necessity of redoing everything once again in a strange combination of conservation and innovation that is unprecedented in the short history of modernism. Will Prometheus ever be cautious enough to redesign the planet?" [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
The war going on outside is a dirty one. It is muddy.
Soldiers have no loyalty. The war has lost all honour.
The film shows Uniforms and badges being interchanged and adopted as per convenience.
One day, one is a Nazi,, the other day he is a Communist. The other day, he is a "Liberator". Stars and Rank are "plucked" off dead corpses of soldiers and worn to exploit the day. Fellow citizens turn scavengers taking advantage of the war-toll to loot for money, for gold, for riches...
They roll in the dirt and go with the flow like pigs.
Swines have made War a Swin-dle.
To mercenaries who trade loyalities, Insignias have become fetishes - they are neither nazi nor jew nor red cross humanity. The iron cross, the xt. cross, the red cross - its all the same "star" to them. The communist hammer is only a secular version of the Xt. cross which Zizek revives all too well. Communism only replaces the sorrowful cross of perdition of Western Xt. with the eastern orthodox optimistic star of natvity...
The tentacles of the western 'Star'-buck too is all over, and has encrusted the world... [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]
The tanks rolling in, in the opening scenes are symbolic of this relativistic levelling. It shows a view of war where one side is just as interchangeable as the other.
A terrifying atmosphere of Nihilism reducing every difference, every significance to Mud. A nazi is the same as a communist is the same as a red cross humanitarian... The war outside turns inside; the animal inside turns humane ouside in all the irony of one's own home being turned into the 'People's Orphanage'... Homelessness is the erasure of root, of signifiers. Man becomes just as edible as animal. The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is not lost. Its all the same star...
The mercenary in the film says, we eat or we die. And that is all the awareness it takes to prefer feeding on a live human to a dead animal.
Like swine, they can eat anything. They discriminate only to level all the meaningful distinctions. The Swin-dlers cannibalize saying, they are not scavengers, "one cannot eat what was already dead and rotten, before it was frozen by the snow." They prefer a fresh human flesh to a dead bird...
When differences are razed to the ground, and everything gets entangled into a spider's web, with which the film hints, one tries to trace a root, a route, an exit, a First Principle.
The First Principle is a Clarity. "First Principles, Clarice." [Hannibal]
In mythology, Hermes is the guide of the lost traveller. Apollo is tricked by Hermes' having the cattle stolen from Apollo, walk backwards. When apollonian clarity is dumbfounded, hermetic knowledge is a regression, a retracing backwards...
Hannibal learns two things in his brief childhood with his parents who give him his First Principles.
From his father, he learns while walking through the forest, "Life is a Game". His father teaches him away from the warm sheltering home his mother makes, Real reality is a hunting ground. Here he receives his first initiation and instruction on navigating with a compass - finding one's direction, and self-orientation. His father teaches him how to survive "outside".
From his mother, who makes a home feel warm and cheerful despite and amidst the war outside, he learns "Pearls before swines", and how to safeguard memories and survive "inside" when there is a savage destruction outside.
And when, "You do not honour the human pecking order, you are always hurting the bullies." - is Hannibal chided in what used to be his own mother's room,,, he escapes, having the strength of his own bearings to navigate out. And his home-castle safe inside him as his memory-palace to navigate in.
Isn't the orienting compass too, a Star...?
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Whoever, for example, did not know how to find the 'similar' often enough, in the context of food or of dangerous animals, whoever subsumed too slowly or too carefully, would have a smaller probability of surviving than one who immediately assumed sameness in the case of similarities." (Nietzsche, GS sec. 111, KSA 3:471)
These yellowish berries, for example, are not quite the same colour as those which my gathering companion so greedily devoured yesterday, just an hour before the stomach convulsions set in which killed him with gruesome rapidity. But they are similar enough in appearance for me to think twice about eating them. And that slight rustling sound is not quite the same as the sound I heard the day before, just seconds before the sabre-toothed tiger leapt upon my hunting companion and devoured him. But it sounds close enough, and sufficiently similar, for me to look for the nearest tree to climb, to a height beyond the range of a tiger’s upward leap.
"In order, then, for certain kinds of practical reasoning to take hold, it was necessary, Nietzsche goes on, for a long time not to see or feel what is changing about things; beings that did not see precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything 'in flux'. In and for itself every high level of carefulness in drawing conclusions, every tendency towards skepticism in this regard, posed a great danger for life." (GS sec. 111, KSA 3:472)
To get on more efficiently with the business of living, it is better not to pay too close attention to what is really going on. Nietzsche later draws an analogy with the process of reading. Just as a reader skims quickly over the individual words on a page,
"so we scarcely see a tree exactly and completely, with regard to its leaves, branches, colour, shape; it is so much easier for us to phantasize an approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences, we still do the same thing: we make up the greater part of the experience." (BGE sec. 192, KSA 5:113f.)
This passage suggests we might be able train ourselves to do what is less easy than phantasising the bulk of our experience, namely, to "see through" the persistent web of concepts and categories and linguistic labels to what is simply there. Given the survival value of the tendency to "phantasize approximations" of things, the strategy would be to suspend this aspect of what phenomenologists call "the natural attitude" – thereby effecting a switch from what one might call a "life perspective" to a "death perspective"
In an aphorism titled "Midday", Nietzsche writes of how "a strange longing for repose" can overwhelm the soul of one who has reached "the noontide of life",
"Upon a meadow hidden among the woods he sees the great god Pan asleep; all the things of nature have fallen asleep with him, an expression of eternity on their faces – so it seems to him. He wants nothing, he frets about nothing, his heart stands still, only his eyes are alive – it is a death with open eyes. Then the man sees much that he has never seen before, and for as far as he can see everything is spun into a net of light and as it were buried in it." (HAH II, WS, sec. 308, KSA 2:690)
Nietzsche calls this condition a means of "procuring the advantages of one who is dead" – a condition not well appreciated, because of what he calls a "fundamentally false evaluation of the dead world on the part of the sentient world" (KSA 9:11)." [Graham Parkes, Panpsychism and Pure Experience]
When the world takes everything away from you, and the last bits of memory, of identity are churned into fodder, one quickly grabs on to the nearest approximation of all that felt like home; "the very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp..." Murasaki is his last kindred; orphaned by the same war.
"Procuring the advantages of one who is dead" is a Daoist or oriental conception of the Fearsome Path. Takuan Soho's saying,
Quote :
"When facing a single tree, if you look at a single one of its red leaves, you will not see all the others. When the eye is not set on any one leaf, and you face the tree with nothing at all in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye without limit. But if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there." [The Unfettered Mind]
mirrors N.'s saying as abovementioned,
Quote :
"...so we scarcely see a tree exactly and completely, with regard to its leaves, branches, colour, shape; it is so much easier for us to phantasize an approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences, we still do the same thing: we make up the greater part of the experience." (BGE sec. 192, KSA 5:113f.)
One experiences and "sees" more, perceives more, when one behaves like the dead. Immovable. Motionless. The Panic state. Soho called this the path of Immovable wisdom. It was represented by the fearsome deity Fudo Myo-o.
Murasaki imparts to him, "be gentle, be brave, you must be ready for anything."
The one who is prepared for death, mimes a corpse through continued study of anatomy, depth psychology, knows to survive the barest conditions. Murasaki shows him how the samurai used to display the heads of their enemies to show lack of fear. Panic passion belongs to both the landscape of the beautiful stillness of the meadows, as well as the terrific awe of the wild;
Quote :
"For Nietzsche this is also a way of getting beyond the human, all-too-human, "To think oneself away out of humanity, to unlearn desires of all kinds, and to employ the entire abundance of one’s powers in looking" (KSA 9:11). And yet what often happens under such conditions... is that the ancient phantasms return, the immortals reappear, the mythic background comes to the fore..." [Parkes, Panpsychism and Pure Experience]
The Samurai ancestral mask and armour conjure the return of his nightmares, of the phantasm, of his sub-conscious repressions initializing a transformation...
Quote :
"Certain texts show us a Pan capable not only of derangement but also of radical transformation, whereby the victim changes his nature. Nonnos mentions a Pan lussöön, "mad," who can shatter an enemy fleet with his sharpened claws (or horns, or hooves, θηγαλέοι,ς όνύχεσσυ). The participle lussöön relates this fury to personified madness, to the mythical Lyssa. This latter appears not infrequently in Greek mythology. She plays a terrifying and bewitching melody upon her flute, and thus transforms her victim into a mad dog or a furious wolf. Heracles, who suddenly begins to pant like a dog, sets off after his children in a hunt unleashed by the goddess; the Bacchae, styled by Euripides "the quick dogs of Lyssa," track Pentheus like their prey; Actaeon's dogs go mad and rend their master under the influence of this same Lyssa. It even seems that etymologically Lyssa means "she-wolf," in the sense of "she who turns one into a wolf." As Nonnos speaks of him, Pan shares the power of Lyssa." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]
Murasaki spiritualizes his rage, his hatred, and disciplines his vengeance with pride and passion, that lift a man out of his animal condition.
Hannibal refers to his first kill not as a murder, but as a crime of passion. Panic love is the resuscitation and suturing of the scattered parts of oneself, alligning wilderness and civilization, man and animal, beast and the sovereign together, into a whole that Pan stands for at the threshold of their intersecting junctions. One is both man-and-animal in all its dissonant-harmony.
Nietzsche wrote:
"Our spiritualization of hostility. It consists in a profound appreciation of the value of having enemies: in short, it means acting and thinking in the opposite way from that which has been the rule. Our attitude to the "internal enemy" is no different: here too we have spiritualized hostility; here too we have come to appreciate its value. The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young only as long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace. Nothing has become more alien to us than that desideratum of former times, "peace of soul," the Christian desideratum; there is nothing we envy less than the moralistic cow and the fat happiness of the good conscience. One has renounced the great life when one renounces war. The spiritualization of sensuality is called love." [Twilight of the Idols, Morality]
It is to stand upright from the fallen condition of a blind beast, mindless as a swine.
Norman Brown wrote:
"In an essay written in 1912 surveying the disorder in the sexual life of man, Freud finally concludes that the deepest trouble is an unresolved ambivalence in the human attitude toward anality:
"We know that at its beginning the sexual instinct is divided into a large number of componentsor rather it develops from themnot all of which can be carried on into its final form; some have to be surpassed or turned to other uses before the final form results. Above all, the coprophilic elements in the instinct have proved incompatible with our aesthetic ideas, probably since the time when man developed an upright posture and so removed his organ of smell from the ground; further, a considerable proportion of the sadistic elements belonging to the erotic instinct have to be abandoned. All such developmental processes, however, relate only to the upper layers of the complicated structure. The fundamental processes which promote erotic excitation remain always the same. Excremental things are all too intimately and inseparably bound up with sexual things; the position of the genital organsinter urinas et faeces remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty; they have retained their animal cast; and so even today love, too, is in essence as animal as it ever was."
Again, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud pursues the thought that the deepest cause of sexual repression is an organic factor, a disbalance in the human organism between higher and lower functions:
"The whole of sexuality and not merely anal erotism is threatened with falling a victim to the organic repression consequent upon man's adoption of the erect posture and the lowering in value of the sense of smell; so that since that time the sexual function has been associated with a resistance not susceptible of further explanation, which puts obstacles in the way of full satisfaction and forces it away from its sexual aim towards sublimations and displacements of libido. ...All neurotics, and many others too, take exception to the fact that "inter urinas et faeces nascimur."
Thus we should find, as the deepest root of the sexual repression that marches with culture, the organic defense of the new form of life that began with the erect posture.
Swift explains all these phenomena with his notion of sublimation:
"The Seed or Principle, which has ever put Men upon Visions in Things Invisible, is of a corporeal Nature. ...The Spinal Marrow, being nothing else but a Continuation of the Brain, must needs create a very free Communication between the Superior Faculties and those below: And thus the Thorn in the Flesh serves for a Spur to the Spirit."" [Norman Brown, Life Against Death]
Isn't Hannibal prickled by a thorn of a seemingly delicate orchid? The drop of blood oozing, that Murasaki attends to, is a Spur to his Spirit...
Pearls have to be cultured.
Last edited by Lyssa on Thu 22 Jan 2015 - 6:52; edited 1 time in total
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Pearls are born of agitated secretions within tightly closed chambers. "A pearl is a hard object produced within a soft tissue of a living shell." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
"The English word pearl comes from the French perle, originally from the Latin perna meaning leg, after the ham- or mutton leg-shaped bivalve. The iridescence that pearls display is caused by the overlapping of successive layers, which breaks up light falling on the surface. Pearls are formed inside the shell of certain mollusks as a defence mechanism against a potentially threatening irritant such as a parasite inside the shell, or a traumatic attack from outside that injures the mantle tissue. The mollusk creates a pearl sac to seal off the irritation. Pearls are commonly viewed by scientists as a by-product of an adaptive immune system-like function." [ib.]
He writes letters, secretes thoughts, talks to his dead father and mother. Layers of memories fold and enclose over, keep safe that pearl of life, of an innocence and happiness yet, from the scarred flesh and wounds.
The internal process of contamination and culturing pearls in the deep waters of the subconscious is the other side of the border. The external contamination and corruption is not that wars are being fought, or people are being killed, but its fetishization. As David Hawkes wrote,
Quote :
"To take a medium of representation for reality is to fetishize signification as performative, to believe that signs constitute things. Once sufficiently captivated by signs that we can no longer perceive their referents, we lapse into the supposition that anything which is not immediately perceptible is not real." [The Faust Myth]
The Germ of rudeness begins here.
The blindness, the mindlessness, the indiscriminate trampling and levelling is the Vulgarity of the Demand that unless it is made to perceive immediately, it is not real. Everything must be a sign to earn legitimation in its eyes for it to be real. No longer things, but signs of things is what is real to it.
Oblivious to everything else, detached from reality, it intrudes into spaces, it oversteps its paces. It recognizes nothing. It is a swine.
David Hawkes wrote:
"According to Marx, the effect of money on the natural, physical world is precisely magical: it overrides the laws of nature and abolishes the distinction between fantasy and reality:
If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not—turns it, that is, into its contrary. Money, in short, is the power that transforms human beings into objects: death." [The Faust Myth]
Satyr wrote:
And not only money but symbol, word, number, abstraction....the noumenon replaces the phenomenon by detaching from it....looping back upon itself and referring back to another noumenon. Masturbation, solipsism, the comforting liberation from a world that remains indifferent to our contrivances." [Manifesto]
Such an external contamination is the opposite culturing of a pearl.
Enclosed in its own artificial world, the borders between real and artificial dissolved, is no longer a secretion of an organism fighting to maintain its immune,, but the solipsistic masturbation, an osmosis of broken borders and immune become defunct. The inability to refrain from reacting to stimuli is not an active state, but a passive flow and release of nervous energy. What emerges from within its self-enclosed walls, what has congealed of its masturbation are nihilistic codes sweated under barricaded reality, nature debarred.
Quote :
"Money is transferable power, congealed human activity, the force of which can be stored and released because it has been encapsulated in symbolic form. It was the efficacious power of the sign; the same kind of power as magicians aspired to exercise. Usury was magic perfected by other means.'' [Hawkes, Culture of Usury]
Usury was feared for its ab-normality. It is an artificial growth from "nothing", a cancer.
Money is a germ, not a gem; a pearl. It is a Virus.
What is contamination contra culture, is not hypocrisy, but the absence of even a genuine hypocrisy that defines Modernity;
Satyr wrote:
"All societies end up wearing masks." [Baudrillard]
Social unity is the product of weakness: the insecurity of an individual driving it to congregate with others of its kind to raise its survivability potential. It involves a compromise, because it is a symptom of weakness. The compromise is that of freedom, of self. The "compromise" is this mask being worn to hide the origins." [Manifesto]
Genuine Hypocrisy:
Nietzsche wrote:
"Even when in the deepest distress, the actor ultimately cannot cease to think of the impression he and the whole scenic effect is making, even for example at the burial of his own child; he will weep over his own distress and the ways in which it expresses itself, as his own audience. The hypocrite who always plays one and the same role finally ceases to be a hypocrite; for example priests, who as young men are usually conscious or unconscious hypocrites, finally become natural and then really are priests without any affectation; or if the father fails to get that far then perhaps the son does so, employing his father's start and inheriting his habits. If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else. The profession of almost every man, even that of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation from without, with a copying of what is most effective. He who is always wearing a mask of a friendly countenance must finally acquire a power over benevolent moods without which the impression of friendliness cannot be obtained - and finally these acquire power over him, he is benevolent." [HATH]
The Hypocrisy of the Swin-dler:
Nietzsche wrote:
"Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has." [HATH]
But that is exactly what has occured. The abandoning of every belief. The abandoning and desertion and thoughtless disregard of Any belief. Like money equalizes and lowers any one thing with another to a common denomination, and making significances drop down, magicians make everything interconvertible.
And what are such magicians, if not Swin-dlers?!
Law and order break down, the very fabric(ation, genuine hypocrisy) of Civilization breaks down, when Swindlers erase all difference between police and criminal. Hannibal imposes a rhetorical, where were the police when 'Criminal' nazis threw children into the trucks... the 'Police' were just as unrecognizable as the 'Criminals', one couldn't tell them apart. And he lets it hang in the air... no foothold, no one accountable...
Its all the same Star...ling, Clarice...
Last edited by Lyssa on Thu 22 Jan 2015 - 6:50; edited 1 time in total
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"The metaphor of the machine as human (or the human as machine) is sufficiently powerful to have made serious inroads in everyday language. People now commonly speak of "programming" or "de-programming" themselves. They speak of their brains as a piece of "hard wiring," capable of "retrieving data," and it has become common to think about thinking as a mere matter of processing and decoding. From the proposition that humans are in some respects like machines, we move to the proposition that humans are little else but machines and, finally, that human beings are machines. And then, inevitably to the proposition that machines are human beings. It follows that machines can be made that duplicate human intelligence, and thus research in the field known as artificial intelligence was inevitable. What is most significant about this line of thinking is the dangerous reductionism it represents. Human intelligence, as Weizenbaum has tried energetically to remind everyone, is not transferable. It is meaning, not utterance, that makes mind unique.
Through a curious form of grammatical alchemy, the sentence "We use the computer to calculate" comes to mean "The computer calculates." If a computer calculates, then it may decide to miscalculate or not calculate at all. That is what bank tellers mean when they tell you that they cannot say how much money is in your checking account because "the computers are down." The implication, of course, is that no person at the bank is responsible. Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame people? We may call this line of thinking an "agentic shift," a term I borrow from Stanley Milgram to name the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. When this happens, we have relinquished control, which in the case of the computer means that we may, without excessive remorse, pursue ill-advised or even inhuman goals because the computer can accomplish them or be imagined to accomplish them. How obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words "The computer shows . . ." or "The computer has determined . . ." It is Technopoly's equivalent of the sentence "It is God's will," and the effect is roughly the same." [Technopoly]
The dark parody in Hannibal is that its not War that is invasive, but the De-militarization of language, syntax, contexts, symbols that has become viral. "Your house is as good as mine." When Courtesy and civility are presumed agreements, Rudeness is a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a swine-flu...
Quote :
"Translation is an approximation of discourse — and, in approximating, it produces a new discourse. Displacement is rude and insistent, an unwashed party crasher — uninvited and poorly behaved — refusing to leave. Displacement revels in disjunction, imposing its meaning, agenda, and mores on whatever situation it encounters. Globalization engenders displacement. People are displaced, objects are displaced, language is displaced. In a global circulatory system, there is no time — and certainly not enough energy — for tracing the long supply chains that lead to understanding. Instead, there is a blinkered lack of understanding.
"Syntax" said John Cage, "is the arrangement of the army."Legislated by the laws of grammatical concord, syntax sets chains of linguistic assimilation into motion, a situation whereby words are forced to adapt to words surrounding them, formally and sonically. Cage views language as being expressive of a societal politic, and therefore ripe for contestation: "This demilitarization of language is conducted in many ways: a single language is pulverized; the boundaries between two and more languages are crossed; elements not strictly linguistic (graphic, musical) are introduced; etc. Translation becomes, if not impossible, unnecessary." Shattering language into pieces as a political act. Picking them up and putting them back together the wrong way as an act of liberation. Creative misuses of language like homophonic translations and mondegreens as models of playful anarchy. Question linguistic structures, question political structures.
Computer networks are also arrangements of the army, but their logic is already that of displacement, pulverization, crossed boundaries. As citizens of these networks, data packets are by nature both stable and nomadic; they offer a parallel for the movement of bodies in space. Moving in bulk, data packets course through networks like charter groups on holiday tours or Bangladeshi workers trundled off to UAE labor camps. Buffered and queued — resulting in variable delays and throughput depending on the network's capacity and the traffic load — they are dispatched through labyrinths of nodes, borders, switches, gateways, routers, and immigration checkpoints. Aping the mechanics of the RAID drive, displacement spits its subjects across the globe, redundantly segmenting and replicating them — one part can easily be swapped out for another — thereby minimizing chances for loss while increasing chances for totality.
We have faith that data packets will constitute themselves as promised but often that proves to be false: the high-def video we were seeking is merely a cellphone grab, held up shakily for ninety minutes at a screen in a dim theater. In our computational ecosystem, these spurious artifacts take on the characteristics of an unwanted guest. We invite someone for dinner, but they don't behave the way we wish: perhaps they're unkempt, or rude — we toss them out. But sometimes they sneak in unawares. The malware, keylogger, or Trojan horse that surreptitiously slips in under the guise of a pirated program, movie, or link, settles in, becoming a part of the household. Sometimes we have no choice but to accommodate our displaced guest.
Displacement, on a larger scale, is no different. Acid rain is displaced weather. Petroleum is displaced prehistoric life. Nuclear waste from Fukushima washing up on the shores of California is displaced industry. Melting polar ice caps are displaced Ice Age. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is displaced geography, a displaced landmass comprised of displaced rubbish. These riotous amalgamations of displaced color and form — accidental collaborations between nature and man — are permanent reefitecture for fishes.
Plastic bags twisted around branches of trees become year-round foliage, transforming bare winter oaks into everblues and everreds, technicolor displays that make New England Octobers pale by comparison. Seasonal narratives take on a rouge character: older bags, their shape deformed by sunlight and rough weather, disintegrate into fluttering flaglike shreds before being blown off the trees by gales. Those same gales attach fresh bags to the trees, blossoming anew each day.
A tree grows to devour a metal grate that once served as its protector. The tree now becomes the guardian of the grate, swallowing it whole, nestling it deep within its core. A state of détente: the tree doesn't die. Instead, it adapts like the man who, in midlife after complaining of stomach pains, discovers that he has been carrying his conjoined twin unbeknownst to him within his belly all these years, fetus in fetu. Displaced tumors as fetuses; displaced fetuses as tumors.
In Hong Kong after a typhoon, 150 tons of microplastic nurdles were blown into the sea, so small and numerous that they could never be gathered. They washed ashore and became a part of the beach; beachgoers now prefer nuzzling these new spongy, pliant grains between their toes to the natural sand. PCBs are displaced toxins, permanently enmeshed in the river's mud. Removing them would only stir up their noxiousness, so they slumber in the riverbed undisturbed for eternity. A part of the river's ecosystem for so long, it's hard to remember a time when they weren't there.
Retained foreign objects are displaced industrial items which have become lodged inside of living bodies, coexisting with organs and flesh for years without incident or detection. A bullet shot into a boy's face remains comfortably embedded for the next eighty years. The bullet's heat sterilizes it; once lodged, infection is impossible. Unnoticed, life goes on. Metal melds with bone: plates in legs, silver in teeth. A teenager swallows a pen, where it remains in her stomach for a quarter of a century. Finally removed, it still writes. Surgical tools left in bodies are known as retained surgical items. One man is found with sixteen of them inside him. Doctors remark on his body's amazing ability to get used to things.
Displacement is modernism for the 21st century, a child of montage, psychogeography, and the objet trouvé. Appropriation is the engine of displacement, mechanically moving unimpeded toward its goal. Trading in binaries — this either can or cannot be appropriated — appropriation eschews messy questions of morality, ethics and nuance. A boundless annexing machine, it sucks indiscriminately. The consequences are low — transnational, networked, fast-moving and ubiquitous, terrestrial law can't begin to compete. Instead, appropriation abides by the law of the network, which is the law of open architecture, of select-all. Flexible and cunning, it always finds a loophole.
Appropriation is a cipher, cobbling together bits and pieces willy-nilly, resulting in bizarre Frankensteinian artifacts: iPhones cloned with TV antennas and USB ports; PDFs of books with pages pieced together from various editions, in various languages, editions, fonts, and font sizes; some pages are upside down, others are missing entirely; Hollywood blockbusters with hard-coded Telgu subs; Tollywood blockbusters with singed-in Urdu subs. There are ten Harry Potter books in the Chinese series as opposed to the seven penned by J.K. Rowling. Appropriation thrives on provisionality, the craft of the kludge — it's ugly but it works. Quantity over quality: trawl in deep enough waters with a wide enough net and you're bound to catch something. Take it now. Sort it later. Or never sort it. Compile & stockpile. Redistribute & resell.
Sampling and remixing are based on borrowing. Borrowing is translation. Polite and neighborly, it involves exchange and social discourse, agreed upon terms and conditions. Sampling is the art of mindful recontextualization. You sample a riff of a James Brown song, building your song off it; you don't simply re-present the whole song and call it your own. Likewise, remixing bears the hand of the mixer, marked by an individual aesthetic. Remixing is a game of telephone, a conversation, mindful of the version which proceeded yours and the version which will follow. "I always tried to bring something fresh to anything that I used," said Jimmy Page, commenting on his reworking of preexisting material. "I always made sure to come up with some variation." Appropriation, on the other hand, is effortless and brutal, dumbly picking things up whole and dropping them whole into new situations. Anonymous and authorless, displaced versions are replicas and knockoffs, indistinguishable from one another except in metaphysical ways: conceptualization, contextualization, and distribution.
Robert Smithson didn't make paintings of the sky; instead, by reflecting it in a mirror, he displaced it, fusing it with the earth, dropping squares of blue into seas of green. Blazing azure one day, smoggy grayish-yellow the next, Smithson's gestures were at once formal color studies, quiet mediations on nature, and political statements on ecology. The mirror is a displacement machine which appropriates all that passes before it. A pre-programmed automaton, the mirror employs no judgment or morals, indiscriminately displaying all that passes before it. Reflect something emotional, the mirror becomes emotional. Reflect something political, the mirror becomes political. Reflect something erotic, the mirror becomes erotic. The mirror works around the clock, reflecting a dark room all night long when its inhabitants are sleeping, or an empty apartment all day long when its inhabitants are at work. Like its cousin the surveillance camera, the mirror displays scads of dark data, but unlike the NSA, the mirror has no memory: every image passing across its surface is ephemeral. Great crimes are committed before mirrors; no one is ever the wiser. If this mirror could talk... The mirror, then, is closer to a movie screen than CCTV, a surface upon which images are projected/ reflected in reverse. But unlike the movie screen, the mirror never goes dark. Smash the mirror, disperse the image. Toss the pieces in the trash, they continue to dumbly reflect.
The displaced text is a mirror, taking on the hue of whatever it is placed near. Displaced authorship solely consists of determining what the text will reflect. Reflect something emotional, you have written an emotional text. Reflect something political, you have written a political text. Reflect something erotic, you have written an erotic text. Mirrored writing is not writing: it is copying, moving, and reflecting. Editing is moving. Want to alter your text? Move it elsewhere. The displaced text's natural environment is in the network. Born of copy-and-paste, everything about the displaced text is circumstantial and temporary. Ricocheting across the networks, the displaced text restlessly replicates, morphs, and self-distributes. The text assumes the affect of a mirror, offering a curious kind of utopianism which should not be confused with nihilism except that, like all utopias, it indirectly advocates a tabula rasa; like most utopias, it has no concrete expression.
The displaced text is always recycled. Recycled language is politically and ecologically sustainable, promoting reuse and reconditioning as opposed to the manufacture and consumption of the new, counteracting rampant global capitalist consumption by admitting that language is not able to be owned or possessed, that it is a shared and endlessly abundant resource. The digital ecosystem with its replicative and mimetic processes yields limitless resources — too much is never enough.
Yet — and this is where it gets interesting — the displaced text's entwinement with the latest technology, its scraping, warehousing, and hoarding of data, its celebration of baroque excess and fetishizing of waste, aligns it with nefarious global capitalist tendencies. In addition, there's an imperialistic aspect to it, a colonizing imperative. Like a virus spreading rapidly across networks, it threatens to take on the character of a huge multinational monster. All of these contradictions are part of the discourse of displacement, inseparable from its processes, production, and reception. The limits of the network are the limits of its world.
Displacement is a shift away from linear models of political orientation: neither left nor right, progressive nor reactionary, but swirling and sideways. The right tries to seal borders and legislate displacement out of existence, oblivious to the flows that whirl freely around it. Meanwhile, the left still holds out hope against hope for translation — can't we all just get along? Displacement, instead of responding to difference with understanding and consideration, responds to difference by swallowing it whole.
Odd things appear: retained foreign objects. Things that I don't understand. Things I didn't ask for.A system update will, unbeknownst to me, drop things into the midst of my environment. I have no idea they are there. I panic and wonder whether I can go back to an earlier version. I can't. Notwithstanding that, I begin to toy with the idea of going back to the previous system, the one I knew, the one I was comfortable in. There is no going back. I struggle, I whine, I eventually adapt myself to it; the displacement, once obtrusive, becomes the new normal — at least until the next upgrade. I don't move them — generally they can't be moved — so I live with them. I learn to accept them, even though I might not understand them. My computer has thousands of such displaced items on it. I can't translate them. The song that shows up in iTunes. I can't tell you where it came from. I wish I knew. The song has no identifying information, no ID3 tags, no provenance. But I like it. I tame it by tagging it, domesticate it by filing it on my hard drive. It becomes mine." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
In daylight civility, Pan-demics are only countered with Pan-ic attacks - wise-Cracks landing on the other like whip-Cracks...
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"The phobos of Pan strikes horses and men together, and the cause (the first victim) of an army's panic is often an animal—this belief can be traced back as far as Xenophon. Aeneas the Tactician knew well that animal disorder could seep over into human fear, since he advises sending herds of goats (or other beasts) intoxicated and hung with bells to the enemy camp at night; the stirring of animals then transforms itself without a break into human disorder. Therefore, when the whip has a role in mania, we are dealing with mania of a particular kind. The verbs paraplazein, parakoptein, parakrouein, parapaiein, and so on, are not exact synonyms, but they all evoke, in speaking of madness, the image of some element essential to personal balance (phrënes or nous, "mind") that is driven, warped, or deranged by a blow. The goat-god is immediately evoked, and he is the privileged embodiment of a particular aspect or sphere of madness; he stands for a landscape where human fear enacts its hallucinations with gestures borrowed from animal disorder. Here boundaries are blurred, and in our disorientation we hear the call of uncontrollable longing." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]
Hannibal is a Mind-manipulator, a pan-ic master. The stealth cut of his sword shows its haemorrhage and damage received untraceably later... The cracks he opens are a de-range-ment of the other; seeds silently implanted without losing "face" and com-"posture"...
Erving Goffman wrote:
"When a person treats face-work not as something he need be prepared to perform, but rather as something that others can be counted on to perform or to accept, then an encounter or an undertaking becomes less a scene of mutual considerateness than an arena in which a contest or match is held. The purpose of the game is to preserve everyone's line from an inexcusable contradiction, while scoring as many points as possible against one's adversaries and making as many gains as possible for oneself. An audience to the struggle is almost a necessity.
Points made by allusion to social class status are sometimes called snubs; those made by allusions to moral respectability are sometimes called digs; in either case one deals with a capacity at what is sometimes called "bitchiness.'"
In aggressive interchanges the winner not only succeeds in introducing information favorable to himself and unfavorable to the others, but also demonstrates that as interactant he can handle himself better than his adversaries. Evidence of this capacity is often more important than all the other information the person conveys in the inter-change, so that the introduction of a "crack" in verbal interaction tends to imply that the initiator is better at footwork than those who must suffer his remarks. However, if they succeed in making a successful parry of the thrust and then a successful riposte, the instigator of the play must not only face the disparagement with which the others have answered him but also accept the fact that his assumption of superiority in footwork has proven false. He is made to look foolish; he loses face. Hence it is always a gamble to "make a remark." The tables can be turned and the aggressor can lose more than he could have gained had his move won the point. Successful ripostes or come backs in our society are sometimes called squelches or toppers; theoretically it would be possible for a squelch to be squelched, a topper to be topped, and a riposte to be parried with a counterriposte, but except in staged interchanges this third level of successful action seems rare." [Interaction Ritual]
The web of the spider "evokes the fragility of a reality which is no more than illusory and deceptive appearance..."
Note that the spider too secret-es secret-ively... In esoterism, they are seen as initiates who have attained "internalization", creative power from within. An introversion absorbed by their own centre. Thus in HATH, 427, Nietzsche warns the free-spirit to be vigilant of one's habits like "the spider who has caught himself and has to live on his own blood." The negligence of vigilance on habits, is also the negligence of Habitats. Where and with whom one dwells... Points of disconnections are linked, webbed, and traversed. Yet these are delicate webs of deception; "We sit within our net, we spiders, and whatever we may catch in it, we can catch nothing at all except that which allows itself to be caught precisely in our net." [N., Daybreak, 117]
Our knowledge only reflects back the extent of our senses.
If the secretion of the spider helps one survive under the delicate illusion of webs of similarities, quick approximations, the secretion of the pearl is an inner survival discriminating differences, inside and outside.
Quote :
"Reason, that is to say, as pure ‘mediation’, enjoys the unlimited freedom of transformation among arbitrary signifiers. Being wholly abstract, reason accepts no practical limit upon the range of its internal self-reference. And, as pure ‘relation’, it avoids the compromises and contradictions of empirical reality. Sanity exists, however, in tolerating the contradictions, inconsistencies, and incompleteness which has been expunged from the life of reason." [Fergusson, The Science of Pleaure]
Nightmares and traumatic memories, visions are the fragility of borders that guard sanity. Sleep and wakefulness is also one such border.
In astrology, pearls are associated with Pisces; their aura has a calming effect to the neptunian paranoia that is constantly threatened with dissolution of borders and overrules the immune system. The Pearl of wisdom in a protective shell is symbolic of the mother-child relation between Aphrodite and Eros in trying to survive a harsh reality...
Quote :
"Primordial Eros (Neptune) is the innate psychic longing to return a space of absolute and complete participation with nature, of total fusion with the source of life itself. This state to which we long to return is a memory of the "amniotic Eros", which we experience while we are evolving in the womb (Moon) through spirituality, art, music and various transcendent functions. They spur us on to find our own creative source within."
Although modernity has reduced eros into a harmless angelic cupid, eros has a darker past. Aphrodite of dual nature - urania [of the light] - the nurturing mother-cum-mate, telekinetic love, liberator by beauty, grace,,, and the dark-mother who initiated erotic love, madness, blindness, violence, lust, phantasms was all too well demarcated by Plato.
Yet the transformations of protective and possessive, and that of the nymph and the bride and the hag, overlap seamlessly as was shown by Robert Graves in his The White Goddess, a mesmerizing book...
The mother-child relation in Hannibal has more historical undercurrents. Hannibal's mother hides her pearls in the mouth of a swine, the head of a wild-boar, while uttering in all satirical irony "pearls before swines"...
Before the phrase occurred in Matthew 7:6: "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet", old English speakers had adapted it from the scriptural Latin "Ne ge ne wurpen eowre meregrotu toforan eo wrum swynon", where the Latin marguerite 'daisy' was misread and corrupted as margarite 'pearl.'
The original 'daisy' of the field was the rice-pearl, the paddy-crop of grain that would be trampled and overturned and destroyed, spilled-over by the wild boars, while in a way ploughing and aerating the soil, keeping it fertile. All vegetative life comes to a stand-still when the grain-goddess Demeter searches for her abducted self 'core' in Hades by taking a sow with her. The wild boar is the traumatic wound received in the heart, in the subconscious core, where 'the pearl is hidden'... and return to life demands its spilling... blood, violence, unleashing... "killing swines"...
Quote :
"Pigs root around and turn ground in to mud. The pig shares its symbolic value with the boar. In Mesopotamia, at Catal Huyuk, in shrine EVI8, rows of breasts molded over jaws and tusks of boars express the idea that life comes from death.
The White Sow - the beast of Cerridwen, welsh goddess of sacrifice... has long associations with the White Sow, magic, and poetry. As she seeds the Earth, she seeds the imagination of poet, becoming his dark Muse...
In Crete the pig was a favorite sacrificial animal at the Peak Sanctuary on Mount Juktas and other mountaintop shrines consecrated to the Lady of the Beasts. In Crete the Crone, as Goddess of Wisdom, takes the form of a Sow... The Sow is the creature of the Underworld — she lies under the Earth, one with the soil seeded with grain. As early as the seventh millenium B.C.E., the sow was involved in vegetation rituals. The pig’s habit of rooting in the soil with its tusks is a primal image of the plowing of the soil. the sow’s fast growth, and wealth of piglets, made her a creature of plenty. As the pig is sacrificed to the Goddess to make the crops grow, the boar is often the agency of death. Set takes the form of a boar to kill Osiris. The Irish God Diarmid is killed by a boar — in fact many Grail Knights are wounded in the thigh by boars to be rescued by Faery Queens. The rites of Tammuz follow the same boar slain pattern as all the dying and resurrecting Gods of the Grain.
The artist must be taken sometimes against his or her will. The Muse possesses the artist, for the artist is the instrument through which the Goddess speaks. The creative process is a fire. It brings illumination, radiation, and sometimes pain, when one comes to close to the flames. The Goddess, Cerridwen, kept the Cauldron of Poetry and Rebirth. As Gwion’s fingers are spattered by the Witch’s brew, he gains the gift of prophetic speech. If he enters the cauldron he will be twice born, divinized, springing up like the grain from the soil of death. He becomes Taliesin, poet, prophet, divine son of the Goddess."
The word pig has many associations; ferocity, violence, sloth, gluttony, evil, dirt, vulgarity. The Indo-European word is su, a word that in one form or another survives in most European languages, in the English sow and swine...
The pig is, among other things, a devourer; it is a menace to crops and to people, it is voracious and it is omnivorous. Even the strong-stomached goat will not eat meat, its young, or manure. Stories of domestic pigs killing and eating children, women in childbirth, even grown men are abundant, and some are undoubtedly true. Thus for dangerousness the pig has no rival among domestic animals, except the bull, but he at least will not eat you.
In the primitive highlands of Arcadia, where old practices lingered, the Erymanthian Boar was a vicious creature that lived on Mount Erymanthos, a mountain that was apparently once sacred to the Mistress of the Animals, for in classical times it remained the haunt of Artemis (Homer, Odyssey, VI.105). A boar was a dangerous animal: "When the goddess turned a wrathful countenance upon a country, as in the story of Meleagros, she would send a raging boar, which laid waste the farmers' fields." (Kerenyi 1959, p 149). The fates, the moon goddess, the death pig, the prominance in the story of the mother and maternal uncles--almost to the exclusion of the father--all suggest an earlier matrilineal age with a feminine moon-earth-fertility religion. In Meleager we see the masculine independence and individualism of the heroic age asserting itself, and though he is destroyed by the old order, he represents the future.
The grandest of all boars, however, is from India; Vishnu as cosmic boar rescues the goddess earth from the depths of the cosmic sea.
The word for boar is varâha which also has the meaning of lifting up 'aroha' that which is sacred 'vara'. This symbolic legend refers to the attempt at recovering the lost or buried knowledge [hidden speech], buried in the realms of our subconscious.
Var-aha - raising of the sacred - the lust is calmed, is properly channelled for creation; Vishnu-varaha remoulds the earth. A wrongful hunting/killing will most definitely unleash "the flood" - "the lust" upon the hunter and paralyze his ability to speak or think poetically and completely 'de-flower' him [cf. Adonis], i.e. negate his shakti. The Boar is the Underworld sovereign of regenerative power.
One of the ancient books of India prescribes that when a sacrifice is offered for victory, the earth out of which the altar is to be made should be taken from a place where a boar has been wallowing, since the strength of the boar will be in that earth.
It is constantly received and avouched," says Bacon, "that the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself. You shall note the points following: first, the ointment wherewith this is done is made of divers ingredients, whereof the strangest and hardest to come by are the moss upon the skull of a dead man unburied, and the fats of a boar and a bear killed in the act of generation." [Frazer, Golden Bough] A magical transference or regeneration of strength...
In Saxo's History of the Danes the order of the battle of Bravalla is described, and Woden or Odin's device of a boar's head [hamalt fylking] is said to refer to the swine-head military formation referred to in the Code of Manu a "terrible column with wedge head which could cleave the stoutest line." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
In Valhalla Odin feasts with his chosen heroes, all those who have fallen bravely in battle, for all who die a peaceful death are excluded. The flesh of the boar Serimnir is served up to them, and is abundant for all. For although this boar is cooked every morning, he becomes whole again every night. The Boar represented an early attempt to re-assign to a male the holy creative blood of life, the Goddess's menstruum. As the pahllic god who gave his life for humanity, he was worshipped in conjunction with the Goddess by Germanic Aryans who, Tacitus said, "worship the mother of the gods, and wear as a religious symbol the device of the wild boar."
This Germanic boar-god became the doomsday-averting Savior and Lord of Death, in both human and porcine form, "born in the days of old... of the race of gods." He was identified with Heimdall, born of the Earth-and-Sea mother, fathered by boar blood. "He was made strong with the force of the earth, wioth the cold sea and the blood of the sacrificial boar." That is, like most gods, in dying he begot himself again. The boar-god was sacrificed especially at Yule, with an apple in his mouth, symbolizing his regenerated heart-soul, according to the Scandinavian belief that apples were resurrection charms. Hence the traditional Yule pig roasted with an apple in its mouth. There was a mystical meaning behind the pork-eating ritual. "Valhalla's boar" was cooked in a cauldron, the regenerative womb-symbol, and the skalds said of it, "It's prime of pork, but few men know on what Valhalla's champions feed." [Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myth and Magic]
A pig farmer on an even more massive scale is Odysseus. Why pigs are emphasised so heavily in the Odyssey, Homer does not make clear. However, the are probably the shadow of Odysseus' Olympian rationality--the power of night, of darkness, of the underworld, of the feminine and unconscious. The number of important female characters in the story is striking--Athena, Calypso, Circe, Helen, Nausicaa, the old nurse, Penelope. Pigs too are prominant; Odysseus is a large scale pig farmer; when he arrives in Ithaca he stays incognito with the swineherd; his reward for defeating the beggar in a fist fight is a blood sausage, a wurst made with pig's blood; he is first recognized by the old nurse because of a scar made on his thigh by a wild boar; one of his greatest dangers is Circe, the witch who turns men into swine, and who sends Odysseus on his journey to the underworld where, among other sights, he is shown a procession of the great women of antiquity."
The Boar's peculiarly hermaphroditic nature is almost universally recognized in mythology. This presumably derives from our long and intimate acquaintance with the unique bodily character of the most impressive, dangerous, fascinating and human of the animals that are both domesticated and hunted. The sow's combination of gross whiskery nakedness and riotous carnality is seized by the mythic imagination, evidently as a sort of uterus on the loose - upholstered with breasts. Most alarming of all is that elephantine, lolling mouth under her great ear-flaps, like a Breughelesque nightmare vagina, baggy with overproduction, famous for gobbling her piglets, magnified and shameless, exuberantly omnivorous and insatiable, swamping the senses.
This sow has supplanted all other beasts as the elemental mother (even Zeus was born of a sow; even Demeter - mother of Dionysos and Persephone- was a sow). But she fulfils an ambiguous lunar role. Her variable dark past is sinister, not only because she incorporates more shocking physical familiarity, more radical enterprise, more rapturous appetite, cruder travesties of infantile memory, wilder nostalgias, than the cow, but because she is inseparable from the lethal factor of the Boar, who carries the same vaginal grin yet is prodigiously virile - the same swinging, earth-searching, root-ripping mouth but equipped with moon-sickle tusks - and who incarnates the most determined, sudden and murderous temperament.
The male aphrodisiac pheromone scent spray, sold in modern sex shops, is commonly based on a hormone extract from the wild boar.
This figure of the Boar has assimilated the magical birth-source of the Sow to create a symbol that emerges, in a man's eyes, from everything about female sexuality tha is awesome, alien, terrifying and 'beyond' the reaches of his soul. So the boar becomes the animal form of the Queen of Hell, the Black Witch, the Terrible Mother, bringing the crippling wound in the thigh, wherever he enters man's fantasy. In his role in this myth of the god who dies for and by the Goddess and who is reborn to destroy her, he appears at the centre of religious mysteries, and Shakespeare could have found him, in the same role, as easily in England (for instance, as the Twrch Trwyth, the terrible Boar King, who is hunted through the Celtic world in the great Welsh myth of Culhwch and Olwen) as in classical mythology.
These myths suggest two things - when a 'possessed' rationality fights for and gradually gains the upper hand over divine irrationality, and conversely it suggests, where rational overcomes irrational, the creative moment is followed by arid, formal constriction, and in the second reverse case, by chaotic, sentimental dispersal." [Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being]
"Ger. Reich - "empire, kingdom" (from O.H.G. rihhi, related to O.E. rice, from P.Gmc. *rikja "rule")"
In I.E. semantics, the philology of king/lord meant one who distributes the loaf.
The harvest of the soil and prosperity of the land was directly related to the King [a representative of the Sun]. The crop was related to the Sow Goddess. In ancient literature and mythology, the Sow is seen as the one who dethrones the King into waxing and waning suns. Likewise...
It is interesting to recall references made in Sukraniti about Vrihi. Sukraniti mentions that Vrihi (oryza sativa) is used in rubbing the oyster pearls, soaked in to saline water during the previous night, in order to test its genuineness. Again it says that the culpability of an offender was determined by divya sadhana or divine test. In this the offender has to chew with out anxiety or fear one karsa amount of rice. In doing so, if the offender experiences difficulties through palpitation of heart or want of salivation the man would be declared guilty. The rice-ordeal is to be applied in a case involving theft... Varahi is the consort of Boar, the female energy of boar form of Vishnu. Head of a female boar and the body of a female, with coral ornaments, constitutes Varahi; the plough is her sacred emblem.
The word varahi might have changed in to vrihi. Vrihi ripened in autumn. Bahuvrihi is the place where there is plenty of vrihi grain. Vrihyagaram means a granary."
He is fishy - elusive, slippery, vigilant, and ever on the move... in the restless currents. He feels at home nowhere. He is swine - "upturns" the "earth", the "grounds of being", digs minds, anatomies and overturns the rules of the game... The fish is always caught with baits,,, now the fishy-swindler Baits others. The swine tramples the plants and spills the grain, the seed,,, now the fishy-swindler Implants seeds in the minds of others.
The fishy-swindler overturns the order. Man is Food for the Sovereign Beast. The Sovereign Beast is God and God is all Pr(a)ey.
It is in his own mother's room-turned-people's-orphanage, he is rebuked: "you do not honour the human pecking order, you are always hurting the bullies."
The swine and the pearl connoted a positive relation, that led the I.Es to assimilate pork, while for the Jews, it became a sacred taboo. They feared the dark charges of the swine's polluting power, its impurity, its uncleanliness...
From this we can glean an important distinction between the Crude and the Rude.
Crudity is the Affirmative-Cruelty of the Blond Barbarian; Rudeness is the Abject-Civility of the Blind Brute.
Hannibal is a Swine. His cruelty is Raw - which does not mean unsophisticated, but Raw - without the moral sanctimoniousness of self-deception. He tramples mercilessly on the masked civility of the rude. It is a raw, bloody, and affirmative display of power, of selfhood. The rude are swine, because they are unable to be cruel. Abjection is the state of powerless and ressentimental envy, that is whitewashed as Politeness, civility, courtesy, correctness. It is self-deceiving airs, stainless and provocating draining of power, of self-under-hood, a mask, a veil.
Kristeva wrote:
"Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them.
A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I perma nently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, "I" is expelled. The border has become an object.
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility ofthe law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning mur der, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law-rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is im moral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you.'..." [Abjection]
Cruelty is a violence of self-involvement to the full. The cruel are self-assertive. Rudeness is a violence of a self-noncommital, even when one is rude on purpose. The rude are self-preserving.
The Rudeness of J.-Xt. and its masquerade of holy correctness was perfectly satirized by Bosch in his painting aptly titled 'The Conjurer' or 'The Magician'...
It is no coincidence that it is a painting of a 'Swin-dler' and a 'Pearl'...
Bosch depicts how people are fooled by lack of alertness and insight, creating a "spellbinding tension" that reappears in his later paintings. The conjurer on the right of the image captures his apt and diverse audience with a game of cups and balls. The central character and true focus of the image is the man of rank in the forefront who leans in and is fixed on the pearl in the conjurer's hand while unaware of being relieved of his money purse. Bosch associates the conjurer as a common criminal, luring in the prey.
Animals are used in the painting to symbolize human traits that allow for deception and victimization. The little owl from the basket at the conjurer's waist signifies his intelligence.
The child engrossed in our victim and the man stealing the money purse seems to exemplify the Flemish proverb: "He who lets himself be fooled by conjuring tricks loses his money and becomes the laughing stock of children." Another Flemish proverb, published and widely distributed ca 1480 in Bosch's hometown of 's-Hertogenbosch about the time of this painting, is: "No one is so much a fool as a willful fool." Bosch had used other proverbs as the basis of his painting, such as the "The world is a haystack, and each man plucks from it what he can" for his painting, the Hay Wagon.
Elina Gertsman's article about this painting explores this painting from the perspectives of Flemish culture, religious figures and the later body of Bosch's work. A much simpler view by Adrian Maben, filmmaker of Bosch's life and work, is:
The Conjurer, an extraordinary tale of a conjurer trying to persuade the spectator that he's pulling toads or frogs out of his mouth. Meanwhile there's someone standing behind this spectator, who's stealing his wallet. It's a wonderful little painting, we unfortunately don't have the original, but it's a very good copy. It's a secular painting and has got away from the moralising and religious pose which one normally associates with Bosch. This genre painting became very popular in the Netherlands and the north in general, because it was opposed to the mythological painting of Italy. Here you had scenes from everyday life, it was getting away from the porcelain-like saints, down into the street. I think it was very modern. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Quote :
"Compared to the grotesque and nightmarish figures in much of the work of Hieronymus Bosch, the subjects of “ The Conjurer ” [c. 1475] are rather sedate. A group on the left huddles over a table upon which are displayed cups, balls, and a magic wand. A frog is also present, possibly having just emerged from the mouth of the main figure – most likely a woman – leaning over the table from the left.
Theft of the Purse
Bosch’s hometown of s’Hertogenbosch, during his lifetime, was an important and growing market town. According to available records, the increasing population brought increases in theft. Because they had no fixed address, and because a tight-knit community like Bosch’s town would keep an eye out for strangers, travelers like the conjurer depicted here were objects of fascination but also of suspicion. Hawkers, musicians, storytellers, and magicians like this very conjurer were always in search of fascinated crowds to take advantage of.
In the back of the crowd a man dressed as a Dominican monk steals the money bag of the woman bent over the table. Bosch perhaps chooses a friar to depict as a thief because the Dominicans were both powerful and controversial. They abused the power of the Church to carry out the horrors of the Inquisition and to terrify people in the name of protecting them from witches. Perhaps Bosch believes the conjurer and the friar alike bait and prey upon gullible people.
The Conjurer’s Tall Hat
In “Hammer of the Witches,” a handbook for those who carried out the notorious Inquisition, women were depicted as frivolous creatures easily influenced by the devil. In Bosch’s painting, according to author Hagen, the conjurer influences the woman leaning over his table simply by looking into her eyes.
The conjurer wears a tall hat symbolic of the type worn by those in the ruling court. The Hapsburgs and the Burgundians ruled the day. Bosch’s town, part of the Burgundian kingdom, had just fallen to what the people viewed as the tyrannical Hapsburg empire. Because they extracted a tenth of the Church’s wealth in supplication, the Hapsburgs formed an alliance with the powerful Dominicans.
Just as Bosch uses the powerful Dominican friar in the form of a thief, he shows the elitist Burgundian ruler – symbolized by the tall hat – in the form of a common conjurer. Thus he views the people as subject to oppression and theft from both religious and worldly rulers.
Bosch seems to admonish his viewers that the world is full of deceivers we should not trust yet who succeed in taking advantage of us with all kinds of tricks."
Source: Hagen, Rose-Marie & Rainer. What Great Paintings Say: Old Masters in Detail. Cologne: Benedikt Tasche, 2000.
The really rude are those with false Airs of correctness and 'chivalry', the Crusaders whose logic ends in terrorism.
The really rude are petty and crass; the rude Annoy us. They Disturb. They cause nausea in others because of the scope of life they could not digest. Indigestion weakens the stomach and they become unable to eat. They disturb from Hunger. They are rude because they cannot be cruel. The cruel are sublime... They Destroy. They destroy as creators; their excess is an unconditional self-expenditure beyond cost/benefit utilitarianism. The 'pleasant' disturb for pleasure; its abjection enjoys seeing the other suffer in its shoes; it collapses distance. It disturbs for obfuscation. The swin-dler's noncommital-ness is a fence-sitting obscurantism. The sophistocrat destroy from pleasure; its affirmation enjoys seeing its self indifferent to the other; it widens distance. It destroys for clear definition. The swindler's self-involvement is a wicked-delight in clarity.
Trivers explains at length;
Trivers wrote:
"Why do I talk about, or wish to talk about, deception and self-deception in the same breath? Because I think you miss the truth about each if you are not conscious of the other and the relationship between the two. If by deception you only think of conscious deception, where you're planning to lie or aware of the fact that you're lying, you will miss all the lying that goes on that the individual is unaware of, and this may be the larger portion of lies and deception that is going on.
Conversely, if you think about self-deception without comprehending its connection with deception, then I think you'll miss the major function of self-deception. In particular, you'll be tempted to go the route that psychology went a hundred years ago or so and think of self-deception as defensive: I'm defending my tender ego, I'm defending my weak psyche. And you will not see the offensive characteristic of self-deception.
What do I mean by that? I mean that I believe that self-deception evolves in the service of deceit. That is, that the major function of self-deception is to better deceive others. Both make it harder for others to detect your deception, and also allow you to deceive with less immediate cognitive cost. So if I'm lying to you now about something you actually care about, you might pay attention to my shifty eyes if I'm consciously lying, or the quality of my voice, or some other behavioral cue that's associated with conscious knowledge of deception and nervousness about being detected. But if I'm unaware of the fact that I'm lying to you, those avenues of detection will be unavailable to you.
Regarding the second argument, it is intrinsically difficult, and mentally demanding, to lie and be conscious about it. The more complex in detail the lie—the longer you have to keep it up—the more costly cognitively. I believe that selection favors rendering a portion of the lie unconscious, or much of the knowledge of it unconscious, so as to reduce the immediate cognitive cost. That is, with self-deception you'll perform better cognitively on unrelated tasks that you might have to do moments later than if you had just undergone a lot of consciously mediated deception.
Let me step back and say a word or two about the underlying logic. First of all, we understand that if we are making an evolutionary argument in terms of natural selection, we are talking about benefits to individuals in terms of the propagation of their own genes, and there are innumerable opportunities in nature to gain a benefit by deceiving another.
However, the reverse is true for the deceived.
The deceived is typically losing knowledge or resources or whatever, resulting in a decrease in the propagation of their genes. So you have what we call a co-evolutionary struggle: with natural selection improving deception on the one hand, and improving the ability to spot deception on the other.
Now let me just say that deception is a very deep feature of nature. At all levels, all interactions, e.g. viruses and bacteria often use deception to get inside you. They may mimic your own cell surface proteins. They may have other tricks to deceive your system into not recognizing them as alien and worthy of attack. Even genes inside yourself, which propagate themselves selfishly during meiosis may do so by mimicking particular sub-sections of other genes so as to get copied an extra time, even though the rest of the genome, if you asked their opinion, would be against this extra copying.
When you turn to insects and larger creatures like those, we know that in relations between species, again there's a huge and rich world of deception. Considering insects alone: they will mimic harmless objects so as to avoid detection by their predators. Or they will mimic poisonous or distasteful objects to avoid being eaten. Or they will mimic a predator of their predator, so as to frighten away their predator. Or, in one case, they will mimic the predator that's trying to eat them, so that the predator misinterprets them as a member of their own species and gives them territorial display instead of eating them.
They will even, I have to tell you, mimic the feces, or droppings, of their predators. That's so common it has a technical term in the literature, forgive me, "shit mimics". And they come in all varieties and sizes. There are moths that look like the splash variety of a bird dropping. And you can understand from the bird's standpoint, you might have a strong supposition that this is a butterfly or a moth, but you'd be unwilling to put it to the test—especially if you have to use your beak to put it to a test.
Now when you turn to relations within species, you find a rich world that we're uncovering now of deception also. To give you two quick examples. Warning cries have evolved in many contexts to warn others of danger. But they can be used in new and deceitful contexts. For example you can give a warning cry in order to grab an item of food from another individual. The individual's startled and runs for cover, you grab the food. You can give a warning cry when your offspring are at each other's throats—they run to cover and then you separate them and protect them from each other. It has even been described that you can give a warning call when you see your mate near a prospective lover—get them dashing to safety, and then you intervene.
In this continually co-evolving struggle regarding truth and falsehood, if you will, there are situations in other creatures as well as ourselves where we have to make tight evaluations of each others' motive in an aggressive encounter. I'm lining up against Marc Hauser; how confident is he of himself? I'm courting someone; the woman is looking at me; how confident am I of myself? And so on. That allows misrepresentation of these kinds of psychological variables and you can see how self-deception can start coming in. Be more confident than you have grounds to be confident and be unconscious of that bias, the better to manipulate others.
Once you have language, that greatly increases the opportunity for both deception and self-deception. We spend a lot of time with each other pushing various theories of reality, which are often biased towards our own interests but sold as being generally useful and true.
Let me just mention a little bit of evidence—and of course there's a huge amount of evidence regarding self-deception, from everyday life, from study of politics and history, autobiography, et cetera. But I just want to talk about some of the scientific evidence in psychology. There's a whole branch of social psychology that's devoted to our tendencies for self-inflation. If you ask students how many of them think they're in the top half of the class in terms of leadership ability, 80 percent say they are. But if you turn to their professors and ask them how many think they're in the top half of their profession, 94 percent say they are.
And people are often unconscious of some of the mechanisms that naturally occur in them in a biased way. For example, if I do something that is beneficial to you or to others, I will use the active voice: I did this, I did that, then benefits rained down on you. But if I did something that harmed others, I unconsciously switch to a passive voice: this happened, then that happened, then unfortunately you suffered these costs. One example I always loved was a man in San Francisco who ran into a telephone pole with his car, and he described it to the police as, "the pole was approaching my car, I attempted to swerve out of the way, when it struck me".
Let me give you another, the way in which group membership can entrain language-usages that are self-deceptive. You can divide people into in-groups or out-groups, or use naturally occurring in-groups and out-groups, and if someone's a member of your in-group and they do something nice, you give a general description of it—"he's a generous person". If they do something negative, you state a particular fact: "in this case he misled me", or something like that. But it's exactly the other way around for an out-group member. If an out-group member does something nice, you give a specific description of it: "she gave me directions to where I wanted to go". But if she does something negative, you say, "she's a selfish person". So these kinds of manipulations of reality are occurring largely unconsciously, in a way that's perhaps similar to what Marc Hauser in his talk was saying about morality.
A new world of the neurophysiology of deceit and self-deception is emerging. For example, it has been shown that consciously directed forgetting can produce results a month later and they are achieved by a particular area of the prefrontal cortex (normally associated with initiating motor responses or overcoming cognitive obstacles) suppressing activity in the hippocomapus, the brain region in which memories are stored. So there is clear evidence that one part of the brain has been co-opted in evolution to serve the function of personal information suppression within self.
What I want to turn to very briefly is the relationship between self-deception and war. Now war, in the sense of battles between large numbers of soldiers, is an evolutionarily very recent phenomenon. A raid, where you run over to another group, kill off a number of individuals, and run back, is something we share with chimpanzees. And that has a long history and is much more likely to be constrained by rational considerations.
But warfare as we experience it now is a ten thousand, (plus or minus a few thousand) year old phenomenon. Not an awful lot of time for selection. And not much selection necessarily on those who start the wars. There may be a lot of selection in the civilian population or the soldiers, but it's not necessarily true that those who start stupid wars end up with as as great a decrease in surviving offspring (and other kin) as one would have wished.
Wars also tempt us easily to self-deception for other reasons. There is often very little overlap in self-interest between your group and another group, in contrast to activities within the group. There is also low feedback from members of an outside group. There's greater ignorance.
And so war is a particular situation where self-deception is expected to be both especially prominent and especially harmful in its general effects.
Let us use the most recent war—the current war launched by my own country, the United States in 2003 against the country of Iraq—to see one simple illustration of how deceit and self-deception is a useful concept in thinking about war. It has been said that the first casualty of war is the truth, but we know regarding the Iraq war that the truth was dead long before this war started. We know the thing was conceived and promulgated based on a lie. The predator, the U.S., saw an opportunity to leap on a prey, and decided almost immediately, within days of 9/11, and certainly within a couple of months, to prepare and launch this war.
Now what's the significance of that fact? Well, one significance of it is, psychologists have shown, very nicely I think, for 20 years now, that when we are considering an option—whether to marry Susan, or to go to the University of Bologna instead of Barcelona, or whatnot—we are much more rational, we weigh options, and we are even, if anything, slightly depressed. But once we decide which way to go, we act as if we want all the cells in our body rowing in the same direction. If it's Susan we're going to marry, we don't want to hear about Maria or some of Susan's less desirable side. If it's Barcelona we're going to, that's the best university to go to and to hell with Bologna.
Now the point about this war is that there was no period of rational discussion of the pluses and minuses. The United States decided—at least a small cabal within it, including the President, decided—to go to war almost instantaneously. They immediately went into the implementation stage—your mood goes up, you downplay the negatives—after all, you have made your decision—and you do not wish to hear contrary opinions. Especially you do not wish to hear contrary opinions if the real reasons for going to war can not be revealed and the whole public pretense is a lie.
Thus, all planning for the aftermath was dismissed because it greatly increased the apparent expense and difficulty and suggested greatly diminished gains from the endeavor. This, of course, implicitly called into question the entire enterprise, so rational planning was dismissed. And witness the dread effects, a continuing bloodbath unleashed on an innocent population.
One other comment: self-deception can not only get you into disastrous situations, but then it gives you a second reward and that is, it deprives you of the ability to deal with the disaster once it's in front of you. And what could be more dramatic than what happened in the first month after the U.S. arrived in Baghdad—the complete looting of the country, 20 billion dollars of resources destroyed, priceless cultural heritage destroyed—all of that and the U.S. sat around and sucked its thumb. Did nothing to deal with it. And has been dealing with an escalating disaster ever since. A blood-letting of dreadful proportions, and still blind about what to do.
Well, I'll just summarize these thoughts by saying that there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is, we do have it in our grasp at last to develop a scientific theory of deceit and self-deception, integrating all kinds of information, but at least sticking this phenomenon out in front of ourselves and studying it objectively. The bad new is that the forces we're dealing with—that is, of deceit and self-deception—are very powerful."
The Demetrian cycle is never complete - periods of mourning and clarity alternate. Demeter managed the release of core from Hades only by means of Negotiation. Core would spend six months in the underworld, and six months on earth. The cycle of seasons has no terminus, between darkness and daylight, and the powers of Zeus and Hades.
Agriculture - the Demetrian civilization is purchased at the cost of maintaining masks, deceptions of the inviolability of Sacred and Profane, of Cleanliness and Pollution, of Pearl and Pig. The autochthonic culture is negotiated at the price of crime and transgression of borders, of renewing the stagnancy of hypocritical civilization again and again. This is not the nihilism of indiscriminate trampling of borders, but of showing swine their place, and of asserting one's own.
Odysseus is but such a play of a swindler amidst swin-dlers in his own home... Penelope's weaving is a stalling, a negotiation...
Quote :
""While often dismissed as irrational, disingenuous, unethical or “Machiavellian,” game playing strategies and devices are a natural and necessary part of the negotiation and mediation of difficult issues and controversies. If acknowledged and monitored thoughtfully, gaming behavior allows participants a measure of self-protection and provides a lubricant for the constructive, creative and ethical management of complex issues. Games, if artfully designed and well played, allow people to deal with painful truths and harsh realities. Probing and circling each other in ways that might seem to be nonsensical, lets them ‘sniff each other out,’ cautiously sizing up the risks so they can protect themselves. “When threatened, the noble lies people tell themselves and other s-- even if unauthorized -- allows them to keep alive the prospect of a solution with a minimum of deception. It is as much by the grace of guile, as by reason, that humans survive and endure." [Loyal Rue, By the Grace of Guile, 1994]
Game playing behavior evolved as a means of self-protection and survival in a socially complex world. Along with self-deception, denial, and deceit, suggests noted evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, such behavior allows people to live with themselves and develop means to ferret out plots and disingenuous and untrustworthy people that threaten them. (Trivers, Robert, The Folly of Fools, 2011; Rue, Loyal, By the Grace of Guile: The Role of Deception in Natural History and Human Affairs, 1994)
Yet, although an ingrained part of the human repertoire of behaviors, game playing is also frequently viewed as alternatively, demonic, unethical, illegal, or immoral. And, while people readily see others engaged in game playing, have trouble recognizing their own propensity to play games. If they acknowledge their own behavior at all, there is often the application of a double standard: one’s own game playing is viewed as necessary and justified; this behavior in others is taken as proof of deceit.
Culturally, morally and personally, many people continue to view game playing to be closely associated with scams, swindles and confidence, or con-games, all of which rely upon intentionally scheming to gain other peoples confidence and trust in order to betray them. In fact, the mechanics of a successful con-games are much the same as an effective negotiation or mediation: the first steps are to establish a connection with the parties, or a “mark,” gain some measure of trust, engage them in a common plot that is of mutual benefit, and minimize the risk of the venture. What differs, however, is an actor’s conscious intention to deceive and defraud others without the ability of others to be aware of or discover those actions. Not infrequently, a party’s intentions are misconstrued or misjudged. Nonetheless, many observers and participants, see the negotiative process as being made up of incessant “talk” and the “spinning” and “twisting” of words and meanings in ways that are confusing and dissembling; for them, negotiation appears to be little more than a con-gam. In personal relationships, game playing is viewed as a form of dishonesty, or in the extreme, pathological. And in Christian theology and many other religious faiths the behavior is considered not just unseemly but sinful. The primary modus operandi of Satan is to tempt, persuade, manipulate, deceive, and negotiate to procure human souls. That message is not lost on many and contributes to their negative bias. (Benjamin, R.D., “Negotiation and Evil: Moral and Religious Resistance to the Settlement of Confects,” Mediation Quarterly 15: 245-266, 1998; also in Guerrilla Negotiation, CD-ROM, Mediate.com, 2001)
There are five commonly identifiable strategies described here, but there are many others as well, and no practitioner is a purist in their approach.
1. The interests-needs “occupying the middle ground” approach is the most prevalent and favored strategy in the present day. It is based on the working assumption that people are rational actors who are interested in identifying their common interests and needs, and susceptible to reasoned persuasion in order to efficiently solve problems. The substantive merit of the strategy is clear and not to be denied. However, being reasonable can also be a gaming strategy. When one party asserts his or her position to be “more rational and logical” than another’s, there is often a resulting contest. In addition, many negotiators theatrically take on the demeanor of a “calm and reasoned” person in order to presume an air of superiority over those who appear less self-possessed, or extreme by comparison.
2. The positional bargaining or “high-low” game approach is a longstanding bargaining strategy that can be efficient, especially when the matters involved are predominantly the buying and selling, or distribution of money or property. While validly applied in appropriate circumstances, like the purchase of a pair of shoes on Ebay, it is essentially, a game designed to arrive at a workable number. The working assumption is that after one party has made an unreasonably high demand and another has made an absurdly low counter-offer, they will compromise and settle in the middle.
3. The “hardball” approach to negotiation is the most disfavored, and commonly associated with tactics that are considered coercive, unscrupulous, and “Machiavellian.” Drawn from the competitive model, it is based on the assumption that people in negotiation are interested only in asserting their power and control over others, and that the process is all about winning. Aside from the game playing, however, there are circumstances when such strategies are substantively valid, useful and necessary. Generating a measure of fear can often catalyze the emergence of an agreement.
4. The relational approach assumes that the relationship between the parties, specifically, their acknowledgement and trust of each other, is critical to reaching an agreement. However, while some amount of empathy and communication are unquestionably essential factors in most negotiative processes, there is also a strong gaming aspect to this strategy. Many negotiators have become adept at taking on the persona of being an authentic and caring person who can “feel your pain.” The theater of forgiveness can be appealing, even if the authenticity is questionable.
5. The “Caucus-Style” approach stands in contrast to the relational approach and operates on the assumption that minimizing contact between people who are at odds allows for greater control of the situation by a negotiator or mediator. This is essentially a negotiative technique that has been bootstrapped up into an overall strategic approach. While separate meetings can be useful, from a game playing perspective, this approach allows a negotiator or mediator the opportunity to “divide and conquer.” By keeping the principals separated, negotiators, lawyers, or a mediator can shuttle back and forth between them, containing “disruptive” emotional behavior and carefully controlling and managing what is said and heard by each.
Negotiation and mediation are as much performance art and theater as they are reasoned persuasion and discussion. Feigning or exaggerating a feeling, for example, a flash of anger, frustration, confusion, fear, or hurt, can all be shown to disrupt or re-direct the negotiative process. Similarly, a participant acting passively or assertively can influence the pace of the process, and effective negotiators and mediators quickly develop a sense of timing for when an offer should be presented. Sometimes stalling, while in other circumstances, setting a firm deadline, or using a nudge, feint or miss-direction to hide a particularly sensitive need among less important ones, are all available and useful. (Benjamin, R.D., “Negotiation as Performance Art and Mediation as Theater,” Mediate.com, 2002)
Only negotiative processes offers the pragmatic flexibility necessary to manage extreme conflict terrains in a manner that allows “losers” to survive and the “victors” to cease hostilities, stabilize, and preserve resources. In primal negotiative approaches there are few rules other than survival and any means necessary is justified. Game playing strategies and tactics serve much the same purposes and needs. (Benjamin, R.D., “The Natural History of Negotiation and Mediation: The Evolution of Negotiative Behaviors and Rituals,” 2012)
Not unlike the more harsh circumstances that leave little room for anything but primal negotiative approaches, in most controversies there is still a palpable resentment at being compelled to negotiate with an “enemy,” the likes of a betraying spouse, a deceitful business, or an unethical doctor. Even when survival is not directly or immediately at issue, it often feels as though it is and people in the negotiation of almost any matter continue to feel as though their survival -- their way of life as they have known it --hangs in the balance. Their psychic, economic, political and social existences -- one, some or all -- feel very much at stake. Even seeming minimal issues and controversies are commonly escalated into matters of bedrock principle that justify primal negotiative approaches, including game playing, in defense.
The invention of an enemy is itself a time-honored game-playing tactic through which adversaries posture and circle around the prospect of negotiating.
All animal species, not just human beings, display rudimentary forms of game playing and engage in negotiative rituals and behaviors as a matter of survival and procreation of their species. Animal ethologists have documented the many ways different species stalk their prey or evade detection by predators. They camouflage themselves, send misdirecting signals, and use countless other ingenious and creative means to adapt otherwise do whatever is necessary to survive in their environment. Many species live in relatively complex social organizations, which require game playing and negotiation for mating, hunting and protection. (Aurelli, Filippo, and DeWaal, Franz, Natural Dispute Resolution, 2000) Many animal species, dogs for example, rely on scent and smell to sense a threat or opportunity, while humans tend to rely on visual cues and audial intonations and inflections.
Humans are, of course, the most sophisticated game players of all of the species, if only because they are able to abstractly devise, plan and execute ruses and schemes to avoid detection or trap an adversary. (Rue, Loyal, By the Grace of Guile, the Place of Deception in Natural History and Human Affairs, 1994) And, because of the complexity of human social organization, in no other species is game playing such a pervasive and preoccupying part of their focus of attention and daily interactions." [Robert Benjamin]
The wounded subconscious is forever haunting Hannibal... Where earth and water predominate, there is calm and melancholia. Fragile and buried memories and unearthing pearls of wisdom need negotiating, inner dialogues, internal communication... and what is psychoanalysis, as discerned by Freud himself, if not the constant over-turning of the subconscious? "Scars have the power to remind us that the past was real." [Hannibal]
Every agitation, every rubbing of the wound leaves the pearl more irridiscent...
The wounds bored by the boar are holy.
"Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. – The spirits increase, vigour grows through a wound." [Nietzsche]
"Spirit is life that itself cuts into life." [Nietzsche]
"The unexamined life is not worth living." [Socrates]
If Psychology is the activity of a swine, a wild-boar - overturning the mind, the subconscious, again and again, keeping it aerated, Philosophy is the activity of a cow - calm rumination - turning over the mind, the conscious again and again. If Truth of psychoanalysis is baubo, philosophical Wisdom is a goddess.
Wasn't Socrates too a Swindler? The socratic method is a relentless boaring, digging, turning over of things...
Wasn't he too traumatized by a war... like Hannibal... and re-emerge with the mask of a sophist? Was not Socrates already ugly as a swine, yet slashing swin-dlers who sold wisdom for money?
Was it not at the festival of a goddess, this fishy-swindler Overturned the Order? The daimon emerges.
Isn't Socrates initiated by a Diotima on the nature of love and desire? Isn't Socrates the forerunner of Murasaki's instruction to Hannibal: 'Be Ready Always.'...? In life. In death.
Socrates and Hannibal are swindlers at the opposite ends of the negotiating table... Socrates and Hannibal both corrupt minds. Both believe in the necessity of a higher civilization, and upbreeding. Both recognize
"Rudeness is an epidemic." [Hannibal]
"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers." [Socrates]
Yet, Socrates - The Philosopher for all, from above the law [sovereign]; Hannibal - the criminal for his kind, from outside the law [beast]...
And Nietzsche?
Didn't he too emerge from the war, a swindler?...
"Sharp and mild, dull and keen, well known and strange, dirty and clean, where both the fool and wise are seen: All this am I, have ever been, - in me dove, snake and swine convene!"
― Friedrich Nietzsche
And what of the swin-dler...?
"Has there ever been anything filthier on earth than the saints in the wilderness? Around them was not only the devil loose - but also the swine. And I offer you this parable: Not a few who sought to cast out their devil entered into the swine themselves." [TSZ]
Nightmares and traumatic memories, visions are the fragility of borders that guard sanity. Sleep and wakefulness is also one such border.
In astrology, pearls are associated with Pisces; their aura has a calming effect to the neptunian paranoia that is constantly threatened with dissolution of borders and overrules the immune system. The Pearl of wisdom in a protective shell is symbolic of the mother-child relation between Aphrodite and Eros in trying to survive a harsh reality...
"Primordial Eros (Neptune) is the innate psychic longing to return a space of absolute and complete participation with nature, of total fusion with the source of life itself. This state to which we long to return is a memory of the "amniotic Eros", which we experience while we are evolving in the womb (Moon) through spirituality, art, music and various transcendent functions. They spur us on to find our own creative source within."
__________________
"Petrarch’s evocation of his parole morte (dead words) suggests precisely the linguistic alienation that for Kristeva signals the ghostly presence of a buried object: “[T]he dead language they speak . . . conceals a Thing buried alive.”
Pearls are associated with songs that arise from the ocean, the voice of the sirens seductive, pulling,... it is associated with words, dead words ['parole' morte] like pearls that lie deep, buried alive, like a 'secret wound' the melancholic suffers...
"Melancholic love is born of a "revolt against mourning".
It broods, producing layers of scar tissue and pearls, words in the process... Han is the refusal to cry, to mourn, to take pride in the refusal to be consoled. It is a furious reaction from within the cold awareness, "the world is out of joint", and there is no substitution to the severed bond from one's mother.
The Secret Wound: Love Melancholy
Quote :
"Ficino’s description of the connection between Platonic contemplation—which is still revered as an ennobling force—and melancholia, highlights precisely this submerged link between love-melancholy and Platonic madness:
[Contemplation itself, in its turn, by a continual recollection and compression, as it were, brings on a nature similar to black bile. . . . Moreover, on account of the repeated movements of inquiry, the spirits continually move and get dispersed. . . . My author Plato signified this in the Timaeus; he said that the soul contemplating divine things assiduously and intently grows up so much on food of this kind and becomes so powerful, that it overreaches its body above what the corporeal nature can endure; and sometimes in its too vehement agitation, it either in a way flies out of it or sometimes seems as if to disintegrate it.]
Ficino discusses—in negative terms—the effects of an obsessive love on the body and soul of the lover:
[The entire attention of a lover’s soul is devoted to continuous thought about the beloved. . . . Moreover, wherever the continuous attention of the soul is carried, there also fly the spirits, which are the chariots, or instruments of the soul. . . . Flying out there, they are continuously dissipated. . . . Hence the body dries out and grows squalid, and hence lovers become melancholics. For from dry, thick, and black blood is produced melancholy, that is, black bile, which fills the head with its vapours, dries out the brain, and ceaselessly troubles the soul day and night with hideous and horrible images.]
In both contexts, Ficino uses Arnaldus’s phrase assidua cogitatio or a variation of it to pinpoint the origin of the melancholic condition, whether of the contemplative or the erotic kind.
In both cases, though, the melancholic dissipation of the body threatens the very life of the subject. The juxtaposition of these two passages suggests, contra Ficino’s ostensible philosophical agenda, that it is the erotic nature of all thought that threatens the very basis of philosophical contemplation. This structural affinity between love-melancholy and the Platonic “divine” madness is apparent in the double-edged concept of “heroic love” and its Arabic forerunner, al-’ishq. For heroic love in the medical tradition is precisely a love that “overreaches” the power of the body, creating a “vehement agitation” that causes that body to sicken and perhaps perish. Although the object of the fixation of thought differs—in the former instance, the object is “divine” and in the latter, mortal—we have already seen how Platonic love is rooted initially in mortal beauty, while “heroic” love strains to divinize a mortal beloved. Love-melancholy thus remains the “dark” side of Platonic love, disclosing the precariousness and perhaps the incoherence of any philosophy that attempts to transcend the body altogether.
The work draws on Greek medical sources and approvingly cites Galen’s notion that the soul follows the body’s temperament. The involvement of the soul in the body’s affairs (and vice versa) is perhaps the central feature of this account and inflects the entire treatise. The disease is securely located in the brain at the beginning of the treatise:
Amor qui dicit eros dicitur morbus est cerebro contiguus. Est autem magnum desiderium cum nimia concupiscentia et afflictione cogitationum.
[The love that is called “eros” is a disease touching the brain. For it is a great longing with intense sexual desire and affliction of the thoughts.]
This great longing remains ambiguously lodged in the mind but causally linked to rudely somatic processes. Thus the first cause of lovesickness to be mentioned is a bodily one:
Aliquando huius amoris necessitas nimia est nature necessitas in multa humorum superfluitate expellenda. Unde Rufus: Coitus, inquid, valere videtur quibus nigra colera et mania dominantur.
[Sometimes the cause of this love is an intense natural need to expel a great excess of humors. Whence Rufus says: “Intercourse is seen to benefit those in whom black bile and frenzy reign.”]
But immediately following this grossly physical “cause” of the illness is another cause that seems to bring the disease into contact with a Platonic conception of transcendent love:
Aliquando etiam eros causa pulchra est formositas considerata. Quam si in sibi consimili forma conspiciat, quasi insanit anima in ea ad voluptatem explendam adipiscendam.
[Sometimes the cause of eros is also the contemplation of beauty. For if the soul observes a form similar to itself it goes mad, as it were, over it in order to achieve the fulfillment of its pleasure.]
This kind of madness seems to be a version of the medicalized Platonic ecstasy. Certainly the notion that love is provoked by a desire for the beautiful associates it with the Platonic eros. But the gradual elevation of the soul predicted in the Symposium or the Phaedrus does not occur in this context; rather, this fixation remains stubbornly attached to a single individual, fomenting the “affliction of thoughts” that gradually leads to melancholy.
Another translation of the Arabic Zd al-musfir, the Liber de heros morbo, written a little after the Viaticum (ca. 1100), provides an interesting alternative to Constantine’s translation of these lines:
Huius autem herois causa aliquando est rationalis anime oblectatio in aliqua re pulcra. Quam pulcritudinem si in sibi simili conspexerit forma, furor accenditur ut ei se uniat.
[Sometimes the cause of this disease heros is the delight of the rational soul in a beautiful object. For if it contemplates beauty in a form similar to itself, a rage to unite with it is kindled.]
Constantine’s text also recommends literary and “talking” cures; the sufferer should enjoy conversation with dear friends (“colloqui dilectissimi amicis”) and the recitation of poetry (“versus recitatio”). The deployment of spoken language—conversation and recitals—as a cure that soothes the body and the mind is evidence of an early awareness of the susceptibility of melancholic diseases to the power of the human voice. I address the implications of this susceptibility in the next chapter, elaborating what I take to be a latent poetics of melancholy in these early medical texts.
In the Viaticum, then, excessive love is not yet a form of melancholy, but is causally related to it. The “excessive thoughts” of the former condition pull the sufferer remorselessly toward the latter:
Unde si non eriosis succuratur ut cogitatio eorum auferatur et anima levigetur, in passionem melancholica necesse est incidant.
[Thus if erotic lovers are not helped so that their thought is lifted and their spirit lightened, they inevitably fall into a melancholic disease].
Avicenna (980–1037), a generation younger than the author of Constantine’s source for his Viaticum, makes the connection between amor hereos and melancholia more forcefully. His Liber canonis provides what seems to be the single most influential formulation of the disease:
Haec aegritudo est solicitudo melancholica similis melancholiae, in quo homo sibi iam induxit incitationem seu applicationem cogitationis suae continuam super pulchritudine ipsius quarundam formarum.
[This sickness is a melancholy worry similar to melancholy, in which a man is seduced into a state of excitement or continual application of thought over the beauty of certain forms.]
[The Epicurean philosopher, Lucretius, the most unhappy of all lovers, perceived this very thing:
Thus, therefore, he who receives wounds from the arrows of Venus, whether it is a boy with girlish limbs who shoots him or a woman sending out love from her whole body, tends thither whence he is wounded and longs to come together; and to send out the humor drawn from his body into its body. . . . They hungrily form a body, and join salivas, and pressing lips with teeth, they breathe from each others mouths, but in vain, since they can rub off nothing thence, nor penetrate and pass over into its body with the whole body, for they sometimes seem to wish and to be struggling to do this. They cling passionately in the couplings of Venus up to the point where their parts, violently shaken for a moment by the force of ecstasy, melt.
This is what Lucretius the Epicurean says. That lovers desire to take the whole beloved into themselves Artemisia, the wife of King Mausolus of Caria, also showed, who is said to have loved her husband beyond belief of human affection and to have ground up his body, when he died, into a powder, and to have drunk it, dissolved in water.] (De amore 7.6, text and trans. Jayne)
After quoting at length from Lucretius’s description of the furor of love as a frantic attempt to “devour” the lover, Ficino reaches for the further example of Artemisia, who was said to have consumed her husband’s ashes. But rather than simply confirming Lucretius’s point about love-madness as a kind of regressive oral rage, Ficino’s new example extends love-melan- choly to include—to be, in fact—a response to excessive grief. Artemisia’s action shows not only that “lovers desire to take the whole beloved into themselves” but also that such a desire arises from a refusal to accept the loss or potential loss of the beloved. We might perceive in both her absorption of her husband’s ashes and the lovers’ struggles to “pass over into [the beloved’s] body with the whole body” a response to the continual threat of absence posed by the beloved’s very mortality noted in Leone Ebreo’s dialogue. The erotic struggle truly is, then, as Ficino implies, a struggle against death.
It is, significantly, when Ficino describes the dissipation of the lover’s “self” as a result of his infection by the other’s spirits that he reaches for the Lucretian figure of the “secret wound.” The figure in its new context is glossed in terms of Ficino’s own theory of fascination; thus the thinness and warmth of the invading spirits borne through the eye wound the lover from within:
[Certainly the former [the thinness of the spirits] divides and plucks to pieces the viscera; the latter [the warmth of the spirits] takes away from the man that which is his own and changes it into the nature of the other, through which change clearly it does not permit him to rest in himself, but always draws him toward the person by whom he has been infected. This Lucretius hinted at thus:
And the body seeks that whence the mind is wounded by love, for we all fall for the most part toward the wound, and the blood spurts out in the direction whence we are struck by the blow; and if he is nearby, the red humour seizes the enemy.
In these verses Lucretius can only mean that the blood of a man wounded by a ray of the eyes flows forward into the wounder, just as the blood of a man slain with a sword flows onto the slayer.] (De amore, 7.5)
In the following Ficinian passage, Valleriola rightly hears an echo of Virgil’s description of Dido, wounded by a fierce love for Aeneas:
[Also the disquiet of lovers necessarily lasts as long as that infection of the blood, injected into the viscera through fascination, lasts; it presses the heart with heavy care, feeds the wound through the veins, and burns the members with unseen flames.] (De amore 7.11, italics mine)
Valleriola hears in the italicized passages a reference to the crucial Virgilian passages depicting Dido’s deadly madness: (The great poet Virgil expresses this in this way in his beautiful song: But the queen for a long time now wounded by a deep care, nourishes the wound in her veins, and is worn away by a hidden fire). For Valleriola, Virgil is describing an instance of Ficinian fascination (“et paulo post, fascinationis ab amore modu explicans”).
Ficino develops what in Lucretius is a parodic literalization of the Hellenistic “wound of love” into a serious piece of his theory of fascination. In Lucretius’s text, the “literal” wound becomes a figurative site for the exchange of body fluids in a ghastly parody of sexual intercourse. In Ficino’s text, the figurative depiction of intercourse is submerged beneath an analysis of the wound as a more or less literal locus of ocular “infection.” In both texts, however, the wound is the quasi-physical, quasi-psychological point at which the boundaries of the lover’s “self ” are breached. For Ficino, the wound marks a point of infection by the invisible, yet material spirits of the beloved other, drawing the spirits of the lover toward the beloved and draining him of his inner vitality. For Lucretius, the wound is even more clearly a site of illness, both physical and mental; it is an inward sore, much like the one that troubles Britomart after her vision of Arthegall: “[A]ll mine entrailes flow with poysnous gore, / And th’ulcer groweth daily more and more; / Ne can my running sore find remedie” (Faerie Queene 3.2.39).
Ficino’s development of the ontological implications of the “secret wound” orients his theory of melancholic love toward a fuller examina- tion of the lover’s unconscious drives. If for Lucretius the lover is deluded by a vain conflation of katastematic and kinetic desire (the need to eat and the erotic desire to join with the beloved), Ficino actually interprets the unseen wound as a kind of devouring mouth. Although he omits the passage from De rerum natura in which the images of the beloved are com- pared to empty images of food, he goes on to compare the insane lover to Artemisia, who devoured her husband’s ashes. In Artemisia, then, the hidden wound takes on its full significance: her literal consumption of her husband’s ashes through her mouth brings to its logical end the Lucretian identification of melancholic love (or insania amoris) and eating.
Although for the Stoics body and soul were blended rather than fused, food that is taken into the body is clearly fused with the body: it may not be separated from the body once digestion has taken place. Thus sexual union is fantasized not as a temporary juxtaposition of ontologically separate persons but as the permanent fusion of these persons in the creation of a new body. The inevitable failure of this fantasy in the face of the separateness of the be- loved produces the madness and despair of which Lucretius speaks. For the Lucretian lover paradoxically desires the Other to such an excess that his or her irreducible Otherness represents an intolerable barrier to the desired oneness. Ficino’s use of the story of Artemisia highlights what is at stake in the fantasy of fusion that lies behind love-melancholy. Her literal attempt to “fuse” her body with her husband’s transforms the figurative “food of love” into a literal kind of food, but at the cost of turning love into a form of cannibalism.
The image of the “secret wound” also establishes a coincidental but telling link between this classical tradition and psychoanalytic theory. Freud uses (twice) the figure of a wound to indicate just the kind of internal leakage described by Lucretius (tabescunt volnere caeco). “The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energy from all sides (which we have called in the transference neuroses ‘anti-cathexes’) and draining the ego until it is utterly depleted.” The wound, to put Freud’s point another way, figures an internal psychomachia resulting from the ego’s dangerous absorption of the object: “Now the analysis of mel- ancholia shows that the ego can kill itself only when, the object-cathexis having been withdrawn upon it, it can treat itself as an object.” While the medieval medical writers speak of amor dominalis as a love that ruth- lessly subjugates the soul to the internalized object, Freud similarly sees the destructive aspects of melancholia in terms of the object’s power to overwhelm the ego: “In the two contrasting situations of intense love and of suicide the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.”
The metaphorical trans- lation of food into words is replaced by a fantasy of literal devouring; this fantasy is noted as a basis of the melancholic position by Kristeva: “Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested . . . than lost. The melancholy cannibalistic imagination undertakes a repudiation of the loss’s reality and of death as well.” The rejection of language thus constitutes a refusal of the symbolic process of substitution and displacement that promotes a mournful rather than a melancholic relation to a lost object. Rather than “agree[ing] to lose mother,” the melancholic person becomes estranged from language itself: “[M]elancholy persons are foreigners in their maternal tongue. They have lost the meaning—the value—of their mother tongue for want of losing the mother.” The fantasy of devouring the beloved (m)other, then, is a symptom precisely of a fixation that prevents the introjection of loss. In Lacanian terms, such a fixation prevents the introjection of the “relation between a named object and a system of named objects.” If such an introjection cannot take place, the subject remains within the realm of what Lacan calls the Imaginary, the dyadic, mirroring relationship with the mother’s image in which the self is not fully distinct from the other.
The notion that melancholic love is born of a “revolt against mourning” of the most primitive kind, a fantasized fusion with the mother, is borne out not only from the vantage point of contemporary psychoanalysis but also by accounts of the tradition in the early medical texts.
The melancholic lover’s extreme susceptibility to mournful songs indicates the subversion of his reason by somatic processes. The danger of voice in song is that it threatens to move away from the Aristotelian insistence on meaning (“for voice is a sound with a meaning”) toward a less distinctively human sound.
The flebil canto (mournful song) of the nightingale heard in the enchanted wood represents a dangerously labile poetic “voice” in which the sounds of breeze and water are indistinguishably mingled with a sighing, sobbing voice. This flebil canto, shaped by the medical and poetic discourse of love-melancholy, emerges as the powerfully seductive voice of romance in Tasso’s poem.
The affective power that song or poetry wields over the melancholic lov- er, on this account, derives from poetry’s “sublimatory hold over the lost Thing.” The lover is drawn out of his baffled, asocial silence because the song speaks directly to the “secret wound” of his or her loss. However, the song’s semiotic structure also ensures that the subject will be alienated from the very language that he speaks or hears, precisely because it owes its power not to the speaker but to the buried object:
Melancholy persons, with their despondent, secret insides, are potential exiles but also intellectuals capable of dazzling, albeit abstract, constructions. . . .
Through their empty speech they assure themselves of an inaccessible (because it is “semiotic” and not “symbolic”) ascendancy over an archaic object that thus remains, for themselves and all others, an enigma and a secret.
The semiotically rich yet symbolically “empty” discourse of the melancholic bears witness to the brooding power of the lost object, which, locked within a fantastic world of the lover’s own making, threatens the dissolu- tion of the subject from within.
Petrarch’s poetry offers a particularly rich example of the relationship be- tween poetic discourse and melancholia that allows us to trace the early medico-poetic discourse of love-melancholy to its most fully achieved form. In the poems of the Canzoniere, the figure of Laura, whose name is punningly associated not only with lauro (laurel) but also with l’aura (breeze, breath), represents a powerful synthesis of the pneumatic/phantasmic conception of love. Laura exerts a force that draws the poet’s spirit out of him in tears and sighs, but that also “inspires” him; she is a labile, shadowy figure imperfectly distinguished from the phantasms (“l’idolo mio,” Sestina 30) within the poet’s own mind. The tornata that closes canzone beautifully illustrates the paradoxical process in which the self of the speaker is emptied out in order to permit a fantasized union with the breeze of inspiration, L/aura herself:
[Song, beyond those Alps, where the sky is more clear and happy, you shall see me again beside a running stream, where the breeze from a fresh and fragrant laurel can be felt: there is my heart, and she who steals it from me; here you can see only my image.]
This loss of self to the pneumatic “aura” that draws the speaker away from his body recalls the “spiritual” flow toward the image of the beloved—both within the lover’s mind and in the actual world—described in the medical literature. In both contexts the result of this spiritual depletion is obses- sion, but Petrarch willingly embraces this obsession as the price of the bit- tersweet poetry it makes possible. In sonnet 133 we see even more clearly how the pneumatic circulation of song, words, and spirit within the metaphorical breeze both threatens the poet’s life and enables his poetry:
[And your angelic singing and your words, with your sweet spirit (spirto) against which I cannot defend myself, are the breeze before which my life flees.]
(Rime Sparse 133, trans. Durling, with minor emendation)
The quest for Laura/l’aura seems to represent in part a quest for poetic voice, the dolce spirto that in Aristotelian theory is the “matter of articulate voice.” But the mysterious pneumatic song that in the medical literature offers a cure for lovesickness becomes in Petrarch’s poem a more dangerous pharmakon—a therapy that deepens the wound it soothes. Inspiration, in this collection, involves a willed loss of self in exchange for the capture of a voice that both is and is not the poet’s own.
The characteristic feature of Petrarch’s sorrow in the Secretum—as in the Canzoniere—is its bittersweet quality; he refers to his grief as an atra voluptas (dark sorrow) that he indulges in spite of himself. Unable to tear himself away from this atra or funesta voluptas, Petrarch feeds compulsively on grief:
Et (qui supremus miseriarum cumulus dici potest) sic lacrimis et doloribus pascor, atra quadam cum voluptate, ut invitus avellar.
[And (this can be said to be the supremest of miseries), I so feed on tears and griefs with a certain black pleasure that I resist being rescued from them.] (2.13.2)
As Boitani suggests, the atra voluptas that Petrarch appears to repudiate in the Secretum lies behind the self-perpetuating cycle of sorrow and joy that generates the lyric poetry:
Pascomi di dolor, piangendo rido, egualmente mi spiace morte et vita. In questo stato son, Donna, per vui.
[I feed on pain, weeping I laugh; equally displeasing to me are death and life. In this state am I, Lady, on account of you.]
(Rime Sparse 134)
The suggestive language of “feeding” on grief indicates in psychoanalytic terms that the source of Petrarchan lyric is a lost object, the buried or encrypted maternal Thing that has not been fully mourned.
Petrarch’s evocation of his parole morte (dead words) suggests precisely the linguistic alienation that for Kristeva signals the ghostly presence of a buried object: “[T]he dead language they speak . . . conceals a Thing buried alive.”
The image of the figure that sings and “feeds” on his grief and tears as a way of sustaining the melancholy source of his inspiration draws not only on the medical/theological literature of acedia, but also on classical portraits of Orpheus. Like the Petrarch of the Secretum, Ovid’s Orpheus also feeds on his own tears:
[S]eptem tamen ille diebus squalidus in ripa Cereris sine munere sedit; cura dolorque animi laacrimaeque alimenta fuere.
[Seven days he sat there on the bank in filthy rags and with no taste of food. Care, anguish of soul, and tears were his nourishment.]
(Met. 10.73–75)
This transformation of tears into an illusory kind of nourishment informs Petrarch’s self-consuming grief, the atra voluptas that both soothes and ex- acerbates the love-melancholy of the Canzoniere (pascomi di dolor). Ovid also connects Orpheus’s melancholic absorption in his grief with the production of song. For it is after the death of Eurydice and Orpheus’s refusal to accept any substitutes for his lost wife—he turns away from women and marriage altogether—that he utters the songs that fill the tenth book of the Metamorphoses." [Marion Wells - The Secret Wound: Love Melancholy]
Back to the secret wounding by the boar;
Lyssa wrote:
Odysseus is a large scale pig farmer; when he arrives in Ithaca he stays incognito with the swineherd; his reward for defeating the beggar in a fist fight is a blood sausage, a wurst made with pig's blood; he is first recognized by the old nurse because of a scar made on his thigh by a wild boar; one of his greatest dangers is Circe, the witch who turns men into swine, and who sends Odysseus on his journey to the underworld where, among other sights, he is shown a procession of the great women of antiquity.
This figure of the Boar has assimilated the magical birth-source of the Sow to create a symbol that emerges, in a man's eyes, from everything about female sexuality tha is awesome, alien, terrifying and 'beyond' the reaches of his soul. So the boar becomes the animal form of the Queen of Hell, the Black Witch, the Terrible Mother, bringing the crippling wound in the thigh, wherever he enters man's fantasy. In his role in this myth of the god who dies for and by the Goddess and who is reborn to destroy her, he appears at the centre of religious mysteries, and Shakespeare could have found him, in the same role, as easily in England (for instance, as the Twrch Trwyth, the terrible Boar King, who is hunted through the Celtic world in the great Welsh myth of Culhwch and Olwen) as in classical mythology.
The rites of Tammuz follow the same boar slain pattern as all the dying and resurrecting Gods of the Grain. The Irish God Diarmid is killed by a boar — in fact many Grail Knights are wounded in the thigh by boars to be rescued by Faery Queens.
"Give me more death." — Pablo Neruda"
And hasn't Hannibal always been rescued by women?
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"c.1300, "one at dice," from Old French as "one at dice," from Latin as "a unit, one, a whole, unity;" also the name of a small Roman coin ("originally one pound of copper; reduced by depreciation to half an ounce" [Lewis]), perhaps originally Etruscan and related to Greek eis "one" (from PIE *sem- "one, as one"), or directly from the Greek word."
The highest Ace is also called the spadille or the Death Card, which takes the shape of a spade along with the sickle or the hook;
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"In English, it meant the side of the die with only one mark before it meant the playing card with one pip (1530s). Because this was the lowest roll at dice, ace was used metaphorically in Middle English for "bad luck" or "something of no value;" but as the ace is often the highest playing card, the extended senses based on "excellence, good quality" arose 18c. as card-playing became popular. Ace in the hole in the figurative sense of "concealed advantage" is attested from 1904."
That which is buried is death, woundings, metal tips that boar/bore into you. But Death also tears you open to new life; life is a continual shedding of the useless. What's hidden and buried can then be "concealed advantages" - having the "ace up one's sleeve"... To become "one with the dice" is to overcome the accidents of fate, of deaths, to Become God playing dice... Death's wounds turn to pearls of wisdom. The splintered Self collects and cools itself into a wholesome sphere of unity, a unique pearl. It comes together as one unit. What looks as a small, quantitatively insignifcant mark on the die, a low roll hinting bad luck,, comes to stand for the game-changer. It overturns the luck. It plays Besides death. To be served an Ace, is to have unsurpassably overtaken the other, to have Swindled them from any scope of acting, and leaving them speechless and so far behind, one stands as one's own.
"One has to be very light to drive one’s will to knowledge into such a distance and, as it were, beyond one’s time, to create for oneself eyes to survey millennia and, moreover, clear skies in these eyes." [N.]
The A-spade opens the gulf.
One.
Excellence.
Self-distinguished.
A class apart.
One is enough for oneself.
Satyr wrote:
"We build small conceptual rafts and string them together into floating sentences.
Then we let them go, into the river, knowing they will be torn apart – some to be used as life-preservers, while others to be used as anchors…but we, we remain untouched by the utility, as our intent has been fulfilled the moment we managed to connect these seemingly arbitrary elements to form one craft." [Mf.]
Self-orientation is finding internal stability relative to the external world; which is to say, how much one can forego metaphysics as the basis of one's actions. Xt. is the swine's erasure of body-politic and real-politic; the levelling of state and individual.
Hyper-masculine Terrorism that is an ex-tension of Xt. hatred for the world as it is, has for its basis an erotic over-identification with the nourishing earth, with the comfort of the sensual body, is an Erotic aggression, and not a thymotic one. Atomic or Stirnerite individualism is a self-distancing of a simply "being-against"... It is reactive, not orienting. This distance is from a self-extinguishing. Aristocratic individuality is a self-distinguishing - it is not only one of distance in terms of horizontal measure, but also of a 'vert-ical' quality, a Method, a principle, a turning-point of Cor-Rage... eros & thymos self-alligning. It is a being-against-with. It with-stands life as it is - death, accidents, chaos, injuries.
"What does not kill me makes me stronger." [N.]
"The most valuable standpoints are always the last to be found, but the most valuable standpoints are the methods." [N.]
When it inevitably becomes too much, to pay the cost of life, the Therapon was a ritual substitute, a literal swindling of sending another, an Other in place of one's self.
The pagan..."Man has often had enough; there are actual epidemics of having had enough (as around 1348, at the time of the dance of death); but even this nausea, this weariness, this disgust with himself, all this bursts from him with such violence that it at once becomes a new fetter. The No he says to life brings to light, as if by magic, an abundance of tender Yeses; even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction, the very wound itself afterward compels him to live." [N.]
Whereas, the Modern is the scapegoat swin-dled by Xt; his self de-politicized...
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Hardt and Negri wrote:
"This "empire" can only be understood in the singular and is strictly ecumenical in nature [...] Just as it often happens that the Church cannot distinguish itself from the world it claims to resist, so we can no longer make a clear separation between the multitude of the universe and the capital from which it seeks to distance itself [...] Only a mystical decision allows members of the affluent left to know that they are still on the left [...] They base this on introspective observation, the fact that they feel within themselves a pure being-against. Since the enemy to be risen against no longer has a shape, the affect "against" has to be enough on its own: this being against becomes the essential key to every active position in the world... De facto, these against-men, belonging to the Church of opposition, are, like all contemporaries, ambivalent clients of the given." [Empire., p. 730-731]
At a distance of twenty years this critique of Empire and the remarks on the therapeutic limitations of politics are mutually illuminating. The critique of Empire illustrates the way that Sloterdijk rejects any interpretation of the suffering of being-in-the-world that simply refers back to an underlying political antagonism and how he moreover rules out all claims to base an "active position in the world" on reactive being-against. His condemnation of the totalizing passion of the political is implacable, at the level of both theory (the division of the world into empire and multitude) and practice (the subjective truth of being-against as the foundation of an active position in the world).
For Sloterdijk therapeutics literally encompasses the domain of politics or, to put it another way, Sloterdijk seeks to counter the universality of politics with a "generalized therapeutic concern" [SM, p.254] that "queries the individual as to his capacity to endure his innate cosmopolitanism" [N., p.84.] For Sloterdijk therapeutic theory is from the outset located in a cosmopolitical context, and the apparent strangeness of the expression "innate cosmopolitanism" merely anticipates the later development of his "theory of the spheres" and his remarks on immunitarian processes.
Sloterdijk wrote:
"Let me put it this way: during the plunge from the body of the mother into late capitalism, the pain of individuation accumulates for which late capitalism as such cannot be held responsible – however close this reflex may be and as numerous as the discourses may be that tell us, in the course of the instinctive search for the guilty party, where he can be found. To process on a subpolitical level this pain, which belongs not to the realm of social formation but rather to the cycle of life, a self-aware antipolitical therapeutics is required – not to depoliticize individuals, but to deneuroticize politics, to protect the political from psychodynamic movements and Dionysian short circuits. (N., p. 90) [therapeutics releases] politics from the suspicion that it could be immediately responsible for the self-compositions and the sufferings caused by individuation in individual lives." [N., p. 90]
This radical critique of the political totality, made from the therapeutic domain, is one of the fundamental gestures of Sloterdijk's thought." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
Although the environment outside, the political structure outside tries to offer comfort - "meta/physical stabilities", such an action that stems from external stabilizers renders one a 'Performer', than an Act-or.
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"Ability to act must always be won from primary inhibition:
"Being a "subject" means adopting a position from which an actor can move from theory to practice. This transition usually occurs when an actor finds the motive that frees him from hesitation and takes away his inhibitions, allowing him to act." [Sloterdijk, PC, p. 86]
"American liberal psychology understood that the "papacy" is not a Roman peculiarity, but a psychic function with ubiquitous validity that must be explicitly activated when individualist forms of life start to become dominant. The mission of the inner pope is to halt the infinite regression produced by doubt in order to assert the psycho-semantic function of dogma on an individual basis." [ib., p.92]
The main problem that is then posed for this theory is to explain the means by which the subject succeeds in casting off his inhibitions. More precisely, it is a matter of understanding how one manages to obtain a "psychic formatting" that enables one to act "starting from oneself", how one manages to "mobilize" oneself – on this point Sloterdijk even speaks of the "arming of subjectivity".
So if by metaphysics we understand all efforts to stabilize a referent for action, how does Sloterdijk understand the question of action non-metaphysically?
Heidegger wrote:
"The distinction of metaphysical origin between theory and practice, and the representation of transmission between the two, blocks the access of the intelligence to what I call "thinking"."
Sloterdijk wrote:
"If there has been something like a primal scene of the clearing, in the perspective of evolution, it would indubitably consist of a series of actions in the course of which the pre-man would take hold of a stone [...]
Watching a thrown stone is the initial preliminary form of theory and the feeling of concord engendered by a successful throw, a shot on target, an effective throw, is the first stage in a function of post-animal truth. [...] [It was enough] to unleash the first event of anthropogenesis, the first production with ontological significance, in the sense of the production of an effect in an open space." [Sloterdijk, DE, p. 48-51]
To envisage a technical action as producing a space in which truth is produced is also to envisage "moments of truth". Rather than giving more value to the manly capacity to confront the excess or abyss of the act, thinking based on immanence prefers to concentrate on the concrete processes that enable the body to attain the required levels of intensity, precision and attention: open space, emptiness – and the possibility of getting it right. This is what José Gil calls "the space of the body", "a spatial middle ground (milieu) that creates the depth of places".
According to some sinologists the character 中 (zhong), one of the most important characters of the empire that always called itself "middle", zhongguo) is the representation of a target seen from above, pierced through its centre by an arrow. It is said that every five years in ancient China there would be archery competitions in which all the nobles of the royal court took part. During these competitions, the most important test was musical shooting. This involved hitting the centre of the target at the right moment, in other words at a particular moment in the melody sounded out by the gong. Whoever managed not just to aim well but more importantly to loose his arrow to the rhythm of the melody demonstrated that he had the ability to govern. The "happy medium" [juste milieu] is thus not a geometrical notion but a vibrant space. In this context we can see the full significance of the idea that it is in the void that the act comes together. This understanding of the act opens up the sphere of the ethos. The latter seems to be at the opposite pole from the sphere of the exercise of actual power only for those who conceive of it in a strictly formalist, metaphysical way." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
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"Union: early 15c., "action of joining one thing to another," also "agreement, accord," also "state of matrimony," from Anglo-French unioun, Old French union (12c.), from Late Latin unionem (nominative unio) "oneness, unity, a uniting," also in Latin meaning "a single pearl or onion," from unus "one," from PIE *oi-no- "one, unique".
The Actor is One Self, a residual pearl of light foaming in the existential angst. The Actor is blind; his eyes stop nowhere. He does not miss the forest for the tree, or the tree for the forest.
To Act is a self-Recollection, of gathering many different eyes for oneself. One Re-members the world to oneself, and re-collects all that is thrown one's way. They become one's self-extensions. Ears, and feet, and circumstances and people, and everyday things, all become instruments that can see more, feel more. This is what it means to be Narcissistic. It is the voluptuousness of the most Objective. To be littered with many eyes...
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"The peacock is sometimes associated to an avatar, or a person who has achieved perfect virtues after many rebirths in the physical realm... Alchemists claimed that there was a moment just before the alchemical mercury was about to be transformed into gold, when the substance became colorful and bright. This moment was called "cauda pavonis" ("peacock's tail" in English), and would correspond to the moment that the human soul, after many painful rebirths, would realize that all colors of nature also exist inside them. This understanding would lead the person to finally see that everything is one as a genuine inner transformation. This is the moment when a soul of lead becomes a soul of gold. ...The symbol of the peacock’s tail was chosen because of the many colorful and brilliant ‘eyes’. It is said that originally they were the eyes of the Greek Argus, whose name means ‘he who sees everything’." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
Nietzsche wrote:
"A philosopher should seek knowledge by resolving “to see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently... so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives... in the service of knowledge. The more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of the thing, our "objectivity" be." [GM]
Only a Dancer possesses the discipline and fluidity to shift and balance the many eyes without going mad, or bitter...
"The wise man is not surprised by death he is always ready to leave." - La Fontaine
To have an ace up one's sleeve is to dance besides death, indifferent to happiness and unhappiness, more ruthless, more exacting, more (self-)demanding in the real-ization every over-coming requires a down-going.
Nietzsche wrote:
"Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically”and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game–"
I may break, but I do not bend!
The smoothest pearls are culled from the most undaunted concentration.
The irony of life is such, alligning thought, speech, and deed in a Straight Line, sometimes by crooked means, is what makes a self more wholesome, more well-Rounded...
An Ace.
Self-joy is reveling and gloating in that swindle, of extracting spheres from straight lines.
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Lyssa wrote:
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"But before man hunted with the real bird of flesh and blood, he had already invented the mechanical bird. It would fit well into the intellectual scheme of early man, if, as is not unlikely, the arrow represented a materialized metaphor. When the hunter saw the animal gallop off out of his reach he thought that a bird with its light wings might be able to catch up to it. Since he was not a bird and did not have one handy-it is surprising how little attention primitive man paid to birds-he put a beak on one end of a stick and feathers on the other; that is, he created the artificial bird, the arrow, which flies swiftly through the air toward the flanks of the fleeing great stag." [Gasset, Meditations on Hunting]
The I.E. semantic complex between the arrow and the bird, esp. the eagle and the horse in terms of swiftness, to the sun which was symbolic of the soul, is a strong one; and it was meant to convey the more poetic spirituality of the the Doer and the Deed becoming one in the swiftness of the mind...
The Hunter [mind], the Arrow [self], and the Aim [self-possibility] all becoming one; the ouroboros 'almost' catching its tail, a near self-absolute:
"Om is the bow, the self is the arrow, brahman is its aim. It is to be hit by a man whose mind is not distraught; and then, as the arrow [becomes one with the target], he will become one with brahman." [Mundaka Upanishad, 2.1.4]
Satyr wrote:
I am interaction - interaction is not something I do, it is what I am. There is no "I" which just happens to act...the act is the "I", and is nothing if not that.
I am lack, movement, seeking, wanting...directing, seeking a fulfillment, a finality, a teleos. I am Becoming wanting to Be.
Lyssa wrote:
I-Am-My-Action.
"My action is my possession, my action is my inheritance, my action is the womb that bears me, my action is the family to which I am related, my action is my refuge." [Buddha]
To Look at the prey is to be unwavering, is to stop your mind no-where, and keep that continuity Hunter-Arrow-Aim as a singular flame, or to put it another way, if you become Obsessed with your prey, if you let your mind 'to stop' somewhere, 'rest' it on the prey, you've become the prey and the hunted;
"A hunter knows he will lure game into his traps over and over, so he doesn't worry. To worry is to become accessible. And once you worry you cling to anything out of desperation; and once you cling you are bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whoever or whatever you are clinging to." [Castaneda, Don Juan]
Satyr wrote:
This is the basis of all misunderstandings when dealing with Moderns. For them to care, and/or to need, is something one experiences, as if there is Self which 'just happens to care and need' at some point in time/space.
The actor is not other than the act.
Last edited by Lyssa on Sun 1 Feb 2015 - 14:54; edited 6 times in total
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"The Norse god Odin's missing eye is a feature which is firmly established in the vocabulary of the Viking poets; but the poetic language also contains numerous Odin by-names which call him "the Blind One," or the like, and Odin is nowhere depicted as blind. Terms for "blind" and "one-eyed" easily fall together, but Odin is not consistently one-eyed, either. That Odin's one eye was not, originally, a physical feature, but rather goes back to a ritual of the Indo-European cultic warrior brotherhoods (Mannerbunde) over which Odin, or analogous gods, presided." [The One-eyed God]
In the ancient Indian dice game played with the nuts of the Terminalia Belerica tree, a player began taking nuts away by fours. At the end there could be four, three, two, or one nut left - that is krta, treta, dvapara, or kali named after the 4 Hesiodic ages.
Krta - the golden age of godly truth and the dharma bull has four legs. Treta - the silver age of heroes and the dharma bull has three legs. Dvapara - the bronze age of warriors and the dharma bull has two legs. Kali - the iron age of Swindlers and the dharma bull stands on one leg.
Kershaw wrote:
"In the dice game, if there were four nuts left in the end, it was krta, and the four could be removed away with no nuts remaining and the player would have won, "collected krta" - he was the best.
If there was one nut left had had lost, and in a profane game he could lose everything from his house, wealth, and his own self and end up as a bondservant. This sole remaining nut was Kali. Personified, he is one-eyed, ekasha. There is a vast well of symbolism involving dogs, blindness, one-eyedness, darkness, blackness, and death.
The distinguishing mark of the death-boding dog was its one-eye. Among the Greeks Kyne was the worst throw. In Latin the worst throw was canis or canicula. According to Schlerath, among the Indo-Europeans the worst throw in the originally cultic dice game was called 'Dog', which in fact means 'Death'. Whoever had the 'dog' outcome, turned into Rudra, the Dog, the Leader of the Wild Host. When a player was left with one nut, Kali entered him and he turned into Kali, the Dog in the Wilderness - the rabid Berserker full of lyssa.
In old Norse and modern Scandinavian languages, as in German, the pips on the dice are "eyes". And this is why Odin, the wild necromancer god of the North, is one-eyed. The warband or the Mannerbunde was an army of dice where game originally meant sacrifice. Hence "big game Hunting". The leader is chosen by the one-eye result, and the one-eyed god enters into him: he becomes the one-eyed god. The ritual dice game was to choose a leader, who is not the winner but the loser - who becomes the dog, who becomes the mad god, who becomes Death, and withdrawn from the land of the living. He is the ex-static leader.
Odin and Rudra were not "really" one-eyed, but typically Indo-European, a conventional epithet of choosing a leader.
Fearsome dogs are psychopompoi. Canis is a greedy devourer, like Death is the great devourer, the Eater of flesh. It cannot be seen. The Wolf-god is the veiled deity who bestows poetic vision and transfixes the enemy army. He is the madness of the poet and the seer, as well as the ecstatic warrior in cultic union with his dead ancestors." [The One-eyed God]
Hades is the unseen and likewise Odin with the broad-brimmed hat and robin-Hood and his band of 'thieves'. In Ireland, the cu glas or the 'grey dog', a circumlocution for wolf - was the man banished from his own people. Exiled, the wolf has forfeited his rights and could be killed without penalty. He was in effect, a Criminal, Vargr. Slavic epics attributed the Criminal as the hero, as wuk [wolf]... and in Russian Volx, Germanic Volk... but also as the Wurger - the strangler who is the quintessential killer dining on death and flesh and cannibalism. He is the wanderer, the guest, and always mysterious. The 'guest' in its ancient connotation also meant enemy.
The spear"Head" is the stand-in for Odin, who carries it with him typically. The tip of the sword or the spear"Head" shaped like an ace, was also seen as one-eyed, from which Death descended down. Literally the jaws of death opened...
The 'loser' was the under-Dog - literally in the sense of the death-dog under the world. Of hades.
The One-eyed Leader came as death and hunger upon others. The dharma with just one leg left, the One-eyed Ace was the Last, 'the loser', the "Siren", "Alarm" to the world, showing the precariousness of Order.
Sloterdijk wrote:
"This choice of name plays with the insight that sirens can trigger archaic feelings among those who hear them.
It is, incidentally, one of the typical self-revelations of the twentieth century - and one of its characteristic cynicisms - that it referred to the wailing machines on factory roofs, and in wartime also the alarm systems that spread panic in cities being attacked from the air, as "sirens". The most open form of listening was thus betrayed to terror, as if the subject were only close to its truth when running to save itself. At the same time, this renaming of the siren voice inappropriately coarsens it, instrumentalizing it for the most brutal mass signals." [Spheres: Bubbles]
Terror, panic, rabidity, battle-madness, ecstatic rage: lyssa, were vision-"stretchers", to swell with life.
Lyssa, literally, "immune to pain", "mad ravening", is the rabid intensity at the edge between civilized and animal world. The Beast And the Sovereign. The lone-wolf full of lyssa is Spengler's 'Last man standing' noted of the Roman soldier - of Rome founded by a she-wolf, the extended parlance of which was also the "whore" - out-sider/ex+stasis. Ecstasy of vision.
"Hashish as a hunting dog . . . It Sees quicker than we do." [Henri Michaux, Light Through Darkness]
Veracity is a voracity of the de-Vouring wolf. The siren-alarm goes ahead of the rest, and de-Monster-ates the frailty of order in the world, the signs of the time "out of joint".
Hitler wrote:
"When man attempts to rebel against the Iron logic of nature, he comes into struggle with the principles to which he himself owes his existence as a man. And this attack must lead to his own doom." [MK]
Ortega gasset wrote:
"For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man - not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia. As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics." [The Revolt of the Masses]
Spengler wrote:
"The honourable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man." [Man and Technics]
The link between the Wild hunt of the phantom-dead and the phantasm of Derrida's spectre still lingers. And speaks of an "Hauntology" of modernity's melancholia and its dis/ease with death:
Derrida wrote:
"What seems almost impossible is to speak always of the specter, to speak to the specter, to speak with it, therefore especially to make or to let a spirit speak. And the thing seems even more difficult for a reader, an expert, a professor, an interpreter, in short, for what Marcellus calls a "scholar." Perhaps for a spectator in general. Finally, the last one to whom a specter can appear, address itself, or pay attention is a spectator as such. At the theater or school." [Spectre]
Odin's spectre always appearing at junctions where fates are decided.
The dharma bull standing on its last leg precariously holds the dissolution of borders,, where the wolf on the inside, is the wolf of chaos threatening on the outside. Odin with his two wolves maintaining order with the sun and the moon, must also face the apocalyptic wolf of chaos Fenrir, that tries to swallow the last light...
"Without death, we'd be at a loss. It is the prospect of death that drives us to greatness." [Hannibal, 2.10]
What threatens to swallow order is not just at the macrocosmic scale, but also the inner microcosm; the subconscious that looms and threatens to dissolve borders... The under-dog must be the one that knows how to throw off scents from the best bloodhounds, by diverting them right towards oneself... In ancient times, "the dog" was the worst throw in dice (attested in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, where the word for "the lucky player" was literally "the dog-killer"), which plausibly explains the Greek word for "danger," kindynas, which appears to be "play the dog." Drowning is not always a struggling experience; in Hannibal's art of therapy, the transference elicited is voluntary...
"Will’s dogs work best as a symbol for Will himself. Hannibal throws the dogs off his scent by feeding them sausages, the same way he throws Will off his scent by “feeding” him other murderers, misguiding tips and suggestions that Jack Crawford is manipulating him – “ A manipulative method in itself”, as Gideon very smartly remarks in the next episode. Notice that Will is often referred to as a bloodhound; Hannibal refers to him as such in the first scene of Oeuf.
Hannibal: “A boat engine is a machine, a predictable problem. Easy to solve. If you fail, there is a paddle. Where was your paddle with Hobbs?”
Will: “You’re supposed to be my paddle.”
Hannibal: “I am. It wasn’t the act of killing Hobbs that got you down, was it? Did you really feel so bad because killing him felt so good?”
Transference is a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. This also shows how the Web of Banking and Commerce is actually balanced on precarious trust..., and so too the Web of Words, and language, on which Derrida remarked,
Quote :
"To understand Derrida’s hugely important critique of the dominant tradition that excludes animals both from philosophy and, indeed, from the ‘world’, it is, however, first of all necessary to understand what for Derrida constitutes ‘language’. From beginning to end of his oeuvre, Derrida has repeatedly attempted to rectify the misunderstandings of readers blinded by the very anthropocentrism that his notion of language seeks to contest, and this seminar is no exception. Language, he insists once again, is the constructed community of the world, simulated by sets of (more or less) stabilizing apparatuses, by ‘codes of traces being designed, among all living beings, to construct a unity of the world that is […] nowhere and never given in nature’. Language, in short, is a community shared by all living beings. Consequently, the notion of ‘world’ loses its ontological weight, becoming merely ‘a cobbled-together verbal and terminological construction, destined […] to protect us against the infantile but infinite anxiety of the fact that there is not the world’. In the place of ‘world’ there is only radical dissemination: ‘the irremediable solitude without salvation of the living being’."
The illusion of safety is our last clutch we must let go; but as N. said, "That the destruction of an illusion does not produce truth but only one more piece of ignorance, an extension of our "empty space," an increase of our "desert"..." [WTP, 603]
"He writes letters, secretes thoughts, talks to his dead father and mother. Layers of memories fold and enclose over, keep safe that pearl of life, of an innocence and happiness yet, from the scarred flesh and wounds.
The internal process of contamination and culturing pearls in the deep waters of the subconscious is the other side of the border.
The wild boar is the traumatic wound received in the heart, in the subconscious core, where 'the pearl is hidden'... and return to life demands its spilling... blood, violence, unleashing... "killing swines"...
Fragile and buried memories and unearthing pearls of wisdom need negotiating, inner dialogues, internal communication... and what is psychoanalysis, as discerned by Freud himself, if not the constant over-turning of the subconscious? "Scars have the power to remind us that the past was real." [Hannibal]
Every agitation, every rubbing of the wound leaves the pearl more irridiscent...
"Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. – The spirits increase, vigour grows through a wound." [Nietzsche]
"Spirit is life that itself cuts into life." [Nietzsche]
"The unexamined life is not worth living." [Socrates]
Quote :
"The wound is the quasi-physical, quasi-psychological point at which the boundaries of the lover’s “self” are breached. For Ficino, the wound marks a point of infection by the invisible, yet material spirits of the beloved other, drawing the spirits of the lover toward the beloved and draining him of his inner vitality. Ficino’s development of the ontological implications of the “secret wound” orients his theory of melancholic love toward a fuller examina- tion of the lover’s unconscious drives. Ficino actually interprets the unseen wound as a kind of devouring mouth.
The image of the “secret wound” also establishes a coincidental but telling link between this classical tradition and psychoanalytic theory. Freud uses (twice) the figure of a wound to indicate just the kind of internal leakage described by Lucretius (tabescunt volnere caeco). “The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energy from all sides (which we have called in the transference neuroses ‘anti-cathexes’) and draining the ego until it is utterly depleted.”
The metaphorical translation of food into words is replaced by a fantasy of literal devouring; this fantasy is noted as a basis of the melancholic position by Kristeva: “Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested . . . than lost. The melancholy cannibalistic imagination undertakes a repudiation of the loss’s reality and of death as well.” The rejection of language thus constitutes a refusal of the symbolic process of substitution and displacement that promotes a mournful rather than a melancholic relation to a lost object. Rather than “agree[ing] to lose mother,” the melancholic person becomes estranged from language itself: “[M]elancholy persons are foreigners in their maternal tongue. They have lost the meaning—the value—of their mother tongue for want of losing the mother.” The fantasy of devouring the beloved (m)other, then, is a symptom precisely of a fixation that prevents the introjection of loss.
The notion that melancholic love is born of a “revolt against mourning” of the most primitive kind, a fantasized fusion with the mother, is borne out not only from the vantage point of contemporary psychoanalysis but also by accounts of the tradition in the early medical texts. Melancholy persons, with their despondent, secret insides, are potential exiles but also intellectuals capable of dazzling, albeit abstract, constructions. . . ." [Marion Wells - The Secret Wound: Love Melancholy]
Hannibal's De-cisive disgust:
Menninghaus wrote:
"According to a much cited diary entry, Kafka’s writing strives for the avoidance of metaphors in the desperate awareness of their unavoidability (D, 398). The cutting and stabbing with words, too, is no ‘mere’ metaphor. Nor is it simply a matter of the incisive effect which a speech is calculated to have on a listener. Rather, the cut with the knife comprises an objective moment in words themselves. From Homer to Saussure, the articulation of language has been repeatedly understood as a cutting and dividing. In his treatise Von der Poesie im Recht (1815), Jacob Grimm writes: “to speak is also to divide, for the speaker (or reader) cuts the word in his mouth (and in his senses); it is for this reason that Homer calls human beings in general meropes.”
Saussure defined “the domain of articulations” as a field of dividing slices into a previously diffuse “nebula”; without the articulating achievement of the signs, the cloud of thoughts and sounds would forever remain a “shapeless . . . mass.”
A particularly suggestive effect of articulation borrows its name directly from the idea of the cut (Stich): a Stichwort (keyword) has the capacity to cut through masses of data and thereby to serve up selective portions of the mass. But none of these indications really suffice for Kafka’s poetics of the knife cut. Obviously, Kafka is interested neither in expounding a general doctrine of the articulation of signs nor in advancing the literature of cataloguing by means of keywords.
More specific clues into the function of literary cutting and piercing are provided by mythology and metrics. Among the animal prototypes for the writer, not the least significant is the bee: from Homer to Augustine, it appears over and over as representing a honey-sweet discourse which itself is grounded in acts of reading (in the sense of gathering and gleaning (Aufle- sen). The bee is an insect—from Latin insecare, “to cut into s.th.”; itself articulated (cut) in segments and divisions, it is also quite capable of pointedly stinging. Thomas Schestag has shown that the paradigms of cutting, seg- menting, and stinging are at least as relevant to the writer-bee mythology as the idea of persuasion through honeyed discourse. What is perhaps the richest articulatory achievement of literary language—poetic verse—contains already in the terminology of metrics various references to cutting and piercing. In Greek, poetic verse as form of a linguistic cut is known as a stíchos, a finely articulated line of writing; phonetically, this line correlates with the battle line (stíx, stichós), in which it is literally a matter of swords and the “slaughtering” of living bodies. Moreover, in the line of verse there are particular points known as caesuras: dividing cuts which, precisely as empty places, as interrup- tions of the voice, indicate the position of the knife itself. Stichomythia is a speech and counterspeech that either cuts out all utterances according to the pattern of one single line of verse or even cuts the verse line itself, dividing it between two different speakers. The hectic exchange of such sharply cutout stichomythemes regularly indicates and produces situations of de-cision, where the course of dramatic action is poised on the (bare) edge of a knife blade.
As far as Kafka’s work is concerned, another aspect of the cuts at work in lines of verse may be usefully adduced. A stichomythem is designed to strike home (treffen) in a twofold sense: formally, it should “meet” (treffen) the verse pattern, and, pragmatically, it is intended to “strike” (treffen) the addressee like a cut and thrust. It is, in an emphatic sense, a well-aimed (treffendes) word, fitting for its purpose like a stinging and cutting weapon. Kafka’s poetics of the knife refers, through the medium of a radical literalization, to this category of the treffendes Wort, the well-aimed—because successfully stinging and cutting—word. At the same time, it interweaves this category of the “treffendes” word—a category which is scarcely viable as a rhetorical concept, while, in ordinary language, no longer felt as a powerful metaphor—with the conception of the se ̃ma als sõma, of the word as body, and thus links it to the an-aesthetic of the disgusting, to the vivisection of the flesh. Well-aimed word, cutting of the flesh, and disgust are therefore the three moments a primal scene of inventing literary language consists of." [Disgust]
Finding pearls in the deep layers are forced out with agitation and torture...
Menninghaus wrote:
"If the pleasurable and disgusting vivisection of one’s own body is the model of literary language, then Kafka’s obsession with techniques of dismemberment, torture, murder, and execution concerns the project of his writing itself. This obsession—consistently favoring very detailed descriptions which, through their quasi-ethnologic gesture of objective, unempathic observation, border on the (morally) disgusting as well—may then be interpreted as the form in which Kafka’s poetics of the knife and the disgusting cut presents itself most directly. As Milena Jesenska is translating a passage about torture from “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka writes to her:
Kafka wrote:
"It does indicate an affinity of taste that you have translated just this passage. Yes, torturing is extremely important to me, I’m preoccupied with nothing but being tortured and torturing. Why? For much the same reason as Perkins was and equally thoughtlessly, mechanically, and according to tradition—i.e., to learn the cursed word from the cursed mouth." (LM, 216)
In fully detached abstraction, Kafka reads torture, “according to tradition,” as a method of finding hidden layers of language: as with his own poetics, the true or, at least, the desired word is forced from a body by means of knife cuts. To Freud’s parallels between torture and psychoanalysis, between the stigmata diaboli and traumata (which, through repeated stabs of the executioner or the analytic process respectively are recalled and dissolved), Kafka gives a sadistic turn—while nevertheless remaining bound to the pseudonaïve quest for the legendary saving word. It is no mere façon de parler when Kafka keeps confessing to tormenting Felice with his letters, and even lays emphasis on this tendency in an offensive manner:
Kafka wrote:
"These letters, as they are, are good for nothing but to torment, and if they don’t torment, it’s even worse. (LM, 223)
What kind of person am I! I am tormenting her and myself to death. (L, 116)
She is a real martyr and it is clear that I am undermining the entire basis on which she previously used to live, happy and in tune with the whole world. (L, 95)"
To force “the cursed word from the cursed mouth”—that in fact seems to be the goal of Kafka’s intentional tormenting by means of epistolary knives. His torturing reached its most ingenious heights where the language-cutting unity of “being tortured” and “torturing” is found: the cardinal trope of this self-reflective torture is the twisting of the knife in his own heart (D, 101)." [Disgust]
And thinking of her Sweet sleep overcame me I am your master See your heart And of this burning heart Your heart She trembling Obediently eats. Weeping, I saw him then depart from me. Joy is converted To bitterest tears I am in peace My heart I am in peace See my heart.
To every captive soul and gentle heart into whose sight this present speech may come, so that they might write its meaning for me, greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love. Already a third of the hours were almost past of the time when all the stars were shining, when Amor suddenly appeared to me whose memory fills me with terror. Joyfully Amor seemed to me to hold my heart in his hand, and held in his arms my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping. Then he woke her, and that burning heart he fed to her reverently, she fearing, afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.
Cavalcanti had suggested that eating the heart could perhaps be an antidote against death (vv. 9-11):
Di voi lo core ne portò, veggendo che vostra donna la morte chedea; nodrilla de lo cor, di ciò temendo.
As did Evola on the A-mor [without death];
Evola wrote:
"Therefore it was not a question of personified theological abstraction, as many commentators of Dante had thought in the case of Beatrice, but of the “initiatic woman,” the “Lady of the Miracle,” the “glorious woman of the mind” (thus Dante calls her and adds: “Who was called Beatrix by many who knew no other name to give her”) that is to say, a being, a real efficient power, whose effects have often been described in dramatic form. To behold this lady, to receive her “salutation,” to make love operate, is something that kills, that wounds, that strikes like lightning. At the same time, the Lady bestows salvation (there is often a play of words on the Italian expression “salute”; the texts speak of the Lady who “salutes,” and this may mean giving her greeting as well as giving salvation = salute). Mors osculi, death in a kiss, was a former cabalistic formula. Some among the Fedeli d’Amore speak of a “light which strikes the heart,” causing loss of control over the limbs and the vital spirit. But by striking the heart and slaying, “the mind that slumbered is awakened.” “From this death life will arise,” writes one of these poets. There are some who dealing with the “grades and powers of true love"...
In relation to the “miraculous Lady of all virtue” (virtue = power) and to the “higher virtue of the nuptials,” we should remember that Da Barberino also introduces the symbol of the androgyne, i.e. of the One who puts an end to the dual condition of the split individual. That Immortality is the end sought, is deduced by a Provencal exponent of the same trend of thought, Jacob de Baisieux, from the word amor itself. He explains this word thus: a-mors: the meaning of a is without; mors means death, “Amor = without death.” The experience is not without problematic, nay dangerous features. Some, indeed, utter the warning cry: “Fly if you are not willing to die.” Dante gives to Love personified a “fearful” aspect.
No less interesting is the reference to the intellectual side of such experiences. One of the names by which the Lady is known is “Madonna Intelligenza.” She is the Holy Wisdom. Cavalcanti speaks of the “possible Intellect” as the place in which Love acts and where the Lady exercises her power. The “possible intellect” is a technical expression from Aristotle’s doctrine as interpreted by Averroes. It expresses the nous, the transcendent, super-individual, transfiguring intellect which in the ordinary man is a mere potential faculty; it is for that it is called the “possible intellect.”
Regeneration, a New Life is a recurrent motif. The Vita Nuova is the title of Dante’s famous cryptic work. In the Convivio (The Banquet) Dante attributes to the “Lady of the Miracle” the power to “renew the nature of those who behold her, which is a marvelous thing.” Life in the higher initiatic sense is bestowed by the Woman. Therefore Cecco d’Ascoli says that his Lady shaped his mind and showed him salvation, and that when union with her is interrupted he “feels again the darkness of death.”
Even these necessarily brief references clearly show that the matter dealt with by the Fedeli d’Amore was something quite other than mere poetry, than sublimated sentimentality or sophisticated symbolism. The experiences they recorded should be traced back to the Mysteries of Woman; they essentially took place on a hyperphysical plane and had an initiatory character."
Yet, in the tradition of courtly love, the eating of the heart was a punishment for treachery imposed upon the wives who betray their lord, along in parallel, within the initiatory frame, the eating of the heart by the Salutory Lady, "La gloriosa donna della mia mente" (the glorious lady of my mind), of their knights and secret lovers was a partaking as in the Eucharist, of an intimate union beyond earthly death of that great love which sets free. It was a Participation.
Quote :
The "Lai d'Ignaure"
"In his article "The Lure of the Heart," Miland Doueihi interprets the gruesome story of Ignaure told in an early 12th-century French lai by the troubadour Renaut.
Twelve ladies decide to play a game in which one of them assumes the role of a priest and each of the others confesses to her the name of her secret lover. In this way, and to the great surprise of all the ladies, it becomes clear that Ignaure is secretly courting each of them. They are so outraged at him for being unfaithful, that they plot together to kill him. Ambushed, Ignaure cleverly escapes death at their hands by explaining that he loves each of them equally. The ladies resolve to remedy the unusual situation, however, and demand that he choose only one of them to whom he must thenceforth be loyal. Ignaure complies with their demand only to find that the eleven spurned lovers seek their own revenge by telling their husbands of Ignaure's illicit affair. The husbands, after talking among themselves, realize what has happened and have Ignaure taken prisoner and murdered. His heart and penis are then ground into a paste which is served the next evening to the twelve women. After eating, the ladies are horrified to learn the true nature of the feast's ingredients. They refuse to eat again and soon die of starvation.
The husbands never consider eating their rival's organs to gain his power. Instead, they trick their wives into ingesting Ignaure's heart and penis (those organs which are most representative of the women's fascination with their lover). The husbands, in this act of violence, attempt to eradicate and "correct" the situation through the preparation of the ghastly meal. It is meant as a punishment for the ladies' transgressions, but in its secrecy becomes a bizarre manifestation of transgressive behavior in itself. This action is a perversion of the Last Supper and, by association, of the Eucharist; here, eating "the body" only creates greater loss and all sense of redemption is negated. The bodies of Ignaure's ladies, on the other hand, become a strangely appropriate "tomb" for his body in that, through their self-sacrifice, their deaths thwart the plans of the husbands and in a sense allow them to regain a certain measure of noble dignity."
""Le Roman du Châtelain de Coucilet et la Dame de Fayel"
This tale, written at the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century by a little known writer named Jakemon Sakesep, relates the story of Raoul de Couci who had been given by his lover, La Dame de Fayel, braids of her hair as a symbol of her devotion. When he leaves to go off to battle, he carries them with him in a jeweled box. In the heat of the fight he is struck by a poisoned arrow and so instructs a servant to cut out his heart, to put it in the box with the braids and to take it back to his lover with a letter explaining how his heart belongs to her. The lady's husband catches the servant and, upon discovering the heart, has it made into a meal for his wife. When she realizes that she has eaten her lover's heart, she refuses any food and dies soon afterward.
The story appears in numerous versions throughout the following centuries, passing into English for the first time in the old romance of "The Knight of Curtesey and the Lady of Faguell." It is taken up again by Howell in 1634 in his "Familiar Letters" and dedicated to Ben Johnson."
In the tradition of courtly love, the discretion of the lover for his beloved was everything.
In one of the poems in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Dante describes Beatrice,
"In her eyes my lady bears Love, by which she makes noble what she gazes on: where she passes, all men turn their look on her, and she makes the heart tremble in him she greets, so that, all pale, he lowers his eyes, and sighs, then, over all his failings: anger and pride fleeing before her. Help me, ladies, to do her honour. All sweetness, all humble thought are born in the heart of him who hears her speak, and he who first saw her is blessed. How she looks when she smiles a little, can not be spoken of, or held in mind, she is so rare a miracle and gentle."
Love is [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] by Lucia's further words [68, 69]:
"Che non soccorri quei che t'amo tanto Che uscio per te della volgare schiera?"
For the "vulgar" is the opposite of the "gentle," and, as Dante has everywhere argued, that which makes the heart "gentle" is love.
"Amore e'l cor gentil sono una cosa."
Beyond the Xt. perversion, what was Rude and vulgar was this lack of intimacy, of spontaneous inti-Mating, of that "greeting" which instantly grasps the other and initiates his long pondering remembrance.
"The original form of the heart symbol is derived from plants. The ivy leaf was used as decoration in the old days of oriental cultures, where it showed up on amphorae and other painted ceramics after 3000 B.C. On Greek vases it can be found as stylized vine tendrils, often connected with the god of vine, Dionysus, who represented the passionate and sensual aspects of human life. So it carried mixed connotations already in its early stages when it appeared in the fourth century A.D. as a sign for a brothel in Ephesus.
The noble side of its meaning developed when this ivy leaf was used in the decoration of tombs. As the ivy is a very long-living and enduring plant, it served as a perfect representation of love and remembrance that goes beyond the grave. It’s also argued that the way ivies grow close on something represented a loving embrace and fidelity.
Therefore the ivy leaf appeared on Greek and Roman gravestones and on early Christian graves in catacombs as a symbol of eternal love."
Everything hinged on this shared understanding and a careless word could become a wound. In shared glances, hearts were exchanged and everything was intimated with (pre)caution, sensitivity and watchfulness.
Hannibal in this sense subtly shifts the Xt. focus from the Lady being both a virgin and whore, to himself.
He is at once, a Lord and a Lover.
Noble and Knight.
He is the Punisher of betrayers as well as the Participant of the secret love.
He is at once a Sear of the heart, as well as a Seer of the heart.
Hannibal wrote:
"One can appreciate another's words without dissecting them. Although on occasion, dissection is the only thing that will do."
as well as,
Hannibal wrote:
"He woke her then, and trembling and obedient, she ate that burning heart out of his hand. Weeping, I saw him then depart from me. Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her? Find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight, and ache for him?"
Between these two quotes, Hannibal links Troubador poetry with psychoanalysis.
Although its been suggested that Virgil leading Dante through the two realms in the Inferno is akin to the Freudian pic. of authority or super-ego leading the ego before Beatrice takes over, and likewise Hannibal leading Will to the utmost centre of hell where Dante places Lucifer frozen in ice cannibalizing on his own subjects - the treacherous Brutus who betrayed Ceasar and so on till at the last is Judas who betrayed Christ,,, Hannibal also suggests something more Nietzschean.
One can as easily analyze the other without dissecting them, "stopping at the surface as the Greeks knew" [N.].
This is Participation with the other, flowing with the poetry,,, as opposed to Observation and dissection.
Hannibal is both a connoisseur and cannibal in this metaphorical sense too. His observant, cold-blooded dissecting cannibalism Is a participation.
Nietzsche wrote:
""Noble souls desire to have nothing gratituously - least of all life."
"It is a noble dictum which says - what life promises us, that promise will we keep to life!"
"Only the doer learneth."
"To live as I incline or not to live at all."
"All great love does not seek love - it seeks more."" [TSZ (random)]
Nietzsche wrote:
"The ability and obligation to exercise prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge both only within the circle of equals,--artfulness in retaliation, raffinement of the idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies (as outlets for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance--in fact, in order to be a good friend)a: all these are typical characteristics of the noble morality... The desire for freedom, the instinct for happiness and the refinements of the feeling of liberty belong as necessarily to slave-morals and morality, as artifice and enthusiasm in reverence and devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic mode of thinking and estimating.--Hence we can understand without further detail why love as a passion--it is our European specialty--must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself." [BGE, 260]
Quote :
"Thus a gay science is a dedicated science: scientific “all the way down,” including the most painful and troubling insights, every ultimate or "last consequence." Doubting as well as Montaigne, doubting in a more radical fashion than Descartes, and more critical than either Kant or Schopenhauer, dispensing with Spinoza’s and with Hegel’s (but also with Darwin’s and even Newton’s) faith, Nietzsche’s joyful, newly joyful, scientist carries “the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, stringently, harshly, cruelly, and quietly than one had questioned heretofore." Even confidence in life itself, as a value, of course, but also as such, now "becomes a problem." The result is a new kind of love and a new kind of joy, a new passion, a "new happiness.""
Invention - poetry that sustains an empathetic glance at things, literally up-holding the other [self-deception is devotion in courtly poetry] is as telling of the other, as is careful, methodical and unsparing dissection. A lack of appreciation for such poetry that intimates is a vulgarity, a rudeness befitting the slavish. Music is the silent language that speaks.
"Lucifer's eternal punishment, namely, his eternal deprivation of the word, constitutes the most powerful disconfirmation of his primordial attempt against the Verbum. Although Lucifer is endowed with the physical ability to utter sounds and words, he is eternally prevented from doing so. His threefold mouth is denied the highest function for which such an organ was created __ to utter words __ and is debased to its lowest function: that of animals or, even worse, to eat humans who are his own subjects. Precisely because Lucifer, when he was created, rebelled against God and against the Word, Dante's Lucifer parodies the Word and is condemned to eternal silence."
"He was disgraced for betraying his emperor’s trust."
Lucifer parodies Christ - the "Word made flesh", that the Participation in the Eucharist returns to "Flesh made word", a cannibalism. Exactly what Hannibal says is not;
Hannibal wrote:
"It is only cannibalism if we're equals."
David Hawkes wrote:
"The Roman Catholic church grew rich on usury while forbidding it, and Protestants constantly pointed out the connections between the financial and liturgical fetishism that they saw manifested in Rome. Calvin’s thought also announces a new epoch in the history of representation; he is the first to offer an eth- ical justification of the performative sign. Calvin confessed that the bread and wine of the communion were merely symbols of Christ’s body and blood. In this he agreed with the radical Anabaptists, and departed from both Catholics and Lutherans, who believed in a lit- eral real presence. He differed from the radicals, however, in claiming that the sacrament was not merely a memorial but had a real, objective effect on the mind of the communicant. Although it was not a literal but a metaphorical embodiment of Christ, the Eucharist was objectively efficacious. The sacrament, in other words, was a performative sign.
This way of connecting usury with idolatry owes more to Luther’s semiotics than to Calvin’s. Whereas Calvin was most often cited by those who wanted usury limited rather than outlawed, Luther was frequently invoked by the absolutist opponents of all usury. Luther insisted that the efficacious power of the sacrament was inherent in the bread and wine. He thought that the Eucharist’s value was innate, rather than symbolic. He objected to the Catholic Mass, not because of its belief in the real presence, which he shared, but because of its claim that the priest’s liturgical actions had caused a transubstantiation. Luther believed that this reduced the sacrament to magic, making a fetish of the priestly ritual. This furnished another point of comparison between idolatry and usury, which also fetishized alienated human activity. Like Calvin, Luther applied the same ethics of representation to money as he did to the sacrament, when he objected to the idea that labor power can be stored up in the form of a symbol." [Usury]
Isn't that the metaphor of the Snail and the storing up of fat, and "Paticipating" - 'not dining alone'?
Sloterdijk wrote:
"Correctly understood subjectivity, then, always implies the capacity to act, but not in the sense of an irrational rapture or a submission to unresolved drives – which French psychoanalysis noted in the term passage à l’acte. And contrary to what Lacanians and crypto-Catholics believe, not everyone who stands under the symbolic order of some ‘great Other’, of God or the fatherland, is a subject, but rather one who takes part in the experiments of modernity in the psychological formatting of entrepreneurial energies." [The World Interior of Capitalism]
Entrepreneurship is self-invention.
It is this that sets Hannibal's dilemma akin to Hamlet:
To eat, or not to eat? Lord or Lover? (Note that etymologically, the Lord was the loaf-breaker and distributor and the love of his subjects...)
To forgive, or not to forgive?
Hannibal wrote:
"I forgive you."
As Derrida points out, "Forgiveness means always beginning anew"... a Vita Nuova. A rebirth.
In Hannibal, forgiveness Is to eat the other.
Derrida wrote:
"Her “salute,” the “greeting” which is recognized as expressive of Beatrice's role as the embodied promise of Dante's salvation, the annunciation of his new life communicated in the script of her eyes that behold him in “fear and trembling,” prefiguring the act of fevered imagination in which the dream will rescript her promising greeting in the idiom of sacrifice. Life is fed only by faith, hope, and love consumed as the word made flesh of the Other, given as the Gift of Death. This ironic history of eating as substitution, ambiguously signifying both transgression and forgiveness, is also the history of gender and sexuality, equally ambiguous in their significance. Sexuality and gender, both biologically and psychologically configured, are movements of substitution.
Reproductively, the life of the child substitutes for the life of the parents, which is sacrificed for the life of the child; erotically, lovers feed on the flesh of the other immolated by the fire of passion for the (substitute) death of the other in his or her orgasmic climax, while paying the price, making the sacrifice of one’s own (substitute) orgasm-death (Sartre’s sexuality as sado-masochism). Eating and sexuality: both exhibit the ambiguity of their sacrificial structure.
Drawing ultimately if indirectly on the Platonic doctrine of the ascesis of the soul (Symposium and Phaedrus), the educatory disciplining of the soul’s desire (Eros) for Beauty in order to rise through the ascending orders of being to mystical union with the One source of every beautiful image, the Courtly Love tradition manifests the ambiguity that is central to that (neo-)Platonic doctrine: the ascent of Eros, as an educational discipline, is empowered by a drive that simultaneously affirms and negates the images of beauty on which it feeds. Eros affirms the image in so far as the image awakens in the soul the memory of the vision of Beauty that it once enjoyed, but from which it has fallen, thus resurrecting in the soul the spiritual vision that had sunken into oblivion beneath the weight of material embodiment. At the same time, however, it negates the image in the dynamism of transcendence, which, tasting the poison in that on which it feeds, scenting death in the finitude of Beauty’s limited capacity to infuse the dross of matter with its immaterial radiance, soon grows restless with the urge to surpass its satisfaction by seeking higher and more transparent images of Beauty."
Although we know, courtly love was an extension of Xt., in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Derrida continues beyond the Xt. Virgin/Whore dialectic,
Quote :
"In philosophy, language is often treated as a means of explanation or communication. In our “information society” language is the grey servant maid, a mere means of transmission. For Derrida, he says in his last interview with Le monde, language was his only “souveraine,” his master or rather his mistress, whom he started to serve, as he puts it in Le monolinguisme de l’autre, at day break—matitudine. He surrendered and submitted unconditionally to her. To her, he devoted his life.
Derrida’s politics of language—his politics of desire—is opposed to two other models of language: the colonial politics on the one hand and the politics of the colonized on the other. The colonizer lives in the phantasm of the natural propriety and property of a mother tongue that he masters. He imposes it as his own—the master’s voice—as the master language onto the colonized population. He subjects the colony to the language of which he himself is supposedly a subject. The politics of the colonized, on the other hand, here represented by Abdelkebir Khatibi, is the possession of two interfering languages. He calls this bi-langue: double language. The sexual metaphor for the first, the politics of the colonizer, is rape. The colonist appropriates the language and makes it his through rape. The metaphor for the second being in language is, as Khatibi himself puts it, promiscuity—multiple erotic partners and a variety of sexual practices in which the tongue—la langue—plays a determinant role
Derrida opposes to these two models that of high courtly love. To language—his lady, his mistress—he is subjected; he is her subject. He has totally succumbed to her. A la vie, à la mort—unto life, unto death, he is in her service.8 Even before he could speak, vows were binding him to her. These vows prescribed an almost monkish solitude in her service, starting at dawn—matitudine—the time the monks start their morning prayer. But this only one, this sovereign lady, interdicting and interdicted, cannot be appropriated; it cannot be made his and cannot become his property. Since she comes from the other, and since she comes form elsewhere—au delà de la mer, from beyond the sea—he is forever deprived of her. It is a passion that he cannot help but suffer in order to expose his wounds of love. What Derrida then proposes is an unheard of way, a totally new way of making love, and of inscribing oneself into the body of another—into the body of language by inscribing stigmata, tattoos, and wounds of love.
Into his own Derrida cannot come since his mistress, language, cannot be mastered or plundered or possessed; it cannot be made his. She cannot but keep her withdrawn distance in purity; she comes from somewhere else. It is an amour de loing as the troubadours would say.
What links Derrida’s conception of language to the sovereign mistress and to the tradition of courtly love? It is opposed not only to rape and promiscuity, but also, and maybe foremost, to marriage. Derrida’s answer to what love is may well be that of the troubadours. Qu’est-ce que l’amour? Something else, apparently, than a functioning relationship—something else, certainly, than satisfying sex. Maybe it is but the name for a wound—a split in the subject that cannot be healed, a grief, a lover’s lament, addressed at the other.
The parallelism between the courtly mistress and language, as Derrida conceives it, is the total exclusivity of the one and only. All desires are directed at her; she is the only occupation of the lover. The lover surrenders unconditionally to her sovereignty. But this total surrender is not respect; it retains accents of revenge and jealousy. This only object of desire remains principally unreachable—the lady cannot be appropriated, cannot become mine. Their exclusive relationship must be kept totally secret. Being subjected to passion, this suffering surrender, surrendering to suffering, is neither a choice nor can it be understood; it is something done to the subject that it cannot but suffer. Courtly love is a mode of relating to the other that exposes the subject to lack. It can never come into its own, but is always exiled from itself. This self-alienation does not only inhabit the subject, but is the very nature of language. It inhabits language and finds its best expression— its perfect illustration—in the address to the beloved in the lover’s lament. Derrida uses all these topoi of courtly love to illustrate the paradox of a language that is his only one but that does not belong to him. The relation to language is thus dreamed of as an erotic encounter, a tête à tête, where only the lover understands the secret rules."
Hannibal wrote:
"There is no morality; only morale."
Quote :
"All this brings us back to the Vita Nuova, where Dante learns to place his beatitudine not in Beatrice's greeting - which can be removed, thus causing him to desire, to exist defectively, to be placed at a distance - but in that which cannot be taken away. But if desire is the distance that we aspireto overcome, it is also the motion in which we engage in order toovercome it: desire is spiritual motion. So desire isthe dialectic between distance and proximity, and any love poet could be assessed in terms of his handling of the dialectic: does he seek total nearness, thus risking the closing of the distance that creates desire and thereby poetry, or does he insist onthe distance that generates both? Following this line of thought, amor de loing could be glossed as a "love of desire," a "desire for desire"..."
"The turn to praise, the proper style of worship, is a turn toward transcendence."
Heidegger connects Greeting to Remembrance;
Quote :
The interpretation of ―greeting, which Heidegger at once links to the phenomenon of remembrance and, by way of anticipation, to the flow of the river poetized in ―The Ister.
Remembrance, Andenken, is poetized as a greeting; as a greeting, it is a thoughtful turning toward that which is greeted. Genuine greeting, as an address (Zuspruch) turned toward the one greeted, is recognition: the recognition that recognizes the one greeted in ―the nobility of their essence‖ and through such recognition lets them be what they are. Greeting is thus ―a letting be of things and of human beings."
"Heidegger further elaborates on what he calls ‘poetic greeting (dich- tenden Grusses)’ (E 96/120). Pointing to the rarity of a true greeting (des echten Grusses), he writes that in such a greeting the one who greets names himself but wants nothing for himself; he addresses everything to the one who is greeted. ‘A true greeting,’ Heidegger remarks, ‘bestows upon what is greeted the recognition (Anklang) of its essence’ (96/120). The ‘thinking-of (Denken an)’ of this poetic greeting is ‘a fundamental echoing or resonance by which what is greeted can enter into the nobility of its being, so that as what is greeted, it may hence- forth have its essential abode in the greeting’ (E 96-7/120). Greeting (Das Grüssen), thus, is ‘a re-thinking (An-denken)’ (E 97/120).
The greeted one (das Gegrüsste) is never forgotten, for the greeting wants nothing for itself (E 99/122). A greeting, however, is never a one-sided affair: the one who greets can only greet if he himself is greeted. According to Heidegger, a greeting takes place only if the one who greets is ‘addressed in his historical being (geschichlichtes Wesen) and recognised (Annerkannte) as the poet with a historical destiny (dichterischen Bestimmung)’ (E 99/122-3).
In Actes (published in 1966), Deguy also names a greeting or a salut. Deguy has recourse to a work written in Dante’s youth, Vita nuova, to open up another thinking of salut, ‘naming le salut, renaming the acts or verbs of salut-ation (salut), the saluting (saluer) and the saving (le sauver) themselves’ (CN 183/193). Deguy speaks ‘of Dante, of Beatrice — and of their salutation, their salvation (leur salut)’ (CN 183/193) On the second occasion that the poet meets this “miraculous lady (mirabile donna)” (O 921/M 5),12 the one ‘who was called Beatrice even by those who did not know what her name was’ (O 919/M 3), he remarks that ‘she saluted me with so virtuous a bearing (mi salute molto virtuosamente)’ that ‘I seemed there and then to behold the very limits of blessedness’ (O 921/M 5). Her ‘most sweet salutation (dolcissimo salutare)’ (O 921/5) was such that, for the poet, ‘there was no man mine enemy any longer’ (O 931/M 17). The poet speaks of the ‘sur- passing virtue’ that her ‘miraculous salutation (la mirabile salute)’ had on him (O 931/17). When this ‘most gentle lady gave her salutation (gentilissima salute salutava),’ ‘Love’ bred in him such overpowering sweetness that made his body passive and helpless (O 931/M 18). The poet remarks that ‘in her salutation (salute) dwelt my bliss (beatitudine), a bliss which often exceeded my capacity to contain it’ (O 932/18).
As Deguy notes in Actes, “Beatrice is salut (Béatrice est le salut), in the secret, singular bivocality (bivocité) of this word. She is the one who salutes in the Vita nuova and the one who saves in the Commedia’ (A 244). She who confers blessing also addresses a salute or a greeting. Vita nuova, Deguy claims, is the book written ‘to establish (fonder) the double meaning of salut’ (A 246): salut ‘as a call one sends or resends in salvos (comme un appel lancé ou relancé en salve)’ of a vow or benediction, but also the salut of salvation that saves (CN 184/194). It is as though the two saluts operate within one another yet remain apart (CN 185/194). Derrida writes of this double sense that the Vita nuova will have saluted le salut in saluting (aura salué le salut ensaluant)Beatrice—orratherlesalutof Beatricebecauseshe’sthe one who salutes and saves the Vita nuova in the Vita nuova. Beatrice is the one who salutes and the saluted one (saluante et saluée). And safe, she saves (Et sauve, elle sauve). (CN 185/195).
‘The poetics of salutation and salvation (la poétique du salut)’ (CN 185/196) announced here seems to resemble a Heideggerian thinking of the poetic act, already encountered above, in which the poet ‘responds to his distinctive summons (assignation propre): to utter the sacred, the holy or the intact (le sauf ), the unscathed (l’indemne) (das Heilige), that is, salvation (le salut)” (CN 196/186). These [French] words that come to us via Deguy’s translation, which remind us of the great debt owed to this poet-thinker-translator, display the motifs of this double sense of salut: the salut of the intact or unscathed (heil, heilig, das Heilige) and the salut addressed (Grüssen) in naming. And, as Deguy writes, the ‘ “poem” itself is that nomination receiving and giving the salutation (le salut), for the salut is exchange, while it salutes (le salut est échange, saluant)’ (A 247), ‘this Heideggerian poetics of the unscathed, the immune, the safe (sauf ) or the salut’ (CN 189/199).
Derrida’s own thinking of salut not only does not favor one strand, whether salutation or salvation, whether calling out and greeting or desiring safety and conferring health, but insists that the two must be thought together. He attends to these two saluts when he exploits the bivalence of the French reflexive verb s’appeler. S’appeler would be to call or name oneself, to salute oneself, and in doing so call for one’s own salvation. Yet s’appeler is also to call one another or to call out to the other.
There is, according to Derrida, an absolute heterogeneity, an irreconcilable difference between the two saluts. Salut as health or salvation could always be refused, threatened, forbidden, lost, gone. But the possibility of the non-salut of salvation or health must always haunt le salut as calling, that is, a poetical chant that promises a chance to call. [Yet] one can only call out to the other, and salute, while living, as one of the living, that is, while dying, as one of the dying, in one’s passing-on (sa mourance) and in my own, in a living-on (une survivance) that is neither life nor death — and hence where there is no assured salutation, nor any salvation on the horizon. (CN 203/218)"
While Heidegger thinks of the salutation as the unscathed, beatitude, that which saves, the safe safety, refuge, Derrida treats the double meaning of the term salut as both greeting (the hospitality of visitation) and salvation (immunity, health, security) in terms of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in the face of refugees, as an unconditional tolerance [true democracy] to always be open to the other. This point is only useful to see how and why libertarianism and democracy can both be derivatives of the same J.-Xt. courtly tradition.
Zizek [Metastaes of Enjoyment], intensifying this tradition by seeing the Lady as the reality principle, neatly provides a case for the other side of the Virgin/Whore split. If Romantic Idealism of the Virgin and orthodox Xt. triumphed at one end,,, he shows how the other side of Marxist-Communist Feminism and the sadomasochism of pornography evolved out of the same logic of courtly tradition:
Quote :
"For Zizek, the elevation of the Lady that takes place in courtly love isn’t a “spiritualization” but rather a distancing that treats the woman as an abstraction, a “cold, distanced, inhuman partner.” She is “by no means a warm, compassionate, understanding fellow-creature.” He quotes Lacan’s observation that in courtly love, the woman is a “terrifying, an inhuman power.” She is “never characterized for any of her real, concrete virtues, for her wisdom, her prudence, or even her competence. If she is described as wise, it is only because she embodied an immaterial wisdom or because she represents its functions more than she exercises them. On the contrary, she is as arbitrary as possible in the tests she imposes on her servant”. She is not a spiritual being, but represents “a radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with our needs and desires,” and thus a kind of “automaton, a machine which utters meaningless demands at random".
This radical, distanced, indifferent Otherness is what Lacan calls das Ding, the Real, the hard kernel of things that “resists symbolization.” The idealization of the lady is a projection that attempts to neutralize “her traumatic dimension.” The lady becomes a mirror on which the subject projects a narcissistic ideal.
The Lady takes the place of the Thing, the Real, the radical Otherness that is the object of desire but incapable of approach or symbolization. The Real is like Yahweh, the inscrutable biblical God; the Lady is in that position, inscrutable, inaccessible, arbitrary in her demands. The knight is in the position of Job, crying out against what appears to be a void. The knight is like the Psalmist who cries out in bewilderment at being forsaken.
The Lady and her lover set up a master-servant relationship, in which the man’s service takes on a dimension of masochism. She commands him, and he does whatever she requires of him, no matter how humiliating it may be.
Lest we be tempted to think this a Freudo-Lacanian invention, Chretien’s Lancelot provides an apt illustration. C. S. Lewis (ever sensitive to masochistic overtones) summarizes the story (Allegory of Love): “Lancelot sets out to find the Queen and almost at once loses his horse. In this predicament he is met by a dwarf driving a tumbril. To his questions, the dwarf—surly like all his race—replies, ‘Get in, and I will bring you where you shall have news of the Queen.’ The knight hesitates for a moment before mounting the cart of shame and thus appearing as a common criminal; a moment later he obeys. He is driven through the streets where the rabble try out upon him and ask what he has done and whether he is to be flayed or hanged. He is brought to a castle where he is shown a bed that he must not lie in because he is a knight disgraced. He comes to the bridge that crosses into the land of Gorre—the sword-bridge, made of a single blade of steel—and is warned that the high enterprise of crossing it is not for one so dishonored as he. ‘Remember your ride on the cart,’ says the keeper of the bridge. Even his friends acknowledge that he will never be rid of the disgrace. When he has crossed the bridge, wounded in hands, knees, and feet, he comes at least into the presence of the Queen. She will not speak to him. An old king, moved with pity, presses on her the merits of his service.”
She replies that “all his time is spilt for nought.” He will not win any thanks from the Queen. Lewis continues, “It is only later that he learns the cause of all this cruelty. The Queen has heard of his momentary hesitation in stepping on to the tumbril, and this lukewarmness in the service of love has been held by her as sufficient to annihilate all the merits of his subsequent labours and hmiliations. Even when he is forgiven, his trials are not yet at an end. The tournament at the close of the poem gives Guinevere another opportunity of exercising her power. When he has already entered the lists, in disguise, and all, as usually, is going down before him, she sends him a message ordering him to do his poorest. Lancelot obediently lets himself be unhorsed by the next knight that comes against him, and then takes to his heels, feigning terror of every combatant that passes near him. The herald mocks him for a cower, and the whole field takes up the laugh against him: the Queen looks on delighted.” She finally relents and lets him fight.
As Lewis says, “The submission which Lancelot shows in his actions is accompanied, on the subjective side, by a feeling that deliberately apes religious devotion. Although his love is by no means supersensual and is indeed carnally rewarded in this very poem, he is represented as treating Guinevere with saintly, if not divine, honours. When he comes before the bed where she lies he kneels and adores her. . . . When he leaves her chamber he makes a genuflexion as if he were before a shrine”.
Zizek sees the same religious dimension, and generalizes it. Courtly love is not just a religious vision of love, but an attempt to grapple with the existential condition that we are in, confronted by a Real that remains beyond our comprehension of symbolization. We can only deal with this by pretending it’s better than it is, or by translating the Real into something we can grasp, translating the inaccessibility of the Real into something that we have created.
Zizek writes, “Within this perspective, courtly love appears as simply the most radical strategy for elevating the value of the object by putting up conventional obstacles to its attainability. When, in his seminar Encore, Lacan provides the most succinct formulation of the paradox of courtly love, he says something that is apparently similar, yet fundamentally different: ‘A very refined manner to supplant the absence of the sexual relationship is by feigning that it is us who put the obstacle in its way. ' The point, therefore, is not simply that we set up additional conventional hindrances in order to heighten the value of the object: external hindrances that thwart our access to the object are there precisely to create the illusion that without them, the object would be directly accessible—what such hindrances thereby conceal is the inherent impossibility of attaining the object”.
In this context, what the lover longs for isn’t sex, but response. Faced with a faceless Real, he longs for some sign from the lady-Real that she acknowledges his existence, that she responds to his pain, that she is not a machine: “in courtly love itself, the long-awaited moment of highest fulfillment, when the Lady renders Gnade, mercy, to her servant, is not the Lady's surrender, her consent to the sexual act, nor some mysterious rite of initiation, but simply a sign of love on the part of the Lady, the ' miracle' that the Object answered, stretching its hand out towards the supplicant”.
Zizek sees courtly love everywhere still. It’s not a medieval phenomenon only, but a contemporary one. The femme fatale is an heiress of the cruel lady of courtly love: “like the Lady, the femme fatale is an ‘inhuman partner', a traumatic Object with whom no relationship is possible, an apathetic void imposing senseless, arbitrary ordeals”.
He also sees the masochistic dynamics arising even in a world that claims to have renounced the Master-Servant model of love, in both its patriarchal or courtly love versions. There are ontological obstacles to the formation of truly equitable relationships among the sexes. At least, sexual relationship cannot achieve the reciprocity: “The problem is that once the relationship between the two sexes is conceived of as a symmetrical, reciprocal, voluntary partnership or contract, the fantasy matrix which first emerged in courtly love remains in power. Why? In so far as sexual difference is a Real that resists symbolization, the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship in which the Other, our partner, prior to being a subject, is a Thing, an ' inhuman partner' ; as such, the sexual relationship cannot be transposed into a symmetrical relationship between pure subjects. The bourgeois principle of contract between equal subjects can be applied to sexuality only in the form of the perverse-masochistic-contract in which, paradoxically, the very form of balanced contract serves to establish a relationship of domination. It is no accident that in the so-called alternative sexual practices (‘sadomasochistic' lesbian and gay couples) the Master-and-slave relationship re-emerges with a vengeance, including all the ingredients of the masochistic theatre. In other words, we are far from inventing a new ‘formula' capable of replacing the matrix of courtly love” (108-9)."
Hannibal... "the Hunter becomes the Hunted." Self-dissection and "Know Thyself" can only be attempted by one who is already Open to Death. Hannibal sets bait to draw in his own enemies; such a self-sabotage [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]] almost veers towards Derrida's take that "there is no contradiction between immunity and auto-immunity", hospitality and health... The Host originally and still retains the ambiguity of both guest [Lat. hospes] and enemy [hostis, hostile]...
Nietzsche wrote:
"Ennoblement through degeneration. History teaches us that that part of a people maintains itself best whose members generally share a vital public spirit, due to the similarity of their long-standing, incontrovertible principles, that is, of their common faith. In their case, good, sound custom strengthens them; they are taught to subordinate the individual, and their character is given solidity, at first innately and later through education. The danger in these strong communities, founded on similar, steadfast individual members, is an increasing, inherited stupidity, which follows all stability like a shadow. In such communities, spiritual progress depends on those individuals who are less bound, much less certain, and morally weaker; they are men who try new things, and many different things. Because of their weakness, countless such men are destroyed without having much visible effect; but in general, especially if they have descendants, they loosen things up, and, from time to time, deliver a wound to the stable element of a community. Precisely at this wounded, weakened place, the common body is inoculated, so to speak, with something new;however, the community's overall strength, has to be great enough to take this new thing into its bloodstream and assimilate it.Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it." [HATH, 224]
This only works, if the overall strength is great enough, else one is left to consider injecting oneself with illness that is marketed as the "cure" to keep off "zombies"... which is exactly Derrida's position...
Satyr wrote:
"Mindless, consumerism - the brainless appetites of materialism and hedonism unleashed in a population, turned into a thoughtless, instinctive, herd. We see the symptoms in the U.S. where this infection has been the most successful, having nothing to slow its spread down - like culture, a shared heritage, family.
To fight the disease of materialism and hedonism, we have popular zombie films suggesting one must make one's self ill. It is sickness that can preserve the individual from illness and all-consuming parasitism.
The individual is either a mindless eating, instinctive, machine, rotting because time is degenerating it, or it surrenders to the collective, finding identity in the mass, sacrificing self, to a greater Self which never grows old and never, presumably, rots. But the zombies can recognize their own kind, and so when infected the one who just committed suicide, is recognized by the mindless flesh-eaters as one of their own: fellow Nihilists.
The internal, civil war, continues. The dualistic lines make sure no alternative enters the fight. One is either a mindless mass of need, obsessed with satisfaction, or one kills oneself, and becomes part of an Ideal Self, Humanity, where one's mindlessness will at least never die.
We continue to see the Cold War dynamics still in play - this internal war over hearts and minds where both sides are offering a different variant of the same nihilism."
Hannibal's capture will set open the idea of Self-Therapy [being one's own therapon, one's own double], that will make him more and more proficient into reading the minds of other killers "without having to dissect" them...
We are seeing an evolution of an art-form here that is contra psychoanalysis.
The evolution of Lector.
The Mind-Reader "without dissection", situated Immobile, Word-less, Frozen like Lucifer in the world's inferno, the last and the most interior cell in the prison.
The Salutation of Beatrice initiates Dante from poet to the pilgrim's path, not unlike Hannibal's journey seeking his Beatrix, his Donna Gentil [gentle lady of the home]...
Quote :
""She has ineffable courtesy, is my beatitude, the destroyer of all vices and the queen of virtue, salvation."
Dante saw Beatrice as a saviour, one who removed all evil intentions from him. It is perhaps this idea of her being a force for good that he fell in love with, a force which he believed made him a better person."
