Radical atheism - the mystic's radical doubt - is the true predicate of belief. Traditional religion, or Heidegger's 'ontotheology' or 'religion touched by metaphysics,' is, meanwhile, proximate to non-belief. Or so Derrida argues in this wonderful excerpt from the 2002 'Other Testaments' conference in Toronto.
[Note: Derrida is exploring the themes I raised in the 'Prayer at Harvard Square' post.]
Always looking out for The Church, Drudge is trying to connect a demographic shift to, um, a would-be 'terrorist'? Oh Matt, if only the Vatican weren't performing so poorly against the Pentecostals in Latin America. [Note: I attended a Spanish-language Pentecostal Sunday service in Los Banos, California, a few years ago. The church - whose congregation consisted entirely of Hispanic ex-Catholics - exerted a great deal of energy refocusing congregant efforts away from 'the saints' and the Virgin Mary toward more Protestant concerns (read: the Devil and lack of faith). There was also much glossolalia.]
Less to the fantasies of young American men than it is to their various pathologies. Take, for instance, Maxim editors' decision - in a magazine ostensibly geared toward titillation - to publish a list of women whom they had determined to be the 'unsexiest' women alive. The list should be understood as an entry in the long chapter of a fixation on the part of young males with women determined to be ugly - a fixation manifested in baseball players' use of the 'slump buster' and, certainly, in trope and feature of much fraternity house banter.
What can we draw from all this 'unsexiest' business? For one thing, we can begin to discern the interdependence and proximity of disgust and lust. Both, it seems, are libidinous. In that sense, a magazine dedicated to titillating young men is not exactly deviating from that end when it publishes a list - along with supposedly cringeworthy bodily descriptions - of a supposedly sad selection of the female specimen. The libidinous fixation with 'ugly women' would appear to stem from the twist in sexual power relations presented by such women - in the minds of these men, that is: They are thought to be vulnerable and damaged and deserving of punishment and humiliation. The specter of the 'ugly woman' would, it seem, be a sort of caricature of the already existing notion of any other woman for these men. The will to rape would stem from the same structure of arousal.
The humiliation - the spreading - of women across the magazine's pages thus fulfills a need: It answers to the call of an originary terror. That is, the terror of powerlessness.
In Maxim's proclivity for the bizarrely disembodying inspection of each intricacy of the female body - both in word and image - we can discern the terror of aesthetic powerlessness: '23 pounds of Funyun fudge' and 'Barbaro-faced' were among the piece's descriptions of its honorees. Most of Maxim's young male constituency is in the throes of expanding torsic girth and quickly receding hairlines. They are, meanwhile, preparing for the long American corporate slog. Most of these men will not marry women deemed to be beautiful.
It is perhaps enough then that they can get off on the 'ugly' ones.
Sullivan, whom I love not despite but because of his faults, has turned The Daily Dish into an Obama lovefest. Suddenly, everything connects back to Obama. Every event, every speech, every excuse to post a photo of the fetching would-be nominee is up and running at the top of The Dish. Frankly, it is not altogether pleasant to watch a very clever writer become so consumed by - and, regrettably, uncritical of- a politician. A politician.
We all know the feeling. It is, in fact, a natural feeling. We discover something new - say, a person for whom we seem to have feelings that can be characterized in no other way than 'libidinous' - and we can't help but discuss (or proselytize, dare I say) in regards to this person and his various virtues. Suddenly, everything - both in thought and conversation - connects and leads back to said person.
Certainly, Obama is a very promising candidate. And it's fine to have a crush on him, ok Andrew? But perhaps we ought to let good manners get in our way once in a while. We wouldn't want to become bores now, would we?
Isn't Malkmus looking more like Him than usual in the pic? This comes to Drôle Parole courtesy of Lindsey Bahr, our future fashion editor at large. Miss Bahr had the good fortune of attending the Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks concert at DC's 9:30 Club last night.
Earlier this month, the adhan - or, in the lingua franca, the 'Islamic call to prayer' - was proclaimed over Harvard Yard as part of the student-run Islam Awareness Week. A March 21 NYT piece covered the ensuing debate (in addition to segregated gym hours at Harvard), which was stoked by this Crimson op-ed condemning the broadcast. The three authors of that op-ed advanced the notion that the proselytizing nature of the adhan encroached upon the principles of mutual respect that they said were central to the university.
Professing adherence to a negativity - to the notion of secularism, which is predicated on an absence - does not place us outside of ideology. Quite the opposite in fact: The object of the concept of a secular space - of Harvard as a secular space - is the notion of the possibility of absence. That is, of the possibility of the 'existence' of some 'thing' lying at once at the center of our thought ('As a secular institution we are committed to a neutral, secular environment.') , but, finally, outside of our thought: It is not there. God is not there.
Or, rather, God is not supposed to be there. And yet, once again, that which we try to paper over, to expel, always has a way of resurfacing - in this case - in our absent center (that is, Harvard Yard emptied of God). How so? Well, suffice it to say that, as Bataille notes wonderfully throughout Erotism, a negative notion of God lies at the center of most forms of mysticism.
To profess to atheism or a belief in secularism is a more complex procedure (and for more than simply the obvious etymological reason - ism) than most of us are aware. I am an atheist. But there is an ordering signified in that sentence. As in physics, or in the case of Heidegger's vase (see, "The Thing"), there is never an emptying. Rather, there is a replacement (and even that remains a haunted replacement).
Let us be honest then and profess to our belief in the benefits of such a replacement. But we should be aware that it is a replacement - a reversal even - that can never be characterized as neutral.
As for the notion - advocated in the Crimson op-ed - that the inclusion (or exclusion) of elements of proselytization in expression should be the criterion on which we judge the acceptability of such public expression, I say the following: To truly exclude proselytization from speech in certain areas would require silence.
The equipment pictured below was left behind by the Iraqi army on Failaka Island, which, located 20km off the coast of Kuwait, was occupied by the Iraqis during the first Gulf War. I took these during a recent outing with the Kuwait University anthropology class for which I'm at TA.
The sister, in Comp. Lit. and Society, does a sweet reading of Stein's "A Fire."
'Stumbling over this point, the reader reaches the first verb, ostensibly a moment of action, of movement, “to send.” But Stein backtracks. She counters the action by adding “and not send.” This initially appears to be a contradiction, perhaps a moment of narrative indecision (the reader, whose eye quickly sees the word letter, imagines someone staring at an envelope deciding whether to mail it or not). But, Stein is playing with attempts at imposing linearity on the poem; her game is that there is no indecision, for the time was spent sending “and” - NOT or - not sending the letter.
Further complicating the action, Stein casts this muddled verb, which has been both done and undone, as a hypothetical. She puts the “to send” dilemma within a “what . . . if” phrase, entering into the register of the scientific method. But after setting up this small system of logic, she switches her tone, becoming completely vague; the crux of the poem is an unspecified “kind of thing” which makes an unspecified “that” come in. The reader then looks for what “that” could be and, logically, uses the title: Fire. The word rests with solidity in the reader’s mind, a puzzle solved. Stein began the sentence with a questioning “what” but leaves it without a question mark. The reader already answered the question, in a way.
The last sentence, “A letter was nicely sent.” seems to offer finality. But the suspiciously simple conclusion, the sappy adverb “nicely” and the juxtaposition of fire from the previous sentence mucks the simplicity. The reader conjured the word fire, only to be confronted with “a letter.” Letters, made out of paper, burn. Stein, forcing these two ideas together, almost implicates the reader in this, seems to involve the audience in something violent. What begins as a pedantic question becomes a scientific analysis. Analysis falls away to vagueness interpreted. But interpretation destroys. The letter, whose fate dominates all of the verbs “to send,” “not send,” is put to a fiery death with the finality of “sent.” The poem is held in this tension between adding and taking, between things that “come in” and things that are sent out, between what we bring to her objects and what her objects are. On one level, Stein is teaching us how to understand her poetry. But ultimately, this piece is a warning against falling into the trap of imposing interpretation, lest we start the fire that burns.'
A sign noting the route on the back of a public bus here in Kuwait surprised me:
To denote that the bus's route included trips to Salmiya, the area where I happen to live, and then back again, the sign read: 'Salmiya and her opposite,' ('سالمية و عكسها'). We simply would not use that phrase, translated literally, in English. In terms of any discussion of Heideggerian presencing or even dialectics, this is significant: Residing in the most common signifier for 'opposite' in formal Arabic is a residual and abiding notion of circuity. Does this fashion of signifying opposition in Arabic not partake less in an operation of concealment than does its equivalent in English? As evidenced rather perfectly in the Anglophone signification, opposition tends to suppress the contingency of its poles.
"So I walk into a conference for comp lit and see this little indian woman holding part of her sari and telling a small attentive clutch of academics, "well, sometimes i wear it over my left but" (and here she swings the end over her shoulder) "i usually wrap it around the right."GAYATRI!She's sitting right in front of me, and I have this impossible desire to stroke her bright dyed red hair."
Hossein 'Hoder' Derakhshan, of Editor:Myself, long hailed in the Anglophone world as the young Iranian blogger par excellence, needs to drop out of graduate school. Those of us who have kept up with the Tehran-born penman's posts have watched on in horror as names like Laclau and Foucault have crept with increasing regularity onto Editor:Myself. In one recent post Derakhshan implores us to read Laclau and Mouffe's 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to illuminate, presumably, the various futilities that inhere in revolt. Indeed - and surely unaware of the irony given his newfound hostility to reformist forces in his country of birth - Hoder has taken to posting entire articles from Foucault's largely - and mercifully - ignored 1978 dispatches from Tehran, later published in Corriere della Sera. He's even shown hostility to the recent activity in Lhasa.
By no coincidence, Hoder's reformist stock has precipitously declined. Indeed, 'Ahmadinejad made Bush show respect to Iran,' reads the title of one recent post, and, commenting on a piece about the president's base, Hoder writes that he was 'simply brought...into tears' and proceeds to perform a contrition of sorts: 'I really regret the time I was so against him as a result of reading so much crappy "journalism" that the reformists and their foreign allies have been publishing....'
The culprit?
'I have started a Masters programme in Media studies at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London this Autumn. The wonderful thing about this programme is that it is structured under Anthropology with a post-colonial and post-structuralist leaning. So all of us are going through an amazing experience of breaking our previous Euro-American centric intellectual habits or knowledge structures that has been imposed on us for decades.'
Oh dear. Hoder's creeping nationalism and growing intolerance for opposition in general seems to have found an intellectual buttress of sorts. Seems being central here. Laclau, who was a professor of mine at Northwestern, may have limited sympathy for what we might call 'authoritarianism in the South' - I vaguely remember him leaving the seminar for a week to do some consulting with the Venezuelan government - but I doubt he would be quite so charitable in this case.'Worse - and immanently, we might say - Hoder's lack of nuanced sympathy for the Iranian opposition (we are surely not all obligated to love Voice of America) suggests that he has fallen victim to a problematic with which Heidegger was fixated and which Derrida would later give the full treatment: That is, encountering opposition without simply effecting a reversal and therefore a reproduction of that precise hierarchy. The Buddhist schools have also been acutely aware of the problem. We have, I suppose, seen Hoder on both poles. Rather, we must, as Derrida writes in Spurs, consider the operation that Heidegger identified with Umdrehung, 'in which the opposition which has been submitted to reversal is itself suppressed.'
Of course, there are plenty of reasons to admire Ahmadinejad - most of them just happen to be aesthetic.
