spikenard

Many rituals are ancient traditions and when we perform these ancient patterns it may seem that we are dancing with a corpse. Yet even the most ritualised act is, once more anew, produced in the activity. That is to say that the activity does not merely reproduce a ritual itself for itself. To the extent that ritual is part of life it cannot be purely ritual.

Ritual is not something performed by a puppet on a string, it is rather as if the puppet’s movement causes the strings hanging limply from their limbs to lift up and float above them: untethered in the air, in a trance of present history, only as if there were a puppeteer.

The ritual is given to me as a ritual but I give it back to the tradition from which it does not wholly derive. A tradition of ritual that is not wholly separable from my performance of the ritual. I give it back to that tradition through my performance, even though the performance is not purely votive and part of the ritual is always kept for myself. Not that I  choose to hold something back for myself or that there is something that could have been given that is not. So not by choice…but the ritual still remains mine.

Otherwise one is mugged by a ghost.

I came across this quotation this morning:

“Levinas, in a fundamental debate, reproaches Heidegger, as well as an entire tradition, for wrongly thinking death, in its very essence and in the first place, as annihilation.”

- Derrida, Aporias, pp. 13-14

Now I don’t know the technical details of the disagreement between Levinas and Heidegger to which Derrida here refers but it got me thinking about what is not annihilated in death. The first thing that comes to mind is the relationship to the person who is dead that continues after the event of the death. It is this odd relationship that structures grief.

The relationship to the dead is a strange relationship because in order for it to be a relationship there must be something that is being related to, there must be something to which the griever relates that is not annihilated in death. The history of the dead is not annihilated in death and neither is the habitus of our relationship to them. The relationship to what is not annihilated in death is also in some sense the object of the relationship itself – the intentional projection of our relatedness beyond ourselves makes it possible for grievers to relate to the externality of the relation itself. The misery of this self relation is part of what makes grief terrible but this is not to suggest that grief is only something terrible that we are trapped within. Grief is also beautiful in its solemn profundity, it is also an ode that we willingly gift to the dead. Our very willingness as givers constitutes the receiver that has not been annihilated in death.

The image comes to me of making a phone call to the person who has died. Their phone rings and the phone is picked up but they never speak.

When my mother died I often had dreams of her still being alive and happy, joking and chatting, but she would never hear me and would never speak to me. It was as if I were the ghost, not her.

I have reached that stage where everything I read infuriates me and I have no choice but to write myself so that I might either join myself to the din or abandon reading altogether. I have reached a point where I am so nauseated by everything that is said of Derrida – the philosopher of whom everything is said – that I must contradict certain descriptions that lack the neutrality of mere descriptions, or worse, are so disingenuously neutral that they embalm everything that was ever beautiful.

I cannot read the term post-structuralist one more time. I cannot read ‘the founder of deconstruction’ again. I hate all the pat little epitaphs ascribed by publishers on the dust covers of books. It is undeniable that these epitaphs are a kind of consensus and refined wisdom of many learned scholars – it is because this is undeniably the case, it is because these things are approximately true and have been repeated so often that they stink of a truism and hence of fallacy (for all truisms are necessarily false), that I must write a polemic.

What I write will not be the most true – at least it will not be cursed with that particular mundanity – it will perhaps be a little interesting and provide some relief like an overdue shit. This will not be another polemic against Derrida, that insipid cow path genre, nor will it be a polemic for Derrida or one that tracks a parralel to the trajectory of his thought. It is rather a polemic with both a certain affinity for Derrida and against a certain idea of Derrida. A certain idea of Derrida yet not just an idea for it is an idea of Derrida with which Derrida himself overlaps. To the extent that the epitaphs I must disagree with have been somewhat intelligent and somewhat sensible descriptions of Derrida’s work, which is to say to the extent that these truisms are almost true, and that Derrida himself has given some cause for them I must necessarily disagree with Derrida also.

The task is infeasible and somewhat antithetical to the mode of a dutiful scholar so I shall instead be an undutiful one. I shall use scholarship at times but make no claim to scholarship myself. It will make far more sense to disagree with much of what I say than to agree with it but sometimes it is most strategic to say something that is not true as if it were true that has not been said in order to shake up the dust. This shall be my polemic somewhat involving Derrida.

this is an eight warhead multiple re-entry vehicle intercontinental balistic missile test. the newspeak paradox is peacemaker but i prefer man-made astrology. normally i wouldn’t use the phrase man-made. i hate it when people write man instead of human. even if you’re not a feminist that’s a straightforward conceptual mistake. man-made makes it sound like men own and control the means of production.

(an assertion that aproximates the truth but sometimes it’s worth avoiding the rider on assertions of apparent fact – that it is natural or intractable or to be tolerated through resignation. resignation isn’t an option for those that hold no position to resign from. resignation is just death and when it becomes both options – where to act is to fail, to fail is to succeed – life comes to know itself as slight remainder. madness and absurdity and desperate profound necessity. factual assertions are by definition tied up with the falsity they reject. they try to put ethics out of play. don’t lie to me. derrida writes that language is that which cannot be parenthesised. so this is the direction in which the truth of my explanation lies.)

but man-made seems strangely appropriate – even if only in this – the blue tonal palette of the long night exposure. the scale beyond scale. a parabolic symmetry streaking through clouds. how far have these arcs fallen to this nuclear horizon?

“astrology is a group of systems, traditions, and beliefs in which knowledge of the apparent relative positions of celestial bodies and related details is held to be useful in understanding, interpreting, and organizing information about personality, human affairs, and other terrestrial matters.”

thoughtless cerebral playing with stars. celebrity death match. careful crisis creation of european science; that god is death. “now i am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

“Oppenheimer was invited to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task that he threw himself into with full vigor. At this time he renounced what he called his “left-wing wanderings” to concentrate on his responsibilities”

there was nothing wrong with your wanderings. turn the lights out. get lost. try to stumble a bit more. skin your knee. fuck yourself up. a little less precision. a little less concentration. what have you found, by losing  your loss, what responsibility did your uranium concentration rob from us robert?

power is like uranium. in the natural state its so widely distributed that its ill effects join the ambient cosmic difficulties. when man concentrates it, centralises it, he creates the self perpetuating violence of the state. the nuclear bomb is violence. not only the horror shimmer, hiroshima, but every test, every plan, every process of enrichment, every peace made diktat by peacemakers is violence. its a concentration of power that cannot be disposed of and cannot be defused. it is the existence of the threat.

it was only four years from the lost wanderings of 1941 to “now i am become death” in 1945 and only one year until 1946 when this photograph of all the smiling nazi rocket scientists was taken at an air force base in america where they had been recruited to continue developing hitlers second vengence weapon. just whistle while you work.

so when one states that auschwitz was liberated do we mean that the survivors of auschwitz were released or do we mean that auschwitz itself was set free? if they don’t tattoo it on our arm and let us keep our names will we still feel dehumanised when they give us our numbers? tax numbers, employee numbers, student numbers, mortgage account numbers, credit card debt numbers. if the barbwire fences are set far enough apart will we be able to tell when we’re between them? a single barb wire fence divides the global south from the global north and we are one half damned and the other half trapped within the camp it designates.

putting a man on the moon is the same level of rocketry required to land a nuclear missile on russia – on those that kept wandering and ended up so far away that the urgent truth of the mistake must be sent after them with as much advanced primitive precision as possible. one small step for man, one giant fuck up for all humankind. we keep wandering and they keep tracking us by satellite.

so was armstrongs footprint planted in lunar dust or in the promised fallout dusting moscow four inches deep? was the american flag planted in the sea of tranquility or in the ashes of hiroshima? shall the meaning of the event be constructed as facts or as morality?

blue astrology makes me crash my bike.

“when i was young my mother told me never to stare at the sun. so one day i did.”

the greeks had an elaborate system of myth to contextualise and determine their culture. one might wonder how the greeks ever believed in the fanciful stories of their own myths but this is like asking how the greeks ever believed in their own culture. the culturemyth is – but also is not – a matter of mere belief.

now the greeks are themselves a kind of myth used to contextualise and determine european society. the undecidability of the relation of the culturemyth to belief is concealed in the distinction between myth and history. this is the distinction that allows one to doubt the reality of the greek myth while making it possible to take for granted that european society is culturally derived from greek society. this is now no longer possible.

consider also how culture is reified in the present – how the myth of polis that denies its own status as myth creates the reality of politics. to rework the myth in a way that undoes the old myth through a new myth: the birth of the city state in ancient greece is also the birth of urbanism – the daily encounter of the stranger or, rephrased more pointedly, the domestication of otherness – is the end of the very polis that greece is credited with having initiated. it is the impossibility of the inoperative community. this is the premythology of politics.

there is something strange about education, about actually studying history rather than just assuming it. the more you learn about the culturemyth the more insubstantial it seems. when you read hegel, marx, derrida and these figures become determined and lose their cultural mystery – their cultural mythstory – then you approach the boundaries of thought within the culturemyth. you meet the delimitation of the culturemyth. encountering this limit is encountering the radically unknowable, the radical absence of all knowing and consciousness, it is the ecounter with the prospect of death. without being able to really think the outside – because the real outside is the outside of all possible thought (at least all of our possible thought as individuals) – you realise the reality of the outside. this is just a reiteration, or remarking, of death as the only certainty.

when you seize the culturemyth as such – when you attempt this reduction – you encounter the reality which is nothingness. i have made this elaborate approach to a single [feeling or intuition or experience or negotiation of the text] that through this approach i have tried to give some specificity or communicability: there is nothing beyond the culturemyth.

i’m honestly interested in whether i am alone in this. can you feel the outside too? can you feel the hollowness of all the theories you have absorbed? can you look out at the world and see the great nothingness of it all? can you marvel at the people going places where they think they need to be? can you see all the buildings built for nothing? can you think all the thoughts thought for nothing? the absence of society, the polis, the police? the reality of the crisis.

breathe – its ok. in the nothingness of all theories of reality is the reality of nothingness and the coincidence of the two. the nothingness is really there. imagine the invisible tree behind the phenomenon of the tree behind the theory of the tree reflecting photons. imagine being the stranger walking beside you in the street experiencing you walking beside them in the street as they experience walking in the street in a way that isn’t quite the same as your experience of walking in the street beside them – an experience that is both just a few feet parallel to your own and radically, unknowably, different – and how here in the possibility and limitations of imagination you experience the reality of the difference, the reality of nothingness, and that’s it!

there is nothing [else!]

…then, of course, you pick up another book and it turns out that the thinker you thought you already understood is always richer in detail than you previously believed and the details change the understanding you thought you had. that the encounter with the outside was really just the encounter with your own ignorance. it’s like the mental image you have of a place before you get there and the reality of how the place actually looks when you do. there is always more concrete and more bricks that you expected in your minds eye. the facticity of it overwhelms my presumption. as i move from a historical sense to actual history it is revealed to me that the limits of my stupidity are the limits of my world.

a sudden gust blows autumnal leaves skidding

over my feet fleeing the city like rats

“We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.” -Michel Foucault

Hegel is the ultimate philosopher of the ultimate. All negation and opposition is included within his conception of the absolute. Hegel is the thinker that claims to master all contradictions. His thought is the system that re-appropriates all alterity and all opposition. This is what leads to Foucault’s philosophic nightmare.

Derrida’s strategy to escape the nightmare is first obliquity or marginality. To obviously oppose  Hegel is to be within Hegel’s way of thinking but to work obliquely, in the margins as it were, can begin  to begin in a way that is not determined within the tradition. Consider, for example, how Derrida discusses Marx  only by discussing the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Specters of Marx. A literary resonance of relevance is developed between the spectre of Hamlet’s father and the specter of Marxism rather than an explicit philosophical opposition to Fukuyama’s claim that humanity has reached the end of history with the collapse of Soviet Russia.

Derrida’s second strategy is to not oppose Hegel from the outside but to show the limitations of Hegel from the inside. Derrida inhabit’s the Hegelian system in order to show the imperfection of the aufhebung. An imperfection that demonstrates the differance that cannot be recuperated within Hegel’s system – the reality of history beyond the reality of the present. The aporia that there is no aporia.

Last night I dreamt you scarred yourself so deeply that you wanted to die so that you could be reborn. An ability special to your family. From that giant old house you retrieved a revolver with a metre long octagonal barrel and chain hoist trigger action. You held the barrel against your head and I helped you to operate the mechanism. Winding deadly springs, slowly rotating the cylinder, each long second filled with a sudden violent promise. Womb. Thump. The bullet flew up the long barrel and exited with a noise like a palm striking the opening of a plastic pipe. It went through your beautiful face, your beautiful mind. That bullet hit your capoeira dancing soul. You died and were reborn. But you no longer knew me your friend.

Imagine being the tongue trapped behind teeth that will not open. Sharp lower incisors closed to the roof of the mouth. You cut yourself even just trying to find a way out. You can’t form enough of a point to lever a gap. Your soft subtlety that prays so well cannot overcome even a rotten tooth. So you say nothing. You pray nothing. Only wish the teeth to open. I must speak to you again my friend.