Elisions and Traces:

"Exercise in 'P'" or "Packing"

2007-08-09T16:11:32Z

punctilious permanence pervades present presence preventing preparatory processes progressing painfully, pointlessly, powerlessly, parading paradigms performing Parsifal pandering ponderously picking pitiful preformances prompting preservation.

"Exercise in 'R'"--or-- "Recognitions"

2007-08-05T23:27:41Z

Rapid rotations render revised results.
Reckon "reminitions redeemed."
Resolute reconnoitering reveals repulsive rubbish:
rubberized rudiments retaining reverberations
recalling renaissances ripped, returned, retained.
Retrace. Record.
Rancid reveries rebound,
rudders replace remembrances,
refined rewordings, riding roughly-ridden roads 'round round recollections.

"Response to 'Exercise in 'S'"

2007-08-01T18:45:43Z

Such silliness sputters spasmatically; staggering stupidly; serving selfish sarcifice; strangling synonomous semblances; stirring severity; stymied syllogisms; sickly, smoky, studiously serene shit.

"Exercise with 'S'"

2007-08-01T17:29:13Z

static
sounding serious
self-searching
summons spires
siddeling sideways
sinking stinking silt
sucks sonorous
symptoms speaking
silently seethingly spittle
slashing soak
surrounds somnambulistic
seeking scratching surfaces
silky slickly sealed
surviving streams steamy
suffocating seeing
still sprawled spread
supple
solid
sensuous sleek
slipping
stranding searches stopped
stilted
sojourns
seeping sweated shrill
screams speaking self-same
Same Self

palexfire @ 2007-07-13T12:06:00

2007-07-13T16:07:01Z

Brief note:
Palindromes is a movie to see.
A wonderful film about pedophilia, abortion, Christian fundamentalism, "homes"/belonging, love, revenge.
And identity.
One girl. Multiple actors.
Taking its name from the main character, Aviva, Palindromes spans religion, race, age, and gender to present the chaotic "inner life"(?) of a __ year-old girl(?) who wishes to become a mother.
We even are given a Pessimist's genetic determinism--
(He--the pessimist--of course is the black sheep cousin accused of child molestation)--
to ease(?)/(heighten?) our worries that Aviva is just a "troubled youth" and not representative of us, the viewer.
A fun film which only comes together, I think, in the last moments of the film.
I do enjoy those.
One thing was lacking: the absence of subtitles. Apparently my hearing is shot to shit.

Justice: American Style

2007-07-03T15:40:00Z

Lewis "Scooter" Libby receives a commuted sentance from President George W. Bush.
30 months in jail is apparently "too excessive" a punishment for the man responsible for the CIA leak.
Or at least the guy who took the fall for the CIA leak.
The question, then is, for me at least, what constitutes an "excessive" sentance?
Perhaps, "excessive" punishment applies to white, male, friends of powerful white men.
Unless President Bush plans on commuting all of those (usually black, poor) men and women who are appealing their cases on countless points.
I don't think so.
That is "just" punishment. For "them" ("their kind").

A sadness so real, that it populates...

2007-06-29T01:56:59Z

Why would he come
back through the park?
You thought that you saw him
but no, you did not.
It's not him who comes across the sea to find you
not him who would know where in London to find you.

A sadness so real that it populates
the city
and leaves you homeless again
Steam from the cup
and snow on the path.
The seasons have passed
from present to past.
...
Why would he come
back through the park?
You throught that you saw him
but no, you did not.
Who can be sure
of anything through
the distance that keeps you
from knowing
the truth.

Why would you think
your boy could become
the man who would make you sure
he was the one.
My one...

Lucio Fontana

2007-06-18T02:41:18Z

How an Italian artist expressed:...
"Expectations"

A gash: a wound: a space which cannot be occupied...

All that is solid melts into air...

2007-05-31T01:23:04Z

It is strange: In a sense, the ability to state: I will, or I willed it as such, also requires that one accept a past that has led up to the ability to state: I willed it as such; are we more than the sum total of our lived experience? no. And thus, to say "I do", the very use of the individuating pronoun, is to posit the "I" that is the result of this lived experience.

And perhaps this is the source of desperate denials of responsibility.

If to say, "Yes" is to tacitly acknowledge and affirm a past--the content of which is most often riddled with memories burned into our very flesh with the irons of humiliation, shame, regret--then is there any doubt why a "Yes" is so rarely and boldly uttered?

Isn't this where Sartre is most precient insight in to "Bad Faith"? I posit an "I" I do not truly wish to posit: to do so is to accept the necessity of a past I am not reconciled with, and may never be.
...

Three cheers for the Underground!

2007-05-30T15:19:55Z

Broken Social Scene: on the play list at an American Eagle subsidiary.

I wonder what new "authentic" expression of meaning and resistance will be colonized next.

Dive deeper.

or at least read Marx.

palexfire @ 2006-08-31T15:38:00

2006-08-31T19:38:57Z

Holderlin is better than Tennyson. For the record. Being German helps. And WRITING BETTER POETRY! ;-)

palexfire @ 2006-08-31T15:28:00

2006-08-31T19:28:25Z

HAPPY 21st BIRTHDAY RACHIE!!! WOO-HOOO!!!

palexfire @ 2006-08-07T11:15:00

2006-08-07T15:15:25Z

Home...
Goodness I am tired.
And poor.

Last Post before Leaving (part II?)

2006-07-17T19:18:21Z

Oh well. Here I go.

palexfire @ 2006-07-17T10:25:00

2006-07-17T14:25:09Z

Well, I am all ready, almost.
At least I'm ready to be ready to go.
"The more you try to erase me
the more
oh the more that I appear."

Kierkegaard Knew:

2006-07-15T05:48:04Z

Kierkegaard knew that with the death of God was not an actual death: how does the eternal die? Rather, Kierkegaard knew that what had died was the public "presence" of God. Reason was elevated above God in the Enlightenment, faith in anything was considered unexamined prejudice and scorned. It is Hegel, however, that discovers that the Enlightenment project itself was little more than a "replacement" for God, that blind faith in God had been replaced by blind faith in Reason. The attempt to eliminate the need to believe is exposed as nothing less than belief itself, only now as a belief in the finite capacities of humans, i.e., Reason.
When Nietzsche declares "God is dead" his aphoristic analysis comes at the point when humanity despairs not over the death of God but in its own capacities, these very abilities having been exposed as fraudulent. Nietzsche's analysis notes the shift from a despair over the death of God to a despair over the futility of finding meaning in anything once God--who had thus been the "giver of meaning"--is dead. His analysis is so declarative because he sees the desire to return to a time where God was something that could be believed in, in a despair over the crumbling of meaning itself. It isn't God's death that is certain, not in-itself. Rather, it is the longing for an ability to believe in God that truly announces the "death of God." (Nietzsche famously quotes Democritus who states in a surviving fragment: "[speaking as the "super-sensory"] crude senses you wish to over throw me, but with the death of my world comes the death of your own."--this is a rough paraphrase] What Nietzsche sees around him is a "decadence", a decline in social and individual vitality, he sees the rise of hedonism, the always already failed attempts to re-establish a believable God, and the rise of the Nation-State as that "encompassing" entity that bestows meaning onto its citizens. The Nation-State Nietzsche calls "The New Idol" (in part one of Zarathustra).
Nietzsche thus embarks on an effort to "revaluate values," to invert Christianity, to locate meaning in the very life process itself, rather than in the "transcendent". The problem with this effort, a seemingly valiant attempt to "revitalize" humanity by focusing on health, on steadfastness in one's decisions, in a "will to power", and a "self-shaping", is simply that it is devoid of any ethics. While unpopular to say these days, Nazism, with its emphasis on "purity of blood" and "strength" derived from physical and mental prowess, is the logical conclusion of placing meaning in the life process itself. While Nietzsche himself would have been disgusted by the Nazis (he himself grouped anti-Semites with other such nasty folk as hedonists and rank nationalists) he would have been forced to state: "they misinterpreted my meaning." (It is not surprising then that Heidegger, who was himself an "active" member of the Nazi party, chose to focus on Nietzsche in his lecture course denouncing Nazism; it was his "subversive" distancing of himself from the Nazis.)
Nonetheless, as Hannah Arendt rightly states, morality has never been about life, but rather about a willingness to discount ones own life in the face of the Others. Certainly there are interpretations of Nietzsche that would locate a morality within his work, but the fact remains that this interpretation comes too late and requires a massive effort of re-interpretation. Thus, what remains of Nietzsche's legacy is not his "will to power" as such but his focus on a "genealogical method" of interpretation, on his emphasis on an "ascetic," self-shaping self, and his furious critique of Christianity and the other such idolatry that sprung up after the "death of God", i.e., Nationalism, hedonism, ect.

However, there is a contemporary of Nietzsche that interprets the problem of the death of God in a different manner. This is, of course, Kierkegaard. He saw the impossibility of a "communal faith"--he renounces the last rites from a Protestant priest, the very alternative to a monolithic and inert Catholicism.
Rather, he sees the difficulty posed by the "death of God" as a challenge to faith. He sees Hegel's critique and the vapidity of Reason as an all encompassing "grounding" or foundation for human existence. An example from Keikegaard's own life may be illuminating: He was in love with a woman who also was in love with him, and they were engaged to be married. However, Kiekegaard is incapable of actually consummating the engagement and they never marry. Where shall rationality be located in love? The answer of course is that it cannot be: love itself is a "passion", an irrational force dating back to the very first surviving Greek fragments, most notably Sappho (for an excellent analysis of eros (love) in Ancient Greece see Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet.)
However, Kierkegaard expands this very inability to chose out of the sphere of love and into the entirety of human choices and responsibility. He famously marks the difference between the Greeks and Modernity in Fear and Trembling with his comparison of Abraham and Agamemnon. The latter had a shared ethical framework to which he could appeal, whereas the former, Abraham, had to rely solely on faith in God when told he must sacrifice his son Isaac. Thus, as Abraham descends the mountain after he is stopped from his sacrifice, he is "silent": there is no one to whom he could appeal, nothing he could explain that would be "rationally" understood by his peers.
Many interpret Kiekegaard as a "Christian" existentialist because he locates the very silence of Abraham in the fact that Abraham could only appeal to God, that his relationship was so radically individualized that only God, to whom he resigned himself to in faith, could understand his actions (or attempted and aborted actions).
However, I find this to be a mischaracterization of Kierkegaard. The very location of appeal to the unknown providence of God essentially, in all practical matters, is to locate responsibility and judgment in the individual: faith comes as a belief that what one does is the right thing. However, in Kierkegaard's own case, he could not know if marrying his beloved was the right thing to do. He stood with "fear and trembling" at the precipice of his own decision: he could not act because he did not know how to act, because there was nothing and no one he could appeal to: his very existence was so radically individuated that he was alone, alienated from God and from other fellow humans.
So what are we to make of this radical despair over one's own very existence? How does Kierkegaard propose this existential conundrum be addressed?
To a certain extent Kierkegaard does not offer a solution, and his refusal of the last rites, I believe, demonstrates that he never reconciled himself to the absolute difference that lay before and separated every [hu]man and her world, community and her God.
But he never gives up his faith.
James, in typical pragmatic style, suggests a "will to believe." Of course this is as doomed as Nietzsche's "will to power": the will itself is contradictory: if Kierkegaard could not even will himself to marry, then how was he to take on the exponentially larger and more intense effort to "will himself to believe"? Thus we should not look to James for any help. Rather, we should stick with Kierkegaard, who rightly saw that for faith to be meaningful it must be devoid of any "willing": it must be immediate and "intuitive", it must not arise out of the individual but rather strike the individual from without and thus transform who she is "inside". After all, how can meaning be meaningful if it is fabricated, i.e., constructed by humans? Isn't this nothing less than another mirror in the fun house we have yet to smash? And this is Kierkegaard's (and Nietzsche's alike) critique: all the mirrors have been smashed, and thus we see nothing: nothing is behind the mirror and we ourselves are now deprived of any "reflection" of ourselves, distorted as it may be.
However, with the advent of the post-structuralist/deconstructionist/post-modern critique, it appears that there is nothing that can "arise" as if from no-where to offer meaning to the world and the relations of its inhabitants.
Which leaves us, still, with the despair over faith, with an inability to believe in anyone or anything. The world, as Zizek aptly describes it, has become "virtual": nothing is "real" any longer, not the voices of the singers on the radio, not the intention of our public officials, not even the daily existence of the capitalist "cog". It is as if the "real" is ever elusive, always "behind" something, which is behind something, which is behind something ad infinitum.

Which is to say: Kiekegaard knew that the problem of post-Modernity is that of faith, of belief in the face of the impossibility to believe in anything or derive meaning from anything. (Interestingly enough, Camus, in his essay "the Myth of Sisyphus", states--again, to paraphrase--"the problem of the 20th Century is that of suicide." Which is to say: the problem confronting the 20th Century is "why live at all if there is nothing meaningful to live for?" We may say with Camus that his optimism ought to be banished and his statement be extended into the 21st Century.)
The answer to this problem, I confess, alludes me. And terrifyingly so.

palexfire @ 2006-07-13T02:49:00

2006-07-13T06:49:05Z

Kierkegaard knew...

When the resolve to continue in the unknown with the (hope) expectation that the "end" which one...

2006-07-10T03:56:29Z

seeks will inevitably befall (or raise one up) has encountered the deformations of a blaise and monochome existence, where the only refuge is into the lips of a bottle and the pages of a book... pages are always printed black on white--at least in the books I read--and the vision of alcohol's fire is always pale yet surprising jagged (like a cracked pin's pressed imprint): the monochome persists, and I resent that I must persist in it still. Linger. Lunger. Lunge. Lugged. Luge. Luger. Looter. Lute-er. Lighter. Light. Lie. Lay. La. La. La-la-la: My brown eyed girl. Do you remember...?

That every poet be damned and every word written in earnest burned!
The lyric poem comes from the fact that the Ancient poets (Sappho, namely) would sing their poems with the accompaniment of a lyre. (Pronounced Liar? Or Leer? Or neither? Or eye-thur. N'aye-thur. The "i" follows the "e". I follow thee. Oh look at the rhymes. Oh tweedle-ee-dee!

And this is the basic problem of humanity: I follows the Thee. Shouldn't we all just admit that?
No, you shut-up there, you in the back! You only lead because you know you will be followed. Let's see you "so boldly strode without care..." if your train is absent, vanished, POOF! I didn't think so either. That's ok, though. You are in good company.

Aristotle presents us with (three? perhaps three) definitions of what it is to be human: rational, political, and capable of speech. In good democratic fashion I prove my point! Two-thirds majority!: politics and speech (logos) cannot take place in the absence of other people. And even if they could, what use would they be?

You may disagree with Aristotle. But that is an entirely different matter. And a foolish one at that! Jesus fucking-A, people! People. (Addressed: To the plural.)

Nancy has a book called being the singluar plural. I wonder what that means. My grammar is terrible. Clearly.

It is as hot as my body pressed against hers in this room. And there is no "pressed against hers" to justify this heat, this sweat, this terrible oppression of skin swollen with air and water and salt.

this is my last cigarette. I wrote you a new song. I don't think you will like it though.

Joe! Let's name our (fictional) band (you know the one: "we are so damn sexy and we know it; down-stroke/up-beat; what do you mean we suck?"): (ready?): "If My Lips Were Razors..." Maybe we could wear dresses. Give it an entirely new meaning. Or not. Either way. Or maybe that name sucks. I'll let you decide.

To bed!

Heidegger, Zizek, the Politics of the Real

2006-07-06T19:10:42Z

Well,
With Rachel, Joe and Lexy all off in Europe I have had the time (for better or worse) to indulge in my second favorite thing: reading.
Recently it has been Heidegger. I am re-reading Sein und Zeit (I thought I would be in Germany, but as things turned out I got a better offer!). Heidegger is fundamentally the thinker of the 20th Century. What that means remains to be fully developed/discovered. Having had the extensive Arendt, Aristotle, Hegel/Kant helps. It is also funny to see where, just from having read the introduction, Foucault, Derrida and other "post-modern"/"deconstructionists" have taken their ques from Heidegger's project.
I am also reading some Zizek (for light reading, of course). He was recommended to me by Matt, and with Morris having attended the Lacan seminar in London I wanted to see what--if anything--Zizek has to offer. I find that, at root, he is a Marxist. But his flights into the realm of psychoanalysis don't always help his thesis and sometimes even come off as a distraction. I also saw what Matt was complaining about! Zizek repeats entire paragraphs without any hesitation! Such sloppiness is troublesome. Plus, he needs to re-engage the Ancients (Heidegger's big lesson!) rather than flounder in the swamp of pop-culture.
About my own trip, however, I am still somewhat nervous. London should be ok because of Morris. And Paris isn't that terrible, really. Plus, my hostel is right in the heart of things (for better or worse). Italy will be wonderful! I can't wait for Venice, and Rome. But mostly Venice! And NOW! Now that I will be meeting Rachel et al in Pisciotta Italy will be even better!
I must brush up on my Italian, though. Maybe I will pick up Agamben or Vico in the original language, just to have it. We'll see!
Ciao!

Today, and counting...

2006-07-03T16:21:44Z

Well, after Joe leaves tonight at 5 it is just me here in NY.
The girls are doing well in Italy.
I'll be there soon. Today and two weeks.

Graduation and Beyond...

2006-05-23T16:21:09Z

Well it has been ages since I've updated this thing. Mostly because I was drowning in school work--I turned in my Aristotle paper at 7am the day of graduation! (I got an A on it though!!!)
Graduation itself was a mess! Mud and rain and lots of waiting around for things to happen. I was very, very nervous--goodness, could you imagine tripping or falling or slipping or something terrible like that?! I would have died!
But afterwards was awesome. Rachie came and my mom and dad and my sister, too. My grandma flew in from Florida and it was great to have them all there. After the marching and the calling of names and the enduring of dampness we all went out for dinner at the Bengal Tiger...mmmmmm. The BEST indian food EVER! We all had a great time. And my parents got to see Rachie for the first time in months--they were very excited and very happy... it was a super awesome evening.
After (over)eating Rachie and I headed up to Caitlin's house for some good old drinkin' and hangin' out! Again, good times!

I just found out, to my great pleasure, that I got an A+ on my senior project!!!!! And it has propelled me into honors! (though, as Joe and his bloody math predicted, not high honors, but I'll settle!)
I can't wait to see Morris in London! It will just be a blast!

My creative writing class is gonna be awesome. Rachel Simon is the best and we will have a great time. (not to mention an easy A!--hopefully!)

Rachie and I have started the summer right, at least thus far: Last night we saw an awesome hardcore show (very funny at points, slightly scary at others, but just a good time with some great music! And the Cataloisotialutas (whose name I can't rightly remember--clearly!) gave an awesome performance, and the lead singer was TOTALLY cool! In addition to great stage presence he was a genuinely nice guy! He made sure kids in the pit we ok, scolded a boy for punching another kid, and stopped mid-song to make sure some kid who had fallen down was picked up and ok! AND! He said: (and I quote) "Let's just remember we're all here to have fun, not to look cool." WHAT! A lead singer actually humble? A lead singer subverting the status of heroic demi-god? AWESOME!
Tonight is Murder By Death and that should be a great time, too!
I have a good feeling about this summer... :-)

Ok, off to shower and then to class!

Bamboooooooohzledddddd

2006-05-08T06:23:47Z

What a wonderful time! Sunshine, good music, AFI!!!! and great company. A perfect prelude to a summer of great times and monumental memories.
A well earned break from the thesis (which reads at 73 pages thus far) and other such work.
I ate my first ever fat cat's sandwich, and goodness me!-- need i say more?
Must sleep!
Judicial Board meeting at the ass crack of dawn.
Math test to take.
Thesis to finish (a penultimate section before the conclusion is all that stands in my way!)

Thanks, Rachie, I had a wonderful time! You rock as hard as AFI did tonight! (just in case you needed a concrete metaphor.)

Ich gehe zu Europa!

2006-04-22T19:19:21Z

It's official... well, almost. I get my confimation e-mail in an hour!
July 17th: Depart for Madrid from JFK
July 18th: Madrid to London

Then,
August 6th: Rome to Madrid (fl. 3605!!!)/Madrid to JFK (fl. 6253!!!)

Which gives me a good 3 weeks of bopping around, meeting Morris, seeing Germany and then dropping down to Rome, then up to VENICE!!!!
Wondeful! Prima! Wunderbar!

TO WORK!!!

The Enlightenment, Courage, and Honesty

2006-04-16T05:38:21Z

What does the contemporary non-analytic thought offer?
For some it is the legitimation of nihilism, for others the opprotunity to pass off slip-shod scholarship as studuious research.
Neither of these views interest me.

Contemporary thought, often called post-structuralism, post-existentialism or post-modernism, is a project of destruction, and this I find quite appealing. For some it is no less an extension of the Enlightenment project. However, what is being destroyed is the Enlightenment project itself. And for this reason I find it both provocative and incredibly fruitful.

The Enlightenment sought to ground man with his reason and nothing but that. Kant, of course, is the poster boy of this project. Tradition, dogma, culture; these things polluted man's sense of himself and blinded him, obscuring the pristine "self" that was caked over with bias, habit, fear. Descartes asks, "how can I know that I exist?"; Kant asks, "What is behind appearance?" The aim of this project is, as Sartre put it candidly, to become God. Plato mischeviously has Socrates say the "good" is what "participates" in the form of "The Good". Descartes says, in all seriousness, Man exists because he participates in something divine. Kant says, again, in all seriousness, Man is self-grounding because he has access, a part of him (his intellect) participates, in the Noumenal world.

Hegel wryly responds to Kant's question of "what exists beyond appearance?": Appearance. Absolute Knowledge is the rotation around, the dialectical manuneuvering through, appearance to appearance. What appears gives rise to its own appearance: the appearance is it.

Thus Hegel ends the Enlightenment project, that idolatry of Reason, by subsuming Reason under the forces of "history"--"History" taken in a broad sense as both observation and documentation: the philosopher is the story-teller.

But this raises the question: What story is being told? And Hegel hints towards this, but it is Nietzsche who articulates it most forcefully in the Genealogy: the story is of the formation of Modern man, of the Self. Like Hegel, Nietzsche sees the formation of modern man as a product of history, of forces clashing to produce a subject who feels, thinks and acts in the ways he does. But where Nietzsche and Hegel differ, of course, is in their final assessment of what these historico-cultural forces has produced.

For Hegel, the condition of Modern man is the apex of development. For Nietzsche it is a radical delipidation of Man: his culture has lost any depth, his communities lack passion or strength, his mind is a prison cell, and his desires are sublated into self-torture. Whereas Hegel thought Man had to develop out of and beyond the idolatry of the Enlightenment (speaking of courage, Hegel sneers: you replace one god with another more insidious one: your own reason. Erich Fromm, offering a distinctly Marxist reading of alienated labor, traces this back to the idolatry of the Judeo-Christian tradition, where by statues and relics were crafted and then imbued with divinity. His reading suggests that, in much the same way, Reason has been externalized, that is sterlized of all that makes it distinctly human, in the Enlightenment project: where culture is evident, the Enlightenment costumes it in the robes of Reason. For Hegel this is a slave mentality: the in-fighting of Self-Certainty--cf. Phenomenology.). Nietzsche, however, sees the answer in a revaluation: the entire project must be up-ended: we must actively undermine the pillars of tradition, the Enlightenment being first on that (very long) list.

The appropriation of Nietzsche has not been pretty. And that ignores the bastardization of his Will to Power that the Nazis took up. However, among those who engage seriously with his thought, Williams (who knew?!), Freud, Foucault, Adorno, Butler, Zizeck, Arendt, one sees a common thread between them: Man is NOT self-grounding, his courage is the result of his community and its values, and his actions, behaviors, desires, fears, feelings and thoughts are derivative of larger cultural and biological forces. I, these thinkers say, am not my own self.

Which raises the question: who am I?

This question is not the question of the Enlightenment, but rather of Ancient Greece: Socrates' quest to know himself. The thinking done with in the "post-" traditions seek to, as Foucault says in his essay on Nietzsche, trace the scars of culture, to expose the gaps, to open spaces where scabs are forming, to create new wounds in the body text that is the narrative of the West. They do this by attacking the fallacious notion that stasis is somehow indicative of a legitimacy, the seek to expose the currents that exist unseen under the surface: this is where the "self" exists: as the product of culture, of history, of community. It is appearance as the ground of what is apparant: being is being-in-the-world.

Psycho-analytic thought also identifies the fallacious notions of a) a static self and b) self-grounding autonomy. Freud's work on primary object relations and libinous attachment is a matter of showing the infant is invaded by the world he is thrown into: the infant's sense of self is derivative of a more primary sense that what he first experiences (i.e., the world) is not himself: his identity is established out of modalities of differentiation.

This invasion is never recovered from: within my own "self" (as a psychic constuct) are my parents, my friends, my lovers, my enemies... My self is infected with others, always already.

This is Williams' point when he says we are closer to the Ancient Greeks than we would like to admit. They saw that no person was self-grounding. Courage was a matter of accepting these influences and living up to them.

For us, however, blessed or cursed with Hegelian "interiority," our project casts courage as a matter of freeing ourselves from the poisonous influences of Judeo-Christianity, of Buddhism, of psudo-secular Enlightenment humanism. This is Nietzsche's will to power, his idea of a self-shaping man, of a revaluation of values. Where he fell short, I would risk suggesting, is that at the very moment he sought to over-come the forces that had shaped him, he forgot (or denied) the very grounds of human existence: if we are but the product of "historical" forces, then we do not exist in isolation. Nietzsche forgot, or did not want to accept, that he needed a community: of maybe he didn't: he refered to himself a an "untimely thinker": he was before his time, and thus, history denied him of his potential community.

Thus, courage for us must be, if we mean to be honest with ourselves, a willingness to engage in critique, of a personal deconstruction, of a weakening of our metaphysical fallacies which would proport us as Gods. It means building communities where exposure can be risked, where honesty prevails and where, like artists, the members of this community can shape their appearance-- that is: grow.

And it should be emphatically noted that courage, if it is to mean a damn, but first be a courage to judge, be it aesthetically, politically, morally. A community that aims at honesty, and which champions courage, cannot shirk from judgment.

Which brings up another issue: if judgments are rendered, a truly courageous and honest person would not then fall back onto the judgments established by apparatuses of, what Heidegger would call, "inauthenticity," of the "They." The attempt to create a novel form of communal existence, the effort of politics, is fragile, and, as one of my friends notes in his senior thesis, vulnerable to corruption and manipulation. However, while this vulnerability exists, it is not by any means a weakness: it is the structure of the human condition. The efforts of the "post" traditions is to reveal this: there is no "strength" such as God or the sovereign nation-state or the "Uber-Mensch." These are fantasies.

Butler calls calls our condition "precarious life" and for good reason. Life is precarious, the communities created by the living are subject to corruption from within and destruction from outside forces (natural and conventional). The hubris that Heraclitus saw was the hubris of those who sought to make "everything One" (like Parmenides), those who sought stasis outside of the city walls. This god-like arrogance is fitting: only Gods never change, nor are they subject to the whims of nature or of passions they cannot rectify or master. Heraclitus thought this Hubris ought to be extinguished, that it was more dangerous that a wild, raging fire.

I will dare to make a claim that is my own, with my own words, even though it is not very original: those who would sneer at the freedom offered by a loss of sovereignty are truly fools. As Heraclitus says, Man should not walk around as though he were asleep, because those who do live in a dream-like state: the idea of a radically self-making self is a dream, one which can only be actualized through great expenditures of violence, both to others and to this "made" self.

It takes courage to reveal one's self to others, and it takes courage to listen to their criticisms. It takes honesty to see if there is anything to what is said, and even more courage to act on it.

But it is cheap and the mark of what Nietzsche called "a small person" to exploit that honesty and courage. And more to the point, it isn't what a friend would do.

palexfire @ 2006-04-13T15:06:00

2006-04-13T19:06:16Z

I got my BIKE!!!
Talk about good times!
It is still in good condition and i still remember how to ride it!
Paying to park at work is a thing of the past, starting tonight!
Yippee!