“Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements [stoicheion] of the world” – Galations 4:3
“In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths [stoicheion] of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!” – Hebrews 5:12
In the synagogue there was a man possessed by a demon, an impure spirit. He cried out at the top of his voice, “Go away! What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”
“Be quiet!” Jesus said sternly. “Come out of him!” Then the demon threw the man down before them all and came out without injuring him. – Luke 4:33
“The indivisible element , the atomos… is the stoicheion, a word designating the graphic thing as well as the mark, the letter, the trait, or the point.”
“ I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival [la vie est survie]. To survive in the usual sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.”
“Vintery, mintery, cuttery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn
Wire, briar, limber lock,
Three geese in a flock,
One flew East, one flew West,
One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest
O-U-T spells OUT
Goose swoops down and
Plucks you out…”
The merry pranksters idea of search>research is incredibly aligned with deconstruction and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the term “personal computer” came from the guys going around doing acid tests bingo bongo congo diamonds in the ruff ruff whose that dog?
In Writing and Difference he claims that Freud and psychoanalysis are determined by language. That the unconscious was bound to be born by the very consequence of how consciousness is defined. Derrida is saying that not only is something like the unconscious determined by the shadow of the conscious as an object for study, a word, organically weaving into its possibilities, its un-, sub-, super-, etc., but as a subject in its own history. Consider the development in Foucault’s Heideggarian hermeneutical bibliography, tracing the story of insanity through the years in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, only now Derrida is thinking of consciousness as it applies to itself and knows itself as itself. This goes to show Derrida’s eligibility to discuss on these matters because Freud would agree. For Freud the discovery of the unconscious was not in that (you) wanted to kill your father and rape your mother, but that you had become Oedipus, that unconscious is much more public property than we like to imagine, and thats without saying it should or shouldn’t be this way, but as that what determines the ethos of your surroundings will determine what you know (conscious), and what you don’t know you know (unconscious). So for Derrida it’s not only the interrogation of a word, a symptom to be interpreted, here conscious and there unconscious, this structure and that necessity for the other to be self and referential, but the matrimony of the one and therefore, by necessity, the other, not just within the determination of language in its very ontology, as ontic facts coordinated on a legible map, but in the very qualitative contact with the actual “conscious” and “unconscious” experience. I mean I can see how the unconscious was always determined by the conscious, but the idea that this conjugation manifesting within the womb of grammar and syntax itself is what I know as my conscious and unconscious life? Holy fuck.
The split between nature and culture, embedded in Levi Strauss’ work, facilitate themselves by their dependence on each other and furthermore that their significance can only be understood in this cohabitation. By choosing one over the other, the system by which both become known as themselves becomes incoherent. It’s almost as if the moment one were to choose, nature or culture, use-value or exchange-value, right wing or left wing, myth or logos, the very choice would choose that which is no longer there to be chosen. By denying the antonym, one displaces the subject entirely. It’s not a matter of settling with both, or by making a truce between opposites, but by acknowledging that this game is at heart of structured incoherence. It is a body of thought that was doomed to fail when the side of its very own came upon itself. In the dream to dominate and subdue the Other, the half that remains is the dream itself.
In Playing and Reality Winnicott interprets in a really great way the important findings in the 40s-50s regarding non-purposive activity. He gives the example of a world renowned artist that may be good at his job yet fails to find meaning to the solutions in his life. And he says that the role of the psychiatrist was to enable a space for the patient to encounter themselves, through play, that is non-purposive activity. What he says is the children who can’t do this, that is encounter themselves by self engagement, have a fundamental distrust for their environment, and so become frigid and distant. So the psychiatrist creates an environment where they can relax. But what he adds is that it isn’t so the child can ‘learn to play’, or so the psychologist can ‘interpret their play’, but for this very personal encounter with themselves. As if play was a moment of reclaiming ones sovereignty over oneself, ones own powers and creativity. No matter what solutions the patient may create, the important thing is they find it in themselves the capacity to create them. This self empowerment is the real aim of the total integration of the subject with their environment. The interpretation of this or that behavior is supplementary at best, according to Winnicott. The real goal is the child/patients encounter with themselves, that is key for healing, and it can only take place when the child/patient feels a sense of trust with their environment. Winnicott says that succeeding in making the child/patient relax is the real milestone. Because in being able to play, to freely associate, they have found their abilities, capabilities and possibilities. The play is transitional, he calls it the transitional object(s), whats transcendent is the human being feeling a sense of safety to act from themself, as opposed to fear. That at the core of “who we are” is the ability to act for ourself, empowerment, that means the ability to create our own solutions. Problems arise when the child/patient is no longer creative enough to make solutions due to a distrust with their environment. The problems, therefore, aren’t missing a solution from the outside but an empowerment from the inside. And Winnicotts studies prove that when the child/patient is relaxed, feeling safe, their ability to solve their own problems (which they did) wasn’t the big achievement, solving of an individual problem wasn’t as important as the encounter with that creative part of themselves that reminds them of their capacity to help themselves. A space to discover ones own capacity for creation. That capacity is a permanent solution, it’s transcendental. And according to Winnicott, the best way to do that is to make sure they feel safe, and that the environment is one they can trust, that won’t turn on them and try to hurt them, and that the space they need to encounter themselves, even if it’s just to “play”, is a holy space. Play, taken seriously, is not “interpreted nonsense” or “organized chaos”, but the encounter with the creative force that is both somatic (bodily) and psychic (mental). In the Quran I find this total integration of the self/ the world / the heavenly realms. The remembrance of Allah is to see properly, and the voice that Allah uses to reveal his message is your own. So that by remembering Allah you encounter your powers, giving yourself the gift of Allah also means receiving the gift from Allah. A space for an encounter, that is creative, that is a new experience, therefore non-purposive, cannot be alieved by definition, but by relaxation established in trust, not so that chaos is allowed or that nonsense becomes organized, as a defense against anxiety. A concomitants with, as a creative, the encounter with all.
“Someone to whom I recently showed my glass beehive, with its movement like the main gear wheel of a clock…
Someone who saw the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious maddened commotion of the nurse bees over the nests, the teeming bridges and stairways of wax, the invading spirals of the queen, the endlessly varied and repetitive labors of the swarm, the relentless yet ineffectual toil, the fevered comings and goings, the call to sleep always ignored, undermining the next day’s work, the final repose of death far from a place that tolerates neither sickness nor tombs…
Someone who observed these things after the initial astonishment had passed, quickly looked away with an expression of indescribable sadness and horror.”
Those still teaching Heidegger to MIT students studying AI should know there are big surprises to be made in post-structuralism in regards to engineering AI. Heideggers ontology seems on point with Ponty covering the embodiment gap: Dasein and disclosure, embodiment and perception. Heidegger is right when he uses the phrase ‘always already’- “we are are always already in the world”, the moment we try to analyze we are already putting ourselves to ourselves, and this is especially true in works of Ponty who makes it manifest by talking about perception, specifically in how there is always already a frame that any experience whatsoever can manifest in the shape of whatever (yes very Kantian) but i think Ponty, goes a step further with Heidegger (for example, people who lost a limb but still experience pain in the arm that is missing). This is speculative philosophy coming to fruition. I think Post-structuralism reaches its climax with Derrida, and the short of it is that what we come to think has already been thought out by the very nature of language itself and that the present hammer was always already a hammer whether it discloses itself or not. As long as we are searching we will find meaning because meaning itself is what propels any search whatsoever. The feedback loop that AI engineers talk about is already there, we aren’t creating AI, we are in a way manifesting “intelligence, logos, nous” proper. Anyways, feedback loops are key, because that’s how we process information and continue the process of processing and meta-processing, programs that can correct themselves of errors. Michael Hofstadter’s books ‘I Am A Strange Loop’ and ‘Godel, Escher, Bach’ go into this a lot better. So with machines, like Silicon Valley start ups, most of they’re expenses go to electricity because those machines need to be running night and day to process all that fucking information. I remember hearing how the sex scene in fight club took nine months to process, with the computers running constantly for that long. I think Derrida comes into say that, the present/absent distinction is invented, there’s isn’t a moment of awareness or intelligence, that we are constantly running and AI would have to be too. Intelligence isn’t a ‘function feature’, and neither is it a moment of awareness when we are awake, we are constantly processing information even in sleep, in dreams. The metaphysics of presence collapses. If you really gave life to AI there wouldn’t be an off switch, the moment you turned it on, in order for it to Be, it would have to run and grow like a child, soaking in information and fixing it, building on it, relearning and recalibrating at thought-speed.
“And the soul, unsupervised
wants to levitate in free flights
in the enchanted circle of night
living deeply and thousandfold.”
Read Bernard Stiegler. The problem began when humans became instruments to instrumentality. The way knowledge is set up, the secular scientific dissection of the body in medicine was itself the spirit of an orientation toward life by discourse developing within a discipline that lost sight of the sanctity of life. When humans became instruments, when we began to serve technology, from the very foundation that saw knowledge as an extension of conquest, the earth as a means to resources, institutions as an end for the triumph of ideology rooted not in welfare of the people or the care of the planet and the beings therein but the consolidation of power through modes of disciplined by our idolatry around certain discourses (race, class, aptitude, etc.) Capitalism and that rehearsed debate is a conflict taking place within a story that has spread far and wide for no other reason than it was the fruition of what intelligent men came up with. Today we have marx’s, einstien’s, Freud’s by the dozen, their analyses get lost in the donated boxes found outside public libraries in the early mornings. The question is a question concerning technology, technicity itself, not especially in the form of tools or engineering, but as an orientation toward life, toward each other. We call ourselves “human beings”, we being to a “species”, we participate in an “economy”. We are Indian givers in the world of ideas, and those who question normalacy itself, as history shows, find that there is much work to be done, that the terms we pass around like balls are no more than a sport so that we can entertain ourselves with the belief that we are engaged with the questions. How often do we really question though? Not rehearse, but really ask ourselves our own questions. That would presuppose we let our own memory speak, to really reflect and search for the meaning of that individual experience that is always inherently yours and not a game.
I address it to Searle. But where is he? Do I know him? He may never even read this question. If he does, it will be after many others, myself included, and perhaps without understanding it. Perhaps he will understand it only in part and without judging it to be quite serious. Others will probably read it after him. How is all that possible? What does it imply? That is precisely what interests me. When I say that I do not know John R. Searle, that is not ” literally” “true. ” For that would seem to mean that I have never met him “in person,” “physically,” and yet I am not sure of that, with all these colloquia; moreover, although I have read some of his work (more, in any case, than he seems to have read of mine-my first compliment),what I read in “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply To Derrida,” strikes me as being very familiar. It is as if I had known him forever. I will have occasion to return to this strange, uncanny familiarity.
Is being sexy important? Is sexiness a part of beauty? I acknowledge how right the romantics were, except their ignoring this part. The Greeks didn’t ignore it. The church is to blame for shunning it. And the modern age is exploiting it because academics unknowingly treat it like the church did. Business students are taught three words: scalability, sustainability, and most importantly (to my surprise) sexiness. The word sexy is the same in both French, German and Spanish. Derrida said that if there was anything he would have wanted to know about the masters it was their sex life: why does Hegel and Heidegger present themselves asexual in their work? In Plato’s dialogue ‘Parmenides’ Socrates acknowledges Parmenides and Zeno as being very attractive for their age. Freud takes for his whole study the theme of sex as a symptom to be interpreted when he contemplates, not a woman’s breasts, but her cleavage. Among all the prophets, from Abraham to David, Jesus to Mohammed, all we’re acknowledged to be very attractive and even very beautiful. Perhaps sexy? Makes me laugh to say that, but why? Why does sexiness make us giggle and glee? A woman may hold her devotion to her guy, but to the man she finds sexy she has to force herself not to obsess. Any explanation leaning toward degeneracy, that sexy is a symptom of the fornication obsessed is itself codified by a prudish ideology. Sexiness is more attraction then temptation. We may be tempted to do the wrong thing, but no one can say they are attracted to it. At the heart of Empedocles cosmology is Love and Strife, Love akin to attraction. Being attractive is one thing, but sexy? So powerful is it that we find on the subject either demonization, or its transmutation into something more tame (I.e. beauty, attraction, etc.), or just silence. Fiction does a great job, but any Philosophy? I have read great works in marketing, they talk about glamour, and mystery, touch on sexiness, but nothing as serious as I am seeing it. It seems to me that sexiness is not only just part or a even great part of the good life and happy life, but that the good and happy life are inherently sexy. “All art is erotic”, is not the same true of life?
Levinas talks a lot about the Other. The Other that we can never get around to. Philosophy and knowledge itself always presupposes the Other but tries to claim it, tries to subdue it and make it enter its system. This is inherently predatory and a reflection of the West in general. On a personal level it’s not respectful. Respect, hospitality, these are what we give to the Other as Other, as something we can never get around. Well Derrida turns this. Derrida claims that there is a part of ourselves that remains Other, that the very notion of identity is inherently a ploy of language by the way knowledge has been set up, as Levinas describes. This ties to Derrida’s idea of “metaphysics of presence” that we think of “who we are” as this moment, where as that’s not true. It’s not just that, as in the cogito, the (i) in the beginning of ‘I think therefore i am’ is not the same as the last (i) in that sentence, but that this (i) itself is a product of a writing that writes itself into itself. Difference is the condition for identity but also deference. Identity is not only located within differences but as itself always defers to something beyond it-self. The thing always escapes.
I don’t know how to put it, but I just can’t get it through my head that here and now is really here and now. Or that I am really me. It doesn’t quite hit home. It’s always this way. Only much later on does it ever come together. For the last ten years, it’s been like this.
Incarnation means in + carne, to make flesh. The metamorphosis of Jesus of Nazareth into God is the salvation of the soul from indifference. Only a positive infinity can lift the trace, sublimate it into a corporate identity. A reconstitution of the subject through hope, through life, where the work of the law, which is always broken and is why there is any need for law, is displaced by the law of the spirit of life, and this then frees us from the slavery to fear. A hope is unseen. Lacan agrees with Freud, the ego is constituted in fear. The abundance of the ethereal realms is always obstructed by an orientation that is bound by limits, only indirect access is available. The struggle is the constituting element. The son is not a master signifier. The word is not the transcendental signified. That is onto-theology. The bodily register, the image as “i”, these belong to the symbolic and imaginary respectively. Direct excess- “Abba” (Father)- the reconstituting of the subject as a child of God, the body of sin/the body of death is displaced in the resurrection life of the spirit. Paul says “the ‘i’ has been crucified”, “ We have our sights set on that which is unseen”. Seeing through our ears, auditory presentation in the instant, that always comes as proof of a future, a redemption. Aquinas and Barthes agree that Being is always analogous. The logos as the sublimation of the trace is theological.
The increase of occasions in which holy matter erupted with blood, tears, and other signs of animation was of course predicated on the proliferation of devotional objects themselves; relics, images, contact relics, miracle hosts, etc. The tendency for holy matter to come alive was both a problem and an opportunity for theologians, preachers, and ordinary worshippers. But transformation miracles were a threat on a more metaphysical level as well. For Matter is by definition locatable, temporal, changeable. The Christian God is by definition immutable, transcendent. Yet the Christian God is able to Redeem, not merely to transcend the material. Hence corruptible matter must be, impossibly, inconceivably, paradoxically, capable of incorruption. By definition partable, matter must be capable of eternal wholeness. One consequence of this paradox: Christianity’s insistence on material fragmentation as a way of conveying and distributing the holy while embedding this insistence in the idea of concomitance, the idea that part is whole. Decay was feared, repressed, denied. Partition was sublimated. Yet fragmentation was central to the Christian cult of holy matter. However much Christians disclaim or obfuscate the disintegration brought by putrefaction and partition, they were busy dividing bodies for religious purposes. Over the course of the early Middle Ages, actual and metaphorical partition of holy objects became central to piety.
From an interpretation of “Le Roman de la Rose” (Romance of the Rose) 1230AD
Uncovering the vagina as “revealing the relics.” The lovers sword penetrates those relics which are located between the ladies legs. But the legs have become the pillars of a temple, her unveiling and sexual initiation is explicitly rendered as a tearing of the temple curtain and entry into the tabernacle.
Relic partition and distribution, host desecration charges, partable burial of kings and cardinals as well as saints, the fragmentation of Christ’s body into five wounds in poetry and visual presentation, all suggest that such thinking was more than a theological doctrine. Concomitance was a habit of mind. The habit of concomitant thinking was deeply imbedded in medieval assumptions about what the Material is. Because it was understood to be that which changes, matter was threat and opportunity: a threat because it decays, an opportunity because change is manifestation of the new. Matter is the place where what was seems to depart, yet it is also the place where life can be born. Astonishing things can erupt in it. It can even renew itself or return from decay to life in resurrection miracles or resurrection of healing of lost body parts. The assumption that part is whole is closely connected to this understanding of the Material. For concomitance is in way a sense of defeating the threat of matter while making explicable, even profiting from, the occasion it provides for new life. Concomitant thinking assumes that vision does not desttroy what was, partition does not kill, distribution does not dissolve identity. Identity, wholeness, is-ness continues through partition, and indeed the act of partition can be that which produces new life, which is not just continuity, but the flowering of the living which contradicts the decay, which in other ways partition seems to signal. The Cardinal or King whose head is in one church while his bones are in another is the same is the same Cardinal or King present in two places. Part is not inert, it is potentially alive as well as potentially whole. Hence partition and distribution can proceed for each part carries the fullness of power. When people behaved as if wall paintings were animate or hosts bled, just as when they theorized that Christ or the Saint resided in every fragment of itself, they were so to speak performing the habit of concomitance. The paradox is, if human beings are to gain access to and express ultimate significance, whether religious or moral, it must be done through matter, and matter presents itself, to those who live in it, the fundamental problem of how we can find wholeness in material stuff that is by definition that which decays and divides.
“[…] the beginning is unbegotten, for that which is begotten has a beginning; but the beginning is begotten of nothing, for if it were begotten of something, then the begotten would not come from a beginning. But if unbegotten, it must also be indestructible; for if beginning were destroyed, there could be no beginning out of anything, nor anything out of a beginning; and all things must have a beginning. And therefore the self-moving is the beginning of motion; and this can neither be destroyed nor begotten, else the whole heavens and all creation would collapse and stand still, and never again have motion or birth. But if the self-moving is proved to be immortal, he who affirms that self-motion is the very idea and essence of the soul will not be put to confusion. For the body which is moved from without is soulless; but that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul. But if this be true, must not the soul be the self-moving, and therefore of necessity unbegotten and immortal?”
The idea of an origin naïvely presupposes a writing that is meant to find its own origin. It is writing that makes the idea of an origin possible. That writing must be pre-supposed in the very formulation of origins. An unwritten language is inconceivable. All languages have to be able to repeat, have some static semblance, subject verb object, object verb subject, verb object subject, etc. in this way, this organization in order for differences to play out, in order for speech to say anything, is itself written. The grapheme, gram, etc., is the legibility of what writing does, not what writing is. What can be spoken ‘makes sense’ only because it is organized, it follows in sequence, it refers and defers, and this organization, chronology, referring and deferring is itself writing whether or not it ever becomes written. This is what makes the study of writing so interesting. What does writing do? It speaks a language? And this language can be written, whether it ever is or not. If it cannot, it cannot be a language, it cannot speak. What can be spoken must always already be prepared to make itself explicit, and this explication is what we mean by writing. Yet how could that be, if what makes this explication possible is the possibility of its legibility in uniform sign? No doubt the communication between birds and bees, and the unzipping of genes, passing all (A, C, T, G) bases, are in uniform order to be read. For those who know, and are able to make the word flesh, it’s only as hard as it needs to be.
The successive discoveries surrounding archaea, horizontal gene transfer, endosymbiosis, the microbiome and all the rest constitute a new view of life. A lot of sedimentary rock is crumbling. The recent discoveries in genetics lead to more questions and more interestingly on questions we thought were delivered. Such as gene transfer. In Darwinian evolution the reproduction of the gene is all that matters because in that model all life means is the survival of the gene. Dawkins book The Selfish Gene is an entire system based on viewing life this way, of human evolution being in constant orientation to survival and therefore reproduction. Human beings and the history of human beings is oriented from the view that all of nature is one big causal thread from microorganisms to the Human Being, and this for the sake of the survival of the genes through reproduction. Acts of sacrifice too were sublimated as proof of instincts in the species that make everything subservient to the survival of the gene. Human beings are no different than chimps because we share alot of the same genes for example. But we share more genes with Bananas. Are human beings also bananas? The human being has around 21000 genes. A rice seed has three times that many. Does that mean a rice seed is more complex than a human being? A third of the genes in the human being are called “junk”, because we literally have no idea what it’s there for. More questions. The most interesting is horizontal gene transfer. So genes don’t just pass by reproduction, meaning there are genes in you that were not inherited, they did not come from your parents or your “ancestry”. Where did they come from? Well we know how they come, transformation, transduction, and conjugation- and what this means is that genes show up out of nowhere. What’s more is that the idea of life being a Darwinian process of natural selection still makes a lot of sense in the animal kingdom, but for human beings it’s entirely lacking, especially now that we are developing the abilities to not only sequence genes, but repair and even alter genes. Meaning we are attempting to make contact with the fundamental building blocks of life that appear to be engineering the transmission and selection of genes while we as human beings are also at the precipice of altering and mastering genes ourself. One wonders whether the guiding principle isn’t the same from first to last.
“And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to.”
ov1d.com 