Downloaded this Flyer at Adbusters

George Sorel didn’t call it the myth of the general strike for nothing: like any myth, it wields imaginative power, dangerous memory and expectation, symbolic-world-making energy, and
the promise of festival ecstasy.

Ran across this contemporary call for a general strike of our coercive consumption work: Buy Nothing Day, November 27, 2009, at Adbusters.

I am considering ways to join in, in spite of being out of town and en famille.

How do you feel about that?

As my life continues to implode, the last thing I need is another source of stress. So, naturally, I decided to count the days until I need to have a final draft of this dissertation approved and delivered to the Graduate School. That would be 127. As the overwhelming odds are that I’m going to live at least that long, it’s most likely I will not be spared the need to keep working on this, no matter how I feel about it.

La Dévotion Marianne

Just in time for Advent, realized yesterday that Mary was a radical revolutionary type.

This is not exactly how we were taught to think of Mary, and it goes against the meek mild self-effacing Mary of approximately 2000 years of western visual and devotional culture, particularly the last 200 or so years of holy card kitsch. But there is an in-your-face redistributive justice revolutionary ecstatic Mary in the text for the reading. Hidden in plain sight.

I have heard a LOT of preaching about Mary’s fear, acquiescence, willingness to set her own comfort etc. aside to accept the will of God. Not a lot about “He will be great,” or “called the Son of the Most High” or “the throne of his ancestor David” (the Great King, lest we forget) or “reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom there will be no end.” How do we miss that the promise of the annunciation is that Mary has a chance to be an instrumental, pivotal figure in a liberation drama with greatness and immortality as the payoff?

Her response is not oh, I’m not worthy. It’s more like — so, what’s the plan, and aren’t you forgetting something? And the “nothing will be impossible with God” line is what immediately precedes — should we suppose this is the deal-clincher? — her “OK, count me in” declaration.

Then, later in the chapter, the Magnificat contains lines that could be flying from the barricades:

Text Luke 1:46b-55 (NRSV):
My soul¹ magnifies the Lord,²
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor
on the lowliness of his servant.³
Surely, from now on
all generations will call me blessed;⁴
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud
in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful
from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.⁵
He has helped his servant Israel⁶
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.

Commentary:
¹ Greek is psyche, but would like to think we could think here the echoing Hebrew nephesh, less floaty body-transcendent mentation and more juicy embodied spirit.

² Greek kyrion presumably subbing for YHWH, for which I follow Johanna Bos in arguing is best translated as the Holy God or the Holy One. (See “Who Is The King of Glory” at Wimminwise for a little more on this.) Could add “the God of Israel,” recalling that “Israel” from Gen. 32 could be read “he strives [together] with God” or “God strives.” So it is arguably not wrong to think of this as a name-constellation that points to human-divine solidarity in strife.

³ Greek epiblepw for NRSV’s “looked with favor;” RSV has “regarded;” other candidates are “looked at, gazed upon, looked into the depths, considered, cared about” the tapeinwsin or “humiliation” of his servant. We probably ought to read this in remembrance of Ex. 3:7, where YHWH observes the misery of the people in Egypt and has known their sufferings. So, not so much to be read as God commending the intrinsic virtue of humility, as God noticing and taking action with respect to the social dislocation signified in humiliation.

⁴ My dictionary suggests “blessed” usually occurs in the sense of “privileged recipient of divine favor.” Two women in scripture before Mary are called blessed: Jael (Judges 4) and Judith. Both are assassins, of military oppressors. There’s a precedent for you.

⁵ Reversal and redistribution. No more “when the revolution comes,” this is it . . .

⁶ Initially the servant was Mary, but now, it’s Israel, for which Mary has become an emblem. But Israel is emblematic, in turn, of the people who strive [together] with God. [Should we note the literary parallels here with Isaiah 42, 44, 49, etc., which, while easy to be misconstrued, seem to be pretty strongly alluded to in this speech? "Strength with his arm"? Isaiah 51:9? Coincidence? Probably not. Exile, return, pattern, meaning.]

So, my whole mental picture of Mary has changed — she is looking a lot more like a union maid, a partisan, a member of the resistance, a revolutionary, a Zapatista . . . she is raising a fist, with “the hand that cradles the rock” . . . she means business. It puts Marian devotion in a whole new light.

Finally read my own blog (“possibly related posts”) and found out about an event a month ago to launch the publication of Atheism in Christianity. Well, maybe better late than never applies, since the book itself looks to be worth reading. The idea of atheism in Christianity is reminiscent of Bonhoeffer’s “religionless religion” — whatever that meant! (A short review of the work is online at Socialist Review, and a bit longer one at the Guardian, and both are generally favorable.)

Newell Rubbermaid's corporate self-image

Continuing to think about Deer Hunting with Jesus.

One point the text makes, at least implicitly, is that there is a limit to how far the cultural studies and cultural apparatuses approaches can get on their own. Relations of production matter. They are involved in the determination of the specific content of culture, however much other factors also come into play. Whoever ignores them does so at the peril of terminal irrelevance. Whoever would be rolling up their sleeves and wading into the mess that is our form of life with the thought in mind of lending a hand to the cleaning up best be respecting them.

That’s no solution, but it does seem to be something to keep in mind in thinking about what the territory to be traveled on the way to one will surely look like.

I read Deer Hunting with Jesus and hope you will, too.

I wish everyone would read this book.

My dad read it on his vacation last month. And told me about it. At length.

Found it at Barnes and Noble yesterday, recognized it, read it, like someone abducted by aliens. Sat in the Starbucks and surveyed the aisles of books and thought “none of the people this book is about come to places like this.” Wished I had a kleenex. Or a pipewrench.

I used to work for an advertising agency. (Everybody has to work somewhere.) One of our clients was Rubbermaid. (Setting and Big Other of Bageant’s Ch. 2)

I wish everyone would read this book.

And then do something about it.

Not exactly news. But this essay by Slavoj Žižek (found at Perverse Egalitarianism) explains its particular failure to materialize in the wake of the utopiphoria following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

“The same threat hangs over both [the content of the tradition and its receivers]: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” (Walter Benjamin, Thesis VI on the Philosophy of History)

“[Walter Benjamin] wanted all his life to learn Hebrew . . .”

(Source: Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, translated by Patrick Camiller (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994) 56.)

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and good life, satisfaction, help, comfort, refuge, healing, redemption, forgiveness, atonement, relief and salvation, for us and for all His people Israel; and let us say amen. May the One who makes peace to reign in the high heavens, grant in his mercy peace for us and for all his people Israel, and let us say, amen.

Happiness under the sign of suffering

In utopia, garden gnomes use their pointy red caps to mulch grass clippings and fall leaves, in a ratio of 500:1, and then disperse them around the bases of trees and along woodland tracks in the course of their lively nocturnal sports.

While they are not mowing, raking and mulching, humans occupy themselves with writing page after page of entertaining academic reflections, cooking tasty meals from scratch out of whole grains and vegetables with minimal fat and salt, and tickling their children.

A Glimpse of Paradise

Noting and trying to understand the relationship of Benjamin’s discussion of “idea” in the introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Agamben’s discussion of “idea” in Idea of Prose, and particularly in “The Idea of Appearance.” Here appearance is “beautiful,” inexplicable in any further way than through a hypothesis which “saves” it — insofar as it can be saved, or needs to be saved — for “a different understanding which now grasps it as it is in itself, anhypothetically, in its splendor.”¹ The appearance is sensible, but not in a sense in which something sensible is “presupposed by language and knowledge, but rather exposed in them, absolutely” such that the appearance stands in itself “the thing no longer separated from its intelligibility, but in the midst of it, . . . the idea, the thing itself.”²

Regardless of what might be thought of this representation of the idea of appearance as representation, or as idea, or as truth, it seems to demand reading in light of Benjamin’s image of Adam’s “action of naming things” in Paradise as a direct encounter with things in their intelligibility so that it “confirms the state of paradise as a state in which there is as yet no need to struggle with the communicative significance of words.”³

The struggle with the communicative significance of words — which Benjamin assigns to philosophy, and which is clearly philosophy’s political task — then explicitly characterizes a post-paradisaical state. No linguistic politics in Paradise.

On the other hand, the struggle with the communicative significance of words might be illustrated pretty well by the problem of the meaning of “die” in Genesis 2:17, 3:3, 3:4, and (negatively) 3:22. There are the coordinates of a paradigmatic story of linguistic politics and bad exegesis, suggesting that whatever fall out of the Paradise in which there was no struggle occurs earlier in the story. Just off stage? Or already with the setting up of an original need to manage communicative significance, in the encounter with a different subject of an encounter of things in their intelligibility.

Anyway, I uploaded my notes on the first few pages of the Origin etc.. Back to work . . .

¹ Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, translated by Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995) 122.
² Agamben, 123.
³ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1995) 37.