Am not for killing. Vegetarian and all that. Nevertheless. Just cannot accept that the interest (?) of the unborn in seeing the light of day must always compel the already born to finish the job.

Dulce et decorum

The politics of progress, “the future,” is always a politics of sacrifice. It is a politics of a specific kind of sacrifice. It’s the politics of the sacrifice of concrete actualities — of people with names and faces — to the abstract ideal.

This is not the question of “the individual” and “the collective.” It is the mystery — a mystery, because how can it be such a mystery — of the obscurity of the neighbor.

“The poor” is an abstraction. My neighbor, who asks me for a ride to the grocery store or Burger King, is not. She has a face and a name, and she recognizes mine.

Will those of us who observe the Friday before Easter ever get this if we keep calling that Friday “Good”?

(Who named it that, anyway?)

Looks like one of the neighbors.

The air has turned colder here. What was rain yesterday has turned to sparse flakes of snow this morning. The neighbors are complaining about the shocking emptiness of the bird feeder. Life is what happens while you’re making plans for how to salvage the last section of ch. 4 and figure out how to deal with the mandatory discussion of Irigaray’s religious imagery that you’d have thought since it was in the proposal would have been in the text by now.

Took a break and moved a stack of papers on my desk.

Found a meditation on passages in Song of Songs composed for the Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2007. Thought I would share it here.

Meditation on Song of Songs for Transgender Day of Remembrance 2007

There is a beautiful painting linked to Song of Songs (Song of Songs Verse III by Anna Ruth Henriques) that is part of the 2006 New Possessions exhibit, online at the Museum of the Americas.

[Anna Ruth Henriques has a website, as well. I like her work. It's all copyrighted.]

A little bit about me. I’m one of those people who strikes other people as someone who doesn’t need any help. Who is doing fine all on their own. Which is to say, in triage, I would be in the third of everyone who receives no attention whatsoever because no one thinks there are grounds for concern. To be fair, I strive to support this impression. Having a pathological aversion to asking for help, and having cultivated repressive defenses against any awareness of the need or desire for help, contributes.

It’s dystopian, and doesn’t conduce to actually finishing one’s dissertation.

So I have learned something after all, it seems. My take-away, as we used to say in advertising: It is probably wise to ask for assistance and advice as a matter of principle. It is probably wise to offer assistance, and to check for FAQ-type issues, even with people who seem to have their act totally together. As the Teacher said, “what is lacking cannot be counted” — you don’t know what you don’t know.

In memoriam
Jo Caula Gregg Thiessen
January 19, 1931 – July 18, 2004

Prov. 31:31

Is. 25:7

Noticed that Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference is a compilation of lectures given at Erasmus University in Rotterdam under the terms of the Jan Tinbergen chair. She details the terms in the foreword; the lectures were part of a course in philosophy titled “The Ethics of the Passions.”

This information seems significant from a utopian point of view. Erasmus was the intended recipient of Thomas More’s Utopia. The incorporation of “the passions,” the affects people suffer, also relates to utopia, at least if people take seriously the proposition that utopia has an intrinsic relationship to suffering, as its imaginative transformation.

Ethics of Sexual Difference as a whole can usefully be read as Irigaray’s extended reflection on the character and conditions for utopia.

Minor edits 2/5/10

Bizarrely, Samuel Beckett’s enunciation “Fail again. Fail better.” has now been taken as an affirmation of entrepreneurial spunk. (Saw it on Google, while checking for the source).

This is to commend tracking down sources.

Also found the arts portal Fail Better. It had some instructions on how to build a portal to another world, which seemed relevant.

Choreography

For Adorno, time is the place — where utopic practice, if there ever might be any, would take place.

For Agamben, following Benjamin, every space is potentially a place of messianic now-time. The question is what practice releases that time. Place is the time for utopic praxis.

Which place? Maybe one between-two that still needs to be built and cultivated, as pointed to (rather than identified, perhaps) by Irigaray.

That cultivation still seems to require the metaphysical, or perhaps poietic, practice that “would be possible only as a legible constellation of things in being” from which “it would get the material without which it would not be” and would bring those elements “into a configuration in which the elements unite to form a script.”*

Performance art. Liturgy.

*Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Ashton trans., 407.

Essential being under construction

When Heidegger says “spaces receive their essential being from places and not ‘from’ space,”* “essential being” clearly becomes something that depends on cultural activity, human activity, even (if you will) technē. Presumably OK, as long as one knows that. It might not be one’s first thought about how that term (“essential being,” that is) would be used.

Still, it seems to lend credence to Adorno’s point that existentialist usage takes some historically specific and particular state of being and ontologizes (eternalizes) it.

And perhaps it suggests that some of the palaver about “essentializing” and “essentialism” related to Irigaray might have needed to notice that she is responding to someone for whom “essence” might not have that much to do with something naturally and eternally present in the whatever existence is under consideration. If “essence” doesn’t include the idea “independent of culture or history” but precisely includes “something dependent on culture and history” then what was presumably a point of dispute becomes one no longer.

(*in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”)