New Barbarisms.

The following is a poem I wrote some time ago. It strikes me as in keeping with the general direction of this blog, as well as to the phantasmatic and pietistic nature of the internet in general and blogs in particular. The architectural setting of this poem is an apartment.

The Civilized Subject 

Confined to inner spaces 

I hear yelling on the stairs. 

Profane must be the places 

left outside. 

Architectonic races

To quell all our human cares. 

Insane must be the faces 

That don't hide. 

Sanctify the inner sphere 

I doubt everything but mind 

Phantom could be the worldly 

voice of God. 

Hearken to the other fear 

Doubt in doubt can even find

Caution could be but the surdly 

guise of fraud. 

Love, Not an Evil Thing

  Well, the latest of St.Margaret's Slater-Maguire lectures has come and gone and I am left to ponder what exactly it has to say to the current Canadian/Christian intellectual scene.
The speaker was one Father Raymond de Souza, a Catholic priest, economist and columnist for the National Post. He offered an overview of the latest of the papal encyclicals bearing upon the question of faith in the public sphere, namely John Paul II's Centesimus Annus and Benedict's Caritas et Veritate. De Souza, whose talk was entitled "What's Love Got to do with It: Charity and Economics" focused primarily on the latter document.
  I must admit that the title, as well as some of the phrases that were thrown around, logic of the gift for example, sounded exciting. However the thrust of the lecture seemed to be that "people should be good and moral and that religion is important to economics" without any substantive content being given to morality or religion. Moreover although de Souza recommended, following Benedict, that charity  be considered the prime virtue to govern the market he did not give body to the notion of charity. He repeatedly stressed that economics does not know what to do with gifts since they do not follow the logic of exchanges upon which economics trades.
  I questioned De Souza on this last point, since to my understanding a gift is a type of exchange, although certainly not a fixed exchange in the sense understood in a capitalist schematic. A gift is an exchange between friends - an exchange of love, whose return is non-identical and offered in full freedom of spirit. What is given in a true gift is, indeed, the giver herself, and in giving she does not decrease but becomes more fully human, particularly as the gift itself serves to open up a space of friendship and trust. That is the space that is Charity.
  De Souza, however, stressed that a gift is not an exchange because it must be completely gratuitous. By extension this seems to mean that the gift is something which cannot enrich the giver and must, by definition, deplete and diminish her. Moreover she cannot even feel a satisfaction of having done a noble sacrifice, since such satisfaction could be classified as a return, thereby sullying the gift with an aura of exchange. A gift in short is an absolute sacrifice towards which the sacrificer is utterly indifferent. This is unreasonable. It also sounds evil.
  By the end of the talk it seemed that religion and economics had been kept comfortably apart. The good was knowable and doable apart from religion. However religion was still very important because it proclaimed some kind of truth. Perhaps the truth was that Charity is important, that part was unclear, particularly since the gift never did make it into the economy and charity seemed to mean pretty much what it has come to mean in our age the handouts of the wealthy to the poor. While mention was made that every human person has some intrinsic dignity, nothing was offered as to how this could be shored up in practice.
  My main disappoint was actually not that no critique of capitalism or even any of the practices pursued was offered so much as that all the concepts etched out were essentially reduced to sentiment and intuition. Morality and religion were invoked as good and true, but we did not learn what they meant or how they were connected. The only time an explicit example of amorality was offered was an offhand reference to pornography. The gist was that pornography is intuitively wrong. No theological explanation was proffered.
  Throughout the lecture, in fact, it seemed that the only real theological reference made was to the fall of man and original sin. This was used as a gloss to explain away systemic evils and failures - they are simply an unavoidable result of original sin.
    To argue that our faith actually makes a difference I believe that we need to start taking ourselves much more seriously. And we should not be afraid when Love turns out to be hard and not at all in line with our current practices and systems.

On the Life of Pi,Religion, and an Eavesdropping Coffee Drinker

The character of Pi, in Yann Martel's novel the "Life of Pi" is to my mind a brilliant subversion of the standard (bland) liberal thesis on the freedom/equality of religions. Not content with the belaboured tolerance of modernity -to each her own, I have my truth you have yours etc - Pi becomes the dedicated devotee and practitioner of not one but three very distinct traditions- Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. In each case Pi experiences a profound and dramatic conversion tied to a specific social reality and community. The son of secular Hindu parents Pi a re-discovers  his ancestral tradition and its epic narratives. Through a friendship from a chance meeting Pi is moved by the power of the Muslim life ordered around daily prayers. And through the Christian school system in India he is drawn to the dramatic personalism of Christianity. In each case Pi's conversion are a result of specific situations, particular practices, and real friendships. Each encounter also carries with it a history, thousands of years of choices, customs, conflicts and alliances converging to form the present that is Pi. To these three we must hastily add a fourth encounter, that of Pi with his atheist biology teacher, in whom we find, perhaps, the unspoken truth of Pi's conglomerate belief system.

In an interesting and fruitful coincidence of terminology Alain Badiou's designated matheme for the present is the Greek symbol for pi.( I would write it in but I have not yet figured out how to insert symbols and non-Latin characters.) Badiou's formulation of the faithful subject is roughly as follows: A broken or fragmented body bears the trace of an Event in the production of a present. An event here must be understood not as a slight change or modification but something that really alters the fabric of reality. In an event something that was seen not to exist or to be of minimal (absolutely minimal) importance becomes of maximal importance, to the point that everything hinges around the event. To produce a present, moreover, is to produce something true, something that takes place in time and is yet eternal. If we follow Badiou a little further we find four generic truth-procedures, four fields in which a truth may be produced, namely art,love, politics, and science.

Superficially we might assign one of these areas to each of Pi's "religious" encounters respectively. It is the artistry and power of the Hindu epics that sways Pi to embrace Hinduism, it is the love and prayerful devotion of his friend Satish Kumar the invisible Muslim, the political urgency of the meteoric "God in a hurry" Christian faith, which is, not insignificantly, a part of the colonial education system. Finally, the other Satish Kumar, that ebullient polio-suffering atheist, bequeaths to Pi a hearty scientific enthusiasm.

There is more going on, of course. Hinduism makes truth claims about love and politics in the story, necessarily so given its context. The invisibility and devotion to prayer of the one Satish Kumar reflects the obvious over-abundance and naturalism of the other suggesting that the one is somehow the truth of the other. Religion, science - it's complexified. More than simple relationships, more than systems of truth and meaning, out of the multitudinous chaos an event has taken place and persists in a subject called Pi.

This is where the comparison with Badiou gets really interesting. Piscine Molitor Patel is the name given the central character by his parents. Pi is the name he dramatically gives to himself in order to avoid the teasing of his classmates. This renaming we could call the Pi -Event. Pi = 3.14 etc. Pi is a transcendental number and moreover an irrational number. The implications of this, taken together with a philosophy that propounds mathematics as the science of being qua being, are interesting if nothing else. Transcendental is the name Badiou gives to the concept which allows intensities of identity of a given world to be measured. And Pi, as the ratio of any given circle's circumference to its diameter, as well the ratio of a circle's area to radius squared, is precisely the transcendental index measuring the world of circles. How far one can take this comparison I am neither certain nor qualified. But to say that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter can be taken as a metaphor for a human subject is definitely possible. Certainly this is where Pi found himself, as a disappearing constant or ratio that judged/measured his surroundings not from the position of a space outside, but at the very core of the truth which he sought.

The second part of this story takes place in a small coffeeshop in Winnipeg and involves a Mormon with an eyepatch, a New Age lady, and, as the title of this post suggests a coffee drinker who couldn't keep his ears to himself. The upshot of the conversation I overheard, which I now largely forget though it was what provoked me to write this post in the first place, was basically that each of the two participants sought to show how tolerant they were and how there respective philosophies of religion were very expansive. Thus the pirate Mormon confessed to the arrogance of  baptizing the dead because in the afterlife they could be converted - an eternal mission field. The New Age lady responded saying that she was the more arrogant because she made room in her beliefs for his way of believing, and every other belief system. The conversation was polite, heartfelt, and genuine and, given the context- a yuppie intellectual coffeeshop, gave me the sensation of having partaken in something rather sinister. Religion, clearly, in this context was nothing more than a mind game, maybe a set of principles or a fascinating bit of history that we cling on to for nostalgic reasons, but certainly not a matter of life and death, and certainly not the result of an Event that staggeringly altered the very fabric of reality.
We'll be laughing together and having a pint in the afterlife they said in that cafe... but the lesson of Pi is that we have to face tigers on the open sea to know about this life.

Crime as Vocation

In a recent issue of the New Left Review I came across a delightful anecdote about Diogenes the Cynic. Meeting the Oracle at Delphi Diogenes is entrusted with the task of falsifying, or defacing, the common currency.
Upon further research of this story the details became murkier. Variations of the story run that Diogenes, or his father, were engaged in a literal defacing of coinage, and it was only afterwards - and after being exiled- that Diogenes was entrusted with his mandate by the oracle. Other readings go that Diogenes was supposed to "adulterate the political currency" but misunderstood and wrecked some money.

The version I like best is the one where Diogenes commits the  crime (defacing a coin) is punished with exile but learns from the Oracle that his petulant act is symbolic of an entire life of philosophical pursuit. The act, undertaken in haste - perhaps rage, perhaps confusion- takes on a life of its own. Or we could say, why not, that Diogenes act retroactively creates the possibility of the Oracle's command - or even of Cynic philosophy as such. What is inconceivable in philosophy - that is that falsifying or defacing would even have value as a philosophical pursuit- becomes possible after the act is undertaken by the philosopher.

In the aforementioned article - a review by Michael Hardt of Foucault's last lectures- Hardt follows the story with Foucault's interpretation of it - which takes the perspective that the slogan "falsify the currency"- is meant conceptually, playing on the similarity between the Greek words for currency and law. In other words the slogan means to revalue or "transvalue all values" so as to transform society.

As true as Foucault's rendering may be it does downplay the irony of the narrative. This great transvaluing begins with a simple and  petty crime - an act of defiance.
And in that small gesture we hear the voice of the gods.

The Gateway of Faith

It is not from thought that faith passes over into the heart, it is from practice that it draws down a divine light for the spirit. God acts in this action and that is why the thought that follows the act is richer by an infinity than that which precedes it. It has entered into a new world where no philosophical speculation can lead it or follow it. -Maurice Blondel 

The quote above, taken from the English translation of Blondel's dissertation - Action(1893) Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of practice, drives to the heart of Blondel's philosophy. A philosophy that posits neither a priority of theory nor of practice but a seamless unity which finds itself always-already infused with God/grace/Being. John Milbank dubs Blondel's philosophy a "supernatural pragmatics" stating that for Blondel the logic of every action demands the supernatural.

 But just to back up, why bring up Blondel at all? One could state a number of reasons. Blondel was instrumental in shaping the nouvelle theologie. Yves Congar, one of the theologians of that tradition, referred to Blondel as "the philosopher of Vatican II." No less significant was Blondel's contribution to philosophy -Oliva Blanchette notes that before Blondel "action" had all but disappeared from the philosophical vocabularly. In fact his thesis proposal was initially refused on the grounds that "action" was not a matter of philosophy. (Oliva Blanchette Translator's preface to Blondel's Action(1893)

No less important than Blondel's contributions was the hostility he met both from the religious and philosophical establishments. Berated as overly religous by many philosophers, and as intruding on the domain of the theology by many theologians, Blondel found himself besot on all sides. Because his philosophy stressed action as it did it also ran the risk of being written of as anti-intellectualism. It is this, perhaps most of all, that leads us to the crucial import of Blondel's lesson. In a time when anti-intellectualism is an increasing reality -culturally, politically, economically - and when the intellectual traditions, especially the universities, appear  disinterested in action, particularly as it relates to thought, Blondel's philosophy is timely once again.

 In what follows it is my intention to engage on this blog in a systematic study of Blondel's thought, through his dissertation L'Action, with the hope of framing the discussion -for today- of a supernatural pragmatics, a deepening of every action/thought. Life is not intended to be a stupid fragmented acts, yet it is also not a structure entirely determined before we walk it. With every good act our thought deepens, and as it does we are able to act better and in more fullness. Thus the gateway to faith is not merely belief in a set of principles, but an ever-deepening practice and rule of life.

It is up to us to work out our salvation in fear and trembling.

The Beginning

Thus it begins. One warm night in October I enter the world of blogging.
        Actually I "created" this blog probably over a month ago, without really understanding why or what exactly I was intending to do with it. I certainly have little interest in becoming another faceless voice on the internet expressing my snarky erudite opinion about everything from music, wine, and cheese to international politics and metaphysics. Neither am I particularly interested in drawing many readers and trying to make money or stimulate argument and conversation, though there is certainly some value to the latter. Perhaps that is part of the intention here.
        My main motivation was an obligation to writing, a directive both urged upon me by others and stemming from an inner compulsion that yet lacked the necessary form for discipline and the forum. Problematically I have always preferred reading to writing, a fault owing, no doubt, to my very unMontessorian education. Of course, as one of my great teachers once told me you have to write about something. I agree with this up to a point. What experience has taught me, and experience can teach us somethings if we reflect on it, is that the subject of writing, for me, has invariably turned into an essay in/on subjectivity itself.
        We do not stand outside our action, and writing must be a part of action, as a complete and self-sufficient entity. No, we are changed by what we do, by what we write. Every creation is also a self creation. It was Hegel's genius to realize that, as Badiou writes, "the True is 'self-becoming' and must be thought 'not only as substance but also and at the same time as subject.'"(Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 141) Of course, as Badiou goes on to note one of Hegel's challenges then becomes avoiding subjective mysticism - and here we must heed the words of my wise teacher - we must write about something. There must be substance as well as subjectivity. If the crime of the moderns or Enlightenment thinkers was the fall into "objective" dogmatism it might be said that our tendency now - the postmodern or whatever- is precisely to slip into the subjective mysticism - of the One as Badiou puts it - since we see connections and analogues everywhere. This entails a loss of rigour as substance is sacrificed to the pervasive insistence of subjectivity, that is to say basically a positing of the transcendental subject in an obfuscated, but nonetheless Kantian form - perhaps not so far from the moderns after all. Upon its insistence of its own primacy the subject is lost because, having no substance, it can again become that most objective of objects the commodity-form.
    This commodity-form of subjectivity (or if you like identity) is something we see increasingly in our world of late or cultural capitalism where it is ideas, cultures, and languages which are in numerous and frightening ways entering into the sphere of market capitalism. The classic example is, of course, the food court - all the exotic cultures etc. in the market square but having lost any real sense of difference and all subjected to the same shopping mall logic/existence. One may of course go further and look at various types of popular music or literature which can be of varying styles and yet all still purchasable, or choosable from the same massive producers (i.e. Amazon/Zondervan/SonyMusic) Actually the concept of style that is evoked, and here we should understand even the hallowed term lifestyle which seems like a supremely subjective instance - the concept of style is revealed to be a very precisely pre-packaged thing. Under the misguided assumption that we individuals create ourselves and choose who we want to be, we are produced by market conditions. We do not choose the music we like the industry chooses what we are allowed to like. Our very existence is produced by market forces beyond our control, if you like.
       No wonder I was concerned about writing a blog. There is no discernible authority on this vast network to engage my work, to critique it, to shape my subjectivity and its substance. There are only the countless faceless others and perhaps the "big Other" (Google?) who so ungraciously allow me to pretend to create myself as I spew a vacuous, disjointed, and altogether too long diatribe into this unforgiving and disembodied medium known as the internet or cyberspace. Come to think of it the internet is very like a subjective mysticism of the One. A pretense of equality and unity (of ideas and interests) which, in its largesse, takes the concreteness, the substance, the importance away from every voice.
Much like Democracy.