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Ascolo Parodites
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Credere, pastores, levibus nolite puellis; Phyllida Mopsus habet, Lycidan habet ultima rerum:
love can only endure in the extremity of despair and destitution; it needs this absurdity in order
not to fall victim to the objective madness, poros. The unrestricted openness to experience inwhich despair is both sewn and bolstered, amounts to self-abandonment in which the vanquished
rediscovers itself as the object of some love as yet inaccessible to it; just as the children of
Medea who, in giving themselves over to their mother as instruments of her revenge, find in her
the semblance of a love as yet inaccessible to them, but which nonetheless they are compelled to
accede for no other reason than, by virtue of the sheer grotesquery of their mother's thought, they
could not absorb her injustice. Excess of love is alone the proof of love: that is the most
foreboding lesson, which we should take from Medea's children. Even the blooming vine lies the
moment that its flower is seen without 'O caecitatem immensame. O atram ingeniorum
calignem.' [Laguna's Europa Heauten Timorumene] Even the innocent appreciation of a young
girl becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously perverse, and there is no longer love except
in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in the unalleviated consciousness of negativity
holding fast to the possibility of agapeic being, even if that may be illusory. This malignant
deeper meaning of levity, canis festinas, caecos parit catulos, [Johannes Sinapius in Adversus
Ignavium, Et Sordes Eorum sint De Pane Lucrando] should call back to diffidence every act of
spontaneity and self abandonment, for such impetuosity implies pliancy towards the superior
Apollonian image of the 'beauty of illusion.' The mode of despair and love's desplacement is one
of katharsis, for what would trepidation of our fellow creature be that was not measured by the
immeasurable love which it illicits in us? It is through the image of iniquity, of unjust suffering,
that our love for the first time is expressed within the consciousness of its own importunity. Love
is bound to the principium individuationis of self-abandonment, the image of iniquity, which
abolishes itself out of its own consistency: love grants to perennial despair as much right to
express itself as the martyr has to scream, none whatsoever. Yet love is not so dreadful because it
simply has turned its back upon the existence of iniquity, utterly squeezed dry, but because it
does not do so energetically enough, because it is squeezed just as dry, because the satisfactions
which it pretends to give, converge with the humiliation of reality, with renunciation. Separated
from the immanent logic of the object, love turns into something produced on tap, as Anteros,
viz. the reform of ameliorable feelings of neediness, conterbunial transfiguration, thereby
simultaneously tangible and void. The silence imposed by despair, a silence only hallowed by
Eros, does not impose the silence of paralysis, it does not impose, at least originally, the implicit
and unacknowledged consent to the injustice passively witnessed; it imposes what Adorno calls
the velleity of conscience, an affectivity completely isolated from any transcendental meaning.
Empathy, extended in this way towards the voiceless and forgotten of history's catastrophe,
amounts to the fulfillment of a pure reason within the practical order of human catastrophe,
which perhaps owes more to the problem of evil than to the enigmas of the Chinese calender.
Beyond the magic circle of identitarian philosophy, the transcendental subject can be deciphered
as Eros unaware of his importunity, of the necessity to stand for and take the account of the
voiceless and forgotten, who thereby fulfills himself in agape as a sort of transcendental
deduction from the practical order of human catastrophes. Such ignorance is implied by the very
principle of Medean self-abandonment. Ever since penia and poros were disunited in the sign of
the dominant mind, Eros, the sign of the justified privilege of the masculine, the separated mind
has been obliged to vindicate the very claim to dominate what it derives from the thesis that it is
primary and original- and to forget the source of its claim in iniquity, lest the claim lapse into
despair again. Deep down, Eros feels that its stable dominance is not mental rule at all, that is
ultima ratio lies in the physical force at its disposal. On pain of perdition, however, it must not
put its secret into words. Because it is the possible truth of the apropos of agape, of universallove for mankind, the unimaginable catastrophe of world-history preserves the reality of my
empathy towards the suffering of others beyond the consciousness of my merely possessing it,
and more particularly the reality of injustice beyond the feelings of shame and guilt. Despair may
be properly defined, that moment of conscience which opposes to the equalitarian experience of
love, and the magic circle of identitarian philosophy, the graduated experience of shame, and by
virtue of the total consistency of this opposition reveals to love the moment of its objective truth,
its incommensurability with the genuine image, of the truth of iniquity: Eros then registers its
object, the fellow man, dia Phaidron and unmediatedly, through the daemon and its non-intuitive
concept, as desire, and therefor as something extrinsic to itself, something incommensurable, the
latter to which Eros relates as coldly as to the moral catastrophe; even as Stesichorus, to avoid
becoming blind, exonerates the beautiful Helen from her responsibility for the Trojan War. The
consciousness of love, on the other hand, congealed into the apparition of waking thought, arises
from the decomposition of the empathic response into despair and the image of iniquity,
respectively. The incommensurability effected thereby, between love and iniquity, is the very
constitution of the moment of love's objective realization: this moment snaps us out of our
merely subjective affectation towards individual woman, for instance, and reintroduces us to
despair proper, and to the apropos of a universal love for all mankind. One therein, through love,
experiences the shock, that the deeper, the more powerfully love penetrates the depths of the
world's nightmare to redeem it of its iniquity, the greater the waking suspicion that it would be
distancing itself from how things really are. To treat the oneiric as an object of discursive
thought would be heinous: in it the moment of the supplementary in love can be bodily felt, the
image of iniquity which supplements love but which, by virtue of the consistency of its
opposition to it, is incommensurable with love. Bodily, because it is the anxiety and despair,
hyperbolized well beyond its mere veniality, of the unbearable pain inflicted upon on
individuals, even after love, as an intellectual form of empathizing, is on the point of
disappearing. Medea, the first wholly self-aware and despondently self-reflecting individual,
experienced her own self as an ultimately destructive power when carried outside the bounds of
her own country and her ancient God. In her the absolute experience of the individual as the self,
and the awareness of the self's usurpatory and murderous potential, when deprived of its essence
as something capable of political and social impact, are coincided and reduced to silence, to
passive consent to whatever use is being made of the murderous powers of the will. Medea
herself claims that she was bound to break the codes. The separation of theodicy and the
possibility of consoling victims of the unspeakable, which makes it possible to say, blessed are
these vain little Elihus, hypostasizes the historically achieved subsumption of human compassion
to its completely negativized form, soteriology. By contrast, it is probably the case today that,
because the individual no longer exists, the usurpatory and murderous potential of the will, of
individual power, has become something wholly incommensurable with the entire order of
personal life, the annihilation of a nothing. The immanent affectivity in the human being,
completely isolated from any transcendental meaning, is the staging grounds of despair. In this
inescapably dense affectivity human beings perceive iniquity solely as something extrinsic and
alien to them, without illusions as to its commensurability with their life. They cannot absorb the
fact of slavery and exploitation. An oblique, severed, and even paradoxical piece of hope clings
to this fascinatio nugacitatis, however, as something which might be preserved from from such
an illusion: precisely because injustice does not, as in Levinas, constitute the entirety of
existence, one experiences iniquity and its emissaries, slavery, exploitation, and murder, asheterogeneous, ego-alien. Yet, all of the elements of the erotic life existed long before the latter
came into existence: affection, companionship, pleasure. Eros can pride itself on having
energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of akrasia into the sphere of
immanent affectivity, on making this a principle, on divesting those elements of of their
obtrusive naivetes and in opening them up to false universality of transcendence, which is
already circulus vitiosus. The more absolute it became, the more semblant of agape it appeared,
the more ruthless it was in excusing perverse existences, and thereby in forcing the new minotaur
to pronounce the values of the old; the more elevated it became, the more impossible katharsis
became. It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes, the truth of iniquity, the truth of
injustice, can without it reproduce as a lie within it; as a love that is wholly just, a love that does
not betray its place anywhere in the earth, as agape. The worst in levity, 'romance' as such, is not
a decadent form of erotic life. Anyone who complains that it is a betryal of the ideal of pure
expression of family and marriage, who complains that it is merely a celebration of all the baser
and more transient affectivites of love, is under an illusion about society. The purity of the
romantic passivity, which hypostasized itself as a world of freedom in contrast to the total
impotence which romantic idealism presented with respect to the world of material, was from the
beginning bought with the exclusion of real suffering, of the whole sphere of material
participations, and even acknowledgements- with whose cause, the real universality, eros keeps
faith precisely by its freedom from the end of the false universality. Agape has been withheld
from those for whom the hardship and iniquity of life make a mockery of ero's bad infinity of
violence and revenge, and who must be glad to use time not under the bane of such inquity to
quietly contemplate it. This is the type of the misanthrope. Eros has ever been the shadow of the
world's pain. It is the social bad conscience of the iniquity and alienation of human life. Since the
Platonic doctrine of Eros was formulated, idealistic thinks have understood the 'the unrest at
heart' as the sense of distance, and of great longing, but they have not understood it, as in
Christian Faith, as homesickness, as the pain of banishment, as the result of alienation from God.
This truth is only given in the fact of the bad conscience or the sense of guilt which is the merely
passive aspect of the legalistic existence. The truth which this iniquity lacked necessarily,
because of its underlying social premises, gives Eros, in all his self-justification, even to the
point of romanticism, the semblance of legitmacy. The division itself, at the heart of penia, of
lack, is the truth; the truth of iniquity, the truth of injustice, and ultimately, of death: it does at
least express the negativity of the society which the different spheres, eros and thanatos, desire
and death, constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing eros into thanatos,
or vice versa. But that is what romantic idealism attempts, and the Greek concept, in poets,-
anangnorisis, foreshadows. For Holderlin, Empedocles- the one who defies the measure of
mortal life, is in the wrong; whereas the lover is always he who loves beyond measure. Whereas
the sacrifice that Medea's children bring is glorious, covetous pain is taken to ensure that her
children are not themselves spared a sacrifice. Hecate's power, which subjects Artemis to her and
makes him obedient, becomes her obedience to Artemis who, in renunciation of Iphigenia, and in
the attempt to transform her into 'his Hekate,' refuses to submit to her. The influence over nature
and man which the poet ascribed to the goddess Hekate dwindles to become mere sorcery - and
even clever foresight as far as the enchantress Medea is concerned. Justice cannot be measured
by the mere adherence to those laws to which the Pharisean conscience equates itself. It is not
justice, as in Kant, which is a moral category, but intellect. Thus to the very extent that justice
surpasses what is merely sanctioned and legitimate, the impugnation of Mammonism surpassesthe resources of the guilt and the shame least satisfied with themselves. For the height of the
Pharisean conscience lies in the ability and in the willingness to contradict, even with enmity,
what is sanctioned or canonical, in daring to commit the act which exceeds the bounds of the
law, the unjustifiable, apart from which justice cannot be taken as a simple antinomianism. For,
to stand in the midst of this expertus metuit of life, and of the whole profound suspicion and rich
ellipsis of creation without daring, without trembling with the craving and rapture of such daring,
without the audacity to smart upon the name of the injustice with the varia vita est of the
unjustifiable; without at least hating the person who so dares, perhaps even finding him faintly
amusing - that is what I feel to be contemptible. Woe, when you long for your youth: is it like the
sailor, who longs for dry lands, or is it out of fear, like Odysseus, under the bane of Poseidon?--
the fear even of the "human freedom" which everywhere in the humanity of matured vision,
seems to deride itself of its very inclination; in liability, in commitment, etc. All of this, were as
if the eyes of your childhood could, or would, plead upon the account of your heart, your old
heart, full of the wisdom of morality, or if that heart of yours could sing unto the eye of your
childhood in that hallowed rhyme between 'innocence' and 'authenticity'. Society can only
reproduce or extend the outrage at existence, not obviate it. For the transcendental separation of
the intuition and intellect hypostasizes, out of the mere belief of having differentiated, the
historically achieved indifference, the non-opposition to which the philosopher returns, in pure
being, that is taken for an eternal one. "Can we not see," goes a Macaronic sermon, "the shadow
of vengeance in the mirror of the earthly?" The Pharisean conscience, as the power of the law,
opposes in its being carried out what is already given, by simultaneously expressing it. This is
the key to Benjamin's divine violence. The New Testament opposes, in its very execution, the
Old Testament, the given, by simultaneouly expressing it. Once we have encountered the
tendency of positive law to naturalize itself in the Holderlinian ellipse, the false modus
philosophicus of a return to pure being, we must reconsider the distinction between the Pharisean
conscience and the indirect legal methodologies to which it equates itself, despite (and precisely
because of) the ideological discourse that supports them. We must now draw the urgent
consequences of a critique of violence and a meta-critique its evil logic. Tragedy, taken as a
"calculable law," that is always on the side of order, insofar as this latter requires periodic
rejuvenation, already stresses the fact that the essential contamination between the Pharisean
conscience, as the power of the law, and law-preserving violence calls for another critical
criterion that gives us the chance for a radical critique of violence-- we must address violence as
such, as in the case of Antigone; namely, outside the boundaries of the law, where it could find a
manifestation not subjected to the economy of means and ends, which is already falsified by the
justice which has been taken as a moral category. The Jewish conscience, the great Pharisean
conscience, in its archetypal form is a mere manifestation of the law. Not a means to its end,
scarcely a manifestation of its intent, but primarily a manifestation of its existence. So in
principle there is no need for the Pharisean conscience to justify the enmity which is most
proper to it: this enmity, this temptation to argument, this willigness and ability to contradict,
comes from, testifies to the existence of the law, and therefore is not to be contested. How would
it be, therefore if all the violence imposed, under just means, were of itself in irreconcilable
conflict with just ends, and if at the same time a different kind of violence arose that certainly
could be either the justified or the unjustified means to those ends but was not related to them as
means at all but in some different way? Far from being a rhetorical hypothesis, this is in fact the
expression of the basic idea of apologoumena. For the notion of agape enables an affirmativeresponse to this question. But what this rhetoric betrays, is the following: here rational thought is
always walking along the edge of the Holderlinian ellipse, on the edge of the ineffable and
unthinkable: violence that is not violent because it annihiliates without leaving victims- justice
outside law. Empathy becomes, koina aisteta confirmation of every injustice that exists, in that it
trivializes the distinction which must be made between the injunction of conscience and the
objective truth of iniquity. The guilt of love, what as pure factum already takes our lover's breath
away, before we have even to tell her we love her, is no longer to be reconciled with life, or even
with our waking thought: this girl, who presently I might only have bared to look at under the
rays of Apollo, now I must entrust to the hands of Onerioi, because she frightens me even more
then those terrible brothers do. The image of this world's iniquity must be kept in nightmares, for
as a reality it defies the most grotesque imaginations of the waking mind. Eros cannot, at any
price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than with any other of his conditions
and qualities; desire and destitution, for there is no element of sanctity in his condition, in his
worldly life vulnerable to inveiglement with the generosites of the female form. If Eros is not
equivalent to mere life, if he is truly split in his being between penia and mere existence, and
poros, some excess, then that excess is, in a way, sentenced to existence, to the burden of penia.
This existence, mere life, bears whatever order of vitiation is pronounced upon Eros. It is the site
of the injunction of conscience precisely because it is the site of guilt's inscription. Love,
characterized as the immediate disposition towards the image of iniquity, which disavows all
existential attitudes, arrives at its objective truth in a moment which leads beyond the delusion of
self-abandonment: "Coacta virtus similis hibernae rosae, diuturna non est. Cum nihil potuit amor,
justas amoris sustinent partes timor. [Tragico-Comoedia parabolica Androphilus] Yet, the kind
of agape which could arouse courage in us exists only in the Diana we might have defiled, in the
children we could have killed." As Ricoeur says: "although the consciousness of defilement
seems to be a memory inaccessible to any re-enactment in the imagination or sympathy, a
moment that has been abolished by the progress of moral consciousness itself, it nevertheless
contains in germ all possible moments of the life and future of the moral consciousness," even as
'the heart has its own order,' because it conceals within itself the secret of its own passing, which
is of the 'order of intellect.' As tempting as these words may be for messianic readings, it is not
inevitable to interpret them in such ways; in accordance with Bergsons 's typus of the
conscience, the mystical would take place when the discourse of philosophy comes up against its
limit, in theodicy, in morality, in its performative power itself; this is most strikingly represented
in the image of Job. The desire for the moral principle to be guaranteed, the desire for God, is
pronounced as such, as a desire that, in Benjamin's language, is a kind of violence without being
violent, as Agape, that is expressed only in the failure of discourse itself, of the logos generally,
of the law and philosophy. In imputing criminality to the responsibility of the law itself, the
moral vision is the assimilation of the Medean narrative into an intelligble philosophical theme.
Thus the presumption of the moral conscience that has laden itself with the entire weight of
violence and crime is questionable. The failure of the ethical vision is even more obvious when
evil as it is suffered is examined. The suffering of the innocent, is an accusation against the
moral God, the one who guarantees the moral principle and accuses the evil doer If the mystical;
happens there were the discourse of philosophy comes up against its own limit,where the moral
conscience finaly demands for the moral principle to be guaranteed, to pronounce the desire for
utopia or judgment, we must at any rate try to surpass these limits and outline the place where
this utopia might be thought.
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