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Ascolo Parodites
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Almost every lover knows, at one stage of his development, the "Zopyrian existence," one in we should put out our eyes and burn our lyres if it means we can be loved. But from this eventually springs up a desperation that, born from unaquit passions, nonetheless is not registered as pain, bearing no usual salt for the old wound of solitude, a wound in which formerly all pains were interpreted by the great lover as healing salts. Zopyrus- the form of pre-existence of every Orpheus, the true womanizer, and Thamyris, the true poet, the greatest of lovers. Credis me potuisse meae maledicere vitae ambobus mihi quae carior est oculis?- It is this question, that is the first to be put to the lover,- as a test of conscience. 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 capacity for love and despair are the same, and 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: Ni spirat immota: [Daniel Heinsius in Queris quid sit amor?] 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 universal love 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 penia into despair and the image of iniquity, of the absolute, as opposed to transigent, reality of mortal suffering. 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 absolute of creaturely existence, 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, carried 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, as heterogeneous, 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 surpasses the 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 the entire imposition of violence, under just means, were of itself in intransigent opposition with just ends, and if at once a stranger 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 affirmative response 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, which is the subjugatory principle at the heart of Eros, 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 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 in Benjamin's language, even as a kind of violence without being violent, only in the failure of discourse itself, of the logos or 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 intelligible 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. The writer of this book is neither a pessimist or a cynic in the least, or perhaps in the least-- but certainly not in the truest sense of those words, in the Schopenhauerian and Diogenian sense: one pays too dearly for being suspicious about the world, nature, and man-- for casting a doubt upon their purpose, their justice. Unto one of that kind, the words higher nature, higher purpose; and with these, usury, and punishment, ring. And unto that ringing, are the only graceful words lost of their grace and their truth, and drowned out in the whole bellowing cacophony: revenge, lex talionis, redemption. Revenge, that is the most fearsome, the most penetrating of eyes: but then again, the whole foreground of usury, punishment, and 'higher nature' is far to extensive for that wild, that animal acuity, that eye, to carry any use whatsoever. If one would doubt the way the world was doubted formerly, Platonically, wholly, without exception, with a full heart, with the whole, Pyrrhonic love of doubting - then one would have to renounce mistrust: -- and how much graciousness, and how much patience; the patience to write books to ourselves, and more importantly to rear children, even do we owe precisely to our mistrust, to our mistrust in nature, the world, and Man! Revenge knows only the one shibboleth: open air, clear spaces, the ocean. These things it craves before all else, even before its object. For, it is nothing less then the destructive principle, thanatos, intuited bodily. It may yet be the highest magnanimity when mistrust singeth unto vengeance. Revenge is the will's aversion to time, not for the sake of what was, not for the sake of dust and ash, but for the sake of the path which is henceforth freely opened unto them, in which every son of every father shall pass. It is not Oedipus, that is the organizing psychological principle, but Thyestes. Revenge, as an extreme of the pathological character, is not succeeded by the moderate feeling of expiation and relief, but by an obverse extreme: horror at what we have done, or pride bordering on the attainment of the Gods. Thus the belief in the absolute immorality of punishment. Vengeance is the psychologically necessary affect once the belief in the order of law becomes untenable. The most grotestque criminality appears at that point, not that the displeasure at mankind and law has become greater than before but because one has come to mistrust punishment, indeed even the law itself. One interpretation has collapsed: again, the moral vision is realized in the assimilation of the Medean narrative into an intelligble philosophic theme: but because it was an interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in law, as if everything were in vain. Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: human law as it is, without meaning or aim, yet perservating mythically without any ultimity in the innocence which is proper to it: "agape." This is the most extreme form of the Maimonidean doctrine of silence. The vegeance of knowledge compels this belief. So one understands that an antithesis to Manicheanism is attempted here: for everything 'perfect, divine, eternal, just' also compels the agapeic love of God, by virtue of the importunity of the moral principle and its foundation. Question: does the Law make impossible the Manichean affirmation of all things, too? At bottom, it is only the god of the law that has been overcome. Does it make sense to conceive a God beyond the law? Would a Manicheaism in this sense be possible, a moral God? How can a single word, redemption, express this circumambient analogue between the mythos of human violence and agape, in such a way as all revolutionary power comes from divine violence, and yet man's consent, consent to the moral principle, which is the constitutive element of agapeic being, in which the 'incomparable events' of divine violence are manifest, but which is nonetheless implicated in the circle of mythical violence, is not overridden? This helps us to understand the ebb and flow, through history, of the tides of human deed and creaturely freedom; a deluge of exalted titles and reverences that is quite necessarily followed by an ebb that reconstitutes this level, mythically; but again, this ebb-tide can also sweep away, leading to oblivion, just as Moses destroys the tablets of the law in fearing that they might become idols. This historical ebb and tide expresses the oscillation within mythos itself, which resists all attempts to place it into rigid historical categories; mythic violence is oriented to divine violence and on the other hand shares in the same free human nature. It is precisely this irreducible double-focus that can illuminate the sphere of creaturely freedom. The essential aporia of this double-focus is the fact that the certainty which we hope for in the sphere of divine violence, the security of the moral principle to which we have consented, to the commandment, is of a radically distinct nature from the certainty of law and world-historical contingences. Yet the true illumination of the sphere of creaturely freedom lies in this fact: divine violence yields a way of asserting its justness, in agape. In the figure of Issac, blood sacrifice exists as a genuine attestation to the love of God, not because any violence which reconstitutes the immanent logic of the Decalogue and re-initiates a mythos to preserve its integrity in the sphere of the law, and thus abstains from the spilling of human blood, is to be considered pure; but because blood for the first time genuinely enters the field of moral and political discoruse only if the individual is capable of embracing the full responsibility of his deed, namely, of acting in opposition to the moral principle, ie. in breaking the commandment. The commandment is not a law nor a criterion of judgment, but in its delivery through divine violence imposes itself upon the sphere of creaturely freedom, insofar as it enlarges the socio-historico-political dimension - not by rule, but in illiciting the most profound and unprovoked moral interrogation upon mankind. If the mystical; happens there were the discourse of philosophy comes up against its own limit,where the moral conscience finally 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. When the moral principle is uprooted, and every legality is destroyed, and the possibility of the most despicable, of taking the law into one's own hands seems to be all that is left, the accusation against the moral God meets its irreducible answer in agape, in the desire for God, and for his justice. After the annihilation is accomplished by the manifestation of agape, the annihilation of the record of the living and of the law itself, there still stands the figure of the Lex Talionis to act as a guide for human action. The violence of eros is profane desire over the other for its own sake, the violence of agape is pure desire which extends beyond the whole earth, for the sake of the living. It was Law that protected life against despair and the leap into nothingness, among men and classes who for whatever amount of time managed not to violate and oppress themselves, but to live as a saeculum and fraternity: for it is the experience of being powerless before nature, not men, that generates the most desperate embitterment against existence, for it is in that powerlessness that something more terrible than oppression and slavery rises up in mankind: the great bells of punishment, usury, and higher nature ring empty. Law became politics and under God, in the first Jerusalem, thenceforth treated the violent despots, the doers of injustice, as the enemies against whom the common man must be protected, which means first of all encouraged and strengthed through indirect legal means. Law consequntly taught men to hate and despise most profoundly what is the basic, the direct means thereunto justice: the spirit of revenge. To abolish, deny, and dissolve this law -- that would require looking at the most hated instinct, that one deemed the most unworthy, with an opposite feeling and valuation. If the suffering and oppresed lost the faith that they have the right to despise their own spirit of revenge, they would enter the phase of hopeless despair. This would be the case if this trait were essential to life and it could be shown that even in the spirit of the law this spirit of revenge were hidden, and even this hatred and contempt were still a spirit of revenge. The oppresed would come to see that they were on the same plain with the oppressors, without prerogative, without higher rank. Agape annihilates, through decentering man's relation to God, so that the sacred existence of the living can be again ensured; so that the soul of the living remains unburdened by the fat of a thousand years of revenge and violence in the law, accumulated by Eros, by the old principle of subjugation. Creaturely, suffering as such is timeless. But this is not the case for Eros, the desire, on which Agape feeds. Revenge, the thirst for power, hatred- each of these things, which scourge us inwardly, for they are the pains of Eros, are not found in the old Canon of the deadly sins: for we shall be clean in the inward parts. On the other hand, anyone who wished to described the genius and the curse of today's populorum in theological terms would undoubtedly encounter vengeance: the 'spirit of revenge' serves as the nexus between the human failure of theodicy and the theological dead-end, the incomprehensible Book of Revelations and doctrine of a Last Judgment. Nietzsche, Szymanowski, these are avid tongues of flame that flicker in the little breezes stirred up by theodicists! Does Nietzsche wish to show (we might thus sympathetically interpret his writings) what would have become of his generation if it had not been able to replete its consuming vengeance, the spirit of revenge, on grotesque impetuosity of communication and pleasure? Or does he wish to invoke the deadly forces that are bound up in the heart of his people, and pronounce its greatest triumphs, and that only with the further ambition to increase their speed yet many times over, if the opprtunity should arrive, and to break out in a destructive processes of untold celerity? For this is the basic locus of the Carmelite's soul: that it not only violate the external rights, the sanctity of God, but also offend against the natural order of creation, which owes its justice to the justice of God. This is why it arouses the destructive forces of the entire cosmos. And what it brings down upon itself is not so much divine judgment, as the revolt of Nature against whoever disturbs its peace, and moreover the intention to provoke this revolt, out of a far more pressing concern, that of the security of the moral principle. Theologically, what is the deepest truth of humanity, is precisely the truth of suffering. What will we do with the Apollonian beauty, when anagnorisis vanishes, and the spell of vengeance is broken? What will we do after we have at last executed our spirit of revenge? We will breathe a sigh of relief. However unimaginable the object of revenge may be, the climax, the unimaginable absolutely, will always lie beyond your visual horizon: it is in this wise, that murder, adultery, etc. become possible. The present is the seal of authenticity which clings to every compulsion of the spirit: this present we find either conquered by the spirit, rejected of the spirit, or in contradiction with the spirit. An episodic submerging and re-awakening- this is how we should envisage the writing of Nietzsche. A vibrant rhapsody of so many unimaginable things, all of which pronounce themselves upon our most inward self: and each of these terrors are the terror, in some way, of giving birth.
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