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Ascolo Parodites
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To observe ignotus tineas inertes, or indulgeth thine own eyes unto all the world's confusion, vidi ego me propter ruptos telluris hiatus, nec subii; uidi exanimum fecique nocentem Tydea; me Tegee regem indefensa reposcit, orbaque Parrhasiis ululat mihi mater in antris-- to see the world yawn and gape on thy own account, is to dwell wholly alone; nec rhombos ideo libertis ponere lautus, nec tenuis sollers turdarum nosse salivas. messe tenus propria vive et granaria, fas est, emole; quid metuis? Occa, et seges altera in herba est. Or as thou watch thereof as the whole world is caught up in it's abject businesses, to till thine own and from thine own expect of nothing more. You shall never know the sheer indulgence of reason, if you cannot set yourself upon a single point, even like Themis, the blind goddess of justice. Yet, rather should I think that image conveys the greatest sense of terror, especially on the part of Themis. For the conclusion of the whole noble fiction is but cast like unto water and is but a whisper, tis' to be herein remanded; discerpti tollunt iuga conscia Penthei, oppida ubi rubro stant Hysiaea solo, whilst we hath abstrused the very seeds of hope. Terrestri crassa grabato tardant fatalem membrorum pondera somnum, nor will caecas grave olentis Averni afford much displeasure unto dreams; wherein the longueur of that sense might sigh unto the ghost of henbane. If the mercy of God were as closely apprehended as the pity of man, then it surely were to be an Ignatius but to live; and unto such as believe that there is nothing but a great Lethe after death, than surely being forgotten were more than the oblivion of the record of human names, wherein to die were surely more than death. Why does Agamemnon foretell what should happen unto Ulyyses, yet makes ignorant inquiry into what has become of his own son? If death truly is a Lethe, it nevertheless thereby destroys present existence, the existence of the merely animal, and thereby impresses its seal on the commandment that existence is nothing more than an interrupted death in the present moment, and characterizes this as the constitutive moment of human existence, at least in Christian philosophies, that wherein I must recognize myself in my subjecthood to murderous and usurpatory potential of my fellow man's freedom-- and this is also the deeper meaning of the words of Moses, the very constitution of social existence; that the intervention of or, in some sense or other, a reaching out for the ministration of our fellow man is what holds the living onto life and pushes them forward into life, into a noble caliginoso carceri and homini occupemus osculum, whereafter that malorum machinatrix facinorum might be weak enough to be put to death by a kiss. Minervam nec nemoris muti iunxisse carentia sensu robora, sed caeso Tomari Iovis augure luco arbore praesaga tabulas animasse loquaces, for some prefer their book as like unto some speaking forest; some keep them more strictly, pinge globum tenui quem libratum undique filo sustineat summi numinis alta manus. Therefor go and write thy books, just as much as I may impute quid proderat ditasse Paelignas anus uelociusue miscuisse toxicum for one hath drunken from this knowledge of man of which one knoweth not what the name of the precious wine is, is it oenomel, or is it Samosian? One does not even ask the important question, does it bear the spices of Keres? But one would, like a good Socrates, learn how to choose one's own fate, and call that choice knowledge! Even commandments involve a secret antagony, that of the moral, the questioning self. 'Thou shalt!' is met with 'Shalt I?' Yes... It is precisely therein, that it finds its power. The Cynic denies trust to himself, the adulteress does so only to the man she loves. The most grievous thing the poet can say to the musician is: "Could I ask the name of this piece?" I do not trust the abilities of many poets, but rather perceive a kind of dumb virtuosity in them. Many a poet succeeds as one of the great lyricists or epicists, simply because his memory is too perfect. Arrogance, a fortiori, is one of the most effective ways of keeping people at a distance. After all, I have found that it is one of the most convincing of all masks. You would understand the beast by relating yourself to it? You would assure yourself that it indeed has a certain dignity, by reminding yourself that, for instance, you both drink and eat, and thus you both find offensive this and that, or what is pleasurable; you both know pain, and thus you may hold the suffering beast in your arms, and be assured that something there, that is more than teeth and claws. Ha! But that will only welcome the beast to look back into you, and reveal the most lyrical, humorous, terrible, the most unintelligent sensibilities in you. And none of that denotes what animal existence really is. Yet, lantiqui promisit Nestoris annos ut renet tecum natus et ipse senex: promised the years of Nestor, thou hadst yet any wisdom gained in thy bookes, or written wisdom itself; so that all of thy pantomimi chorum serves up it's guests with an excellence of books awaiting to be given the dregs of cariosae fragmine cupae themselves. Wherefor thou Wisdom! So thou hadst written thine self in thy vessel of our books, non parva comas evinxit oliva: concisum argentum in titulos, inscriptaque vasa praemia victorum statuunt; oraque pinxit mir virum, jussitque suis prostare senestris institor, et grandes mirantur compita suras; that thee mayst place thine wears before all of this thine publick, in the seat of philosophy, and have thy whole patomimi chorum serve to its guests an excellency of books, awaiting to be given the dres of cariosae fragmine cupae themselvest, until' the philosopher lives, ut memorant, non invidiosa nefandis nec cupienda bonis regna Thoantis erant. hic pro supposita virgo Pelopeia cerva sacra deae coluit qualiacumque suae, or in that kingdom whereinto neither the evil envy nor the good desireth, that nectebant flavis gestamen aristis agricolae, solitoque rubens in palmite bacchis; paxque sua laetam fulgens ornabat oliva, thou shouldest be content with feeding all daye on thy piteous olive, forthwith to be secured thy peace and thine property. Lest he hath all the world of an oxen open unto him, or goeth to saye, nulla est sapientia major, spernere quam fulvum toto de corde metallum atque suas aliis meritas concedere laudes, and not without contorta suo non prodidit ullum indicio, elinguem reddidit Iphicrates: I must bear my censure, play the part of the beast without a tounge, wherefor cui non certaverit ulla aut tantum fluere aut totidem durare per annos, no grape canst vie for gust of wine juice. Mine reader might safely inquireth, bucera secla effodient pedibus glebas: for I am so just as hath I read, so wise as I hath read. Pani coniferie pinus, sua vitis Iacco, clavigero placeat populus alta deo, a Iove principium Musae, Iovis arbore gaudent: though e'en the muses hath their beginning in Jove, for any adequate fleshment, I fancy this, thou canst fancy whatever it is that thou want, I am no worse off to hath given this admission, for I presume not unto the works of a magician, who must needs conceal any trickery, lest his act be the less convincing: let that thine excavation carryeth out of this booke strange herbs, or hints of garlic; I am happy to forfeit gold, I hath no audience, that wherewith I wouldest try the juvenile sun in the Chaldean house, or to read in some secrets of nature what thee thy self cannot read. Servus est e Caria, quemad modum Execestides, avos sibi procreet apud nos, et invenientur ipsi gentiles, hatch thy proper pedigree, no longer to be a Carian servant, or might ask why I, tales et barbara Thracia montes olim habuisse dolet, sed Dacia gaudet habere. quod labor hic hominum magno molimine praestat; Gryphum rostra brevi peragunt facilique labore. Horum igitur gazas, non nidos, credit avara gens Arimasporum, nec opinio fallit inanis, would play the part of the bird that eateth it's own eggs, and write as I hitherto openly confess: I hath given thee to an inflamed insperatum auxillium, a picture without hope. And as to why I wouldest demure mine own favorite authors, I taketh after the wealth of the nest: likely this is me, that is more then canst be said about some authors. I will imagine that I have no audience, nor have I my own Illisus to meet my own beautiful Phaedrus; and it was not so uncommon for me to divagate, or to question what the world was in himself, if he is (letteth Pallenginus Stellatus give us the term) mundus stultorum cavea, or is after all a hollow cave: a dream, or is even a sort of theatre, wherefor to behold this our unworthy forbears and captains, I hath so been placed thereunto, if I mayst elicit a phrase from Samuel Rogers, by the "Instructors of my youth! Who first unveil'd the hallow'd form of Truth," whereafter I thenceforth discover, to Nietzsche's displeasure, that wisdom is so full of pity that we pay for it with much pain, even as it is in Euripides, nor hath any judicature from any man yet come to so wholly censure withal that I have done, that is ever unbridled, then in the medicall hope for God, lest mine days keepest me as under the shadow of life, who's judgement is in virtues and vices, and lest I imputeth mine curiosity with the one or the other, who's range bearest a title unto the artifices of sin. On the other hand, it is the despicable that merely appeals to us from those blandishments in our own artifices, conduct, character: as pronouncements of any more common erring between us and he that we have labled unworthy, accursed, and despicable, and the mutual destruction of character which bears the name of vice. As concerns revenge, I hath not examined beyond the fact that he whom fears from near at hand fears often less of Adromache, and this would be a simple enough answer to it; though I would now insert a passage of Sophocles: my sufferings past I could forget; but oh! I dread the woes to come; for well I know when once the mind's corrupted it brings forth unnumbered crimes, and ills to ills succeed. For if we let this delicious fault to spread, sed talis Thrasos catuli immerso brachio linguae extirparet fibras, quin et Getuli iugulum leonis rumperet, quotquot Thermodoon alias Amazonas aluit nostro supprimerem iugo, I would like to pull a tongue out by it's root. Olenius Tydeus (fraterni sanguinis illum conscius horror agit) ora comasque gerens subit uno tegmine, cuius fusus humo gelida partem prior hospes habebat, for whenever I begin to hold another man under the judgment of my own tounge, I remind myself that we art strangers of a self same shelter, so none are really enemies under this our theatre, and again we canst not hold the world itself against us, so we hath no enemy to know hereon, unless we sing unto the ears of our revenge: yet none of our despicable humors becomes anything less then a glutton o'er revenge. My vengeance rangest til' mine thoughts art like the labor of so many anvils being hammered, when, as Cinesias saith in Aristophanes, what time we've wasted we might have drenched with Paphian laughter, flung on Aphrodite's Mysteries. So every Argo must have it's Planctae, every summer it's wasps. As under but some unwholesome senate, is the world brought up, who's Sovergnties hath discovered more revolutions then the moon, as Hudibras redivivus saith it, or as in Cottoni Posthuma: yet as with one Seal many Patents are sealed. The relief of one fortune is but pensare legumine panem, or the distributor of a few beans; inquit ille satyrus noster, nigroque simillima cygno, to hath painted a swan black, quod viret et molles imitatur rupibus herbas; hic Nomadum lucent flaventia saxa Thasosque et Chios et gaudens fluctus spectare Carystos, or to even be that glass which ungulates in color as doth the sea. A riverine and brutal nature never seeks for clemency but always only his Arethusa - however he may maunder about the injustices which his fellow man hath dealt to him.What is the truth of his love? It is certainly as difficulty as Clymene narrabat inanem Vulcani Martisque dolos et dulcia furta, aque Chao densos divum numerabat amores or enumerating the love affairs of the gods. Observe the flock of birds which you see now, in the sky above you. It does not know what expiation and conviction are. It flies, it eats, it digests, and so on from season to season and from the birth of a new flock to re-birth, with its joys and aversions sounded out with every strum of its heart, reminded of its brethren and kin and mortal enemies in every sensation, every noise, every vision. To witness this is hard for man, because he boasts to himself that his race is better than the beast and yet, in everything he does, tries so desperately to attain an analogous state: above all, man desires to sound out his kin and his enemies. His greatest danger and sin is, therefor, forgetting who these two are, and confusing them. One day the man demands of the beast: "Why do you not talk to me about the justice of your life and only gaze at me, without talking?" The beast wants to answer, too. Yet by the time the beast has informed the man about how his good and his evil ray in upon him in every breath he takes, the man has already taken a second breath, and in his oblique thinking has already misunderstood what the beast has to say, and it is the man, not the beast, that falls silent, and merely wonders on about the beast. But he also wonders about himself, that he is not able to learn how to keep his good and his evil always upon him and that he would sink back into non-existence if he did not have the spirit of revenge to keep him alive, to keep him distinguishing his friends from his enemies. Humanity continually offers him fruit amongst the roll of ages, which he eats or stores away, and which is now and again offered him once more. For man says, I am a spirit of vengeance; I posses friends, a family, and enimies, and envies the beast, which immediately recognizes the true and the false, which immediately recognizes the poisoned fruit from the unblemished, and has no need to store away, and no need to anticipate another creature. And it is in this moment, that man comes to his most terrible realization yet: perhaps he has confused his greatest good with his severest evil, maybe what he calls love, by which his family and his friends are known, is yet the spirit of his vengeance, the spirit of distinctions. 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. This is no guarded secret: or albae rara senectae, the rarer honey of old age, or as subtle cheeks kept behind pergit caerulei vitreas ad Thybridis aedes, non galea conclusa genas, with latebricolarum hominum corruptor, or the promises of love, Panthoides Euphorbus eram, cui pectore quondam haesit in adverso gravis hasta minoris Atridae; cognovi clipeum, laevae gestamina nostrae, nuper Abanteis templo Iunonis in Argi, that tameth us with the confidence of a woman's illsome bribes, corruptoris improbitas ipsos audet temptare parentes: tanta in muneribus fiducia. Nullus ephebum deformem saeua castrauit in arce tyrannus, nec praetextatum rapuit Nero loripedem nec strumosum atque utero pariter gibboque tumentem; to avert the naive fervency of men against themselves, and thereby to their own us, neither does it satisfy us to sup on either roots or bark for it, whereafter the benign Ceres twas' unknown to us, whereafter our tastes art worsened over them, lest we beholdeth in Jupiter's fane our former shield, and take upon to loving woman after we have discovered their frustra Thiadesque, Tigresque, silenumque oculis, to see a thousand fools coming from all directions. But from this 'Zopyrian existence' 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 and every Thamyris. 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 amounts to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers itself as the object of some love as yet inaccessible to it in the moment of despair itself; 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 truly loving, 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 the 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 Eros is for the first time expressed within the consciousness of its own importunity. Eros, on the other had, abreviated from the suffering of the world, is bound to the principium individuationis of self-abandonment, which abolishes itself out of the consistency of its very opposition to that suffering: 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 does not impose the silence of paralysis, it does not impose, at least originally, the implicit and unacknowledged consent to iniquity it imposes what Adorno calls the velleity of conscience, an affectivity completely isolated from any transcendental meaning. Empathy, precisely as this affectivity, 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 restricted to the bounds of this transcendence which is already the repetition of the drive, who thereby fulfills himself in agape as a sort of transcendental deduction from the practical order of the world-historico narrative. 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 moral responsibility invoked by the revelation of the law itself, as the divine law, bearing no previous formulation and thus illiciting unforseen and unaccounted for moral questions in the recipient of the law, the character of the moral vision imparted by the bearing witness unto the Decalaouge is analgous to 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, Manichean 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 reaching an ultimate 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 certainity 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. The essential nature of agape is the following: in an attempt to secure the integrity of the moral principle, it is necessary to re-forumulate it in such a way as it has never been formulated before: it is necessary to abrupt the discourse of philosophy in its performative power itself. The revelation of the law is a revelation precisely because it occurs within the mystical realm: to those to whom the law has been revealed, a moral uncertainty is illicited within them which demands a response- precielsy because the question illicited had never been asked before, does it so powerfully demand attention. When Moses utters 'Thou shalt not kill..." he for the first time allows the significance of 'blood' to weigh upon moral and legal theory; yet the profound element in this, is in the fact that Moses is not addressing any particular person, but is more or less addressing himself, setting his own law. It is precisely Agape which underlies the creation of moral values in the West, running all the way back to Moses, the Decalogue, and Mount Sinai. Unable to bear the injustice imposed by mankind and the very world, agape imagines and creates a world to secure the integrity of the moral principle according to which human law as it is, without meaning or aim, yet perservating mythically without reaching an ultimate in the innocence which is proper to it, is finally closed off. That is to say, "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." The genesis of morals thus is not out of brotherly love, caritas as the transfiguration of grace within agape, but out of the desire to ensure the sanctity of the living. Agape and the creation of Law is not just one aspect of the moral stock of the West, but defines its metaphysical orientation, and thus also its understanding of life and death, being, and time itself. Agape creates a world by stamping the mythical and purely human with the character of divinity. The mythical is only the ever-making-sense of the divine, logos. The relation of man to God has no permanence, and the fleeting character of this relationship brings a mythos into the way we undergo our own existence. That is, the injustice occasioned by the relentlessness and violence of mythos is annihilated in agape, and the divine as it is, is resisted. We come to imagine the law as having the character of that which endures ideology and mythology, such that 'divine' refers to that which is despite the violence of mythos. To say that something is law is to set it up over and against the world of mythology. The human being comes into existence in this great moment of saying 'No' to the divine, of saying 'No' to the violent perservation of mythos and the injustice which is intelligble only in terms of its relation to the divine. Indeed, the injustice comes into existence here as that which stands in the face of the divine. The great act of agape is to set up a world- the world of the human being, the consecrated living man. There is a deep duplicity involved in setting up this world, as the human being, just like Moses, quails at the Cyclopean nature of its deed. Instead, the man sets up a past and honors its traditions and ancestors, and installs idols and Gods as forbears and creators. In setting up this world of being human, the the duplicity authorizes the invention and transference of responsibility for the injustice that befalls man. This element of responsibility, signfies the necessity for Moses to destroy the tablet upon which the orginal words of God were inscribed. For, if he did not do so, by locating the divine outside the mythical violence of the law, the human could take constant vengeance upon the entire mythos by identifying causes for suffering in those beings who do not uphold the divinely revealed commandment. We are given to understand the freedom and agency of human beings in a moral way when we understand the conditions under which we can hold them responsible. And it is preciesly this, which signifies the essential nature of Moses's decalogue. Thus we do not find freedom as something in the world, but postutate its existence in order to make sense of moral phenomenon, a commandment or act of divine violence. To think agape is to bite decisely into the repulsive snake of human law-making, of the subjugation of man by man. Agape has its proper content in the dual movement by which the thought recoils on the thinker and the thinker is drawn into the thought: in the creation of a commandment, a 'thou shalt...' This requires the existential engagement of the particular person bodily, without such there is no thought of agape. Agape thus cannot be taken as a transcendental form or idea; it must remain totally rooted in the body of the person who realizes the disgust and nausea of human law-making and punsihment. The essential mythos at work in human law is a condition to which to react. Human law is a defensive notion in consequence of which nothing can be asserered of the divine as a whole. The Law becomes something we fundamentally cannot adress in totality. The human being remains torn between an auxetic ethical vision of expiation and redemption, the restoration of the sancity of life, and the reality of a human mythos at work in the sheer instrumentalism of processes of reconciliation. But without power, desire, or need to decide. Are these two poles irreducible? No. The correct way to realize agape, in which the reduction of these poles is possible, has two conditions. First, one must think in terms of the moment of forgiving, expiation, and redemption. We transpose our forgivness to the temporality of policiy and decision, glancing ahead at what is assigned us as a pardon and back at the fellow man which has convicted us. Forgiveness is that in which future and past affront one another. Second, one must think the thought of agape as the overcoming of the mythos of human law. We transpose ourselves to the condition of need that arises with mythos. One has the thought of agape after one thinks the nihlism and mythos behind human law. This evokes disgust. So does the pinched bhavior of the usual human being. Agape has no objective nature: the truth of the commandment is such only when it is our truth. The commandment is only when those to whom it has been revealed are. Agape thus deals with an experiiential situation, grounded in the materiality of human existence. It is impossible to know the terrible burden of the thought of agape until a person experiences the horror of mythos and human law. 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, the great moment of nay-saying in which the human being is born, and the theological dead-end, the incomprehensible doctrine of the 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 convicts nature and life itself whom owe their 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 forgetfulness and reawakening analagous to the Gnostic pleroma- this is how we should envisage the thought of Nietzsche. For it is 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. Nietzsche's terror is the old Gnostic terror, represented in the Demiurge, the fear of creation- the fear of attributing the creation to God.
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