Friday, March 29, 2013

pure randomness is tough to find




I find myself repeating the same ideas, the same conflicts. And life is like that: repetition. Kierkegaard uses that term to describe the life of faith. He asks if repetition is possible? Not meaning, can I do the same thing - but can I experience the vacancy of each moment - or that each moment is filled with the same Me. Our subjectivity is all we have - and we hardly begin to understand it in our lives. This is what Merleu Ponty means when he says that he cannot know another's grief, nor can his grief be known - it can only be displayed. Only loving links our subjectivities together. As incomplete as it is: Lacan doubting that such a relationship can even exist: it is all we have that is productive. Jung states bluntly that loves builds and hatred destroys. He is supremely aware of how our ideas of others are glazed with our own projections - such that we may not be certain that we're being heard or that we're even hearing. Special care must be taken. Some of us seem so authoritative, so confident, that we assume that they're all right; others seem so negligible, so quiet that we don't even think of them - let alone hear. 

The gist of Kaja Silverman's argument seems to be that we must take care to open up the subjectivity in ourselves. She uses the Orpheus myth and focuses on the addendum Ovid supplies: that after Orpheus' death he and Eurydice see each other as if for the first time - trading places in play of the turning at the cave that proved so fatal for her. Silverman seems to be carrying forward Klein's idea that the object must die before we can use it. Yet we don't even consider that the objects inside that maintain our attention, that seem to sustain our individuality, are counters, mere vapors whose time is gone. They hold us in thrall. But when we die to them, we emerge, like Orpheus, and are able to engage with our beloved, with each other. I think I could put this as discovering the fact that I can extend love to you without losing my self. That my self can die and doesn't disappear. 

When I first read St Paul's exclamation that he was crucified to the world - the old world was now dead to him and that Christ had flowered a new world in him - that all things were renewed. He seems to be articulating that. There was a time Paul was held in thrall to his objects, sustained by law and duty and tradition; Christ initially threatened these objects - but at the moment of crisis, these objects that had held such a hold on him, that had overcoded his life with inscriptions of what to do, these objects were themselves crucified - they were shown for what they were. In this crisis Paul discovered that he still existed, but that now his existence was as a new man - now those antinomies that defined his world (male and female; slave and free; Jew and Greek) no longer held force. They could no longer sustain him. He now existed without law - what law could now fit and define the man he had been remade as? As in the garden he discovered that the law left him naked and,  instead of shame, clothed in grace.




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