March Twitter Archive
Mar. 29th, 2012 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
endymions_bower3 March
@ibogost: Earnest, snark-free question: how did Deleuze get so popular? What is it about Deleuze that is so appealing to so many?
I've never considered myself a "Deleuzean", but was a very enthusiastic reader of his in the late 80's and early 90's. I think it was, to begin with, his eclecticism, esp. in the work with Guattari: philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, anthropology, etc., which made him a sort of Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of 20th c. French academic thought, introducing one to so many other interesting thinkers, like Pierre Clastres, just to pick a name from the air. Recall that post-structuralists were the only people who would touch ontology at the time. Later, I came to admire his creative readings in the tradition--Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, the Stoics, et al.--which provided a model. Indeed, this is my main complaint with "Deleuzeans": they adhere to Deleuze's conclusions, rather than following his method. (Not that his "method" is easy to explain or apply!)
8 March
Interesting catechism from Coffin Texts spell 479: "Those who exist see me, those who do not exist worship me, those who are yonder give me praise." This catechism is an example of the role played in Egyptian thought by certain categories of explicit nonbeing.
Hornung has discussed the Egyptian concept of nonbeing in an excursus in his "Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt" (172-183). It seems the strong concept of nonbeing in Egyptian thought comes from an equally strong identification of *being* with *formation*. Indeed, one is struck by how many words there are in Egyptian that mean "form" in one sense or another. Accordingly, there is much greater scope for nuance in the use of these terms than there is in Greek, which has fewer. Particularly significant, it seems to me, is the distinction in Egyptian between forms-in-process and static, ideal forms. Forms-in-process are xprw (the scarab), lit. "transformations"; static forms (twt, ki, et al.) use the mummy sign: mummy=arrested process. In Greek, one could express this as the distinction between energeia, form as "activity" or "actuality" of a substance vs. ousia or to ti ên einai, terms for "substance" or "essence" that imply the presence of the past. This distinction, however, is one which has caused a great deal of trouble for Western metaphysics.
12 March
Did another chunk of work on the Book of Thoth, dealing primarily with writing's underworld axis. (To recap, writing has 3 axes of exteriority in the BOT, I'm arguing: 1. axis of materiality 2. axis of underworld 3. axis of animality.) Underworld axis seems defined by relation to bas (bA.w, 'manifestations', 'souls') on the one hand, to akhu (ax.w, 'spirits') on the other. Bas are texts themselves, but also the forces at work in texts, a field of turbulent, pre-personal potencies. Bas belong to the 'now' of the text, hence are either caught in the net, or are embodied in the writer as fisher/hunter. The text as akh, 'effective', however, is the product of a transfigured subjectivity; the akh is a being rendered mAa-xrw, 'true of voice'. An entity thus 'justified' becomes a site of utterance with which the writer aspires to enter into a symbiotic relationship. The bas are of the absolute now, they are presence as such; the akhu are of the past and of the future, on account of their generativity.To the extent that the author of a text is present personally in the text, it can only be as an akh; the bas immanent to a text are at once pre- and transpersonal, hence analysis on this plane does not preserve the author.
13 March
I've found it most useful not to presuppose what a text "is about", the field of application for some set of concepts, but rather to focus on the relations between the concepts, the structure or shape thus formed. Then see what problem that shape fits; this becomes a potential field of application.
The problem with structuralism in its classical form (Lévi-Strauss) is that it only recognizes oppositions, so it forces the n-adic field of relations into dyadic form, the dyad into an opposition. Another way of putting this is that structuralism only recognizes a single mode of mediation. This problem has its roots in Hegel. The problem is not that in Hegel, the opposition is reconciled, but that the system does not (cannot) acknowledge the real diversity within sublation itself. Each operation of sublation in the Science of Logic is a slightly different operation. This is because sublation is a living activity, not an essence. But this means the moments of sublation in Hegel are inherently historical. The Hegelian will say, "That's the point: reason is historical and history rational."
(I dropped the thread here.)
18 March
The idea of being "justified", literally, "true-of-voice" (mAa-xrw), may be the core concept of what we might term Egyptian epistemology. Since it is applied to a speaker no longer extant, it implies their utterance is rendered wholly true by a transposition of reference. The displacement of the speaker from fixed coordinates is the condition of possibility for becoming "justified" in this absolute sense. A different way of putting it is that only upon closure of this site of utterance is it possible to adjust it, rendering it utterly True.
@tonhoberlinense: would justified utterances in this sense be something like the foundational texts of commentarial traditions?
I believe so; hence in the Book of Thoth, the "justified" akhu ("spirits") have a "second body" in the interpreting scribe. The concept of "justification" in the Egyptian sense would be incomplete without this hermeneutic dimension, because the "adjustment" that renders the utterance True is the ongoing interpretive labor. We can see this futurity of truth in the role of Horus relative to Osiris: civilization vindicates the mortal. The hermeneutical structure, of course, need not only apply to the deceased speaker; rather, it concerns the conditions rendering any utterance "effective" (akh)—hence akhu means "spell" as well as "spirit". I think that the Book of Thoth opens the way to a hermeneutical reading of much of the Egyptian resurrection literature.
21 March
Coming to terms with the writer's relationship to animality in the Book of Thoth (third axis of exteriority). The animal possesses instruction or guidance whose source is explicitly non-textual: "Is a learned one he who instructs? The beasts and the birds, teaching comes about for them, but what is the book which they have read? The four-footed beasts which are upon the mountains, do they not have guidance?" (B02, 1/6-7). The possession of this explicitly non-textual knowledge appears to vest in the animal the possibility of absolute textual originality. Animals, therefore, escape the closed hermeneutic economy of the akhu, the writers who came before, and the writer in the present. The akhu are 'justified' through being freed of indexicality, while the writer in the now takes on the burden of being their 'second body'. The animal, outside this economy, is its originator: "These dogs, these jackals, these baboons, these snakes, which prophesize according to their utterances" (B02, 11/3). The animal is the original "prophet" (sr/sl). At B02, 10, we read that the "lord of the bas of Re," that is, the sacred texts, characterized as "the messenger of prophecy" (hby slA) "knew the form of speech of the baboons and the ibises. He went about truly in the hall of the dog. He did not restrain their barking. He understood the barkings of these and these cries of the land of the fathers. He made the four pleas of the wild beasts, one by one … He understood them. He brought them before me." (B02, 10/8-11) Note that "messenger" (hby) always alludes to "ibis" (hb), and so to Thoth. The original prophet is thus the animal, and the mediation of this inhuman utterance the primary hermeneutical intervention; an intervention, moreover, which is already also ethical, as we can see from the reference to juridical 'pleas'.
23-25 March
Been having a conversation on Facebook about subversive readings of Abrahamic scriptures. "Solomon had a vineyard in Baal Hamon; he let out his vineyard to tenants. Each was to bring for its fruit a thousand shekels of silver," (Song of Solomon 8.11). One can reverse-engineer from this line an invocation of the God Baal Hamon. This is a very promising direction for future work, though it is not a principal interest of my own. This method could redirect surplus energy, as it were, from these highly invested texts into invoking the deity inadvertently "cited".
One could do this wherever a deity's name is also a word that features in the text, or with epithets. The idea is to find a presence in the text for the deity that bypasses the confrontations, damnations, proscriptions, that are explicit. This has nothing to do with any appeal to historicity: it's a purely esoteric practice. (Best etymology of Baal Hamon appears to be "Baal (Lord, Ruler) of the crowd/multitude"; which fits the verse nicely.)
@tonhoberlinense: For humans to subvert prophetic and sacred text seems a bit rash, to say the least, no?
"Subversive" was a poor choice of words on my part. To me, as a polytheist, it is not subversive of these texts, though I recognize that it is subversive of a certain way of construing them. It is not considered subversive, for example, of the Vedas to treat occurrences of the word durga, meaning "inaccessible", as invocations of the Goddess Durga, although this is anachronistic, as well as counter to the sense of those Vedic passages. So I would say that treating texts in this fashion is not subversive of a proper understanding of their sacredness, though it is subversive of a narrow, all-too-human understanding of them. I am interested in this technique purely as a way of developing resources for revivalist pagans to invoke their deities, who have been written into these texts perhaps according to a greater providence. These names and epithets attest by their presence that the language of these texts is rooted in traditions which they cannot master. The prophet cannot impose human ownership upon the language in which he speaks.
@tonhoberlinense: Thanks for the extended reply. Nonetheless it still seems rash to me.
The point about anachronism is apposite concerning prophetic texts. Especially fulfilled prophetic texts. What you say about durga reminds me of how church fathers interpret the old testament. That our languages ultimately have roots in gods and beyond man is consistent with Babel and God's alloting men to the many gods. But the fulfillment of the scriptures is what seems to make a divorce between them and their interpretation by the Church rash, and the employment of this divorce for revitalizing paganism even more rash. That the Word was made flesh implies that even our babelic, bastard tongues have been the object of divine condescension, so the "scandal" of the subversion is just a small part of the scandal of Christ on the cross. Indeed, significantly, the reversal of Babel is also the foundation of the Church here on Earth on Pentecost. So although the text cannot master anything on its own, it is an instrument in a specific, announced and attested divine action and to employ it otherwise is to subvert it, just as to use a medical pill to cause harm is a subversion of it. To deny the name's connection would be to forget Babel. To employ this in an invocation is to risk blinding oneself to Pentecost. Leaving the text to its orthodox interpretation within the theurgy of man's salvation is appropriate to our human position.
But perhaps not appropriate to the historical contestation over the "ownership" of these languages, these texts. Are you saying that the misuse of scripture is a "risk" *beyond* that of being a pagan polytheist in the first place? Is it similarly "rash" to invoke Orishas in the guise of saints? I would refrain from such an activity only if I got the sense that the pagan deity in question did not wish to be invoked from these texts.
@tonhoberlinense: Yes, it seems to me be something beyond that. Not only is there lack of faith, but a misuse of objects pertaining to the faith. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it would seem that from a polytheist point of view one can see that there is at least one deity who quite expressly does not want the texts to be used in this way. Is that a concern?
It is ultimately up to those who are called to the worship of Canaanite or pre-Islamic Arabian deities what use to make of these objects. I should stress that this is not part of anybody's practice, as far as I know. It is quite possible that they would not sanction it, either for the reason you cite, or feeling these texts too ambivalent, even evil.
An issue that could be raised, though, in principle, is the question of an identity between the God of Abraham and West Semitic El, raising the question of an alternative or even prior covenant. But to answer this would require a combination of historical inquiry and personal gnosis, and it's not really my affair.
@tonhoberlinense: Indeed! Thanks again for the explanations. How the Church looks theologically from a pagan perspective is smthng I'm curious about. Vicente Ferreire ad Silva explains Christinaity as a species of forgetfulness of being, but at the cost of subordinating the gods to being. The most interesting Heideggerianism I know.
Most pagans I know see it as a historical catastrophe that is being remedied in our time according to some providence. They generally believe, though, that under the Church's hegemony, experience of divinity in an attenuated sense persisted, either through the sacredness of places or iconic potencies, or through individual mysticism; that the Gods did not abandon humanity.
@tonhoberlinense: hm. I understand materialists describing it as a merely historical catastrophe, but thought polytheists would think differently
Some venture into theodicy to explain it, but more common is to point to human free will, and hence freedom to alienate oneself from the Gods, and even to damage society in ways future generations must deal with.
@tonhoberlinense: Sorry to insist on the issue, but what about the supernatural side of things, i.e, saints, miracles, relics, exorcisms etc...?
I can't speak for everyone, but many see these as either a lingering divine presence (e.g., the cult of saints veiling the continued activity of certain Gods, certain persistent patterns of worship, etc.) or as purely psychical phenomena, or as spurious. Most don't give it much thought.
@tonhoberlinense: hmmm, ok.
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@ajnabee: what distinguishes Leibniz from those who preceded him is that "his concept of God is relegated to a pure function." God is therefore defined as the "most dilated and de-contracted state of the monad … the key by which all monads harmonize."
Precisely. In this way, Leibniz is closest to correctly understanding the operation of the Platonic "One Itself" of any modern.
@ajnabee: …interesting, complicated point. Leibniz's praise for Plato, and the Platonic "One" is well-known… Leibnizian monads "participate" in the One via the clarity and distinctness of their perceptions…
Yes, which is a matter of their own integrity or unity; this is what the One is.
@ajnabee: and Leibniz does accept the innate idea (rejecting the sensible, phenomena). God instantiates concepts which strive… this is not eleatic monism (afaik)…i see it as the One-multiple…multiple as substantive…
According to Patricia Curd, even "Eleatic Monism" is not substantial (i.e. material or numerical) monism, but "predicational".
@ajnabee: "anyone who calls God one or single has no true idea of God." -Spinoza, letter to Jelles
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@TempleAlchemy: Alchemy is about change, destruction & creation. Called the "spagyric art," from Greek words meaning "to tear apart" & "to bring together".
A beautiful coinage, probably Paracelsan. The "tear apart" portion, from spaô, sparassô, has strong Dionysian associations.
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It would be legitimate to see Egyptian influence upon Plato's Phaedrus in the motif of being "in the following" of a deity traveling celestially. This is a major concept in Egyptian theology, weak or unattested in previous Hellenic theology. The explicit reference to Thoth (Theuth) in this dialogue, by name and without syncretism, also strengthens this idea.
@tonhoberlinense: Cool, when I first learnt of this in Egyptian theology I immediately thought of the Phaedrus. Later, the alternating ages of the Statesman also reminded me of the sun barque's netherworld nighttime journey.
A good point. There is some evidence of earlier Hellenic appropriation of Egyptian theology, viz. "Apollonius' "Argonautika" and Egyptian Solar Mythology," S. Noegel, Classical World 97.2 (2004), pp. 123-136. (Noegel on Argonautika is talking about Apollonius' version, which is late; I am suggesting the original myth might show trace influence.)
@tonhoberlinense: Do you know of a text on this? It will be useful when explaining study of Egyptian views in upcoming doctorate on parts of time.
"Knowledge for the Afterlife" by Theodor Abt and Erik Hornung might be an accessible introduction.
26 March
I'm struck by the similarity in Egyptian between wnn, "to be, exist", wnwt, "hour, division of time", wn, "to open up", wni, "to hasten." On the one hand, I think that in Egyptian thought "being" is inseparable from becoming available to perception, from coming into one's moment [there is an epithet, e.g., of Sekhmet, "in her moment" (m At.s)], which is to be determinate and to be exposed to negation, passing away, while on the other hand, time is always spatialized in Egyptian thought, and passing away thus itself negated. Whatever has been, necessarily still is, in a space differently defined. The dependence of this spatiality upon the moment of definition or measurement, however, is how space is in turn temporalized.
We see this in the genre of resurrection literature that focuses on the journey of Re through the night. I'm reading one such right now, quite closely: the so-called "Book of the Earth". Re travels through the "night", illuminating objects that are, absent his living presence, essentially, ontologically "dark". These objects, which are frequently called "corpses" (XA.wt) in this text, are akin to Suhrawardi's category of "dusky barriers". The use of the term XA.t in the "Book of the Earth" convinces me we know much less than we think about the theological sense of this word. There is simply no way it means "corpse" in a literal and mundane sense. At least in the "Book of the Earth", it appears to designate something that is a pure object, divorced from subjectivity (or the purely objective aspect of a complex subject-object).
@_shrine_: Reminds me of PKDs 'wall of beef'' and the world of shells. I still need info on dead and dismembered gods if you have any?
Dismembered Gods I know most about are Osiris and Dionysos. Actual dismemberment of Osiris rarely spoken of in Egyptian texts, so the operation not fully transparent. Dionysos seems to disperse integral soul into faculties, intoxication of embodiment.
@micapam: Been reading Sloterdijk on pre-subjective foetal experience. Did ancient egyptians liken tomb to womb as contemporaneous Old Europeans seemed to?
Yes; the question is whether sometimes this is transmigration. "Officially", there is no transmigration in Egyptian theology, but an awful lot of Greeks, and indeed maybe Egyptians writing in Greek, seem to have thought there was; I think that a doctrine of transmigration hides in plain sight in the Egyptian resurrection literature.
@_shrine_: There are some clues here re: hasten about why 'fated' or synchronous events seem to occur to damaged psyches.
@_shrine_: My heart told me recently that it was Ra/Re and when I asked it to speak in its actual voice, blood rushing in my body, too loud.
Regarding "dead" Gods, part of what has me working on the "Book of the Earth" is strange terminology of "corpses" (XA.wt) of Gods. I've never encountered this terminology before, and I've read virtually every published ancient Egyptian theological text. The word XA.t, "corpse", is written with an Oxyrhynchus fish, the kind that swallowed Osiris' phallus. I haven't found any illumination from etymology as to the peculiar usage of XA.t ("corpse") in the "Book of the Earth". There is a theory about the suppression of third consonants in Egyptian. Perhaps the semantic field informing XA lies in some XA*; more likely the "Book of the Earth" has a unique technical sense.
27 March
@_shrine_: You posted something about masturbation, the replacement of a god's hand…
The myth you refer to, I believe, concerns Horus, Seth and Isis. Horus and Seth contest the sovereignty of the cosmos, Seth on the principle of strength, Horus on the principle of legitimacy. At one point, Seth attempts to influence the judges by implicating Horus as the passive partner in a homosexual encounter. The purpose presumably is to show that he can dominate Horus and violate him; and so perhaps the plan was for penetration, but instead Horus catches Seth's semen in his hand, and shows it to his mother, Isis. Isis cuts off the hand with Seth's semen in it, then fashions a new hand for Horus. Isis then masturbates Horus and collects his semen. (I'm going to attract an erotic spambot with this kind of talk.) Isis deposits the semen on lettuce in Seth's garden. Lettuce was regarded as aphrodisiac by Egyptians, hence Seth is fond of it. Seth ingests Horus' semen, and when he raises in court the issue of his imposing himself sexually upon Horus, Thoth calls upon both of their semen to answer; Seth's answers from the marsh into which Isis threw Horus' hand, while Horus' answers from within Seth's body. This semen is born from Seth's head as a lunar disc and given to Thoth. The hand of Horus which was thrown into the water is identified in Coffin Texts spell 158 with the mystery of the fish-trap. There is a general pattern in Egyptian theology of mutilations of Gods resulting in human participation in some divine potency. Horus' severed hand containing the semen of Seth is, as the fish-trap, perhaps analogous to Osiris' phallus swallowed by a fish. I suspect it is a distinct mode of binding a soul. Also significant that Thoth receives the product of Horus and Seth's union.
@_shrine_: Who is Thoth? It seems to me if a man works another man's procreative needs (culture) the hands of the second are the first's.
That would be Seth's interpretation. Alternative would see here a compromise, civilization's "handjob" of disruptive impulses.
Very interesting exchange with @tonhoberlinense
Date: 2012-04-07 04:54 pm (UTC)This vid gives an idea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSfNyGSiRck
Bottom line, a radical explanation of why initial Abrahamic missionaries often said there was 'no religion' in India, why there is no word for 'religion' in Chinese etc. etc. -- there actually =isn't= religion there -- Abrahamic religion is a fundamentally separate cultural category from other spiritual traditions which is why there has never been a rigorous definition of 'religion' that includes everything people point at when they say it.
Includes a great analysis of the handover from Roman 'religio' to Christianity and how the argument proceeded so as to cover up a lot of awkward ignorance. And does define religion in a way connected with what I wrote on my blog today about 'wild attachment to a text-based “understanding” that we have to cheerlead as it “explains everything for our own good”'.
His stuff swept through a lot of Gordians in one fell rhetorical swoop for me, I will blog on it in two weeks' time.
I take the supernatural question far more seriously than 'pagans' do and have blogged about that in the past I think.
Re: Very interesting exchange with @tonhoberlinense
Date: 2012-04-07 09:03 pm (UTC)Regarding the "supernatural", if I understood Antonio correctly, he was asking what Pagans think about the alleged supernatural manifestations within the Church. My reply was meant to indicate that I've never known Pagans to give much thought to what "miracles" experienced by Christians ought to mean to them. I'm not speaking to a general attitude toward the supernatural, but to a lack of interest in claims by Christians of supernatural experiences, which have a high value within Christianity, of course, but outside that context, not so much.
It would be a separate question whether Pagans are less interested in "miracles" even within their own religion; quite possibly they are, but it's a separate question nevertheless.
Re: Very interesting exchange with @tonhoberlinense
Date: 2012-04-12 02:14 pm (UTC)