Ktaadn.
“What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”
The Cell.
…
The ice
The idea
“Talk of mysteries!
I’m astounded by my body”
A strange matter in which
I’m bound
An elk, a pane of
glass, an egg
“Think of our life in
nature – daily to be encountering
matter, to come into contact
with it – rocks, trees, wind
on our cheeks! the solid
earth! the actual world! the
common sense!
Who are we? where are
we?”
Beginning
again
with Lyn
Hejinian.
Rewriting (Howe’s?) Thorow, rewriting the 19th century through language.
Are Emily’s fascicles visuals, not auralities? In a day when reading a poem by the fire made the poem profound? Letters and correspondence, contacting you, lives written in postcards, yours sincerely, your gnome, she said gnomically, cryptology and the suppressed pun
what do you mean
“Mean. Potatoes”?
all I can read is meat and potatoes, proving once again
from the beginning
the importance of the reader.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Notes for a Lecture
Or,
'Poetry can only be criticised by way of poetry. A critical judgment of an artistic production has no civil rights in the realm of art if it isn’t itself a work of art, either in its substance as a representation or a necessary impression in the state of becoming' (Schlegel, Critical Fragment 117)
The great traditionalist,
in his essay from 1933,
bestows the following
demand on the critic:
‘The exhaustive critic,’ he writes, ‘armed with a powerful glass, will be able to sweep the distance and gain an acquaintance with minute objects in the landscape with which to compare close at hand.’ He continues: ‘he will be able to gauge nicely the position and proportion of the objects surrounding us, in the whole of the vast panorama.’
Panorama or Complete vision: to see that which they saw and as they saw it; yet, also to see what they
– the poets and authors from the past –
had not seen, that which cannot be seen unless it
– Coleridge: I AM –
is brought forward into the future,
placed under a lens.
From Pope’s pan-theon; the invisible in Swift, Lilliput;
Gay’s dark alley theatre; the hidden sensibilia in Mackenzie’s novella,
to the spectre in Austen’s Abbey,
a story of things unseen, not seen.
The poet in the Lake; Blake;
Coleridge on Opium; Dickens in Coketown;
Pope’s 'Judging Ill, his Want of Skill': their image-nation, their, own, vision of a nation.
Eliot’s demand is our grant: ‘to compare close at hand’.
Simonides, writing in his own language, tells the story of a woman who wants to travel across sea to meet her dead husband: to see his face
(οφθαλμοισι φίλον)
and touch his hands
(χειρα λάβοιμι).
In fragmented speech, Paul
Celan,
forever borrowing poet,
a Pole Jew writing in the German of the Fool, reminds us of a poem he once wrote: ‘Voices from the path through nettles: / Come to us on your hands’.
Poems are encounters, ‘paths from a voice to a listening You.’
‘Is it on such paths that poems take us when we think of them?’
It is an act of crossing over, one another – an other: Eliot’s ‘poet…artist of any art’
'Compare close at hand'.
'Poetry can only be criticised by way of poetry.'
(reminds the other night, I had said the opposite)
And, then, Week 5 and 10, hand in, before 12.10.
Writing for the one upstairs, is writing for the other, too.
Criticism is pairing hands.
'Poetry can only be criticised by way of poetry. A critical judgment of an artistic production has no civil rights in the realm of art if it isn’t itself a work of art, either in its substance as a representation or a necessary impression in the state of becoming' (Schlegel, Critical Fragment 117)
The great traditionalist,
in his essay from 1933,
bestows the following
demand on the critic:
‘The exhaustive critic,’ he writes, ‘armed with a powerful glass, will be able to sweep the distance and gain an acquaintance with minute objects in the landscape with which to compare close at hand.’ He continues: ‘he will be able to gauge nicely the position and proportion of the objects surrounding us, in the whole of the vast panorama.’
Panorama or Complete vision: to see that which they saw and as they saw it; yet, also to see what they
– the poets and authors from the past –
had not seen, that which cannot be seen unless it
– Coleridge: I AM –
is brought forward into the future,
placed under a lens.
From Pope’s pan-theon; the invisible in Swift, Lilliput;
Gay’s dark alley theatre; the hidden sensibilia in Mackenzie’s novella,
to the spectre in Austen’s Abbey,
a story of things unseen, not seen.
The poet in the Lake; Blake;
Coleridge on Opium; Dickens in Coketown;
Pope’s 'Judging Ill, his Want of Skill': their image-nation, their, own, vision of a nation.
Eliot’s demand is our grant: ‘to compare close at hand’.
Simonides, writing in his own language, tells the story of a woman who wants to travel across sea to meet her dead husband: to see his face
(οφθαλμοισι φίλον)
and touch his hands
(χειρα λάβοιμι).
In fragmented speech, Paul
Celan,
forever borrowing poet,
a Pole Jew writing in the German of the Fool, reminds us of a poem he once wrote: ‘Voices from the path through nettles: / Come to us on your hands’.
Poems are encounters, ‘paths from a voice to a listening You.’
‘Is it on such paths that poems take us when we think of them?’
It is an act of crossing over, one another – an other: Eliot’s ‘poet…artist of any art’
'Compare close at hand'.
'Poetry can only be criticised by way of poetry.'
(reminds the other night, I had said the opposite)
And, then, Week 5 and 10, hand in, before 12.10.
Writing for the one upstairs, is writing for the other, too.
Criticism is pairing hands.
Draft Panegyric For The Boat-Shoe
...συμπλωρίτες...
Negotiating muddy tarmac edges that double as side-walks one realises that our relationship with the city as subjects of it / in it is mediated through the sole of our shoes. And whereas the post-post-feminist female attempts to hack a niche for herself upon the redolent of Mies' Seagram spirit Manolo Blahnik high heel sandals, the retrosexual male of a landlocked island capital has nothing but his boat-shoes. Both him and Carrie have a latent nostalgia, a nostalgia apres (a) Heidegger, where the essence of being has been completely lost; and lost too is that space which acted, mythological nonetheless, as the ground - and reason (Grund) - of the indivisible, originary, authentic Being-in-the-world of modernity: the city. Domesticated, sub-urbanised and firmly protected in terms of its public spaces by sub-cultures unable to escape their enclaving enclosure and transform it, the city looses that revolutionary potential for the utopian tnasformation of its subject(s) and form(s) alike. Saving face of this all so human endeavour is not the presence of its subjects - their thereness, their acts, their future - but the nostalgia itself, the longing of that f(l)ighting spirit of urban aporetics, as it is manifested in public.
And whereas the feistiness of New York City lays between its angular positions, the opaqueness of a martini glass and the riveting inches of steel the ever-transformative tempest of Nicosia is grounded as the city plays shoreline to Cyprus' Mediterranean Sea affinities. It is by now well understood that even if Cyprus is an island it is one with a historic aversion to, a confinement from, the sea. Castles, oil refineries, military bases and more recently hotels have shaped the island as an inward, inland looking place alongside with that explosive dogma of amalgamated nationalisms and mainland Motherland and overfishing. And even though the capital, Nicosia, in true islanders' fashion is still called Chora it is the city furthest away from the sea and only a secondary, processed receptacle yet strongly suggestive substitute of an urban ground. Which footwear would then be most ideal for such a city as Nicosia than the boat-shoe?
The boat has always stood diametrically opposed to the house. A "place without a place", an other or third space the boat has become a schema of the uncontrolled differance, of an access to history without antiquity, of an idealised non-hegemony, of a radical reworking of primordial myths, of libertarian politics, of transgression, the "greatest reserve of the imagination". Contra the closure of the urban as domicile then, the boat -a vessel of unstable, unpredictable journeying- still supplies the imagination with the jouissance of a-poria -a jouissance lost amidst domesticity's grounding of ex-istance, regardless of the reality of marinas or of the techniques of naval navigation.
Even though it is not unlikely to see a lot of boat-shoes walking around parks, hanging over pavements waiting to go across, dancing in beer-paddles, drying up in front of central heating radiators, anybody who has ever been on a boat would know that boat-shoes are seldom worn on boats. More often than not you are asked to take your Sebagos, or Timberlands, or Quaysides, or Andark off. Boats - not mega-yachts, or crewed floating villas, or weekend cruise liners - are crammed little spaces of 40-50ft. maximum in which Hoovers don't have much wiggle room. Any cleaning, if not all cleaning, is done by hand and commonly by the owner who is not too keen on your shit-stained, gas-smelling, gum-marked soles rubbing his freshly oiled teak deck or his carpeted galley.
Within the boat-shoe's exilic position from the utilitarianism of both its nature and its aspirations and at its juncture with the privileged position of the boat in modernity lies the actual importance of the boat-shoe as an urban shoe vis-a-vis the inherent promise of (a) city. Cultural theory would have us to believe that in civilizations without boats, dreams dry up (Foucault, Of Other Spaces). In the presence of such an absence as we encounter it in Nicosia, the boat-shoe is there to take their place. Always ashore, aside, it diffuses the question marks of existence in an island's capital earmarking a loss and a voyage, the loss and the voyage. Instead of taking us home the boat-shoe stands in for the dream of an ex-istential urbanism long lost, a dream as absent from the everyday understanding and consumption of Nicosia as circumnavigation and piracy are from job center notice boards - even at ports. And akin the Manolo Blahniks it adds an idealistic spring to our walks and dead-end rendezvous, that this city is still capable of being beautiful, giving, a potentiality, a sea in-itself for which "there is no telling what it may not vomit up" (Thoreau).
Negotiating muddy tarmac edges that double as side-walks one realises that our relationship with the city as subjects of it / in it is mediated through the sole of our shoes. And whereas the post-post-feminist female attempts to hack a niche for herself upon the redolent of Mies' Seagram spirit Manolo Blahnik high heel sandals, the retrosexual male of a landlocked island capital has nothing but his boat-shoes. Both him and Carrie have a latent nostalgia, a nostalgia apres (a) Heidegger, where the essence of being has been completely lost; and lost too is that space which acted, mythological nonetheless, as the ground - and reason (Grund) - of the indivisible, originary, authentic Being-in-the-world of modernity: the city. Domesticated, sub-urbanised and firmly protected in terms of its public spaces by sub-cultures unable to escape their enclaving enclosure and transform it, the city looses that revolutionary potential for the utopian tnasformation of its subject(s) and form(s) alike. Saving face of this all so human endeavour is not the presence of its subjects - their thereness, their acts, their future - but the nostalgia itself, the longing of that f(l)ighting spirit of urban aporetics, as it is manifested in public.
And whereas the feistiness of New York City lays between its angular positions, the opaqueness of a martini glass and the riveting inches of steel the ever-transformative tempest of Nicosia is grounded as the city plays shoreline to Cyprus' Mediterranean Sea affinities. It is by now well understood that even if Cyprus is an island it is one with a historic aversion to, a confinement from, the sea. Castles, oil refineries, military bases and more recently hotels have shaped the island as an inward, inland looking place alongside with that explosive dogma of amalgamated nationalisms and mainland Motherland and overfishing. And even though the capital, Nicosia, in true islanders' fashion is still called Chora it is the city furthest away from the sea and only a secondary, processed receptacle yet strongly suggestive substitute of an urban ground. Which footwear would then be most ideal for such a city as Nicosia than the boat-shoe?
The boat has always stood diametrically opposed to the house. A "place without a place", an other or third space the boat has become a schema of the uncontrolled differance, of an access to history without antiquity, of an idealised non-hegemony, of a radical reworking of primordial myths, of libertarian politics, of transgression, the "greatest reserve of the imagination". Contra the closure of the urban as domicile then, the boat -a vessel of unstable, unpredictable journeying- still supplies the imagination with the jouissance of a-poria -a jouissance lost amidst domesticity's grounding of ex-istance, regardless of the reality of marinas or of the techniques of naval navigation.
Even though it is not unlikely to see a lot of boat-shoes walking around parks, hanging over pavements waiting to go across, dancing in beer-paddles, drying up in front of central heating radiators, anybody who has ever been on a boat would know that boat-shoes are seldom worn on boats. More often than not you are asked to take your Sebagos, or Timberlands, or Quaysides, or Andark off. Boats - not mega-yachts, or crewed floating villas, or weekend cruise liners - are crammed little spaces of 40-50ft. maximum in which Hoovers don't have much wiggle room. Any cleaning, if not all cleaning, is done by hand and commonly by the owner who is not too keen on your shit-stained, gas-smelling, gum-marked soles rubbing his freshly oiled teak deck or his carpeted galley.
Within the boat-shoe's exilic position from the utilitarianism of both its nature and its aspirations and at its juncture with the privileged position of the boat in modernity lies the actual importance of the boat-shoe as an urban shoe vis-a-vis the inherent promise of (a) city. Cultural theory would have us to believe that in civilizations without boats, dreams dry up (Foucault, Of Other Spaces). In the presence of such an absence as we encounter it in Nicosia, the boat-shoe is there to take their place. Always ashore, aside, it diffuses the question marks of existence in an island's capital earmarking a loss and a voyage, the loss and the voyage. Instead of taking us home the boat-shoe stands in for the dream of an ex-istential urbanism long lost, a dream as absent from the everyday understanding and consumption of Nicosia as circumnavigation and piracy are from job center notice boards - even at ports. And akin the Manolo Blahniks it adds an idealistic spring to our walks and dead-end rendezvous, that this city is still capable of being beautiful, giving, a potentiality, a sea in-itself for which "there is no telling what it may not vomit up" (Thoreau).
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
Bataillean Fragment
How can we disregard the utterly erotic encounter of a mortar shell and a roof at 10:40 Nicosia time, the roof of a female's house nonetheless, on Democracy Avenue and a military training mortar shell of 81 mm? An encounter with a much more corporeal past but one which suspension and state politics had lulled to a gape; a gape it has today trespassed. A spectacular and equally violent attempt -as all attempts are, as all temptation- at rapprochement therefore, heart-rending and blank, declassifying the fear of 'missing-the-spot', the mortar's hailing (or interpellation if you wish) has been ignored by the individual, who as we are informed 'was absent', and in such a way re-transcribed the public eroticism of this city as always, already latent. Yet, as always, there were those apparatus of capture to whom such latency, such slow-burning potentiality is, in its essential instability, already, a threat. Their media-ted panic of the shell hitting the school nearby is of course completely unfounded. Single mortar shells never hit on schools. They are dropped on them.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Τριαδα - Trinity and Tobacco
Γλώσσα μασσί και ανορθόγραφη.
Ολέθρια μπιζέλια. Πανολεθρία. Η απάτη του πρίγκηπα Αλβέρτου. Κυνήγη. Η πόρτα κλείνει στις 04.16. Η μηχανή αναμμένη. Αλάθιτος ο ήχος του διπλού. Κάμπινου. Προς αναζήτηση της φόρμουλας επικύρωσης των αξιωμάτων της γνώσης. Το λεξικό ως το μόνο βιβλίο που ακροτηριάζει τους σελιδοδείχτες. Αχρίαστος να ‘ναι. Και ο τηλεφωνικός κατάλογος. Συμπέρασμα: ανέκφραστα. Αν η σκέψη ήταν μονάχα παρούσα στη γλώσσα θα θρηνούσαμε τον εγκλωβισμό της στους γραμματικούς κανόνες. Διαύγεια. Από την Λουριτζήνα. Τουρκοκύπριος, συνελήφθει για αρχαιοκαπηλεία στην Ποταμιά. Ανεκόπηκε αρχικά από το Τμήμα Λαθροθηρίας. Επίσης Έλληνας του Πόντου συνελλήφθηκε στη Λινόπετρα για πειρατία. Στη κατοχή του βρέθηκαν 36 000 DVDs. Η αστυνομία χρειάστηκε 7 ώρες για την καταμέτρηση του υλικού. Επίσης συνελλήφθηκε Ρωσσίδα που τον βοηθούσε. Δεν ανακοινώθηκε πόσο χρόνο χρειάστηκε η αστυνομία να την μετρήσει. Ο Υπουργός Εξωτερικών ανακοινώσε την παροχή βοήθιας στη Σομαλία στην προσπάθεια που καταβάλλει για καταστολή της πειρατίας. Στις δηλώσεις του τόνισε πως η Κύπρος, ως νησί που έπεσε θύμα της πειρατίας επανελημμένα, μπορεί να προσφέρει της υπηρεσίες και γνώσεις, της σε μια άλλη χώρα που πάσχει από την ίδια νόσο. Τρεις λαλούν και δυο χορεύουν (Διώνη Νικολέττα Δεδαήτη). Absolute morality leads to absolute tragedy. « Putrefaction and offensive odor» (Winner Tardy, Pansaint, Summer 2003).
Χάσμα, καινό, χασμουρητό. Σκαλίζει τα Π και τα Ξ της. Ευοίωνος. Η ησυχεία. Η Χαρίκλια του Καλομοίρη που μας έσαζε τα υδραυλικά ο άντρας της και που έκαμνε και τις πιο ωραίες χαλλουμοτές, σήμερα, μεταξύ πέντε και έξι το απόγευμα, αψιουρίστηκε τέσσερις φορές, ενώ εβίδωνεν την αντέννα της τηλεόρασης της πάνω στο τιπόζιτο.
Αναζήτηση της Κα. Μεταφυσικής. Για τον σκοπό αυτό συστρατεύονται 6 Λέμμοι Νορβηγίας.Τέσσερις που θα επιθεορίσουν την Αρχιεπισκοπή, ένας το Διάστημα με σκάμανδρο και οξυγόνο και ένας στο Texas με σπιρούνια. Βρυκόλακα των σκέψεων μου, ακτινοβόλησε τις νεφοσκεπής μακριά σου ώρες μου, με την φωνή σου. Έφόσον συνεχίζουμε σε λέξεις να σκεφτόμαστε και ελπίζουμε, τουλάχιστον, πως οι λέξεις δεν θα ‘ναι ποτέ αρκετές να εξουθενώσουν τις σκέψεις / τη σκέψη, έχουμε τότε βάσιμες υποψίες να ελπίζουμαι πως κάποιο μέρος της σκέψης κάπου αλλού θα υπάρχει, πέραν των λέξεων. Και η πίστη; «Βρέχει». «Ποιός;». The mind is melted in love. For 10 minutes. Then add the spices. «Our minds are furnished with abstractions that have been made by others, abstractions that are already part of the communal stock of memories in our cultural world» (H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder I, 1997).
Εξασθενημένος από την ουλήτιδα. Να με οχυρώσεις με τα φιλιά σου. Εντάξει;
Ολέθρια μπιζέλια. Πανολεθρία. Η απάτη του πρίγκηπα Αλβέρτου. Κυνήγη. Η πόρτα κλείνει στις 04.16. Η μηχανή αναμμένη. Αλάθιτος ο ήχος του διπλού. Κάμπινου. Προς αναζήτηση της φόρμουλας επικύρωσης των αξιωμάτων της γνώσης. Το λεξικό ως το μόνο βιβλίο που ακροτηριάζει τους σελιδοδείχτες. Αχρίαστος να ‘ναι. Και ο τηλεφωνικός κατάλογος. Συμπέρασμα: ανέκφραστα. Αν η σκέψη ήταν μονάχα παρούσα στη γλώσσα θα θρηνούσαμε τον εγκλωβισμό της στους γραμματικούς κανόνες. Διαύγεια. Από την Λουριτζήνα. Τουρκοκύπριος, συνελήφθει για αρχαιοκαπηλεία στην Ποταμιά. Ανεκόπηκε αρχικά από το Τμήμα Λαθροθηρίας. Επίσης Έλληνας του Πόντου συνελλήφθηκε στη Λινόπετρα για πειρατία. Στη κατοχή του βρέθηκαν 36 000 DVDs. Η αστυνομία χρειάστηκε 7 ώρες για την καταμέτρηση του υλικού. Επίσης συνελλήφθηκε Ρωσσίδα που τον βοηθούσε. Δεν ανακοινώθηκε πόσο χρόνο χρειάστηκε η αστυνομία να την μετρήσει. Ο Υπουργός Εξωτερικών ανακοινώσε την παροχή βοήθιας στη Σομαλία στην προσπάθεια που καταβάλλει για καταστολή της πειρατίας. Στις δηλώσεις του τόνισε πως η Κύπρος, ως νησί που έπεσε θύμα της πειρατίας επανελημμένα, μπορεί να προσφέρει της υπηρεσίες και γνώσεις, της σε μια άλλη χώρα που πάσχει από την ίδια νόσο. Τρεις λαλούν και δυο χορεύουν (Διώνη Νικολέττα Δεδαήτη). Absolute morality leads to absolute tragedy. « Putrefaction and offensive odor» (Winner Tardy, Pansaint, Summer 2003).
Χάσμα, καινό, χασμουρητό. Σκαλίζει τα Π και τα Ξ της. Ευοίωνος. Η ησυχεία. Η Χαρίκλια του Καλομοίρη που μας έσαζε τα υδραυλικά ο άντρας της και που έκαμνε και τις πιο ωραίες χαλλουμοτές, σήμερα, μεταξύ πέντε και έξι το απόγευμα, αψιουρίστηκε τέσσερις φορές, ενώ εβίδωνεν την αντέννα της τηλεόρασης της πάνω στο τιπόζιτο.
Αναζήτηση της Κα. Μεταφυσικής. Για τον σκοπό αυτό συστρατεύονται 6 Λέμμοι Νορβηγίας.Τέσσερις που θα επιθεορίσουν την Αρχιεπισκοπή, ένας το Διάστημα με σκάμανδρο και οξυγόνο και ένας στο Texas με σπιρούνια. Βρυκόλακα των σκέψεων μου, ακτινοβόλησε τις νεφοσκεπής μακριά σου ώρες μου, με την φωνή σου. Έφόσον συνεχίζουμε σε λέξεις να σκεφτόμαστε και ελπίζουμε, τουλάχιστον, πως οι λέξεις δεν θα ‘ναι ποτέ αρκετές να εξουθενώσουν τις σκέψεις / τη σκέψη, έχουμε τότε βάσιμες υποψίες να ελπίζουμαι πως κάποιο μέρος της σκέψης κάπου αλλού θα υπάρχει, πέραν των λέξεων. Και η πίστη; «Βρέχει». «Ποιός;». The mind is melted in love. For 10 minutes. Then add the spices. «Our minds are furnished with abstractions that have been made by others, abstractions that are already part of the communal stock of memories in our cultural world» (H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder I, 1997).
Εξασθενημένος από την ουλήτιδα. Να με οχυρώσεις με τα φιλιά σου. Εντάξει;
60
I always liked you. With your Turnbull and Asser shirts, your struggling combover, your spiritualist architectural critiques, your cutting-edge traditionalism, your Byzantine Quakerism and your misguided affairs, your rare-breed, rare-cuts obsessions, your wine-fueled Aston Martin, your hermetic sprees, your near-uselessness.
Happy Birthday Charles!
Thursday, November 13, 2008
♥
Peter Paul Rubens, Venus Before The Mirror, 1615
"We love women of all different shapes and sizes.We love them not because of how they look or how they dress, but because of who they are and their spirit and their style and their humour and everything about them."
Alistair Burt MP
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Abraham Obama
Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government, 1840s
The invocation of a Marx vis-a-vis the future of the undoubtedly singularly historic election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the U.S.A. is as inappropriate an analytic tool as was the summoning of a spectre of Marx by the Republican scaremonger. America's center-stage politics are after all the politics of religiosity and deism, not of the trade-union or the radical squad - not anymore at least. The reinvigoration of politics, the attack on political dynasties and elites, the return to government that Obama's campaign and election effected is not a socialist turn therefore but an attempt to return to an idiosyncratic Americanism of the belief in the 'American Dream', the (primarily) topological messianism from Thoreau to facebook Mob-Wars to the (re)building of the Freedom Tower, perpetuated by the prophetic announcement even in its technological rendition of news-networks 'calling' elections, the naming, the logos of the father.
According to U.S.A.'s unique Abrahamic inheritance, government's "legitimate object (...) is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves in their separate, and individual capacities." Whereas whenever and in whatever they can do themselves, government must not get involved.It is this recent hopeless inability of people in the U.S. to do themselves "whatever they need to have done" that has brought up the question of the role of government within the specific context of the American democratic system. Unable to name a source for and of hope, unable to decipher a calling, no god to trust in, they turn their gaze to an analysis of the sign-ificance of the nature of hope. That is they return to the practice of naming, to the name itself. To the origin, the father: Abraham or A-ba-ra-ma or Obama. The Lincoln Center. It is from here, from the Abrahamic that this American re-birth stems. The crying and groaning the yelling and choking - the tears of High Fathers, Moses-figures of the civil rights movement like Jesse Jackson for example- were not but the stuff of labor. Of "labor which is prior and independent of capital" as Lincoln writes, of "labor which is superior to capital", yes, above and beyond capital and its analytics. A labor whose mid-wife was after all the Biblical grammar of podia and an a-dieu to the heroics of bondage - be them black or white.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
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