FAITH: what I need when I’ve got
no faith or the other way around:
one of them’s good-to-go when
the other’s away.
With faith on hand, FAITH’s eclipsed
& my bias & belief homeland security
system's all bells & whistles—beep
& beep, me: comfy in my own under-
standings, aims, goals, purposes &
measurable outcomes. No problem
no doubt..
Liberal Art Needed
I am
conflicted with the need to criticize,
carp,
quibble, mock, ridicule, confound
and
confuse so much and so many and
at
the same time the need to be liked, really
liked.
A cognitive & affective dissonance
I
struggle with continuously, continually
wrestling
with on-the-one- hand (OMG can
you
believe IT!). yet also on-the-other-hand:
like
me, really like me. And
I can’t afford
to
do
injustice to either hand.—torn between
2
loves as it were: need to criticize and
antagonize
& need to be liked, really
liked. A dilemma. No doubt.
... It is in this setting where we can being to talk of "faith" in a post-modern parlance. The fiduciary character of speaking to another is what unsettles all signification. it is also what concretizes the otherness of the other. Both theology and philosophy from the modern, let alone the postmodern, standpoint have been unable to take any kind of "theoretical" account of faith because of the way in which the intentionality of all religious conversation, whether one is talkiing to one's neighbor or to one's Maker, savages any descriptivist bias. The deposition of the sign is both a viral infection of contemporary semantics, what Baudrillard terms the "negative intensity" of the nameless surface grammars and simulacra that have proliferated at the closure of the modern conversation, and a blast that reveals an openness to a new grammar of address. This new grammar of address requires an understanding of the orthogonality of speech, as opposed to the linearity of discourse. If Nietzsche seeded the postmodernist revolution with his assault on the grammar of identity, we must now go beyond the revolution itself by breaking the totalizing stranglehold of differentialism--not the metaphysics of identity in difference, but the new metalogic of difference as identity, the kind of "bad boy dialectic" for which Deleuze became infamous.
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This is a quote. I'm just saying. But since quotes aren't allowed, I won't say by whom. It is from a recent book on post-modern religious theory, in which any given sentence makes practically no sense to me. Not even the title of the book makes any sense. For some bizarre reason, it seemed to me that it might apply here. Maybe you can explain it. It does say something about "faith" and something about "meta-logic" and something about "dialectic." That's the most I can say.
I get a sense of the (grotesque?)quote, and even maybe the possibility that it addresses what interests me: the "living Christ" of converse action when any 2 or more may I say "argue" IT out? As opposed to each one of us, walking around, sealed-in to our experience and knowledge and opinion. A converse action is a performance going on: 2 or more "in play." Call it debate, dialogue, dialectic: there's a differnce, of course: but what's same is the "back & forth" which I cherish. Living Christ I call it -- to you and Carl. Can't use that term anywhere without profanation, true? (On Quote: my only objection was to the big slab of quote like a massive bumper sticker. Much more interested in any "us" talking out of our own terms and stammer and stutter and effort to SAY for our selves. Hope you are doing well, Gite.
ReplyDeleteI'm sick in bed with the flu trying to wrap my head around post-modern theory on religion.
ReplyDeleteSorry. Had it a couple years ago. No fun. Read a novel, for crying out loud. Or Bible, for heaven's sakes. At least a little Luther.
ReplyDeleteI should have my head examined.
ReplyDeleteWhy?
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