fragilekeys

My article “Doing (the) Nothing: Eric Santner and Giorgio Agamben on Suspending the Apparatus of Glory” was recently published on Epoche Magazine. My thanks to Timofei and John over there for continuing to support my work. Make sure to check out the other writings– it’s quite the archive of philosophy by now at issue #67! Here is an excerpt from section IV:

As creatures made up of spectral flesh, we feel more than just the pressure to uphold the norms of social life corresponding to our role and placement in it. We also feel the pressure of the void around which these norms orbit, “the lack of any ultimate grounding or authorization of those normative statuses,” and increasingly we feel the precarity and dispensability of our roles (84). But this void is terrifying. Exposed to it, our world threatens to fall apart. Santner calls formations of the flesh the ways in which this “ontological vulnerability” is covered up (92). The King covered this void in two ways: by veiling it (this is the immediate effect of the glorious body: to captivate) and by vouching for it (by backing whatever debt in the justification of society was outstanding). With the deposition of royal sovereignty, this function of veiling and vouching spreads itself across the whole fabric of the social, such that captivation and justification becomes an immanent practice, as we’ve seen. The “subject-matter” of the modern citizen-subject directly involves these formations of the flesh which labor over the legitimacy of those forms, for it is now the People’s body that must function “as glorious guarantor covering the missing link at the ‘anthropogenetic’ knotting of the somatic and the normative” (86).

Political economy thus pertains to the maintenance of the People’s Two Bodies: not just material life (the management of biological life and death) but also spectral life (the glory and spectacle of its symbolic, undead body). It inherits the duty to vouch for the normative order and its suture to the somatic, and thus to “redeem or indemnify” a lack at its origin (88). Biopolitics doesn’t just address man as species and population, but also in this dimension of flesh as the bearer of royal remains, for “the threshold of modernity is marked by the ‘massification’ of the physical-juridical flesh of the king, its dispersion into populations that for that very reason must be placed in the care of biopolitical administration” (89). Biopolitics, on this level, is the regime that justifies veils over the void and securitizes or funds them. Foucault even showed in his genealogical analyses that policing was originally conceived as, “the art of the state’s splendor as visible order and manifest force”: not just the maintenance of rule but the maintenance of glory (91). What appears to be “policing of empirical bodies and forces” conceals its liturgical dimension, for this often violent administration is also responsible for covering the void upon which social existence is built. Still, it is not just the police but every political subject who inherits responsibility for the People’s second body. All of us have a hand in it, for it is at stake in our own. This is what weighs upon us uncannily: the production and shaping of the glorious flesh of the social bond (99), the imperative to care for this “spectral flesh of the sovereign People” (86). To become more aware of these veilings and vouchings, especially as they have enmeshed our own flesh into unfreedom, is therefore a biopolitical task that is as critical as it is intimate. Continue reading!

Letter to John

Part III
1. Poems

WISEACRE / WISDOM TICKET

At the limit of the query in the real,
every certainty fails. The dispersal of all energy
prevails        as one sparse detached resolution
deriving the antithesis of death
from the ruination of all persistent illusions.
Only the quest to love and one’s insufficiency to love
sustains        once images of God
no longer avail the heart surrendered
fatally to the talisman-stripped openness
it must embark.        And the stations of the self,
remember: they quit the self: not a single
shred of self-evidence is left once
the zero is indwelt, zero that is plenum as well:
the confect of its beam within the dazzling darkness
the night which spells the culmination of the faith
the pristine corporal sensoration of
a consciousness        mandala-immense
rippling waves of Suchness with a sea-infocused core
O this rife, ripe, intangible common sense!

And yet still        I cannot erase        quickly enough
these impressions I am dreamily impelling
from my non-sight          this ignorant
allegiance to the bottomed-out
nakedness I kept on
confessing for the truth        because I may confuse it to confess:
because within my diamond cut of faulty gratitude
only the vast agency of
dynamic spaciousness insists
the non-recursive playfulness of cancelled signs
the lullabying quiver of the phantom
dissipated for all sentients by the simplest thud:
for that is where the ease of sky
probes every wanderer’s right under the sun
to let it roll       without horizon lines       into the quick.

See now I am like Icarus        whose flames desert
a theologian divested of his tomes
a negligible worker whose lumbering intent
descends       stumbling from the precipice
nowhere to reach nowhere to
rest content in the unfathomable wealth
pure presence manifests         questionless—
but who could reach the depth I splash from then?
when it is but the surface pressure of
an all-eroding safety       content to soak the trees.

The past I cannot foresay        the present
relinquishes me long before I learn my speech
my fidelity therefore must lodge
somewhere in the salt floe of the vagabond
Jesus, but he without a chance
of being understood        who pitilessly
tears in two the temple veils
until body alone ascends of future glory
which can no longer be reserved for anything but
his gory heart:         future that inexorably
demands of the liberated conscience it be enough
since there is nothing left to live by but         lost love.

—May 30th, 2023

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Letter to John

Part II
Additions
(June – Aug 4th, 2023)

1

What must be gradually eradicated is the entire movement of auto-suggestion in consciousness.

On close examination, the link between mental phenomena and consciousness cannot be established. No thought will raise consciousness and no thought can dampen consciousness. Only the spontaneous, effortless, “natural” stilling of thoughts will render consciousness permeable to its own clarity— without the interferences of projections, ideations, and judgments; without the investment of the display upon consciousness as real.

As for the thoughts etc. which appear upon the display, they are thoroughly empty, non-binding, and spontaneously released. They are flits of “substance” which at worst will remind us of the impermanence of substance and of its utter inability to define or alter consciousness: they pass before they arise and, finally, have nothing to do with us.

This fact can be contrasted with auto-suggestion: the process whereby mental phenomena are allowed to determine and push around consciousness, or more to the point, the conscious being, who believes that the mental phenomena are its own.

Indeed that is the first result of auto-suggestion: the sense of (independent) I-being, ahamkara, as “owner” (or appropriator) of objective thought, objective reality, objecthood in general. From this node of error flows the entire complex of related errors; but all of them express the same ignorant move, namely: when our consciousness mistakes itself for and globs on to an objective or mental phenomena of the nature “I am, you are, they are, we are, it is, it is all… X.”

One must thoroughly grok not only the unreliability and contingency of any such saying, but also the folly of the entire operation (despite its minor successes to ‘say the real’) as simply a defense against the impartial space of consciousness— against the mystery of the Unattributable which suffuses all attribution and renders it empty. For, in the end, we do not know what is happening— because “nothing” is happening. It is in the coincidence of nothing-happens and it-happens that the miracle of existence is named.

The semblance of definition and alteration in consciousness, however, is perhaps the most difficult thing to disabuse ourselves of, because it boils down to the judgment of existence. Not the categorical judgment (i.e. assigning qualities) but the existential judgment itself: “it is.”

(It may indeed be the case “X is”, but we are limited to knowing the case and not its nature. What we say of X will always carry the flaw of a limited perspective, and it is only in withdrawing from this game that we reapproach the total perspective which treats each thing as it is and thus repairs the rift between being and knowledge. That is why everything is “in the mystical” in the final perception: we cannot know what “it” was, or if it was an “it”; if “it” and “is” do not reveal more a failure to know than anything.)

A thought arises in consciousness, it repeats, it nags us, it provokes us, we want it, we don’t want it, it has importance, it is meaningless— its deployment is unending because we keep vacillating on whether or not the thought “exists,” has meaning, relevance, pertinence. We see its emptiness, its non-binding nature, even its illusory and reality-misnaming nature; but then we forget this, we resubstantialize it, we glob it back on to another thought we also deem substantial, and so the investment in relevance-delusion continues.

This does not imply a judgment of irrelevance on things, but locates relevance outside the mental judgment of relevance. It implies a surrender to the real relevance of presence, rather than a slavery to the false, superimposed, egocentric relevance. This means that relevance certainly is— what could be more obvious?— but it is unlocalizable and indeterminable: not in the direction of the vague, but in the direction of the ever-more-abundantly unknown! On the other side of our attributions of reality is the revelation of the Unattributable.

Ultimately, we do not see the empty, non-binding, spontaneously-liberated character of thoughts because we are invested in some image or sense of I-being, which those particular thoughts are supporting, antagonizing, terrorizing, flattering, and in any case: sustaining “in existence” such that the judgment on the existence of that I-being is, if not positive outright, at least dubiously-suspiciously positive— which indeed always the case. We name this “egoism.”

2

No more performance in prayer.

3

In Buddhism there is no debt to repay. In most theistic systems, there is a debt.

The debt we have incurred through our sin and wrong-action can only be forgiven by God. As a karmic debt, we must pay it off according to the Lord’s justice. But the Lord may always intervene and lessen or cancel the sentence. God is sovereign in this regard. Indeed in this control over moral cause and effect he proves himself Lord of the universe, since life and death are at stake.

The debt however proves too exorbitant (when compared to what it would have been to obey God) for us to pay it off. The incarnation of God must pay it off. Ironically, the human being that shows how far we fall from the ideal, is the only human being who can show us the way back to the heights.

Buddhism however has no need for this, hence in the enlightened state there is no judgment on existence. Good and bad appear relative, indeed, as attributions which simply set the neurotic cycle of sin and punishment, debt and retribution, in motion.

At the same time, in its aspiration to free us from karmic cycles, much is essentially the same. One could even say that the stroke of grace is here even more radical for not requiring a deity: it is “built in” to the universe (the impermanent expanse) that an increase of awareness, of mind-clarity, will lead to an increase in good-making behavior and loving-kindness. The Buddha Samantabhadra is All-Good spontaneously, without any choice—is this not another extreme expression of the sovereignty of Unchangeable, Unlocateable Presence over everything that changes in time and space?

If there is a drama, it is a drama of owing something to God, of making up for having missed the true life. If there is no drama, the true life cannot be missed, and everything rests freely. But both perspectives require or lead to a sort of long-standing trust in being—a surrender of the “I” who would control, in favor of an entrustment to the Indestructible, however the latter is further narrated and figured (Dharmakaya, Godhead, etc).

Does this debt derive from a comparison of our actual selves with the self we intuit was possible? In the theist’s case, the God-man holds the position of the self that was possible. In the case of Buddhism, there is no comparison possible, due to codependent arising, and so no debt before another is possible: every debt would be shared, there could only be a total paying back of everything to everyone—but in the clarity of mind that very “paying back” would be “spontaneous arising”: the drama of debt ceases to make sense.

But, there is joy in the owing, in the striving for the impossible, for the unactualized perfection of God. We also know this because of the incarnation. The God-Man more than anyone loves God. He lives unto the debt Man owes God. He loves God more than enough to pay it, and will pay it infinitely out of love. Our having missed what we could have been sorrows God and the God-Man. The latter shows us that Devotion and Atonement are the same movement in the soul of Man: love is always love-suffering for the beloved, whether the beloved of God for Man or Man for God.

4

The pain of being born is unending
Train the mind in wisdom of the breach
And death will never reach you

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