“Might not chora mean: that which separates itself from every particular, that which with draws, and in this way admits and ‘makes room’ precisely for something else?”
I love the preppy old Chinese men that I see along my block: their prim nautical selves, the crew of Ulysses. The trope of the figure standing-against time, an adventure of the lonely, lovely signifier: the mechanic at Far East motors; the easily affable paternal figure who is somehow exempt from the seduction of mother, from the production of the couple that so easily dominates a kind of post-mythic curvature (the artist formally known as narrative, or writing, or text in those uninformed genetic terms available for mixed or popular use). Like that phantom automaton that prostitutes systemic control with individual jouissance, like a video game (without a hero, there is no event) that offers its re-payment over a duration of investment; the video game sanctions its reward via a subjective exchange of control. The player inserts his subjectivity like a coin at the very sli(t)p of formal identification where mortality is effaced and exchanged in the docile embrace of an object-commodity. The civility of the commodity implies the highest good and organization of the state. While this statement lacks immodesty, it is merely the transcendental imagination that consists the horizon of democracy, and what lies beyond some immentionable meridian of terror, of hymenic puncturing, of utter irruption of the total horizon of the world.
How far out does the horizon sound? What are the tidal moments of one’s knowing?
No word, no word for word will suffice to translate this word that gathers in its idiomatic value stock, race, family, species, genus/gender, generation, sex. Then, after saying the word Geschlecht, I amended or correct myself: the mark Geschlecht, I clarified. For the theme of my analysis would come down to a sort of composition or decomposition that affects, precisely, the unity of this word. Perhaps it is not longer a word. Perhaps one must begin by gaining access to it from its disarticulation or its decomposition, in other words, its formation, its information, its deformations or transformations, its translations, the genealogy of its body.
Two other dogs sat a little apart, squatting loosely in their skins, just frames of dogs in napless hides watching the coupled dogs and then watching the prisoners clanking away up the street. All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men’s minds.
It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a third party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol exacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.
Beginning with the father is a bad start. There is simply nothing unsavory about it. Fallen as it is beyond morality and into the void of a ‘historical science’ no longer techne. Yet, Freud is unrecognizable as the heir. I did not ask to bear witness to your life, but I am here nonetheless. Father as an idea of his life in mine, in abstention. Mother has a plan, a remedy, a murder .
Yes, the stubborn persistence of the pre-modern. Global systems have been ‘worlding’ the world since the Enlightenment, the Crusades, or where does the Global begin if not Odysseus or that stubborn Chinese boat that found California?
I stumbled into town just like a sacred cow, visions of swastikas in my head and plans for everyone. In the whites of their eyes, My little china you shouldn’t mess with me, I‘ll ruin everything you are. I give you television. I give you eyes of blue. I give you men who want to rule the world. And when I get excited she says, “shhh .”
A one desiring to understand the world looks about for a clue to its comprehension. Dasein pitches upon some area of common-sense fact and tries if he cannot understand other areas in terms of this one. This original area becomes then Dasein’s basic analogy or root metaphor. Dasein describes as best the characteristics of this area, or, if you will, discriminates its structure. A list of its structural characteristics becomes his basic concepts of explanation and description. In each case, Dasein believes, I shall try to trace out the implications of a model, to see how much of the ethnography makes sense in its terms, and to show how and to what degree the model is embodied in practices.
Models are partial constructions. They are selective, offering a perspective without exhausting all the possible facets of an experience. Formal economic models, for instance, deal only with selected dimensions such as what it means to secure a livelihood. Ricardo offered a model of the British economy, but he did not claim that it accounted for every aspect within that set of practices. The Physiocrats did not pretend to provide a model of all economic behavior.
Local models are often built around ‘primal,’ ‘focal’ or ‘axiomatic’ metaphors. A primal metaphor is a construction so basic to a people it defines reality for them. Primal metaphors are the dominant idiom for constituting and expressing events, and have than organizing force for a broad range of behavior. These schemes resemble what Stephen Pepper has called ‘root metaphors.’
Although, how would I know that without the historicity of what happens, without those generic concepts associated with the Totality of the World? One could not precisely say, however, how many studies have attempted to critique the error of judgement involved in the cosmology of concepts common and unveiled in being. This unveiling, which is best souvenir from Heidegger, is like walking a path in the forest, an arborescence of knowledge. The important idea here is that there would be some forest to which one entertains a intimacy, some idea of the land ritually intuited. To unveil the tension between a polysemy, ultimately controlled, that Heidegger affirms, and a dissemination that will escape that control, which Derrida affirms—a tension between the two economies.
The critique of fascism in J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings seems to break down along two political ontologies. On the one hand, there is the Fellowship of the Ring, which roughly fits our image of Enlightenment thought, especially in its paternal catalogue of the greatest warriors (the Western Ideal is Greece, the ideal of contemporary capitalism is America’s leadership and participation in the Allied response to the pseudo-event of Fascism, a kind of paradox inherent to capitalism itself.) The Fellowship consists of the peaceful co-existence of racial empires of scale. In the famous film version, there is a consistent motif (visually-lifted from Indiana Jones ) of mapping the progress of the advanced guard, as it were, on a map of middle earth. This emphasis upon naming the fantasy world earth may seem to be a obvious trope of fantasy literature—that is to say, a convenient formal bridge that actualizes the metaphoric torsion upon our understanding of being-as-such, thus unveiling the durable texture of the narrative’s imaginative image. Formal studies of this concept may point to the artistic work of construction and technique, while others may see a catalogue of political signifiers available for actionability in a public sphere of campaign advocacy. The great dream of children’s literature has been the phantasmatic investment of subjective involvement, which in its formality is simply the interests of reading comprehension, symbolic vocabulary, and rhetorical argumentation. Impressionably we could say that this is the connection fostered by the empathy of hearing others-as-being. In other worlds, the general lesson would be that there is something out there that threatens the very vocabulary of the world as such, essentially that which not only threatens one’s own life, but the earth itself. The Fellowship seeks to protect the earth, as it is, against the event of a new world. In the state of Mordor, Sauroman is the advocate of a Singular and Universal claim to truth. He would change the earth in its status as world. Consider these lines from Heidegger:
As the world strives to grow back into the earth, it encounters resistance. In the process, the earth appears in a determinate way in terms of the resistance that the world encounters. In building the cathedral, we discover particular ways in which our practices are limited and constrained. Our worlds, and consequently our meaningful relations to things, are always based in something that can’t be explained in terms of the prevailing intelligible structure of the world.
There is always something resisting and supporting our practices, and that something is very real.
Our perversity of the enemy makes us long for the fragile resurrection of his empire so that we may play with immortal attachment, which is often symbolized in the animal, the warrior-thing, the woman:
He woke all night with the cold. He'd rise and mend back the fire and she was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gate lamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one.
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