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Absolution:
The Moment of Decisive Significance
ii
Absolution:
The Moment of Decisive Significance
Lance Allan Kair
Lance A. Kair
2016
Contents
Acknowledgements ..................................................................ix
PART ONE......................................................................................1
Prelude.........................................................................................3
In The Beginning....................................................................9
The Appropriation of Discourse .................................21
PART TWO...................................................................................25
The Virgin Birth...................................................................43
The King of the Jews .........................................................53
The Ministry...............................................................................63
The Passover..............................................................................77
Thought: Of the Subject In-Itself................................99
The Disciple..........................................................................105
Gethsemane..........................................................................111
Doubt .........................................................................................119
The Departure ....................................................................135
The Wisdom of Peter ............................................................153
PART THREE ..........................................................................177
The Second Moment of Decisive Significance .179
Afterword ..................................................................................191
Notes.............................................................................................205
Acknowledgements
There is an odd sort of being that entertains
ideas. Often these ideas have a quality of faith, and indeed it
is these ideas that constitute faith in its most original sense,
a sense that has no object. A free floating anxiety, one might
say. It is gained from experiences that occur at a distance
and so rely upon and amount to the individual on a path,
knowing and questioning and doubting and knowing.
Through this process a being can come unto itself, and
thereby know itself, without recourse to any sort of faith;
that is, until the idea comes upon its own completion, its
own verification. Then even while one rallies to assert its
truth, here doubt come into play in a whole new way, for
then one realizes that indeed there was only an idea, at that,
upheld by faith.
To have people that merely repeat the same
words and say yes to the idea stated, do nothing for being.
To be, one must not only have had faith, but must be willing
to test it and then in the end let it go, no matter how the test
went, for there was really no test but that of an idea.
I wish to thank three bloggers, though they
probably wouldnt even know that they had a thanks
coming.
Dave at the extinct blog In the Salt Mine.
Dave at Big Story Guide bigstoryguide.wordpress.com
S.C.
Hickman
at
socialecologies.wordpress.com
ix
Alien
Ecologies
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PART ONE
Kair
Kair
Prelude
When undertaking any sort of venture one is often
persuaded to prepare. In the case of this essay, one might
upon being critically informed and perhaps be educated
upon certain academic or philosophical issues. But beware;
this kind of conventional approach might take on water
since through this essay we are often asked to stand on our
heads, to turn upside-down the notions by which we suppose
to have gained bearings, to put what seems first, last, and
last, first. Yet for sure; of what might constitute such
prepared information we can be pretty confident.
Theologians might be drawn to this title, as well as what we
could call spiritual or religious philosophers, but these
should not exclude epistemologists nor ontologists, nor
idealists nor realists. Indeed, none would be amiss by
gathering their theoretical forces, but they might, in fact,
miss the argument if not the point. This translation asks
from no other authority than the book itself, The Bible.
Those not informed of, ignorant of or plain antagonistic to
the philosophical discourse of the Western tradition, I might
suggest avoid this Prelude as well and the Afterword, and
move to the main body of the essay; you will have missed
nothing by doing so. The more strict academic philosophical
considerations I put forth do not add nor detract anything
important to the meaning of this essay; they merely enlarge
the possible ways we might speak about the situation at
hand.
*
We might be tempted to see this book as a type of
hermeneutical offering, or even Grammatological offering,
and likewise such an estimation would most likely not be far
off the mark. Jacques Derrida addresses Michel Foucault to
the same question upon criteria for the latters essay on
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Neither the type of Jean-Francois Lyotard that asks how
communication takes place, nor of Alain Badiou and
Francois Laruelle, that develops reductions toward
particular communicative passes, stem queries outside of
the implicit assumption of a projected common form; which
is to say, the authors have not reflected upon their own
positions of assertion sufficiently enough to take to its end
the issue of the text. Indeed, the situation of history put
forth in passing by this essay is that they could not take it to
its end. Instead, the move here is more toward Lyotards
implication upon whether the case can be made to a court
that has no way of understanding the communication that is
offered, because thereby do such philosophical situations
become non-conventional historical marks, at times even,
desire-production hiatuses. Here then we need only give up
on the reduction and leave such ideological strides to the
Realist passes that stand upon conventional routes argued
by the post-postmodernsii. We must thereby consider
agreement that does not cohere in the common route.
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subject of multiple meanings; this is the meaning behind the
term colonize. On the contrary; it unfolds into exactly two
routes for meaning, as, again, Badiou, and indeed the author
of the blog In The Salt Mine has said, the issue is of the
twoiv.
Kair
In The Beginning
It may well be of humanity that we exist in a world
that is inconceivable in its absolution, that indeed, it is a
world of our own making. Singularly absent from any
conception of what such a world is, we may also have only
that world that has been passed down from the supposed
beginning of our heritage in life, and this then would be just
as unknowable as the world. Then, from the contradiction of
such an unknown past, our heritage would be at root a mere
living and not a human life as we make it, but a life as that
of a plant or a tree, in that is grows, does what it does, and is
as it is, making no real decision for its future. It is thus this
limit, that which proscribes its end as that which must be,
but cannot ever be, that reveals our lack, our effective
denial, and therefore, for the wise and truly free, the
necessity for absolution as well as its possibility.
The situation is intolerable to us, to our ever present
presumption of our own humanity, of our own preeminence.
Nevertheless, our rejection of this type of destiny arrives in
the two ways we may understand what humanity is.
Negated in our inception, our conception is the necessity of
consciousness against that which would be the basic life, of
which we are not but the conception. It may be that children
retain this basic life as they come into the world, ignorant, a
tabula rasa, if you will, genetically determined, if we can
really say this, to live exactly the life that is life eternally
interconnected and correspondent with all else, determined
and fixed in its course. But in that they are human, human
life, they become that which is human, which is
consciousness, which is human consciousness. Perhaps we
see this period of childhood as ignorance but definitely with
wonder, naive. Perhaps children come into the world as a
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sort of nether-being, of the basic life but also human, and the
distinction that comes to be known is exactly that which is
knowledge, the human life being itself human. Maybe
children are joined to humanity in this way of knowledge
and joined to life in being attached and dependent upon
their parents, having no opinion or novel thought as we
know it, but merely reflecting in their own being the life that
is humanity around them, their parents and family
primarily. That is, until the human life reaches a significant
point in the human life; perhaps this is puberty, perhaps a
little earlier, perhaps a little later, when the motion of
creation of life for being human must become more fully
human, in contra-distinction to the basic life, to further
humanity, for that much is lifes maxim, to further itself.
And perhaps there is this point when the human being as
such may part from the basic life that is held within a child.
This may amount to a decision, but decision would account
too much agency, for we are still dealing here with the life
itself, in a child at that but a decision nevertheless, that is
the mark between the heritage that is present in the
immediate parents and the immediate life that is present in
the child. We might call this point the moment of decisive
significance. Either way will always yield the human, but
hence we may have responsibility for the variation called
human individuality.
Such a significant event would have to do with the
moment when the human individual enters or becomes
human consciousness, that is conscious awareness of its
humanity. This is not so much a psychology of child
development or cognitive science as it is an indeterminable
moment in existence when the human being comes upon
itself, whatever the scientific stages of mental development.
Ones psychology has little to do with this moment, since
psychology takes manifestation as a means to determine an
aggregate plausibility of cause by which it can prescribe
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particular activity so to assert control of a mental issue or
problem and determine a future for an individual, even as it
implies the prescriptions, retroactively, as a description of
some truly real humanity, toward the future solution. Such
an endeavor excludes the exception where otherwise every
cause one would attribute to a state of affairs fails to account
for the next variation until it can determine another series
of causes. Twin children exposed to the same parenting can
nevertheless develop drastically different mentalities in one
case, and similar mannerisms in another; determination of
causes for such diversion or confluence, diagnosis and
application, are made upon the end events and extrapolated
into other posited similar cases and say little of actual cause.
We apply our best knowledge to the healthy growth of our
children, but how they actually manifest themselves in the
world is always based in chance and hope.
*
The weight of the world that is the greater general
heritage of humanity being human must be come upon by
the child, and in this time, also the life that is still dealing
with what it is to be human. Perhaps this is where the
weight is distributed, diffused if you will, such that Self and
Other become present or are presented to knowledge. The
tendency of life in the human would have it be merely life, so
the vector for being of any of the created species will have its
difficulty in becoming itself apart from mere life, a separate
entity in itself. In humans, consciousness may come upon
itself as it comes upon the human world, when the heritage
of the childs parents becomes situated in a polar awareness
for identity. At this time, the life in the child would be
presented to its consciousness, and in this, also the
awareness of its heritage as the rule of the parents, the
direction of the parents; the child is presented itself and the
heritage of the world, and the problem of how to deal with
the given world. The given human world must likewise
bifurcate; life becoming the human being as consciousness,
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what we might call, a decision; uphold the residuum of the
basic life from its childhood and deal with the world by its
Self, or release the remnants of the basic life and deal with
the world by the heritage of the parents. This is why we can
say human
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human heritage what is in front has been placed there
through a displacement, which is, by denial of its actual
place for the sake of True Objects, namely, for the temporal
segregation of identity for past, present and future. This is
the reason that certain conventional (of the heritage of
humanity) investigations lead to nothing, because there is
really nothing to see but its own projections of meaning.
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fallacy of a posteriori orientation: It is a priori. Further, such
a purpose based in history, in a meaningful creation, is
insufficient to provide an absolute purpose (except the
insufficiency of actual freedom which allows for a proper
ethics); to this end one must have a justified future, and this
future, as the necessary counterpart of the known past, so
far as the possible future cannot but exist without a known
past, is denied in the fully humans route, or orientation, as
it is provided the tentative present, and the segregated
reality given in this scheme of knowledge is then reflected in
the meaning of absolution. The wholeness of a posterior
absolution is suspended in basic ignorance, which is the
condition of the significant move away from the basic life.
*
In this way we come upon a more precise meaning of
the term Absolute. In human heritage, of the fully human,
the absolute is found always at arms length in the Object
that is the basic life renounced as such: A moment of
creation or the beginning of the universe in one sense, and
truth of the objective of knowledge in the other. The
absolute, and thus human solvency, is seen as a point of
absolution, as a purpose, a goal, a sought after reconciliation
of Self. But this activity is always thwarted in the fully
human. An Absolute thus manifests as hope, and as the
attempt to bring everyone under one roof in the act of
helping, of asserting propriety, of promoting the best and
correct way against the come upon incorrection, and this
assertion is understood, as a sort of disclaimer, as an act of
selflessness. But in this act, the fully human contradicts
itself (again) by negating life again, asserting as it does the
object of Self against what might be not the self, the Other,
at once attempting a reconciliation rooted in a state of
separation, that which is the fully human and not the basic
life. Absolution, the effective arm of what is understood as
the Absolute, be it God or no-God, is peeled back upon the
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which can only occur so long as and is indeed the definition
which posits the method the subject remains a subjectobject. The problem of absolution, then, has to do with the
meaning involved with avoiding the recursive reduction of
the Subject to the subject-object.
*
Such it is that Christianity has been posed as the
paramount of religious knowledge. The problem that is most
insistent in humanity, whether it be philosophical or
religious, is this subject-object duality; the problem of
human knowledge is how to reconcile the individual human
being and the world around it, and this determines typically
an ethical method. While technology, and its ideological
counterparts, philosophy, critical theory and anthropology,
offers one manner of dealing with the problem, Christianity,
in so much as it deals directly with the thought and
consciousness itself, offers the most solvent solution to this
problem; it addresses the apparent duality by offering
absolution that itself speaks dualistically. It can be no
coincidence that Christ advocates becoming like a child in
order to enter the kingdom of heaven, and that Christians
may be born again. Yet, here we have issue put toward
another object: Heaven, the Kingdom, at that! Likewise, we
have
the
double
movement
of
absolution
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expressing, a method for appropriating the Object, albeit in
a different way than they are used to. Since his expression is
exactly renunciation of the Object, the fully human will not
hear of this except in as much as such expression will denote
a method for negotiating objects, and this deaf orientation is
resolute in Being offended. Yet Jesus knows of his objectivity
and being so oriented, as he is, he has already given it up.
His life is only that he lives, is only that he expresses what
he is, as this is knowledge, and this expression of knowledge,
though conveyed in the objectivity of the fully human, does
not correspond with the knowledge of the Object, but
renounces it. So it is that the interaction of these polemics,
Jesus as reconciled to himself and Jesus as reflecting that
which is of the heritage and is not reconciled by the
knowledge of the Object, inevitably produces not only Jesus
coming complete in his minimal humanity by relinquishing
to the basic life that last vestige of being human, his
physical body, but also indicates, indeed fulfills, that
knowledge of the Object which designates Jesus but so
rejects him. The knowledge which confers upon him his
objectivity, which is the reconciliation, redemption, and
completion which Jesus himself is because of knowledge that
is the basic life, is that which so offends the humanity of the
Object. Hence, for the human heritage Jesus Christ becomes
a symbol of the human situation that refuses to admit, is
indeed incapable of acknowledging, its own basis of heritage
as such. Humanity therefore and thereby needs a redeemer,
a savior, who can absolve humanity from its sin, which is
the contradiction in discourse involved with a responsibility
to the Object, that worldly thing, as opposed to
responsibility to, what we could say is, God. Jesus Christ
becomes that thing, that human being, that son of god, that
sought after Object, which can relieve humanity of its
burden. The Absolution which Jesus Christ (the subjectobject) can bring creates and affirms reflexively the
condition of the world and God; that which may be the basic
life as an Object then, the thing to be attained, is God. And
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PART TWO
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between Jesuss birth and, say, the Egyptian mythological
stories. The comparisons between mythologies are better
taken up by other, more scholarly authors. If there is some
sort of common human theme which is reflected in the
various mythologies then I see that to speak of one is to
speak of the significance of the others, and that to address
the specific theme in one is likewise addressing the
possibilities of the meaning of the themes in the others. I am
most familiar with Christianity and so will begin my
investigation here, if for the sake of convenience. I hope to
sometime be able to speak upon the other stories in the way
I have here. Such a view of Jesus Christ affords the
perfection of the story in that it fulfills not merely some
mythological or religious belief, for such a story of a
redeemer is but one possibility for a problem found in life,
but indeed addresses the significant problem of human
existence.
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knew this story. If there was a Jesus Christ, how did they
know of what happened at his birth? They were not there;
how were they privy to all the various circumstances and
situations? Indeed, here I must give them the benefit of the
doubt and assume that they were there for at least some of
it, but then how come they, the authors, are not mentioned
or implied in the story? Were they acting as journalists?
Even if they were merely recording the events, even if some
sort of cultural norm prescribed a certain anonymity, I
cannot but see that if they were there for the events of
Jesuss life, they most likely were not there for his birth.
Even behind the historians revealing that the gospels were
most likely written after Jesuss death and probably the
death of the apostles, it is not difficult to understand that
the authors were probably given or accumulated the story
through a conglomerate of stories, such that the gospels
themselves were the closest rendition of what actual story
was itself available, and, then again, perhaps the event of
Jesuss life was so profound that the story remained
sufficiently viable to be brought to the authors intact, but it
may also be that the story had come to them in just that
particular way, baring little or no resemblance to an actual
event. In sum; at minimum it was a profoundly impactful
story.
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came to Luke, he had a perfect understanding of all things
[of Christ] from the very first, and though many before him
have set forth a declaration of what we surely believe,
Luke thought it would be good to put it in writing that thou
might know the certainty of those things, wherein thou has
been instructed. It is not so much that here was a story
which made sense to him, but that Luke already knew
perfectly the meaning of what had been brought to him. He
again indicates his position in the matter by stating his
intensions for others: In that thou has been instructed and
know of these events, here I will tell you so you may know
the certainty of those things, as I, Luke, have had a perfect
understanding of these things from the very first.
*
The genealogy given in Mathew of the lineage of Jesus
can be seen as a justification of experience. Perhaps the
author was given this lineage that had been kept since the
time of Abraham, but this seems implausible since more
contemporary authors have attempted the same type of
lineages to justify their faith; but it is possible. In any case,
such a recording must be seen in the context of the
individual attempting to reconcile the object of his faith to a
reality so that his faith rings actually true, instead of just
faithfully true. No one would attempt to draw a conclusion of
this nature if something within the person did not require it,
did not compel the person to see such a connection. He must
have felt a need as well as a reason to propose a lineage for
Jesus. The author must have been, at once, attempting to
justify his own faith, in that, one, there was an impulsive
sense about the whole thing, two, the significance of Jesus
must have some linkage to the holy past, but also, three,
that the author had such a significance in his being of faith;
he was compelled to let others know of the reality of the
significance. It seems unlikely that it is merely an intention
for propaganda, merely as some power play. The faith of the
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of the Object, was likewise caught in this same dilemma. We
should see then that Jesus did not write this story about
himself, nor did he ask anyone to write it; in fact, as we will
see, he was appealing only to that experience which already
existed in his apostles because of the nature of his Being
and because of this basic experience the story is written. So,
if we also consider that the story of Jesus contains elements
that are similar and indeed carry over from other earlier
stories from other lands and cultures, it might be seen that
the story of Jesus may have been less a story about an
actual, single person, but an after the fact conflation of
history recording what had been come upon and being
expressed as such by a few people, exercising their own
minimally human existence in correspondence with the
actual human events which reflected and are responsible for
the resonance of stories prior and leading up to that time of
Christ, and that the writers of the Gospels were likewise
such individuals.
*
To more fully describe this motion, I would like to
draw an analogy. I am not a scholar of contemporary
popular culture and I am sure the picture I pose here could
be ripped apart in any number of ways. Keep in mind that I
am not attempting to draw a correspondence between
objects, but rather to indicate the process of meaning by
which such conflation may have occurred. Take the example
of the development of popular genres in music through the
20th century; here we have a development that was long in
the making before such genres were established. One could
easily make a cultural analysis that stems from the
Industrial Revolution a hundred years prior to what became
our current state of music, or mode of presentation, which
moves through the local cultures into, say, folk music, such
as the blues, country-western, bluegrass, swing, jazz then
rock and roll, to perhaps the more directly artistic music
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to the establishment of the genre. Soon the experience that
was the event of the loose originating group had passed and
left only the idea of the experience in the definition of what
it was, as if it still is. Still others felt they too had the same
experience but were excluded by the mere fact of the genre
defined as it is, but the experience could not be dismissed,
and thus what may be seen as similar experiences tending
toward unity in the same way were catalyzed into new forms
of expression, each new experience drawing the included
and defining itself by the excluded a genre, new loose
associations arose around the rejection, creating further
new genres. Jazz and bluegrass, city and rural music, let to
Rock and Roll, which became rock; rock let to Heavy
Metal and Punk; Disco to dance music; rap and disco
morphed into house music and Hip Hop, which perhaps
contributed to the Rave scene; etcetera. Despite what and
where charting flows, the list of permutations goes on.
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made generic, and thus move into the new form of the basic
experience, lending as it happens to another definition of
popular genre, all the while continually falling away into
silencexii.
Again, this is so much only to indicate a process by
which humanity shows up in the world, and not necessarily
a direct comparison of things similarity of meaning. Yet,
attending the difference between the development of 20th
century genres and the development of sects of Christianity,
we might see a difference in orientation upon the world. The
motion of differentiation occurs from a most basic level from
experience to definition. Genres are necessarily fleeting and
of the past, made into a history for historys sake, by which
others may now establish the new, where by labels then
occur simultaneous with the experience, which are really the
indicator of the passed event. Christianity lacks this
secular quality for success, but if we look at the Protestant
Reformation we might see a similar generic process
occurring here too. Experience is often set aside for the
definition; the continuing effervescent cycle of definition
emphasizes the Object as the pre-existence by which we may
come into the world; e.g. blues and jazz were pre-existing
objects that allowed rock and roll; Catholicism a pre-existing
condition for Protestantism. Thus it may be said that there
is no originating experience, but that this too was itself a
response to a definition, a genre, a thing, an Object; the
problem thus only concerns by where or when we decide to
stop the cycle and begin to define. By this apparent reality,
the experience is relegated to a passing fashion, a generic
fancy, and the definition is held for what is real and lasting,
as if the definition holds within it as it is passed along, what
is true.
Hence, we have the heritage of the world of the
human being. The fully human sees itself in the Object
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through a denied effect and attempts to surmount the denial
and reconcile itself through a relation of objects; the
minimally human renounces the Object and is reconciled by
the basic life in experience as objects are integral to this
experience. So it is upon consideration of these two routes
that a conflation of these two humanities perhaps implies for
Christianity that there was no individual person that was a
singular Christ but that the term was more an identifier of a
motion, indeed, an experience come upon by a few
individuals reconciled in the basic life, who renounced the
Object as the means for absolution, that Jesus was perhaps
one who was more vocal and overt in the experience. The
more fully human element, the majority, in the effort to
reconcile their being to the Object, thus defines the Object
toward and upon a path of truth that at best is fleeting but
typically never is found and the basic experience of
individuals is taken up and again conflated as an Object, i.e.
traditional religious dogma. Hence, what occurs is an ironic
movement of humanity where to speak about one is to speak
about the other, and where the meaning of the story of
Christ becomes a desired object in one, based in the hope for
reconciliation, and for the other, a present reconciled reality:
A common history divided in the potential of denial.
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speak, then history is reified in the heritage of the Object
(the fully human heritage) and the moment is dissolved into
the infinity that is the potential of every moment. Jesus
presents that silent voice as Christ; the apostles the
reification of the Object and the recurrent extrication from
it; together they illustrate the human existential constant.
That which is most absurd, the silent voice, a denial of the
human heritage, is either vehemently enacted upon, or it
retains its silence, that is, remains an invalid object, and is
enfolded into the sanity and sensibility of the heritage,
unknown and un-ventured: It remains silent. So the
remaining silent is the issue, and is what I endeavor to
enlightenxiii. The guardian of the Object rests upon the
silence as the objective of knowledge, to uncover that which
is covered in silence, that which is unknown in potential, so
it has the world of Objects to negotiate and information to
learn. She is on the new road, mapping the path; yet she
rides upon the silence that is never heard, even as she sees
the silence is gaining voice through her discovery. This is the
meaning of transcendence, of the transcendental clause. As
she moves, the silence thus remains silent at all times and
decision has no significance but against that which has been
mapped; though she sees toward the new as an experience,
she merely repeats the old in experience. The renouncer is
of a different stature. The Object has been mapped; the
silence heard. His plight has to do with the silence; he is the
speaker of the silence. Though he sees the old as his
experience, he repeats the new in his experience.
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referencing the fully human scheme of meaning, is solved
through again imbuing an ability for a term to indicate
something absolutely true, seeing terms as evidence of truth
self-evidently (in potential), but albeit redundantly, this
time, something supernatural, or something that lay outside
the capacity and or purview of our ability to know of it. And
likewise and correspondently we have an introduction of a
kind of paganism, which is to say, a kind of pluralistic
knowing that is not based in a monastic order of things. So
against this potential for reaching out, evidently, that is,
apparently, which is to say, to refer to that which can be
conveyed honestly, there is no one God, no possibility of an
entity that is separate from our known existing universe;
every possibility of such an entity collapses within the
possibility involved in exactly what I know as an extant,
that any such entity becomes again another item entirely
contained with the knowledge of it. In this knowing, the
terms become the issue, and in this knowing, no divine
intervention occurred because divinity is always in reference
to what is humanly known and what is humanly known has
been conceived as a condition of previous ideas, previous
historical terms. But in Jesus this is all there is: He knows
that he was born of a virgin or does he? Again, in one
sense, in order for him to know this, he would have to have
been told; he would not have known this from experience
except that his experience was becoming a certain age so he
could understand what it meant when he was told. This
would imply that his mother probably told him, or perhaps a
close family friend; but at all times he would already have a
context to be able to know anything at all. So this is not
anything that we can really imagine as a normal situation;
this is not that Mary had a fling one night or that she was
raped. Indeed, if this was the case, she may have well told
Jesus that she was a virgin but conceived him; perhaps we
could then make a psychological correlation to Jesus during
his ministry associating with a whore. But this is great
speculation; we stick with the story that is come upon. Why
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more skeptical of the veracity of the actual event. Never
mind that at the time there was no way to verify that indeed
Mary had the experience the Bible tells; again, the same
critique could be applied, i.e. was someone there to witness
Marys encounter with an angel? Indeed; the experience
such as proposed of Mary is also included in the subject of
this essay. It seems entirely far fetched to even imagine that
the story of the virgin birth could have stayed attached and
consistent with a single individual so as to constitute an
autobiographical account. At best, given what we know of
verbal traditions and the tendency for fully human attitudes
to be impressed, we could have the seeds for the emergence
of a generic mythology of faith.
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rejected from birth. Again, the positions conflate. The fully
human makes the decision into the history of the Object and
so develops religion and ideology around the objective of a
woman who has not had sexual intercourse giving birth to a
son. In so taking this route the fully human could not have
decided to consider this situation any other way, that is,
without considering the objective truth, that we have, at
least, a story about it, of the given virgin birth. A decision
not based upon this truth is taken to be absurd, or in other
words, not valid, meaning, there is no decision to be had.
Here, then we have the minimal human who has renounced
the Object through a moment of significance and so makes
the decision that could not be made because it is absurd.
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childish ignorance, are wise men), and then I am left with
the fact that I am only that history to the extent that I am
knowing that of me; I am initiated and taught into the
human heritage and associate what knowledge I do gain of
my own experience with that quality of knowledge that I
have learned from others of True Objects. I am thus not
separated from my birth nor thrown into any existence as I
am asserting myself as the Object of myself in relation to
other Objects.
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be denied as actually real that the king will not receive its
dethroning, so the emissaries do not return. So it is when we
are able to be honest and not stop short, then the fully
human situation of reality prevents the emissaries from
returning because of the insistence of its rules, which will
effectively kill the Subject-king if the emissaries were to
return with information of him. Further, in retrograde,
assuming there are parents who are the de facto effective
kings of the object, the conveyors of the true heritage for the
children, the potential for the children to come upon that
moment of decision discussed in the beginning of this essay,
likewise repeats this part of the story of Christ in the eternal
repetition of human life because typically the majority of
humanity, the fully human, never encounters the first
moment of significance due to the decision involved of being
oriented upon the true history of the Objectxx.
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away from the rules of the Object, such that when the
heritage is come upon at that time of decision, the rules of
the Object, the king of such arena of the fully human, has
died, thus no decision is found, no choice to be made. We
will see how this plays also later in the story of Peter and
Judas. For now, similarly, and ironically, to repeat, the
individual will remain under the dominion of the king of the
Object, the rules that govern the relations between objects,
until that time when the king has died. This is the double
sided imperative that runs through the story of the existence
of being human.
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that he can do is verified and in this moment, and Jesus is
likewise confirmed in his destiny.
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because this evidently is often not seen or noticed, and thus
reveals that a (first) significant moment is not in effect, then
Jesus implicates a possibility of a second moment in John
3:14; And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
even so must the Son of man... he who is not inclusive of
himself, who has not come upon the significant moment
be lifted up, must come upon such a moment the staff
that became a serpent did so not through some considerate
metamorphosis, but suddenly changed from staff to snake
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have
eternal life. (Italics mine). And likewise, the Son of God. In
so much as there is a distinction between the Son of man
and the Son of God, and such a discrepancy is relied upon,
that is 'believed in', is seen and understood as designating
True Objects, objects that are set away from the individual
into reality such that the individual needs saving, just so
much is that person not saved, but rather, must be lifted
up, must be suddenly transformed. The terms 'eternal' and
'everlasting' ring within the dual voice, at once indicating
those who do not understand as evidenced by their assertion
of its truth or fallacy, as well as those who do, who have no
need to discern such ever-presence as true of false.
*
We have here, in this beginning of the story, a
statement of our present existential situation that has
played throughout history in some manner for every human
being. In Mathew, Jesus is born and then appears on the
scene after an announcement from a prophet who is
preaching that the rules of religion, the rules which allow a
negotiation of Objects and determine our being as subjects
(subject-objects), are not sufficient for preparing oneself for
absolution, that one cannot abide by the rules and still
repent; one cannot merely be a child of Abraham, one that
goes ignorantly and naively to be sacrificedxxvii. God himself,
whom Abraham communed with, spoke with, will raise those
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The Ministry
Once such an Object has been renounced, once the
human being has repented and prepared itself for
absolution, the belief has passed and the world of rules has
disappeared. This disappearance, though, is not that which
the modern sensibility 'being gone' would equate to insanity,
or a complete disassociation with the world, though from a
conventional disposition such a disappearance can be indeed
termed absurd if not insanexxix. The human being is always
involved with the actual world, as noted above. Such an
event of renouncing the object leaves the individual in an
odd sort of state (also discussed above). No object helps him
in to the world; interactions with other humans are strained;
the individual goes into himself, the reflection of the basic
life in humanity. The renouncer must come to terms with
how the world has disappeared and what that means to and
in terms of the human heritage.
*
Jesus proceeds to go out into the wilderness where he
encounters the tempter. He fasts for forty days and Jesus is
mocked for his faith. The devil tells him that if he is truly
the son of God then he should make bread out of stones,
then that he should jump off the roof of the temple, and then
offers him the kingdoms of the world. These are the
temptations that plague human heritage at every turn. One
is always dependent upon food; one is plagued by depression
or unhappiness; one would like to be all powerful and get
whatever he wants. So it seems right that Jesus the human
would have these temptations, for they are not the objects
that are the rules of humanity, but are indeed the very bases
of the rules that humanity encounters in living that he
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action, presents thus an alternate reading of history that
appears to account for a more factual basis of movement for
history itself. John the Baptists announcement we do not
hear of; we only know that his role is to make the
announcement that the time is near. But the appearance in
reality of the minimal human always causes a reaction from
the fully human, an offense that eventually wants to bring
about the removal of the figure.
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potential. If one was to say our people are corrupted by this
Roman society, we need to revolt, everyone would have a
contextual object by which to understand him. Even today,
many people advocate getting back to basics (read, a return
to conservative traditional rules), as a means to make
everything ok. This is a commonplace assertion; maybe some
people agree, but others dont. Ironically, Jesuss message
said just as much, but yet it said much more. He could not
just go out and recruit people, see if they dig his plight; such
people would not do. As implied by his birth in the story, yet
also by the simple fact of his renouncement, his life was
determined; his life was destined to go a particular, and
particularly obtuse, way. With this in mind, from one angle
of seeing Jesus, he had to be sure that whomever he found
that it was not of his choosing (for he had no choice); the
choice had to be that of which people would find themselves
(the others would likewise have to have no choice in the
matter, and God would have to choose for them all, including
Jesus). He had to know that they understood what he was
about, what he was up to. Jesus, himself, had to fish for
men who would follow him, and in his own fishing for men,
Peter and Andrew themselves fishing could understand that
Jesus was he who they should follow.
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as The One, The Object, by which a person may be absolved.
However, in that he was Being, what he was saying was
nothing more than what, we can say, one says to oneself, one
having renounced and therefore being reconciled with, but
not responsible to, the Object. This distinction is clearly
made in John 17:9; Jesus says, I pray for them: I pray not
for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for
they are thine. For those so oriented upon the Object of
Jesus, namely the subsequent Christians, this passage
speaks of those who believe that absolution may be achieved
through the object that is Jesus; indeed, it is a circular
argument of their faith. I submit an alternate reading, that
Jesus is not praying or speaking about the world of Objects
(nor subject-objects), which includes those fully human
individuals of the world who know by the Object; on the
contrary, here Jesus is referring to those who have become
fishers of men, those whom Jesus has been given because
they were likewise minimally human and who, as Luke
expresses, had perfect understanding of all things from the
very first, namely, the disciples. And, to add further
significance to my distinction, Jesus is not so much being
empathetic for his disciples, so much as such believers might
have a difficult time in the world of non-believers. No; Jesus
is speaking of the facts of the matter as this is his
experience, as this is their experience.
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argumentative proofs (since the proofs merely confirm their
antitheses).
*
There are other possibilities of miracle, particularly
speculative possibilities, that are not discounted by the
mythology of, what we might call, modern rational science. A
miracle occurs in the motion of time as progress; a miracle
occurs always in the past. This is to say that a True Object
has a history, a past, a heritage that informs an identity to
its reality, and thus what is miraculous is that the past is
suddenly viewed from its contingency in the present. The
past suddenly and momentarily loses its coherence as a
substrate for a present orientating meaning; this is then
manifested as a present shift, a mutation of sorts of the very
same moment wherein is consolidated a new kind of present.
This new present turns upon this generic term miracle
through a conflation of meaning arising out of this
debasements real counter, out of the denial of existence and
the assertion of real-true. A discernment between what
could be some actual object changing miraculously, like a
couple loaves of bread into enough to feel a multitude, and a
sudden changing of the terms of meaning of any event is a
non sequitur; it is not even a contradiction but more a point
that can never have meaning itself beyond a particularly
transcendental effect of the terms themselves that would
rely upon a term-object identityxxxiii.
Further, the miracle can be a precipitate of truth as
well as an equal and opposite force; a frontier stronghold
against which true claims of reality may be made. History in
this way is miraculous in a similar sense as some have
said, in that there are so many events in history that we can
look to and say, oh it was such a miracle that we ever got
through that. The present moment is called the rational
moment, and thus conveys in interpretation exactly what
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the state of knowledge about the universe at whatever time
was exactly how the universe was constituted at that time.
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reduced to our current scientific criterion for truthfulness.
And this is so much to say that the humanity of today is
involved, however global and standardized it is or is not, in a
faith, an intrinsic mythology, that grants the truth of the
universe for the sake of justifying our presence and being in
the universe. Such mythology is the condition of knowledge,
allowing for the polemics of reality so that it can be reality.
The effort involved in discovering these objects of truth by a
particular method, assert and rely upon a projected absolute
truth by which we find our current truths, and for which we
proceed in the effort of the object: This absolute truth is
based in mythology (a story) that functions through
knowledge by faith, and it is the consolidation of the tenants
of such catholic faith that constitutes the historical reasons
and efforts of at least some of new Realisms. Indeed, reality
must constantly be proposed away from truth upon such
faith, and this is necessary.
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The Passover
Just as the Lord of the Old Testament went about
about finding out who among the Egyptians were indeed
the Israelites, to thereby passover them, by Jesuss
miraculous existence Christ has come into the world and
been come upon by others whom God had given himxxxix;
namely, the disciples. Concordantly, Jesus the Son of God
sees that he has to find a way to distinguish who among the
sheep really will follow him. Jesus worked within an
assumption that they understood what was going on as he
carried himself, his works, into the world. Now Jesus is
coming to the end of his being, the end of his speaking the
renunciation of the Object; he sees the state of affairs and
that he will now move into the actual reconciliation that is
absolution. As the basic life Jesus sees what is to happen; he
is hated by the world and is the lamb to be sacrificed, and he
is and his life has been reconciled in this purpose; as the
minimal human, he has come upon his humanity, his
mortality and is beginning to reflect upon his life.
**
The chapters preceding John 17, the Passover meal of
13, then 14, 15 and 16, may be seen as Jesus attempting to
discern who among his disciples, if any, really understands
him, what has been going on all this time in his ministry
and his association with them. Jesus is sensing that they do
not, but he is trying to get them to make the move; Jesus is
beginning to realize that his experience is not duplicated in
them, and is moving into his own hope, his own desperation
that his time here has been in vain. Yet, along these lines,
we might see that Judas is the only one (since John the
Baptistxl) who has understood that the Subject must do what
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the like a child, the born again, the Subject itself. So
further, Jesus appeals to a logic, as if to persuade that
Subject, that disciple, to come out, to show himself, to
Jesuss knowing of himself. Who will continue where Jesus
is leaving off? Since Jesus is beginning to wonder if he is
alone in his understanding, he says, if God be glorified in the
Son of man (the Subject), then God shall also glorify him in
himself; which is to say that the individual Subject, the
minimally human, shall know of his own glory because of
Gods glorifying the Subject, and thus, the result, Jesus is
saying, is that the Subject will straightaway directly,
imminently, now be de facto, effectively, glorified by God.
Left unsaid is Jesuss appeal: Who is it? God, let me know
who it is. Continuing; Jesus implores all of them since God
has not let Jesus know who it may be, and he rejoins in a
sort of plea: Little children, yet I am a little while with you.
Ye shall seek me: and as I have said unto the Jews. The
Jews are of the Law, and so are of the world, and just like
Jesus has said to the Jews that they will seek me in the
Object that is Jesus, he says to them, the disciples, yet still
appealing to what they have experienced of themselves that
they followed him, and to the things they have witnessed in
their travels, that they, his disciples, if anyone, should know
what I am saying here: Whither I go, ye cannot come; so
now I say to you. again the silence speaks: God, let me
know who it may be. And then he is defeated when Simon
Peter, the first disciple who came with him, Lord, whither
goest thou? And Jesus sees that God will grant him none;
Jesuss reply shows that he sees this now, for sure. Now he
changes his tone and tells them whither I go, thou canst not
follow me now. Now, no longer, do you follow me; obviously
(to Jesus), you do not understand, and are incapable of
following me as the Subject, for you are not, you are an
Object of the World; but thou will follow me afterwards, in
other words, I go from here to die (this physical body), and so
also you shall die one day, but also, in foreshadow, after I go
then you will indeed follow, indeed will carry on as the
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are one in the same element in Jesuss experience: They are
not objects. So Jesus vacillates as he approaches the
completion of his absolution, which speaks ironically in a
dual voice of the removal of the physical, or, death. As the
story goes, the movement serves to verify to us that this was
not any actual man-god-object-subject, but, at least, a
reflection of a very human being. The beginning of the basic
life is absolved through renunciation of the Object, in a
manner of speaking, a move that is founded in the absolute
experience of relation to the absolute; vacillation occurs at
the end of the ministry. The doubt and anxiety was left upon
the fully human as Jesus challenges the rules of the Object
by his minimal humanity, Jesuss move large and social,
involved with humanity in general. At the end, the doubt
and anxiety is his alone as Jesus is involved with the private
and personal, dealing one on one with people, his friends, his
disciples, and in correspondence, absolution will occur not
psychically, but physically. Thus Jesus replays this move by
asking for the Object to confirm his faith; he is thereby
asking that his faith be annihilated. This can only occur by
the domination of the Object; the spirit succumbs to the
physical world. The confidence of the spirit is replaced by
the anxiety of the mind, but it is in this anxiety, the wax and
wane of which, that continues right up to the moment before
death but is resolved at his moment of death, that grants
credence to Jesuss plight as the minimally human of faithxliii
.
*
John sheds more light upon the reality of this
situation. Before they go to the garden where the guards
then come to take him, Jesus addresses his disciples. He
speaks through the dialectic, of himself to himself, for he is
dismayed at the revelation at hand and the revealing that to
which he still will not acquiesce easily. He begins speaking
as he often does; as he speaks to his audience, God is
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that I am; God tells Moses to tell the children of Israel that
I AM hath sent me to you.
*
We will do well here to take a look at Exodus 3.
And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a
flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he
looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and
the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I
will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why
the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw
that he had turned aside to see, God called unto
him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses,
Moses. And he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw
not hither: put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the
place whereon thou standest is holy ground.
Probably the first thing to point out is that the term
bush is the English translation for the Hebrew word which
more closely confers bramblexlvii. A bramble is a prickly
shrub like that of a blackberry or raspberry; it is not so
much a bush. A bush tends to convey a much more
cultivated or shapely form. Indeed, a bush is more similar
to a small, low tree, whereas a bramble, like a blackberry
thicket, grows hardly like a tree and more like a large,
sprawling, invading, wandering vine. It is prickly, it has
thorns; people do not often wish to venture into a bramble.
Though definitions might be somewhat vague, it seems
prudent to make this distinction here. There are many
pertinent issues in this small phrase. Recall, we are dealing
in this essay with the issue concerning the basic life, what I
have termed the minimally human, and the fully human,
and in this I have determined the former of the Subject and
the latter the Object.
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may be. Of the bush I see its trunk, its branches, its shape,
neatly and sensibly established.
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come now to me, but rather, put off thy shoes from thy feet,
for the place whereon thou standeth is holy ground. In one
view, it may be that we can infer that God called Moses to
stop and to not investigate the great sight, that God, upon
seeing that Moses went to investigate, commanded him to
stop, or come out, take off your shoes because Moses should
not defile holy ground with the wearing of shoes, nor, by
implication, insult God by investigating Gods pleasure. This
would seem to be consistent with the burning bush version,
which stems upon the True Object of reality. Yet, just as
sensible, if not more sensible, it seems that God calls to
Moses once he starts to investigate the bramble in which he
now finds himself. Moses went into the bramble to
investigate and then God called to him, saying Moses,
Moses, here am I, that in the bramble Moses encountered
God, in all His eternal wandering and indefinity and God
told him not to come to Him right just yet. Instead, God
indicates Mosess minimal humanity and tells him to take
his shoes off, his shoes being a symbol, of the fully human
heritage, the Object, of what stands between Moses and God,
and that through this symbol, because of the Object, Moses
is standing upon holy ground; holy ground being, in this
sense, that ground by which, though Moses is separated
from God because of the Object, is thereby not separated: It
is auspicious ground.
Moses, meeting God, would have come to God having
left the Objective world, but he is human, of the basic life,
and so returns or is called out from the bramble that is the
angel speaking for God, such that in having the Object
removed, Moses now stands upon holy ground from which he
is to go into the world with purpose, that Moses cannot but
now do that he must do. Of this Moses is afraid; he hid his
face; for he was afraid to look upon Godxlix. Again, from the
perspective that looks upon the True Object, Moses has been
reprimanded by God for investigating the bush and is now
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being commanded and instructed about how things are and
what he must do now, as if Moses is supposed to do things
because he has been commanded by God and that this in
that he did not deny Gods command is what makes him
greatl.
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Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the
God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob.lii
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of John 14 and 15 show Jesus in a less desperate mode
attempting to appeal intellectually to them. Indeed, this
move is again twofold. Of course Jesus must feel that what
he has is good for everyone, that everyone should know this
great knowledge. So he is attempting to get beyond the
ignorance of his disciples. But on the other hand, as we have
seen, Jesus is in an effort to attain the justification of the
Object, if by a type of reverse psychologylviii. In this
movement he effectively grants us an even better view into
the minimal human experience.
*
One problem that can hold the fully human in its
place of defender of the Object with reference to the story of
Jesus is the storys reference to various personas, if you will.
Much of Christian interpretation of the gospels turn upon
the situating of the Father, the Son and Holy ghost.
For example, John 14:10;
Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and
the Father in me? The words that I speak unto
you, I speak not of myself: but the Father that
dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.
It is a simple thoughtlessness to believe in the trinity;
it is a simple faith. So simple, I must say, that it does not
even reach absurdity, but more often silliness. Indeed, it
does not even qualify as absurd because, first, Christians
would hardly admit their faith is absurd, and second, they
go to great lengths to prove to others (and so justify their
belief) the sensibility of this scheme of reality; to them it
makes the most sense. It is a faith based in the full
knowledge of daily life; it takes the obvious problems of
living and existence and reconciles it to God in an absolution
that will come in heaven. As a Christian, I can hardly go
wrong no matter what I do. So simple; my attitudes of life
control my place, and I justify my place by my attitude in a
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find the transcendental clause. Either I am always justified
in the potential to defer myself to God, or I am justified by
what I gain and both occur for the fully human being; for
this world we should endeavor to gain Objects, and a
measure of our faith will be reflected in how much objects we
have gained, but again, or how much we are kept from
gaining. Eventually God is unnecessary because we still are
just doing what we do and/or endeavoring to gain objects
and measure our existential stature by them in whatever
manner, of excess or poverty. No god needs to exist
(absolutely) because the True Object has gained such stature
of goodness (god-ness) in itself we need only the rules of
the game. Our place as a piece in the game matters little
against the transcending term, for the term and the place
have conflated in the subject-object. God is ever present
whether we believe or not. And Christianity is just one way
of avoiding ones self: It is an assertion of my self upon the
Object of my faith, of the subject-object that is me avoided by
a holy ghost, a motivator, upon the Object.
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incredulous; he confronts them with what they should
already know. He is saying, in effect, do not you already
know that I and my father are the same? He is in me as I am
in Him? This is such the case that I do not speak but the
father speaks; indeed, he does the workslxi. His works are
not only miracles of healing but the work of speakinglxii, in
that the way he speaks speaks or has spoken to the disciples
such that they became disciples. Jesus's words are the works
but not along a conventional vector as though we can
reduce works to words, as a kind of interpretation that
means misinterpretation. Reality is situated in a particular
appropriation of terms, but also, Jesus as the minimal
human is expressing existence for knowledge itself, of
existence, he cannot then but help do this expressing
through his humanity he thus coincides such expression,
indeed is the coincidence, of the motion of existence by his
being the expression of knowledge and thus the miraculous
reality of the fully human. So it is he is telling them that
even if the concept is not sufficient to have you believe such
that it is thus knowledge, then believe what is your
experience by the fact that I (Jesus) called and you followed,
for it was not me (Jesus) that called you it was no True
Objective case rather it was the Father that gave you to me
and thus to Himself. John 14:11,
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It is the double voice; the one speaking a question of choice,
the other a statement of fact: If you do love me then you will
keep my commandmentslxvi; he who loves Jesus thereby
loves the Father, and by this fact is in the Father and the
Father in him, as is with Jesus. Yet since Jesus has come to
terms with the reality of fulfillment of righteousness, of
absolution, which is to say the completion of the motion of
his Being in this world, death, he has done so by seeing the
real temptation of reaching for validation in the Object, and
through this vacillating motion he comes upon the
possibility of the disciples: They are caught by the Object of
Jesus. And Jesus is leaving them. The voice that is Jesus but
not Jesus, the Father but not the Father emanates not from
any single knowable source; the Father is that source
reduced to a manner of speaking, as the point of reduction.
In so much as his disciples are in the Father, but are
possibly caught upon the Object of Jesus, as he leaves,
Jesus might see that they will have been renounced from the
Object, as if by the will of God, since Jesus can do nothing
more, be nothing more, than that he exists. Jesus will pray
that the Father (in them) thereby will bring his knowledge
unto them as renouncers, and in so much as they have had
the Object of Jesus to prevent them from the responsibility
that is their own being in the worldlxvii, minimal human,
John 14:16-19 (emphasis added.):
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mind that the distinction between what is said, the terms,
and what is done, as activity, is only made for the fully
human who sees terms as relating to singular and specific
things in (potentially) an absolute manner, and as such that
a thing in-itself may be known as True and yet relinquish
that truth at the application of a segregate autonomous
powerlxxi. Hence, for the fully human, works must be
particularly miracles of healinglxxii, such as leprosy, and
magic, such as the water to wine, the feeding of the 5000,
and the resurrecting of Lazarus. The fully human searches
the world of True Objects for the possibility of such miracles
having occurred; he thus reduces all possibilities of existence
to his one reality that is absolutely truelxxiii. This is to say
that (miraculous) works must adhere to a particular vector
of activity, the meaning of which prescribes the force
involved and occurs in a manner that defies the specific
dynamic of meaningful term-object organization; ironically,
what this essay is describing.
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reflection by which to know what is true; she can only know
what other individuals might think and then come to an
opinion that she hopes will pan out so that she might be
recognized as a true object herself, that which is called
individual identity. The usual conventional method, then,
would take this and draw its logical method upon it to
conclude that where this point is made it is thus indicating
its fallacy or at least its compromise, to then conclude a
world without individual identity is nonsensical and
absurd, meaning, it cannot be real, hence again verifying our
point of two irreducible routes for world.
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that is 'that which is not me': The Object (since the human
reflection of the minimal human moves at once toward and
away from its self), is the branches in that the disciples are
the examples for Jesus of his 'good fruit' and this reiterates
the situation at this moment in the story.
The Disciple
In so much as Jesus may be instructing the disciples,
we are to assume, on one hand, that Jesus is still doubting
hoping but doubting that his disciples really understand
him, doubting whether they are on board, so to speak, but
as well that Jesus is telling them what to expect because
Jesus has come to terms with his experience, his Being not
required to have validation from the Object, and he has
thereby understood that indeed they are on board but in
exactly the manner and time that God would have them;
indeed, in John 16:7, Jesus expresses just this: if I do not
go away, the Comforter will not come unto you, and is
therefore speaking in resonance with the experience that
they are all having and thus is really just iterating what is
occurring in all of their experience, though the disciples do
not yet realize the full extent of their situation.
The instruction is simple. The defender of the Object
will see this passage as indication of the mytho-religious, the
traditional real-truth. The facts of the matter are likewise
simple, but in that they have a different correspondence
with the Object, in that they express the determination of
the basic life, the explanation according to the rules of the
Object are a little more involved. We might see that in that I
(the disciple) exist, born of a virgin into this world (and as
possibly this world is the vessel in which I have conception,
in which I have been conceived), being as I am determined in
this way, I could not arise from nowhere; the copula is is
equivocal with coming into being as being is this irreducible
integrated condition. The culmination of effect that is the
present moment where and as I am being, along with the
conflation of occurrences that arrive at only my self, these
taken as a whole, against all of which I come upon myself,
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stem from the vine; but this I not a tree, indeed it is more a
bramble, and the Father is the husbandman who makes it
such that there is a vine with branches. So the disciples, as
minimal human in their own right, too can say they bring
forth fruit because they abideth in me, and I in him...; the
minimal human cannot be nor is not separate from the
activity of the basic life; the minimal human expresses the
basic life at all times; ...the same bringeth forth much fruit.
The disciples will hear the Father in them and then will
remove themselves, or will be removed, from the possibility
that they did not understand, because when they come upon
the significant moment, which is the decision to renounce
the Object, they will see how their life has been determined
in its entirety. Jesus will be leaving. They will ask what ye
will and it shall be done unto you because what they ask
is innately of the basic life determined such that what ye
asks will be done unto you because it is already being done
such that ye had to have asked. Jesus says, the Father has
loved me, so I love you and you continue in my love because
the Father is in them as he is in Jesus. That Jesus is the
Object, the Object is leaving them, and they will have the
Father because they have had the Object that they will have
been renounced by when Jesus leaves.
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justification from the Object, into the realization of the
nature of experience, and the summation in comfort of the
actuality of the situation at hand, speaking to his disciples
as friends. Having traversed the real vacillation, he is
centered and resolute in what is to come. He has been
speaking to his disciples, but in that he is minimally human
he can do nothing but speak and act by virtue of the basic
life, and so was also speaking to himself, of himself, in the
movement of the effect of God; the discrepancy reveals his
humanity, the humanity that is going to end soon. Now he
has come back to this presence, and he speaks within the
confidence of his Being, in communion with existence, in
supplication, to himself, to his disciples, to no one in
particular, to everyone everywhere:
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Gethsemane
We should take a moment and see that the next part
of the story beckons us back to the virgin birth, for we must
ask, again: How can we know this? If only the four were
there, how does this story come to us; and, how could we
know what Jesus did or thought when he was alone? The
answer to these questions give further support to the idea
that this is not a story about one necessary person only
(Jesus), but more about an experience that individuals were
coming upon, common between them, and that these
separate experiences of separate people occurred along the
same storyline (Christ); the individuals had the same types
of experiences individually, and that individually they were
secret, mysterious, even from others, but that indeed there
was more than one who had the experience.
*
Jesuss apprehension is confirmed in Gethsemane.
Though he has reached through the first vacillations, the
latter will lead Jesus to the reality of his life. Knowing of the
the pattern a reason for the vacillations, Jesus now must
confront them on a different level. Instead of seeking an
identical validation, he is looking still for signs of the
continuation of the ministry. Thus continuing in the effort to
discover who will follow him, Jesus retires to the garden, for
he began to be very sorrowful and very heavylxxxi, with
those that might seem to be the best candidates, still, the
first three whom God had given Jesus, Peter, or whom Jesus
names Cephas, which is the rock or stone, and the two
sons of Zebedee, James and John. He asks the three to keep
watch while he goes to pray because his soul is exceedingly
sorrowful, even unto death. He is expressing his worry
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God is all powerful, if he will remove the whole thing like it
had been a bad dream; yet even as he may doubt, the fact of
his doubting denies that his doubt could be valid, since if
there were nothing to doubt then he could not doubt, yet he
doubts, and this doubt brings despair. Jesuss despair is not
so much that he is going to die, but that his life has been in
vain, for if it had not been so, if it had not been exactly the
life that it has been, then he would not have this dilemma.
His doubt is vanity, identification with the Object. He asks
God to remove this cup from me, this cup that is his
experience in the basic life from which he drinks and offers
to the world the absolute Object. He sulks in self
introspection and doubt, and this eternal cycle of himself
that leads him out of his situation only to bring him back to
it through every avenue he truly carries the burden that is
the weight of the world. In this doubting, Jesuss vanity
enfolds upon itself; he has lead men out of their livelihood
based upon an insinuation of self perception upon the other,
and based upon this these men have forsaken their lives and
followed him, believing that he had something significant for
them. Now he is going to die, and they do not even perceive
it, did not even know of it; even as he has told them all along
and now tells them again as it is here, they are astonished.
Indeed, Jesus must wonder, am I a selfish father leaving his
ignorant children to fend for themselves? He is left in his
sullen mire of doubt and faith, pleading to God to at once
take away this redundant assertion while implicitly asking
God to reveal to him which of his disciples has understood,
for then Jesus would be renewed and be confident that his
life had not been in vain, that indeed his faith and
understanding was not a delusion, that he has carried a true
message. Do they understand? But he gets up and returns to
Peter, James and John to find them asleep, seemingly
oblivious to the whole situation. Jesus is flabbergasted and
reacts rebuking their ignorance, offended in his
contemplation that is seem to be made moot, couldest not
thou watch one hour? And then he comes into himself as
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of Subjects; as he confronts his mortality, he is come upon by
the Object of his death, and attempts to hold it in place,
away from himself, so he may know it: He fulfills the plight
of being human in that he responds as fully human, desirous
of the Object to justify his experience in knowledge. Once
this begins to occur, we move into a different phase of the
story. The single ministry of Jesus begins to show its
plurality in resonant fractures. Jesus is coming to terms
with the reality of being the minimal human of faith.
* * *
So Jesuss ministry comes to a close; now, by dying, he
is to come complete for absolution. The solution cannot be
half gained; life is only half, incomplete and segregated in its
meaning. It is based in the parameter defined by death, as
death for the fully human life marks the absolute limit of
knowledge, and thus the opening for God, the transcendent.
Were Jesus in his life to say and do as much, but then not be
crucified, not be the target for the fully human resentment,
his life would mean nothing and there would be no Christ.
The struggle of the foregoing episode is balanced in his
resurrection, and a release from the tension begins in the
garden of Gethsemane, which Luke calls the Mount of
Olives, which John says lay on the other side of the brook
Cedron; but not before the tension culminates in terrible
suffering. We have symmetry in the story of Jesus Christ;
the Passion counters in weight the length and breadth of the
ministry. Yet, as if by literary method, in the transition
between this symmetry, a break occurs in the garden. After
crossing a brook, which can be seen as symbolic of the
transition, upon the Mount of Olives, which is a symbol for
peacelxxxiii, an interlude, or intermission, a pause marks the
separation between the struggle of the life of the minimal
human that endeavors in a deep compassion, and the
struggle of his death, that proceeds in a deep passion;
whereas his ministry can be seen to have involved a type of
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want me, then let my friends go and take me already. Simon
Peter is the first to come out of the stupor that is the
processing of the realization of the ridiculous picture before
him, and pulls his sword out and instead of killing one of
them, joins Jesus in ridicule of the men by cutting off the ear
of one of them. Then as a segue back into the immanence of
the situation, Jesus responds to Simon Peter, answering the
question posed by his attack; the cup which my Father hath
given me, shall I not drink it?lxxxvi The minimal human
determined, Jesus is saying: How else could I proceed?
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Doubt
In contrast to the acceptance of the minimal human of
Jesus we have the denial of Simeon Peter. Now, Peter is a
disciple. We are not to place him in the camp of the True
Object; yet we read that he places himself there as the high
priests took Jesus. He followed behind them to watch what
would happen and then joined the crowd when a woman
recognized him as a follower of Jesus. In fact, three
individuals recognize him. And three times he denies that he
even knows Jesus, as Jesus told him he would. Conventional
knowledge of the the fully human sees this event as an
example of the insecurity of humanity, and a statement
about faith; one is supposed to stand firm in their faith and
testify the truth. Yet a few things interest us for the version
proposed in this essay of the minimal human and absolution.
We can approach through this interest by layers of
understanding; we can enter by a critical level that presents
a generalized form, and thereby situated, then proceed into
the more specific existential indications.
*
In John 18, verse 15, Peter and another disciple
followed Jesus. This other disciple is known to the high
priest and goes in with Jesus in to the palace while Peter
stays outside. Now, given this setup we can assume that
Caiaphas, the high priest, was not interested in persecuting
anyone but Jesus. All that is said of the situation is that this
disciple was known to Caiaphas; we do not have a
qualification for what known means. All we can say is that
he was known enough to be allowed into the temple even
while he was known to be a follower of Jesus; obviously this
other disciple had nothing to fear. If we follow this picture,
we might see that the problem was seen as Jesus, and not so
much as his followers, and this other disciple was allowed to
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claiming he is the Messiah most likely, this is what has
been inferred by the people hearing him, and most probably
many other public preachers have been saying all sorts of
questionable things including things about a Messiah but
how he is saying things. The implicit renunciation of the
Object, which Jesus cannot but help to express, is taken by
those of the Law, which we will see with Peter also includes
the crowd outside, as a call to renounce the Law.
*
We should explore this 'saying of things'. The story of
Jesus sheds light upon a critical moment of this essay
through exhibiting 1) how the Subject is limited in its
expression by the conventional Law (fully human
conventional reality), that is, the law which designates
(structures signs meaningfully) how truth may be situated
for reality; 2) how this limitation reveals what is capable of
being expressed, which is to say, how the limitation
evidences a true historical progress by indicating the limits
placed upon the expression of truth; 3) a moment where
Jesus is coming up against the Law in his use of it for what
he intends to express of the truth; 4) how the fully human,
he who is confined by the Law and thus comprehends
nothing further than what the Law appears to denote, which
is, for a word, infinity, is offended by the subject, interprets
this moment.
A key expression of this moment, and indeed, a
significant indicator of the meaning of this essay here,
occurs in John 7 and 10; it is most poignant in John chapter
10, verse 20:
And many of them said, he hath a devil, and is
mad; why ye hear him?
This expression of Jesus 'having a devil' begins to occur
in these latter chapters. In Chapter John 7:20,
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this mode, he is really indicating for those minimal humans
that 'now is the time'. So Jesus says as much:
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and/or supposed to lead one to righteousness and so to God.
But no such awakening or enlightenment has occurred in
either manner except that Jesus is here; the Jews merely see
the Law as designating truth and have no further reflection
upon the law than that of individual behavior in social
negotiation. Hence Jesus comes exactly at this right time. In
Jesus, as in Moses, the law has been fulfilled. There is
nothing about the Law that Jesus negates, but in this, in his
expression of the total law, is also ironically the expression
that is bound to no law (remember, Moses could only do that
he does also, could only express existence) but exactly the
law in its entirety which is the explication of existence in
knowledge; those who see not the law's truth, but instead
see the word of law as designating a truth for which they are
less, or not worthy except that they must live under it and
try these faithful of the Law of the true Object cannot and
will not hear what Jesus is saying, and so cannot but see his
expression in terms of The reality (the only possible reality)
of the Law of the True Object, and thereby negate Jesus
(inevitably) and see Jesus as 'having a devil', as one who is
possessed, as one who appears to be saying something, but
upon further investigation, is saying only nonsense. It is
they who are dead in reflection to life eternal (Jesus; the
minimal human; existence) and so want to make him like
them, which is to kill Jesus through requiring of him to be
justified against the True Object. But Jesus will not be, and
thus makes no accusation but merely expresses the facts of
the matter at hand. Likewise, in chapter 8, the Jews attempt
to trap Jesus in fallacious logic, but it is just this type of
attachment to the Law of the Object for which Jesus has no
responsibility. Then in chapter 10, it is clear that he is not
confronting them the same way, but rather is making sense
to them in a way that they do not wish to make sense, and it
is this type of blatant denial that designates true sinners.
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they not follow, but will flee from him: for they
know not the voice of strangers.
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polemic, one that is not reduced to relative behavioral
applicability, one that is not based in negotiation.
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alluding to 'the' sheep and the shepherd who enters into the
sheepfold by the door and this is taken to mean the chosen
people of God. Then he says that what is supposed by the
Jews to mean God, the good shepherd, calls to his sheep by
name who hear him because they know his voice. Now Jesus
is speaking of a division of sheep within the sheepfold, as if
there is the chosen, but then there is the really chosen. The
Pharisees do not understand Jesus so he attempts to make it
more clear by shifting discursive register to be more plainly
conventional but also to mock their ignorance. He says that
he, Jesus, is the door but also the good shepherd. He also
speaks of 'the Father', and this then would have the Jews
totally confused, since they would have been following what
Jesus is saying is the shepherd to mean God the Father.
This more, purportedly, clear or more precise iteration
brings the listeners to move from general misunderstanding
to actual divisive positions, as well as bringing Jesus to have
to spell out the situation in a more confronting manner.
Some say he has a devil, or is possessed, others say that this
cannot be since he was able to make the blind see. In the
context of what is being told here in this story of Jesus, we
have a picture of the ignorant fully human; in discussion,
some have reasons to see one who speaks this way as insane,
or having a devil, and others who tend to justify what should
be a consistent or even profound meaning by his actions,
even though they really do not comprehend what was said in
actuality. Yet according to Jesus, both of these types are
blind and sinful; these are the thieves and hirelings. The
good shepherd does not live by virtue of the Law, but fulfills
it. 'I am' brings all of his sheep into one fold and for this
reason, for this purpose, does the Father love Jesus, loves 'I
am', because I lay down my life, the life that the Law of the
Object determines is true, the proper method by which one
comes to and understands what life is, the contingent and
circumstantial life, that I might take it again not for all
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sheep, but for those sheep that hear their name and know
the good shepherd's voice, those who hear themselves called
to the door. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down
myself. There is no one who may dissuade the disciples, the
shepherd's sheep, from their knowing of the truth, for they
have been called.
*
Moving on, the story seems to change setting but is
still concerning the parable of the sheep. Here Jesus is
brought into describing the situation more particularly and
poignantly; the story ends with a quick exit of Jesus because
now the Jews are so offended by what he is saying that they
almost stone him. The stage is set; indeed the next story is
that of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead as if the
emphasize the absolute discrepancy involved so far, that
Jesus must actually raise a dead person. But dead in what
sense? This precedes the departure. Much of this, the Jew's
mounting energy of frustration and offense over Jesus,
comes about because Jesus (at least in John) does his best to
never answer questions with direct answers; he never
justifies the True Object, but he nevertheless is often
brought to answers that directly confront the questioner
without implicating himself as a true Object.
The Jews have again sought out Jesus, we are to
suppose, because his last parable left them in such a stir
that they need a 'plain' answer. The Jews say, How long
dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us
plainly.xcvii And Jesus says:
I told you, and ye believe not: the works I do in my
Father's name, they bear witness of me. But ye believe
not, because you are not of my sheep, as I have said unto
you. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they
follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they
shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out
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the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified.civ
This must so be the case that it seems Jesus is not too
worriedcv. One might say (those of the fully human) that it is
because Jesus knows that he can raise people from the dead,
so he is waiting for him to die so people might see his
miracle so ye may believecvi; Jesus waits two days after he
heard of his sickness before leaving to go to him. We are to
surmise that the trip takes at least two days because by the
time Jesus arrives Lazarus was in the grave four days. Jesus
waits two days and then gets ready to go back to Judea, but
his disciples tell him not to because that is where the Jews
want to kill him. But Jesus says, Are there not 12 hours in
the day?... Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may
wake him out of sleep. It is enough here to say that Jesus
performs the miracle of life and death upon another human
being in the same way as the Father will perform the
miracle of Jesus's death and resurrection, but from the
perspective of the minimal human, who is the expression of
existence in human knowledge, those who are of the Law are
asleep, sick, and blind, and it is the purpose and reason of
the minimal human to expose the insolvent nature of the
True Object, just as Jesus exposes the true nature of human
existence through his Being.
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The Departure
In John chapter 12, verse 23, Jesus announces,
The hour is come, that the Son of man should be
glorified.
With this begins the departure, and so here we rejoin
our discussion.
*
The public that is becoming unrested. And it is
probably not so much that people believe or dont believe
that Jesus is the Messiah, but more the confusion about
facts that is typical of the public. Jesus is aggravating the
problem because he is not speaking methodologically nor
objectively; Jesus just so happens to be fueling this
confusion because he touches upon ideas that bring the Law
into question (it is all he can do as a minimal human being).
We might see that in this period the Law was ubiquitous to
social living, much as now in the United States and other
countries Law permeates its citizens, often in a somewhat
vague, ambiguous fashion. All of its citizens know the Law,
but not really; they have a general idea of the Law but it is
the officers of the courts which really know the law. It is to
them that the maintenance of social order is given. So it
must have been with the Jews, but as opposed to modern
U.S. Law, which is created specifically in the name of social
order and has little if any concern with the quality or
integrity of ones spiritually or essentially human Being, the
Jewish Law is impregnated with an urgency that has to do
with an obligation of ones Being as this is concerned and
should be concerned with ones People, the Chosen People of
God. The Law is not merely concerned with ones behavior,
but is implicit in how one is constituted as a living social
creature. The Law determines what one is. Tradition,
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saying or doing. But that which the opinions where settling
around was the movement occurring within those who heard
Jesus because Jesus was expressing the basic life, which is a
part of every human being, and most are fully human settled
in the law of Objects. Jesus now comes as a renouncer of the
law of the Object, so everyone is affected, and the social
order based in the law is upset. Thus we can see that it is
not merely a Jewish issue, but that Jesus is Jewish; we
begin with the world of the Jews. Those who are not Jewish
are likewise effected, and this is making it difficult for the
Jews, for then the Romans, who often ask little more than
that each religion keep their constituents in line, might see a
need to step more prominently into Jewish jurisdiction.
*
Peter appears not very confident in his position, and
yet he acts in confidence; what he believes and what he
knows are somehow at oddscx. As Jesus recognized earlier,
the complexity of Peter involves a presumption upon this
minimal human experience, a doubt vested of pure selfrighteousness, a counterpart to the immediate and straight
forward ministry of Jesus and the decision of Judas. This
complexity involves the interplay of noticeable aspects of
humanity, so we will take a closer look at what each of the
Gospels say about the denial of Peter, as well then the
betrayal of Judas.
First, though, in order to set the stage whereby the
same minimal human experience expresses itself through
different meanings and phases, we should take a moment
and attempt an explanation of the different versions of the
various tales apparent in Mathew, Mark, Luke and John; we
will take as our first example the beginning of the hearings
of Jesus. We notice by this examination the feature of the
gospels consistent with the markers of vacillation described
above; namely, that which justifies by the Object and that
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to the prophets, he relies on no Object but only refers to the
object of Christ; John's word is the authority. He speaks of
what is true: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God.cxii John needs no
prior Object to gain or propose his truth, except the truth
which is the determination of minimal human, which is thus
and cannot be otherwise The Truth. This resonates with the
proposition of this essay, that Christ may not have been a
particular single individual, but that there was a minority of
people who had an experience who were together in a
sufficient densitycxiii to come upon one another, and that this
occasion lent itself to some of these individuals eventually
writing of their experience against the significant occasion
itself such that they could speak of it as an Object, Jesus
Christ, so that they might be heard.
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and said, Thou art also of them. And Peter said,
Man, I am not. And about the space of one hour
after another confidently affirmed, saying, Of a
truth this fellow also was with him: for he is a
Galilean. And Peter said, Man, I know not what
thou sayest. And immediately, while he yet
spake, the cock crew. And the Lord turned, and
looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the
word of the Lord, how he had said unto him,
Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.
And Peter went out and wept bitterly.
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It is a stroke of simple teaching to view these excerpts
as referencing one event, but through different eyes. The
event goes something like this: Jesus is taken from
Gethsemane to the palace of the high priest. Peter follows
behind so as to not get drawn up and maybe likewise
persecuted, sneaks into the palace to watch the preliminary
trial, and gets confronted a few times by people in the house
who say they think he is a disciple of Jesus. When Peter
then denies his association with Jesus, he recalls in some
manner how he just betrayed his faith, and is very upset.
This event unfolds in the story to emphasize how Jesus
knew exactly what would happen, and how Peter wavers in
his faith.
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arrested and is being taken away most probably to be killed.
The rest of the group is astonished and surprised and some
are ready to fight, but Jesus says no. This is a group that is
of a common knowledge, a common manner of apprehending
meaning that Jesus has just elaborated upon as to what it
means, what happens of it as well as the conditions of it.
Jesus has his moment of vacillation that is evidenced in an
inability to have the experience verified and validated by the
others whom he is with. In effect and in a manner of
speaking, he leaves himself to find himself in an other, fails
to do so, and then returns to himself to thereby have found
himself through the other. This is a pretty intense
experience because while the story has it that Jesus is
speaking to an audience (objects, disciples), the meaning of
the event suggests that what is being described is indeed
what is happening to the attendees, namely, the disciples, or
for a more general, inclusive term, the group of minimal
humans. One guy cant hang; Judas leaves to get the people
who will come and get rid of Jesus once and for all (the Law);
he goes to effect the physical removal of what he
understands as the source of the uncomfortable intensity of
the vacillation. Another guy is obviously shaken: Peter does
not just hang back in the garden nor flees, but has to go to
see what is going to happen to Jesus. The others either flee
(according to Matthew and Mark), or stay in the garden and
chill or (in effect) just disappear from view even after Jesus is
taken (Luke and John dont mention what they do), but
Peter goes with Jesus Christ, which we might say he thus
stays in the proximity and effectuation of the vacillation. And
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stumble, like the small tentative cuts of a suicidals arm
with a blade at hand. In meaning, faith is questioned and
that which requires faith may be viewed in those moments,
during those desperate times. But then, at least in some
instances, the ineffective comfort that had been catalyzing
the hesitations reaches a tipping point, if you will, and the
comfort is finally upset by the unknown end. The end asserts
itself; in this instance, faith asserts itself over Truth; the
Law begins to reveal itself to its nature.
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allow his faith to continue to be validated by The Object
Jesus. He thus removes himself rather than the Object
removing itself from him, but then must return to actually
destroy that True Object of faith because he sees it is the
source of the vacillations. He removes himself to escape the
vacillations that Jesus is arousing by his presence, by the
presence of Christ in the disciples experience; in order to
keep the object of his faith, he must then destroy this
catalyzer of the vacillations, Jesus. Then, because the
vacillation is not caused by the Object but is indeed
instigated by Christ, by the determination of the minimal
human being, after his betrayal, he realizes his error and
must thus destroy himself. An ironic event indeed.
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Their faith is being tried against the True Object, the trial
that will yield the Truth, ironically, through the processes of
Law that are upheld through faith, a Truth that then
transforms from faith in the True Object, to wisdom.
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human, one could see a kind of coincidence, but a
culmination of meaning. Yet if there is to be a distinction
made between the ministry and the departure, if you will,
then the minimal human would have to have a certain
capacity for a kind of reflection again differentiated from the
true reflection spoken about earlier in this essaycxxv. The
true reflection of a self-consciousness coming upon an other
self-consciousness, what we can say of the minimal human is
God in-itself (through faith but not through faith), must be
visited upon by a further differencecxxvi.
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experiences through the discursive tropes that probably had
already developed; these authors are thus not only telling
about their own experiences, but using the story of perhaps
the first group who came together under a common manner,
who worked or functioned together to develop the tropic
scheme, a scheme of terms that had meanings specific to the
particular and marginalized experience of what we are
calling the minimal human being. We have then proximity
used with reference to how different individuals came to
terms with the significant event, that we might say is thus
the Christ event.
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significant. Lukes narrative seems a little more intimate,
for it appears to have details that Matthew and Mark do not
see, or did not experience. With Luke, Peter is in the midst
of the hall, and when he denied Jesus, the Lord actually
looks over to him and brings about his memory, where as in
Matthew and Mark, Peter merely recalls.
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certain light, say, a kind of nether-world of the story, a
transitional world that resides in between the fully and the
minimal human worlds. Peter may not have been so well
known in these circles, in this stratum of servants and
laypeople. So when the other disciple comes back for Peter,
he tells her that kept the door to let Peter in, and she asks
Peter if he is this mans disciple.
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story of Peter that by each of the authors telling of his story
thereby tell of their experience, their own vacillations of
faith, who also thereby indicate a certain proximity to the
event itself by their versions of telling about itcxxxii. The
author John apparently conveys what is occurring for the
rest most thoroughly. Peter follows from afar with another
disciple, the movement of doubt dividing Peter upon himself,
his faith in the True Object that is Jesus and the knowledge
of the Truth that is wisdom. Peter comes to the door and this
other disciple goes in while Peter himself, his doubt, his faith
in the True Object in question, stays outside. This other
disciple comes back and talks to a woman that is keeping the
door, who then lets him in and asks if he is a disciple of this
man, and Peter answers truthfully, and says No, I Am not.
Peter is not a disciple of this man, but is indeed Christ
himself; Peter is coming to terms with the situation at hand
of the minimal human. He passes through this door kept by
a woman and goes over to warm himself with the other
servants and officers.
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Peter come over and accuse him, asking him if he didnt see
him in the garden with him. Peter, having come resolved in
himself, in his knowledge, wherein he is comforted (by the
Comfortercxxxv), seeing the previous self, the subject of faith,
the person who reacted to the taking of the Object from him
by attacking the ones who came to take itcxxxvi, as no longer
true, no longer who Peter is this new person of knowledge,
of wisdom, again answers his accuser honestly and denies he
was that person in the garden. Then the cock crows. In John,
Peter does not weep, for the cock crowing can at once be seen
as a dawning of a new day, as well as the signal, the
indication that indeed all is proceeding as planned,
determined as such.
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contradiction, that mark of what is false, thus history is set
in motion through the denial of the contradiction, which is
hidden in plain sight and thus not believable in its nature.
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allow them their justification and so their actions proceeding
from here, which are inevitable, lay in the justification that
is the sin of the world. So it is, on the other hand, that Jesus,
again, is merely stating the facts of the matter; i.e. if I were
to tell you, which is, if indeed you were to hear me, if my
saying were indeed telling you in truth the truth, then you
would not be believing, but would indeed be knowing. And in
so much as this is not the case (this case is determined: The
future inherent in the present) I am thus not telling you.
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Mathew, Mark and Luke each have Jesus answer but
once to his accusations. Jesus's answer to the question of if
he is the Christ is 'so you say', and then nothing morecxlvi.
Luke, as if to emphasize the irony and profound
ridiculousness of the trial, as well as the inhumanity of
Jesus, even has Pilate return Jesus to the Jewish governor,
Herod, where people continue to throw accusations about
Jesus and Jesus makes no rebuttal, no response. Then in
Luke 23, verses 11-12, because Herod thought Jesus a fool,
he returned him to Pilate; Pilate then may have felt
validated, because Luke says that Herod and Pilate became
friends whereas before there was enmity between them.
This alliance has been forged due to both having a common
sense that Jesus is ridiculous and does not deserve death
under either Law. We might see that whereas Pilate saw
Herod as a Jew before a Roman citizen, now Pilate can see
that indeed the Law is what reigns, that Herod is not falling
upon any religious Law necessarily opposed to the Law of
the State (of Rome, of the True Object), but that they are
'friendly' in the Law of Reality that sees Jesus as just
another religious fanatic, as opposed to Caiaphas, as John
has it, who saw that it was expedient for one man to die for
the peoplecxlvii.
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little stake in the business of the True Object because Rome
is the Law of the Real World, the True Object already
manifest; it is the State of reality.
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to his trial before the priests. Thus Jesus, likewise, answers
Pilate plainly, telling him that perhaps he has done
something but it is something not ethically compromised but
actually non-ethicalcli:
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PART THREE
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understand why the crowd demanded Barabbas, a thief and
a murderer, be released instead of Jesus, for they could not
(were incapable) receive the truth. Jesus supplies the
material by which the crowd makes or had made its
decision.
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Returning to the crowd, having found no fault in Jesus
that would warrant death, Pilate finds the crowd
unreasonable, unrelenting and undeterred. They cry give us
Barabbas and crucify Jesusclviii. This would seem to be
getting tiresome to Pilate, for in Matthew and Mark he
implores them again to reconsider by asking the crowd
Why? What evil has he done?clixThen Pilate willing to
content the peopleclx gives in.
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the Jews do not move him; rather, he was already afraid, as
were the Jews, since they are Lawful, of the fully human
estimation of truth. Already Pilate is fully human. He is
reduced to this state from his objective stature of being the
Law, the World, through his encounter with the authentic
Being, the True Subject, the actual subject of the story in
which he is involved, for Pilate himself was with Jesus in
the judgment hall, together meeting on equal grounds. Now
though, we find the distinction of existential difference in
the players. Pilate comes unto his own being because of his
interaction with an authentic Being, as the story suggests,
the King of Subjects, as Pilate is also a subject, but at that
oriented upon True Objects, Lawful real objects. Through
this significant moment, Pilate is so moved by the
transcendent clause, inherent of such an orientation, to be
that being that he is, which is the Law, the King of Objects.
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*
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And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the
writing was, JESUS OF NARARETH THE KING OF
THE JEWS.clxviii
Because it was near the city, it was posted in the three
languages common to the city. The priests did not like that
sign, and told Pilate to change it to say I am the king of the
Jews, but Pilate, probably because he has had enough of all
the nonsense, says, in effect, screw you; What I have
written, I have written.
What is the difference between the two signs?
Convention would have it that the priests wanted it to be
more clear that this man up on the cross, Jesus, claimed
that he was the king of the Jews, as opposed to Pilates sign
that might be vague in this distinction. But we should not
forget the significance of I am. What we have is further
indication of the irony that has infiltrated the story in a
particular way through the arrival of Pilate. Pilates sign
reflects his new but not new situation, the after encounter
with significance, where if he did not know it before, he was
now an agent of transcendence, and this is verified
rhetorically, symbolically, by the Jews announcing Cesar as
their king.
Note the significance of becoming an agent of
transcendence through the second moment: Nothing
changes. The significance of the second moment is that
something is seen to have changed in the person, but
nothing really changes; the person proceeds as if upon a new
basis, but there is no evidence beyond the affect experience
(and the terms used to refer to it) that the person would not
have acted in the very same manner despite the eventclxix.
The experience is always left out, always transcendent to the
situation. It is only through faith that behavior is
understood to have changed, only through faith that the
Event has any meaning, at that, because Objects are viewed
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differently as to their Truth. The transcendental clause has
had an effect due to the meaning of the True Object that was
already invested of identity. Pilate, being so moved, thus
behaves as he should have behaved in the first place, as he
can only behave: As a judge. But instead it is Pilate who has
been judged. He thus projects this judgment upon the
Objects of his view, the Objects over which he rules as an
agent of transcendence. He begrudgingly crucifies Jesus,
against his better judgment and because of this, because his
judgment is not supposed to come from some subjective
place, but from an objective place, from the subjects (-objects)
that he presides over, he does exactly what he should and
would do. He (in effect, as we have said) is the World, the
Law. Having encountered the significant moment, he now
must enact decision, but this action has already been
decided. The mockery of a trial is the trial of Pilate. He
washes his hands of blameclxx because he has encountered
his subjectivity as Truth yet still must act as he is
determined. He has encountered the True Subject, but it is
not what it seems; it is an odd sort of knowing, an ironic
situation. He therefore must enact a division, and washes
his hands because he must force the blame from himself,
because he has encountered the transcendent, and now must
perform his existential duty because it has been determined
of him from the start.
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was erected by people, the sign of the ages will not read the
Truth, i.e. I Am King of the Jews, but indeed the fully
human distanced expression of Objective Truth.
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Afterword
In Gayatri Spivaks English translation of Jacques
Derridas Of Grammatology, she uses pretty much of a
quarter of the book for the Translators Preface, the
beginning of which concerns Derridas concern for Hegels
idea of the preface. To Derrida, there is no preface. The most
interesting aspect of his whole book, though, is not the
various essays themselves, because the various essays are
proposed to not exclude the Preface. How then are we to
come to terms with the essays? To be simple, and avoiding
the necessity of performance that seems cannot be avoided
in the telling of the impossibility of a preface, if even the
possibility of an Afterword, we are reminded of Martin
Heideggers essay on The Work of Art; the turn that occurs
from the presumption of topic to the matter that is actually
addressed emphasizes the performative aspect of the
subject: The subject that is performing, that is, as opposed to
some sort of human Agent-Being, is a subject of discourse
that is performing. Indeed, what twist is enacted in that
simple sentence? At no point does any definition avoid the
subject that occurs of discourse; might we substitute text
and we recede at least 35 years in time, but still then do we
remain at the subject, the issue at handclxxi. For at no time
am I excluding what is rightly the subject of the foregone
essay. The conflating of meaning in unexpected ways is the
performative aspect of the subject; the object is always
presented against a static arena. We have to wonder, then,
about discourses that speak directly without the sort of
ironic twist that certain authors evidence by their
authorship, because the irony of any discourse is not located
in this performative aspect but rather more so in fact in the
appropriative concern. While this development is indeed
interesting, it seems at least these two authors set aside the
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Kierkegaardian near derogatory interesting and instead
make their bed within it.
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of the (fearful?) imaginations. And as it proceeded as a
liberal ideal, nothing less than an activity of colonialismclxxv.
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other hand, the many evidently could not understand him.
The presumption was that everyone is involved in a common
real arena. His aguish was that he could not relieve himself
of this want for justification by the many, could not will
himself to be relieved of his faith. So it is that the solution to
this problem of enlightenment would seem to be found in
there actually being two routes not being subject to the
further reduction of another one route; that the
enlightenment was a self righteous pompousness, necessary,
but self righteous historical and cultural colonialism. The
removal of this transcendent agency thus reveals actually
two routes, for we might see now that it is indeed
transcendence itself that overcomes the gap between them.
See, though, that we are not reiterating or recapitulating a
postmodernism; this is not an invitation for multiple
realities; all those things occur in reality. We are not
advocating any sort of reality but reality itself, and hence,
again, two routes for meaning. Reality is but one of those
routes. We need somehow come to terms with our
colonialism (colonihilism), that the defiance as well as fear of
a great reckoning are the features of the colonial modern.
*
There is a type of irony that invites deception. A more
recent kind of philosopher is keen and cunning; they argue
Marxist capital while using it as a means to support their
argument. In effect, they saw Kierkegaards despair and
armed against it for the purpose of creating scarcity for the
material they then pedal; identity capital is the new
immaterialist material. They corner the market by enacting
the redundancy that they cannot escape because they are
arguing the market scarcity by their theoretically redundant
position. They become a they due to what they withhold by
the proper method which has led them to the situation
where they must produce material. Whatever they might
argue to the contrary or resist, they inevitably end up in the
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occurred at the pleasure of the ruler: in this way
the mystery of the emperors pleasure was
communicated to the masses.clxxx
{emphasis
added}
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the situation that is my appropriation of discourse. But by
present conventional standards, it is improper to say my
and still hope to convey the meaning, however immediate
and fantastical I had to really be just then. It is not the
subjective I appropriating personal meaning as opposed to
everyone else and their own subjective appropriations; in the
estimation of two routes, we are talking about I am in true
self-reflection as us in opposition to them. Zizeks perpetual
conflating and segregating discursive enactments is exactly
the example of the agent of enlightenment, while also of the
antithesis of such an agent, that which we call an operator,
one who has such fluid access to the dialectical material that
he cannot but produce relevant statements at every juncture
of objective quality. Yet he is not sovereign; it is more that he
is exhibiting the features of an operator of truth, more that
he enacts the void as multiple in its most truly ironic sense.
Every law-abiding, real situation is exhibited in relief by the
set of contradictions, contradictions that Zizek never denies
except when, but while in the act, he has the occasion before
him through which to speak. He is the example of
Kierkegaards Abraham, the standard by which Kierkegaard
is able to speak of his, and as well the general conditions of,
faith, even while this situation brings forth the commentary
by Kierkegaard of the situation that is the exact
contradiction of which he does not entertain, indeed, cannot
entertain. There is no matter to consider of how Zizek
himself might be different, or how his case might exhibit a
compartmentalization of behaviors, for if it were the case
that Zizek were to exhibit himself any differently than the
situation itself by which he has been and is being presented,
then, as we argue, Zizek or myself, that is the subject itself, is
enacting a deception, or indeed, contradiction would equate
to the end of the world; and this never happens. Every
moment of sense corresponds with the making of meaning.
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of holding. But perhaps where we begin to doubt Derrida,
should we forgive Heidegger? His apparent support of
Nazism, the recent papers that have caused a stir around
whether to continue to accept himclxxxi, the ethical
ramifications, is not the proper site for philosophical
considerations. Rather, the result of Nazism, its complete (or
near complete; Neo-Nazism is a kind of blasphemous postmodern rendition of it) destruction is the mark that tells us
that if Dasein were to continue it would have to under
disguise. Modern becomes post-modern. What more perfect
ruse than that of irony, Daseins native waters. Do not be
fooled: Dasein continues in the disguise that would conflate
a preface into the total work as to annihilate it; hence the
really interesting thing about, at least, Of Grammatology.
But that is a topic for another essay.
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Notes
i My source for this inference is the essay Cogito and the History of Madness
(Cogito et lhistorie de la folie. Lecture delivered March 4, 1963 ) comes from a
compilation of Derridas essays gathered over the course of his life, called Writing and
Difference. Translated, with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass. The
University of Chicago Press. 1978.
ii This is to say that what we might call the New Realism is based upon a pass because
they are allowing another pass that is given, or rather, unnoticed (not given notice) in their
ruminative processions. The question before us is this given pass that is routinely set aside;
this first pass validates further passes of the same type. But keep in mind that we do not here
associate these passes with the moments of significance discussed in the foregoing essays. It
is the closing of a particular route that allows for the continuance of the same route via a
pass. In this case, the closing has been associated with the dead end of the phenomenological
reduction of Edmund Husserl, I believe noted by Graham Harman, and Copernicus, noted by
Quentin Meillassoux, ( Ray Brassier and Levi Bryant also have a claim) though both suggest
a problem with the limit involved with a Kantian universe. The pass enacted here is twofold;
an (typically) overdetermined phenomenal reduction fails to account for every occurrence
without the aid of spiritual aspects to account for outside phenomena, and second, which
is currently the more rigorously philosophical, that the limit of language, or discourse, is seen
to be able to evidence what can be beyond discourse. With both there is a plain setting aside
of what is uncomfortable or seemingly useless (for the development and maintenance of
hierarchical identities) to consider any longer. They thus pass over what they cannot
reconcile, as well get a pass from the community that sees objects only along or within a
certain teleo-ontological horizon, such that a change in discourse is somehow equated with a
change in reality (another pass). But the real pass is the one noticed explicitly by Badiou;
namely, and I paraphrase, that the operator of truth must relinquish that truth for the value it
has in reality. Strangely enough, the move most distinctive and possibly most consistent with
this essay might be the closing that occurs with the extension of the end that requires a pass
to its furthest and most offensive situations, what could be seen as a taking of nihilism past its
reactionary end to its absolute end.
My over generalization of New Realists, I admit, is based in a type of academic
laziness, but from what I have read, to me, it does not appear very far fetched to place a
whole culture of philosophical rhetoric of the early 21st century under a Realist title. I may
appear nave and unscholarly, but it is likewise not too obtuse to place much of our world
concern associated with terror, under the rubric of terrorism. It would seem that somehow
the revealing of humanity unto itself during the 20th century was terrible enough to elicit if
not demand more concrete discourses, called solutions, that can be applied to specific and
impeding dooms, armageddons that move for a skip over the terrorizing end to thereby offer
passing solutions. Indeed; Heideggers Dasein persists, but it would seem we needed to get
beyond existence to whats real and keep it real; apparent acceleration and apparent more
information somehow correlates with a capacity for better solutions, leaving Dasein to be
ignored for the glamour of a better world. But the focus of the lens through which realism
looks becomes more refined but effectively smaller, more myopic. We can thus find all sorts
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iv Being and Event by Alain Badiou. 2005 Continuum. I mention the (extinct) blog
In The Salt Mine because I am concerned with the modern capital-communist
overpowering motion of authors and identity who all too often merely list the Big Names,
when, again, often enough, it is the smaller names that usually have more tangibility and
access upon the subject, which is the subject of communication. As if we are all down, or
should be down with the natural flow of information; whatever that might mean.
v Specifically, I am speaking of Graham Harmans book on H.P. Lovecraft, and the
trans and post-humanist discussions that consider the strange and odd situations that can arise
after modernity, this of course, a kind of response to the human situation that Zizek noticed:
We might say that humanism responds by reifying the human limit of itself by taking as
given the un-reflected, or otherwise stifled move toward reflection that being human may
entail, to enlist the appearance of freedom. Freedom, where extended to every potential of
inclusion, tends to argue a particular kind of economic interaction, a product itself the modern
ideological situation of Capitalism; this situation is almost impossible to imagine our way out
of.
This impossibility, though, is tempered by what I am calling conventional faith. The
issue has entirely to with limits, yes, but the view by which such limits become known do so
not through intellectualizations and conceptual apparatus. They become known through
something else, and the terming of this something else again evidences the essential-generic
motion discussed in this essay. We want to avoid the want to substantiate through arguing a
conventionally manifested object, so we instead speak of effects. This is to say that once the
object is understood, and this understanding begins to be presented, then the Subject (in the
context of this essay) has a genuine responsibility for it. Hence, simply speaking, we have
Harman talking about the Object; then by real extension, the objects for which he has claimed
responsibility by the presentation of the (singular understood) Object, as an initial impetus,
withdraw from view.
Similarly, though I am not yet well read here, we can stand to make a few statements
about these other real discourses. If what is human is retained as a conventional reality for a
subject, such that there is a corresponding object, then the situation of what remains, beyond
this noticed conventional situation, can be viewed as a transitional substance, a kind of
material that moves between what is real and what, we should suppose is not yet real. This
substance thus enters the field of conventional reality through the discourse that speaks of
what is determining the modern real subject, which is, to be technical, not merely an object,
but indeed technology. We have here a trans-human discussion. Further then, we might
imagine reality to be conflated with what it is to be human, albeit as a kind of humanist
incarnation. With the introduction of a technological object of its own making, the human
being finds an exit from the redundancy that analyzes things into nothingness. It thereby
constructs an object through the apparent agency that entirely overcomes so as to depart from
the humanist situation, from human agency itself, so this being the situation at hand anyways,
hence we have a post-human discussion.
While this is a very brief, general, and most probably ill-informed description of
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various ways of addressing the issue at hand, notice that these types tend toward a kind of
real reconciliation. Harmans reconciliation is in the explication of how it is that objects may
be withdrawn and what that means for reality. Trans-humanist discourse appears as a sort of
inaccessible yet present possibility of the future, since what is of the future is already
displaced by the atemporality of what allows for the transition from human creator of
technology to human technology defying what it is or was to be human, yet while retaining
the possibility of a real humanity. What is post-human occurs through the same type of
displacement by which post-modern departed from what is modern in the conventional sense,
and I might add, is most probably subject to the same issues as its forerunner given a
calibration for a new set of defining terms (we will see). Nevertheless, all of these proposals
have to do as they are intimately involved with reality.
The present essay, while complimentary and implicit, moves in the opposite direction
of these discourses. If what constitutes Object, Trans, and Post (real) of these discussions
can be viewed as a central theme from which each discussion moves along its own
meaningful path elliptically to enrich or otherwise fulfill a real problematic, then this essay
forms a polemic with them. However, because all of our discourses appear to displace the
central phenomenal subject to thereby be concerned with the object, and (supposedly) not an
argumentative object (which is a relapse back into the phenomenal subject), the ellipse this
essay presents concerns the figure made by the others interests with real estimations, and
thus forms no ellipse, no return, or perhaps a return of a highly eccentric orbit, the centrist
subject being the orbital path itself. This essay thus can be said to concern a polemic through
a procedure that divides the divided house to be able to speak of the minimal and fully
human being, since what is real can be said to be already divided unto itself. The minimal
human being is that which is the withdrawn object, the transition as well as the post of
the real situation; correspondent with inclusive real interests, or the interest that is based
within the inclusivity of reality and its concept, this essay concerns what is not real.
vi For this essay, the minimal human is taken as a developed position. In as much as
Jesus is the Son of Man and the Son of God, absolution must come from the removal of this
distinction, but this aside from mere conceptual evaluations. Indeed, this is the problem of the
ages: The categorical mistake. Indeed, in John 14:16, Jesus says I am the Way.
vii This is some of the issue that Kierkegaard takes up in his book Philosophical
Crumbs, specifically, the section about The Situation of the Contemporary Disciple. As
we will see shortly, it is the issue concerning this whole essay as an underlying link, so to
speak, where the more overt and stated topics can be seen as kinds of patsies, of sorts, for
the true issue, which concerns the Contemporary, that may begin with Jesus, move through
Luke, through Kierkegaard, even to the event of the current essay, and indeed to that uncrowded reader for whom it is written. To this end Kierkegaard becomes most exemplary; for
we must ask why it would be necessary for him to assume pseudonymous authorship. Why
did Kierkegaard approach his topics through the various guises?
At first glance is will be obvious that he was attempting to tell us something, but we
need not get into another full length volume to talk about all those meanings; I am sure it has
been well written about and all the interesting creative meanings investigated. Nonetheless,
the fact that indeed he did use fictitious names, even though everyone reading him
supposedly knew it was indeed Soren, says something eveb more objvious: He was
uncomfortable about presenting the topics and discussions in the manner he felt necessary.
Yet when we contrast this wit the fortitude of his statements, of his authorial style, say, we
have to then say something more. The question that slips by everyones conception while
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they apply Kierkegaards words to a general and common humanity, the generality that then
might be seen as that very element that brought about his duplicity and apparent (ironic)
insecurity, is more directly and properly stated in the context of Luke (see below): How is it
possible that someone who did not live at the time of Jesus knew perfectly what Jesus was not
only saying and meant, but what he was talking about, which is to say, even before he
encountered the Jesus-story-text? And this would be to speak for Kierkegaard most boldly:
How could I know?
viii
Luke 1:1-3
ix We should take notice that with the proposal of this essay, the usual notion of faith is
overturned. The notion of faith is turned on its head. We find this necessity in the signal that
is modern philosophical Object orientation, but aside and complementary to its Object
Ontology; in as much as it might be an ontology there do we have the mark of a theoretical
proposal indicating a real manifestation, as though something new has occurred, as if reality
itself has somehow changed. Correlationalism, an idea coined by Quentin Meillassoux,
shows that such an orientation must assert itself, thereby leaving the truth of the matter as a
residual piece that nevertheless has withdrawn such that the rhetoric says it needs not be
addressed anymore (nevermind for now the irony of Harmans Object Oriented Ontology;
perhaps it is merely being addressed differently); since, here we are. Philosophical rhetoric
being an incident that we comment upon, the summation is that if such an ontology is in fact
Real, or even just has an effect upon what reality is or may be in itself, then reality is, in
itself, in fact, a theological manifestation, or perhaps to put it more kindly, a mythological
effect, or even more kind, a functional ideology; which is to say finally: Reality occurs
through faith.
What this means in the context of the topic of this essay is that where there has been an
overturning, there has been a feature that has not turned. If the manner by which we speak of
reality does indeed change and or otherwise establishes reality, then this essay speaks of that
by which such establishment is challenged; it speaks of an historical motion that defies the
human agent user of discourse, the progressive directional enforcement of thought to
discourse to reality. In this meaningful arena we can thus say that faith is usually understood
as another type of agency, at that, of believing. I agree with Bruno Latour that the idea of
belief is vacant, but perhaps go beyond him to notice that awareness of this idea is not
sufficient to change any sort of believing (ironically); still we believe. Hence, we say that
where belief is operative, now we have reality, but not the reality by which this essay finds its
true meaning. Hence, it is non sequitur to apply our sense of belief, or not-belief as the case
may be, to the sense put forth of this essay of the gospels. We cannot, in good faith, say that I
believe the sense I have of the gospels is true; if the gospels are true, that is, if the meaning
they convey is the truth then it has nothing to do with what I might believe, but yet if I say I
believe it, then there is evidence that the meaning I have might not be true and I must have
faith for it to be true. If the sense I have of the gospels might not be true, I then proceed upon
an insecurity that moves in the mentioned directional manner of proof through argument.
In this way we might apply the original sense of post-modern, as well as modern in the
sense that Latour uses it. It is not like somehow in the past there were humans that occurred
in reality any differently than the way we do now. It is more proper to say that the terms of
reality have changed. But to belay argument, we instead leave reality to those most concerned
with what it mayor may not be.
So in the gospels, when the authors say faith and belief, they are surly upholding the
meaning that stays consistent through Soren Kierkegaard, as well as our usual veins. The
difference, though, to bring in Kierkegaard, is that his intervention critically opens the door
for this overturning of which I speak. By this we need also revise our idea of the length of the
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past, for even upon his notice, there still we needed Husserl and Heidegger, if not all the rest
of the more contemporary philosophers and theologians, until now; it took 150+ years to take
the step indicated by Kierkegaard.
In contrast to this kind of faith that tends to become belief, the significance of this
overturning is that reality is a product of faith. Yet, in the moment of the gospels reality was
just reality, and this means that humanity was understood to exist upon a universal and
omnipresent plane, such that what might be experienced or come upon by one human being
occurs in the continuum of a humanity, and this is to say that what can and cannot be
communicated, as well as what can and cannot be experienced, exists in the same potential
across all human beings. Hence, the experience that this essay speaks of, more, the situation
that is come upon by Jesus and the Apostles (at least), should be able to be be communicated
as well as understood and known it its absolute manifestation of truth. Unfortunately, because
this is not the case, because, for example, the default put forth by Alain Badiou if not
Francios Laruelle and others (Latour might also be guilty of this), where truth is relinquished
for the sake of reality, the one for the multiple, is still a bad compromise (rooted in bad faith),
we thus speak of the truth to those who are of an experience that defies the common human
potential, a truth that has nothing to do with whether one believes or not. Truth is evident,
and, faith makes true. This is the irony of our time.
x
We will take up how the story traverses what we will call the scenario in
Absolution, Part 2: The Second Moment of Decisive Significance.
xi The significance of this story feedsback upon itself; as to my thesis, though the story
is presumably about Jesus Christ, the subject, its significance is found against the true and
pure antagonist: Not the Jews, but Pontius Pilate, the True Object. As we will see; the story is
about the existential situation of the subject-object, and Christ is thus a patsy, an occasion to
speak about consciousness and the nature of reality.
xii
The genre always vacillates with experience even as the experience is held onto for
the rejection of the Object genre; it can be viewed as the tie between the individual and the
group. The silence, on the other hand, having successfully parted from the Object, thus falls
either into a marginalization, which is the reassertion of the Object and a rejection of ones
success (if ever one was of a minimal humanity), or a resignation, where the minimalist resigns reality; which is to say, Jesus, as Moses, was resigned to the world. The former
explains the predominance of individuals who may be said to have been tested and failed, but
who then thus establish themselves, as volition, within the margin. They consciously, yet in
denial, manifest the boundary which holds the experience at bay to be objectified in
knowledge as spirituality or faith (this may be said of the tragic hero), and the latter
explains the one of silence who sees the basic sign in the reiteration of generic individuals.
xiii
Concerning Gayatri Chakravorti Spivaks noted essay Can the Subaltern Speak?.
The political silence must be addressed first, however it ends, concordant with the
philosophical motion of recession (philosophy is always too concerned with the past); only
then can that which is denied for the sake of reality be voiced. Reality must be universally
solute; which is to say, no longer caught in the ideal of different humanities; humanity must
attain the veracity of a True Object, so that essence can again extricate from it. In effect,
colonialism must have worked for the historicity of the matter to be able to be discussed.
Everyone concerned must be included in what it is to be human, even if in subsequence we
find that indeed there is no common humanity. This is the fact that underlies history.
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xiv One might want to call this anachronism therefore a mythologically extrinsic notion,
but we should be careful of this type of designation. To say that that the notion of God has
becomes extrinsic would be to say that the Object to which the term God refers, the
supernatural agent, so to speak, is no longer effective, and many might take this enforcing a
kind of atheism. On the contrary. We posit that a mythos is the entirety of functioning
meaning, and that discourse can be evidence of the mythos, with a caveat; if a term is used,
the meaning associated with the term is not excluded from the mythology. Here, it is not
proper to use a definitional exclusion; argumentative reference is not sufficient to define a
mythos. Hence, to say that God is ananachonistic idea or term, is to point specifically to a
particular manner of using terms, a particular manner of coming upon the world, what we say
indicates a route, but also indicates ones orientation upon objects. There is no bridge
between these routes, nor is there a reduction that can reconcile their stations. God has
become a mythologically extrinsic idea within the context that this essay attempts to pose.
xv The minimal human is constant through history, objects determine his path, and the
fully human changes and progresses with the Object of its pursuit. There is a calculus of
objects yet to be explored.
xvi
This blind spot might be said to be similar to what Slavoj Zizek might call the
parallax gap. Yet see; despite what theoretical elucidation of the situation might grant, the
manner by which experience occurs defies the theory: The meaning of the theory, or the
object that the theory is supposing to account for, is offensive to experience. But not just
common experience. Indeed, the gap itself is due to a theoretical situation; it is not that the
theory is somehow true, but more that it is real.
xvii My use of the term existence does not have the same connotations as the existence
that Martin Heidegger finds. Existence here is a foundational term; it is that which is. So,
while I concede to and agree with much of what Heidegger puts forth regarding Dasein
(English is usually translated as being-there), and grant that Heidegger even argues against
this: I simply grant that Being is existing in so much as when something is then it exists,
and when something exists, it does so there within the is, since, in as much as Heidegger
may be correct, what is there is just as apparent as what is, and together they thus bethere as this apparent meaning that amounts to the minimal human experience discussed in
this essay.
Likewise, while I may say experience, and still consistent with Dasein, there is only
an experience in existence in as much as we are speaking of meaning only, albeit, of the
appropriation of discourse, as said, of route and orientation.
The discussion about reduction of meaning to a one common human standard, which is
to say, the reason why Heidegger might be talking about Daseins (plural; a nod to Graham
Harmans objects), as though every individual Being is a Dasein, has already been
addressed by the two routes: It is a categorical error that is addressed by the meaning of this
essay. The purpose of having one route is to reconcile the True Object of faith to experience
of the one route of meaning; this can indicate the redundancy of conventional discourse, but it
also defines that which arises as contradiction in effort. To posit something that is beyond is a
type reconciliation by defeat; hence, often enough, spiritual and religious postures and
proclamations. It is the effort of reconciling ones meaning to indeed a one meaning that has
been defeated; always insisting upon one side or the other, discourse itself is already
bifurcated as material, already established in an object of faith that must be True, because, as
we say, faith makes true. This is why in the effort for truth (as opposed to the True Object)
doubt is instrumental but essential. We have here the makings of a type of historical calculus,
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an opening for an analysis of history by its terms, rather than by the True events that must
have occurred in this or that manner.
xviii Though the term existential is often associated with the 20th century philosophical
object coined by Jean-Paul Sartre called Existentialism, unless specifically sited, we will
stick with the usual meaning of or relating to existence.
xix It is wise men that inform us, as if from nowhere, of the situation, as well mark the
situation as significant.
xx The virgin mother, Mary, and the surrogate and or step father, Joseph, convey a
different reality by their parenthood.
xxi This is no slight upon families of homosexual or alternate lifestyle parents, merely
a usual, typical or common sense ideal based upon the historical-traditional egg-sperm
biological mandate. There is always a polemical relationship involved in existing in a world.
xxii This is the basis for the conventional, objectival psychotherapy. The patient is
supposed to be in a process with the therapist whereby the former is guided to identify and
express, to speak or talk about, repressed elements of their psyche (the object of neurosis) and
thereby solve or other wise heal their problem. But, as more thoroughly explicated by
Jacques Lacan, this method merely begs the question of a stable basis of health, and the
process thus sees that basis as merely an intermediary stage in the process of attaining health
since such a basis itself is merely another representation of repression, which is to say,
merely another story based in a factual beginning. It is no mere coincidence that that
purpose of psychotherapy advocated by Lacan is the dissolving of the therapist/patient
dichotomy, but not as a sort of co-dependant projection or absorption; indeed, the desired
result is a state of being where discourse is appropriated in the manner that is put forth by this
essay of the minimal human. Lacan proposes to be able to arouse or incite a moment of
decisive significance of the first type, but the categorical error is most often that the
contradiction that must dissolve remains such that in bringing it about, the second type is
usually enacted.
xxiii
xxiv
Luke 3:8
xxv
xxvi
John 3:3-21
xxvii As Issac was saved from Abraham, and from God by God due to Abrahams faith,
one can no longer rely upon a proxy. Indeed; it is the equivocation of Abraham and Jesus as
objects, albeit holy and distinguished blessed, chosen subjects (-objects), that Jesus
rebukes, and likewise Abraham rebuked even then, as shown by the willingness to bring
Issac, whom he loved (as God so loved the world) to the truth, to God, by any means. The
God of the Law that Issac has been raised to believe in, as well the reason why Moses goes to
sacrifice him: To exemplify Moses in one view, and to show Issac in another. The
mythological transference that occurs in the fully human projection of its own incompletion
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is not to be abided.
xxviii
Matthew 3:17
xxix Recall the difference between that which informs a position, and the consideration
of that information. The Gospels can be understood as a story about the interrelation of these
facets of experience. Presently, that which informs the position has been relinquished, such
that consideration of the position takes place as a fasting in the wilderness.
xxx Matthew 4:17. Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand; Mark 1:15. The
time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.
xxxi
See John 14:10. It becomes exceedingly obvious just how the fully human
interpretation has commandeered discourse to a one proper meaning when we compare the
King James Version interpretation to that of subsequent interpretations. Keep in mind that we
are not talking about terms per say, but rather about meaning, but indeed, the terms of
meaning. When this is taken into account, we might then see that the ancients had a
significantly better grasp on what was occurring with this whole Jesus thing, and whereas
groups tend to have a general feeling if not a direct understanding of what occurs under their
view, what is modern might better indicate a mark of when such feeling, such meaning,
has moved out beyond the grasp of the common sort.
I admit I do not read ancient Greek, nor any of the ancient languages wherein the books
of the Bible were written; but I submit that it would not matter. If I need not hold an example
of my own personal experience with original texts, then I surely can point to others, such as
Heidegger, that show for me that indeed what I put forth does not veer from our historical
move. If Indeed the King James Version was the first English translation, then we should no
longer look to some proper linguistic term-meaning with reference to some the times and
then come to our current modern better translation. This is indeed what people have done,
and we show thereby that we are dealing with two routes, the second of which that we wish
to elucidate by this essay. We should see that the writers of the King James version most
probably, intuitively if not cognitively, understood something that people of our day do not
commonly wish to understand, nor are capable of understanding and in fact are often so
blinded by faith that they will vehemently and sometimes violently act out their defiance to
that understanding; the developing myopia is evidenced in the subsequent translations.
One need only go on the internet to find a comparison of translations, but we need only
two to make our point here. [passages taken from biblehub.com]
King James Version: Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words
that I speak unto you I speak not of myself; but the father that dwellest in me, he doeth the works.
The point for this text note is that the terms of discourse are the issue, but more that it is
about ones orientation upon the terms, and the object conferred by the terms. This passage
was translated in mind of staying as true as possible to the original text available, but in as
much as the meaning that occupies the space between the original and translated text cannot
be mitigated, set aside or disregarded, whatever that may be. Clearly Jesus is saying that the
words that he is speaking has nothing to do with himself, which can be to say, the real
Object-subject that is Jesus before them, but that the father that dwells in Jesus the Objectsubject does the works. The transitivity of words and works cannot be missed, that is,
unless you are already reading it from a distanced privileged place.
By contrast, and historical displacement, we have the
International Standard Version: You believe, dont you, that I am in the Father and the Father is
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in me? The words that I say to you I dont speak on my own. It is the Father who dwells in me and who
carries out his work.
Notice how the ISV has made more clear a distinction such that a kind of distance is
enforced in the reading. Clearly here Jesus is speaking about a True Object (-subject) called
the Father. This textual evolution can be seen to more thoroughly emphasize the inability to
reconcile in meaning the message of the Gospels; thus the meaning that find offense creates a
meaningful way to reconcile it. The Subject becomes more subjectivized and the Object more
objectivized. As the offense continues, the fully human gets more angry and defensive and
God becomes more and less True and False; which is to say, the religious comes to mean
something actually manifest and or indicating as a real thing, as well as atheism comes about
and is seen to be speaking of some actual True thing or aspect of reality.
xxxii This rebuttal is where the early 21st century Speculative Realist and Object
Oriented Ontology ideas take up and begin to repeat the historical discussion. This oddity
will be taken up in my next essay on the Second Moment of Decisive Significance.
xxxiii
The term-object identity is the assumed situation of the fully human. It figures an
attitude upon all that may be, an orientation upon objects where terms have a sort of essential
linkage or are able to represent or otherwise convey some aspect or elementary part of an
object in question. The term-object-identity assumes that there is indeed a one ubiquitous
truth that somehow and or somewhere permeates all of the universe and existence, and that
this one truth may be conveyed through terms of discourse, in potential. It is the vehicle by
which our current idea of progress has veracity.
The Kantian ubiquity of knowledge is not discounted here; rather it becomes a moot
point. The assumption of Kant as well as upon Kant is that he indeed was conveying or
attempting to convey a distinct and particular meaning, which we must count as the truth of
his proposals. Kant is therefore not only attempting to convey a true object, or the truth of an
object, but likewise is figuring upon the static and definite ideal of terms to be able to convey
this truth.
If we must follow the usual and conventional interpretation of Kant, then we can now
safely set aside his proposals as a kind of Lacanian mistake. We thus no longer are in the
attempt to make an argument about some essential nature of things; on the contrary, we have
moved beyond such pubescent ponderings to now describe what is and has been occurring in
the traditional philosophical method.
Further, the argument that would deny that there is any such term invested link with
truth due to the apparent discussion over what any particular term actually means, is missing
the issue for the sake of making an ontological argument and is missing the significance of
description over argument. Given now that philosophy likes to reside upon an arena that has
no fundamental substance, no essential truth by which to anchor itself, the predominance of
argument in philosophy should be called what it is, which is critical method, and oddly
enough, because it gets no further than itself, which is to say, the argument that itself has
deemed as essentially true, we should place such rebuttal at the level of freshman comment,
and get on to address what is significant of philosophy, so to be able to use the term,
ironically, to mean something specific.
We first need to see that we are in an effort of description of function, purpose, and
method. At dinner, we do not argue over what I shall pass to my friend who asks for the salt.
Likewise, we must begin with that there is agreement over what we are talking about, and
move beyond the self-centered hallucinations of discursive glamour and science fiction
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fantasy. If we can get to a point where we are writing fantasy that we wish to be considered
as serious input, then let us not disguise it in phantasms of philosophical mushy deception
and exhibitions of academic discursive gymnastics.
xxxiv
xxxv Quentin Meillassoux, in his book After Finitude poses the idea of
correlationalism on this same idea. The problem then is how to get beyond it. But this
problem is often mis-appropriated. Indeed, Meillassoux himself attempts to locate some sort
of mathematical primacy, but so far as Ive seen, he is not faring well for this. The problem,
though, is indeed what this essay addresses, as he puts it, magical thinking, as I put it the
transcendental clause. Perhaps we are speaking of slightly different aspects. It should be so
then in that if the question is how to get beyond correlationalism, then my answer is that we
dont ever get there, that there is no getting there.
Religion and rationality (read: philosophy) are merely two sides of the same real coin:
The only way we might get there is through the never-ending discursive process of poses and
postures, argument and rebuttal, the truth of any time being the real manifestation of
discourse within a proper and posed one real and true manner of meaning. This is redundancy
itself; that sentence describing and exemplifying the redundant motion.
It might then be more proper to say that the upheld one reality floats tentatively upon
a sea of what we might otherwise call a chaos of unknownness. Indeed, there are many
modern authors who have taken their ideas from this. But what some might not admit, the
situation where in the question of how to get beyond correlationalism arises, is no smaller
than the ideas that would write (science-)fictions about the possibilities of some trans- postor non-human existence; which is to say, they get no further than the correlational reality.
Hence the intrusion into reality by this chaotic field, could just as well be called a miracle as
it could be a monster. Whatever it might be, though, Slavoj Zizeks rendering is cool:
Something went terribly wrong.
There is no getting beyond correlationalism. We only are already there. Despite what
academic capital correlationalism might want to wield, and despite what author might have
coined the term for some actually meant, the term is best seen to reside as a kind of netherword, since it just came up at a time when many people already were standing around it. The
mistake of the Speculative Realist thing is that it took place under the guise of a certain sect
of the academy, and so will always now be in the throes of argument and rebuttal that is
always and perhaps did already miss what it should have meant if it doesnt already. It should
not be seen as a temporal-theoretical mark of some actual state of I dont know what;
thats what all the talk is about.
The question of the honesty that may or may not reside around this nonsense is also
taken up in my next book.
xxxvi Not necessarily correlational. It is certainly possible that the absolute unknown
vastness, incomprehensibility and general unknown-ness of the universe allows for a free
will that completely negates as it transcends our ability to know. In this instance of last case,
we then have to come to terms with whether or not such unknown-ness is allowed or able to
enter into our field of knowing, as well as how that might occur. It is not enough to merely
transpose or re-place the subject into is capacity for an imagination that nevertheless can
follow logical suppositions. It is this type of positioning that merely sets aside the more
significant question of how such creativity can be true. Again; my next book will address this
blatant commercialist philosophy.
xxxvii
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reasonable, and turn that corner and find a just as reasonable reason completely contrary to
the one you just agreed with; the only out then is to assert your own enlightened reason to
discern what constitutes the best way forward. Sometimes it is discussion and negotiation, but
just as likely it is violence and killing. Both are a reaction, a motion of subsequence.
Nonetheless, it is not that this manner may be incorrect or that somehow humanity will
change in this respect; it is more that we are using the term enlightenment to fill in and or
account for a significant gap in understanding, and that despite the term, its real failure is in
its presumption of ubiquitous knowledge and the reluctance defiance, rather, in the face of
difference to venture new paths. Enlightenment, as an historical project has failed; which is
to say, where the term may indeed identify some aspect of being human in the universe, it is
in so much as this becomes a generic term for an essential aspect of a True universe does it
eventually dissipate and fail.
Where we are merely using the term enlightenment, and not relying upon it as some
sort of manifest destined universal saving grace, we have the indications that synthetical a
priori knowledge is being presented, but where very few have the resource to be able to
access it; oddly enough, in a quite Hegelian sense, it is the discourse of enlightenment that
allows the situation we are eludicating, of not only allowing for difference, but in fact
prescribing that difference as a mandate to use in whatever way its meaning seems fit, so long
as the essence of the generic meaning stays intact, to advocate access while holding within its
awareness the understanding that access is very limited.. In fact, the denial of the lack of
access is the instrumentation of inequality that then invests in the offense by most to take
recourse in the route of meaning to mean every person and her thinking,, which in Christian
terms is sin. The political attempts to reconcile such sin can be found in the variously
acknowledged political systems that we know of in our day, which function to project
ideology into the future (teleology) by defining Being (ontology), and vice versa, redundanly;
Fascism attempts to retain the inequality precipitated from the enlightened awareness to there
by enact a type of historical-universal propriety (the apparent propriety involved in becoming
enlightened); Western democratic liberalism, which assumes to be able to allow for a shifting
of present strata thereby to hear all the voices of enlightenment; Communism, which assumes
to be able level the field to allow for common enlightenment through the necessitation of
the enlightened agent having to curb its enlightened endowment. In this scheme, we are let
to seeing a process whereby the enlightened agent is brought down from its presumptuous
loft.
This is the reason behind the post-postmodern solutions. These solutions are still
involved with the project of enlightenment and so find themselves in a particularly sticky
situation because in the real historical play, they are 1) not allowed to assert their privilege,
2)have found that what they are attempting to communicate is not translating, 3) are never
thus having a level playing field. But they are indeed still stuck in the quite insistent situation
of their being enlightened, or such an agent thereof (however one would put that now). They
thus have found various ways to disguise themselves. A type of Speculative resurgence
attempts to find a manner of revealing their enlightened view in a softer, gentler way, by
turning attention to Reality, in the hopes that their agency will be now view as a real
occurrence as opposed to a sort of ideal occurrence. Others have turned to objects,
because enlightenment has usually been associated with a subject.
Yet all modern philosophical authors have the task of finding a legitimate teleoontological justification for their ability to have such views. Bruno Latour has suggested the
idea of a pass; this appears necessary since one is wanting to overlook that such real
objective proposals are still rooted in the modern enlightened situation that they appear to
want to critique. For example, the idea that novelty arises as chaos erupts into the stream of
the real. If we can be honest; this is just a different way of situating what past authors might
argue is the inspiration of God, and this then is also really nothing larger than the void
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interacting with the multiple. Then we have a more overt disclaimer that accompanies the
modern transference of responsibility: Alain Badious general notion that the operator of truth
must relinquish such truth for the sake of reality. Not only is Badiou showing his access, but
he is denying it through the necessity to answer to arguments that are stemming from a
position of no access, and thereby unwittingly is granting credence to the ubiquity of
subsequent ordination. They are still arguing over the facts, what are the facts, what
constitutes facts, and what the facts then are, what details may be describes of the facts
(Wittgenstein was not apologizing for modernity in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but
indeed was trying to weaken its hold; the seriousness his proposals then merely brought about
a necessary (historical) furthering unto absurdity with the post-modern). Can we just say
plainly to the very enlightened intelligentsia: Lets get over our incessant self-righteous
capitalization of identities and bring academics back to the matter at hand: The facts are now
already there! We might just need to admit that there are existential situations that not
everyone has access to, be done with it, and get on to the description of the facts themselves.
But we should imagine that this will not happen for some time, if it ever does. A carpenter or
engineer may describe to a layman the general features of why a structure is constructed the
way it is, but she does not refer to the layman for the reason why it should be built in any
particular manner, that is, beyond how it may need to appear, which is to say, beyond
aesthetics. But ironically, this is why we say philosophy is more an art: The carpenter may
indeed have to answer to how the person wishes her house to be built, but the artist answers
only to the necessity of structural requirements. Again; we have barely even begun to look at
what these limits might be.
Once we may understand what has been signaled, then we find that the Gospel story
itself, linked as it is with the Creation story of Genesis, is an initial occasion, and the reader is
thereby involved in an order of subsequence, such that the story that is then told in
subsequence merely reiterates the initial occasion. The fully human will always have it that
this is improper and nonsensical, but we do not deny here that it is absurd. Likewise, though,
when the second moment of decisive significance is come upon by the same judge, he thus
sees the moment as indeed caused by some initiating factor, aspect or element. Nevertheless,
we have already seen how John the Baptist as well as Jesus treats this fully human
realization in Luke chapter 3 and John chapter 3.
xl John the Baptist announces Christ is coming; Judas announces that Jesus is going.
So it might seem that he one that is left, the one that Jesus seeks now, is the one who will
announce that Jesus Christ is always here
xli John 13:31-32
xlii
xliii
Jesus realizes this situation since faith is required only of the fully human
xliv
John 14
xlv Believe in me. We might take this to mean not to segregate the object of belief from
the act that is believing in its truth. To believe in me, then, is to have the belief of oneself
where there can be no object beyond or outside the inherence of the belief itself, which would
then deny that there is an object segregate from the act. Believe in me can be understood as
the negation of the conventional idea of belief.
Kair
xlvi
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John 14:6
xlvii
In particular, this connotation comes from Wikipedia, burning bush. The Hebrew
word used in the narrative, that is translated into English as bush, is seneh, which refers in
particular to brambles. Wikipedia sites Cheyne and Black 1899, Encyclopedia Biblica, the
Jewish Encyclopedia, and Peakes Commentary on the Bible. Many internet references
confirm this meaning of thorn bush, thorn, even to associate with a particular tree called
the acacia. Other similes have to do with mountains or rocks, but even more interesting is
that seneh also refers to a mountain range near Jerusalem, as well as deriving from the Arabic
to lift up, or high. Though our discussion centers around its meaning as bramble, none of
these other meanings contradict the discussion that follows in this essay, and in fact the
discussion could be taken along the varied vectors of meaning; if tree, I am just as sure the
Kabbalistic inference would not be missed as I am that the meanings of high, and rocky
mountains would not be missed for their possibly less privileged esoteric connotations, by
many. The point here could follow from the situation of the minimal human having no
responsibility to the True Object.
xlviii I was raised American heartland Lutheran Protestant; a nod to some embarrassment
of my picture of Charlton Hestons rendition in the movie The Ten Commandments.
xlix
Exodus 3:6.
l Here we have a reasonable implication of why we can say that Truth concerns the
orientation upon objects, and that the terms are thus the issue at hand. This approach can
account for the age old distinction between what we have called spiritual and mundane,
but also referenced to the subject and object, as well as what has been called speculative
and practical, among a plethora of probably other dyadic systems. Where terms (discourse)
are viewed to be tools of consciousness, already we have a division that informs all
subsequent investigations. This is why all investigations taken to their end result in
contradiction; investigations that taken to their end do not yield contradiction are those that
have a buffer, or patsy, term that acts as an interlocutor, intermediary, or for a modern
term, firewall, against contradiction, that thus allows for their being True. For
conventional reality, these firewalls are the subject and the object; they function to inform
meaning as to its purpose, as to its parameters (we might now investigate just how meaning
gains these parameters), because it is a contradiction to indict thought, since it is thought that
is doing the considering. We have yet to discover what firewalls there might be in
considerations that are not conventional.
So just as we have a real object, we also have a real subject. The real object cannot be
breached, or, it can only be breached along certain vectors of acknowledgment, because only
certain meaningful paths can apprehend anything, can get a hold of, something that can then
be knowledge that we can then use in various ways. Yet even along these paths, science has
moved so far into the object, breaching various levels of objectivity, that what they have
found is a kind of contradictory objectivity that they have called quantum physics. But
even this has not stopped them from going further; still they find out about things through
the various paths.
Likewise, the real subject is breached and inevitably finds contradiction, not the least
nor the earliest of which we have called correlationalism, but Phenomenonology is no less
an investigation that leads to contradiction; and again, Dasein; and again, Hegels historical
consciousness, and again Kants imperatives and such. All of these junctures find a
contradiction that is found a way out of through, again, vectors of meaning that correspond
with how the contradiction is proposed upon. But not only in the Western Philosophy, just as
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226
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reflection, is based in an inability to come upon a true self reflection; it denies its inability,
and its offence (evidenced by the denial) thus reduces its inability to reject the possibility of
any other kind of self reflection beyond its own type of reflection that is a justified extension
of free will called objective reflection.
Hence, the question of being chosen by God is dealt with and the issue closed in
this moment by the occasion of this essay: Jesus is not speaking to everyone but only those
who have indeed been come upon by a true self reflection. The question of Gods existence is
moot; since existence is a quality of knowledge, we can only say that the ethical God of
religious position, the one (or more) that are supposed by the faithful to exist as some sort of
entity that is involved with this world in some way, from his or her other-world, is by default
of its own proposed ethics and rationale, not true: God as such proposed religious focus and
impetus does not exist beyond the negotiation of human knowledge for truth, and this is most
evident at the extremes of negotiation: Violence. So, in as much as this may be this case, God
exactly does not exist, because this world of existence is informed by knowledge of what is
true in reality such that, for fully human knowledge, reality and existence are equivalent and
subjectively limited reflection is the only self reflection that can possibly occur. This
knowledge (of reality) then is situated and determined in orientation as proposed by this
essay, minimal and fully human knowledge and it is not so much a question of whether this
is true, but instead should be a discussion about the ramifications of its veracity for
negotiated, conventional knowledge, once the parameters of the situation have been
delineated.
lii
Exodus 3:6
liii
Exodus 3:11
liv
Exodus 3: 12-13
lv
If someone will have faith, as an imperative witnessed of the future by the present,
then that person has faith, but more so because that person does not need to believe.
lvi
Exodus 3:14-15
lvii
John 14:7
lviii
A game Jesus plays with himself. In a way, the vacillations are the ironic and
repetitive result f Jesus in an effort to trick himself out of the vacillating motion. This
cannot be done, though, and in fact it is the playing of the game to its results, so that the
results eventually become expected, and then soon relied upon, that is the process of doubt in
faith that leads to wisdom (see below).
lix
John 14:7
lx
John 14:9
lxi
lxiiA
strange sympathy resides between the actual ability to heal and the minimal
human. While indeed physical healing is a knowledge and skill that is often passed down,
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there is also a further innate knowledge that is somehow able to inuit what the problem is and
what to do about it. There are plenty of examples; the shaman and curandera are but two.
For what are we speaking of when we say healing? In one sense, it is only a correction
of one self unto oneself; healing here is based upon an unsegregated person (a body without
organs?). We might see this as correlative with a minimal humanity. In light of this, we might
also understand that modern scientific medicine on a whole does not correct a body unto
itself so much as impose a correction upon the body from what is foreign to it. These kind of
observations thus bring into question what we mean when we say life and what such
notions as quality of life really mean.
lxiii
John 14:11
lxiv
Again, faith that does not have responsibility to the True Object.
lxv
John 14:15
lxvi Recall notes xlvi and li. Here we can notice the grammatical transference of I am
Being, to the communicative metalyptical expression of possession; my commandments,
witness a shift from the directional [myobject] to the conspiratorial [my/Object], the
commands thereof begotten by the father are not so much orders or instructions that should
be (but might not be) carried out, but rather categorical imperatives. We make distinction
between the subject-object and subject/object here to indicate the conventionally ironic state
as a polemical option, either subject or object, a directional imperative, as opposed to a
conspiratorial imperative that is a category in-itself.
lxvii Being responsible for rather that to the object. Responsibility for an object confers
an ethics that ties existence and Being together, inseparable, both aligning as an imperative of
the category. Responsibility to an object confers the existence that will not admit its
existential intimacy to the object, such that what is ethical becomes a command.
lxviii In as much as there may be a Subject in-itself, thereby do we indicate an exposure
of the nature of a thing of the universe: An object. Until this moment, we have only subjectobjects and object-subjects. The meaning of this distinction is real; this is to say, in reality
subjects and object refer to relative things that always and never reduce to each other in a
never ending correlational cycle of redundancy that is stopped at arbitrary moments that
exhibit faith and point to the True Object. For example; the infamous ontological analysis of
a table (to be brief) of which finds that at no time do we ever find table-ness, but in fact, a
table is merely the Name of an infinitude of interrelating universal aspects and elements.
Here we have an object-subject; the object is taken as a substantial and segregate actual thing
that is not part of the human consideration of it, but yet in the consideration of what it might
be, as well as its uses, the thing reduces to the very human (subjective) consideration, which
is never exhausted. Likewise, but opposite, the subject is taken as a universal agent,
consciousness a working catalyst of things that may or may not come about in the universe,
its effect is directional such that there indeed is a table which can be used and situated in a
multitude of contexts for a plethora of meanings, particular, actual and metaphorical, yet,
when the table is taken out of its potential for use, the table becomes a thing in-itself, a
common and universal thing that is distinct and particular unto its own existence. This is the
subject-object.
Similarly, by the use of subject-object in this essay to refer to the fully human, I mean
to denote an already in transition state, that what the conventional agent views of itself as a
subject of discourse, is but merely another object of the universe. This is the case due to the
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lxx
John 15:1-9
lxxi
lxxii See note lxii. Here we refer to healing of the latter sense, of correction of the body
through the imposition of something foreign to it.
lxxiii For our current ideological paradigm, this, of course, is the general scientific effort
to reduce the works of Jesus Christ and other miraculous events in the Bible to natural or
what can be said as not supernatural or un-miraculous explanations. Of course, the
significance of this effort is not understood by the fully human beyond its own intrinsic
mythological significance, which is that of discovering the true explanation of what those
past (and present) ignorant and superstitious peoples believed. The significance, again, of
course, is that mythology is that which is the story of truth, and faith is the operative
element of mythological reality. This is to say, that, of course, science would be able to
reduce such superstitious events to its own rationale for truth, for that is the operation of
consciousness: To make sense of the universe; to make the indicator of the limitation
involved in the human experience. And, of course, it does not mean that this or any other
scheme of this making sense has any actual relation to any truth of existence beyond what can
be said to be an ideological justification of power (a redundant justification), but it can
implicate a true universal motion of which the behavior of consciousness is included, at that,
in the possibility described by this essay: The possibility of an exclusion that is not
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The very simple idea here is that there is a redundancy involved in the statement, and
this redundancy can be solved by one of two moves that are consistent with this essay. The
first and most usual move is to see agency. Here, this statement is exhibiting the potential of
the True Object, involved in itself with a capacity to present an objectively True thing of
existence, and or the human being. As an author has commented,
The task, then, is to construct the image of thought adequate to our historical present
since it is the plane itself that determines what Thought (and philosophy) can rightfully
call its own, or properly understand its broader social-political function in the
present. (from the site/blog: thetragiccommunity.wordpress.com: We Head for the
Horizon and Return With Bloodshot Eyes. Posted April 9, 2016. Used with permission)
It is not difficult to see that there is a kind of spirit (for a term) at work behind the
scenes, a kind of immanence that functions to grant real conditions against which thought
then may work to bring about a particular world for itself.
The second manner of appropriating this statement by D and G is to see that they are
presenting a contradictory situation. The question must be: How are we to conceive of a
conception that is not a concept? Here, we follow their lead and see that even the concept of
a Plane of Immanence is a faulty conception. The idea that there is a plane that resides behind
thought, behind conception, is itself merely a conception, and so should be set aside. This
situation then corresponds with the minimal human of this essay. The concept that activates
the fully human agency is where the image of thought is the material by which thought itself
is allowed as a real estimation; this is an objective reflection.
An issue that this essay also treats is where the question stops its teleo-ontologial cycle,
for this stopping is not made by a choice, but indeed reflects an existential condition of the
question itself. The question involved with its solution enacts as it reflects an inherent
distance between what is proposed as true, which argues its own limitation as a relative
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Absolution
position within an infinity of unknowable relations, what I call Real, and what is actually
True given the entirety of the condition of discourse at hand. So the question of how one
might step outside the correlational limit is really merely a notice of where, within the
potential that lay in the correlational scheme of meaning, thought begins and ends, which is
to say, for another term, where faith lay. The point of philosophy that is concerned with
ontology and teleology is to locate where and or when in the questioning of things thought
finds its end, and this, to mark a persons Being in existence, where thought becomes
offended, and thus, in the extension that we call humanity and then the world, the real True
Object.
lxxiv In this light, technology (the object) can be seen as the actual determining element
of reality. Since, if knowledge proceeds along particular vectors that are limited by
conditional clauses, then it is no longer sound to believe; that humanity is discovering or
creating anything, but rather is merely unfolding in being lead along a particular universal
objective path, a path, the objective, purpose or end of which, ironically, is eternally obscured
and essentially unknowable.
lxxv Genesis 1:1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. If neither of
these elements were created, or rather, established, then neither could exist. Ironically, in
our particular scheme of knowledge, it is the earth, the element with which we have an
absolutely necessary relation, that allows for heaven. The earth in this sense might be seen
analogous to the Object. In order for there to be a minimal human, there must have been a
fully human, or everyone would just be human, and there would be no history, or rather, there
would be only one correct history which again, ironically, is exactly what the fully human
truth proclaims within its disclaimer of relativity. Thus, the impetus of this essay: That this is
the case ironically.
lxxvi
John 15:11
lxxvii
John 15:26
lxxviii The fascination of the fully human for the minimal human gradually wears off;
this is the reason for the foreshadowed torment the disciples will soon encounter, as well as
Jesuss inevitable crucifixion. This is because the fully human being cannot suffer against
what it knows as true, which is the Object of faith. Its minimal human basis, though,
(everyone is at least human) hears or otherwise senses its own resonance in the subject, and
so is called to by the voice of the true Subject (its own voice), so to speak, that is the
Subject of Truth. But because the truth of the Object is founded in the individuals
renouncement of its own subject (-object) hood, the fully human is ultimately offended at
the Subjects voice (the Object of faith constitutes the effective basis of true reality, the real
truth of all that is possible), for it announces the fallacy of the individuals Object of faith.
Echo Nietzsche: The offense is resolved through individual resentment, which is an assertive
motion based in the denial of its own basis of existence. The end result is always the same:
The individual will not tolerate the constant assault upon its bases of truth (reality) and so
must remove the threat, which is always fatal, for the Subject (of truth) never stops its
insulting barrage. Though at first the subject-object thinks it may relent at some critical but as
of yet unknown moment, and so entertains what the Subject says because the beginning of
the Object is always the announcement of the subject, which is to say, the subject hears
itself in the Object as a type of longing for home, the discrepancy is soon felt all too close to
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the real home in the individuals heart of truth, so the Subject (truth) must die so the Object
(faith) may live.
lxxix
John 17:1
lxxx At some point I will write an essay that will discuss how it is that someone can be
human and be determined in its motion despite moments where choice appears. In short, it is
because at each juncture of decision the ramifications of the decision become already
manifest, so the decision is always in line with that which must be. This situation is
opposed to the complete misunderstanding and misapplication that would reduce such states
to psychology or some sort of possibly trauma enforced behavior. One can never get through
to a scientist that reduces everything to the results of science, nor convince them that there is
a human existence that does not follow its rules: Faith makes true. The situation that is
intolerable to such orientation upon things is that the orientation as a function operates along
side of another that is not included in its proclamations.
lxxxi
Matthew 26:37-38
lxxxii
Luke 22:43-44
lxxxiii Genesis 8:11. Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. But
where to land? If Jesus had not already known, by now the waters were abated: The
deluge was the encroachment of the Object upon his Being in the vacillations; in the book
of John there is no last temptation but the temptation of the Object represented by his
disciples. One may be tempted to associate the deluge with the upcoming passion, the
physical torture and such, but by that time the move had already been made. Indeed, we can
make sharper the distinction explored later in this essay: Matthew and Mark, those authors
who seem more to have justified their faith by the Object, have Jesus respond again to the
taunting Objects (objections); Luke and John have Jesus remaining detached and secure.
Since the storm has run its course and the waters cover the face of the earth, now a dove
returns with an olive branch, so Jesus knows for sure (the Mount of Olives can be either a
sign of the comforter of Jesuss, or at least as a mark of the story) that the waters were
abated and that he would soon find landfall, that his destiny, his purpose, was intact.
lxxxiv The Cross is a literary device and symbol, but not merely and only these. The
coincidence of appropriation, meaning, performance and activity are not independent events
of a causal arrangement. In a sense they can be said to be correspondent in existence,
inextricable to a causal field. Nevertheless; A life that is not fulfilled still ends with death, but
Jesuss life ends at its fulfillment. This can be seen as the difference between the life of faith
and eternal life; again, the term death can be read in two ways as well as unfold upon two
routes.
lxxxv
lxxxvi
John 18:11
lxxxvii
John 7:15-16
lxxxviii
This is the real method we know as argument towards proof. Everything does not
make sense automatically and indeed to overcome the gaps in sensibility one looks for proof
and presents arguments that are tempered by rebuttal and counter argument. The route upon
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which one looks for and finds proof is the issue at hand; or rather, whether or not or how well
the route is bound by thickets and walls.
lxxxix
John 7:17-18
xc
John 7:19
xci
John 10:1-6
xcii
xciii
Jesus is speaking as this process indicates the potential in hand for the moment that
would have the subject-object be able to comprehend the Truth if indeed one were able to use
the correct terms. This situation thus indicates a more substantial historical motion. Yet even
as Jesus indeed is using an unlawful manner of discourse aimed at the very few, the
contradiction inherent of the minimal human at this moment can be seen in that there is still a
vision that sees a common humanity, where all may be recouped by a common discursive
meaning, this under the rubric of everyone can be saved.
History might be better understood in this light as a coming to terms with the actual
human being of an irreconcilable existential situation; hence, the need for the projection of
faith that perpetually reconstitutes the reconciliation under various headings, various
meanings, like some sort of living motor of humanity, creating a future, but caught in a
redundancy of repetition. These ideas have been tossed around for some time, but we have
never come upon how it actually occurs; it seems always left to the spirit.
The historicity of humans being might be seen as cycle of forgetting, of missing
the determination of the object for the sake of the choice upon the True Object. Here change
occurs at significant junctures of meaning that would expose the fallacy of the real, but
junctures of meaning that are passed over, set aside and effectually denied. However, change
is the retaining at each juncture the continuity that the pass allows, such that something is
learned; this is to say, the mistake is seen to be cause not a mistake that causes, but
actually of a rejection, a revolt, toward which the object is reconstituted under the exclusion
of the previous incorrect meaning. By this route, through small, cumulative progressive
meaning(s), the capacity involved in the possibility of consciousness, is filled out, so to
speak, in and as history such that a divergence precipitates out of the one route to establish
the two irreconcilable conditions, and a present reveals a sort of finality. Evidenced in the
apparent prevailing conflicts of humanity over various True Objects, the collapse of the world
itself is avoided in the last instance, the end itself is passed over, humanity itself as an
exclusionary group recoups its unity in the total explanatory trope, the true meta-discourse
by which all human activity may by accounted for as ontological-teleological purpose (some
theorists have called this transition Capitalism to Communism, but the effective move
seems would be more toward a universal catholic religion), and history begins again in the
new basis from which humanity may diversify into its various affective truths; which is to
say, the meaningful accounting of human activity begins to fail. History, as a total
accounting, is forgotten. But this forgetting has nothing to do with what symbolic
manifestations might remain, for we are speaking of the appropriation of meaning. This is a
topic for another essay.
xciv
Though religious dogma and theological affirmations may indeed have a valid
interpretation, they are insufficient to the meaning here. The many born again Christians
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will argue their positions by all sorts of discursive strategies. As much as the Christian will
pose exclusivity against the want for belief, though, it is obvious (to some) that such clauses
are not exhibiting exclusive meanings posed within the the necessity of witnessing. The
problem is that such Christian clauses are understood all too well by believers and nonbelievers alike. The effective partition between believers and non-believers, that the believers
understand as semi-permeable, is not the situation presented of this essay, as much as it may
be analogous. Indeed; there is no impetus here to argue for some sort of conversion, no
imperative to enlighten, but only a description of the situation at hand.
xcv
John 9:35
xcvi
John 9:41
xcvii
John 10:24
xcviii
John 10:25-31
xcix Not for works, but for blasphemy. This can be seen as pivotal, since the term
blasphemy
is
generally
understood
to
mean
to
speak
evil
of
[http://www.etymonline.com/blasphemy]. Hence, in the sense that this essay suggests, where
his works might actually be words, the power of discourse, by this part in the story, the
glamour of the arousal of the minimal human echo that lay within the fully human is starting
to give way to plain confusion. Whereas before people were interested yet leery, now people
are awakening to the apparent nonsense; whereas before they thought they were coming upon
something in Jesus and his ministry, some event, of a person that is significant, awed by the
plain auspiciousness of the occasion, now their fully human heritage is asserting itself in the
call for identity, and are finding none.
Further; the story itself seems to incorporate a creative technique, literary devices, to
emphasize what is occurring, telling about the turning while exemplifying the turn in the
mechanics of the story itself. At this point the words that are the works, which is a kind of
glamour of smearing distinction, are falling into distinction, into identity, such that if the
works were indeed experiences upon words, the experience in meaning and of meaning itself,
now there is a questioning upon what exactly was going on. The fully human is beginning to
seek the Law in the works such that some sort of actual activity must have occurred apart
from mere words. The tension has nearly peaked because the echo of the minimal humanity is
fading and credence is moving toward the Law of the fully human, and Jesus as an identity is
getting in the way of what sympathy might have been resonating. The contradiction that is
the existence of God is becoming pronounced, becoming palatable, and it is not comfortable;
in fact, it is offensive.
They go to stone him (to kill him) and Jesus asks them for what, and they say not for
any of his works. Whatever had occurred prior to this they are not so concerned; whatever
miracles may have happened is not the issue now. Now the words and the works become
distinguished against the Law, as though recognizing the remaining overlap that still is
informing them to what Jesus may be, they are going to stone him for speaking evil of
to specify the intensive meaning here that which is The Good. Contradiction now emerging
as the indicator of what is false. But the glamour, the resonance, is still there, albeit barely,
and Jesus still talks his way out of it by referring to the scriptures.
c
John 10:33-39
ci
Psalms 82:6
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Absolution
Jesus attempts to appeal to the intact experience of the minimal human, but it is
fading.
ciii
John 10:42
civ
I concur and rely upon Soren Kierkegaards appraisal put forth in his The Sickness
Unto Death, with a caveat that I discuss elsewhere. Nevertheless, I will not reiterate him
here, but offer a little something more.
cv
cvi
John 11:15
cvii
Mark 1:22
cviii
cix
Matthew 5:17
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appearance of this truth that calls for faith in its reflection. Again; the Gospels are a telling, a
working, of the minimal human conditions of meaning, of humanity coming to terms with
itself, the movement from faith in reality, to knowledge of truth.
This is the significance of Peter, and why Peter becomes the basis of the church:
Because his condition marks a factual instance of historical meaning. If one has only faith,
then no church is founded but merely rises and falls by the dictates of her religion. Peter
searches for the truth, and finds it in the very real situation of being, through actual
occurrences.
cxi That which is is justified by the True Object is justified by nothing, emptiness; this is
to say, there is no knowable object in-itself except that which is justified by a type of
Kantian intuition, which is for my terms, conventional faith. But the irony does not stop
there. The manner by which we might even say that there is no object in-itself, is, in itself,
merely a manner of meaning, which means, albeit redundantly, that there is no knowable
object in-itself because that is how we are knowing things through this particular manner of
meaning, an evidence of a particular historical motion, a certain indicator of historical
phase. Conventional faith is the suture(pass) by which the manner, route, or orientation, of
knowing may be solute, that is, may operate for a viable reality; faith is the counter weight of
such meaningful limitation that allows for the logical invocation of the transcendent. The
exposing of the transcendent to the sensible appropriation of human experience without the
need for fantastical explanation, forms the impetus of this essay.
cxii
cxiii
John 1:1
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cxv As an analogy of this situation, we might see of this difference, this difficulty, an
expression of a three-plus dimensional state expressed as two dimensions. The difficulty does
not lay in that fact that a multidimensional space can be sensibly reduced to two dimensions,
but it is the expressing of that two dimensional state (of the three-plus state) in the terms of
the three-plus state that poses a challenge, because the continental bound native of the
three-plus state will always want to see the expression of the two-dimensional state as a
three-plus expression. The difficulty arises in the primary sense of what is foundational; if
multidimensionality is primary, then any expression of two-dimensional space is
automatically relegated to its being within a multidimensional truth for its sensibility. It is
the recurrent instalment of multidimensionality to the disruption of multidimensionality
(seeing disruption as evidence that three-plus equals three-plus) that may be analogous to the
correlational limit of discourse. Again: The limit is solved by suspension.
cxvi
John 1:1
cxvii This is the question that Jean Franois Lyotard addresses in his book The
Differend. The question he poses is of the historically advanced situation: How can a
plaintiff get justice for a case that the court cannot (incapable) hear?
cxviii A more precise way for this classification might be people who believe in the
dogma of the religious institutions, but the manner by which the Judeo-religious doctrine has
been disseminated through scholastic teaching will not exempt near everyone from the
religious category. The persistent and incessant problem with some areas of academic
philosophical effort is found in the inability of many people to get at the meaning of the
philosophical texts. In this manner, many philosophical discourses are misappropriated as
they are misunderstood. This arises due to a confusion involved with method; it is always
founded upon an assumed common practice and or arena of practice. This is to say, on one
hand, quite often if not historically proper, those who would be appropriating a kind of
correct meaning still involve themselves in an effort to exhibit and prove for others but
everyone the veracity of their solution. And, on the other hand, those who indeed are
misappropriating and misconstruing the texts are confirmed in their mistake (that it is no
mistake) by the former authors addressing the latters objections. This is the problem we
come upon presently. The issue at hand is confused as it is conflated into a one common
discourse. It occurs of course because it is offensive and illegal, as well as institutionally
undemocratic, to presume privilege upon any situation. No one is allowed to understand
anything that does not present itself in a continuum of common human potential. Ironically,
this is what eventually allows all discourse its inherent ideological hierarchy, which is to say,
religious founding. For, if we could admit that there is knowledge that is privileged in an
essential case, then, again ironically, we would have the conditions for a true egalitarian and
democratic state. But of course, as we see and are coming to terms with, this never happens,
and further this is the reason why it appears to some philosophers that some kind of grand
reckoning is occurring, some final and all end of the world. What seemed to be the ethical
and proper route for discovering or uncovering a saving truth is actually turning out to be
contradictory in-itself; that is, to be unambiguous as possible, as a route for meaning, those
who are invested in the discourse of term-identities see the state of discourse (its meaning-full
state) as revealing its collapse as if the world is actually in the throwes of dying; it becomes
evident everywhere. They await as they are witnessing the great world catastrophe; this is a
religious view. The meaning of the texts is found through a misappropriation, an incorrect
route, and this route followed leads to catastrophe but only unto itself. So it is, we need not
and cannot simply decide that this calls for no action; on the contrary, real estimations must
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This is the beginning of the conventional religious mistake; the beginning of the
True Object.
cxxiii
cxxiv
We are reminded of Derridas commentaries upon women and the feminine. The
truth, in this view, is a kind of double departure, a double withdrawal; a disruption of sorts
that thereby disrupts by coming forward and then retreating from the advance. The selfconsciousness thereby has no self-consciousness prior to this moment but is instead involved
with merely a motion of faith, determined as such in contongency. The advance is thus a kind
a falling out of grace, against which the retreat disrupts everything that has been known of
faith until that point. It amounts to the question that must be answered but continues to
supply questions as a sort of route, which we might say, is a route out of faith and into truth.
Nonetheless, there is no transcending transcendence; rather, where faith posits transcendence
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in a redundancy where the Object of faith is seen to have intervened to grant faith, there only
may we transcend transcendence. But Hegel was incomplete; Kierkegaard completes the
motion. What occurs in this second transcendence is actually a return to, not immanence,
but existence, and at that, its material. As Nietzsche, we return back to the earth, to
actuality, and this is because we (in regards to the rebuttal at hand: The fully human) are
already oriented upon transcendence. Where the fully human sees in its meaning an essential
meaning, an inspired meaning, there do we have indicated the real ability to transcend this
mundane reality. All this occurs in a specific paradigm of meaning, and, if we can reference
the simple translation of books, this specific paradigm was indeed masculine; in the Bible we
have The Father. In reference to this state, whilst occupied by this real-truth, the only
meaningful way to transcend this situation is found within the structure of meaning itself, that
which carries and informs what masculine is, what faith and spirit is. The distance that is
occurring, that is suspended within this paradigm, is exactly what is feminine, what is notfaith, not-transcendence, not-sinful, this last meaning in reference to the Kierkegaardian
sin, not in despair and not stemming from offense. We there by face what is before us
without reference to anything outside the paradigm and address it as such: As actuality.
Hence, it is the feminine that leads one out of faith, to wisdom.
cxxvii One day, perhaps, I will write a book that considers all we have on the topic,
though this essay might do very well at closing the need for such a volume.
cxxviii The indication of repetition is present in this. Once we are able to explain a
situation without reference to an outside influence or creator, then what is left is how that
situation came to be. This is the default ground from which all religious speculation arises,
and is why we can say that if history is a process of humanity coming to terms with itself in
the universe, its placement and purpose, then with this explicatory disclosure, history will
now begin to repeat, because the fully human will not be able to resist, again, positing what
this outside aspect may be, and will develop, again, further rationales and explanatory
theories that appear, again, sensible and reasonable, which is to say, they will develop another
meaningful encompassing identity (institution) that we call the True Object.
Such an explanation must encompass not merely what means, such as psychology and
neuroscience decide upon, but moreso must address route of meaning, for the current
platform of sciences will not ever get into just what is occurring so as to be able to come
across their own scientific proposals for example, no matter what chemical-neuro pathways,
no matter what plasticity might explain how the organ of the body functions to make
meaning, it will never directly address the scientist who is using such knowledge; as we
might say, the scientist always withdraws from its findings, for its use. The issue of route,
nevertheless and strangely enough, just may allow us to come to terms with our situation so
that we no longer have such paralyzing meanings that propose endless arguments for the sake
of the the faith invested by the Truth of the term in questions, arguments that are never
communicating to one another but are rather asserting their difference upon one another.
Maybe not now, but at some point, everyone will have to be included, for we are still caught
in the truth that faith is providing; as Slavoj Zizek has been noted to say, it is the most
difficult thing to imagine outside of capitalism.
cxxix The same just noted; Matthew 26:58, 69-75; Mark 14:54,66-72; Luke 22:54-62;
John 18:15-18, 25-26.
cxxx
Luke 22:51
cxxxi
Matthew 27:1-8
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Absolution
cxxxii
There is a certain kind of honesty that is not found in capitalistic states. We might
imagine that the vacillations are indeed a personal experience of intimate insecurity, and the
Gospels were the product of various people who had indeed experienced such sorry
moments, such anxiety and came together to talk about them, finding the commonality of
such experiences. This as opposed to the capitalistic mode which upholds the insecurity and
keeps it for oneself and uses the experience, the lack of confidence, to gain leverage and
advantage upon everyone else. We might find thus a new definition of individualism in this
withholding of insecurity.
cxxxiii
cxxxiv
cxxxv Many modern English translations have this terms a advocate to emphasize, in a
manner of speaking that Jesus, The Object of their faith, advocates for their sinfulness. One
has to wonder of the term advocate did not exist yet at the time of the first translations of
the Bible into English.
cxxxvi It is significant that Jesus rebukes such retaliation, such attack and reaches out to
replace the stricken ear.
cxxxvii Like Jesus in his vacillations. So this story of Simon-Peter might be seen as
conspiratorical with this story (of Jesus) in which it is embedded. That together they evidence
a beginning of a type of existential historical motion.
cxxxviii Peter has overridden the choice that is no choice. He has made and is an example
of the real act and therefore of redundancy yet set aside, which is the object. I will take up
this question more thoroughly in my book The Significant Event. Absolution and The
Second Moment of Decisive Significance..
cxxxix
Matthew 16:18-19
cxl
Matthew 16:4
cxli
Luke 22:67
cxlii
Luke 22:68
cxliii
John 18:20-23
cxliv
John 18:30
cxlv
John 18:31
cxlvi
Matthew 27:14. Also note that while Mark has Jesus answer directly to the high
priest that indeed he is the Christ (Mark 14:62), later with Pilate present in Chapter 15, verse
2, Jesus replies merely Thou sayest it and then upon further pleading by Pilate, in verse 5,
But Jesus yet answered yet nothing. This would seem to support the suggestions of this
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241
essay that Mark was indeed moved, but could be seen to merely be iterating what he heard,
being the most distanced from the event and so evidencing an orientation toward the truth of
the story rather than the event itself.
cxlvii
John 18:14
cxlviii
cxlix This flies completely in the face of the Kantian universe. The point is that even if
there is indeed no object, as Kant put it, in-itself that we can know, the fact that is
insinuated in the notion that knowledge is the only possible platform upon or through which
to know of any object, is that such objects behave as in-itself objects. To argue that any
particular object is true or false, and then to bracket this postulate within an arena of essential
not-true-ness, is might we say that Kant was indeed correct in his, perhaps unrecognized,
irony a metaphysical proposal; which is to say, utterly contained within a certain
ideological frame, which is also to say, utterly mythological. Human beings must have True
Objects by which to negotiate reality; in order to posit anything about the ultimate nature of
reality, True Objects are objects in-themselves.
cl
Phenomenological intension is the real aspect of the fully human. Yet, regardless of
what discursive formations or conceptual exercise, the situation may be more properly
understood as a result of the intuited object. When we turn the usual understanding of faith
on its head, we find, contrary to the Husserlian idea, that intentionality is an object derived
affect, that objects have intension that are reflected in our concepts of them. This can be
easily realized when we attempt to honestly form a concept around an object for which is
inconsistent with the presented object; it is not a contradiction that arises but plain and simple
nonsense. We might be able to use this adjusted formulation to distinguish when authors are
merely using their creativity to come up with ontological possibilities. Here, we are
attempting to relieve ourselves from theories that should be set more in artistic arenas. We
call to mind the Sokal Hoax, perpetrated by Alan Sokal, that, at least for a moment, called out
certain post-modern theoretical presentations. Just because human beings can sculpt terms
and squeeze out detailed meaning from clausal structures, does not mean they contain any
actual truth. There are still theoreticians who love to stay within this paradigm of discursive
fantasy. So, one of the issues of truth is how it is possible for a human being to see nonsense
as sensible. But we know why they might have credence and staying power: Because human
consciousness makes sense, and because faith makes true. One cannot argue sensibility into a
person through arguing with the sense they make; this yields all the more violence as the
nonsensical object of faith asserts the propriety of its sense.
Of course; there will be those social advocates that will move in to suggest there
is some sort of attempt at hegemony going on here, but those activists should first see that I
am not proposing that reality can occur in any other way than it does, and then see that
everyone (every political identity) is already included in the discussion of how they might be
excluded or marginalized; the issue is that indeed we assert a hegemony when we propose
certain people and situations be heard in their own voice. I am not suggesting that reality is
incorrect in its determinations; I am pointing out that reality and its ideological constructions,
such as psychology, have yet to be able to account for all that may exist of the human being,
most probably because the psychological framing of the human being is founded upon
subjects that are already admitting or otherwise assumed to be or are evidencing that they are
encountering a problem with their Being. Nevertheless, the presumption of potential is a
faulty, even as it is necessary, real conception. The issue should not be what is the in-itself
object, but how it behaves. Presently psychology is entangled with presenting the object of
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Absolution
humanity by the reasoning from effects. Hence as we have mentioned elsewhere, the idea that
there are other human beings and or other cultures, social, gender and racial groups that
amount to existing in an ideologically enforced silence is founded upon an incomplete
motion. To end with ideology and politics is to be fully invested in the mythology wherein
such political ideology resides, as well as to assert a historical static and determined common
human subject; we have come to call this correlationalism. Yet see; we have reached a
moment of humanity where everyone is included automatically, despite what ignorance may
be, where the process of social justice has become an ideological norm, a means for identity
and generating capital, a routine process of modern colonialization.
cli This can be to say not real but true. Jesuss ministry is a correction and not a
negation. The correction is upon that discourse that understands its power to be of negation.
clii
John 17:38
cliii
cliv What divides is a question here, placed in the declarative. If there is a thing,
then the conventional route sees an investigation into that thing as a manner of dividing, of
looking into its components. These components are thus found to be a reason for the thing,
as these components are likewise viewed within a particular contextual vector of further
division to get to cause. In this scheme of meaning, the process has yielded a progress; the
information gained through the process of dividing is understood as a progressed
knowledge, more knowledge, better knowledge, more thoroughet cetera. The significant
question upon this situation, though, is whether or not a different result could have been
gained through the exact same application; the answer that says that there are never the same
exact circumstances has never gotten further than Heraclitus stepping in a particular stream:
We cannot step in the same stream twice, then might we completely disrupt that keen
observation and suggest that we cannot even once!? (Thank you for that, Soren.) The actual
question concerns if the result was different that it is; the situation is so absurd to
conventional method that one should not even attempt to get through that faithful direction.
In all these considerations, though, it should be amply clear that no, the situation could only
have yielded the result it did, and it did yield only that result. Hence, if this is indeed the case,
then what divides is the result itself, but that which then constituted the situation in the first
place. The same can be said of any decision and thus to find what this prior decision is, is
merely a matter of describing the situation at hand. Also, though and this is key: A
description of how a thing is, functions and or operates does not negate that thing for what it
really is and still is; e.g. when one describes a table it does not invalidate, negate nor remove
the table from its existence or its being a table. Still I sit and type this essay with my paper,
books and computer sitting on the table. The description that the table may be multiplicity of
aspects, an infinitude of sub-molecular particles that have no mass or even negative mass, or
a social-linguistic construction does not remove the table from it being a table. I might
suggest that those who would unilateraize social constructions of objects as a ubiquitous
human function is really a Capitalist who is conflicted in drawing profit from her theoretical
privilege, and should draw a couple more bong rips while contemplating whether the THC in
the herb is really doing anything to relax her or change her mood, or if she is just thinking
that is occurring due to the social construction behind marijuana. Regardless; likewise,
does the description of how reality functions do nothing to argue that it should be any
different than it is; this is not an argument of how this thing called progress occurs as
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243
though somehow progress is a fallacious term or idea. Progress may be a problematic notion,
but the description of how or why progress occurs does nothing to suggest that it is an
illusion or somehow faulty in its conception. This is simply to say that where progress is
viewed as accounting for the entirety of how the universe occurs, often enough, the
description of a prior decision becomes a problem in-itself, vague and full of opinion, and
hence then my point of an object in-itself.
clv
This is one translation of the meaning of the collusion in Alain Badious discussion
of void and multiple.
clvi This different manner in equity of universal objects. No one asks a table a reconcile
to a chair, and if I walk my face straight into the low branches of a pine tree, I will most
likely find discomfort; when glaciers melt and oceans may rise. They behave as objects unto
themselves. A True Object reduces such horizontal equity to existential conditions that are
more true and that we call metaphysical speculations; yet, science is more a vertical
substantiation.
clvii
clviii
clix
clx
Mark 15:15
clxi John 19:1-2; Mark 15:17; Matthew 27:29. If there was any possibility of Jesus not
being crucified before, there is no turning back now. The soldiers mock Jesus by draping him
in a purple cloak, put a crown of thorns on his head, and giving him a reed staff. They then
take a knee and worship him; the full mock. Yet the irony has just come complete to end the
mockery of the trial and to begin the real mockery, the real trial that humanity thenceforth is
occupied in acting out, that is, real history of the subject-object. Before this, there was no
question. The crown of thorns is reminiscent of the burning bramble of Moses mentioned
earlier. By Jesus, the True Subject has reached a level of conventional exposure; whereas
before there was always a certain amount of legitimate denial in plain ignorance that is found
in the newness of things and events. The Old Testament might then be seen to be the
repetition that occurs in cycling of learning, of showing, forgetting most of it, re-presentation,
revelation, denial, and then the acceptance that only come through reality witnessing a
divergence with itself, a splitting, since such an experience is not common to humanity, but
only a part of humanity. History now becomes the story of humanity coming to terms with
itself in denial, humanity as a product of justifying itself against what is denied of itself.
clxii
John 19:4-6
clxiii
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. 1958 Oxford University Press.
clxiv
John 19:7
clxv
clxvi In the context of the Bible, so as well this essay, we can say God, but the same
formula follows for any transcendence come upon even as it might be denied and placed into
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Absolution
some sort of other category, such as, spirits, psychological diagnoses, or natural
phenomena. In general, an irregular occurrence of meaning where the consistency of
understanding is disrupted to be placed, whether it be momentarily or lasting, in an alternate
context or frame of meaning that calls into question the former framing. In a manner of
speaking, we can call such movements of frame as common real possibility, and thus come
to categories of experience that thereby, by such inevitable reductive displacement to infinite
redundancy, are allowed to be broken by such essentially other possibility, or for another
term, essential transcendence. The idea of God and a monadic first of anything or situation
is the term that is always ultimately called upon to support or refute. No other term resides in
ultimate primacy; even sciences Big Bang, or philosophys nothingness or void or
chaos, never completely avoids a fundamental positing of God meaning. This is why
redundancy is an appropriate idea: It gains slightly more than repetition.
clxvii Many philosophers through through the ages have talked about an abyss in the
context, if not explicitly, of freedom. The basic idea is that there is a limit and what is beyond
the limit is an abyss. The implicit theme involves an encounter with this limit as in incurs
what is beyond it, which is, for all meaning in every context, nothingness, void, or with some
authors, even God. The distinction that we find with the second moment, exemplified with
Pilate, concerns a founding term. The founding term is a type of ideological base where when
all routes of meaning have been exhausted, which can be to say, when one comes upon the
mysterium tremendum, the nothing that resides behind the thing, she encounters the
contradiction inherent of the situation and she, as Sartre says, revolts from it. The meaning of
this move makes sense if we consider that if a person were to really encounter nothingness,
then there would be nothing left for us to be considering it; not just for her but all would
simply
This is the case because nothing cannot exist and still be known. If there was a nothing
that was known then it would no longer be nothing, in fact, it would be something, the thing
that is nothing. So it is, the only possible manner by which knowledge may encounter
nothing, which is to say, the only manner that consciousness may know nothing is for there
to have been a break, a discontinuity in the stream of knowing wherein knowledge make
sense. The break must be effective and not merely another type of understanding; it is not unconsciousness, memory loss or the like because these occurrences reside within the
sensibility that marks the knowing of real things. The break therefore institutes another
knowledge, another manner of knowing.
Hence it is the meaning of the revolt that is significant. In the Existentialist-postmodern sense, the revolt allows for a new agency; the person sees that all reality is made of
arbitrary constructs and so is now able to move freely. Having now an awareness of how the
constructs are not merely arbitrary, the agent herself sees her involvement in that very
construction. The existential agent thereby is free to construct her own reality. The founding
term is that first condition that allows for the revolt; which is to say, she revolts back into the
conventional construct with a new awareness of it. In this modern existential case, the
founding term is nothing, or perhaps void, but in every case, the term itself is understood
implicitly to be the first and only term that is not arbitrary, the first identification of a True
Thing, the only term that transcends the situation of coming upon a nothingness on the other
side of the limit to be able to link itself to an essential substrate of the universe. In this case
the essentially True Thing nothingness somehow is not included in the real construction of
reality; upon this void the agent thus finds the freedom to construct a new reality. The issue
we treat in this essay is the elimination, or at least displacement, of the founding term, but the
next book will deal more squarely with the repercussions of this situation.
Kair
clxviii
245
John 19:19
Matthew 27:24
clxxi
It is in this moment that we become able to speak only of objects, but that topic is
for another essay.
clxxii Bruno Latour is the first author I have been let to find who has attempted to
develop a theoretical avenue to be able to allow for such an opening. Likewise, Francois
Laruelle and his Nonphilosophy has allowed for an opening that I believe is often being
framed as philo-fiction, but unfortunately, I have to tell, it appears the intensity as well as
the depth of his nonphilosophical discourses have lead many instead into a type of philofictional-hell, where the result of his dense verbosity has been a kind of secularphilosophical-religion of sorts; a clergy who lay in a nonphilosophical dogma of
misinterpretation. Laruelles fears were warranted: what should have been an opening has
been shut in to another philosophical object.
In either case, though, the need for an opening has been understood; as much I might
lament the monster that has been made of Laruelles Nonphilosophy by some philo-religio
zealots, as the meaning of Laruelles works may fall simply under the route that this essay
presents, Latour seems to have granted us the least harmful of theoretical frameworks by
which to move forward the process to actually gain an opening (the operative term here is
seems). See An Enquiry into Modes of Existence, by Bruno Latour.
clxxiii
Yes; I have evoked Theodor Adorno. Once we begin to describe the Event, it
could only have already occurred but is occurring, yet in so much as it seems apparent that it
has not happened, that there indeed are people who are trying to figure it out and or trying to
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Absolution
find out what has already happened, that there might be this realization that what seems so
obvious and omnipresent is yet more prosaic, there we might say that it has not happened and
will at some point occur. Yet by this description, we undoubtedly must say that it indeed did
occur and was missed, and so will never occur. For at some point we need see that our faith is
not sufficient to bring about the product and hope of its affect, and indeed merely serves, at
some point, to cause to bring down the whole faade upon itself due to the eternal denial it
upholds over what is truly occurring.
clxxiv
clxxv This is where feminist critique gains its foothold. Recall the earlier discussion
about wisdom. Though the post-modern was taken in its moment in the same stride a postcolonialism, we find inevitably that post-modernism was a patsy, a puppet discourse of
colonialism for the purpose of reifying and reinstating the modern as the ubiquitous and
inescapable condition of The world. We can say this because of the dual voice that sounds at
every event; the distinction between Hegel, historical consciousness, Nietzsche, Ubermensch,
Dasein, Heidegger, Nazi Germany, modernism and post-modernism is ultimately found only
within the post-modern discourses that propose as well as suppose that it is the inescapable
limit of discourse that finds modernism as a particular political movement, a particular
ideological enforcement. Through this late 20th century critique, though, we find the reenforcement of the ideology by post-modern argument as it has gained a certain dogmatic
ubiquity: It is not so much that, as Zizek has said, capitalism is so difficult to think beyond; it
is more that particular post-modern arguments have become axiomatic in the discernment of
what reality is. This is to say that Dasein persists as well as our modern state. It is the purpose
of ideology to replicate itself for the purpose of enforcing power. While the post-modern
proposed to relieve oppression and bring about some sort of freedom, some sort of human
equality, we find now that all that has happened is that everyone can speak the same
language about what is occurring; every has become modern, or at least is in the process of
catching up, everyone has RSVPd or assumed to have done so; everyone has been
colonized. It is this condition that some of the speculative realists as well as object
ontologists are attempting to get beyond, attempting to break free of.
If we can say that this whole affair is quite ironic, then we should see that feminism,
while using the platform of post-modern and post-colonial, (in the same way as the disciples
use the Jewish rhetoric) is ironic to the irony. This then does not mean it returns itself to the
modern state in which irony tends to indicate some great enlightened future, on the contrary;
what is ironic of irony is that irony is revealed unto itself, not as a flattened horizon of
inspired ethical agency, but as to what it does. The attempt is to stop (if I can use Graham
Harmans terms) overmining and undermining real estimations of things. The feminist
critique has always been an effort to get back to the things in themselves, and to reveal what
is occurring in the encoded politics of modern ideological thinking. We might then call this
wise.
clxxvi
clxxvii
clxxviii
clxxix
Though I do not believe Slavoj Zizek uses this notion nil subject, it is possible to
Kair
derive this term from the meaning he intends. See Zizeks book The Parallax View.
clxxx
Slavoj Zizek. Living in The End Times. 2011 Slovoj Zizek. Pg. 15-16.
clxxxi
The Black Notebooks. I have not seen them; I have only heard about them.
247