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Well, that’s it for Spurious for the time being. This weblog has been up for almost exactly 6 months. I’ve got a book to finish by December 15th, so I’ll post only very intermittently until then.

Herodotus is said to have called an end to the time of myth and opened the period of history, at least here in the West. This is still an age of myths, as if we belonged to the era Herodotus had already left behind – the time of the epic, of great causes and triumphal victories. The mythical age is not over – it lingers yet in the war without end which opened more than two years ago – itself the continuance of what perhaps the word ‘war’ cannot reach: an unsettled and impersonal struggle that has long spread across all the nations on the globe. Yes, it is still mythic, this war, for as long as Bush pretends to be the conscience of the world.

And Blair? Who is Blair pretending to be? ‘Do you pray together?’ Jeremy Paxman asked him of his relationship to Bush in a studio not far from here? ‘No we don’t pray together, Jeremy’, said Blair. Then I remember Alistair Campbell’s comment of the PR machinery that surrounds the Prime Minister: ‘we don’t do God.’ What do they do instead? Appeal to the great end which would justify the means: democracy for the Middle East, an end to a destructive regime etc.: a humanitarian cause. Impressive if it were true – but we are too sceptical to believe that and to believe anything from our politicians. There is a strange severing of the populace from their leaders. A dream: the public becomes unpredictable, wayward; apathy gives way to militancy; there is a general refusal of myth.

And the Enlightenment dream that myth will disappear? This is perhaps our hope, and it may be a vain one: the great evil against which we are enlisted to struggle will be exposed as the last shadows of an ancient myth. And the great good? The great humanitarian cause? Wake up, sober up: the broken, humilated body of the Iraqi prisoner refuses to be reappropriated by a mythical humanitarianism. Do not try and justify torture as royal road to happiness for all. This would be to accede to oldest theodicean and cosmodicean myth which survived right up to the concentration camps: everything will be justified, everything will come right in the end.

Is it the absence of myth that we see in the photographs of the tortured bodies of Iraqi prisoners? Will others see it, too? This is the time of the digital camera and the internet. Of technology and the atom bomb. Horrible and wonderful, it could be the new technology which allows us to witness evidence of the tortured and the dead which will finally drive myth from the world. This is naive, hopelessly so – who would counterpose myth and technology in any simple minded way when it was technicians who designed the great places of extermination? And why should one expect the public to believe incidents of torture are anything but exceptional?

Dream of the end of the myth, of a new age in which a utopian future does not justify terror in the present. When every day is as the last day, the day of judgement and no theodicy or cosmodicy could justify a present injustice.

One reads with Heidegger of the first beginning [Anfang], the Ereignis, the originating event of the West through which the great names physis, aletheia, logos appeared etc., etc. What then of the event called Auschwitz – or for which the name ‘Auschwitz’ is a synecdoche? Did it give us a new set of primal words, or does it exacerbate the ones we already have? Did it accomplish a glorious new Dichtung, bringing names forward in the fire of a new experience of the logos, or did it, rather, mock that same Dichtung and that same fire?

Adorno on Beckett, in the famous ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’: ‘Understanding it can mean only understanding its intelligibility [Unverständlichkeit], concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning’. It has no meaning? It is set after an indeterminate disaster; the apocalypse has happened. In postwar Europe, ‘everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realising it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own damaged state [Zerschlagenheit] useless’. They talk, the characters, they repeat lame jokes, they babble and mutter. There is nothing to talk about, nothing to do. Movement is ritual without meaning. What happens will happen again. Dead time.

In the face of this, understanding cannot, as for Kant, bring intuitions under concepts. Do not try to understand Endgame – but do not try, likewise, to grasp it under the heading of Heideggerian Dichtung (which itself bestows understanding, bringing beings to a stand). Does it call for a new beginning – for us to dream of a new Dichtung, a new happening of the Ereignis? Or does it attest, rather, to the impossibility not only of such a happening but of the ‘first’ beginning [Anfang] of which Heidegger writes?

More notes in the margin of Philip Goodchild’s book Religion and Capitalism:

What matters most? This book presents us with four insights which have not, according to Goodchild, been thought in their interrelation. Firstly, there is the truth of suffering: human life is not sustainable, but the ecological catastrophe is preventable; secondly, the awareness that money has become the self-positing measure of all values; thought and values themselves must be understood in terms of their monetary value; thirdly, the awareness of what Goodchild calls the “experience” of God and fourthly, the awareness of the “murder of God” as this reveals the nihilism of the European tradition – the values which devalue themselves.

Traditional accounts of this murder will not suffice. It is not the development of nominalism, or the displacement of religious authority from ecclesiastical institutions to individual conscience in the Reformation, or the rise of the experimental method in the sciences which transformed the concretion of knowledge and prepared the way for secularism and atheism; none of these accounts for their condition, which is, Goodchild argues, a shift in pieties – a shift from God to Mammon, which is to say, the murder of God happens because of the emergence of the self-regulating market as the basis for the organization of the social order.

What is to be done? How might one alter the currency? Might one hold out for a redirection of attention – for a new piety, a new religion, a new conception of God and with it, a new understanding of truth and goodness? For Goodchild, to alter the currency is to redirect attention. It is to understand economics and economism as a kind of piety – as a way of directing attention away from what matters. But it is also to counterpose a religious piety to economic piety as it is founded upon excess and not conservation. One might object that this talk of piety nostalgic. Doesn’t scientific progress already testify to the anachronism of the appeal to piety? But, for Goodchild, the currency of truth must be altered, since the apparent stability purchased through abstraction wagers the real. When truth is understood as immutable, incorporeal and identical over time, it threatens to pass over what is changeable, material and discontinuous. The objects of astronomy or mechanics are indeed regular and ordered in their behavior – but this is not the case with the ostensible object of economics.

Pierre Bourdieu writes of the mason who forewent the ritual meal that was supposed to be eaten in the mason’s honor after he had constructed a house. He asked for 200 francs in exchange for the meal in addition to the 1,000 francs for the construction itself. What is wrong with that? The event of the meal – the taste of the food, the animals killed to supply that food, the friendships which are formed and reaffirmed over that meal, conversation and conviviality – is not substitutable. Trust is everything in the system Bourdieu describes; therefore, the temptation is to cheat by feigning trustworthiness.

One might understand the transition of ritual to historical piety to occur at this point, although Goodchild warns us against any simple understanding of this transition. The God of historical piety is understood as being able to bestow reparations for suffering in the present: He will punish deceit and wickedness; the righteous will prosper and the wicked will perish. Piety, here, is no longer directed towards the ritual repetition of a past event but to the future. Abraham, trusting the promise of God, leaves Ur because of a promise; he ventures his life on this uncertainty. Ritual piety is put to death when he is called to sacrifice his son; meaning and value spring out of this gesture. Hebrew monotheism depends upon a rejection of idolatry: one worships one God; the past, and the ritual piety in which one returns ceaseless to the past, is sacrificed in view of a universalism. Piety is now oriented towards the future – to the coming of the Messiah, or, with Christianity, to the return of Christ which will bring about the Kingdom of God.

But here, already, the divine economy allows God to resemble Mammon. The event of the murder of God has already been prepared; historical piety is perilously close to the economism that will allow commodification and reification. But religion does not collapse into capitalism. Broadly speaking, for Goodchild, religious piety is still able to embrace the singular and exceptional: it can attend to suffering because it is pluralistic in a way capital is not. Doesn’t Marx show this when he allows that money “is the god among commodities” – that it is “the incarnation of exchange value”? The monism of capitalism allows it to as it were worship itself; piety synthesizes time such that the future becomes, for the financier, the object of speculation even as, for the householder, the future harbors catastrophe: the threat that he or she will be unable to subsist.

It is perhaps because only the philosopher of religion can understand the stakes of what Goodchild calls apocalyptic piety – an experience which directs itself towards the singularity of suffering in a way outside the consensus. Apocalyptic piety opens what Goodchild calls the “chaotic interval” which other forms of piety conceal (indeed, other forms of piety, whether economic or religious, are precisely an attempt to shield themselves from chaos). One cannot bring oneself into such piety through an act of will. Rather, it reveals itself only in an experience of excess which overwhelms the consensual determination of what is real. Philosophy of religion, understanding apocalyptic piety in its philosophical and political stakes, which is to say, as a way of revealing a future no longer bound by chains of necessity to the present, rises to its vocation to alter the currency. Such a philosophy must be a critical theory of religion because otherwise the experience of God which gives itself in apocalyptic piety will be misunderstood. Only thus might the thinker plunge into the reality of change and discontinuity – to the becoming and affect of the world as it exceeds economic determination and is bound, in that opening, to what Goodchild calls absolute faith.

Reading these pages, I am reminded of Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. We first meet Domenico as he is prevented from his attempt to cross the hot pool dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena in the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni, where the protagonist of the film, the Russian poet Gorchakov is staying. Domenico, we learn, locked himself in the house for seven years with his family, waiting for the end of the world. Gorchakov is taken by this stranger. When he is told Domenico is mad, he replies: “We don’t know what so-called insanity, or madness, is. First, they are inconvenient, they get in everyone’s way. Their behavior, their wishes lie outside the generally accepted rules. And then, we simply don’t wish to understand them. They are terribly lonely, but I’m sure they are closer to the truth than we are.” Later, Domenico immolates himself after preaching to the army of solitaries he has gathered about him for three days and nights. Before he sets himself on fire, he cries: “What is this world worth, what is the value of its truth if some unhappy mental patient, as you call us, tells you: ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves!’ While there’s still time!” Tarkovsky shows us Domenico’s death is not beautiful. He falls and crawls along the ground, crying out. In the interval between the immolation and his death, he is just a man who has set himself alight. His is the mad attempt draw the whole world into the fire of sacrifice and bring it shuddering back into birth. But it is, perhaps, the act of madness which reveals the madness of the world and thus the chaotic interval between one future and another. Meanwhile, far away, Gorchakov has heard of Domenico’s death. He takes the stub of a candle and begins to walk across the drained pool. This is not an act of ritual piety (the repetition of an eternal past) nor even an act of historical piety (it is not performed in the service of righteousness). Dazzled by the chaotic interval, it honors an apocalyptic piety.

I wonder whether Goodchild’s philosopher of religion must embody both Domenico and Gorchakov, answering to the opening of the chaotic interval and then, afterwards, patiently transmitting that experience, along with the singularity of suffering to which it is linked. The first apocalyptic experience, the experience of the interval, leads to death, or at least a kind of dying (Domenico’s self-sacrifice; the shattering of self-consciousness which Goodchild himself describes). It gives way to a second – the affirmation of difference as a potency of which nothing can be known. Such difference is wondrous – to think, henceforward, is to answer what is unthinkable; it is to direct attention to an experience whose source one cannot render explicit. But Goodchild maintains a third apocalyptic experience is necessary through which one comes to understand the experience in question, the affirmation of difference, as an experience of God. I will close with a quotation from the last chapter of Religion and Capitalism, which, if I do not yet understand, is a sign, for me of the necessity of rereading this book:

Apocalyptic piety has no name for the God it experiences, no identity on which to cling. It is merely an experience after the death of God, the subject and the world. It follows the dissolution of reality and the dissolution of the will. If it awakens to God as Truth, Goodness and Awareness, this is not a God it can condition, possess or will. It is merely an experience. Apocalyptic piety stands outside itself: it is a capacity to laugh at, relinquish and forgive oneself; it is a capacity to attend to suffering; it is a capacity to bear within oneself little fragments of heaven and hell. It is compassion.

Some notes in the margin of Philip Goodchild’s impressive book Religion and Capitalism:

The risks of inflation, until the eighteenth centuries, meant that total coinage could only be introduced with the conquest of new territories. With overseas investment, the asset-stripping of the conquered territories, the organization of the slave trade, such an increase in coinage could occur. But the greatest step came with the nationalization that created the Bank of England, which allowed a secure value to be attached to bank notes, enabling long term, low interest loans which could be secured against future taxation. Thus, the economy could function on the basis of an infinitely deferred redemption of a promise of value. Money is thus created as a loan on the basis of a debt. But this means production is always increased in order to obtain a profit on the loan. The value of assets is now determined through a speculative anticipation of its rate of return. But just as currency is circulated in the form of banknotes which never have to be cashed in, the value of assets is determined by a future which never arrives. Since the market will not crash (the government can always raise more taxes), there is now no limit to the amount of money that can be created. Our material and social reality is wagered on the basis of an ideal future; the national power which creates the Bank of England it is seized by what it seized. The issuing of government bonds and, later, trading on financial futures and derivatives, exacerbates already set in motion.

What follows? Prices are determined for commodities, excess production is encouraged and new needs are created with the consequences of ecological devastation and financial uncertainty. The operation of the free market sees labor subordinated by debt bondage, slavery, the threat of unemployment or the outsourcing of labor to countries where it can be bought more cheaply. Labor has no choice but to participate either because of debt or because it is enthralled by the idea of making money.

One may object that we live in the most humane of human societies; that we enjoy prosperity as never before. But we are blinded by the self-evidence of economics as it serves to uphold the apparently benevolent despotism of liberal humanism. Economics cannot take account of the suffering which results when the social and material condition of the present is wagered on the basis of an ideal future. Abstractions like Gross Domestic Product, which purport to provide us with the value of an economy, cannot calculate the repercussions to the environment; a cost-benefit analysis does not permit sufficient attention to be paid to the threat of financial catastrophe.

For a happy minority, credit is plentiful and goods are cheap. But for the majority, the future – the immediate future – is grim; the main question is one of survival. All of us stand before the same horizon, the same looming catastrophe, whether we want to or not. Why don’t the terrifying claims of the report on the results of climate change commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall, grip us before any other problem? Our attention is misdirected. Is this the effect of our governments, which no longer answer to international law or to the wishes of their people?

Politics is possible only for as long as our attention is uncoupled from the magic of image, spectacle and glamour as they circulate in the mass media. It is possible only when we extend the scope of that which lays claim to our attention. Vaster than the number of countable voters is the polity of those who will have to live in a world which becomes progressively less inhabitable as well as those outside our country with whom we are bound in networks of interdependency.

Our political system encourages short-termism and populism: the political candidate must be adept at handling the mass media; it is necessary to look and speak the part, which means wealth, appearance and debating skills supplant the ethical sensibility which would allow the politician to respond to what matters. A political response articulated out of a universal awareness is barely conceivable. But the catastrophe may still be preventable which means nothing is more pressing that developing this awareness.

Our attention has been captured. How to bind apathy in the face of politics into a universal politics which works on a local and a worldwide level that can struggle for the world? But there is no one to listen; the commonwealth has disappeared. There is no public when the European tradition of reason with its faith in a public standard of rationality has collapsed, and when there is only suspicion of the same values which once united us: truth, wisdom, the human being.

The most pressing task is the awakening of a new universalism – of a commonwealth alert to ecological and financial catastrophe.

This, via James Ward’s Heidegger’s Politics:

According to Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger would write, in a passage omitted from the published version of G53: “Perhaps the poet Hölderlin must become a Geschick of decisive confrontation for a thinker whose grandfather was born at the same time the ‘Ister Hymn’ and the poem ‘Andenken’ originated — according to the records, in the sheepfold of a dairy farm in Ovili, which lies in the upper Danube valley near the bank of the river, beneath the cliffs. The hidden history of Saying knows no accidents. Everything is dispensation [Schickung] ( “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding”, p. 223).