I
don’t necessarily want to clarify or even revisit full throttle the conclusion of yesterday’s
commentary. But I am interested in making a few notations for revisiting Paul
next year when I return to these commentaries during my sabbatical.
The first note I'll make is a citation of very beginning to the letter
to the Romans where he identifies himself as “Paul, slave of Christ Jesus,
called to be an apostle…” The second note I'll make is in reference to Paul’s letter to the
Galatians IV:3, where he writes of ‘the curse’ and faith in contrast to the law
and those observe it citing the OT “Cursed be everyone who does not preserve in
doing all the things written in the book of the law.” He writes “the law does
not depend on faith”, and thus who live by faith ‘alone’ are living ‘outside’
the law, which Agamben identifies as living in the ‘time that remains,’ or the
messianic time, or what we might call the ‘place of the messiah,’ [place of an
appointed one, or an extra-legal domain, a state outside the law]. When the study of Paul overlapped with the
study of DuBois I conjectured that this ‘third space’ of faith might be mapped
by way of what DuBois identifies as our ‘spiritual strivings’ via
education. That is, not the law (state),
nor the market (economy), but through education will justice be achieved and
emancipation fully realized. Put
differently, I suspect there is a comparative reading to be made, one that
allows us to read Paul alongside DuBois and both within the liberation
theology/education discourse such that we can identify the redemption happening
by way of an effacement with suffering.
This is the unhappiness of John Jones that emerges from learning, “from
studying things.” There is a redemptive moment precisely because there is a
faith in the learning that takes you into your suffering, not away from
it. The work of making justice demands
an effacement with suffering, which entails working in a community outside and
beyond the law, becoming ‘cursed’. The
tragedy of MLK reveals the necessity of going all the way with the
movement. Paul: “Christ ransomed us from
the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed be
everyone who hangs on a tree’…” I want to read this ‘curse’ and
‘Christ…becoming a curse’ by hanging on a tree, as one example for thinking
through the relationship between suffering, learning and redemption.
A
transition from the foregoing to the commentary on the meditation from this day
ten years ago happens by way of ‘Providence’.
The second line of the meditation recalls an earlier moment in the
writing/thinking experiment when the originary dispensation was identified as
denoting “the organization or arrangement of Providence.” The move here happens by way of a retrieval
of the ‘providence’ as holding the temporalities of present and future, as an
event that is a prophetic ‘foreseeing’ and a responsive ‘attending to’. The originary dispensation as originary also holds the two
retrospective and prospective, a dispensation (offering) that must be re-called
because it is also a re-membering – a bringing together, unification,
gathering, embodiment, incarnation: “the
originary dispensation from Being…the re-collection unfolding in the gathering
of community…the re-membering memory
of the originary gift.”(11/1/04 BL
259)…[11/1/14 commentary: “the full bodied incarnation of the originary
dispensation offered in the beating heart, that ceaseless rhythm that maintains
the time and tempo of the dialogic jam.
This is another way of describing the originary granting of receiving/perceiving
as an act of compassion, and the beating of the human heart as enacting the
originary granting “This is the appearance of agape, the profound love of the other that co-arises with the
affirmation originary dispensation. Agape signifies the appearance of the
realm of openness that is preserved with the community because it is preserved
with each as the spirit of humanity…Agape
is the investiture that dignifies each being with the investment of Being
(existence). Agape affirmed in the recognition of the other as other, as exceeding the limits of status quo…”(11/01/04 BL 259)
Redemptive
suffering occurs under the force of the faith in the learning community, “the
diminishment of the ‘I’ within the intersubjective event of dialogue.”(11/9/04 BL 268)
The originary dispensation is an act of compassion, suffering with…living as a ‘curse’ outside the law. “…learning is grounded in this belonging together that is measured in
the enactment of the care that unfolds with compassion.” (11/9/04 BL 268)
The force of faith is felt in the reception of “Being’s ‘call to care’
and [the] affirmative reception of the other.”( 11/9/04 BL 268) Here the connection
is felt between Providence, Agape,
and the gathering of the learning community in the Open. And towards the conclusion of the meditation
I write: “In a letter cited by Heidegger, Rilke describes the Open as ‘the
indescribably open freedom which perhaps has its (extremely fleeting)
equivalents among us only in those first moments of love when the human being
sees his own vastness in another, his beloved, and in man’s elevation toward
God.’”(11/9/04 BL 268)
3.0 (Saturday, Portland, ME). I'll have to check that last fragment that was cited from BL, because I don't remember ever being so straightforwardly theological in my writing. But it is Heidegger's citation of Rilke, and my guess is that it was a way to smuggle in some theology.
ReplyDelete*This fragment from today's OPM resonates powerfully with "LEARN": “the diminishment of the ‘I’ within the intersubjective event of dialogue.”(11/9/04 BL 268). I would say that the "diminishment of the 'I'" is probably the most important trope that has endured over the past two decades. Indeed, the philosophical education described in "LEARN" gets underway with what I call the periagôgé that turns the student away from their private persona. Here are some examples from "LEARN": "Phenomenological reading is underway after the student has been turned away from the ‘self’ (private persona) and toward the object of study. This turning is a negation of the “I,” an epoché: a suspension of the student’s ‘natural attitude’ and setting aside their taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs. The student is now ready to listen to the voice of the book/text." And: "The modality of private persona is suspended and re-placed by that of the student, which is a generic term describing the modality of the learner in the studia liberali. In Bologna during the time when the Athentica Habita guided Irenius and the universitas he organized, the persona of the student was a character one inhabited in the wearing of robes, a uniform that identified the outsider as having a legitimate reason for being abroad in Bologna. The estrangieri wore the robes of the studiente both on and off the campus, thereby covering their private self when in public. The robes not only hid their private selves, but also designated the principle of equality, the original denotation of “uniform”: it matters not what one looks like underneath, so long as one is wearing the robes one is a student. The original force of this principle was lost over time, culminating with schooling organizing itself around “uniformity,” which is the principle of equality degenerated both by the herd mentality of the identical and its dialectical twin of identity politics. Originally, the wearing of academic robes was the literal and figurative turning away from the private persona, and a turning away from the selfsame. And in this way the robes also symbolize the “covering” of parochial bias. The robes denote the uniformity of purpose amongst the students -- studiorum (guild of students) -- but does not entail identical thinking."