OPM 299(300), December 15th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 311-313

I have no precise recollection, but I suspect that in the week in 2004 that included 12/14 was a demanding one because I have multiple copies of the meditations from the days just prior to and including 12/14, but then on 12/15 I forgot to change the date on the meditation, so that beginning on that day and moving forward in the project, the dating is one day off in the original manuscript pages.   And to make matters more complicated, it appears that the page that corresponds to the middle of the meditation from 12/15/04, p. 513 from the original manuscript, is missing!  I’ll have to follow up when I return to my house later and look again in the three ring binder to see if it’s there.  For now, while I have take this time and sit in the balcony of the UNE Portland library, I revisit the meditation in both its original and published form. 

Given the preceding prelude I’m compelled to begin at the end of the meditation, which ends (appropriately): “Ecstasia, insania>insanity, madness, frenzy, rapture; mania; excess; inspiration.”(BL 313)

Where does this final sentence arrive from?  What precedes it?

The meditation begins by returning to Arendt’s reading of Plato’s Gorgias, which is to say, a return to her ‘harmonious Socrates.’  [cf. OPM 266(267), November 7^th and OPM 291(292), December 4^th for two commentaries that take up Arendt’s ‘harmonious Socrates.’ 12/4/14 commentary: “What is true from the Gorgias is Socrates’ non negotiable desire to be ‘in tune’ with himself.  “But, in the end, this ‘harmony’ which achieves a ‘unity’ of mind, an “agreement with himself (homognomonei heauto)”…designate ‘harmony’ as a ‘unity’, and thus ‘friendship’ as an ‘agreement’.  The result is the foreclosure upon the difference and distinction achieved with…alterity.”(BL 296)”]  My response to Arendt then and now is to read Socrates back against her ‘Socrates’ and ten years later I have been relying on what I have been calling Schoenberg’s  ‘higher harmony’, and here cite a moment from the commentary on 12/5/14: “I revisit the meditation from 12/5/04 by recalling the conclusion of the commentary from 12/04/04 when the move to drop friend and friendship was made via a critique of Arendt’s ‘plurality,’ which I conjecture is deficient with respect to attending to the Schoenbergian ‘higher harmony’ that is inclusive of both concord and discord:

“… fact of plurality is better denoted by difference (difference), by this other name, which is to say, the category that can name the fact of a ‘higher’ harmony that can be either one of discord or concord.  Difference does the work of denoting the relationality that grants a ‘higher’ harmony.” 

On 12/15/04 I push back further against Arendt’s ‘harmonious Socrates’ by linking it to the totalizing project of metaphysics.  “That project, which is constantly in search of a stable domos, an abode of regularity, predictability, and domestic security, ends up living in a distorted and debilitating relation to the essential way of dynamic chaos.”(BL 311)   Indexing the work of my late colleague Ilan Gur Ze’ev, I describe this search for a domos as the “condition of diasporic pedagogy, i.e., the despair of constant wandering in search of a mythical ‘homeland’ or ‘final destination.’”(BL 311)  This assignment is one that is reflects the context of my thinking then and now.   The move I made ten years ago was the following: first, to interpret Arendt’s reading of Socrates as an expression of her own diasporic philosophical modality, which I might describe using Rocha’s nostalgia for nostalgia.  When presenting her harmonious Socrates she makes a point of emphasizing thinking as an abode we return to (a theme that Irigaray appropriates almost wholesale in her important essay “Listening, Thinking,  Teaching,” when she writes of thinking as the time of returning to ourselves, to our ‘home’ that we must build each and every day).   Socrates has remain ‘in tune’ with himself is because has to live with himself.    In turn, conflict and strife or being ‘out of tune’ with everyone else is bearable so long as one is a friend to (of?) himself.  And from there unfolds the foundation of the claim that thinking is grounded in friendship, which leads to community; a politics that is not guided  by thinking from outside, but built by thinking from the ground up.   This is  ‘demos archē’ (democracy), or the politics emerging from the ground up – people power.    There’s a sense in which this seems perfectly compatible with the writing/thinking that has been describing koinōnia.  So why the push back?

The critique turns on the ‘domestic’ starting point, the domos as the precursor of the demos.   δῶμα (dôma, “house, housetop”) is a bit archaic, because the term for family or household is oikos (οἶκος)  But if  δῶμα (dôma) denotes a place, both a structure and a part of the structure, it can serve to denote the existential modality of thinking as a place where abide in domestic harmony ‘in tune with myself’.   And this is a fairly typical way the matter has been phrased by the most esteemed and heroic champions of justice.  Consider Ghandhi’s maxim: I must be the change I want to see in the world.   This presumes that before one can work together with others for justice one must first ‘have one’s house in order.’   The critique against the ‘harmonious self’ entails a rejection of this formula, which privileges a kind of certainty that may be necessary for a certain kind of political movement, but is not conducive to the work of the learner as a member of a community.  It is not a matter of having one's house in order, but, rather, of departing altogether from the house, the home, the domos and the oikos.    

Taubes may be right in his reading of Paul as one who expresses the zealotry of a diasporic thinker, but against this we might read Paul as one who is calling together a community for the celebration of the mystery of faith, for a communal movement into the unknown.  Recognizing its past, yes.  But recognizing the present as a monumental break from that past. There is no return, and no desire to return to or seeking of a ‘homeland’.  In fact, no ‘home’ is desired or required once the community has been gathered again and again.   Perhaps this is why Agamben in his reading of Paul places so much emphasis on the messianic temporality, which is both the ‘time that remains’ and the ‘time that is to come’ and the ‘time that is arriving’.    To be with the messiah is to be with the one who has come, gone, returned and promises to return again…some day.    The work of the learning community is thus akin to the modality expressed in the celebration of the mystery of faith insofar as it dwells in a certain uncertain time that privileges neither the past, present or future, and thereby recognizes the fundamental ontology of this temporality as arranging the ‘excessive.’    “In the beyond that always ex-ceeds, and thereby de-constructs the totalizing project, we witness the constant, imminent arrival of the futural, the ‘not yet,’ the free that dwells in the ek-static.”(BL 311)

The critique returns me to my discordant Socrates, the one whose unease is not unlike the ever stirring temperamental Paul.    Both figures enable me to describe the thinker as the polemical persona, or even what Foucault has described as the parrhessiast.  What is defining about them is their dogged commitment to question, and to convey their questioning as the force of dynamis.   Against the sophist claim that ‘man is the measure of all things,’ Socrates responded that the human is wise only insofar as they confess they ignorance and are thereby moved by a desire to be moved by thinking.   What man can measure is only ever what he has made under the guidance of a pre-existing rule.    Perhaps this is what is meant by the technē?  But perhaps there was already a sense of the experimental, and technē was not always working from but working out?  And perhaps, if we read carefully what Plato tells us about Socrates and his muse -- the one who instructed him again and again to ‘make music’ --  we can recall Socrates as the one who revisited his understanding of this command, such that in his last days of his life, in prison, he took up another kind of art making, and experimented with another kind of music making.   He was always guided by his perplexity  --  expressed in his maxim “all I know is that I know nothing at all --  and he was always working from or working out of this existential place of perplexity.   And he was also being worked on by the calling of his muse, by the call of the holy.   He was  called from himself.

 And this brings me to that place where the meditation from 12/15/04 concludes: “The outcome is, precisely, the life of contradiction endured by the split/plural ‘self,’ a life lived ‘under’ the principle of anarchy that seized us out of the ‘normal’ patterns of linear time.  To live under the ‘one truth of ignorance’ is to be seized into the immeasurable domain beyond the ‘rational.’  Here, in the encounter with the sublime, the imaginative is unleashed, unbounded, and released.  Here, the learner as artist dwells with the ek-static, the dynamic continuum: ecstasia, insania, insanity, madness, frenzy, rapture; mania; excess; inspiration.”(BL 313)