OPM 256(257), October 29th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, p. 256

I started this day of work with anticipatory thoughts towards tomorrow’s classes, the early one that will continue with DuBois, and the later ones that will take up Paul’s Epistles.   I was wondering about the move into Paul, something I’ve been anticipating since my Heraclitus lecture when I learned that koinonia was used by him to describe the fellowship of the congregation celebrating the arrival of the Holy Spirit that gathers them into one body.  And I was wondering what kind of writing I would have my students do in response to Paul.  I considered the option of assigning an exegetical interpretation, but to do that properly requires some training, which I’m not prepared to do.  I suppose I could have them do a watered down version?  At any rate, I’m sharing this because in my exploration of exegesis I learned of a kind interpretation that I had never heard of before: eisegesis. 

Dismissed by at least one rather conservative writer as the work of one under ‘demonic influence,’ eisegesis is defined generically as “An interpretation, especially of Scripture, that reflects the personal ideas or viewpoint of the interpreter; reading something into a text that isn't there.”  Now, in a flippant mood I might accuse the hermeneutical Heidegger of eisegesis, especially when it is undertaken under ‘demonic influence’!  There are certainly a number of critics that would applaud that kind of criticism!!  Hablando en serio, as my father would say, there is some plausibility to the criticism that Heidegger’s hermeneutics was a kind of eisegesis.  Castoriadis would concur, or so it seems.   I say all this because I must confess to being guilty of the sin of eisegesis!  And here I have been influenced by the infamous Nietzsche, specifically his Birth of Tragedy.  

I have written on the lasting influence that Ewert Cousins has had on me (OPM117 June 10th Meditation), but even that commentary, which writes of learning the practice of echumenicalism via inter-religious dialogue from Cousins, is an example of eisegesis!  I’m experiencing the effect of an Ah Ha! Moment that feels almost epiphanic.   Eisegesis indeed!!

The question raised in the meditation from this day a decade ago is attuned to the phenomenology of place happening this week in my classes.   Yesterday in our discussion of DuBois we mapped the place of thinking in the location behind the veil where double-consciousness arises.  We conjectured that when Heidegger insists that “most thought-provoking is that we are not yet thinking” he, like Irigaray, who calls for us to invent a new logic, he was pointing to an unknown location…unknown to him but not to us.  Here is where I would make a move to the huacaslogical announced in my Lapiz paper, but this is not the moment to rehearse those claims.  On 10/29/04 the mapping of this place initiates the meditation which begins in media res: “We stand before this gap as before the boundless and are unbound.  Learning unfolds in this standing that is properly understood as a movement, a position that is taken.”(BL 256)  Taken as in seized, occupied by the learning community.   But what of this position as “before the Open”?(BL 256)  Isn’t the Open that darkness of space that surrounds (thorn encircling the heart) and grants the appearance of the learning community’s dialogic movement?   While not teleological there is a movement happening that is one of growth (upward, downward, outward).  This is not an aporetic event but one that is quintessentially poretic.  The learning community gracefully moves through the Open.  Perhaps the position identified here is that place of apatheia, the threshold where the initiates dwells before crossing-over into the Open?

Eisegesis under the incluence of Cousinesque inter-religious dialogic reading:  the appropropriation of the ‘The Hidden Agni’ from the Rig Veda:  “For the waves of truth, the refreshing foods, have always clung to the well-born child for reward.”(cited on 10/29/04 BL 256)  Further eisegesis: “…because you are children…”(Paul, Galatians)

Paul’s epistle to the Galatians pushes me to think the location of learning…still a moving location [collision zone, cf. Lapiz]…as not only a place of faith [the place from which the Kierkegaardian leap is made], but the place outside of the law.  In his book on Paul, The Time That Remains, Agamben sites this place as messianic deactivation of the law: kartargēsis.  Much more to be done on this ‘state’ [place] of exception, but I’m very intrigued by this location as akin to the third that DuBois identifies when he says that it is neither through industry (economy/free market Capitalism), nor through law, but, rather, through education, specifically the liberal arts, that the ongoing movement of emancipation must happen. [Liberal Arts…needs to be broadly conceived as a generic category…indeed, DuBois’ project, specifically The Souls of Black Folk, is an exemplar of what I call originary thinking/writing, breaking free within that state of exception…where the Sorrow Songs (the blues/spirituals) represent the greatest gift of African Americans to human history…and thus must be taken up, studied and learned: “This excess, the appearance and arrival of the ‘not yet’ that arrives  with the echo of the futural…the venturesome whose chanting conveys the movement of Being’s essential sway.  Moving through the congregation on the evening of the copper colored eclipse…the essential sway is welcomed into the company of the learners who sing with songs, improvisational; and, spontaneously dance in the cool, crisp and clear evening…rhythms…beat steadily with the syncopation of ek-static temporality.”{10/29/04 BL 256}).   This offering of the blues is returned by one who has demonstrated the incomparable force of faith. “The position of the learner, the one standing before the Open, is the situation of this one who stands at the water’s edge and is taken by the ocean…”[cf. the conclusion of DuBois’ “On the Coming of John”]  “The position of the learner, the one who is standing before the Open, is the situation of this one who is seized and taken away, into the strange-land…In this seizure the stranger appears as the learner.”(10/29/04 BL 256)