Goethe's Fist

Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.

[cruciform-solidarity]

For the deportee, death ‘martyrdom’ is immediate, but for the prisoner there is an interval ‘which permits the taking up of an attitude to pain before being seized and torn by it’. The theme of the interval as a space for ‘meditation’ both spiritual and philosophical becomes central to Levinas’s thinking in and after the Stalag. He later described the captivity itself in terms of an interval between the intimations of National Socialism in the 1930s and the mourning of its murderous course after the war. The interval is a space of horror and anguish, but it also sustains the frail possibility of escape or survival.

Howard Caygill, ‘Levinas’s Prison Notebooks’  (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

For the deportee, death ‘martyrdom’ is immediate, but for the prisoner there is an interval ‘which permits the taking up of an attitude to pain before being seized and torn by it’. The theme of the interval as a space for ‘meditation’ both spiritual and philosophical becomes central to Levinas’s thinking in and after the Stalag. He later described the captivity itself in terms of an interval between the intimations of National Socialism in the 1930s and the mourning of its murderous course after the war. The interval is a space of horror and anguish, but it also sustains the frail possibility of escape or survival.

Howard Caygill, ‘Levinas’s Prison Notebooks’  (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

Power in the sense of ability to act or potentiality is the daughter of pain. The creature, as witnessed to most obviously for human beings in the human creature, is able to turn the immeasurability of pain into a source of immeasurable charity and grace. Pain becomes a means of grace, but not a means that comes from the outside of the creature, but an immanent means to the suffering flesh. The immeasurable of charity shares in the immeasurability of pain, for both are that which measures.

Anthony Paul Smith, A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

In his early writings, Gershom Scholem speculates on the condition of pain as the true bedrock of meaning; he sees the origin of human language in kinah, Hebrew for ‘lamentation.’

Agata Bielik-Robson, ‘The Unfallen Silence: Kinah and the Other Origin of Language’  (via spiritandteeth)

[anorganisch-deactivated20171123]

The voice, as active hearing, is the pure self positing itself as universal, expressing pain, desire, joy, contentment. Every animal suffering violent death has a voice, and thereby declares its own supersession. In voice, sense returns to inwardness and is negative self or desire – the feeling of its insubstantial nature as mere space, whereas the senses are saturated, filled space.

G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, §358, Zusatz. (via mir-nicht)

[lhommedesmers]

I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable is the element I breathe. I have shut myself up in a room, alone, there is no one in the house, almost no one outside, but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother it and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo.

Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence (L’Arrêt de Mort, 1948) Avoir perdu le silence, le regret que j’en éprouve est sans mesure. Je ne puis dire quel malheur envahit l’homme qui une fois a pris la parole. Malheur immobile, lui-même voué au mutisme; par lui, l’irrespirable est l’élément que je respire. Je me suis enfermé, seul, dans une chambre, et personne dans la maison, au-dehors presque personne, mais cette solitude elle-même s’est mise à parler, et à mon tour, de cette solitude qui parle, il faut que je parle, non par dérision, mais parce qu’au-dessus d’elle veille une plus grande qu’elle et au-dessus de celle-ci une plus grande encore, et chacune, recevant la parole afin de l’étouffer et de la taire, au lieu de cela la répercute à l’infini, et l’infini devient son écho. (via lhommedesmers)

[cruciform-solidarity]

…nothing accomplishes better than love the earnestness, the work, the patience, and the pain of the negative, precisely because only for love is it not a matter of the negative but of kenosis, of the self-emptying and the abandonment that is characteristic of its positive nature. Love hence has a full and entire right to resume charge of what philosophy, still without really knowing what it wants to say, has laid down for these fragile virtues.

Jean-Luc Marion, Believing in Order to See (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

A translation of Werner Hamacher’s essay “Andere Schmerzen,” which he was unable to complete before his death on July 7, 2017. The essay analyzes the connection between pain and language in the work of Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero, Seneca, Kant, Hegel, and Valéry.

[cruciform-solidarity]

The advance of Levinas’s formulation for ethics lies in the positing of a purely affective dimension of sensing that can be experienced as vulnerability: what is other than the self can affect the self through pain and wounding.

Edith Wyschogrod, ‘Does Continental Ethics Have a Future?’  (via spiritandteeth)

[miradeboose]

[cinemaru]

Ivan’s Childhood (1962) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky

[cruciform-solidarity]

A translation of Werner Hamacher’s essay “Andere Schmerzen,” which he was unable to complete before his death on July 7, 2017. The essay analyzes the connection between pain and language in the work of Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero, Seneca, Kant, Hegel, and Valéry.

[cruciform-solidarity]

A translation of Werner Hamacher’s essay “Andere Schmerzen,” which he was unable to complete before his death on July 7, 2017. The essay analyzes the connection between pain and language in the work of Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero, Seneca, Kant, Hegel, and Valéry.

[cruciform-solidarity]

Even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible.

Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (via spiritandteeth)

[cruciform-solidarity]

…we may have responsibilities for which we must consent to death.

Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other (via spiritandteeth)

[rcairns]

Rebecca Cairns

[enmiljontystnader]