the yüng stoic @theyungstoic-blog - Tumblr Blog

camisodo-deactivated20150320

*does laundry but like in a punk way*

subtleseas

hashtagloveloses

*does laundry but in a musical theatre way*

caiju

*does musical theatre but in a punk way*

faeriviera

*does punk but in a musical theatre way*

dragon-in-a-fez

*does musical theater but in a laundry way*

christenisnotsocial-blog

this is my favorite post

yourenotbeneaththis

i can’t not re blog this

winterfellharington

Just BEND THE KNEE to start the work. 😁😂😅

theyungstoic-blog

armie hammer is sassy

theyungstoic-blog

never mind

armie hammer is sassy

#armie hammer #why do i know so much about his sexual preferences #anyway

stormborntargaryen

darlingofthewesterlands

elfogadunk

RL Jaime and Brienne (x)

elizadusku-archive

bnsolo

Let 👏 Nikolaj 👏 save 👏 Jaime’s 👏 redemption 👏 arc 👏

suburbanidiocies

On Transgression

That we went too far at some point along the way is a general consensus. We are living in the after effects of one wrong turn or another. Perhaps it was the victory of neoliberalism in the 80s (or was it earlier?). Maybe, if one is inclined another way, it was the counterculture of the 60s. Either unashamed money making or ecstatic pleasure, or both together, have become hegemonic, Mammon and Dionysus entwined in a fatal chain that encompasses the world. But this may be optimistically making our woes of a too recent origin. We must look further. Present day realities may be mere symptoms of something more fundamentally awry with modernity. Maybe we took a turn for the worse with the Industrial Revolution, or the birth of capitalism, or the conquest of the Americas. Those not interested in these “materialistic” explanations say it was the humanism of the Enlightenment that turned us for the worse. Others, more consistent, prefer to blame the Reformation. More subtly still, perhaps the wheels of the Satanic mills were set in motion when late medieval Catholic theologians elided the distinction between the divine subsistance of God and the common Being of all creatures. Or maybe Aquinas himself was already too corrupted by ontotheology. But this perhaps gives too much credit to the intellectuals. Going back further, the corruption may have came in with Constantine and the marriage of the religion of Jesus with the wickedness of temporal power. But then again, perhaps the pagans have been right all along. Maybe it was Christianity which poisoned the well of the shining spirit of antiquity; perhaps the Roman Empire really was rotted from within by a mystery cult from the East that scorned the accumulated wisdom of millennia. Bolder speculators go further and following Nietzsche and Heidegger find the great detorunment occurred even earlier with the advent of Plato and his cold, rationalistic gaze that slew the Homeric/Pre-Socratic spirit. But this is still only to restrain ourselves to the ambit of what is still called Western civilization. To find what actually went wrong, we may have to go deeper still. Perhaps it was when the starry gods were taken down from the sky, their motions transformed into mystifying tales of murder and rape. Or maybe it was when the first principle of all things was lost in all too human, and all too bestial, pantheons, becoming an invisible prisoner in the house that it itself had made. Perhaps it was the invention of war. Or patriarchy. Or agriculture. Maybe, as Rousseau thought, the source of all our later unhappiness was the moment a human being imposed the distinction between “mine” and “yours” on the universal commons of nature. But all this had to do with language and institutions, when the real guilt may lie deeper still in our very physiology. Maybe some basic desire, some primal hunger, betrayed us in the infancy of our kind. Perhaps the road to planetary death began the moment some early hominids tasted meat and liked it. Less savory theories along these lines could be proposed

One can go on and on. It was the man, it was the woman, it was the serpent. And where did he come from? Each wound reveals another wound, each stumble a new limit, until one arrives at the conclusion that our birth was our death. Creation itself was the original disaster; we are but insects living on the corpse of an aborted world.

Sensing perhaps the ever present possibility of such a regression into Gnosticism, certain theologians preempted the line of speculation by making the Fall itself, in some sense, a blessed occasion.The mysterium iniquitatis was supplemented by an intuition of a mystery of a higher order. The necessary imperfection of whatever is finite and material in relation to its origin had to be turned from a weakness into a potential strength. Not in the sense that that we must sin that grace may more abound, but in the sense that from the recollecting perspective of the redeemed life “ all things work together for good to them that love God.” On the day we sinned, our eyes were indeed opened, for better as well as for worse. The desire to be like gods that began in an error was indeed answered after the long pilgrimage of the centuries.The founding disaster of Genesis was the precondition for the glory of the Gospel where humanity was joined in the divinity that died and rose again. The loss of the simplicity of the garden is redeemed with the building up of the great city of Yahweh-Shammah, the New Jerusalem, with its twelve gates opened in all directions to the ingress of the nations. Nothing evil, then, not even the archetype of all later sins, is permitted to exist without reason. And so the line O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem was incorporated into the liturgy, chanted every year with the rest of the Exsultet to accompany the lighting of the Paschal candle.

Or, as the old hymn went:

Blessed be the time

That apple taken was,

Therefore we moun singen.

Deo gratias!

***

Into the thick of such matters Angela Nagle comes with her notions of transgression and virtue. Like most of us, she fights a battle on two fronts. On the one hand she wants to attack the alt right. At the same time she wants to combat a tendency to the left which has, in her account, prepared the way for a resurgent reaction. The love of revolt for the sake of revolting embraced by liberalism and leftwing radicals has become the occasion as well as the inspiration for the creation of a rancid fascism no longer held back by traditionalist scruples or bourgeois respectability. Just as viruses become, with time, stronger as a result of antibiotics , the far right was emboldened by the cultural prescriptions that was meant to destroy it for good.The Left called forth beasts from the deep, and they came, but, as devils are wont, not in the way expected.

There is a correct intuition in this narrative that should be acknowledged from the get go. Everything else being equal, a plenitude of norms restrain the powerful who find in such circumstances their ability to abuse others frustrated, while a lack of such norms tends to put those with the least ability to defend themselves at a disadvantage. Further, reason finds in the universality of the law the expression a general duty which levels all distinctions of class, sex, and nation. The war of all against all is the the realm of fatal competition while the kingdom of right is the domain of peace. As Lacordaire eloquently said:

Learn, then, those who know it not; learn, enemies of God and of the human race, whatever name they bear, that between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the servant, it is liberty that oppresses, and law that gives freedom.

It is not sufficient, however, to say the law in the abstract is good and trangression is bad. One must ask: Whose law? Which transgression? Who stands to gain? Regarding these questions Nagle remains vague and tries to combine lot of disparate movements together in a manner that confuses clear judgement.

To the extent that society is socially segmented, transgression has a class content, not to mention a racial and gendered meaning as well. There is a difference between a revolt of the peasants and a revolt of the lords, between the thefts of proletarians and those of bankers, between African Americans or women breaking the law to gain the vote and Klansmen doing the same to intimidate the alien in their midst. Does this mean that violation of norms is always right as long as one is “kicking up”? Not at all. The Kishinev pogrom and Gordon Riots were not justified because many of the participants in each event were plebeians. Justice demands more than simply applying an arithmetic of privileges to every political incident or moral problem. But the real inequality of conditions does mean that one should take into consideration the social position of the trangressors in each individual case, and exercise forbearance accordingly.

Nagle rightly wishes to combat the influence of Nietzsche, which is indeed has managed to find all too eager reception on both segments of the left and the right. While his urge to transgression is perhaps more complicated than Nagle model seems to allow, it is true that his celebration of the will in the power is a powerful alibi for mere abuse and irrationalism in practice as well as theory. But she seems willing to buy into the Nietzchean narrative when it comes to the description of the Tumblr liberalism that allegedly provoked the rise of the alt right. Nietzsche blames the Judaic ressentiment of the slaves for the destruction of the free spirited culture of antiquity, and justifies his own aspiration for a new aristocratic transvaluation of culture by decrying the mediocrity and revengeful herd morality of modern society. Similarly, Nagle locates the origin of the counter-revolution of the alt right in the excesses of radicals and liberals themselves, in their culture of vindictiveness,petty spite, and “virtue signaling”. In one essay, she approvingly quotes Nietzche’s cynical inversion of Luke: “ He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.” In addition, her sympathy for Mark Fisher’s Vampire Castle thesis makes this connection to a Nietzchean critique of democratic culture explicit. Such a kinship doesn’t in and of itself make her words invalid. But it certainly creates an unaddressed tension between her stated distaste for the tradition of transgression and the critique of contemporary liberalism/leftwing radicalism she wishes to level. She wants to condemn the Nietzchean/Sadean strain of modernity, but she also wants to take as her own its critique of virtue as a mere mask for the will to power. Nagle thus has none of the same dialectical self awareness that motivated Adorno to say: “It is the fact that Sade did not leave it to its enemies to be horrified by the Enlightenment which makes his work pivotal to its rescue.” Whether this is the correct attitude one should take towards the “dark writers of the bourgeoisie” is a different question. But it is a more intellectually honest position than the tack that Nagle is taking.

There are moments when people break rules just for the frisson of disobedience, Augustine stealing peers being the canonical example in the philosophical tradition. Most trespasses against the law, however, are done for some good or another, albeit in an often misdirected way. There are, for example transgressions done for straightforward aims like power, glory, or pleasure. But then then there are transgressions done in enforcement of the principle of law itself. Obedience to mores themselves can become an excuse for perversion. The “cucked” weakness of authority is corrected through an obscene demonstration of strength.Self-righteousness, contempt for one’s own failings,a desire to scapegoat,and a rage at disgraced resented fathers combine into a deadly form of jouissance in the service of reestablishing through transgression the terror of certain social taboos amid the general social entropy. But Nagle, since she is fixated by the defiantly antinomian cruelty of Sade’s stories, does not consider scenarios in which law can itself become an accessory for pleasure. Perhaps she doesn’t wish to contemplate the possibility that her own appeal for a more moral politics can turn into its opposite. Unlike Adorno, she doesn’t sense the similarity between Nietzche’s fantasy of the Overman and the nobility of the categorical imperative. Or perhaps she wishes to avoid engaging with the rather strident moral claims made by many alt-righters themselves which constitutes the positive side, so to speak, of their penchant for nihilistic humor. Nagle may find it easier to defend her own attempt at a third way in the discourse by saying that she opposed to the glorification of transgression by the left and the right alike, when in reality breaking rules may not be the most distinguishing feature of any significant contemporary movement.

This is in part why trying to tie the alt-right to the carnivalesque as theorized by Bakhtin is insufficient. There certainly an element of that quality among many present day fascists that deserves analysis, but that element is certainly not unique to them. What makes the alt-right the alt-right is the specific political meaning it gives to the nonsensical and sarcastic sensibility of contemporary culture. Further, as with other political persuasions, the mask of irony and absurdism among internet Nazis can hide a fatal earnestness. To assume that it is Kek all the way down both underestimates the problem and also cedes to the fascists’ self description as being at bottom cool, calm, and above it all.

What Nagle is trying to do here is comparable to the common ideological trick of eliding the difference between 20th century actually existing socialism and fascism. What is called Stalinism and Nazism represent two ideologically movements with distinct principles, aims, and social content. They should each be handled on the basis of their individual merits (or lack thereof). This doesn’t mean that the two can never combine,since the case of National Bolshevism shows that is a quite real possibility. Nor does this mean that the series of Events set off by 1917 is above all censure. Rather, it means the synthesis should be called out as its own movement, while the two opposing systems should not be indiscriminately dumped into a common bucket of shame labelled totalitarianism or what have you. A similar approach must be had when dealing with post 60s liberalism/SJWs/pomos and the alt right. In a world where “all things…permeate and respond to each other,” finding similarities, while never trivial, is fairly easy to do. It is the decisive differences which are often more telling. Above all, while the work of genealogy is important, responsibility must ultimately adjudicated based on individual faults, not intellectual paternity. On this point one cannot improve on the curtness of the prophet: Everyone will die for their own sin.

It is true that the “the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression” makes it insufficient as a basis for any sort of livable rule of life, let alone politics. But by the same token, this lack of determination in the matter of the object makes the general condemnation of transgression equally inadequate. Nagle gestures towards a form of neopuritanism without a God that would, in theory, avoid the extremes of the alt right or the Tumblr left. But this devotion to the Law often seems to be little more than a shadow, a mere abstract negation that has no independent content of its own.

In fairness, there are faint suggestions here and there of what a concrete standard is at play in this argument. Nagle does say at one point: “for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one.” This seems to posit some positive standard (namely equality) by which to judge the violation of norms. But since all of the leftwing transgressive tendencies she lists are done in the name of equality,it unclear how the same value by itself can be invoked as restraint on what has happened since the 60s. For that matter, all the modern revolutions that invoked egalitarianism have involved the breaking of rules of one sort or another. How are we to distinguish between what is good and what is suspect in such movements if we are to avoid giving undue praise to transgression ? Greater clarity is needed from Nagle on this point.

We come to the most concrete definition of what Nagle is attacking when she defines transgression as a Sadean “devaluing of the procreative female body.” There are certainly is a broad vaguely “counter-cultural” tendency to denigrate biological reproduction and woman’s role in the propagation of the species. Hence the appeal of eugenics, population control, and transhumanism among a wide variety of constituencies. But the generality of Nagle’s words leaves unanswered important questions: What shall we do with all the desires which escape realization in procreation? Are merely having such inclinations misogynistic? Or is Nagle only concerned about certain expressions of nonreproductive desire ? And if so which ones and why? Nagle doesn’t address any of these concerns. She only hints at what proper sexual morality would be as a way of shaming all her intended targets, without getting into potentially controversial details about what she means.

In the end, It is fitting than, that she openly draws upon Christopher Lasch, who took from Christianity primarily the weight of Original Sin, not the hope of the Resurrection. She can posit only the sin (rather hazily defined) and the Law (also vaguely sketched out). Prohibition in denial about pleasure and revolt without a telos are fated to meet each other constantly in an endless futile combat. A third term is needed if liberty is to be achieved

***

Moving away from the cold cruelty of the aristocratic Sade, the tragically ferbile pretensions to elite status of Nietzsche, and the defiantly petite bourgeois pessimism of Lasch, we arrive at Plato who combined the virtues and the critique of his own class into a compelling, and enduring, whole. Disillusioned with the divinely sanctioned hubris and lust of the society which he imbued from his birth onward, he nevertheless did not fail to find in his surroundings fragments of a better world. The toxic environment upheld by the mythological sensibility, the admiration for martial prowess, and, infamously, the idealization of paiderastia was subverted by the quiet sober work of the dialectic, represented by the ugly and plebeian Socrates. But simultaneously these same overcome elements were turned into motifs of a new music of the spirit. The Olympian myths were remade into philosophical visions, the Homeric agon was reimagined as the encounter of minds in dialogue, and the predatory erastes/eromenos hierarchy (”as wolves loves lambs, so lovers love their loves”)was refashioned into a friendship for eternity,each partner simultaneously master of themselves and a holy force spurring the other to join in the procession of the gods.

One of several clues to this transmutation of the themes from the dominant culture into the work of philosophy lies in Plato’s defense of madness (mania) in the Phaedrus. The first two speeches of the dialogue defend the notion that the non-lover is better than the lover, because the former is not prejudiced by passion, consumed by jealousy, inclined to take advantage of his partner, etc. Such an inversion of the commonplace on the surface would seem to fit Plato’s preference for the authority of reason over the caprices of passion. Plato even seems early on to suggest such a conclusion by invoking the story of the carrying off of Orithyia by Boreas, which is certainly not a model of companionship worth emulating however much it seems to interest Phaedrus. But ultimately Socrates decides such a condemnation of eros is a false, even impious, paradox. Certain forms of madness are gifts from the gods, and the ecstasy of love is one such insanity. What drives one to cross limits is not simply a curse but a necessary element of the motion of our souls. What is in us that longs to be seized is not simply a temptation to mere subordination but is the desire for the genuine emancipation of consciousness from itself.These contradictory impulses are not to be denied but, through the encounter with the lover/beloved and the self control of the individual soul, integrated into one personhood oriented towards what is truly real. Death and seduction must be risked in order to be transcended. The wise man, the just man, is one who has assimilated the possibility of transgression into the pattern of his life. A state of constant sober madness become the homeland in which one lives and moves in freedom.

Amidst the amorous and pastoral setting haunted by the ghosts of past violence grows the chaste agnus castus, providing shade for all who choose to lie beneath it.

***

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! said St. Augustine of Hippo, juxtaposing all the wasted years with the light of the Gospel that he had found. And so do many of us when an epiphany, a true Event, occurs. We regret the thoughtlessness, the betrayals, the aimless wanderings, by which we have put off the demands of the truth.

But if we would be more merciful to ourselves,and more honest about how the process of illumination takes place here below, we would sympathetically read all our errors as prologues to what we now know. Every proposition and every action captures a partial truth. And it seems that in order every one to have a role to play in the ceremony, many exaggerations, comic as well as tragic, farcical as well as oracular, are permitted to exist for the upbuilding or correction of all who have eyes to see and ears to hear. If we have been wrong, then we can take solace in the knowledge that we were always inspired fools who didn’t know just how truly we spoke. Nor can we be ashamed of the original twist given to newly discovered by the accumulated weight of our old habits. Happy are they who have never had occasion to falter,but happy too are those who know the alchemy of turning vices into virtues. The light becomes all the more splendid through the play of chiaroscuro that is permitted to glorify the advent of divinity. In this way, all add their own irreplaceable imago to the collage of humanity as it is assembled into a bifurcated order that we only dimly intuit through the sense of faith and the speculations of reason.

As St. Francis de Sales said in a passing analogy.

The scorpion who stings us is venomous, but when his oil has been distilled, it is the best remedy for his bite;

my GoT ships :

Sansa:

Sansa x Tyrion

Sansa x Podrick

Sansa x Jon

Sansa x Missandei

2. Arya

Arya x Yara

Arya x Gendry

Arya x Missandei