the trees wait to be taken

a well-meaning msa uncle once told me to watch out for the faculty of arts, “because they are materialists.” and he didn’t mean historical materialists. today, amazon sent me a list of books it wanted to push on me, based on prior purchases or ratings. and, entirely unselfconsciously i’m sure, it is recommending me the god delusion, god is not great: how religion poisons everything, and the selfish gene, because i once noted that i owned the communist manifesto and the genealogy of morals. and: it’s no wonder msa uncles think suchlike, if dawkins et al are positioning themselves as the heirs of nietzsche and marx.

the semester officially finished last friday. i somehow still have two essays to write. 1) levinas on responsibility to the Other (need to figure out where i’m going with that) and 2) the slippage between definitions of metonymy (part for whole, cause for effect) as understood through augustine’s confessions. metonymy is the tropological correlative to the incarnation as outlined in a soteriological metaphysics, except that the part/whole distinctions don’t maintain themselves among the persons of the godhead; likewise, metonymy (well, metonymic displacement) is both the cause for augustine’s conversion (him interpellating tolle lege) and acts to contain it in the text of his confessions.

in other news, i discovered abebooks.com yesterday. cheap used books from around the world.

my abilities to live are undoing themselves as i get older. as metonym: the final days of last semester saw me living in front of a computer screen, reading as i typed, producing 80-some pages over those three weeks and forgetting to eat, sleep. i told myself the next few months would be different. i have excuses, many specific, particular, and actually substantial reasons i can use to explain why instead it grew worse, much. but the reasons are coextensive with your regard, and once you turn away they shudder from the effort to adhere.

a few dozen more pages and then onward, onward to the horizon of emancipation. ha, auto-irony.

here the tired begins once more. once more because to speak of beginnings after entrance into past present, present present, future present is itself an echo (and) loaded with nostalgia.

last push to the end. a first push, ironically, to an end. am looking forward to writing (some of) these essays.

and then summer. work, outside / outsideprojects and editing ; perhaps some days in southern alberta in early may ; two summer courses to get requirements out of the way so i can take classes i want next year ; perhaps a BC trip to bridge jerusalem and rome ; a wedding in saskatchewan in mid-june ; hopefully a couple of canoe trips ; much reading.

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i’ve been following a recent exchange at the immanent frame (”live theory”, ha). in the “is critique secular” series, see gourgouris’ response filed as “de-transcendentalizing the secular“, and saba mahmood’s incisive and rather brilliant rebuttal. gourgouris’ professed project is examining the ways secularism can work against empire (in tension with, or at least as distinct from, wendy brown’s exploration of secularism as an instrument of empire). as his argument plays out, however, it becomes clear that his conception of “empire” is perhaps itself problematic. one of the more troubling sections of his post is where he comments “the structural link between european conservative political theology and post-colonial anti-secularism makes for strange encounters.” the two thinkers he focusses on as presumably identified with the post-colonial anti-secularists are talal asad and saba mahmood. you can probably guess how i feel about that. further, his claims to an “anti-imperialist” project are severely undermined by the framework through which he operates - in which, for example, the question of whether critique is secular warrants a yes or no response, and where identifications of anti-secularists and pro-secularists are viable and, not only that, politically desirable directions for discourse - that itself, i would argue, contributes to a moralistic political/discursive culture. anyway, read mahmood’s response - she refuses to accept his political categories or, and this is key, their epistemological corollaries. reading such an response was also useful in suggesting ways i myself might respond.

While it is clear that the genealogy of critique is complicated, the thread we wanted to pull involved rethinking some of the underlying assumptions about history, temporality, causality, and ethics as they have become enshrined in regnant conceptions of critique. Insomuch as the tradition of critical theory is infused with a suspicion, if not dismissal, of religion’s metaphysical and epistemological commitments, we wanted to think “critically” about this dismissal: how are epistemology and critique related within this tradition? Do distinct traditions of critique require a particular epistemology and ontological presuppositions of the subject? How might we rethink the dominant conception of time—as empty, homogenous and unbounded, one so germane to our conception of history—in light of other ways of relating to and experiencing time that also suffuse modern life? How do these other ways of inhabiting time complicate the rigid opposition between secular and sacred time so common to everyday practices of modern life? A final set of questions revolve around various disciplines of subjectivity through which a particular subject of critique is secured. What are some of the practices of self-cultivation—including practices of reading, contemplation, engagement, and sociality—internal to secular conceptions of critique? What is the morphology of these practices and how do these sit with (or differ from) other practices of ethical self-cultivation that might uphold contrastive notions of critique and criticism?

Given the nature of these questions, it must be clear that we were not looking for a “yes” or a “no” answer to our question “Is Critique Secular”.

basically, i love the SSRC blog. have learned a lot there.

quite aside from the argument advanced in his post, i found disturbing the connexion drawn between political and religious conservatisms, on the one hand, and “anti-secularism” (whatever that would mean, today), on the other. i found it unsettling because i am quite aware that my interest in the study of religion, history, and politics (though perhaps not literature) is partially motivated by a reactionary impulse against triumphalist metanarratives and specifically those of high modernism (progress, secularism, development, vulgar materialism, et cetera). how this my reaction translates into the politics of religion and the practice of politics, however, often shifts under my feet. i would not, then, choose to attribute an interest in the postmodern turn toward religion (call it what you will: religion without religion, a poetics of obligation, the materiality of the letter) to a need to “defend” or apologize, apo-legere, apo-logos -for. i think it is better cast in the terms of translation (not, of course, a way to best replicate meanings, but which is also a trans-formation and so is always both excessive and tenuous). “acts of religion”, yes, but also “acts of translation”.

i once read a review, i think it was in Muslim World Book Review, of a book which i think was by muhammad arkoun and was attempting to effect a specific political project precisely through “translation” - between sexy french theory (”post-structuralist” & otherwise) and the imaginaries of classical islamic (legal?) thought. the author, wrote the reviewer, was clearly well-versed with heidegger and gadamer, but didn’t know the islamic intellectual tradition quite as well as he thought. it was a keen-edged review.

i really, really do not want to have such judgments apply to me.

(of course, there’s little chance of that now, either, given that i’m not well-versed with heidegger & gadamer.) (that was a joke.)

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or, as dan would say, “it must be nice to have the time to read these things.”

more links to come.

did i mention i need to get back to work? oh look, it’s after 3am.

me: the headlights on the car actually flicker, they go on and off arbitrarily
brent: they say that faith is like the headlights you see by
me: so what’re you trying to say
brent: that your faith is like flickering headlights

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while referencing the hadith in which the prophet^s clarifies that ‘trusting in god’ (poor translation of tawakkul) means neither quietism nor self-sufficiency, implying a median position between/including both agency and divine command: “tether your camel (ie. do not leave it to wander) and then trust in god (that it will not wander)” -

phuppo: …so my job is to tie my camel.
me: my job is to find my camel.

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one of the proseminars last semester focussed on the synoptic problem. we spent some time looking at jesus’ parables.

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i have maybe mentioned here before, the horror of closure.

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deconstruction advocates illiteracy.

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i guess i should be happy
just to be alive…
but we have poisoned everything
and oblivious to it all
the cell phone zombies babble
through the shopping malls
while condors fall from indian skies
whales beach and die in sand…

i think we can agree that civilizational thought is one of the more insidious and dangerous aspects of cultural apperception. we are familiar with inside/outside divisions, with exclusionary mechanisms, and can probably go further to say that undoing civilizational identification, as performed by huntington and lewis, is one of the more radical oppositions that should be targetted - to not only counter their theses but also to more closely engage with alterity and work in the world.

i find it easier to come up with arguments against speaking of “Western civilization” (with its stock genealogy, its supersessionist teleology, its development) than i do arguments against speaking of “islamic civilization”, if only because i do think there is something in the fact one could/can travel from the deserts of what is now western china to the shores of north africa and everywhere expect that meat is halal, that caravan serais / various awqaf would be available, that an adhan would be called prior to prayer, and so on. these were/are of course locally enacted, but i am uncomfortable reducing such basal aspects entirely to cultural practices - there is something more there that is indivisible from translations of islam as lived tradition. and this is why i think it is different from the case of “Western civilization”. i need to think about this more. the categories we have to even discuss these matters (between culture and civilization, worldview and cult) are extremely provincial, limited.

a question for comment, then. how does ummah play into this? i’m looking to explore its conceptual positioning viz. civilization and culture, islamic civilization and islamic culture, not necessarily looking for a positive definition (though one would be welcome). i’ve heard it interpreted as “moral community”, with which i strongly disagree, and as “worldwide body of muslims”, which is quite minimal. to begin, maybe nuance the following: provisionally, “ummah” describes the relatedness of those who profess the shahadah, to the exclusion of those who do not; it is a relation characterized in the terms of kinship that emerges from the spiritual anthropology of islam; it organizes, according to qur’anic/prophetic traditions, social relations and ethical obligations among muslims (e.g., ‘verily, the muslims are brethren’) and generally toward all humanity (e.g., ‘the muslim is one from whom her neighbour is secure’; ‘none of you have entered iman until you love for your brother what you love for yourself’).

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also, by way of farooq: edward said “laying the smackdown” on lewis (and armstrong).

ira cohen, apr17th, 2003, “some lines written on a cold day on 113th & broadway to the iraqi people”:

i am ashamed to be an american
when i think of the blood
spilled in the nights of depleted
uranium bombs which still
pollute your reticent eyes
drowning in disbelief of destiny’s mocking laughter
your culture from the very cradle
of time lies shipwrecked in
deserts devoid of seeds while
poisonous gases of a dead future
blow away the last remnants of
hammurabi’s dream
the gold harp will not sound
& even your organ harvest
will plummet in the teeth of
democracy’s eternal hunger -
now in the name of the lord
americans will celebrate the
easter bunny & prepare to eat pig

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it is five years this week.

all i remember about those days is the dull fear which set in. i was supposed to be working on high school courses but they faded in the face of this fear that undercut everything else. the one president issued an “ultimatum” to the other, a set deadline and consequences outlined. this, after how many such deadlines and ultimatums had already been met, the most humiliating terms agreed to. hindsight revealing these as manipulations, maneuverings toward apocalypse. and then the last date set: so-and-so many hours before the first bombs were to fall, the first cruise missiles and daisy-cutters and bunker-busters sulphur-bombs cluster-bombs tomahawks and b-52 aircraft were to move in, pincers for the kill. i spent those hours listless, drifting from one thing to the next, watching news sites and waiting for news updates, hoping against all hope, a cold dread underlying everything, a terror that refused to abate, that grew as the hours passed - an anticipatory fear, breath that would catch in my throat. because we knew, we could not but know, that the next hours would bring horrors, would bring pains we could not feel, would mean such destruction for so many lives, for lives not our own. and - as though we were shouting into a void, we were screaming, begging, that - there is so much pain already in the world. why- why add to it, why add to it the cries of so many. so soon after the debacles of afghanistan, the isolation imposed and that darkness gathered. how is this possible, we all, billions of us, human beings, watching this unfold

and damn you, mister bush. damn you and all those who smile, who continue to smile, at this carnage. damn you, and damn you, at the last, for not facing those millions of human beings who curse you before they sleep at night, for every afghan and iraqi and american into whose life you tore.

it is five years this week, since that searing fear.

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uranium dust and the smell of decay
sewage in the street where the kids run and pay
not enough morphine and not enough gauze
firefight in darkness like snapping of jaws

carbombed and carjacked and kidnapped and shot
how do you like it, this freedom we brought?

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and this becomes a point for reflexion on the failure of people to stop this from happening. i do believe, and i think i have always believed, at least so far as i can remember, in a form of negative responsibility - of layers of collective implication that nothing can expunge. rage arises, arendt says, “only when there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not.” because yes, things could have been different / they can be different. and the antiwar movement, the movement that mobilized millions of people across the globe, that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets of berlin, and santiago, and montreal, and london, and singapore, and karachi, in a historically unprecedented global “movement” (because i do not think there is a better word for it), ultimately failed.
why did it fail? there were other, smaller victories, of course, and aspects i do not want to discount - communities were built through these movements, some horizons shifted, certain governments were kept from joining the war effort. but the invasion occurred largely as planned and, except for the occasional hiccup (as at fallujah), met from little effective resistance in its initial phases.
why the antiwar movement failed in what it set out to do, i believe, has to do with a basic naivite regarding the ways in which the modern state exercises its power - a failure to recognize the ways in which modern institutions associated with the state shape the forms possible for life, how all our acts, now, are effectively regulated by the state. it is this, i think, that neutralized the supposed “radicality” of the stock of mechanisms for resistance that we were to draw upon, imaginative strategies largely based on the peace movement of the 60s and 70s (a time which is often remembered for its hippies and its hope, but was also the decade when military expenditure rose like never before).

there was a sense of surprise, at the reaction of others. not only do i feel this way - my neighbours feel this too, this desperation and this resolve. and here there was a power: in the gathering of people. even in edmonton, which we often denigrate as a bastion of conservative sentiment (which supposedly translates into neoconservative politics), 22000 people gathered in the cold at churchill square. we marched, and wrote letters, and sang songs and shouted, and prayed and pleaded, held vigils and held hands, but did not in any other way express our rage and our fear drawn by love - because we did not know how. we did not know how to use the energy, the power we had together, in community, to imagine a way to go beyond “having our voices heard” to in fact dismantling the war machine entire. our refusal to admit that the rogue state to the south (whose administration should under american law face the death penalty for its acts, the past seven years), to which we are necessarily economically and politically allied, could gratuitously spark such a conflagration. how could we translate this might we found we had, with each other, through our bodies and our voices and our prayers, into actions that would stop the auto-da-fe to come?
we did not know.
and so it did not happen.

it’s been five years.

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pictures from mar22.03. the multitude of people, thousands and thousands of people, communities coming together. photo credit unknown.
if you look carefully in the first one you can see muntaka, myself, lara, farooq(?).

to read (no ifs or buts):

- noah feldman, “why shariah?”

- abdal hakim murad, “islam, irigaray, and the retrieval of gender” (though perhaps a misreading of irigaray, it is good because it overviews variously gendered conceptions of the divine, is well attuned to intermuslim politics, and provides certain openings from traditionalist standpoints)

- saba mahmood, “secularism, hermeneutics, empire: the politics of islamic reformation” (read this one if you read any of these)

- the imminent frame, a blog with some very eminent contributors (including talal asad, gil anidjar, wendy brown, mark c. taylor, and charles taylor) on secularism, religion, the public sphere. there’s a series of posts on charles taylor’s a secular age that’s well-worth checking out, among others

- via dr.gow, south jerusalem, a blog on israel, judaism, politics

- naomi klein, “obama, being called a muslim is not a smear”

- zacharia on the shock doctrine

- the myth of humanitarianism in afghanistan

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in other news, i made me an amazon wishlist. not necessarily to buy off amazon but to keep a running list of things i will eventually need to have my own copy of so that i can write on. it even has a priority factor. if any of you locate these books for cheap, i’ll pay you for them. (i also feel the need to prove to fathima that i read things other than theory, because i do (once did), and so would like to point out the token novel. that isn’t really a novel.)

the way class schedules and other commitments have worked out, recently, i often get home after dark. i have taken to turning off the radio when halfway home, after i cross the highway that marks the passage from the city. the only light then the muted glow from dashboard dials in front of me and soft headlights beaming low and yellow onto asphalt ahead and the farm/acreage windows in the distance, these and the stars above. and, some nights, the white moon casting shadows sharp across the fields and trees, fence-lines turned blue, the gnarls and knots of poplar trunks even more stark in that fish-light. everything quiet, oddly, among the car-engine roaring as it turns. i turn off at the range road, park in the garage, reach across to pick up my too-heavy bag, close the door behind me.
and then i pause, before entering the house, and look up, for a few moments, a few minutes, the stars spreading swirling scattered across deep-blue infinite, space onward through shifting horizon, a depth without end,* gaze reaching out of geological time into and through constellations, nebulae, interstellar emptiness, pin-points impervious and witnessing. sometimes i manage to catch coyotes’ yipping or howling on the wind, and sometimes they are close enough to make me start.
and then the cold begins to bite through my jacket and i remember the things i have yet to do, and i re-enter future-oriented time.
this is one of the few quiets still held by days.

* i almost added, there, ’signifier without referent’. that i managed to stop myself i will claim is one of the saving graces i belie, a redemptive measure i deny.

this space gains a self-legitimating character, after a while. existence wills itself to be justified. this a public sphere organized according to a very particular power-configuration, modulated by strands of various discursive traditions and mutually exclusive politics, leading to and itself producing the control society.
habermas, then, is obermeister of the panopticon maintenance staff.

and yet resistance is primary, hardt and negri insist. language is always prior to the self, it resides with the other, we are born into these relations and make them our own. and in this making we come to acquire surplus value, congealed labour-power and habitus, moving through the maqamat and the forms of wonder toward the final eschaton.

at isha, after the coyote chorus faint in the distance had settled, the sound of two canada geese closer by. the birds are returning: spring comes.

lara said, years ago, that i’m abstruse even when i try to be clear. i’d like to think things have changed. maybe it’s just that the vocabulary has shifted.

(yes, i took the title from the sunnipath event.)

great was the sorrow in the city of light, as medina was now called. the companions rebuked each other for weeping, but wept themselves. “nor for him do i weep,” said umm ayman, when questioned about her tears. “know i not that he hath gone to that which is better for him than this world? but i weep for the tidings of heaven that have been cut off from us.” it was indeed as if a great door had been closed. yet they remembered that he had said: “what have i to do with this world? i and this world are as a rider and a tree beneath which he taketh shelter. then he goeth on his way, and leaveth it behind him.” he had said this that they, each one of them, might say it of themselves; and if the door had now closed, it would be open for the faithful at death. they still had in their ears the sound of his saying: “i go before you, and i am your witness. your tryst with me is at the pool.” having delivered his message in this world, he had gone to fulfill it in the hereafter, where he would continue to be, for them and for others, but without the limitations of life on earth, the key of mercy, the key of paradise, the spirit of truth, the happiness of God.

verily God and his angels whelm in blessings the prophet. o ye who believe, invoke blessings upon him, and give him greetings of peace.

- martin lings, muhammad: his life based on the earliest sources (rochester: inner traditions, 2006), 362.

it’s mawlid season. have been listening to anasheed and qasidahs from sham, recordings wali made himself in different gatherings, and they make the world open, the universe widen. let’s hold a mawlid, people.

ya imam ar-rusuli…