remembrance days 1

postcolonial…? what!

did i miss something?

have they gone?

- bobbi sykes

in the houses of history, ed. green and troup (manchester university press, 1999), 278.

061109

a couple of weeks ago i was returning home after an anti-bush protest (gwb is on a speaking tour, and made it to edmonton – i have things to say about speechifying like that in general, and about activism in alberta, and about energy, but these will be another post sometime): i’d got to the LRT station just as the cold was beginning to bite and dusk was settling and, shouldering my bike and watching my feet, i made my way down the stairs to the platform, waiting for the train to take me back across the river. i looked up as someone approached to stand by me. i couldn’t be certain, given his dark sunglasses and the faded green cap pulled firmly over his forehead, but something about his features seemed familiar and i nodded through my music. after we started speaking i remembered who he was, the classes we’d shared over the past two years, the few times we’d tried making awkward small talk. speaking to him then was oddly different: away from the isolating dynamics of the classroom, and each having passed through a year of strange knocks, i no longer found his reticence unsettling. and i was struck by the singularity of the moment: paths crossing on a subway platform, wondering just how many people i know who finish (or almost finish) their degrees and then drift. i use the word ‘drift’ not because it is the best word to describe us – certainly i don’t intend to imply that without the imposing structures of academe we are without mooring, thrown about like flotsam. but i am interested in what-all we are doing, often indivisible remainders to the albertan economy. he is unemployed, living in a basement apartment, and the edges to his jacket seemed honestly frayed. “but the term ‘victory lap’ is so positive!,” lara laughed tonight, and steve commented on the dis-consonance of being on campus again, calling us the undergraduates who would not go away. these are patterns forming, among these friends of mine, giving the lie finally to all the alienating effects of the university.

311009

there was the method of kneeling,

a fine method, if you lived in a country

where stones were smooth.

the women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,

hidden corners where knee fit rock.

their prayers were weathered rib bones,

small calcium words uttered in sequence,

as if this shedding of syllables could somehow

fuse them to the sky.

there were the men who had been shepherds so long

they walked like sheep.

under the olive trees, they raised their arms -

hear us! we have pain on earth!

we have so much pain there is no place to store it!

but the olives bobbed peacefully

in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.

at night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,

and were happy in spite of the pain,

because there was also happiness.

some prized the pilgrimage,

wrapping themselves in new white linen

to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.

when they arrived at Mecca

they would circle the holy places,

on foot, many times,

they would bend to kiss the earth

and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

while for certain cousins and grandmothers

the pilgrimage occurred daily,

lugging water from the spring

or balancing the baskets of grapes.

these were the ones present at births,

humming quietly to perspiring mothers.

the ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,

forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

there were those who didn’t care about praying.

the young ones. the ones who had been to America.

they told the old ones, you are wasting your time.

time? – the old ones prayed for the young ones.

they prayed for allah to mend their brains,

for the twig, the round moon,

to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

and occasionally there would be one

who did none of this,

the old man fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,

who beat everyone at dominoes,

insisted he spoke with god as he spoke with goats,

and was famous for his laugh.

- naomi shihab nye, “different ways to pray”, from words under the words: selected poems (far corner books, 1995), 18-19.

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i gave a presentation on edith wyschogrod’s saints and postmodernism: revisioning moral philosophy (chicago UP, 1990) recently. the epigraph to the first chapter reads:

there is a thought that has haunted me for a long time… it is to portray a wholly good man. nothing is more difficult…especially in our time.
- feodor dostoevsky in a letter to maikov, 31 december 1867

i did not include this in my presentation, which i restricted to a general description of her project. (i remain pessimistic about her conclusions, even while i find them fascinating; i am less convinced of the general moral traction of hermeneutics in an age when even reading practices are modelled on patterns of consumption.) but i reread the epigraph recently, and it called to mind a blogpost by james k.a. smith a few months ago:

in updike’s foreword to early stories, he says his stories are meant “to give the mundane its beautiful due” (p. xvii). but does he ever really settle for the mundane? is the mundane really so adulterous? could updike hallow the mundane conventions of fidelity? that, for art, would be a more remarkable feat.

and this resonates, now. it is so easy to feed on the newsworthy, to eagerly follow the things we call perverse or morbid, to ogle the sexual and scatalogical, the things tinged with scandal. or even to languish in pathos or bathos in an adolescence sprung from postwar existentialism (postwar: which war? the names change, but the faces stay the same…). but what about the things from which these transgressions draw their meaning? this does not make good drama, and is easy to caricature. how much more difficult it is to describe the patient work of banal fidelity, navigating togetherness, the stuff of the mundane.

221009

swallows are flying grief-circles over their featherless young,
night-dropped and dead on the wooden steps.
the aspen leaves have turned grey,
slapped by the hard, west wind.

someone who knows how little he knows
is like the man who comes to a clearing in the forest,
and sees the light spikes,
and suddenly senses how happy his life has been.

- charles wright, “morning occurrence at xanadu,” scar tissue (farrar, straus and giroux, 2006), 25.

harakaat

in the arabic script, it is said, the vowels are not normally marked. an english transcription of an arabic phrase (…) has to insert the missing vowels. but this way of putting it is misleading. the vowel is a peculiar european invention, and is not something ‘missing’ from arabic. arabic words are formed by what arabic grammarians call the ‘movement’ of a sequence of letters. each letter is pronounced with a particular movement (of the mouth and vocal cords), referred to as ‘opening’, ‘fracturing’, and ‘contracting’, and different movements of the same letters produce differences in meaning. the letters k-t-b, for example, can mean ‘he wrote’, ‘it was written’, ‘books’, and so on, according to the different ways in which each letter is moved. it is the different kinds of movement that the orientalists translate into vowels.

the movement, however, is not the equivalent of a vowel. as the tunisian linguist moncef chelli has opinted out, the movement cannot be produced independently of the letter and a letter cannot be produced without a movement, whereas vowels and consonants seem to exist independently of each other. this independence, chelli suggests, gives words in european lnaguages a peculiar appearance of fixedness, as opposed to the movement of arabic words. in treating words as moving combinations of letters, arabic writing remains closer to the play of differences that produces meaning. seen in this way, the vowel is not something missing in arabic. it is a strange artifice, whose presence in european writing masks the relations of difference between words, giving the individual word the apparent independence of a sign. chelli goes on to argue that this apparent independence endows words with an object-quality. as sign-objects they seem to exist independently of their being said. their existence appears as something apart from the material repetition of the word, and seems to precede such repetition. the realm of this prior and sepearate existence is labelled the ‘conceptual’, the independent realm of meaning.

the purpose of this discussion of arabic writing has been to suggest that in diverse ways arabic is much closer than european languages to the play of difference that produces meaning, and correspondingly much further than european languages from producing the metaphysical effect of a conceptual realm, a realm of ‘meaning’ that is believed to exist quite apart from words themselves under the theological name of ‘language’ or ‘truth’ or ‘mind’ or ‘culture’.

timothy mitchell, colonising egypt (university of california press, 1988), 148-149.

in the arabic script, it is said, the vowels are not normally marked. an english transcription of an arabic phrase, such as mine of marsafi’s earlier in this chapter, has to insert the missing vowels. but this way of putting it is misleading. the vowel is a peculiar european invention, and is not something ‘missing’ from arabic. arabic words are formed by what arabic grammarians call the ‘movement’ of a sequence of letters. each letter is pronounced with a particular movement (of the mouth and vocal cords), referred to as ‘opening’, ‘fracturing’, and ‘contracting’, and different movements of the same letters produce differences in meaning. the letters k-t-b, for example, can mean ‘he wrote’, ‘it was written’, ‘books’, and so on, according to the different ways in which each letter is moved. it is the different kinds of movement that the orientalists translate into vowels.

the movement, however, is not the equivalent of a vowel. as the tunisian linguist moncef chelli has pointed out, the movement cannot be produced independently of the letter and a letter cannot be produced without a movement, whereas vowels and consonants seem to exist independently of each other. this independence, chelli suggests, gives words in european languages a peculiar appearance of fixedness, as opposed to the movement of arabic words. in treating words as moving combinations of letters, arabic writing remains closer to the play of differences that produces meaning. seen in this way, the vowel is not something missing in arabic. it is a strange artifice, whose presence in european writing masks the relations of difference between words, giving the individual word the apparent independence of a sign. chelli goes on to argue that this apparent independence endows words with an object-quality. as sign-objects they seem to exist independently of their being said. their existence appears as something apart from the material repetition of the word, and seems to precede such repetition. the realm of this prior and separate existence is labelled the ‘conceptual’, the independent realm of meaning.

the purpose of this discussion of arabic writing has been to suggest that in diverse ways arabic is much closer than european languages to the play of difference that produces meaning, and correspondingly much further than european languages from producing the metaphysical effect of a conceptual realm, a realm of ‘meaning’ that is believed to exist quite apart from words themselves under the theological name of ‘language’ or ‘truth’ or ‘mind’ or ‘culture’.

timothy mitchell, colonising egypt (university of california press, 1988), 148-149.

i really like this book.

glaenzen

karyn ball, “wanted, dead or distracted: on ressentiment in history, philosphy [sic], and everyday life”, cultural critique 52 (autumn 2002), 249:

in his consideration of temporal experience in augustine’s confessions, paul ricoeur reads book 11 as a lament over man’s distance from god. the eternity of the judeo-christian god is portrayed as a transcendent substance, an unmediated unity existing outside and beyond time and change. the biblical fall caused the human creature to lose intimacy with the eternal creator and to buckle under the curse of mortal time lived as a present distended by the pressures of the past and a future that includes death. the allegorical expulsion from paradise thus comes to be identified with dispersal and wandering (distentio) while the lost intimacy with the eternity of god is connected to “the fusion of inner man” (intentio), a nonalienated state never to be regained. deprived of “the stillness of the eternal present,” the soul is torn asunder. faith on this earth will be hereafter experienced as an irredeemable aporia, stretched between an impossible intentio and an unbearable distentio. according to ricoeur, augustine’s lament navigates this aporia, but cannot resolve it.

this passage, excerpted from an elegant and dense essay, precisely describes an emplotment operating recursively across the temporal spheres. fil remains fond of declaring all protestants crypto-papists. which is funny, and of course rings true from his eastern-orthodox tradition. a mirror image (less funny, and enforced by mercenaries across central europe) is that of protestants and specifically anabaptists persecuted as judaizers by both the roman church and the followers of luther. now, today, the globalatinizing effect of a ‘catholic’ protestantism whose universality is partly contested by stiff-necked ethnics and unruly semites exnominates itself through the founding myths of liberalism (here build we our citadel, clearing the wilderness to tend these our gardens, earthly eden) and its derivatives, including a righteous irreverance and cynical reason, proudly post-christian – still in relation to the longlived augustinian lament above.

speaking of ricoeur: sometime last year i came across a slim and worn grey hardcover, the published bampton lectures of himself and alasdair macintyre. i first encountered macintyre, that latter-day thomist, through asad as he develops the idea of a discursive (and, in the case of islam, embodied) tradition constituting a condition for moral enquiry. ricoeur i first encountered in a class on semiotics some years ago, a later essay about the performative acts of metaphor. i was quite pleased to discover this supposed early collaboration between these two figures resulting in a book called the religious significance of atheism. i was sorely disappointed by ricoeur’s contribution, though, as i found him largely animated by the crude platitudes of what today passes as a pseudo-heideggerian gnosticism. it is rather later ricoeur to whom we can fruitfully turn to recover a very different sense of tradition, something he describes as an inherited context of meaning, the shared space where one confronts the possibility of meaning and understanding – something bearing close resemblance to a definition of language itself. tradition as sited discourse, as embodied discursive practice. ball, in the article cited above, goes on to describe the “Urchristian and metaphysical ‘roots’ of heidegger’s rhetoric” – but reading the way _i_ thought even some months ago the painfully obvious reduction remains the christonormative difference between intentio and distentio, as explicit as narziss or goldmund and rehearsed until spent.

this past summer though a difference, of sorts (fissure, fractal); and suddenly i reach to take up some eastern heresies (apokatastasis, ayatology) to re-call elements of practice and ritual. in these lengthening late ramadan nights, and even from my distance from those excesses of devotion, shift-changes. i no longer write in the vein of my past journals of auguries of innocence, or ‘the things i have seen i now can see no more’, until ultimately we reach blind through our mortal sin to glean intimations of immortality – as though through a colourful blake or wordsworth or milton the narrations of the Fall might suddenly reveal something i might live by. our exile was never preternatural nor divinely sanctioned: happiness can be intended, brought to be in the sharing of time as our hearts turn in the fingers of god.

leaves turn autumnal and the quiet moon – now waning gibbous, now third quarter – watches as this month gathers itself to be lifted from us. a month of fasting and charity, nightvigils and searching. haasibu anfusakum qabla an tuhaasibu, a tradition teaches us: take your own self to account before you are taken to account. and in this month perhaps more than any other, we stutter into deep stillness as our burnished hearts reflect in raw shades the things from which we wish to pass, the parts to our persons we dare not gaze at overlong, the noise within our souls. ultimately, as the month does its work, we hope even to leave such reflexions, to have even that self-regard dissolved, to enter the cave of hira. to retire the nafs al-lawwaamah, the self-reckoning soul, and enter the nafs al-mutma’innah, contented, that final aim of perfection. until then, standing in taraweeh, the night prayers witnessing the qur’an, divine speech, head bowed and back straight, resonating and gauging the timbre of our hearts, their tone and pitch against the verses recited, this year’s month is characterized by self-sorrow, at the sedimented forms of life we have embraced without care or caution. listen to the reed, as it narrates a tale. or, here, hear this cry, from one who has been distant.

gow asked the other day how ramadan was going, whether i was fasting yet or merely abstaining from food and drink. i stuttered or mumbled something noncommittal, tried to make a quip that fell flat. surprised at how personal the question became as it echoed. glimmerings, i concluded: there were glimmerings of fasts. manchmal ist es doch gold, was glaenzt.

reckoning with history and the moral debts accrue, but yet still and despite: shadhraat.

glimmerings, drawing me home.

karyn ball, “wanted, dead or distracted: on ressentiment in history, philosphy [sic], and everyday life”, cultural critique 52 (autumn 2002), 249:

in his consideration of temporal experience in augustine’s confessions, paul ricoeur reads book 11 as a lament over man’s distance from god. the eternity of the judeo-christian god is portrayed as a transcendent substance, an unmediated unity existing outside and beyond time and change. the biblical fall caused the human creature to lose intimacy with the eternal creator and to buckle under the curse of mortal time lived as a present distended by the pressures of the past and a future that includes death. the allegorical expulsion from paradise thus comes to be identified with dispersal and wandering (distentio) while the lost intimacy with the eternity of god is connected to “the fusion of inner man” (intentio), a nonalienated state never to be regained. deprived of “the stillness of the eternal present,” the soul is torn asunder. faith on this earth will be hereafter experienced as an irredeemable aporia, stretched between an impossible intentio and an unbearable distentio. according to ricoeur, augustine’s lament navigates this aporia, but cannot resolve it.

this passage, excerpted from an elegant and dense essay, precisely describes an emplotment operating recursively across the temporal spheres. speaking of augustine: fil remains fond of declaring all protestants crypto-papists. which is funny, and of course rings true from his eastern-orthodox tradition. a mirror image (less funny, and enforced by mercenaries across central europe) is that of protestants and specifically anabaptists persecuted as judaizers by both the roman church and the followers of luther. now, today, the globalatinizing effect of a ‘catholic’ protestantism whose universality is partly contested by stiff-necked ethnics and unruly semites exnominates itself through the founding myths of liberalism (here build we our citadel, clearing the wilderness to tend these our gardens, earthly eden) and its derivatives, including a righteous irreverance and cynical reason, proudly post-christian – still in relation to the longlived augustinian lament above.

speaking of ricoeur: sometime last year i came across a slim and worn grey hardcover, the published bampton lectures of himself and alasdair macintyre. i first encountered macintyre, that latter-day thomist, through asad as he develops the idea of a discursive (and, in the case of islam, embodied) tradition constituting a condition for moral enquiry. ricoeur i first encountered in a class on semiotics some years ago, a later essay about the performative acts of metaphor. i was quite pleased to discover this supposed early collaboration between these two figures resulting in a book called the religious significance of atheism. i was sorely disappointed by ricoeur’s contribution, though, as i found him largely animated by the crude platitudes of what today passes as a pseudo-heideggerian gnosticism. it is rather later ricoeur to whom we can fruitfully turn to recover a very different sense of (religious) tradition, something he describes as an inherited context of meaning, the shared space where one confronts the possibility of meaning and understanding – something bearing close resemblance to a definition of language itself. tradition as sited discourse, as embodied discursive practice. ball, in the article cited above, goes on to describe the “Urchristian and metaphysical ‘roots’ of heidegger’s rhetoric”. too, though, the painfully obvious reduction/reading of what _i_ wrote even some months ago remains the christonormative difference between intentio and distentio, as explicit as narziss or goldmund and rehearsed until spent.

this past summer though a difference, of sorts (fissure, fractal); and suddenly i reach to take up some eastern heresies (apokatastasis, ayatology) to re-call other elements. in these lengthening late ramadan nights, and even from my distance from those excesses of devotion, shift-changes. i no longer write in the vein of my past journals of auguries of innocence, or ‘the things i have seen i now can see no more’, until ultimately we reach blind through our mortal sin to glean intimations of immortality – as though through a colourful blake or wordsworth or milton the narrations of the Fall might suddenly reveal something i might live by. our exile was never preternatural nor divinely sanctioned: happiness can be intended, brought to be in the sharing of time as our hearts turn in the fingers of god.

leaves turn autumnal and the quiet moon – now waning gibbous, now third quarter – watches as this month gathers itself to be lifted from us. a month of fasting and charity, nightvigils and searching. haasibu anfusakum qabla an tuhaasibu, a tradition teaches us: take your own self to account before you are taken to account. and in this month perhaps more than any other, we stutter into deep stillness as our burnished hearts reflect in raw shades the things from which we wish to pass, the parts to our persons we dare not gaze at overlong, the noise within our souls. ultimately, as the month does its work, we hope even to leave such reflexions, to have even that self-regard dissolved, to enter the cave of hira. to retire the nafs al-lawwaamah, the self-reckoning soul, and enter the nafs al-mutma’innah, contented, that final aim of perfection. until then, standing in taraweeh, the night prayers witnessing the qur’an, divine speech, head bowed and back straight, resonating and gauging the timbre of our hearts, their tone and pitch against the verses recited, this year’s month is characterized by self-sorrow, at the sedimented forms of life we have embraced without care or caution. listen to the reed, as it narrates a tale. or, here, hear this cry, from one who has been distant.

gow asked the other day how ramadan was going, whether i was fasting yet or merely abstaining from food and drink. i stuttered or mumbled something noncommittal, tried to make a quip that fell flat. surprised at how personal the question became as it echoed. glimmerings, i concluded: there were glimmerings of fasts. manchmal ist es doch gold, was glaenzt.

reckoning with history and the moral debts accrue, but yet still and despite: shadhraat.

glimmerings, drawing me home.

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ramadan dreams: haasibu anfusakum qabla an tuhaasibu

and again, and

for love of the road

o canada / our home on native landITAL

highlight of the past couple months: hitchhiking across british columbia after my car broke down in the mountains. over the course of that adventure i talked to cowboys doing the rodeo circuit, cyclists trekking to the lower mainland for a bike race, a sawmill worker who took great joy from driving his monster truck as though the fiends of hell were after him (“i don’t litter, but i do drink and drive”), a rock scaler who described the adrenaline hangovers he lives for, a chef returning from the north to help his elderly mother, cows lowing in a big field.

i’ve started writing every couple of weeks at muslimlookout.orgLINK, and i encourage you to write there, too. criticism and provocations about how muslims are portrayed in various canadian media.

also, i had a revised version of my al hikmah series presentation (see notes belowLINK) published as “this earth a masjid?”, islam and scienceITAL 7 (summer 2009) 1: 75-78. the basic argument: thinking the indexicals of time and space as kant and hegel insist we do (those two figures placeholders for differing but equally totalizing strands of the western metaphysical tradition) serves also to delegitimize other modes of thought and being. islamic tradition names the essential nature of space as masjid, as a site of sujud, and therefore as occasion to (re-)turn, humbled and in humility; this is something whose articulation is systematically disallowed under the regime of teletechnescience.

there’s a lot of work being done on the politics of difference in relation to ’secular time’ – butler’s article of last year is only the most obvious example – but i think there’s more to be said about the ways such arguments play out spatially. it is a closed system: if, in liberal-democratic societies, it is those who inhabit progressive time who can legitimately occupy political space, the spacing of historical-political concepts also follows a triumphalist periodization. the honours thesis i once thought i’d write in my last semester was going to be called ’secular time, liberal discourse: the stakes of temporality in the public sphere’, and was going to be largely a hashing-over of ananda abeysekara’s the politics of post-secular religion: mourning secular futuresITAL as read through concepts of coevality, governmentality, and representation (as developed respectively by vincent crapanzano, wendy brown, and talal asad) refracting blindspots of democratic theory such as community, tradition and inheritance, alterity, relations to the world as such (a.k.a. “reading the pastoral”), and language. what i ended up looking at instead, last semester, was intercommunal relations in islamic iberia and specifically the metaphoric accommodation extended to muslims by maimonides at the limits of received jewish political theory.

a professor for a class i wasn’t overly fond of told me brusquely, some months ago, that school isn’t only about learning: it is a system like any other, that one must learn to operate within without falling into a puerile moralism. i forgot that, in my last year, and in reaction to its falling-out have developed an over-late impatience with myopia and stupidity, my own and others’. words are vitamins and life is short, and i hope to buffer the more deletrious effects of such trails of regrets. i’ve mostly postponed academic questions of affect and logistics (how much to hinge my hopes on being accepted into certain programs [rough order of preference LINKS1UCBOULDERRS 2RS 3NMC 4PoliSciTheory 5YorkSocAnthro 6McGillIIS 7YorkSPT]), and instead am working construction this summer, building fences and putting in laminate flooring. it is the alberrda advantage, baby, and i am content.

o canada / our home on native land

newly returnéd to edmonton. saskatchewan, british columbia, alberta. at risk of repeating myself i declare again my love for the prairies, this land itself. dry and dusty wheat, sweet summer clover in the air. and, too, for the boreal biome, and craggy shoreline, and ridgewalks in the rockies. BC’s temperate rainforest just doesn’t speak to me as these others do, but i think given time (temporizing gift) i could learn it further.

life with/from a backpack grants days a different texture. we’d just left the wharf after spending the night on an island off the coast of the peninsula, filled up our waterbottle and canteen to ward off the heat sitting heavy in the streets and rising off the asphalt, and had threaded our way through the many agéd seniors to wait sweaty and contented in the shade for the bus to come. and i realized that i had there  everything i could want or need on my back, that i was ready to leave for anywhere; that i could quite literally stay on the road for weeks to come, sleeping under the stars and brushing my teeth in gas station washrooms. a few days later i was describing this sensation and shahana commented: “it’s easier when you’re young”. yes, and it is something to treasure.

highlight of the past couple months: hitchhiking across british columbia after my car broke down in the mountains. over the course of that adventure i talked to cowboys doing the rodeo circuit, cyclists trekking to the lower mainland for a bike race, a sawmill worker who took great joy from driving his monster truck as though the fiends of hell were after him (“i don’t litter, but i do drink and drive”), a rock scaler who described the adrenaline hangovers he lives for, a chef returning from the north to help his elderly mother, cows lowing in a green field.

i started writing every couple of weeks at muslimlookout.org. it’s on hiatus for a while, but i encourage you to write there too when it starts up again in september. (if interested, email muslimlookout@gmail.com.) criticism and provocations about how muslims are portrayed in various canadian media.

also, a revised version of my al hikmah series presentation (see notes below) was published as “this earth a masjid?”, islam and science 7 (summer 2009) 1: 75-78. the basic argument: thinking the indexicals of time and space as kant and hegel insist we do (those two figures placeholders for differing but equally totalizing strands of the western metaphysical tradition) serves also to delegitimize other modes of thought and being. islamic tradition names the essential nature of space as masjid, as a site of sujud, and therefore as occasion to (re-)turn, humbled and in humility; this is something whose articulation (let alone practice) is systematically disallowed under the regime of teletechnescience. to develop this further sometime.

there’s a lot of work being done on the politics of difference in relation to ’secular time’ – butler’s article of last year is only the most obvious example – but i think there’s more to be said about the ways such arguments play out spatially. it is a closed system: if, in liberal-democratic societies, it is those who inhabit progressive time who can legitimately occupy political space, the spacing and emplotment of historical-political concepts also follows a triumphalist periodization. the honours thesis i once thought i’d write in my last semester was going to be called ’secular time, liberal discourse: the stakes of temporality in the public sphere’, and was going to be largely a hashing-over of ananda abeysekara’s the politics of post-secular religion: mourning secular futures as read through concepts of coevality, governmentality, representation, and plurality (as developed respectively by vincent crapanzano, wendy brown, talal asad, and william connolly) refracting some of the blindspots of democratic theory – community, tradition and inheritance, alterity, affect, relations to the world as such (a.k.a. “reading the pastoral”), language… what i ended up looking at instead, last semester, was intercommunal relations in islamic iberia and specifically the metaphoric accommodation extended to muslims by maimonides at the limits of received jewish political theory. maybe sometime i’ll get to overlap these strands to compare the acts of translation performed within islamic and jewish traditions as they reconfigure their views of the subject and the state within and in relation to the secular, or to look at minority relations historically afforded by both traditions at the margins of inherited contexts, or something like that.

a professor teaching a class i wasn’t overly fond of told me brusquely, some months ago, that school isn’t only about learning: it is a system like any other, that one must learn to operate within without falling into a puerile moralism. i forgot that, in my last year, and in reaction to its tragic falling-out have developed an over-late impatience with myopia and stupidity, my own and others’. words are vitamins and life is short, and i hope to buffer the more deletrious effects of such trails of regrets. i’ve mostly postponed academic questions of affect and logistics (how much to hinge my hopes on being accepted into certain programs next year [broadly, roughly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10]), and instead am sporadically working construction in different places this summer, building fences and putting in laminate flooring. it is the alberrda advantage, baby, and i am content.

es ist Arznei, nicht Gift, was ich dir reiche

writing (out) frustration

this will be my last post about the semester. it would’ve been nice to go out on a higher note, but maybe more honest this way. not a bang but a whimper, this is how ends now occur. “the hollow men” was post-”wasteland” – the rats’ alley (115) at least demonstrated a certain movement and a remedial grace. but rats’ feet over broken glass in a barren, arid cellar (9) – that is something different.

i told brian a couple of weeks ago that i can’t pinpoint what’s wrong. we commiserated briefly, and he said just to chalk it up to protracted senioritis. i don’t (and wouldn’t) know if that’s what it is, though. i’ve been through phases before when writing is difficult, when acts of literature (active participle) are definitively not possible because of various reasons. writing as memory and as encounter systematically dis-enabled, so i couldn’t put pen to paper even if i wanted to. though i didn’t want to, and i avoided that arrangement of memory, that encounter of memory, to avoid the memory of those arrangements, and the memory of such encounters. so do we “get by”, such are the conditions of our unknowing.

but this wasn’t that. i enjoyed writing (general term), this semester. my black book is near-full of scribblings, ideen, commentaries, notes toward a future. it was the moment i sat down in front of anything resembling a deadline that i froze, mid-sentence, mid-gesture, mid-day or mid-night, and sedimented into stone. anything involving that disciplinary regime, and i quit, kaput.

and again, it has little to do with curricula-content. my englisch course was pretty amazing. even discussion in my sociology seminar was occasionally stimulating, though not for reasons of the course itself. inter-d was something to get through, but i was glad to write the paper for it. art h had eureka-moments, as discussions from multiple contexts found place alongside each other. eas was math enough to hurt mein kopf, but i now appreciate landscapes like never before. the husserl/phil class was less dry than i’d anticipated, and was often great. and durkheim/RS class was generally interesting. classes haven’t been bad, by and large. i rarely fell asleep in the ones i went to. i kept up with most readings. though my expectations of a couple were disappointed and i did poorly in most courses this term, i had generally amicable relationships with the professors. which, usually, is more important. and i learned a lot, though often not for the reasons they wanted. i’m not freezing-up because of content, and i’ve known that all through.

so i tried everything to build momentum. i read around paper topics, i followed footnotes down the rabbithole, i sat in wonder. i rearranged my workspace and my headspace, tried writing in public (and there’s a whole set of interesting things we could say about that, eh) and on campus. i went running. i performed the pre-writing rituals (making coffee, updating lists). and near-every time it was the same sensation afterward, of hitting a rock-face.

i’ve whined about this ( = about myself) to those that’ll hear me out, even while they might secretly be saying to themselves “get over yourself, basit.” i’ve confessed this lack repeatedly, to lots of people, trying somehow to build from that an exculpation or search out an expiation.

by this time tomorrow evening i’ll have two essay-debts left(over), a 20 pager and a 30 pager. while i’ll be at a colloquium for most of the next few days, i hope to finish the first by the time i leave for southern alberrda on friday afternoon. but the second?

and so i remain astounded by my ability to muck things up. and kind of bewildered. and, just, taken aback.

but this will be my last post about undergraduate ness.

[this is] not primarily a confessional text. to confess is to overcome guilt and shame in the name of truth: it is an epistemological use of language in which ethical values of good and evil are superseded by values of truth and falsehood, one of the implications being that vices such as concupiscence, envy, greed, and the like are vices primarily because they compel one to lie. by stating things as they are, the economy of ethical balance is restored and redemption can start in the clarified atmosphere of a truth that does not hesitate to reveal the crime in all its horror. (…) confessions occur in the name of an absolute truth which is said to exist “for itself” (“pour elle seule,” [1028]) and of which particular truths are only derivative and secondary aspects.

(…)

…at first sight, there should be no conflict between confession and excuse. yet the language reveals the tension in the expression: craindre de m’excuser. the only thing one has to fear from the excuse is that it will indeed exculpate the confessor, thus making the confession (and the confessional text) redundant as it originates. qui s’accuse s’excuse; this sounds convincing and convenient enough, but, in terms of absolute truth, it ruins the seriousness of any confessional discourse by making it self-destructive. since confession is not a reparation in the realm of practical justice but exists only as a verbal utterance, how then are we to know that we are indeed dealing with a true confession, since the recognition of guilt implies its exoneration in the name of the same transcendental principle of truth that allowed for the certitude of guilt in the first place?

(…)

what seemed at first like irrational behavior bordering on insanity has, by the end of the passage, become comprehensible enough to be incorporated within a general economy of human affectivity, in a theory of desire, repression, and self-analyzing discourse in which excuse and knowledge converge.

- paul de man, allegories of reading (yale UP, 1979), 279-280, 287.

(i’ll be back on campus in fall to take hebrew, a class on universalism and the particular, and either hagiography or nature, aesthetics, ethics; and to audit some others (things, contemporary canadian cultural texts). and then winter, to continue to take the hebrew, one on literary studies of the hebrew bible, and narratives&tropes in anthropology; and perhaps audit a couple (eg., religious thought in medieval europe).)