continental drift

or, “letting conservatism loose” before again schoolwriting, hoping against hope to be done on tuesday:

as distraction (dis-traction, except that i was barely making inroads as it was, driving a creaking diesel ford 5000 from the early 70s) – i’ll have to remember to file this post under ‘narcissism’ (the glowing laptop monitor my pool of shining water and this desk my grassy embankment, my hours before the screen spent staring into what is essentially mein own textual image evidence of grecian transfixment, even a drowning) – i turn to something else: that i have a disturbingly cavalier proclivity toward comparativist analyses across disciplines. i draw almost glib parallels and use them as points of humour or derision, playing off arbitrary points of reference to form arguments that adhere only because of the frenetic energy i pour into them, as though through sheer brashness i might forcefully impose (/, duct-tape) a centripetal logic.

no domain is preserved from this speculative enterprise, the seven earths or the heavens holding the sun. as example: in the weekly qur’an class today there was reference made to 31:34 (recitation, translation), the last ayah of surah luqman that reminds humanity that none but allah has knowledge of the Hour, of the descension of rain, of what is held in the womb, of what one shall receive tomorrow, and of where upon this earth we shall each meet death. to play (off) these five in the lit crit of the dilettant, then, we can begin by noting that the sa’ah, the Hour, is named with a word connoting a span of time…and yet it is precisely this (hour/Hour, span, point? this event) that ruptures the temporal order itself (therefore heralding the final recompense and that-which-follows, akhirah, the mishnah’s olam haba). we then consider rain, and remember it figures both as rahmah, lovingkindness and mercy, and as life-giving to a parched earth. indeed, it is for rahmah alone that we can hope; it is rahmah alone that gives us to hope for rahmah alone. martin lings writes further of the mercy of the rain as gnosis and as light, as the quenching drink of knowledge of the divine. the third item in the list, ‘what is in the wombs’, maintains this very semantic field, as the word invokes in semitic languages its etymological affine (rahmah); the womb (rahm) is a source of lovingkindness; it is also, at the most literal level, ‘life-giving’; it further recalls nourishment and tarbiyah, a nurturing and a growing-to-term. the womb holds forth promise of what is to come, knowledge of which remains hidden from our sight; it cultivates anticipation. the fourth item of the list explicitly continues this theme, marking what we receive on the morrow. the word used itself is from the trilateral root k-s-b and signifies what is earned or justly doled out, actions we acquire through kasab and iktisab. the seeds planted have grown to term and their fruits now taken; that which thou sowest that shallst thou reap. finally we are reminded that none of us know where (in what site, in which locale) we shall realize (our) mortality. our encounter with death is thus read spatially, even while we understand death as that which removes us from the spatial realm altogether. of course, death ends the logical (grammatical) chains of causality and responsibility constituted by kasab and iktisab, and so we are brought full circle to the sa’ah that convokes the final accounting.

each of these five is responsive to the others. they are interconnected at a number of levels. indeed, taken together they gather each other: the first, the sa’ah, a name from within the temporal order of which it is terminus, the evenement that finally ruptures its fabric. it separates the world from that-which-comes-after; it separates life before from life after. it is an ‘Hour’ only in the lexicon of sacred occasions figured as temporal events. the rahmah which is the precondition of the world, the guiding principle of that-which-comes-after, and the generative force of the event of the sa’ah is recalled by the image of rain, which sweeps in from the coast to wash the soiled earth; life. the womb is the pallindromic link between the rahmah of rain and the granting-forth of life and the notions of responsibility implicit in what we earn each day. finally we turn to death as an event in the (spatial) world but also as an echo of another order, as though through the traces of such quietus we might hear the thrumming of rain on the other side.

what we’re left with, now, is a basic fact of difference in ground, in metaphysics. the various emphases on the to-come, the promise held forth (of life, and of love), and the strict insistence that none knows what the morrow brings – each of these humble us in and indeed strip us of our knowledge; they tear from us our peculiarly modern apparatuses of knowledge and our technologies to manage the future. they put us on edge in a sort of passional ethics of anticipation, a resignation to the future as that which can only be totally unexpected, à-venir and l’avenir. the rain, rain-life, rain-mercy, womb-mercy, womb-promise, and the womb all bespeak an imperative only to recognize and honour such gift, and so we exist fundamentally in debt and under obligation, attempting only to fulfill the rights of the law = of others. lastly, the here and now cannot be taken as the absolute indexicals of either hegel or kant but must be approached with a nearly humean skepticism and a ghazalian certainty, that we can draw from these ayat the various doctrines of an islamic occasionalism. this configuration of space/time marks a fundamental shift away from the metaphysics of presence, for what that’s worth…and yet its divergent history at least in part autonomous from that of christianity become secularism also means that my first impulse (to equivalence with critiques of ontotheological metaphysics) necessarily reveals me as a hack. these parallelisms are only that: distantly isomorphic. good to think with, perhaps, and nothing less. a stepping-stone to speech. but more brutally, a suturing of one discourse to another on the basis of similar gestures. because these traditions are differentially structured within the academy, such suturing can then be read as the deep-structural fulfillment of a desire fraught with transference issues to gain place (and then our exile) among these others.

in the new york times a few months ago, noah feldman (whose work in general i like, don’t get me wrong) found the constitutional rule of law masquerading under the Sign of the shari’ah; i can, clumsily, find a heideggerian rejection of western metaphysics drawn from an ayah of scripture. these moves foster a politics i do consider positive. and yet, and yet. (this is one of the primary issues i had with peter rollins, as i would insist we have to recognize our own histories. to do otherwise is not only deeply irresponsible but makes a mockery of the traditions we suture. at the same time, this is a pretty steep demand, and i have no idea how to do so in a popular or quasipastoral context – and little enough otherwise.)(i went to see peter rollins perform a couple of times when he was in edmonton a few months ago. he called me his zizek friend.)

because then i step back and begin to see all this as a sort of pedestrian structuralist criticism that sometimes has far more to do with vain speech and petty amusement than it does with exegesis. it neither blasphemes nor gives cause for immediate offense, i do take care for that. but at the same time it sees me co-opting religious or cultural texts in order to (sometimes vulgarly) advance a specific imaginative practice as a (sometimes resentful) politics in a sort of puerile ressentiment, largely through suspect analogies (the cup is the shield of dionysis and the shield the cup of ares), equivocation. at best it sketches as though through a fog the barely-intelligible hybrid contours of an inarticulable task that now, for me, careless as i am even of the bodily pieties, remains definitively beyond my attentions. those paths are foreclosed at least till such time as i leave off these deep, banal betrayals and depart this field entire.

moreover, once reified these works of art, these comparisons, this discourse-stitching, all these become mantlepieces, figureheads worthy of comment by any aesthete worth her snuff…but also sloppy scholarship and uncareful thinking. to cross-reference the world seems a fairly common aim, given all the enthused verbiage over hybridity, fragments, mishmashed identities and textual echoes. but reconstructing this concordance, that is what i want to do, and learn to do well.

at the end of this post, all i’ve demonstrated (i who am widely read in no tradition, have basis to speak in no tradition, am entirely without ijaza), and handicapped as i am by four years of stumbling through the lexica of academe, is that discursive regimes are infinitely translatable, and that it is possible to reduce any text to a core set of platitudes.

and so i forward this as yet another of the abundant jeremiads concerning the betrayal and bankruptcy of the project of liberal education.

jeremiads abound concerning the “betrayal” and “bankruptcy” of the project of liberal education.

- bill readings, the university in ruins (harvard UP, 1996), 1.