Immanent Domain

Gadfly or Drunk?

Christopher Hitchens: casually brilliant gadfly, or just a mean drunk?

Shared by An Experience of Friendship

"Friends do not share something (birth, law, place, taste): they are shared by the experience of friendship.

Friendship is the con-division that precedes every division, since what has to be shared is the very fact of existence, life itself. And it is this sharing without an object, this original con-senting, that constitutes the political." (36)

Giorgio Agamben, "The Friend"
in What Is an Apparatus? Stanford UP: 2009.

This quote is from a much larger discussion of Aristotle, but the first sentences in the quotation above clobbered and fascinated me. A connection or experience that precedes, and indeed envelopes, either friend. You might even say that the friends are effects of the prior connection. There's a lot more in the essay, but for me, there's a lot more to be unpacked, pondered, and tested in the notion that friends are shared by the experience of friendship. I'm going to be mulling this for a good long time.

[Image is of Barthes, with Foucault & Lacan behind him, greeting Deleuze in the underworld after death. From the utterly delightful comic, Salut, Deleuze! by Martin tom Dieck & Jens Balzer.]

Stumbling Along a Bridge Named Desire

We exist as a bridging between two inexhaustible indeterminacies: representation and motion. And the name of this bridging is desire.

I'm not sure I understand or believe what I've just written, but I like the way it sounds. Need to ponder on this for a while. Is there some word, probably German, that means both bridge and bridging?

If it's a bridge, it's a rope bridge that constantly sways and whose ends are always in motion, scrabbling with transitory holds, a grasping which is always loose.

Aphorisms of Mine I'm Not Sure I Believe 2

A weak man lies to others. A strong man to himself.

Unremembered Aphorisms 1-5

Seem to have undergone a cognitive shift when I was about seventeen. Work prior to Inspiration Factory 5 just isn't there.

Inspiration Factory 5

Your enemies are the people you understand. Your friends are the people you know too well to understand.

Inspiration Factory 4

General rules are generally rare.

IF 2 & 3 are mostly short stories, while IF 1 is resolute juvenilia.

This topic and its backstory starts here.

Unremembered Aphorisms 6

In the odd receding time frame of a blog entry, this post continues the previous blog about rediscovering my high school journals. I'm moving forward in space and backwards in time. Aside from a draft of a children’s story about a boy who eats too many pancakes, Inspiration Factory 6 was mostly about adolescent pain. (One page simply says “help” in red ink). There were a couple of sayings I still enjoy, though:

Believing is the first step to becoming.

Christ’s hands are warm because they are bleeding.

Unremembered Aphorisms 7

I was digging around for something else and came upon my journals from high school, each of which I referred to as an "Inspiration Factory." I just finished leafing through Inspiration Factory 7 and have concluded the following:

1> I was a depressed youngster. It would have been good to have been in therapy.

2> Then again, much of the maudlin and macabre moments in these journals (not to mention the towering self-importance) are not unusual for a high school teen.

3> I was religious, but more interested in theology than Jesus.

4> Occasionally I'd crack off something decent.

So I give you the five halfway respectable aphorisms of Inspiration Factory 7 in all their self-congratulatory splendor:

When one seeks inner beauty, they cannot assume all sought inwards is beautiful.

What goes up must come down. Except that which was up to begin with.

If you want to see a man with all the answers, try the graveyard.

If it wasn’t fleeting, would it still be glory?

Show me a room with five men who believe themselves to be wise, and I will show you a room where five men each believe that they are seated with four fools.

Master Kong

"They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom."

What surprised me about this quote initially was that it came not from a Daoist text, but Confucius. English-speaking scholars of Daoism like to complain about how poorly it is understood and appreciated when compared to Buddhism. But both of them seem to flourish in the West when compared to Confucianism. Of China's three major (intermingled) religions, surely Confucianism is the least understood in the United States, and the least attractive to people outside of Chinese American communities.

Why is this? Surely we can't blame it solely on Charlie Chan stereotypes and fortune cookies. I suspect that if you scratch a little deeper, you'll find US culture's traditional hostility to Catholicism (as a religion of supposedly empty forms and superstitions, of rituals people supposedly follow without an inner core of conviction or belief in a set of propositions about faith).

Buddhism, as a soteriological (salvation-oriented) religion that contains missionary  trends, is at least within shouting distance of Christianity, especially Protestantism in the United States. Daoism (or at least texts Westerners traditionally identified as incarnating  "philosophical Daoism") values spontaneity and inner truth much as Protestants value their various callings. But Confucianism's emphasis on subordinating oneself to group, situation, and tradition seems (literally) a world apart from Western truisms about individual conscience. Even orientalism, it seems, has trouble digesting and packaging Confucian forms in appealing garb. In fact, they are far more likely to surface as the despotic, individual-devouring "other" to the individualistic pieties and self-assurances of conservative and progressive Americans alike. 

On top of all this, you have the additional cultural hurdle that Confucianism was traditionally a religion of bureaucrats. It's hard to remember that once upon a time (the seventeenth and eighteenth century, to be exact), European intellectuals admired Chinese bureaucracy as a merit-based alternative to inherited feudal privileges. My, how times have changed. From the magnates of Silicon Valley to right wing nutters, bureaucracy is widely considered to be the enemy of all that is desirable, an unwieldy glove hampering the invisible hand of the marketplace.

And yet, can a billion people be so terribly wrong? If it's really as bad as all that, would anything function at all? So I'm trying to learn how to take a new look at Confucianism. But step one, at least for me, is identifying the factors and cultural legacies that make this hard to do.

Sages Are Like a Mirror

Sages are like a mirror--

They neither see things off

nor go out to meet them.

They respond to everything

without storing anything up.

They are thus never injured

through the myriad transformations they undergo.

--Huainazi, 6

cited in Ames & Hall's translation 

of the Dao de Jing, 101

Aphorisms I'm Pretty Sure I Believe

"Drop that shit and live." --my partner, Liz

"The river has no interest in tales of its origin." --from a dream I had

"What color is your fever?" --from another dream

"there is no other way of learning than to seek your strayed heart." --Mencius