Log24

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Black Key

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

The title was suggested by a post on The Piano
and by the dimensions of an image in this morning’s
previous post:  404 x 211 pixels, suggesting
4/04, a date significant to author Katherine Neville,
and 2/11, the date of a Log24 post from 2014.

These dates are both related to the post…

Everybody Comes to Rick’s
(original title of Casablanca ).

Whimsical, yes, but see Iris Murdoch
on the contingent  in literature and the word
“whimsical” in  a post of January 26, 2004
(in a series of posts involving Michael Sprinker).

Monday, January 26, 2004

Monday January 26, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:00 pm

The Subject Par Excellence

The previous entry connected the mad Marxist Althusser with Mount Sinai; this connection is not as whimsical as it may seem.

From Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (La Pensée, 1970):

" 'And the Lord spoke to Moses and said to him, "I am that I am".'

God thus defines himself as the Subject par excellence, he who is through himself and for himself ('I am that I am'), and he who interpellates [Althusser’s jargon for “hails”] his subject, the individual subjected to him by his very interpellation, i.e. the individual named Moses."

This is from page 179 of Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

The connection of the Althusser disciple Sprinker with the Trinity in Taking Lucifer Seriously is also not as whimsical as it may seem.

See Althusser's note (p. 180, op. cit.) stating that

"The dogma of the Trinity is precisely the theory of the duplication of the Subject (the Father) into a subject (the Son) and of their mirror-connexion (the Holy Spirit)."

Monday January 26, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:11 pm

Language Game

More on "selving," a word coined by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.  (See Saturday's Taking Lucifer Seriously.)

"… through the calibrated truths of temporal discipline such as timetabling, serialization, and the imposition of clock-time, the subject is accorded a moment to speak in."

Dr. Sally R. Munt,

Framing
Intelligibility, Identity, and Selfhood:
A Reconsideration of
Spatio-Temporal Models
.

The "moment to speak in" of today's previous entry, 11:29 AM, is a reference to the date 11/29 of last year's entry

Command at Mount Sinai.

That entry contains, in turn, a reference to the journal Subaltern Studies.  According to a review of Reading Subaltern Studies,

"… the Subaltern Studies collective drew upon the Althusser who questioned the primacy of the subject…."

Munt also has something to say on "the primacy of the subject" —

"Poststructuralism, following particularly Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, has ensured that 'the subject' is a cardinal category of contemporary thought; in any number of disciplines, it is one of the first concepts we teach to our undergraduates. But are we best served by continuing to insist on the intellectual primacy of the 'subject,' formulated as it has been within the negative paradigm of subjectivity as subjection?"

How about objectivity as objection?

I, for one, object strongly to "the Althusser who questioned the primacy of the subject."

This Althusser, a French Marxist philosopher by whom the late Michael Sprinker (Taking Lucifer Seriously) was strongly influenced, murdered his wife in 1980 and died ten years later in a lunatic asylum.

For details, see

The Future Lasts a Long Time.

 

For details of Althusser's philosophy, see the oeuvre of Michael Sprinker.

For another notable French tribute to Marxism, click on the picture at left.

Saturday, January 24, 2004

Saturday January 24, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:09 am

Taking Lucifer Seriously:

Michael Sprinker
versus
The Society of Jesus

As the previous entry indicates, I do not take Christian poetry too seriously.  The Prince of Darkness is another matter.  I encountered him this morning in a book on the Christian poet Hopkins by the late Michael Sprinker.

“You were never on the debating team when you were in high school, were you, ace? When you’re in a debate, you don’t try to convince the other side; they’re never going to agree with you. You try to convince the judges and the audience.”

— Michael Sprinker, quoted in The Minnesota Review, 2003

“For Hopkins, poetry was the act of producing the self, one version of that selving which he associated not only with Christ but with Lucifer.”

— Michael Sprinker, “A Counterpoint of Dissonance” — The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 95

A counterbalance to Sprinker on Hopkins and Lucifer is Hopkins, the Self, and God, by Walter J. Ong, S. J. (University of Toronto Press, 1986).  From p. 119:

“The interior dynamism of the Three Persons in One God was not for Hopkins some sort of formula for theological juggling acts but was rather the centre of his personal devotional life and thus of his own ‘selving.’ ….  He writes to Bridges 24 October 1883…

‘For if the Trinity… is to be explained by grammar and by tropes… where wd. be the mystery? the true mystery, the incomprehensible one.’ “

For the dynamics of the Trinity, see the Jan. 22 entry, Perichoresis, or Coinherence.  Another word for coinherence is “indwelling,” as expressed in what might be called the

Song of Lucifer:

Me into you, 
You into me, 
 Me into you…

Atlanta Rhythm Section

For a Christian version of this “indwelling,” see

Coinherence,
Interpenetration,
Mutual Indwelling

See also last year’s entries of 9/09.

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