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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.

Monday January 26, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:29 am

High Society

An Introduction to the Society of Jesus.
 

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