I will simply state, without waiting further, that the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking—and of ethics (Bataille)
I may fall entirely on my face with this interpretation, but here goes. Odin learns to write via an extravagant sacrifice– nine days, hung up in a tree with no food or drink–and was rewarded with runes– the means of writing, certainly, but with a special charge that I gloss over sometimes: runes had power beyond just signification-in-the-service-of-telling-it-like-it-is. They had a sort of aura about them that predicted, even effected change. In “Voluspa”– Odin gives an eye for knowledge, at least so says the seer-ess. I like that the body is almost a currency of exchange in the myth– the immaterial for the material– suffering for the abstract.
Writing this blog has at times felt like being up in that tree.
Writing of the disaster ought to be attempted not because of any return we hope to gain– Blanchot notes that we can never tell how our work will be received and cannot, for example, know its political import before we send it out into the world–if political import is a kind of compensation or exchange one can enter into through writing.
A small girl cannot sleep and walks downstairs to find her father reading in the kitchen. Surprised to find her still awake, he attempts to entertain her what is apparently the best way he knows how: a puzzle in which there are no intrinsic rules, just intuitions– at least as he plays it: “So, let’s say you’re on a train and someone riding on the rear car with you slips off and is hanging from the rails. And you choose to do nothing. Are you responsible? [Yes. Of course you are. And responsiblity is larger than just a codex-- its practice of writing. ] Let’s say you fall into you’re neighbor’s pit on their property– are they responsible?” ["An Attractice Nuissance" was a term that captured my imagination with-- perhaps--a predictive intensity. I wanted that sort of non-sense. ] ….So perverse to ask a child to intuit civil statutes, in the hopes of tiring her mind out, perhaps. But what resulted was, patience and watchfulness yoked to impulse.
Like writing (and in the same way that the quick of life has always already exceeded life), the cry tends to exceed all language, even if it lends itself to recuperation as language efect. It is both sudden and patient; it has the suddenness of the interminable torment which is always over already. the patience of the cry: it does not simply come to a halt, reduced to nonsense, yet it does remain outside of sense– a meaning infinitely suspended, decried, decipherable, indecipherable (Blanchot 51).
The tradition of the oppressed teaches
us that the ’state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
We must attain to a conception of
history that is in keeping with this insight.
Then we shall clearly realize
that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve
our position in the struggle against
Fascism. One reason why Fascism
has a chance is that in the name
of progress its opponents treat it as a
historical norm. The current amazement
that the things we are experiencing are ’still’ possible
in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning
of knowledge–unless it is the knowledge that the view of history
which gives rise to it is untenable.”
–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
(Spring, 1940) trans. Harry Zohn.
Foreground: Iceland’s Women’s Emergency Government
Background: abstractions for an ideal national subject?
And everyone knows how terrible colds
