Monday, January 26, 2004
(11:02 AM) | Anonymous:
The mosquito flies with the same self-importance
I am not so sure that American's know that God is dead yet like their European cousins do. The way we live as if every action we and our government make will cement our place in history, that sprawling abyss that is time, just screams that we believe in god and that he will hold us in his right hand for all of eternity. I'm not going to say that this is a strain of Christianity, though it may well be, and I don’t see enough of a system surrounding the followers of this god to decide if it is some kind of theism or deism; it frankly is scarier than that. Looking back on Bataille’s Theory of Religion I see this deadly innocence towards belief in Americans, where they are not bothered with the idea of god and so their belief can change and flow to fit whatever situation arises. There is a blind 'faith' in some kind of god and he loves America and the only thing that will prove he does not is our destruction.
"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."
There is a certain kind of wisdom that we need now when we stand at the end of history (I have noticed this event is by far the most boring event ever). Sometimes I think the wisest thing we can do is to find a shitty job that we can deal with, a decent house that isn't that big of a deal to live in or to not live in, a couple decent people to surround yourself with and, with all the pieces in place, just wait out life comfortably until you die. I realize that this is decadence par excellence and the way the bourgeois live but it appears as wisdom.
In The Bacchae we are presented with two kinds of wisdom to sophon, in the neuter, and sophia, in the feminine. The way these are contrasted is important, for Penetheus, the king, refuses to acknowledge Dionysus and believe in him and is always attempting to out maneuver the prophet of Dionysus (who is actually Dionysus incarnate) with his cleverness (to sophon). The god, who is wise like Sophia, kills him in the most cruel and fantastic way.1 Is that the wisdom we need? A real revolution, not one sans revolution, but one where people die.
1I am not a Greek scholar, so my understanding of the translation and difference in meaning comes from Jean-Pierre Vernant's article "The Masked God of Euripidus' The Bacchae".
