Tuesday, August 10, 2004
(8:30 PM) | Anonymous:
Unfinished Sentences and Possible Fragments Concerning Love's Opposition to Ethics and the State.
"The commandment, the prohibition, tempts because it wants to constrain evil; and now sin takes the occasion, it takes it; the prohibition is the occasion. Thus the occasion is, so to speak, a nothing, a swift something that comes between the sin and the prohibition, in a certain sense belongs to both, while in another sense it is as if it did not exist, although yet again nothing that actually has come into existence has done so without an occasion."
The occasion is the outcome of societies demands on us and make no mistake society, as the State, has the sovereignty to demand. In discussions concerning pacifism the question always arises, "What if a murderer broke into your home to kill a loved one? Would you kill the person?" Usually the answer is something like, "I would trust God." Or "I would, but I know that it's wrong." That is unimportant; the fact of the matter is that this occasion, the one where I am faced with two others and their lives rarely comes about in reality. It may happen that you find yourself faced with these two people and their visage and in that moment are demanded not to kill but this moment will likely never come about and when it does it is recognized as extreme and tragic. War, is an outgrowth of ethical concern for the Other if you ask, "Why did we invade Iraq?" then the answer will come back. "To end the suffering of the Iraqi people." War, as part of a bigger ethics, gives rise to the occasion that most people would never experience. War is ethical if the ethics become about the other and their needs.
One of the greatest things Christianity has given us is the ability to look at the end as non-important. "Eschaton" not only means "end things" but also "least important." Every death, while it carries with it the importance of life, is seen as unimportant in the way of eternity. Applying Negri's understanding of eternity to Kierkegaard's has been yielding a material way of reading the Kierkegaard's Works of Love. Instead of reading eternity as that to-come which stretches out before us Negri allows us to read eternity as the material field, which necessarily comes before the now moment and therefore eternity is the past as it invests the body which always lies at the intersection of eternity (past) and the to-come (future). We read:
"'But the main thing is still this, that need be remedied in every way,and that everything possible be done to remedy all need.' This is the way temporality, well intentioned, talks, and it cannot even talk in any other way. Eternity, on the other hand, says: There is only one danger, that mercifulness is not practiced; even if all need were remedied, it still is not settled that it was done through mercifulness, and if this was not the case, this wretchedness, that mercifulness was not practiced at all, would be grater than all temporal need."
This doesn't have to be can move this odd transcendent eternity to a field that is in this world and situated in the story of that same world. Love, when it is rooted in the body and its investment in the past, can challenge the ethical State and demand that it not only feed its citizens but, more importantly, it suffer with them.
