Exile, Old English, ASSC

Here is my paper from the ASSC graduate conference, last month. I was privileged to this give on a panel with Mary Kate Hurley and Mo Pareles. The paper was given with this handout which contains images I reference near the end of the paper.

Where Wisps of Being Mingle:

Theorizing The Space of the Wræclast in Christ and Satan

I want to first invoke Joyce Hill’s call, now almost some 20 years in the past, to attend to the divergent ‘Germania’ and ‘Latinia’ approaches to the so-called Old English ‘biblical poems’ (an article now anthologized in R.M. Liuzza’s Junius 11 Casebook). Yet I would direct us not to Hill’s call for a sober empirical attempt to correct our biases in approaching ‘evidence,’ but to the theoretical implications which appear in “the coming together of Germanic and Latin (Christian) cultures in medieval northwest Europe.”[i] Hill analyzed “the two extreme positions from which scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have approached the vernacular poetry of Anglo-Saxon England.”[ii] From out the earliest Germanic philology and antiquitarianism, feeding into a now infamous nationalism (that understandably continues to darken the sound of ‘philology’ in some quarters), the ‘Germania’ approach allowed that these poems “could be dismissed, as they frequently were, as at best dull paraphrases, deserving of comment only for a few passages, which critic after critic cites as evidence of a persistent Germanic spirit surfacing in the Christian subject matter.”[iii] Twenty years ago Hill could claim that “the biblical poems are obviously catching up,” but only at the cost being read almost solely in terms patristic traditions and Latin Christianity.[iv] I want to offer a reading of the Junius 11 Book poem Christ and Satan geared towards the political work of the poem—analyzing the production of a space that is political, or, rather, determinative of the political, operating a space at the historical, theoretical and literary confluence of Germania and Latinia.

I begin with this lengthy detour because I believe that reading Old English as a confrontation of Germania and Latinia forms the site of a particularly important crux of the west itself: a privileged site for deciphering the space of exile. The space of exile as such open a aporia deep within the ‘west’ and certain impending political disasters around the world. I refer to Giorgio Agamben’s now famous claim that the structure of sovereignty as a double exclusion resides in a figure taken from the Latin tradition and Etruscan law, the homo sacer. Yet, Agamben’s analysis of the structure of this relation to the one who is exiled will rely on a term whose Germanic linguistic origin Agamben sees fit to note (it is of such importance that I ask forgiveness for a long quotation):

If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law, or the supreme rule of the juridical order: it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes itself in it by suspending it. Taking up Jean-Luc Nancy’s suggestion, we shall give the name ban (taken from the old Germanic term that designates both exclusion from the community and the command and insignia of the sovereign) to this potentiality...of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying...He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it, but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable.[v]

Now, Agamben insists that while we might view the task of sovereignty as an ‘ordering of space,’ the space of the exception remains prior to this ordering and always at the threshold of what constitutes an outside: “the state of exception opens the space in which the determination of a certain juridical order and a particular territory first becomes possible. As such, the state of exception itself is thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time).”[vi] But even if this space is permanently un-localizable, or perhaps more importantly if it is, we have yet to decipher the structure of this space as such. So, what is the space of exile, and how is it structured? Given how much we mention exile as readers of Old English—in this corpus of literature that is at once on the edge of and in deeply within the west (geographically and temporally), it seems more than fitting to turn to Christ and Satan.

The Old English word wræclast, a masculine noun glossed by Bosworth-Toller as “an exile track,”[vii] despite being most easily associated with the Exeter Book elegies, occurs three times in the Old English poem Christ and Satan in the eleventh-century Manuscript Junius 11, making Christ and Satan the poem with the most occurrences of the word in a single poem of the extant corpus. Junius 11, of course, also contains Genesis A and B, Exodus, and Daniel, in that order. Christ and Satan is placed at the end of the manuscript and was added later, in multiple, different hands from the first three sections, almost tacked on to remaining folios of what began as a more majestic production, on the outskirts of the book itself in time and space.[viii] I am concerned here with the structure of the space named by wræclast, a word most often associated with the socially or politically defined spaces of exile in the Exeter Book, but which occurs in its highest density in Christ and Satan.

In the Exeter Book elegy known as “The Wanderer,” wræclast names a space one must wadan[ix] (go through, wade through), and also a track or space that commands the complete attention of one’s being, as “warað hine wræclast” (the exile’s path holds him/awaits him/keeps him).[x] Similarly, the speaker in the Exeter Book poem we call “The Seafarer” provides a self-description as an exile among “þe þa wræclastas widost lecgað” (those who follow the exile’s paths the farthest [out]).[xi] In Beowulf , we read that Grendel “wræclastas træd,” (tread on, trampled on the wræclast),[xii] suggesting that the clearly less- if not entirely non-human can move through this space.[xiii] In a more clearly political context, the Old English Death of King Edward, describes how the king, following the defeat of Æthelred by Cnut, “wunode wræclastum wide geond eorðan”[xiv] (dwelled in the exile’s paths widely through the earth).

What is common to all of these uses of the word is the suggestion that the wræclastas is a space, be it landscape or seascape, to where one is cast out from a community and it’s safety, where one is alone, and through or around which one constantly moves—exposed as lonely and without shelter in a vast space. In the above examples, the space is wide, is described as having space enough to wander, dwell, follow, etc. It is indeed Agamben’s threshold where life and law become indistinguishable: the wanderer bereft of any social space for whom any politics would consist in survival; the seafaring pilgrim who, ironically nihilistically, renounces this world as the space of his proper being; the outlawed sovereign king; the monster. Their space is structured in a way such that it both allows and demands movement—the term paired with a verb connoting a sense of travel, wandering, and specifically wandering through a large lonely space. The word thus seems to retain a strong trace of the second part of its compound structure: last (es), a noun meaning “a step, footstep, sole of the foot, track, trace.”[xv]

Satan then, in relation to the sovereign God by placement in lawless space, by the ban of God, would seem to occupy a quintessentially exilic space. And one might initially account for the occurrence of wræclast in Christ and Satan as an appropriation of the mode of the soliloquizing complaint employed by the poets of the Exeter Book elegies, as Robert Hasenfratz has also observed.[xvi] The whole first section of the poem is of course filled with the complaints of Satan and the fallen angels whose cunning and sense of being wronged might even rival that of Milton’s Satan. The first appearance of the word is in one these complaints by Satan, very much in the mode of an elegy. He says that he must: “hweofran ðy widor,/ wadan wræclastas” (roam/turn about widely,/ travel the exile-path).[xvii] Satan’s verb-phrase emphasizing strenuous travel and space is perhaps underscored by the common but still strange plural appearing wræclastas, as if the space is not continuous, but a whole mess of paths. By saying wadan wræclastas, Satan attempts to frame his speech-act to register as that of a lonely and widely wandering exile, demanding the more sympathetic affection we are more willing to lend to the Wanderer. Yet, 20 lines before this initial use of this term, Satan first laments fixity as part and parcel of how his place of torment is structured: “þis is ðeostræ ham, ðearle gebunden/ fæstum fyrclommum; flor is on welme/ attre onlæd” (This dark home is tightly bound/ with fast fire-bindings, the floor is of flame/ kindled with venom).[xviii] Satan cannot in fact wander through the space he names as wræclast even if he wants to in order to hide from the shame of his sin—as the hall is, to him, relatively narrow. Satan claims “Ic eom limwæstmum þæt ic gelutian ne mæg/ on þyssum sidan sele, synnum forwundoed” (I am of such a size that I may not hide/ in this wide hall, totally wounded/stained by sin)[xix] The second time the word appears, Satan is obliged to say that he dwells there in a way characterized by fixity: he explains that “ic geþohte adrifan | drihten of selde,/ weoroda waldend;| sceal nu wreclastas/ settan sorhgcearig, | siðas wide” (I designed to drive the Lord from the throne/the hosts of Ruler; I must now anxious-sorrowing, settan the exile’s paths, the wide ways)[xx]. Satan must “settan,” which can mean “to dwell,” but also, dwelling with the sense of fixity, as in “to establish” or “to set up.”[xxi] These statements are marked strongly by the first person pronoun, as trustworthy or untrustworthy testimony about the very being of Satan, which in turn reflects something about the space he is in. So the wræclast names the space in which Satan dwells, (at least as Satan names it) but unlike in any of the Exeter Book occurrences, Satan describes this space as a structure that can be established in fixity. Remember, he has described it as a kind of shelter, or sele (hall)—implying that the structure of the place wræclast names might be thought otherwise—to the extent that the wræclast could consist of a static ‘home,” with a “floor,” even if this floor is constructed of flame and torment. How is it that Satan is exposed, to what is his being exposed in the sense belonging to the exile under the ban of the sovereign (God), if he is in a narrow shelter (relative to his large size) and not a wide sea or fen?

Satan’s being is exposed to the other beings in this narrow fixed space, and to the subsequent painful dimming of the boundaries of his being as it mingles with that of the others and the structure of the space itself. For, the third occurrence of wræclast reminds us that the fallen angels also dwell in this place, as is it is in their speech that they explain “þæt wræclastas wunian moton” (We should dwell in the exilic space).[xxii] That the demons speak at all in the poem reminds the reader that Satan’s speeches and uses of wræclast are in dialogic relation to those of the fallen angels, as the fallen angels use this word in a speech dialoging with those of Satan. These fallen angels dwell there, like Satan, because, as they say, “we woldon swa/ drihten adrifan of þam deoran ham”[xxiii] (they would have driven the Lord out from that precious home)—they would have exiled God. This occurrence of wræclast in a dialogue, naming the space in which that very dialogue occurs, suggests that the space is structured in a much less ‘lonely’ way than habitually thought. Perhaps Satan and his demons intentionally ‘misuse’ the term, trying to garner sympathy as if in they were in the plight of the lonely wronged exile and not would-be cosmic Sygbryt’s (who the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that Cynwulf drove out of his lands for unjust deeds). But the sheer density of the term’s occurrence in Christ and Satan seems to me to suggest that a reader would have been expected to have the capacity to understand the term in this context, even if ironically. So it is worth asking what the term would mean in this case, even if Satan and the fallen Angels invoke it infelicitously, without the proper political authority, or with intent to deceive.

This relationship between the multiple beings inhabiting this particular space and the structure of the space itself would then call for further re-thinking of exilic space in terms of how the space structures the relations of these beings to each other. In Christ and Satan, this indistinction between inside and outside (identified by Agamben as the topos of the ban) seems to extend itself to the difference between a space and beings that inhabit it. [xxiv] The fallen angels who themselves occupy the space also constitute it as a world for Satan. Satan himself identifies part of the place’s torment for him in complaining that “hwilum ic gehere hellescealas,/ gnornende cynn”[xxv] (Sometimes I hear hell-servants,/ a mourning kin). In this wræclast, some beings are fixed in space, but the distinction between what constitutes the place/space, and what inhabits it is confused or diffused.

So, the wræclast, as a place of exile, or exile-as-punishment for outlawry, may generally name a space understood less as one through which one can or must move, so much as a space in which an unclear relationship between space and beings, and beings and beings, is recognized as part of the structure of what wræclast itself names. In Christ and Satan, instead of a place to freely and widely wander in a romanticized conception of exilic space, Satan uses the term for a space of torment recognized more by its relation to torment and punishment, its relation to how relations function inside this space, and how the relation between space/landscape and Beings dissolves.

Agamben invokes his homo sacer as bare life, a category to which we might assign a wispy sort of ontology, a kind of being in relation to juridical structures only in its non-relation and whose being if it indeed has being in a rigorous sense—this being has at best a dim sort of ontological status. But the exiles of the wræclast—as it appears most densely in this early Germanic language text that is nonetheless the confrontation of that Germania with the theology of Latnia—the being of these exiles is even less than wispy. These beings are themselves part of the structure of the space that defines their being, their cries flitting painfully into and out of one another. The space is as much constituted by static wisps of beings whose boundaries between each other are thin and overlapping as it is by place.

As such, wræclast names a space whose structure in relation to the Beings that inhabit it must be thought in itself as a primordial ground for thinking categories of ‘life,’ and ‘the political.’ The trick, with Christ and Satan, is to think the word in this manner when reading an ostensibly theological poem. The difficulty of understanding this term perhaps reveals the urgent importance of the politics and theology enunciated by the confluence of Germania-Latina in Old English poetry. The exile, the transient of the west, is today increasingly defined in some cases not by movement and migration, but by being inscribed in a lack of freedom of movement, identified with the condition of the place itself: I cite the atrocious restriction of movement by the Israeli army during the current/recent war in Gaza, or the debacle of GTMO. To illustrate this crux of the west, unconcealed from within a strange Old English poem, I would even risk rather recklessly appropriating as images commensurate with that of the space of exile in Christ and Satan, these images from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, of paperless people in cages at the train station, whose structure of exile is made of each other, and whose status, fixed in place in their tiny wræclast among the other exiles leaves them barely encounterable to the hero of the film, much less the viewer for whom they structure only a ‘background’ image. So how do we relate to, or speak of, this space of exile, if its inhabitants so mingle, if they are under a ban which, in Agamben’s words, demands of us that we “put the very form of relation into question and to ask if the political fact is not perhaps thinkable beyond relation...”[xxvi] These questions arise, after all, from the complaints of a Satan whose use of the word wræclast we, on the one hand, should simply not believe as a felicitous use of the term. He may, after all, be trying to frame himself as inhabiting the space of exile to garner sympathy. But, if hell, if the exiled being, is simply inaccessible to our critical thought, presenting us with the threat to the western conception of ‘relation’ itself in the play of presence and absence, accessibility and inaccessibility, then who is it that will name the space of exile and her relation to it? Satan’s crafty complaint at once reveals that exilic space is better understood by the ontological status of its inhabitants than by its shape and size (as an Old English Satan struggles against his own language, revealing the limitations of the suffix last); but reveals also that insincere naming—naming a space with a name that the named space exceeds negatively, speaking about a space or territory without the political authority to do so—is the only speaking that can actually identify exile properly. If it is this convoluted concept of relations to language that we need in order to read the space of exile in Old English poetry, or in any text for that matter, then philology—a discipline trained to read agreements, kinships, influences, rhetoric, etc.—has, at the moment, a pressing task—deciphering perhaps not representations of space and individuals, but the (actual, not the mimetic) relation between the two itself in the realm of the political.

---

[i] See Joyce Hill, “Confronting Germania Latina: Changing Responses to Old English Biblical Verse” in The Poems of Junius 11: Basic readings, Edited by R. M. Liuzza (London: Routeledge, 2002) pp. 1-19.

[ii] Joyce Hill, 1.

[iii] ibid., 5.

[iv] ibid., 6.

[v] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 28.

[vi] ibid., 19.

[vii] Bosworth and Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (hereafter as Bosworth-Toller), s.v. “wræclast.”

[viii] George Philip Krapp, Introduction, The Junius Manuscript, ASPR 1(New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), p. xii.

[ix] The Wanderer, in The Exeter Book, ASPR 3, Edited by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie and George Philip Krapp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 1.

[x] ibid., 32.

[xi] The Seafarer, in The Exeter Book, 55.

[xii] Beowulf, in Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburgh 3^rd Ed., Edited by Fr. Klaeber (Boston: D.C. and Heath, 1950), 1352.

[xiii] This would of course not surprise a reader of Boethius, who comments on the criminal, a status which often is the cause of the exile’s state (though notably not with the wanderer), that “So what happens is that when a man abandons goodness and ceases to be human, being unable to rise to a divine condition, he sinks to the level of being and animal,” from The Consolation of Philosophy, Translated by Victor Watts (London: Penguin, 1966, Revised Ed. 1999), 94.

[xiv] The Death of King Edward in Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ASPR 6, Edited by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press), 15.

[xv] Bosworth-Toller, s.v. “last.”

[xvi] See Robert Hasenfratz, “The Theme of the ‘Penitent Damned’ and its Relation to Beowulf and Christ and Satan, Leeds Studies in English, New Series 21 (1990), pp. 45-69, see especially p. 54. Hasenfratz actually attempts to refine and understand sympathetic responses to the Satan of Christ and Satan like Margaret Bridges who finds, according to Hasenfratz, that Satan “has become the figure of pathos like the exiled Wanderer” (45).

[xvii] Christ and Satan, in The Junius Manuscript, ASPR 1, Edited by George Philip Krapp (New York: Columbia, 1931), 119-120.

[xviii] ibid., 38b-40a. See also 101b-103a: “Hær is nedran swæg,/ wyrmas gewunade. Is ðis wites clom/ feste gebunden” (Here is the sound of snakes, and serpents dwell/ This binding of torment is/ bound fast).

[xix] ibid., 129-130.

[xx] ibid., 187-189.

[xxi] Bosworth-Toller, s.v. “settan.”

[xxii] Christ and Satan, 257.

[xxiii] ibid., 254b-255.

[xxiv] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Soveriegn Power and Bare Life, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.28.

[xxv] Christ and Satan, 132-133b, (Bosworth-Toller does not gloss hellescealc, but does gloss scealc, first as “servant.”)

[xxvi] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 29.

Queering Philology update

Come one, come all. Some of you who read this blog may have already found this through an link over at In the Middle. But, for everyone, here is, straight from the schedule for Kalamazoo this year, the promised SSHMA panel on queering the practice of philology, complete with location and time. I have already been privileged to see some of Mo Pareles' work related to her paper for this session as the ASSC grad conference just the other week (I'll post my own paper from that soon), and it is downright fantastic. I am happy to see this on the horizon.



Session #395: Sex, Theory, and Philology: Queering Anglo-Saxon Studies

Saturday, May 9th @ 10:00 am [Valley I, 107]

Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages (SSHMA), Sponsor

Daniel Remein (New York University), Organizer

Lisa M.C. Weston (California State University-Fresno), Presider

* Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), "The Light of Her Face was the Voluptuous Index of a Multiplicity of Guthlacs: Desire, Friendship, and Incest in the Lives of Saint Guthlac"

* Mo Pareles (New York University), "The Reflexivity of the Unclaenum Gaste: The West Saxon Gospels and the Vocabulary of Self-Mutilation"

* Daniel Remein, "Eddies of Time, Licks of Language: Wulf and Eadwacer and the Queer Time of Old English Philology"

* Stacy Klein (Rutgers University), RESPONSE



Sex, Theory, and Philology: Queering Anglo-Saxon Studies

Taking a hint from Carolyn Dinshaw's claim that an affective historiography could queer historiography itself, as well as the 2008 BABEL session at Kalamazoo titled "Is there a Theory in the House of Old English Studies?," this session especially aims to consider the significance that a Queer history of Anglo-Saxon writing has for contemporary Queer communities. Papers will consider not only a mapping of queer literary history in the Anglo-Saxon period, but also the specific ways that we might queer the very procedures of study for those texts in question. Under examination will be the potential for Queer pleasure in the practice of philology, Queer desire specific to Old English texts, as well as how Queer theory and philology might be better understood as working together—in opposition to traditional views of the opposition of theory and philology. The session will thus provide for possible new discoveries and new directions in the role of Queer theory in Anglo-Saxon studies, while also considering how Anglo-Saxon studies can in turn make theoretical interventions in the contemporary.

sentences on my verse

I am quite happy that in the mail yesterday arrived my contributor-copy of the new issue of Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, No. 6. I am more than pleased to see another volume from Sentence, and especially one in which some of my work gets to hang out with work from poets I admire a great deal: Denise Duhamel, Noah Eli Gordan, Cara Benson (of the Journal Sous Rature, et. al., not to mention some Italian poets of note (see below).

If some of you medievalist types aren't up on the recent history of prose poetry in journals, Sentence was started by Brian Clements et. al. (editors include Maxine Chernoff) to pick up the work of the journal The Prose Poem: An International Journal when it went defunct (1992-2000--now being archived online). The journal thus takes a certain stance on form about which I want to reserve a great deal of ambivalence'[prose poem' (even though I ostensibly write them) as term: what work does it do and why do we want to do this work? Why not recognize a more ambitious poetics in which prose like that of Derrida might be read as a poem--is this something to do with attempting to achieve status of 'the literary' as that which in the 18th and 19th century emerges as fiction/verse that does not fit into genre-categories?]. But, this ambivalence at least means that whatever they are doing with this journal is something to admire a great deal, if the title alone can do this kind of work. As a title, Sentence is perhaps even more interesting (see my post from a few days ago). I like this journal.

Anyways, the book is a handsome volume, with interesting physical features: perfect-bound 5-3/8" X 7-1/4", 299 pages + front and back matter, small but readable point size for the text of the poems (which is a serif font that contrasts in a nice and even sexy sort of way with the large sans-serif titles, numbering, and footers).

Each issue of this journal contains a feature, lately focused on the state of the prose poem in languages other than English (in translation, of course). For no. 6, its Italian. The volume contains poems, essays, and "a feature on The Prose Poem in Italy, introduced by Luigi Ballerini and curated by Ballerini with Gian Lombardo. It includes work by Mariano Baino (translated by Lombardo), Maurizio Cucchi (translated by Amy-Louise Pfeffer), Angelo Lumelli (translated by Maria Esposito Frank), Giampiero Neri (translated by Stephen Sartarelli), Tiziano Rossi (translated by Olivia E. Sears), and Leonardo Sinisgalli (translated by Brendan Hennessey."

Queer News, this: a comment on how history threatens the State

http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/020709/gen_385535247.shtml

Writes Greg Bluestein of the AP: 

State Rep. Charlice Byrd, R-Woodstock, took the House well on Friday to announce a "grassroots" effort to oust professors with expertise in subjects like male prostitution, oral sex, and "queer theory."

"This is not considered higher education," Byrd said

And:

"Our Job is to educate people in sciences, business, math," said Hill, a vice chairman  the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee.  He said professors aren't going to meet those needs "by teaching a class in queer theory."

Usually, I don't engage with this sort of thing.  But I cannot help but point out that the Representative's arguments (which academics and opposing lawmakers retort with arguments that the argument is flawed, or that the university hires professors who investigate 'human experience') totally omit the humanities from  what should ostensibly be a university curriculum.  Now,  you would think that the GOP would want history, so they could teach students about all kinds of great propaganda points in so-called Amerc. history, about the grandeur of Rome as it moved from republic to empire, etc.  But no, they simply omit the humanities.  Queer theory, which the reporter even must put in brackets, is apparently so toxic to the state that if "History" or "English" or even "Religion" might harbor or shelter this little terrorist, we will have to root them out as well, no matter how conservative these disciplines might be.  

This brings up something I thought about quite a lot for a good while, in light of the Bersani-style gays should never be good citizens line from Homos against the Dinshaw-esque desire to save or produce or claim some kind of positive community.  Lately I tend to think these things aren't mutually exclusive for a number of reasons.  Derrida's "Pharmakon" essay is famous for reminding us that our task in the humanities, as it regards writing and studying writing, will not make us good citizens.  In Specters of Marx Derrida reminds us that to listen to ghosts is not to live 'better' but 'more justly,' leading me to believe that living more justly does not always mean being a good citizen.  

Queer Theory (without the quotes) may yet still have some of its threatening potential some would say passed away sometime in the 90's.  Queer Theory may be one of those things that is not better, but more just.  Toxic to the state, dead set on bringing down civilization in a kind of Benjaminian anarchic impulse, but opening up community all the while.   I applaud the fact that this sort of offense and ignorant legislative attempts are being covered my a journalist.  

Thanks to Karl Steel for the link to this story.  

how the we accrues: a question

What she petitioned for was never
instead of something else
--Levertov, "The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich"

Last night was dinner and drinks and desert and drinks:











with some of my most favorite people ever, Eileen Joy, Jeffrey Cohen, Liza Blake, Mary Kate Hurley, Meagan Manas, Nicola Masciandaro, Heather Masciandaro, Myra Seaman. Cheap and fantastic indian food (coconut samosa, champagne, beers, strange orange 'custard' with literally no flavor at all), the telephone bar, then closing down the only place around where we could find a quiet table to actually enjoy everyone's company. And, that is exactly what the evening then became about--but of course in a way particular to that variety of citizen we call the academic. That is to say, Jeffrey Cohen started asking serious questions.

And, in the way of academics, everyone had something to say or to ask, or both. I am still reveling in the loveliness of the conversation (instead of reading the 'katherine-group' "Life of St. Margaret), and how damn happy I am that such people are out there and that sometimes they gather. One of the upshots of the conversation pertained specifically to the BABEL working group, and how to keep a community going--how to want to and insist on perpetuating a community--maintaining it across time and into the future while the community remains one because of a strange double belief in the Now and yet the importance of the Past simply for what it was (and yes, I will admit, thanks to MK Hurley that sometimes, sometimes, there is an obligation to undertake the task of 'description' for this very same reason)--maintaining this collective of individuals who are asking constantly what the hell they are doing, together. Particularly, what is ringing in my ears from this conversation is the sense of demanding that we do whatever we do as in and for the world. So the question, in some sense, is how to remain a worldly community. Another thought I had as a result of these conversations that seems to be sticking with me brings out the not-so-closet Derridean in my thought: a tension that arises in such communities between, on one side provisionality and ephemerality, and on the other unconditionality and perpetual memory/absolute hope. One wants everything to be provisional--to be ready to revolutionize at any moment in order to welcome whatever-is-coming in the unbelievable risk of hospitality. One is obliged, even in such provisionality--or with provisionality as one's means, to remain devoted to the un-conditionality of the community, the risk of its openness. Without this, there is no hope of (to be anti-Eleatic) movement, repetition--the movement of the past into the future as the very hope of the new, or the re-newed (I've been reading Kierkegaard--my apologies); no other-as-absolute-other to welcome and make the community worth it (even if it means risking, as Derrida would say, evil). It actually occurs to me then that this is a very old question--at least as old as the 'presocratics': a question of change and movement. The question will called a naive one, but to no avail: I will keep asking it [convinced that--though we may experience it all as just an economy of the Same--we can should and even must hope, must remember and repeat and not just in terms of a recollection of what is know from 'time immemorial.' We cannot learn or form communities of learning around learning when learning means the putting into place of the Same, the recollection of what our 'eternal souls' have known before this incarnation (à la late Socratic dialogues on the eternal nature of the soul). We think we are above this, but whenever our community is about putting the right ideas in the right place, we make a mistake the west has made since the ancients--putting ideas above the world, forgetting the infinite finitude shared by ideas, by communities, just as much as our human selves--or, for that matter, rocks and stones]. We can only form communities as a thing of the world, in the world, for the world, of the material of the world and of learning as a learning which occurs contingently, ephemerally, in the World as an event of the world that also makes the world (where only on that condition (its finitude) does it touch infinity).

So, I'll ask the question, obstuse as it is, that I am leading up to as a question for this community: How is change or movement possible?

Below then, are a few little notes or sketches, aphoristic and incomplete--things I am by no means devoted to and may not believe, but am experimenting with--emerging around this topic of community. And not just any community--this one, this weird community of medievalists, one of whom a few days ago even told a hotel bartender with a straight face that a handful from this community were from the middle ages.. So, these are not even my ideas--not ideas at all. They are of some infinite corner of the world that is emerging between us, dear reader.

A few notes towards a non-ossifying 'scholarly' community:

§

Unconditional community to shelter provisional work. But two kinds of provisional work: 1. Work which consistently withholds itself, gathering in silence before speech, speech itself. This work is provisional to the extent that it is always--even and most especially in the moments of its speech--enunciated by an elegant uncertainty that it all too often mis-recognizes as timidity. It thinks it withholds speech, in timidity and silence because it can't figure out what it is it wants to say, is too provisional; but in its finest moments such work is not withholding but gathering. This is the sense of the words of Heidegger's "Japanese interlocutor in the 'Dialogue on Language": "

J: Koto, the happening of the lightening message of the graciousness that brings forth.

I:[Heid.] Koto would be the happening holding sway...

J:...holding sway over that which needs the shelter of all that flourishes and flowers.

I: Then, as the name for language, what does Koto ba say?

J: Language, heard through this word, is: the petals that stem from Koto.

I: That is a wonderous words, and therefore inexhautstible. (Heidegger, On the Way to Language , 47).

Even when its speaks, it speaks briefly, clearly, not obnoxiously as if it had earned the right to speak loudly and annoyingly simply by having kept silent. I knows keeping silent is absolutely beyond value, acquires no capital or mandate to be heard once the silence is released as speech that is in turn always provisional. This sort of provisional work, when it speaks, says in such a way that is gathers even in its most timid of sayings, resounding long after--even if in its provisionality it is shortly thereafter retracted. This resounding repeats (not mimicking) as an affective gravitational movement on the level of history which moves forward in time a gathering in the sphere of its hearers, thus a provisionality which in saying is faithful to a community with a kind of unconditional gathering and opening of the community as a saying that is a gathering. This kind of work and its saying is one possible saying then which, in its provisionality, works constantly to forestal the closure of a scholarly community, but without the sort of fear that drives ritual efforts of prevention which, rather than preventing closure and ossification, inevitably grant it a priori, as belonging to their very structure. This is the way of saying that belongs to a particular friend of mine.

2. Work which is constantly speaking, making sayings and statements. This works is always provisional, knows itself to be so. It is ready to betray itself and anything its said at any moment, yet performs its statements as if with absolute certainty, as if to anything it must suspend provisionality and pretend, because otherwise it would say nothing. Such work risks closing any community simply by producing a boundary, a line inside which there are those who have the pre-understanding that these statements are performative, that the work knows itself to be provisional even as it speaks with certainty to such an extreme that it could not dream of taking itself so seriously. To open a community it must leave hints about such saying. If it can do this, it can take constant aim at all the urgent and unpredictable crises that threaten to close a community and, turning on a dime, say something about them. Such saying knows that there is infinite meaning, but operates its faith in such possibility by constantly suspending the serious, as if a student of Erasmus' "In Praise of Folly." It in fact changes constantly its work and the basis of the work--but the nature of the work which gathers such constant saying is a work that works in a shelter of silence given cover by the constant saying--could only risk certain questions which are so improbable and naive if it pretends just for a moment that something might happen (something that matters) and that if it can pretend that this question is the World for the moment--because it knows that the World is what matters infinitely, but that certain questions which matter to the world can only be posed if it pretends, in a pose and just for a moment, that that nothing matters or is serious. The trick is for this work to operate in a spirit of generosity and not a gnostic encoding of secret knowledge only for the initiate--for the pose to provoke but not convince--to be always utterly unbelievable. Again, such aversion to the content of a specific belief moves towards a motion of faith, in which the constant enacting of possibilities consists in the repetition of the community as different, moving into a future.

§

Faith from nothing vs. belief in something. Start with nothing rather than the something, that assumption that something is there. Not anything to come, just what's here. Worldliness, as in, it matters now. There is no other world, or there is another world, this one. Faith in the movements of so many individual wills that move diversely together in one place that is disseminated, occasionally gathered. This rather than gathering around a belief. Allow the gathering, the being-part-of the gathering as a repetition of the infinite meaning of This World. Absolutely no divinity in this world or any other as the condition of such gathering as the event one might once have called divinity, as the repetition of the infinite meaning of this world. Gathering by and around nothing except the infinite becomings that are the gathering.

§


Against the sentence: against the pronouncement that ends; sober reasoning well-balanced and organized so as to convince--to deceive; progression of subjectification in which its readers and hearers are deceived into thinking that a period celebrates the completion of a metaphysical movement in which language dominates reality; logo constantly beating down world or trapping its subjects within itself so they cannot access world; the pronouncement of a law which coincides of the originary violence of language itself in forcing something into its proper hierarchized place within the regimes of the Same and recollection; punishment of those who cannot or refuse to know; pronouncement of law which coincides with the violence of ideas that control;

§

Death is always overdetermined. There are always so many reasons for an event of dying. But the dead one itself is the one not that threatens to ossify the community, but whose memory, if lost, can do just this. What can we not imagine?

§

From Cole Swenson's "The Invention of the Mirror":

The New World

Used flint
   or an obsidian strain.
They had others made of Inca stone
said by Illoa to have been

blue and crossed by veins
that take no polish, that break
in sequence                    or pyrite
              or marcasite
      sometimes called the stone of health
worn in a ring
so that with a single downward glance you can be
the infinitesimal:
          Sing:
          if in pieces
          we are accurate
here the we accrues.                                  (37)

whiskey & fox fashion

Whiskey & Fox has finally gotten around to putting up an archive of past print-only issues for download, staring with Vol. 2 No. 2, Fashion.

Poets in the issue include the Slovenian wonder Tomaž Šalamun, and the late Julie Granum, whose death last year I noted on the blog.

Worth a read, I'd say, even if I am an editor. Additionally, the journal is still taking submissions for its next issue Doing Politics With Animals, so if you've got something up your sleeve, make haste...

glossing is a glorious thing. nyc, spring.

The schedule is now up, here, of a conference I am so so delighted to be a part of this spring; at the CUNY Grad Center, by the Journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of Commentary, under the helm of my friend Nicola Masciandaro (of The Whim blogging fame.

You'll finds favorites of this blog Anna Klosowska, Ryan Dobran, Michael Moore, Erin Labbie, et. al. on the panels. You'll see my little name honored to be chairing the panel on which Klosowka/Labbie sit and on the panel with M. Moore (with another Heidegger paper as well!!), and you'll even see a paper on Auden, which you know (or don't) that I'll be salivating to hear.

Additionally, there is a round table with some names of note: (Moderator: Nicola Masciandaro) David Greetham, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University; Avital Ronell, New York University; Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, Columbia University.

Be there, or fail to be subject to commentary (?).