5/01/2008 07:43:00 PM
"Art is love creating the new world
and justice is love rolling up its
sleeves to heal the old one."
-NT Wright @ Emory University 2008
4/13/2008 07:55:00 AM
Of Aporutopias
The impasse of a utopia in the mode of a to come, an aporutopia is the open to which the determinate is exposed in its living. The to come is that unforeseeable to which all idiosyncratic instantiations invoking an empty signifier expose themselves. Lower case justice in the name of capitalized Justice exposed to the Justice to come. Temporally, the unforeseeable is the future of the forgotten and with the immeasurable demarcates the impossible.
The idiosyncratic instantiate, control and fill the empty signifier. Local, embodied justice acts in the name of Justice. justice is idiosyncratic. This is why humanity will never accomplish Justice. justice is idiosyncratic in that it is only ever present through people and so long as Justice is being served it never arrives.
The particular holds total hegemonic sway over the content of the signifier exposed to the aporutopia. This aporutopian opening is the impossible, what cannot be spoken of, brought into language in the guise of the to come as the absent sense (to use Blanchot’s terms) that cannot be designated (as in the series) or learned (as in the singularity), but, as Nancy writes, “makes sense in and by its very absenting.” The Democracy to Come, The Coming Community, The Language to Come, even the god that is coming: all aporutopias of considerable interest in recent Continental Philosophy. All designating outcomes we do not understand, that we have part in, but cannot bring about: the black box of creation, the unforeseen and the great forgetting. A locution attempting to speak from one register of the ever receding primal future, that impossible undecidable, that is the meaning of linear temporal existence, of finitude.
The world of human finitude, temporal existence, (or to invoke Heidegger) of dwelling, is about construction. It is about a particular remembering (which is always a way of forgetting). It instantiates, premeditates, orchestrates to bring about a particular construction of home. Creation is different from construction. The very patterns of construction always already bring deconstruction within them. That which cannot be deconstructed is created. Creation is scaled differently. We are exposed to it, but cannot bring it about. It calls to us as the earth and the sky, humanity and their gods. So when Derrida explains that Justice cannot be deconstructed he writes of a Justice whose we are—a Justice to come that is not ours to claim, but to which we are exposed as we instantiate justice.
3/24/2008 07:13:00 AM
i think, perhaps, it would be fitting for us to demand that the same no-bid contractors rebuilding New Orleans be given the contract to build the Bush Embarrassment Library.
3/22/2008 01:42:00 PM
The current situation in Tibet is about an idiosyncratic way of life being exterminated by the militaristic patterns of globalization. That these patterns are being enacted by a communist regime is irrelevant. Nevertheless, it need not be forgotten that the ground for the Sino-globalization that is at work in today's Tibet was cleared by the British Empire a hundred years ago (with Russia, Japan, Nepal and India having bit parts in the ensuing years).
The distance of mountain and wilderness that protects a way of life is what is at stake in Tibet and why the transport networks imposed by China are the advent of the actual material domination of the country. From the highway system that reached Lhasa in the 1950s to the super train finished fifty years later it is the acceleration of people and information that is the domineering cadence that destroys the autonomy of the Tibetan way.
This is progress engineered to unravel the fabric of local identity leaving in its place the public camera, ID card and military checkpoint: the architecture of control that regulates the acceleration of subjugation in the name of national unity, financial opportunity and social stability.
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