Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 2/3/22

 

Pope St Martin I, Epistola XVII

Another quick translation for the feast of Pope St. Martin I:

"We always have every desire of consoling your love with letters and alleviating that anxiety which you have about us: and along with you also all the saints and our brothers who care about us because of the Lord.

Look, I am writing to you for the present about the things that oppress us. I speak the truth in the name of Christ our God. For we have been removed from all earthly disturbance, and separated from our sins, and look, we have even been deprived of life itself.

If only the people who live in this region were all pagans! Indeed the people who are known to dwell here have accepted pagan morals, and no longer have that love, with abundant compassion, which human nature shows even among barbarians. God knows that this is how it is, except in regards to the people from the ships which come from 'Romania,' as those who are here call those regions, that is to say, that is what they call the regions of Greek Pontus. For from this region I have not once been able able to get hold of even a single trimensis of grain or food of any other kind, except, as I said above, from the ships which rarely come here to depart again loaded with salt. In this way we have been able to buy with money three or four measures of grain during the period up to the present month of September. And til now we have not been able to buy any fresh produce except four measures for one coin.

I have been amazed, however, and I still am amazed at the lack of understanding and lack of compassion of all those who once belonged to me, even my friends and family, because they have entirely forgotten my plight, and do not even want to know, as I have learned, whether I am above the ground or not. I have also wondered much more at those who belong to the Most Holy Church of Peter the Apostle, because they have given so little effort about their own body and their own body part--that is, my love--in order to bring us back, and are without concern even for the necessities of my body and my daily needs. For even if the Church of Holy Peter does not have gold, nevertheless by the grace of God she does not lack grain and wine and other necessities, so that she could show her concern by giving me even a little.

What sort of conscience do you think we have to display before the tribunal of Christ, at that time when all people, who have arisen from the same mud and the same mass, will accuse and render accounts? What fear is this which has fallen upon people so that they do not at all do the commandments of God, or what fear can there be where there is no fear? Or have malignant spirits buried us in slander to such an extent? Or have I appeared to be an enemy of the whole fullness of the Church, and their enemy?

Nevertheless may God, who wills that all be saved and come to knowledge of the truth, through the intercession of Holy Peter preserve their hearts in the Orthodox Faith, and strengthen them against every heretic and every person opposed to our Church, and guard them immovable, especially that pastor who is now appointed to preside over them, and therefore let them neither fall away, nor turn away, nor let go of, any of those things which in the sight of God and his Holy Angels they have professed in writing, even to the smallest part, and let them, together with my humility, obtain the Crown of Justice of the Orthodox Faith from the hand of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

For the care for this humble body of mine will belong to the Lord himself, as it pleases him to govern it, whether in unceasing troubles, or in a little respite. For the Lord is near; why am I anxious? I certainly hope in his mercies, because he is not now delaying in bringing an end to my race, to which he ordered me.

Keep safe those who belong to you because of the Lord, and all those who for the love of God have had compassion on my chains. May the Most High God with his powerful hand protect you from every trial, and keep you safe for his kingdom."

 -Pope St. Martin I, Epistola XVII

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 1/30/22

"The reabsorption of critical negativity is echoed by an even more radical form of denial: the denial of reality.

In simulation, you move beyond true and false through parody, masquerade, derision to form an immense enterprise of deterrence. Deterrence from every historical reference, from all reality in the passage into signs. This strategy of destabilization, of discrediting, of divestment from reality in the form of parody, mockery, or masquerade becomes the very principle of government, is also a depreciation of all value.

The question is no longer of a power or a 'political' power connected to a history, to forms of representation, to contradictions and a critical alternative. Representation has lost its principle and the democratic illusion is complete--not as much by the violation of rights as by the simulation of values, general uncertainty and the derealization of all reality. Everyone is caught in the signs of power that occupy the entire space--and that are shared by everyone communally (take for example the resigned, embarrassed complicity in the rigged workings of the political sphere and polls).

From there, the system works exponentially:

--not starting from value, but from the liquidation of value.
--not through representation, but through the liquidation of representation.
--not from reality but from the liquidation of reality.

Everything in the name of which domination was exercised is terminated, sacrificed, which should logically lead to the end of domination. This is indeed the case, but for the sake of hegemony.

The system doesn't care a fig for laws; it unleashes deregulation in every domain.

--Deregulation of value in speculation.
--Deregulation of representation in the various form of manipulation and parallel networks.
--Deregulation of reality through information, the media, and virtual reality.

From that point on: total immunity--one can no longer counter the system in the name of one's own principles since the system has abolished them. The end of all critical negativity. Closure of every account and all history. The reign of hegemony.
[...]
The most serious of all forms of self-denial--not only economically or politically but metaphysically--is the denial of reality. This immense enterprise of deterrence from every historical reference, this strategy of discrediting, of divesting from reality in the form of parody, mockery, or masquerade, becomes the very principle of government. The new strategy--and it truly is a mutation--is the self-immolation of value, of every system of value, of self-denial, in differentiation, rejection and nullity as the triumphant command."

-Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 1/9/22

"At the supreme moment of the crisis, the very instant when reciprocal violence is abruptly transformed into unanimous violence, the two faces of violence seem to be juxtaposed; the extremes meet. The surrogate victim serves as catalyst in this metamorphosis. And in performing this function he seems to combine in his person the most pernicious and most beneficial aspect of violence. He becomes the incarnation, as it were, of a game men feign to ignore, one whose basic rules are indeed unknown to them: the game of their own violence.

It is not enough to say that the surrogate victim 'symbolizes' the change from reciprocal violence and destruction to unanimous accord and construction; after all, the victim is directly responsible for this change and is an integral part of the process. From the purely religious point of view, the surrogate victim--or, more simply, the final victim--inevitably appears as a being who submits to violence without provoking a reprisal; a supernatural being who sows violence to reap peace; a mysterious savior who visits affliction on mankind in order subsequently to restore it to good health.

To our modern way of thinking a hero cannot be 'good' without ceasing to be 'evil,' and vice versa. Religious empiricism sees matters in a different light; in a sense, it confines itself to recording events as it sees them. Oedipus is initially an evil force and subsequently a beneficial one. It is not a question of 'exonerating' him, because the question of blaming him, in the modern moralistic sense of the term, never arises.

[...]

The beneficial Oedipus at Colonus supersedes the earlier, evil Oedipus, but he does not negate him. How could he negate him, since it was the expulsion of a guilty Oedipus that prompted the departure of violence? The peaceful outcome of his expulsion confirms the justice of the sentence passed on him, his unanimous conviction for patricide and incest.

If Oedipus is indeed the savior of the community, it is because he is a patricidal and incestuous son."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 12/22/21

"The mechanism of reciprocal violence can be described as a vicious circle. Once a community enters the circle, it is unable to extricate itself. We can define this circle in terms of vengeance and reprisals, and we can offer diverse psychological descriptions of these reactions.

As long as a working capital of accumulated hatred and suspicion exists at the center of the community, it will continue to increase no matter what men do. Each person prepares himself for the probable aggression of his neighbors and interprets his neighbor's preparations as confirmation of the latter's aggressiveness. In more general terms, the mimetic character of violence is so intense that once violence is installed in a community, it cannot burn itself out.

To escape from the circle it is necessary to remove from the scene all those forms of violence that tend to become self-propagating and to spawn new, imitative forms.

When a community succeeds in convincing itself that one alone of its number is responsible for the violent mimesis besetting it; when it is able to view this member as the single 'polluted' enemy who is contaminating the rest; and when the citizens are truly unanimous in this conviction--then the belief becomes a reality, for there will no longer exist elsewhere in the community a form of violence to be followed or opposed, which is to say, imitated and propagated.

In destroying the surrogate victim, men believe that they are ridding themselves of some present ill. And indeed they are, for they are effectively doing away with those forms of violence that beguile the imagination and provoke emulation."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 12/14/21

"First International Bank. Crocker Bank. Bank of America. Pentecostal Savings (or is that one a church?). All bunched together in the heart of the city, alongside the big airlines.

Money is fluid. Like grace, it is never yours. Coming to claim it is an offence against the divinity. Have you deserved this favour? Who are you and what are you going to do with it? You are suspected of wanting to put it to some use, and an evil one no doubt, whereas money is so beautiful in the fluid and intemporal state it is in at the bank, when it is being invested rather than spent. Shame on you and kiss the hand that gives it to you.

It is true that ownership of money burns your fingers, like power. We need people to take this risk for us and we should be eternally grateful to them. This is why I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them? And yet the atmosphere in a bank is that of the confessional (there is no more kafkaesque situation): admit that you have money, confess that this is not normal.

And it is true: having money is an awkward situation, from which the bank is only too happy to deliver you: 'Your money interests us'--the bank holds you to ransom, its greed knows no bounds. Its immodest gaze reveals your private parts to you, and you are forced to hand your money over to appease it.

One day I tried to close my account, taking all the money out in cash. The teller would not let me go with such a sum on me: it was obscene, dangerous, immoral. Would I not at least take travellers' checques? 'No, the whole lot in cash.' I was mad.

In America, you are stark raving mad if, instead of believing in money and its marvellous fluidity, you want to carry it round on you in banknotes. Money is dirty; that you must admit. And we really do need all these concrete and metal sanctuaries to protect us from it. So banks fulfill a crucial social function, and it is quite logical that these buildings should form the monumental heart of every town and city."

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 12/14/21

"In order to grasp how globalization and global antagonism works, we should distinguish carefully between domination and hegemony. One could say that hegemony is the ultimate stage of domination and its terminal phase.

Domination is characterized by the master/slave relation, which is still a dual relation with potential alienation, a relationship of force and conflicts. It has a violent history of oppression and liberation. There are the dominators and the dominated--it remains a symbolic relationship. Everything changes with the emancipation of the slave and the internalization of the master by the emancipated slave. Hegemony begins here in the disappearance of the dual, personal, agonistic domination for the sake of integral reality--the reality of networks, of the virtual and total exchange where there are no longer dominators or dominated.

Indeed, it could be said that hegemony brings domination to an end. We, emancipated workers, internalize the Global Order and its operational setup of which we are the hostages far more than the slaves. Consensus, be it voluntary or involuntary, replaces traditional servitude, which still belongs to the symbolic register of domination.

[...]

Contrary to domination, a hegemony of world power is no longer a dual, personal or real form of domination, but the domination of networks, of calculation and integral exchange.

Domination can be overthrown from the outside. Hegemony can only be inverted or reversed from the inside.

[...]

We have here the profile of the new type of confrontation characterizing the era of Hegemony. It is not a class struggle or a fight for liberation on the global level (since the 'liberation' of exchange and democracy, which were the counterpoint to domination, are the strategies of hegemony). [...] It is an irreducibility, an irreducible antagonism to the global principle of generalized exchange.

In other words, a confrontation that is no longer precisely political but metaphysical and symbolic in the strong sense. It is a confrontation, a divide that exists not only at the heart of the dominant power, but at the heart of our individual existence."

-Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power