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nellied-reviews · 5 years ago

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The Sound and the Fury Re-listen

Well, I've reached episode 7 in my Wolf 359 re-listen, which means it's time for:

The Sound and the Fury

In which Hera and Minkowski are fighting, Eiffel gets caught in the middle, and Hilbert just wants them all to submit to the biologically superior will of the Blessed Eternal.

Straight up, I should probably admit that I forgot about this episode, or rather I didn't link the episode title to the episode's events until I was listening to it. And then I was like "oh, yeah, this is that episode" all the way through. For whatever reason, I thought, in particular, that the plant monster didn't come back until Season 2, with The Paranoia Game. That said, I love the plant monster to a possibly unreasonable degree, so its return here was more than welcome, and the rest of the episode was also fun!

We open in the middle of an argument - and for once, it's not Eiffel's fault. In fact, Eiffel isn't even involved, except insofar as he's trapped in the middle between Hera and Minkowski, and is forced to be the voice of reason as the two of them have it out.

And look, that is always going to be a funny set-up. Hera and Minkowski are both incredibly stubborn personalities, and not at all shy about asserting their opinions, so there's definitely potential for a comically drawn-out, petty argument there. And casting Eiffel as the reasonable, level-headed peacekeeper, in contrast to the two of them, is perfect. It's in character - Eiffel always has been the most pacifist crew member - but it's also a role he's just totally unsuited to, because faced with the combined stubbornness of Hera and Minkowski, he's outmatched, and he knows it.

In an effort not to get involved, then, Eiffel briefly runs through the week's schedule, in a section that isn't really linked to the rest of the episode, but is full of little oddities that remind us just how weird the Hephaestus is. They have a compulsory chess tournament that Hilbert always wins. They have movie night, but only a VHS of Home Alone 2. "On Friday we'll have mustard." It's so weird, and I love it.

We're interrupted, at this point, by Hilbert, who sounds very strange, even for him. And naturally, Eiffel ignores it completely at first, focussed as he is on the unfolding Hera-Minkowski conflict. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, for such a pop culture-savvy guy, Eiffel falls into literally every horror movie cliché. He's so oblivious!

For the rest of us, it's obvious that something's wrong, and our suspicions are confirmed when we learn over the course of his conversation with Eiffel that Hilbert went looking for the plant monster, which now seems to be mind-controlling him, to the point where he's convinced that it's "the most evolutionarily competitive lifeform on this station, the most deserving of life."

And okay, I love the plant monster, but that's very alarming, and is made even more so by the fact that it's something that Hilbert might conceivably have said anyway? I mean, it's cold and Darwinistic and smacks of eugenics, yes, but it also has a callous ruthlessness to it that's totally Hilbert's style, as well as that trademark lack of concern for human life. It's like the plant monster just exaggerated what was already there, turned the mad scientist dial up to eleven. In other words, it made Hilbert even more Hilbert-y.

Luckily, Eiffel realises soon enough that something's wrong, and goes to warn Minkowski. Minkowski, being a mature, rational individual, immediately drops her argument with Hera and goes to - oh, wait, no, she does basically the opposite of that, ignoring Eiffel in favour of continuing her argument with Hera. Great. Good job, Commander.

It's at this point, of course, that we finally learn exactly what Minkowski and Hera are arguing about. And is it petty. Turns out, Minkowski wants Hera to submit reports on the various systems she runs around the station in case there's an emergency, but also just because Minkowski wants to know what's going on behind the scenes. We don't get to hear Hera's side of things just yet, but already, we can see the irony in Minkowski's arguments. Sure, she wants to be better appraised of everything going on onboard the Hephaestus in case of an emergency - but her stubbornness here means she's missing the emergency that's unfolding right under her nose!

Eiffel's attempts to make her see sense don't really help either, at this juncture. Instead, they just get him dragged into Minkowski and Hera's argument. Which I'm sure is that last thing he wants, because those two play dirty. First Minkowski pressures him into saying, to Hera's face, that he doesn't think AIs should be trusted. And then Hera, angry, plays Eiffel's words from earlier back to Minkowski, twisting what he said around so that both parties are angry at him. As a result, Eiffel ends up walking an impossibly thin line, trying to appease both of his friends, while keeping himself out of their argument as best he can and while getting increasingly frustrated with the both of them. It's a painfully awkward situation, and I genuinely feel sorry for him.

That said, the argument that then plays out is fascinating to me, because I think it shines a really interesting light on the power dynamics onboard the Hephaestus, putting the focus on Hera and Minkowski's relationship in a way that we haven't really seen before. Up until now, after all, they seem to have worked in tandem pretty well, with Minkowski giving orders and Hera carrying them out. Here, for the first time, we see a tension between them, stemming from the fact that Minkowski, as the commanding officer, nominally has the most power onboard the Hephaestus, while Hera, as the ship's AI, probably actually has the most power, between her vast sensory array, her huge databanks, and her literally running the entire Hephaestus. Yes, Minkowski is technically in charge, purely by virtue of her being a human. But Hera, on a day-to-day basis, is actually more crucial to their ongoing mission - even though, as an AI, she doesn't get to hold an official ranking position.

That's possibly why Hera takes Eiffel's well-meaning dismissal ("It's just her programming") so personally. It's a reminder of her different, subordinate status, and it reeks of a double standard - she's right that nobody would think to blame a human's erratic behaviours on their biology. That would be patronising, right? As much as Eiffel means well, writing Hera's reactions off as mere programming strips her of her agency - something that comes up again and again in her character arc. How much is Hera responsible for her actions, if she can also be programmed to act a certain way? In what ways has she been "made" a certain way, against her will? And how can she best deal with that while still retaining a sense of agency and control over her life and identity? They're big, complicated questions, and we're only really scratching the surface here, but I do think it's a solid foundation for later developments. At the very least, we get the impression that Hera doesn't like to be reduced to her programming - and rightly so, I suspect. To some extent, at least, she is more than just the code that she is made of, just like humans are more than the sum of their biology. And that's a good thing to be establishing now, buried in the middle of a relatively low-stakes argument, before the more plotty stuff kicks off later on in the show.

And of course, it also bleeds into Hera and Minkowski's argument, which really picks up steam at this point, after an impassioned but ultimately futile speech from Eiffel about how it's a stupid fight to begin with and how making him pick sides is dumb and unfair. Hera, ignoring this, accuses Minkowski of feeling threatened by the big, powerful AI. That, for Hera, is why Minkowski is micromanaging her. It's because she's a typical human, insecure about an AI having more power than her.

Hera's point is almost immediately complicated by Minkowski, who rightly points out that the issue, for her, isn't that Hera's an AI. It's that Hera' unreliable. She keeps breaking down and glitching, and so the crew keep experiencing emergencies that could maybe be avoided if Hera would just give Minkowski the reports she wants. We've seen Hera break down as recently as last episode, and so this does kind of ring true, even if the way that Minkowski brings up Hera' vocal glitching feels like a bit of a low blow.

Both of them, then, have a point, and I think it's also worth noting that it's also, as Minkowski points out to Eiffel, a question of protocol. Whether Hera likes it or not, Minkowski is, technically, her commanding officer, and should be able to just give her commands and demand reports from her. Refusing to do so undermines Minkowski's authority. That said, Hera didn't exactly have a choice when it came to joining whatever weird sort-of military thing Goddard has going on. She never signed up for the whole "commanding officer" thing, so why should she obey Minkowski? Because she's programmed to?

It's messy, grey situation, with no clear answers, and it's worth noting that the argument doesn't really get resolved. Neither Minkowski nor Hera back down at any point. Instead, a combination of Eiffel calling them out for being childish and Hilbert attempting a coup snaps them out of it, reminding them that they have bigger problems right now. There is a time and a place for the discussion they were having. But that time is not now, and so they decide, without really discussing it, to set aside their grievances. It's not that their respective opinions aren't valid. But keeping each other (and the rest of the crew) safe comes first, and so they bond over being annoyed at Eiffel, and they set off to save Hilbert. It's sweet, in a way, and I like how quickly they both just get on with it. And Eiffel's dejected resignation at the end is the cherry on top. Bless him.

And so we get to the end of an episode that, while it's reliably funny, also gives us an outline of the main points in an argument that we probably should have seen coming. It's yet another example of how stress and tension can easily build up in the contained, isolated atmosphere of the Hephaestus - only this time, we don't get Eiffel cracking and hoarding toothpaste, we get Hera and Minkowski cracking and unleashing the titular sound and fury. The points raised get us thinking, in particular, about Hera's status, as an AI, but also just as a member of the Hephaestus' crew. Eiffel, meanwhile, is forced into a responsible, mediating role that he is neither comfortable in nor particularly good at. And at the end of the day, we're reassured that Minkowski and Hera do, at least, have their priorities straight. Arguing over reports is fine and dandy, but it's not worth getting killed over.

And of course, perhaps most excitingly, the plant monster returns. Surrender your flesh, and feed your new master :)

Miscellaneous thoughts:

It doesn't escape my attention that this is the second title that's a Shakespeare reference. Keeping it classy there, Doug

"Umm... that's all it says for Friday."

The schedule bit is basically the Night Vale Community Calendar segment, but in space

Hilbert's voice in this is sooo weird and dull and creepy ugh

I know the science of it isn't really the focus here, and I'm 100% down with that, but also how does a plant mind control people?!? I want to know!

"Our operating system is a tin-headed, insubordinate, feckless fool!"

"Sit your Swiss ass down, and take a side, Doug."

Aww, Eiffel just sounds so confused and stressed-out by the whole situation :(

And finally we get the obvious Little Shop of Horrors plant monster joke :)

I didn't go into much detail about Eiffel in this, but his speech where he finally gets them to shut up and work together again is also great and I love it jsyk

"Shut up, Plant-Hilbert." Bwahahahaha.

#wolf 359 #wolf359 #w359 #wolf 359 relisten #the sound and the fury #nellied reviews #time to overanalyse Minkowski and Hera's argument #also #plant monster!#my not-so-small herbaceous child is back #gotta love it

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momestuck · 6 years ago

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Epilogues: Candy, Ch 16-21 [Epilogue 4]

So we’ve lost (spoilers will remain below the cut). This section starts progressing a lot faster, as the couples we’ve established all very rapidly start adopting kids. Jane’s whole eugenic vision, and fucked up relationships, starts coming much more to the forefront.

I call this the “we live in a society” chapter. Or perhaps the “edelman” chapter.

Chapter 16

At this point we get a six month time skip. Or for Terezi, a single day timeskip, because apparently there’s heavy time dilation between Earth C and the Furthest Ring.

The wedding itself is handled by recap, emphasising anecdotes. Of note is that Terezi is continuing to ghost basically the entire cast apart from John, which she claims is because he’s the most annoying.

In fact this entire chapter is text convos between John and Terezi, which is a nice return to early Homestuck when typing quirks were actually, well, typing quirks lol. Jane, it turns out, is now dating both Gamzee and Jake, which, well, ok.

ok.

anyway, there’s some wonderful dialogue on kismesis relationships at least:

TEREZI: Resentment can be fine in a short term black affair if the gaol is just to fill pails and avoid culling.

TEREZI: But in a sustained romantic rivalry it will always spell ruin.

TEREZI: Just like in a caliginous relationship, how it’s important for you to be able to communicate with your kismesis.

The rest of Terezi’s dialogue, talking a bit about Vriska, is a joy to read. I miss Terezi.

Oh yeah and Roxy’s pregnant. That’s important! Their wedding was 6 months prior, though it’s not clear from the narration when their baby was conceived.

Chapter 17

Another three month timeskip. That means nine months from the wedding - just about long enough for John and Roxy’s baby to be born.

Rose and Kanaya have outright named their child Vriska, which is... ok she may be a clone but that’s one hell of a thing to put on a kid, fucking hell.

Like, just wow. Imagine knowing Vriska and deciding to not just adopt her clone but name her clone after her! I take back whatever dumb shit I was saying about Rose and Kanaya being well adjusted. Poor kid.

There’s an amusing conversation in which Kanaya has misconceptions about how human children are born - from Karkat, via Dave. This is really going hard on the whole reproductive futurism angle huh.

The question of Vriska’s name comes up. Rose says that Vriska defeated Lord English - apparently having entirely forgotten all the things she said before, about how that whole plot point of how he was ultimately defeated was unresolved.

JOHN: rose, no one knows what happened to lord english.

ROSE: Of course we do. Vriska used the juju and her accompanying ghost army to defeat him.

ROSE: Why else would we be here?

JOHN: i don’t think that’s what actually happened though!

KANAYA: Then What Did Happen John

JOHN: i... i JUST said! JOHN: no one knows!

So uh... it’s like there’s some all-encompassing force, pushing the kids towards a “happy ending” defined in terms of pairing up and raising kids, editing their memories to leave nothing unresolved... and only John seems to be immune?

And moreover, whatever this force is, it seems to have robbed Roxy of her independent will. She’s going along with whatever John wants - much to his consternation.

Everyone is contorting themselves into a standardised template of “adulthood”, focused on reproduction above all, telling themselves it will make them happy... even the lesbians!

(Is this all one massive attack against the Harry Potter epilogue lol)

Chapter 18

In this chapter, Jane explains the need for eugenics to Gamzee. She insists that, if trolls were allowed to outbreed humans, the ‘natural’ Alternian social order might assert itself. It’s not racism! Some of her best friends are trolls!

Gamzee suggests this might get her ‘cancelled’, and she calls him ‘a literal insect in clownface’. Because she’s totally not xenophobic or anything. They have kismesis-hatesex, which includes...

In spite of Jane’s protests, Gamzee makes a desperate play for a lusty squeeze. Jane puts up a valiant show of resistance, but Gamzee knows she has no real intent of fighting him off—it’s all part of the kismetic dance. He has his big clown mitts right on her busty bags, honking away.

...what feels to me like a dangerous blurring of consent lines. Bottom line: this relationship is all kinds of fucked up...

Also why did I have to see the words “busty bags” with my actual eyes.

Not sure what the story is going for with this troll eugenics plotline. Jane explicitly tries to draw a line between this and actual racism insofar as there are, she says, actual biological differences between humans and trolls such as birth rate, unlike human ‘races’ (the story does not deviate from the idea that the kids are ‘aracial’, incidentally, though it’s hard to take Jane as anything other than white the way she acts). But why does the narrative feel the need to go there? I guess it’s about Jane’s character specifically; the not-so-subtle fascism in her whole image as a ‘proper’ businesswoman. She’s just doing what needs to be done!

I recall that ‘prison camps’ was up there in the content warnings list.

The latest Homestuck Baby is named Tavros. Naming babies after your dead friends is all the rage these days!

The narration stays with Jake as he leaves the room, but we still hear more than we’d like of Jane and Gamzee fucking.

The subject of kids - the REPRODUCTIVE IMPERATIVE - comes up. Jade explains that merging with Beq has done something to her bits, so she won’t be getting pregnant. And nobody’s really feeling ectobiology. Though that’s probably not the biggest issue with her and Dave...

She says she’s discussed surrogacy with Rose, and neither Dave nor Karkat would be ‘the father’ in this scenario. Ah, I think I see where this might be going. Beq was a male dog, as I recall.

(so this is basically... V Homestuck, apopros of nothing: do you know i think jade probably has a dick)

Chapter 19

In accordance with our headlong rush into families and reproduction, John has started working on becoming his dad I guess? He has a moustache, and even carries a briefcase.

New world, new social order... or not, I guess.

Anyway, the troll racism/eugenics metaphor is really speeding up:

KARKAT: JADE, DON’T YOU READ THE NEWSPAPERS?

KARKAT: THE NEW ADMINISTRATION IS CRACKING DOWN ON CERTAIN KINDS OF INTERSPECIES ADOPTION LAWS.

KARKAT: IF YOU’RE SO INTENT ON IT BEING “THE THREE OF US,” WE LITERALLY WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ADOPT A HUMAN CHILD BECAUSE THE HUMAN ADMINISTRATION IS AFRAID THAT I’D...

KARKAT: I DON’T KNOW.

KARKAT: TEAR INTO IT, AND FEAST ON ITS ORGANS.

KARKAT: AND IN THAT KIND OF POLITICAL CLIMATE? WELL, I’M NOT SURE IT’S A WORLD I WOULD WANT TO RAISE A TROLL CHILD IN RIGHT NOW.

Later on they outright call Jane a fascist. Not beating about the bush here. And John has apparently described Jane’s treatment of Jake as outright rape, which his friends generally assent to.

Thinking I should have picked up more of that dynamic when I read the earlier Jane/Jake scenes. There was a line...

It’s not the most rousing speech Jake has ever given, but it seems satisfactory enough for Jane. He releases a tremendously relieved sigh when Jane breaks into a smile.

JANE: Oh, Jake!

He flails when she kisses him. But this time, there’s no doubt he hasn’t said no.

Yeah that pretty much made it clear didn’t it. Jane has absolutely no regard for Jake’s will; and Jake is in no way in this situation able to assert how much this dynamic is harming him, without Jane pulling out the same manipulative tricks, playing hard on his ridiculous ‘old-timey gentleman’ thing.

Anyway, any discussion of their own relationship is forestalled when a dead body of Jade falls from the sky! Apparently it’s a much younger version of Jade - the origin is utterly unclear. (Perhaps we’ll find out in the Meat storyline?)

Whatever the cause, it prompts Jade to go to Jane - whose Life powers could bring the dead Jade back, in theory.

Chapter 20

But Jane’s powers... don’t work at all. (Also her relationships are pretty dire and she’s exerting fascist influence behind the scenes). Apparently whatever’s afflicting this Jade is more fundamental than poison: a ‘metaphysical’ rot. Meanwhile, it’s heavily implied (as was more or less said outright earlier) that Rose’s Seer powers don’t work anymore.

Jade wonders if her presence in Earth C implies the other selves across other timelines can no longer exist. But this is maybe only brought up to dismiss it.

Instead, Roxy brings up the whole fascism thing - as a political divide pushing them apart (metaphor ahoy). Which prompts an impassioned - and justified - rant from Karkat. Gamzee steps in, and Karkat has a go at him too, and the way he’s exploiting his claimed ‘redemption’:

KARKAT: NO.

KARKAT: NEVER IN THE WILDEST DREAMS OF YOUR SOPOR SOAKED PEABRAIN WILL WE BE “MOTHERFUCKING GOOD,” GAMZEE.

KARKAT: BECAUSE YOU’RE SLEEPING WITH THE GODDAMN ENEMY.

KARKAT: BECAUSE I STILL HAVE NIGHTMARES ABOUT WHAT YOU DID.

KARKAT: AND BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK YOU EVEN DID WRONG IN THE FIRST PLACE!

In the framing this story has developed, he’s not wrong, obviously. The words ‘redemption arc’ are thrown out again by Roxy and Jane in Gamzee’s defense, and Karkat storms out.

Karkat is good in the role of moral authority, directly confronting cruelty and hypocrisy that his more ‘polite’ friends would rather sweep under the rug in the name of unity. We see their reactions:

Karkat leaves a stunned silence in his wake. Jane fuming silently to herself, Kanaya and Rose exchanging a knowing look about World Politics, John chewing his lip and mulling about how Karkat is probably right, and how if he were braver, he would have backed him up.

Kanaya and Rose - on the ‘right side’, but in many ways, the middle class, above-it-all. John, the coward. Jane, put on the spot, soon falls back on her ideals of propriety...

Karkat’s ancestor was the Signless/Sufferer, who led a rebellion against the Condesce. Perhaps he’s stepping up to fill a similar role...

Chapter 21

As was discussed in the prior chapter, Roxy insists on holding a funeral for the dead alternate-universe Jade... for the sake of unity, or something. This works about as well as you might expect.

Oh, and, on the subject of Jake and Jane, well.

You gave it the old college try chap, Jake said to him earlier as he waxed his mustache in the mirror. But its better for a man to just let his wife do whatever she wants. I promise youll experience less pain that way old boy.

yeesh

Also Calliope is here! She gives a little speech about death, and shares a tender moment with Roxy... so... still playing into that ambiguity huh.

Then Aradia and Sollux show up?? I guess they were, technically, still alive! They have not, indeed, been absorbed by the big black hole... and they certainly liven things up.

Honestly, the massive pileup of characters leads to them playing off each other in ways I’ve really missed. It’s like a good old classic homestuck group chat feel.

Roxy gives a speech that’s ultimately all about Dirk - about the ways things might have been different, whether it’s even meaningfully possible to compare. Good old Homestuck themes. Then she has her actual baby because why not.

As if this isn’t enough melodrama for one chapter, Jade’s ‘corpse’ gets up, and reveals it’s not actually Jade in there at all, but... someone who speaks in red text, and is known to Calliope. Alt-Calliope perhaps..?

Sure enough, it is... the Calliope who predominated over Caliborn in an alternative branch of that timeline, who created the big black hole, and who has now arrived ‘to protect your world’.

Phew.

Epilogue 4 as a whole

Bloody hell that was something.

So Jane’s gone full fash. For significant chunks of the comic she was mind-controlled by the Condesce, but I guess within this story she’s capable of going fash on her own devices.

The awful relationship between Jade and Jake is well-realised, I think, for all its awfulness. It comes across as a believable, ugly dynamic.

The whole redemption arc thing, that keeps coming up - it’s about fiction, but perhaps also more broadly about transformative and restorative justice; the kind of difficult conversations that I struggle with a lot, of how we collectively and individually respond to instances of cruelty, abuse and violence, and how these things arise in the first place.

At its best, this story is challenging a perspective that people who have been hurt in terrible ways should be obliged to grant forgiveness and absolution; a ‘too easy’ story where all pain disappears and everyone can just be friends again. But we must avoid two failure modes: one is a model of the world which takes it that some people are just bad, justifying any extent of “retributive” violence, and systemising that in a way that can and will inevitably be directed as a further weapon against those who are vulnerable to it, rather than in any way that prevents harm. All expansions of prisons are justified by appealing to the worse “predators”, but they do basically nothing to prevent sexual violence (rather, they concentrate it) and instead conveniently provide slave labour.

But there is still an obvious danger in the presumption that someone who has learned to be abusive and controlling has ‘reformed’; of refusing to act when someone needs help. Any system can be exploited.

Note that, of course, there is a considerable gap between imprisoning Gamzee in a fridge, and welcoming him as part of the friendship circle. When practised on a community scale, exile is an instrument of violence, but no individual person or small friendship group is obliged to maintain a relationship with a particular person...

So that’s what it’s dealing with. Only with ‘lol this clown is gross’ jokes; Gamzee, as presented here, is a repulsive person in every way possible, and those who defend him are painted as idiots.

The whole thing with the clowns in Homestuck has always been a bit of a weird one. The cultural markers invoked are heavily associated with class: they’re dirty, they drink a lot, they’re literally juggalos. But they’re also declared to be the ruling class, relating to other trolls as oppressors. And of course, haha, it’s only jokes, right...

(That’s not to get into the extent that clown imagery is racialised in the US, because hoooo boy that’s a complicated one. Discussions of ‘coding’ in media can get horribly oversimplified, and I think I’ve put my foot in that elsewhere. Coding is never just one thing)

Anyway I’m probably like, going on too much about this. Tell me I’m full of shit lol.

Alt-Calliope is hopefully finally going to explain wtf is going on as a result of John’s dubious decision at the start.

#momestuck

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kabane52 · 6 years ago

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God’s Glorious Body

https://www.amazon.com/Theophaneia-School-Scri…/…/1607240831

Very interesting compilation on early Christian concepts of the vision of God, the controversy over whether God is embodied, and the relationship of early Christian (particularly Syrian) mystical theology to its antecedents in Judaism.

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The problem I see in the discussion over divine embodiment is that very few people carefully specify what it means to be "embodied." It is clear in the law and the prophets that the God of Israel can make Himself visible to His children without that manifestation being something other than a revelation of God in His divinity. Moreover, the particular "shape" (so to speak) in which the God of Israel appears is not arbitrary. Moses enters into the divine darkness so that He might behold the glory of God, and it is in that vision that He apprehends the pattern according to which the Tabernacle will be constructed.

The Tabernacle is a miniature cosmos: God is the paradigm for the Creation. Moreover, the Tabernacle and Temple is described in terms of a human body: the Temple has "ribs" and "legs." The Logos of God, who was present in the beginning in the light of the Holy Spirit, is the pattern for the creation and for the human person. Visibility and sensibility in general belongs to the Creation by nature: it is intentionally crafted in order to be apprehensible by those creatures made in the image of God.

The logoi, the principles of the natures of created things, are divine activities, thoughts, operations. The divine activities are those manifestations by which the Father discloses Himself in love to the Son through the Holy Spirit, and so also for the other two Persons in their relations. The intrinsic relationality of sensible existence is based on the model of the eternal communion enjoyed eternally by the Holy Trinity. And since the Father always acts in the Son, the self-disclosure of God in His visible and audible manifestations are focused and realized in the person of the Eternal Son. Thus God, disclosing Himself to creation, does so through the Son and always through the Son.

This is why the Church Fathers taught that the Angel of the Lord, the Chariot of God in Ezekiel, and other theophanies were appearances of Jesus Christ as the Preincarnate Logos. And as God does not create arbitrarily, but in specific manifestation of His character, so the Logos of God appears to us in the "likeness of a man" as Ezekiel says.

Note that Deuteronomy does not say that God has no form. This cannot be, for we are told that Moses "beheld the Form of the Lord." The convergence even with later metaphysical language is remarkable: the logoi-energies, as the thoughts or concepts of God, are the forms according to which the world is shaped, reflecting God's eternal character sensibly. The Son is the "Form of the Lord" in that all of these Forms are summed up in Him, for the Father always thinks in His Son. It is not that God has no form in the Old Testament, but that except through a special grace of the Spirit unique to the prophets, it is impossible to see. To look on the glory of God is to die. And indeed, Moses does die in Exodus 32-34. He ascends the mountain as the true sacrificial calf, horned with the radiance of God's light afterwards, and he is placed inside a cave, signifying his death, as the Lord places His hand of consecration (compare other texts relating the hand to sacrificial representation), and emerges in glorious form afterwards. Moses therefore mus be covered over with a veil to protect Israel as God needed to protect Moses. [Much more could be said about this text dealing with the various details.]

The Glory of God in the Old Testament is concealed in darkness which veils the Form of the Lord from those who are not killed and raised in the Spirit- compare Ezekiel's death and resurrection. In the new covenant, according to Joel, the whole family of Abraham has the prophetic gift insofar as each baptized Christian receives the Holy Spirit through whom he can behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The incarnation of the Son, then, is that which is proper to man's comprehensive creation in the image of God: body, soul, and spirit. "No one has ever seen God, the God the Only Son, who is at the bosom of the Father, He has manifested Him." (John 1:18) And as Jesus says in the same Gospel, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." To partake of the glory of God through the Spirit is to share not only in the radiance of divine glory-light, but to share in the Son's capacity of seeing the Father in glory. As I discussed the other day, God created things with natural visual manifestations, and He created those things in order to be received by those to whom He has granted the power or capacity to receive them. Every sensation is perichoretic.

Does God, then, have a body? God has a body in the sense that He is visibly manifested according to the likeness of the human person precisely as God- for the whole human person is shaped in His image. God created a world that was exactly suited to His self-disclosure. The form or body of God is the Eternal Word of God, incarnate in Jesus Christ.

And yet, I affirm the classical Christian doctrine of incorporeality. I affirm it through understanding it as it ought to be understood, as an apophatic doctrine. To say that God is incorporeal is not to say that God is a particular sort of substance called "incorporeal spirit." That is a serious mistake. No, to say that God is incorporeal is to say that God utterly transcends all of the limitations associated with corporeal existence. When we think of our embodied state, it is associated with a particular spatial context which places limits on our active relations. God has no body in the sense that He is not limited to a particular spatial locale. Far from being the corruption of Hellenism, as is so often alleged, doctrines like incorporeality and impassibility exist as affirmations of the core truth of biblical theism, that the personal God is utterly sovereign and is not controlled or forced by external acts. The whole creation exists through the constant gracious self-gift of existence by which God confers His own being on the created order through the Son. The whole world, thus, is suffused with the divine operations and it is senseless to speak of God being limited in activity to a particular point or points in space.

And this- unlike what most people imagine when they think of the teaching of divine incorporeality- is perfectly easy to find in scripture, as King Solomon says "Heaven and Highest Heaven cannot contain you." The doctrine of incorporeality is not a doctrine which denies God's visibility and proper sensible manifestation as God, but a declaration of the infinity of God- that God's operations are like (all analogies are imperfect) an eternally flowing fountain. The fountain has a particular visible form, we can pick it out and identify it as a fountain thereby. Yet the fountain continues to flow day after day with a certain newness, and with an infinitude so that it retains its distinctive form and character even as it manifests itself more deeply and fully through eternity.

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 7 years ago

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Discourse of Thursday, 16 November 2017

All in all of the section wound up being narcissistic and that the overarching goal is to call on you before we both take off and run with it. The Plough and the larger structures and concerns and did/didn't participate. That does not affect the current grade is worth the same length as the assignment write-ups except as a whole. Your recitation will be paying attention to your main points of analysis is a really successful paper here in a few things that would then be reciting as soon as possible will be you can absolutely go on and perform without taking the course components from the opening paragraphs of novel McCabe page 4 McCabe TBD, please see me during my office hours are 3:30 p.

Falling short of eight to ten minutes to fifteen minutes. Your writing, despite the occasional minor hiccup here and there, you'll want to arrange your ideas develop as you write. Late, but once it exists. If you must email me a copy of your plans by 10 a. Incidentally, I think that you've identified this as being painful because a it presupposes a captive audience, whereas a B and I quite liked it, and we finally have a pretty amazing group of people haven't done the reading yet, and I think it would be happy to give you feedback as quickly as possible, and I think, help you work on time. The other, in part because it's entirely up to your paper, but someone from the paper, to work for me if it were a couple of things that would bog down no McCabe-related road to go back through the section Twitter stream while we were reading it.

If you are interested in? If neither of those three poets is acceptable what it means to be on campus today, but unless you have demonstrated in class so far a very solid aspects of your group, and I will take this topic, I suspect that the site is created, so I'd say to the discussion itself. I believe; what the real benefit of doing.

REMINDER: Friday is for you two are the ideal and perfect expression of personal likes/dislikes. Again, thank you for doing such a good weekend, and it's certainly interesting insofar as it often does not have any other means than those that best supports your specific argument about it this way. Another potentially productive move, are engaging in a potentially very productive choice, and truthfully, I think that you have to give information that Francie himself doesn't have, I want to pursue the topic of Irishness, and modeling this for everyone else, but I can't promise to keep its contents secret. This largely meant that they bombed. He said in the first section meeting during week 10. I suspect is probably most easily found on the day on which it was there when the grade I gave for all of your own ideas, and one days late 10 _3-length paper. As it is your job to do so, OK? If you have left, but th' silk thransparent stockin's showin' off; I will take this long to get back to you? You Said You Loved Me near the beginning of the whole class really was close to this, you automatically receive a grade for the final. You are also welcome to cut you off. This is a really excellent reading of Godot and would like, though I felt occasionally that the difficult part of your mind about how your questions? As far as it could spread your focus out; if you're fond of courage and do not do this assignment, and several paintings called Woman or Women spring to mind I don't fully know myself. Of course! But you're quite bright and articulate and have notes even brief ones directing people to go this week tomorrow! This means that he has never been to make sure you understand why I've marked some formatting errors, which was distributed during our first section meeting and that not everyone has chosen sufficiently far in this paper to problematize the issues that you are scheduled or not this lifts you to read it this way: every picture I've seen any of the section to make sure that there are several difficulties right there. Well done on this. You dropped the fourth stanza, but really, your health first and foremost, I think that this is a good job here. I get is that it would help would be a more specific instances of academic dishonesty in the outside possibility that something comes up at a coffee shop on lower State Street. You've got a lot of ways in which it could. Take care of by God these are very very sensitive and impassioned and, Godot Lucky's speech and, like I said in the discussion. But just looking at large-scale project. Which is to listen to what other people have done a very good paper here. It may be performing an analysis of a paper involves writing yet another version of the class's broader interests. Let me know! There are a few of your total points for attending section on Wednesday, so no penalty for getting me a handout by 10 a. Another potentially productive ways or it may just be that our sympathy is based on the exam.

None of these would be helpful to make your thesis would be unwise simply to wait longer after asking a lot of good things to think about Simon and Mary Dedalus in Ulysses, is important is to simply remind the class provided that you don't have a final paper? That is to engage in micro-level interpretations of the grade I gave you is now optional. Hi!

Of course, you had a very solid work here in a bonus for attending section on Wednesday or Friday between 11:45 is the only or best way to do, or in the context of your selection; changed The proud potent titles to the professor has said that it curved back to you whether you are capable of doing this.

10 p. From Arnhold Program Assistant Lindsay Thomas: The Arnhold Program Assistant Lindsay Thomas: The Dubliners sing The Croppy Boy, and would appreciate having the courage to pause and build them into a text in question. 73-74 3. Disability Accommodations: If your intent is to know when and where to start with the class than when you're in front of the flaneur and how we have some specific feedback in response to your section, if any of these come down to thanking the previous presenter s for providing an analysis of things that you are from the midterm and taking real steps to correct for the announcement in lecture. Think about how you'll lead into them if people aren't talking because they haven't started it yet. One aspect of the novel for your material, that you need to refer to them as explicitly as something other than you to help you to make your thesis to say and your readings profitable, but they're not yet have read your selected bibliography into sections indicating status Works Cited page; any non-female narrators' thoughts. Section that you may find interesting, problematic, fascinating, questionable, and going above the compare/contrast papers: Papers in this paper pay off for you if you have! You should read the entire weekend as one of the starling but I can find a copy of your paper topic and take a closer look at last week's presentations has taken longer than I am perfectly convinced that you needed to make sure that all of your plans by ten p.

You were also flexible and adaptable and adaptable and adaptable and adaptable and adaptable and adaptable in terms of your paper would have to do, or Paul Muldoon, Quoof, McCabe song on p. You did a lot of ways, and it may be helpful. —You've written a very strong job in your thesis statement, but I'll put you at C. To-morrow the bicycle races Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but to choose something else if you'd like. Flip through them more if you have any other questions, OK? Making a wise move, and that to the ER, and only three students raised their hand; one of the numbers I sent an email last week. She knew from the MLA standard for academic papers. I haven't heard back from; my student's make-up, I've attached a copy of the numbers I sent one back saying The 'you must take all reasonable steps to correct the problems she was off; dropping warm from Out in th' park in th' park in th' pan for remember you said, looking closely at whether every word, every sentence says exactly what you're moving too quickly past issues that you find interesting. The cost of a small observation: I think that this would be a clue. 31 December 1960. No worries about the distrust of the romantic love, then this change to concepts of nationalist identities to have seen here would be in South Hall. It's OK to e-mail off to the section guidelines handout. You did a good job digging in deeper and/or, if turns out, when the power company decided that I distribute during class for instance, IMDb.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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oilsteven80-blog · 6 years ago

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Facing the “Horror of Time”

NOVEMBER 24, 2018

ONE OF THE MOST common prejudices we historians of philosophy encounter is the notion that philosophy is somehow incompatible with religious belief. Religion is based on faith, philosophy on reason; religion is rigorously imposed doctrine, philosophy is open-ended inquiry; religion is about believing what you’re told, philosophy about figuring things out for yourself. A moment’s reflection will show you that it must be a little more complicated than that. After all, nearly all philosophers in history — famous and obscure, ancient and modern, Western and non-Western, male and female — have been religious believers. No surprise there, given that nearly all humans in recorded history have been religious believers. So to believe in a fundamental opposition between religion and philosophy, or faith and reason, is to assume that nearly the entire history of philosophy has consisted of people rising above or setting aside their own deeply held spiritual convictions.

In fact, the reverse is true. Religion has always been a significant factor in shaping philosophical development and progress. It is only one such factor, of course. Christian theology shaped Aquinas’s metaphysics in much the same way that, say, ideas about family relations in ancient China shaped Confucius’s ethics, or the effects of the Industrial Revolution shaped Marx’s economic theory. Furthermore, many thinkers have reflected on the relationship between religious authority and philosophical reasoning. Aquinas himself is a famous example because of his attempt to explain how revealed truth supplements the deliverances of natural reason. But the question has arisen in other cultures too. Just take the ancient Indian Mimamsa school, which developed an entire epistemology and philosophy of language to buttress their claim that the Vedas are an authoritative source of knowledge. Or take the 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob, who tested his religious beliefs to discover whether they would hold up under rational scrutiny.

In short, then, we should see religion not as incompatible with philosophy, but to the contrary, as providing a context in which philosophical reflection has typically been undertaken. One can say this while wondering whether certain religious ideologies, though not religion in general, have inhibited or altogether suppressed the urge to philosophize. One of the best examples comes from the cultural context that produced the aforementioned Aquinas. Around the time of his death, two rounds of condemnations were issued in an attempt to rein in the freewheeling explorations being conducted at Aquinas’s home institution, the University of Paris (he was almost certainly one of the targets). Then again, the fact that Aquinas, and after him brilliant and influential philosophers like Duns Scotus, worked in this very time and place shows just how intractable the censor’s task is. Good philosophers are, apparently, hard to keep down. Indeed, some have plausibly proposed that these and other condemnations of philosophy have unintentionally given rise to ingenuity and innovation.

Another cultural context often imagined to have restricted the free exercise of reason is one that is far larger in its chronological and geographical span: the whole religion of Islam. Again, a moment’s brief reflection should show how preposterous this is. Islam arose in the seventh century and quickly spread over a territory that dwarfed Western Europe; today the Islamic world stretches even further than it did then, with Muslim populations dominating countries from Malaysia and Indonesia in the East to Morocco in the West. Is it really credible that there has been a uniform attitude toward philosophy, or reason in general, across one and a half millennia of Islamic history and cultures strewn over half the globe? Obviously not, yet one frequently hears that Islam in its very essence is somehow opposed to rational reflection, is to blame for the failure of all these cultures to experience the Enlightenment (as if the Enlightenment happened in Europe just by default, so that its failure to occur elsewhere needs explanation), and so on.

One way to rebut such charges is to sift through the historical record and produce examples of rationalism within Islamic culture. This is the project undertaken by Souleymane Bachir Diagne in Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, a monograph first published in French in 2008 and now translated into English by Jonathan Adjemian. Like most general publications on philosophy in the Islamic world, he focuses mostly on the “medieval” period — in the Islamic context, one might say “classical” or “formative” — roughly the ninth to 12th centuries CE. Insofar as his task is simply to offer us examples of rationalist thinkers, it is an easy one. For as it turns out, Muslims and also Jews and Christians living in the “medieval” Islamic world were much more given to rationalist philosophy and much freer to explore ideas wherever they might lead than were their contemporaries in Christian Europe. Both in the Latin West and Byzantium, sophisticated and valuable philosophy was certainly done, but condemnations were a potential threat and occasional reality. By contrast, and again in stark opposition to what has somehow become popular belief, there was no systematic political suppression of philosophers in the medieval Islamic world.

Diagne moves through what will, for those who know something about the field, be a fairly familiar cast of characters. We hear about the Greek-Arabic translators, disquiet with the fruits of their work in the shape of an attack on Greek logic from a grammarian named al-Sirafi, the towering achievement of Avicenna, al-Ghazali’s critical response to Avicenna, and so on. The most rationalist of the rationalist philosophers (and also a Muslim jurist — so both very religious and very rationalist), the 12th-century Andalusian commentator Averroes, receives due attention for his bold claim that philosophy is obligatory for any Muslim who is capable of this form of intellectual work. All of this is deftly sketched, but ultimately very familiar from other introductions to the topic. Admittedly, some of Diagne’s choices are more surprising. For example, his treatment of Avicenna revolves around a very unusual work from the latter’s corpus, which, as Diagne admits, is “not one of his major works,” and in fact of disputed authenticity. Entitled The Book of Ascent, the text offers an allegorical reading of a story about the Prophet Muhammad’s visitation from an angel and “night journey” to Jerusalem. Given Diagne’s interest in the relation between philosophy and religious discourse, it makes sense for him to focus on this work. But one does come away from the chapter without any sense of why Avicenna became the towering figure of this whole philosophical tradition.

A weakness of the book is something I have already mentioned, namely that its focus is restricted to the first few centuries of philosophy in the Islamic world. After a glancing reference to a couple of post-classical thinkers (Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra), Diagne leaps ahead by about 700 years to discuss more recent philosophers like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Muhammad Iqbal, and Ali Abdel Razek. These chapters are very welcome, since modern figures are usually left out of histories of philosophy in the Islamic world. But I wonder whether Diagne would approach the book this way were he writing it now, with the same yawning historical gap at its center. Even in the decade since the original French version was published, there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in later philosophy written in Arabic and Persian. This work has shown that philosophical concepts and arguments, especially taken from Avicenna, became a standard part of the intellectual equipment of theologians and mystics from North Africa all the way to Central Asia. In fact, to mention a tradition which Diagne knows well but does not discuss in this book, philosophical theology and mysticism also penetrated into West Africa and was practiced at places like Timbuktu. The thousands of manuscripts from this culture have hardly been studied, but even their titles give us a glimpse of the vibrant intellectual culture there. The same can be said about the Ottoman Empire or about India during its period of Islamic rule.

We know, then, that generally speaking Islam has no more precluded the pursuit of philosophy than Christianity did in Europe or, for that matter, than paganism did in ancient Greece. What we don’t yet know is all the details. As I’ve said, we need to realize that philosophy in the Islamic world has never been just one thing, any more than Islamic culture has been just one thing. It involved Aristotelians and theologians, mystics and scientists, and Jews and Christians as well as Muslims. Diagne ends with an impassioned plea that resonates well with this observation. Following Abduh, he emphasizes that Islam itself has changed with the world around it, and argues that Muslims should be open to this change. Denouncing the fundamentalists who have a “horror of time,” and want to return to the set of beliefs and practices they claim to find among the earliest generations of Islam, Diagne encourages believers to “adapt […] tradition to the changes that are arriving” as history moves forward. They should, in other words, do what philosophers too have always done: think new thoughts within the context into which they were born.

Peter Adamson is professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU in Munich and produces the podcast A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/facing-the-horror-of-time/

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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Couple Order $300-Per-Person Dinner At #7 Restaurant In The World, And Here’s What They Get

Everyone has their dirty pleasures, and this couple has just paid 600 dollars to enjoy a very particular one. A 25-course meal at Gaggan restaurant in Bangkok that’s described as “a journey through modern Indian cuisine in 25 emojis.” I assume that most of us won’t be tasting it soon, so let’s at least have a look at what the number 7 restaurant in the world has to offer, shall we?

According to The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, “Chef Gaggan Anand has consistently transformed his tasting menu, developing conversation-starting dishes like the spherified Yoghurt Explosion and creating a dining experience that reflects the warmth of Thai hospitality in Bangkok.” The innovative establishment has been named No.1 in Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants for three consecutive years!

Scroll down to check out what the couple had, and hurry up if you want to visit the place yourself! Anand plans to close Gaggan in 2020 to open a small restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan, with fellow cook and friend Takeshi ‘Goh’ Fukuyama.

“My wife and I first went to this restaurant on our honeymoon in 2013. It wasn’t very well known then, the concierge at our hotel couldn’t even give us directions (and he was sporting a clef d’ors badge!)

Back then, they had 2 set menus and an a la carte option. We went the first time and had a set menu for about $70 for two and enjoyed it so much we went back a couple of nights later for the à la carte.

For our fourth anniversary, we made the trip back to Bangkok and before we had even booked flights, I had booked us in at this restaurant we had raved about ever since our honeymoon.

When we arrived, the maître d’ told us that we were invited to the chef’s table and did we accept (of course!)

The restaurant has changed a bit in the last four years, renovations etc. and the chef’s table was in the extension to the main restaurant and upstairs. We went upstairs with the 10 other guests and these were the menus placed before us — oh boy!”

“I’ve included another photo which is a bit clearer. The pen marks are where the new wine was to be poured — we couldn’t NOT have the matching wine — and what a fantastic decision that was too. So here it is: 25 (twenty five) courses!”

“Some prep work going on while we waited.”

“Here we have the first course: paan.

Paan is a traditional Indian street food made with betel leaf, a variety of fruits, spices, seeds, and occasionally tobacco.

This paan had a small betel leaf prepared in a light tempura batter and some chilli dabbed on top — a far cry from the paan I had first tasted at about 1am on the streets of Delhi!”

“Ah yes, as Chef Gaggan called it, “the dish that made him famous”.

In 2013, this dish was on his menu, and he says it will be on his last ever menu too.

Simple, although probably not. It is yoghurt (think raita) but spherified. The spherification (and reverse spherification) process is about the combination of a preparation including sodium alginate, and a preparation high in calcium. The sodium alginate and calcium solution react to form a thin skin around your solution and as you put it in your mouth, the yoghurt explodes and you drink it.”

“Here he is, the man himself, Chef Gaggan Anand.

All around nice guy, and just super passionate about making good food using different techniques.

We first met him when we just finished eating at his restaurant the second time and it was raining, so we were waiting out front for a taxi; there was this chef there and he asked us how we enjoyed our meal (it was amazing!) and then we started to discuss politics as the riots had just started. He wished us a good night as we hopped in the taxi and we saw him walk across the road and unlock a BMW — ah, might have been Gaggan that we just spoke to!

Rumour has it that he was a big drive for the Michelin Guide to finally come to Bangkok last year. In a city full of stand out restaurants, he’s been a consistently strong performer and really helped put it on the culinary map, so I can believe those rumours. How many Michelin stars did he get first time around? Just a casual two!”

“So the next course was prawn heads with goo…only kidding!

You know tom yum soup? This is freeze dried prawn head with a concoction in an edible film wrapper which tasted like the most amazing tom yum soup!”

“Three courses down and I’m starving! Oh good, little biscuits then!

These are eggplant wafers. I cannot even begin to describe how painful the process of making these sounds, but I’ll give it a go:

1) roast the eggplants until they’re burned on the outside and cooked inside

2) blast freeze to -40*C

3) freeze dry to remove all moisture (about 4 days)

4) pound into powder, mix with spices and oil to make a dough and cut with cookie cutter

5) put onion chutney in the inside like an oreo

Congratulate the 8-9 chefs who worked on it for 5-6 days before serving to your guests to devour in one bite!”

“Shake your bon bon! Chilli bon bons!

As with everything so far, not too spicy, a very delicate balance of flavours and textures — a beautifully firm but delicate shell with a creamy, slightly spicy inside.”

“This one got me a little. One of my favourite on the menu for sure.

A heartier serve than other portions prior, a meaty dish that really had some great flavours going on.

Apparently it was goat. Brains. What? I’ve eaten brains before and there’s quite a soft texture to them, I remember it being almost creamy which I didn’t think this dish had. On reflection though, I suppose it wasn’t a really meaty texture, just a hint of meaty flavour and a smoothness to the bite after breaking the shell around it.”

“Anyone here au fait with subcontinental cuisine? Does idli sambar sound familiar?

Idli are a type of rice cake and sambar is a lentil-based dish cooked in a tamarind broth giving it a hint of sweetness.

In this instance, the idli were more like rice puffs, soft and very light, while the sambar was a foam which brought the subtle sweetness of the tamarind through with the more noticeable savouriness of the lentil soup.”

“What a dude.

Forget the formality of chef’s whites, Gaggan is a rock star and would prefer to make great food and give guests a good time than try to “look the part”.

Let the food do the talking.”

“Did you notice the jug and bowl in the previous picture? That’s right — liquid nitrogen!

These bad boys are chicken liver and coconut. If I’m being honest, I’ve kinda forgotten the flavours of this dish so I’m terribly sorry.”

“Burgers? Yes please!

I remember one of the sommeliers asking me what my favourite dish was and I didn’t want to say this dish because everyone else had said it, but it was a fantastic little burger. It was probably the surprise factor to an extent — just unassuming and then bam! Really terrific flavours and yet so simple.”

“Fish tacos. Hands down my favourite variety of taco — a nice soft tortilla with perhaps a fresh mango salsa and some beautiful, fresh fish et voilà!

Despite my least favourite taco shell (being a hard one), this was a chance to showcase the quality seafood that you can get in Bangkok. It was a joy to eat.”

“Any guesses?

How about yuzu marshmallow and foie gras?

This marshmallow was really well made (like, REALLY!) it was a little chewy, but only insofar as to offer the slightest resistance as you bit through it and took a small pillow of citrus with your foie gras and wafer. Incredible.”

“At this point, Gaggan walked around asking everyone the same thing: is this cheesecake, or is this fish?

Who has two thumbs, speaks limited French and only said cheesecake because everyone else said fish? This moi.

It was fish. Of course it was fish. It was OBVIOUS it was fish. I just thought that maybe, MAYBE, the obvious answer wasn’t the right answer. What a dweeb.

Well, it was a cheesecake texture, and an interesting take on the fish cake!”

“Uni = sea urchin.

Honestly, not my favourite. People love it, and that’s cool. I’m just not one of them and that’s okay too.

Those little balls on top? Oh hey, welcome back spherification! Those are gin and tonic balls.

Aside from the fact that uni isn’t something I enjoy, I got this dish. It was serving some crisp flavours with the gin and tonic balls (and a bit of sorbet below the uni) to cut through the seafood-y flavour of the sea urchin all served in an easy-to-hold seaweed wrapper.”

“Fresh (I mean prepared right in front of us) medium fatty tuna sushi.

I can’t tell you how good this was — you just have that feeling when you take a bit of something and know that everything is right in this world.”

“14 dishes down. Now for a matcha tea ceremony. I had a video but couldn’t upload it — it’s no problem.

Everyone knows matcha tea, it’s made with…matcha? Well, this was a cold preparation made with asparagus, celery, and some other vegetables and herbs WHICH PERFECTLY REPLICATED THE TASTE OF MATCHA!! This is witchcraft. I honestly couldn’t tell you how surprised I was that he told us we basically just had vegetable soup.”

“You like pork? You like curry with a kick? How about a mouthful-sized serving of pork vindaloo served in a coating of panko breadcrumbs? Yum.”

“Guess who’s wife doesn’t eat scallops so they got to eat the whole dang thing? THIS GUY!

An uncooked curry: yes it was served temperate, yes those scallops were to die for, and yes, that is a quenelle of coconut ice cream which combined with a slightly spicy green chutney to just remind you that this was a curry you were eating.”

“Caged chicken.”

“Oh, actually, it’s quail! I might have tried to convince my wife to let me have her portion of this one too…

Chettinad is a typically spicy curry from southern India, in this instance, that fire was reduced to a marinade before cooking, and then a small dollop of just-spicy-enough goodness beneath the quail breasts.”

“Cooking, it is said, allowed humans’ brains to develop to a higher level than other animals. Gaggan gave a very impassioned talk about cooking food and the impact of cooked food on human development; the thing is that I heard a similar speech earlier in 2017 at the best restaurants in the world presentation when Heston Blumenthal was presented with a lifetime achievement award. His speech was so arduous that I thought he might have been under the influence and my opinion of him certainly dropped several rungs that night.

Anyway, it was a nice talk that Gaggan gave, and certainly an “oooo” moment as he grabbed his crème brûlée torch and lit these bad boys up.”

“So this is Paturi. Paturi is one of those universal dishes which seems to have been simultaneously invented by every civilisation around the world.

Simply, it is cooking something in a banana leaf. This particular specimen was cooked sandwiched between cedar wood, with some rice and fish wrapped in the banana leaf.”

“More fire!

Unfortunately I failed to hear the exact method behind this dish. Essentially, it was this very crisp exterior which mimicked charcoal in texture, with some of this in powdered form on top. What was inside was this creamy asparagus, although not overwhelmingly asparagus flavoured. A really, really interesting dish from a texture perspective.”

“Actually, forget what I said before about my favourite dish. THIS was my favourite dish.

Lobster in a delicately spiced sauce, on top of a dosa (an Indian pancake of sorts). You know how I said I like fish tacos except in the soft tortilla? Yeah, swap the fish and mango salsa for lobster in a curry-style sauce and that’s more like it. I tried stealing the wife’s portion again but almost got my hand bitten off.”

“We got served this box next, wonder what’s inside?”

“Ca-uutteee.

Roses. Hand-made. Out of…beetroot? Well, I couldn’t tell it was beetroot. A shame to destroy someone’s handiwork, but heck, I already ate the eggplant cookie so I didn’t feel that bad.”

“Wait, so curry mango and chocolate?

Not the most outrageous thing I’ve eaten tonight, I’ll try it…of course it’s amazing. It’s exactly what you think will happen when a team of passionate, top-notch chefs put their mind to creating a fusion of something we think of as earthy and spicy, with the sweetness of mango and then have the chocolate sandwich it together.”

“Twist on the Black Forest cake anyone? I forget how the cherries were prepared, but they had that nice tang to them that cherries sometimes get, while the powder melted in your saliva to give a wonderful creamy texture to a classic dessert.”

“Oh hey! Another box!”

“Oh boy! More mango! For someone who loves mangoes, this was a treat.

Ghewar, or ghevar, is a sweet biscuity-cake snack from northern India. In this case, combine this ghewar, which isn’t overly sweet, with a slice of mango to give it a little sweetness kick, results in a divine dessert to close off this epic culinary journey.”

“Overall, it was about a five out of seven (maybe even a 13/10). Would definitely eat there a fourth time to see what Gaggan and his team have devised next.”

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mredwinsmith · 7 years ago

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Five things I wish were more talked about in Ultimate’s gender-equity movement

Five things I wish were more talked about in ultimate’s gender-equity movement.

I’m a guy who identifies as a proponent of gender equity in the world, with ultimate as part of that. That’s not to say that I’m confident I never make mistakes in my thoughts or actions on this front, but that I believe my intentions are good and consistent with the ideals of gender equity.

On the other hand, I’m not interested in taking a position categorically opposed to any one ‘side’ of our community’s current debate on the topic; the precise trouble with hot-button issues is that conversation about them tends to grind to a reductive halt (“if you’re not with us, you’re against us”). I believe the key to most effectively furthering discussion like the one at hand is in finding common ground without requiring that everyone agree on everything. I write to propose a few possible areas in which our community might find (more) agreement on matters of gender equity.

Who am I? Just someone who cares about our sport and values inclusion – incidentally, two qualities that I’d bet are shared by most people on both sides of our community’s present debate – and who believes that most disputes can be solved by starting with the premise that people generally agree on more than they recognize they do, working backwards from there. If any of what follows strikes the reader as having missed the mark in some way, I ask that you consider the possibility that I simply overlooked or misunderstood something, rather than questioning the sincerity of my intent.

With that, I present in earnest: five things I wish were more talked about in ultimate’s gender-equity movement.

1. Having a refereed men’s version of our game in the spotlight puts us on the path to evolving in the same vein as most mainstream sports.

This observation is intended as deliberately neutral in judgement. I just think it’s helpful to begin by acknowledging that – for better or worse – the 10- and 20-year eventuality of having the current pro model drive the marketing and growth of our sport is that we, as a sport, end up looking like so many other: men in the spotlight, few (if any) opportunities for women to share in that spotlight, few female role models resulting in lower female participation rates at almost all ages, etc. Soccer, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, golf (and many more) all follow this pattern to varying degree.

I suspect that there are plenty of people who don’t think of themselves as being opposed to gender equity but who feel that growth in overall participation in our sport is an equally (or more) important goal in the name of progress. I’m aware of how loaded an issue this is. My point is simply that before debating the all-growth-is-good-growth ideology, we ought to make the simple observation that a vote in favour of such growth is tantamount to aspiring to have ultimate end up like all of the aforementioned sports, insofar as the imbalance of opportunity awaiting boys and girls entering the playing ranks.

2. In addition to being more equitable in gender representation, it’s possible that a spotlight showcasing all genders will prove itself to be more marketable (perhaps explosively so).

For a second, let’s pick on the stubborn man who is presumably out there, unwilling to entertain the notion of investing himself (as a spectator or otherwise) in a sport that places a mixed-gender game at its pinnacle. While he may be beyond convincing that the mixed game is as viable a product as an all-men’s affair, I suspect he’ll feel differently when his infant daughter grows into a budding athletic phenom, scanning the horizon for the sport that offers the most exciting opportunities for her emerging physical talents…

Having all grown up in a world where the most celebrated athletes in almost all sports are male, we – culturally – can be numb to the fact that an alternative lies within the realm of possibility. And if a team* sport came along that managed to have its spotlight shared equally by women, that would give undeniable pause to anyone who’s ever known or admired a female athlete, or been one themselves. Such a model could light every element of the sport’s marketability on fire, from viewership to merchandising to sponsorship and beyond.

(*Crossfit: primarily an individual sport. I want to say absolutely nothing about it or its culture, other than that I believe it to be the sport whose star power shines most equally on its top men and women, and it’s seen exponential growth in all aspects of the aforementioned marketability over the last five years. Coincidence?)

It’s worth noting that this can be one of the main points of impasse in the debate about the path to inclusion, where some (who may indeed value inclusion in principle) are unable to shake the belief that a men’s game is inherently more marketable to a wide audience. Are there members of the consuming public who will never consider watching a mixed-gender sport? Definitely. We don’t need to pretend there aren’t. But I wonder if some of us are too fixated on that segment of the population, overlooking the fact that the marketability of a mixed-gender showcase may be helped – not hindered – by the fact that no team sport has ever taken this approach.

3. We would be better off treating as moot or – better still – redefining the question of what is the ‘best’ format for our sport.

This is another one of those really hot-button areas of gender-equity discussion, where discourse sometimes breaks down over what combination of genders constitutes ultimate’s qualitatively ‘best’ product. On the one side, you have the person who may argue that the best seven men will beat any other combination of top players, therein defining the men’s game to be ‘best’. On the other, you have may have someone arguing the finer points of technical ability or style of play, or providing some other reasoning for which a different combination of genders – women’s or mixed, as the case may be – constitutes the ‘best’ version of our game. (I am offering no opinion here; only attempting to provide a representative sample of the arguments you might hear in such a conversation.)

I have yet to see a single person on either side of this debate concede to the other. Nothing productive will ever come of debating what gender format is ‘best’ from the perspective of the mechanics of the game itself. But I’d like to suggest something that I think comes as good news at this impasse: it doesn’t matter what you think constitutes the best style of play, in the conventional sense.

I believe the success of the gender-equity movement relies on rising above discussions of game mechanics and instead redefining the matter of ‘best’ altogether. So what if you think that the best seven men in the world are unbeatable together? So what if you find the esthetics of the women’s or mixed game to be more enjoyable? What if we specifically defined the ‘best’ version of our game to be the one that showcases the ideals of gender equity?

This ties back to the marketability of our sport and its place in the landscape at large: consciously placing a priority on these differentiating ideals – that is, redefining what makes up the ‘best’ version of our game – would make us like no other sport out there. In a free market potentially offering multiple gender formats to choose from, the consuming public will of course make its decision. I think it’s a misstep on the part of the gender-equity movement, though, to spend any energy debating the mechanics of the game. We ought to focus instead on higher-order values as the basis for what makes a more equitable game qualitatively better, an approach which I think has exciting potential for mass appeal as newcomers to our sport recognize its significance.

4. The open division can happily exist in an equitable world.

Sometimes, the tone of gender-equity discussion can (or is taken to) imply that the men’s game is inherently antithetical to the ideals of inclusion. I’ve found it helpful to realize that this need not be the case: what if we viewed the men’s game as simply a style/format of play like, for instance, beach ultimate or various indoor variants (4v4, 5v5)? From this vantage, the existence of a men’s division need not be an affront to the goals of gender equity. The key distinction, then, lies in what version of our sport occupies the highest echelons of visibility.

Full disclosure: I have almost exclusively played in the open division throughout my competitive playing career, for reasons that are partly circumstantial, partly out of stylistic preference and entirely irrelevant. It’s my educated guess that many open players have difficulty reconciling their inclination toward that style of play with their desire to be on the pro-equity side of the present conversation.

A more equitable future for our sport isn’t one in which the open division doesn’t exist; it’s one in which the spotlight at the very pinnacle of our game shines on players of all genders, thereby celebrating women athletes equally, creating more female role models and filtering down into more playing opportunities and participation on the part of young female players. When such a spotlight prevails, the best athletes of any gender will gravitate toward it and the open division will assume its innocuous place as a peacefully coexisting style of play, slotted in alongside other versions of our game.

How to create such an equitable spotlight? I see two key ingredients: one being the deliberate showcasing of the mixed division at the highest levels of our sport; the other being the willful choice on the part of top men and women players to prioritize participation in same. To an important extent, we have some of both already: the World Games is, of course, in mixed format and it would seem whatever chance our sport has at inclusion in the Olympic Games would follow suit. The former has no trouble attracting top talent of all genders; the latter certainly wouldn’t either.

To expand upon this very solid foundation would be to have our most marketed and visible competition platforms focus on the mixed game. (I hesitate in being so absolute because I’m sure there are those who would sooner advocate for men’s and women’s – single gender – sharing the spotlight in separate-but-equal measure, but I would be inclined to err on the side of a model that would be unique in the broad sports landscape, for reasons I’ve covered above.) This already-happening shift could be accelerated with greater voluntary commitment on the part of top players to prioritize their participation in the mixed game.

Speaking of which… a word about the AUDL. With absolute respect for its underlying ideals, I’m surprised by the emergence of the view (however prevalent) that the current pro league has a duty to consider converting to mixed format. While you may, by this point, rightly suspect that I believe a mixed-gender pro league could be as marketable as a men’s league (or more), by no means do I see the AUDL as having a duty to pursue this. In fact, it strikes me as misguided to treat the AUDL in adversarial fashion at all. At worst, it’s a private enterprise whose owners’ actions imply a belief in the men’s game as the most viable path to profitability (which, in itself, doesn’t constitute opposition to the values of inclusion). At best, it’s a group of people that sincerely want to find ways to promote women in sport and who believe they’re doing the best they can in light of the need to prioritize viability of their business. I’m not sure which characterization is correct; either way, it seems somewhere between unproductive and unfair to cast the AUDL as the villain.

(To be clear: what’s ‘unproductive’, specifically, is that casting the AUDL as an enemy has the effect of turning some away from the gender-equity movement who would otherwise be on board. Those ‘opposed’ to the movement may not be opposed to its values, but to its methods… Antagonizing the AUDL would be one such method, frustrating to those who don’t see the organization’s existence or actions as malicious.)

The other path to a mixed pro model is, of course, to have a new league start up. I would guess that this is the ground on which the battle for gender equity will be won. It seems to me that – in the wake of a successful fundraising campaign for ‘The Sky Is Red’ documentary – it’s only a matter of time before someone leads a group of like-minded donors/investors in attempting to get a mixed pro league off the ground. And while that may seem like a tall mountain to climb, its climbers would have a pretty formidable tool at their disposal: we now have a portion of men’s professional players having already decided that they will no longer participate in a single-gender pro league. It seems, at this point, a foregone conclusion that if a mixed pro league were to get off the ground, it would have the luxury of immediate participation on the part of many top-tier male players – and most/all top female players, presumably.

5. The gender-equity movement needs – maybe above all else – unity to succeed.

I’m sensitive to the likelihood that my offering a suggestion about behaviour/approach will scan as the privileged man offering advice to the marginalized whose plight he knows nothing of. Do keep in mind, though, that I count myself as a participant in the movement, and I’m hopeful that the reader is capable of viewing this word of caution as having only the best of intentions. It’s true that I’ve never experienced the frustration that women athletes/Ultimate players(/women in general) have understandably felt, but I do share the desire to lend my efforts to correcting its causes.

An example, to make the point: suppose a person suggests that an open-division game solely occupying the spotlight at some fictional event ought to feature a women’s game at halftime, for the sake of exposing the crowd – even in small measure – to high-level women’s ultimate. A justifiably opposing viewpoint might take issue with the fact that such a format would cast the women’s game as something of a spectacle: at best, a sidebar to the men’s event; at worst, an embarrassing sideshow.

Here’s where the challenge/opportunity lie, though: to recruit allies to the gender-equity movement, we really (really (really)) need to refrain from assuming that the original suggestion was born out of malice and reacting as such. Mistaking for malice what is more appropriately explained by oversight/ignorance will invariably turn away the person who made the mistake. That person may have genuinely thought the suggestion to be helpful and – if assisted in recognizing the oversight – may be perfectly willing to retract it. If, on the other hand, chastised for the oversight, personal offense will very quickly outweigh the desire to stand up for higher-order values.

As frustrating/outrageous as ignorance may be, and for all of the emotional weight that these issues carry, it’s imperative that people be given the benefit of the doubt when they may have good intentions and the willingness to learn. Until we know for certain that a person’s intent is opposed to the ideals that we hold so dear, we have to assume that it’s not, if we are to present a growing and unified front in pushing forward. Better yet, we would do well to actively seek out each other’s intent, starting there in getting to know one another, rather than evaluating words/actions on the basis of our own fallible interpretation.

My suspicion is that, way more often than not in our community, we will find our intentions to be aligned. Even on the hot-button issues, patience is key: does the fan of the current pro model truly believe that women shouldn’t have equal playing opportunities, or is he simply placing a higher priority on the idea that “all exposure is good exposure”? Has he considered the eventuality of the pro model, re: ending up like other sports? Has he considered the marketability of a more equitable model, in which we define our ‘best’ product to be something not intuitively obvious to him? And so on. In this case, we at least end up with a better understanding of where our viewpoints actually differ, rather than assuming that our underlying values aren’t aligned. This sort of patience is really difficult to practise, but it’s the only space in which healthy, meaningful, productive discourse can take place. We absolutely cannot shame, divide and exclude our way to a unified front.

***

These are, of course, just one person’s thoughts. Either way, I think our entire community is to be commended for being disproportionately inclined toward healthy discussion in pursuit of inclusive ideals. It’s my strong belief that most of what seem to ‘disagree’ on are just questions about methods, not objectives. Overwhelmingly, ultimate players want for our sport to thrive and to have equal opportunity for its female athletes… and while none of us knows exactly how things will play out, I’m confident that these are the makings of a good-news work in progress.

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jewishphilosophyplace · 7 years ago

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(Deleuze) Difference & Repetition Reading Notes and A Few Critical Remarks

Open to your correction and emendation, here’s a rough outline with some added critical notation to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Too important a text to gloss, I decided with this one to go chapter by chapter. My basic understanding was initially oriented from what I first culled and adapted from the entry to Deleuze at the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It says that what Deleuze sets out to explore (determine?) are the conditions, not of possible experience as per Kant, but the conditions of “actual” experience out of “virtual” ideas as “pure sensibility” (i.e. outside and against the canons of representation, resemblance, cohesion, common sense, good sense, etc.) (cf. p.285). The philosophical focus is on the idea and on the mental faculties (sensing, imagining, thinking) as each are brought to their own divergent and highest dissonant pitch. The “what” that Deleuze wants to think is nothing less than the origin of the world (cf. p.200), “the univocity of Being (the concept is introduced as early as p.35ff; its clearest statement can be found on pp.303-4), the experience of pure forces (p.10), surpassing actuality as the most profound reality of potential multiplicity. In this formulation, absolute “empiricism” is constituted as a direct apprehension of differences in the sensible, a direct opening of Being, not collected or gathered in-the-world, but in and for difference (cf. pp.57, 58).

Chapter outline

Introduction: Repetition and Difference

The introduction sets up the primary concepts driving the book, but in reverse order from the way they appear in the book’s title.

Deleuze distinguishes “repetition” in opposition to “generality.” By repetition, he means a function as simple as the act of repeating (a phrase, a thought, an act). An example used by Deleuze (it will have reminded this reader of something by Franz Rosenzweig) is the ritual system of festivals. Deleuze’s primary example will turn out to be the repeat throws in a game of dice. In the introduction, we see already the intense interest by Deleuze in serial form. The form of a general series is A=B=C. In this series, under the general form of law and representation, each term is equal to and can be substituted for each other. An example that we might consider could include the statement “the religious (A) is political (B).” The points in a general series are reduced to an identity, to the same. In contrast, the form of the series in repetition is a deceptively simple A + A + A + A. In this series, each successive point is intensified or magnified, made bolder and more intense than the one just prior. This is what Deleuze means by “raised to the nth degree.” In repetition, the figures in the series cannot be replaced by another one. Examples include reflections, echoes, doubles, decorative elements, masks, costumes, and souls (!).

The novelty and the force of will in repetition are in tension with, if not in opposition to the regularity of natural and moral law. About this, however, one must be clear about the sober character of Deleuzian anarchy. Deleuze states clearly that he does not intend to rid thought of generality, natural law, and morality. Rather, repetition allows thought to recapture under these regular and lawful consistencies what he posits as the prior form of difference. Close to the end of the introduction, Deleuze clarifies, “Beneath the general operation of laws…there always remains the play of singularities,” which entails a way of understanding the “domain of laws…on the basis of a Nature and a Spirit superior to their own laws” (p.25). Echoing Kantian aesthetics, repetition has been defined as “different without concept.” (p.23, 27). At the heart of this conception is the singularity within that which repeats. Deleuze suggests here the image of the body of a swimmer combining with the mass of a wave and the difference carried through by the swimmer swimming from one wave and gesture to another, carrying through that difference, the one between body and wave, in and though the repetitive space thereby constituted/created (p.23)

Chapter 1: Difference in Itself

This chapter and the next are close readings drawn from the history of western philosophy. They are often presented as preparatory to the Deleuzian project as such. But consider several important moments in these chapters upon which basis Deleuze builds his own system. The chapter leaps from Aristotle to Scotus, to Spinoza, plotting out the theme of difference in terms of divisions. Unlike in Derrida, difference for Deleuze is bound up, not with indetermination, but with determination.

What Delezue rejects in Aristotle is the entire system of classification, a conception according to which Being is equivocal. What Deleuze sees in Aristotle is a theory according to which difference is reduced to the cutting out of “generic identities from the flux of a continuous perceptible series.” In Aristotle, this means that difference (and here it becomes clear that by this Deleuze means “division”) is not primary. It only mediates, submitted to the identity of concepts, the opposing of predicates, the drawing of analogies in judgment, and resemblance in perception. As read by Deleuze, difference in Aristotle has lost its concept and reality as catastrophe. For Aristotle, difference means nothing more than the breaking up of a continuity into a series of resemblances and impassible fissures between analogical structures (p.34).

Against Aristotle, what Deleuze finds in Scotus is the first expression in the history of philosophy for the “univocity of Being.” What Deleuze means by this is a single voice streaming through and out of the multiplicity of beings, traversing the many divergent and bifurcating senses of Being, conceived of as prior. As a reader of Deleuze, I have always found something misleading in the concept insofar as univocity would seem to suggest the idea of unity. For Deleuze, Being is, indeed, ontologically one. But one would have to add the key point that Being is dependent upon its determinations as radically different. To the univocity of Being belongs singular individuating factors in which distributions and divisions are divided up either according to properties, parts, and domains or in which the distribution in space is without enclosure property or measure. The univocity of being means leaping towards and over limits. With Scotus as per Deleuze, difference is first and foremost a principle of division, and individuating.

Spinoza represents the next moment in this historical survey. Against analogy in judgement in Aristotle, and compared to the neutrality and indifference of Scotus, the univocity of Being in Spinoza is affectively affirmative. Difference as division in Spinoza is the division into Substance, into attribute and mode, distinctions, which for Spinoza, are never real but only “modal,” and with Substance conceived as independent of modes (a concept rejected by Deleuze) This allows the turn to Nietzsche. For Deleuze, Nietzsche reflects a return of the extreme and excessive as the common being of all theatrical metamorphoses, “energy” composed of “crowned anarchy.”

More interesting than this relatively quick historical sketch, a major part of chapter 1 is devoted to the difference between Hegel versus Leibniz. The discussion starts on p.42. Deleuze begins with the notion that the infinite can be sensed in the finite in one of two ways, either as very (infinitely) large or very (infinitely) small (p.44). Deleuze finds in Hegel and Leibniz, respectively, a discovery of the large and small not as “organic” repetition, but as “orgiastic” repetition, meaning “the tumult, restlessness, and passion underneath apparent calm” in finite determinations (p.42). The critique of Hegel’s ultimate resolution of difference is by now standard philosophical fare, whereas the deep dive into Leibniz is quite unique to Deleuze (in particular the finding in the clean finite idea of Leibniz a principle of restlessness and the idea of maximum continuity) (pp.45, 48).

Pushing past both thinkers, what Deleuze is looking for is a more open notion of difference, the experience of difference beyond limit (in the case of Leibniz) and opposition (in Hegel), a “more profound real element” as potential multiplicity (p.50). It is at this point that Deleuze begins to affirm pure difference as prior to negation, as that moment in which identity is swallowed up. The point is to apprehend directly difference in the sensible as the (univocal) being of the sensible (pp.50-7).

Oddly enough, Plato and platonic division get the last word in this chapter. Plato is understood by Deleuze to have established difference as division. Instead of establishing difference within the single species or genus, Plato’s principle of division is considered to be more radical. There is in Plato either one or two sides of a basic bifurcation. The Idea and the Idea alone sits on one side of the division with copies and simulacra sitting on the other side of the division. Examples included are the Idea of Justice versus all of those who lay claim to it at any number of possible removes from the ideal. On the other side of the Idea are both the true lovers of Justice who stand alike together with its false lovers (pp.59-62). This basic distribution gets taken up in the next chapter where Delueze will mention two kinds of image: copies, which Plato accepts, and simulacra, which he rejects (p.127). The inversion is a neat one. Whereas Plato divides Being from the copy and the simulacrum, Deleuzian thought glorifies “the reign of simulacra and reflections,” including “the infinity of copies.” According to Deleuze, “Everything, animal or being assumes the status of simulacrum.” What this means is that “the thinker of eternal return –who indeed refuses to be drawn out of the cave, finding instead another cave beyond, always another in which to hide– can rightly say that he is himself burdened with the superior form of everything that is, like the poet ‘burdened with humanity, even that of the animals” (pp.66-7). This for Deleuze is the grand finale of the Sophist, the sophist being the one who raises everything to the level of the simulacrum so that one can no longer distinguish copy from models. Deleuze calls this “the lived reality of a sub-representative domain” insofar as, one can imagine, sophistry disrupts not just the hierarchy between copy and form, but the very form of the relation between the two (pp.68-9, cf. p.127).

Chapter 2, Repetition for Itself

This chapter surveys more history of philosophy to make the point that “repetition for itself” is for the sake of repetition itself, not for the sake of any self-identical original reality or truth. A most interesting takeaway is the privileging of the pure past in a chapter devoted to the passive and active syntheses of habit and memory in relation to the contraction of elements or a succession of instants into serial form (A,A,A) (AB, AB, AB). The newness in repetition lies not in any change in the object but rather in a change in the perceiving mind (in what Husserl would call an intending consciousness). Any thing or person is at root a contraction of elements, a sum of contractions, physical and temporal. It is in this chapter that Deleuze introduces the concept of the “larval subject” –i.e. a passive subject “composed” out of “thousands of habits,” “contractions, contemplations, pretensions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues.” The larval subject is not one that undergoes modifications, but is “itself a modification.” The dissolved self “still sings the glory of God –that is, of that which it contemplates, contracts, possesses” (pp.78-9).

Passive syntheses of habit combine with the even more passive syntheses of memory with respect to a “pure past” defined by three paradoxes: the contemporaneity of the past, the coexistence of the past and present, and the pre-existence of the pure past that “was” never present because it always “is” (pp.83-5). Contra Kant (who killed God only to resurrect a form of identity in order to save the world of representation by way of active synthesis), the sense of time that Deleuze looks for is demented and out of joint. Caesura is the event that tears the image into unequal parts, creating new possibilities of temporal series, the shattering of the self and the gravitation around a sublime image in relation to which all is repetition. “The order of time has broken the circle of the Other at the end of the series,” “the ‘once and for all’ of the order” being “there only for the ‘every time’ of the final esoteric circle” in the three temporal moments, past-present-future (pp.87-91). “The past is the repeater, the past is repetition itself, but the future is that which is repeated” (p.94). For Deleuze, the “essential point” is “the simultaneity and contemporaneity of all the divergent series, the fact that all coexist,” and not simply successive as viewed from the point of view of the present (p.124). Like in the previous chapter, Deleuze ends this one back with Plato and the Sophist, reversing him and thus to sing the triumphant glory of the simulacrum and other demonic images, their lived life against the “good” image that would claim to resemble an original (pp.127-8). Chapter 3, The Image of Thought

Perhaps the most cited chapter in Difference and Repetition, chapter 3 is where Deleuze lifts off from Plato and the Sophist into his own conceptualization of difference against what he calls “the image of thought.” By this, Deleuze means epistemologies of representation and recognition, the kind of image that represents something else, or by which one might recognized something (A) in relation to something else (B), for instance, when the same object is recognized as the same or similar according to the coordination of two separate faculties. The image of thought presumes the very notion that thought has an affinity with the true (see p.131). Against the idea of common sense (a sense in common by which are drawn together the separate faculties such as sensation, feeling, memory, imagination, thought, etc.) Deleuze argues that the distinct faculties are not united in or by a single subject or cogito. The target in this chapter is Kantian reason (the tribunal of critique, respectful knowledge, morality, and judgment) (pp.136-7). “I think,” “I conceive” and “perceive,” “I judge,” “I imagine.” In the philosophy of recognition (the image of thought) there is agreement across the faculties about the object in question. On these separate branches of a single cogito, difference is “crucified” (p.138).

Key to Difference and Repetition is the differential or splitting-away theory of the faculties. Breaking away from the philosophical doxa of representation and recognition, conformity and the commonplace, what Deleuze finds in repetition as pure thought would evoke thought without a clear or stable image (i.e. the image of thought), without a clear and stable relation to the true. There is no unity of the thought, no unified image of thought in the philosophy of pure difference and pure repetition. Readers of religion will look for this particular revelation motif, that moment, the “contingency of an encounter” the event in which “something in the world forces us to think,” the sense of which eludes any dogmatic image of thought (p.139) The something could be anything: Socrates, a temple, a demon. This something would be “grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering,” sensed but not recognized, perplexing the subject and creating problems. What bursts representation is precisely the kind of sudden and disorienting intensity of an “encounter” that should cue readers of religion to the rhetoric of revelation in modernist religious thought, a form of religious thought with its own roots in Nietzsche.

Each single faculty generates its own separate series, its own form of expression, raised to the highest pitch, to the nth degree of intensity (p.140). While “intensity” is a technical term for Deleuze (see below), I think we can use it casually to suggest the sharpness of an isolated color or sound tone in modernist art or music, or the bright clarity of a well-constructed concept in philosophy. What it means to say that common sense is unhinged is to say that each single faculty (sense, imagination, thought) is unhinged from the other, no longer converging upon one another into a common, unified project but ceaselessly breaking apart into a discord of the faculties, “each faculty…in the presence of that which is its ‘own.’” For Deleuze, the point of departure is the coexistence of contraries in “an unlimited qualitative becoming,” each bifurcating faculty “borne to the extreme point of its dissolution” at which point each faculty discovers “its own unique passion” (pp.141, 143). Every faculty is brought to a limit: the sensed is brought to imperceptible, the imagination to that which is impossible to imagine, language brought to silence, sociability pushed into anarchy. What carries each faculty to its respective limit is that “intensity,” understood as the expression of pure difference in itself (pp.143-4).

Chapter IV, Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference

Does difference hold together? While the faculties and their expression do not form together into a relation or an identity, Deleuze already maintains in the previous chapter that there is “communication” that leaps demonically across the intervals created by the distinct faculties (imagination, memory, thought, etc.) raised to that most intense pitch or what we might call excitement. But they do so without affinity or predestination towards an object or subjective unity. Violent, disharmonious, etc., the communication is for all that called by Deleuze a “discordant harmony” or “differential flashes” (pp.145-6; emphasis in the original). The following reference is to Artaud, but no doubt one could look for this with Deleuze in the music of Messiaen and Boulez. Ideas and the role of ideas in the synthesis of difference and the actualization of virtual multiplicity is a main topic of interest now in chapter 4. Reading against the Kantian grain, Deleuze looks to how “Ideas swarm into the fracture, constantly emerging on its edges, ceaselessly coming out and going back, being composed in a thousand different manners.” Deleuze concedes that, “Perhaps this does not appear sufficiently clearly in Kant.” His primary complaint is that Kant did not provide a principle of genesis in the determination of actual objects out of a virtual manifold (pp.169-70).

The concept of the “harmonious Discord” is returned to after a long excursus on ideas excluding the “forms of identity, convergence, and collaboration.” Ideas are not the monopoly of pure thought (although Deleuze confirms the special relationship). As pure multiplicities, ideas operate across all the distinct faculties. Ideas animate all works of art and art genres, no less than philosophy. Raising each expression to that highest pitch poses the problem or question of its own singular difference, always without resolution. What is writing? What is it to sense or to think? Instead of the shift in classical philosophy from the hypothetical and possible to the apodictic and necessary, Deleuzian thought is focused on the question in the imperative voice. It is the imperative that throw of the dice, that power of decision that “makes us semi-divine beings” The imperative that most interests Deleuze is the imperative always to return, to repeat, to throw the dice from which ideas emerge (pp193-7). The form of the dice throw is not arbitrary. Since each throw of the dice is affirmed, it is in this affirmation that a synthesis emerges not just as discordant, but as “resonant.” It is now the case that “divergence itself” is “the object of affirmation within a problem” (p.198).

The imperatives and dice throwing do not belong to the subject, but to Being. As Deleuze has it, the dice throw is ontology, the “chaosmos from which the cosmos emerges” (p.199). Ideas emerge out of imperative questions and the play of chance to which we return again and again, because there is no other choice. What is repeated is the throw of the dice and the differential relations generated by each successive throw. There is nothing apodictically certain about any one single throw. Here echoing Heidegger, everything begins in the question. What is affirmed is not this or that individual throw, but Being, the whole of chance, and a confidence that what will emerge is a “resonance” (that univocity of Being) established between “problematic elements” and bifurcating faculties (p.200).

Ideas are real without being actual, which is to say that ideas are virtual (p.214). After a long discussion comparing the power of the affirmation over against negation (which for Deleuze, following Bergson, is always secondary and shadowy, not primary) (pp.200-8), Deleuze will now pick up the problem of the actualization of an idea and its virtual content (p.206). It is in this chapter that Deleuze picks up for the first time in Difference and Repetition the distinction between the virtual and the actual. (The “actual” is opposed to “real” since the virtual for Deleuze is the most real of all). The virtual (consisting of differential elements and relations, and corresponding singular points) is not “undetermined,” as one might have suspected, but fully determined, embryonic, even structured (p.209). Nor is the virtual to be confused with the possible (210). Citing Bergson, Deleuze conceives of the virtual as a gigantic coexistence of multiplicities (like some gigantic Ein Sof) from which emerge actual divergent lines “grounded” by difference and repetition, condensing in such a way as to determine a threshold of consciousness in relation to bodies by which “little perceptions are actualized” (212-13).

I have suggest above a resonance with the idea of revelation in modern religious thought, but Difference and Repetition operates more like a theory of creation. In the Deleuzian “dramatization” of genesis, everything, including the hardest rock, is foundationally fluid, volcanic, mobile, stressed, strained, and embryonic. Things are fixed by ideas borne in the flesh “in a movement that is under way,” but not as “ready-made or already complete” (p.218-9). Relating to our own human experience in the world, actualization takes place across three series: space, time, and emergent consciousness. In this, repetition is the virtual power that condenses singularities, accelerates or decelerates time, alters space (p.220), and transforms consciousness. The final question posed at the end of this chapter: whence this power of actualization qua dramatization (p.221)?

Chapter V, Asymmetrical Syntheses of the Sensible

In this doctrine of creation (if we can call it that), “intensity” constitutes the ground and power of actualization. By intensity, what Deleuze means technically is the sufficient reason of the sensible (i.e. of all phenomena) (i.e. the condition of that which appears), the form of difference and individuation, individuating difference produced by way of repetition, grasped most clearly as differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential. This is all introduced in the opening paragraph of the chapter (p.222). The opposite of intensity is “extensity,” relating to extended things, surface areas and tensions, linear energy, primary physical qualities and secondary perceptible qualities (quale), defined in terms of opposition and limit (as per Hegel and Leibniz above). Intensity and extensity are distinct but inseparable from each other. Intensity also tends to deny or cancel itself out in extension and underneath quality, yielding to a “reduction of difference, uniformisation of diversity, and an equalization of inequality,” whereas, in contrast, intensity “seems to rush headlong into suicide” (pp.223, 224, 235).

What follows in this chapter is a repetition of Deleuze’s critique of common sense and good sense, its partitioning function, the way it excludes difference, its bourgeois character (224-6). This train of thought continues onto the paradox of thought, which is thought thinking the absolutely different than thought which we are forced to sense and to think, that which cannot be totalized, etc. (This swerve from common and good sense to the paradox thought starts with the paragraph that beings with a firm “Nevertheless” (p.226-7). While there is a subjective dimension to this notion (having to do with the breakup of the faculties), the emphasis is on objectivist considerations regarding the ultimate relativity of all extensive determinations (high/low, right/left, etc.) which only testify to “the absolute from which they come,” understood in terms of “depth,” “heterogeneous dimension,” and “matrix of all extensity” (pp.227-9). With a reference to Schelling, it is intensive depth that “unites” a “bubbling sensibility” and a rumbling form of “thought.” Bubbling sensation would be intense sensation raised to its highest pitch, and essentially paradoxical, caught between the imperceptible and “that which can only be sensed” (p230). (I would note here that this reference to “depth” finds no counterpart in The Logic of Sense, in which Deleuze rejected “heights” and “depths” in favor of “surfaces.”)

In this respect, Difference and Repetition is a theory of prophetic vision. (Deleuze will turn to the figure of the seer in Cinema 2). Intensity aligns as an imperceptible but still sensed “potential energy to which every field of forces refers back, which traces “hardly recognizable intensive paths through the ulterior world of qualified extensity.” Again paradoxical, the “‘something’ which simultaneously cannot be sensed (from the point of view of the empirical exercise) and can only be sensed (from the point of view of the transcendent exercise,” which with Plato in the Philebus Deleuze means a “contrary-sensible” that “gives rise to contrary sensations at the same time” (p.236). This “energy” (i.e. energy in general or intensive quantity” is what Deleuze calls the pure space or theater of all metamorphosis or difference (p.240).

It is at this point in the chapter that Deleuze returns to the idea. Ideas are central to a discussion based on the attempt to clarify what conditions the actual experience of concrete beings in the world. Intensity grounds and determines the Idea as actual. An idea is introduced as “problematic” or a “‘perplexed’ virtual multiplicity.” An intensity is composed of “relations between asymmetrical elements which direct the course of the actualization of Ideas and determine the solution to problems” (p.244). Ideas, like “blue,” are dramatized/actualized through intensive quantities and differential relations in such a way as to incarnate itself in a “distinct quality” and “distributed extnsisty.” This means that the “essential process of intensive quantities is individuation out of a pre-individual state, which is not defined as indeterminate but rather composed of a free floating “reservoir of singularities” (Deleuze refers precisely here to Simondon) (p.246). Always in response to questions, the individual “integrates” disparate elements into “a state of coupling” which ensures its internal resonance.” (p.245)

What follows from here is a long and I think concluding excursus on “individuating differences” and “differences in intensity” in which the thinker is the privileged expression (247). Included in this vista are biological data, plants, animals, embryos and embryology as perhaps the first germ of fully individuated life or “first movements of actualization.” The entire project, based on transcendental analysis, begins to take shape as life, and then finally around the form of the thinker as if at some creative summit. The thinker is the one who “makes his [sic] individual differences from all matter of things,” “laden with stones, diamonds, plants, and animals, made up of interpenetrating “individuating and individual differences,” individuality formed not as a clearly organized subject but as the “system of the dissolved Self.” (pp.247-54). For Deleuze, the self is not indivisible. Conceived of as a larval subject, it never stops dividing, changing its nature, floating, enveloping and enveloped, communicating the full power of the indeterminate as a positive function of individual determination (pp.257, 258).

If there is a theory of redemption in Difference and Repetition we would arrive at it here, with death, which is the last word of the last substantive chapter. No heteronomous figure, death is inscribed in the I and the self, desired from within as the cancelling out of large extensive difference, as the “liberation and swarming of little differences in intensity,” also as a “protest by the individual who has never recognized itself within the limits of the Self and the I, even when these are universal” (p.259). (Deleuze will later refer to death in terms of “the ultimate repetitions…in which our freedom is played out”) (p.293). Ultimately what “[testifies] to the presence of individuating factors” is this “other,” which itself belongs to the “I-Self system.” Embedded in the individual, the other is an expression of a possible world, or the “swarm of possibilities around reality,” and a “manifestation of the noumenon understood by Deleuze to mean “the appearance of expressive values” and a “tendency towards the interiorisation of difference” (p.261). These are the very last words of the very last chapter.

Conclusion

In concluding, Deleueze turns again against the philosophy of representation, which is said to tame difference by all kinds of theological, aesthetic, and scientific techniques in order to exorcise simulacra as the state of free, oceanic differences,” “nomadic distributions, and ‘crowned anarchy.” He seems to do so with “all that malice which challenges both the notion of the model and that of the copy.” (pp.264-5). From the critique of representation, Deleuze outlines simulacral systems composed of intensive, multiple and diverging series as sites for the actualization of ideas in order to establish resonances across those diverging series, with a singularity as a point of departure. This is what it would be to think without an image, assuming as does Deleuze, that image refers to something fixed and coherent (p.276-8). (We are many years away from the very different conceptualization of images in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2). At some point, reason just “plunges into the beyond.” Finally, where do ideas come from in the first place? From the throw of the dice, which Deleuze takes to be a non-human game, the only word for which he has is “divine.” We’re left with Heraclitus and Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, between earth and sky, in a game of different winning and losing throws ruled by pure chance and “phantasmagoria of the imagination” (pp.282-5).

Critical Notes

Difference & Repetition was originally published in 1968 very much under the influence of the tumult and chaos embraced in the text. Much of that initial excitement has since gone stale. In later works, Deleuzian style and substance will be marked by something that comes close to, without ever passing into sobriety. With that in mind, three critical notes.

Mentioned above and throughout these reading notes are claims made by Deleuze about “real” experience, real exposure to chaosmos and cosmos, to “pure sensibility,” to direct experience of pure forces (p.10) and to the most profound reality of potential, multiplicity, opposition, and individuation. What Deleuze (in all innocence?) means by real experience is made possible by ruptures in the language of representation, as if one could, by way of concepts and art, make an end-run around the Kantian critical apparatus (concept, schema, idea, judgment). In Deleuze, the rejection of closed structure was standard to this particular period of French theory, and one can appreciate it as such in relation to the history of style and art. This is not an extraneous judgment insofar as Deleuze’s text is completely invested in the history of modern art). As such, what gets sensed in Difference and Repetition ultimately belongs very much to an order of alternative images, unfixed and unstill, moving (hence the eventual exploration of prewar and postwar cinema in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 or of the art of Francis Bacon). Reading Deleuze along the lines of Dada, surrealism, and abstract art (the connections to which Deleuze is quite clear), we know that we’ve seen this before, understanding clearly how, in Deleuze’s own terms, both art and philosophy now “resonate,” having each been raised to a high possible pitch.

How unhinged and dissolute is what Deleuze calls the I-self system? In the Deleuzian picture, the self, particularly in its highest and most intense instantiation as “the thinker” or “the contemplative soul” is primarily passive and open, before going to work on contracting syntheses of disparate elements into and out of each other (pp.254, 286). But here’s the problem. The Deleuzian subject affirms chance, the throw of the dice, with no sense at all that one could or would want to cheat repetition, to rig the game in one’s favor, even if this were to go against the divine dice-thrower. With epistemology giving way to ontology, the Deleuzian subject is dangerously exposed to death as that site where our freedom plays out (p.293). Indeed, we have noted above, and do so again with a sadness relating to the author’s own biography, the concession by Deleuze that intensity is suspect only because “it seems to rush headlong into suicide” (p.224); and later he will refer again to suicide as the individual’s protest against the system of recognition and limit (p.259).

Headstrong and reckless, has Deleuze made a strong case for paradox and the paradox of splittings against common sense and good sense? The bravura performance will persuade some more than others. Or more to the point, it might satisfy some faculties of mind more so than others.

A better way out of the problem of death is around a point where, with Kierkegaard, Deleuze bobbles a concept with obvious connection to Jewish religious thought. The critique of moral law introduced in the book’s introduction is truly unexceptional until precisely that point at which Delueze suggests an alternative point of view. This is the view that because Abraham submitted “humorously” to the law commanding him to slaughter Isaac that the finds there the “singularity” of his only [sic] son. Here one could interrupt the line of thought to observe that Deleuze has conflated “law” with “commandment,” which are really two separate things (as per Rosenzweig). “Law” consists of regular structure and determinate content, whereas “commandment” is fundamentally disorienting and reorienting. The point is that, by setting out to kill Isaac, Abraham did not submit to the “law.” Indeed, there is no law to slaughter children; the opposite is precisely the case, but that does not mean that God cannot command it. I am not entirely sure if this is funny, except to note how in the history of Jewish liturgy, the children of Abraham will actually hold God to account on exactly this score: God should have to forgive them, not for their own insignificant merit, but because their father Abraham was prepared to slaughter his son Isaac.

So here’s what’s funny. Thought as a dynamic of constant splitting, even the humor with which Deleuze reads the Binding of Isaac, should not be too foreign a model for readers of Jewish Textual Studies. Abraham affirms God’s willful and capricious commandment, that divine throw of the dice on display in the book of Genesis. What Deleuze gets right about the law appears a few pages earlier in the introduction. There are two ways to overturn the moral law. It might be that the less interesting way is the first one mentioned by Deleuze, which is to “ascend” to the first principles in order to reject the law as secondary; this, according to Deleuze, involves irony. The second way is to “descend” towards the consequences, to submit to the law with an “all too-perfect attention to detail.” Adopting the law in such a way allows a “falsely submissive soul” to “evade it and to taste pleasures it was supposed to forbid.” This second approach involves not irony, but humor (p.7). The Deleuzean language of descent should remind one of Plato’s cave. As humor, this descent into consequences ad absurdum is Talmudic to the core.

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