GRGR(12) Squalidozzi

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Richard Romeo wrote:
> 
> Terrance wrote:
> >Next, Squalidozzi says, "They see themselves at the end of a
> >long European dialectic, generations of blighted grain,
> >ergotism, witches on broom sticks, community orgies, cantons
> >lost up there in the folds of the mountain that haven't
> >known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years--keepers
> >of a tradition, aristocrats--"
> >
> >He says, "We can abide that openness."
> >What's at stake here? Metaphysical control. [snip]
> -------------------
> Sounds alot like the chruch's condemnation of the gnostics, nicht wahr?--An
> elite group, sharing a hidden power, remote from man...
> Of course, the church turned into an old boys network rather quickly. Seems
> neither institution can abide by openness--the church feels the threat to
> its growing power, the individual sects fearful, paradoxically, of a
> dilution of its essential purity of vision.  It is easy to see how the
> church becomes the state, the gnostics, hippies, LSD-addled are you
> experienced paranoids. And how things get mighty confused as to who to stand
> with. Have things changed all that much in 2000 years?
> 
> Rich
> 
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In his Gnostic Pynchon, a book we have both read with some
difficulty, Eddins is really quite a Poet, reading him, I
kept the dictionary open, anyway, Eddins, speaking of the
religious dialectic that structures GR, talks about this
notion of metaphysical control, powers that define reality
and what our relationship will be to it. The 500 years, here
mentioned as the european dialectic, yes western history,
seems to me anyway, to try to come to terms with 500 years
of  thought and Modern philosophy, from its birth to the now
post-modern. Somewhere around here I have an essay on
Pynchon's apocalyptic vision or something, any one have
this, read it? I can't remember if it deals with what I want
to speculate about here.  Well, so many of our modern
thinkers, such as Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, have
manifestly been apocalyptic thinkers. Indeed, the very
advent of modernity can be understood to be an apocalyptic
event, an advent ushering in a wholly new world as the
consequence of the ending of an old world. Nowhere was such
a new world more fully present than in thinking itself, a
truly new thinking not only embodied in a new science and a
new philosophy, but in a new reflexivity or introspection in
the inferiority of self-consciousness. "To be or not to be"
Shakespeare was so ahead of his time, like Melville, or
maybe not, maybe we are still trying to figure out what's
ahead and what's behind. In philosophy, it is Cartesian
internal and radical doubt which inaugurates modern
philosophy. Cartesian philosophy could establish itself only
by ending scholastic philosophy, and with that ending a new
philosophy was
truly born, and one implicitly if not explicitly claiming
for itself a radically new world.  That world can be
understood as a new apocalyptic world, one which becomes
manifestly apocalyptic in the French Revolution and German
Idealism, and then one realizing truly universal expressions
in Marxism and in that uniquely modern or postmodern
nihilism which was so decisively inaugurated by Nietzsche's
proclamation of the death of God. 

But here,  "It seems Jamf is only dead." Only dead? Jamf is
of course the conditioner of our favorite paranoid, liberty
loving Yank. Is he  the pornographic god of the west. And
what does it mean that he is only dead? 

TF