VLVL2 (1) Missed Communications: Beginnings

[Dave Monroe]

>From Jonathan Z. Smith. "A Slip in Time Saves Nine:
Prestigious Origins Again," in Chronotypes: The
Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E.
Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991), pp. 67-76
...

   "Note well the argument.  Extraordinary privilege
and priority is given to naked experience.  Jensen
locates all meaning in a prelinguistic, highly
individual, originary moment of 'seizure' that is sui
generis.  All socialization of this moment, from
linguistic expression to repetition, destroys
spontaneity, impoverishes meaning, and is, ultimately,
mere habit...." (p. 72)

   "One does not have to go far to discern the
governing premise of this sort of theory.  It is the
Protestant principle of individuation, of unmediated
and spontaneous revelation run rampant."  (pp. 72-3)

"In Eliade, space and time are conceives as parallel
with respect to the difference betyween the sacred and
the profane.  In both cases, the profane is
'homogeneous' and lacks 'reality.'  Because of this,
it is the realm of the 'meaningless.'"  (p. 73)

"I have deliberately employed the term 'Protestant,'
for it is Protestantism, and in Protestantism alone,
that one finds the systematic articulation of the
model of the 'circle and line' in curious combination
with a strong affirmation of 'breakthrough.' [...] 
Both the cyclical and linear models of time employed
... under the influence of the Protestant myth reduce
'difference' to a discourse of the 'same.'  The
cyclical model does so by insisting on a notion of
repetition that is held to be either inherently
meaningless (as in Metzger) or meaningful because it
is wholly congruent with its exemplar, that is to say
because it lacks difference (as in Eliade).  The
linear model does so by reducing history to a
succession of meaningless events, identical to one to
the other unless interrupted by or directed toward a
supramundane telos.  By viewing the sacred as 'other'
and the profane as the 'same,' the bulk of studies in
religion have eliminated the complex middle gropund of
thought about 'difference' where myth and ritual
live." (p. 76)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48508&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0008&msg=48509&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0106&msg=57091&sort=date

--- Michael Joseph <mjoseph at rci.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> 
> Terrence, just to clarify - Eliade does not posit
> any specific theodicy. Your quotation unfortunately
> implies a Christian or monotheistic foundation to
> his writing, which most definitely is not there.

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