AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[Ian Livingston]

I just came across this in Zizek's Parallax View as I waited for the
rain to clear this morning, it might pertain, though more certainly to
CoL49 and the anarchist miracle:

"'Europe' stands for the (Greek and Christian) dream of parousia, of a
full jouissance beyond the Law, unencumbered by any obstacles or
prohibitions. Modernity itself is propelled by a desire to move beyond
Laws, to a self-regulated transparent social body; the last
installment of this saga, today's postmodern neopagan Gnosticism,
perceives reality as fully malleable, enabling us, humans, to
transform ourselves into a migrating entity floating between a
multitude of realities, sustained only by infinite Love. Against this
tradition, the Jews, in a radically anti-millenarian way, persist in
their fidelity to the Law; they insist on the insurmountable finitude
of humanity and, in consequence, on the need for a minimum of
'alienation'" (255).

Maybe I'm all balled-up here, but I'm beginning to see connections
between P's religious and political satire. From this perspective
CoL49 begins to emerge as particularly subversive novel in 1965,
advocating the inevitability of political-religious anarchy which
stands as perhaps implicit in the documents of the founding fathers in
their condemnation of non-representative government. Ultimately, the
only representative of my interests is me: anarchy is the purest form
of democracy. And, likewise, the only advocate before God is me: God
has no grandchildren and I will face Him as His own beloved son /
daughter, wherever I find God. Freud hints at this ultimately
subjectivized anarchism in Civilization and Its Discontents, when he
says that some people cannot function in community. Of course, he
probably means psychotics and ascetics, but he was accidentally right
on a number of points.

I never made it through VRE, but it is on my list again. Hopefully,
I'll be able to pick up where I left off five years ago. The more I
read of Zizek, the more I think his philosophy is strongly influenced
by the same sources that P. wrestled with 40 years prior.

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 7:16 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> OUR judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on
> the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be
> precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only
> because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we
> were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind
> could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a
> stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in
> life more valuable or significant than any other.
>
> Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat,
> is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the
> feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
>
> We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties
> to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own
> duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth.
> But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with
> which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in
> their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the
> stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the
> significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so
> far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other
> persons' conditions or ideals.
>
> Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more
> intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of
> friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life
> significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or
> smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and
> art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon,
> what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior?
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 7:52 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>> When I first read Vineland, back in early 1990, I was kinda surprised to
>> find the William James
>> book title dropped on page 369, since it did not exactly seem necessary to
>> bring over Jess's
>> Emerson quote. I took this as a hint and, like perhaps the one or other of
>> you too, read the
>> book later on in the 1990s. [My experience with philosophical pragmatism in
>> general is: Dewey,
>> any time I try to read him, gives me narcoleptic seizures, but George
>> Herbert Mead is a still
>> underrated genius!] As the title already suggests, one of the basic
>> thesisses of William James is that
>> the religious needs of people do differ. They are not identical. In Jamesian
>> terms (see the beginning
>> of lecture XX) we can observe the Vineland scene as 'religious' insofar as
>> there is a new taste for
>> life, experienced as a gift plus manifested in forms of lyrical enchantment
>> AND [James says: "or"]
>> in gestalt of a call for seriousness and heroism. Right on, right on!
>>
>> In Pynchon's books one can find all kinds of religious bzw. magical
>> practices; what interests me
>> here is: Can you find other explicit refs to the Jamesian phenomenology of
>> the religious mind?
>>
>> Maybe I did. Having started my regular AtD re-read, I had a good laugh last
>> night. Please do note
>> the last sentence!
>>
>> "An old aerostat hand by now, Pugnax had also learned, like the rest of the
>> crew, to respond to 'calls
>> of nature' by proceeding to the downwind side of the gondola, resulting in
>> surprises among the surface populations below, but not often enough, or even
>> notably enough, for anyone to begin to try to record, much less coordinate
>> reports of, these lavatorial assaults from the sky. They entered rather the
>> realm of folklore, superstition, or perhaps, if one does not mind stretching
>> the definitions, the
>> religious." (p. 5)
>>
>> This is, of course, (also) satirical, but my association machine spat out
>> the Vineland ref at once. And then we should remember what William [Pugnax
>> reads rather Henry] James tells us in lecture XIV (am
>> back-translating, again, from the German edition, this time pp. 336-7):
>>
>> "WE cannot distinguish between natural and supernatural effects, nor
>> recognize among the supernatural effects the ones coming from the grace of
>> God in contrast to those being falsifications
>> done by the devil."
>>
>> Personally I think that taking into account to piss down on people is less
>> problematic than Benny
>> Profane's wish to piss out the sun.
>>
>>
>> Happy Sunday!
>>
>> Kai
>>
>>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."