Lars Iyer's Blog, page 11

Job puts morality where Yahweh puts nature [ ��� ] Yahweh is replying to moral questions with physical ones, beating down the blinkered insight of an underling with blows of wisdom formed in the impenetrable darkness of his cosmos. The nature-pictures are undoubtedly powerful, but there is also a strange, unmistakable whiff of almost demonic pantheism. Nature is no longer the mere arena or show-place [Schauplatz] of human action, as it is in Genesis 1; it is the clothing, or at least the cipher concealing the majesty of God. Yahweh���s works have ceased to be anthropocentric; human teleology breaks down; firmament and colossus tower over it.

Bloch, Atheism in Christianity

You take the ���nothingness of revelation��� as your point of departure, the salvific-historical perspective of the established proceedings of the trial. I take as my starting point the small, nonsensical hope, as well as the creatures for whom this hope is intended and yet who on the other hand are also the creatures in which this absurdity is mirrored [ ��� ] Whether the pupils have lost it [the Scripture] or whether they are unable to decipher it comes down to the same thing, because, without the key that belongs to it, the Scripture is not Scripture, but life. Life as it is lived in the village at the foot of the hill in which the castle is built. It is in the attempt to metaphorize life into Scripture that I perceive the meaning of ���reversal��� [Umkehr], which so many of Kafka���s parables endeavour to bring about [ ��� ] Kafka���s messianic category is ���the reversal��� or the ���studying���.

Walter Benjamin, replying to Scholem in a letter

You ask what I understand by the ���nothingness of revelation���? I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak. This is obviously a borderline case in the religious sense, and whether it can really come to pass is a very dubious point. I certainly cannot share your opinion that it doesn���t matter whether the disciples have lost the ���Scripture��� or whether they cannot decipher them, and I view this as one of the greatest mistakes you could have made. When I speak of the nothingness of revelation, I do so precisely to characterize the difference between these two positions.

Gerschom Scholem, from his correspondence with Walter Benajmin

There is no doubt that we had lost sight of the traditional objects of theology, yet they still remain as hidden lights, which radiate from the inside, invisible from the outside. God, expelled from the human sphere by psychology, and from the social world by sociology, gave up his reign in Heaven. He passed the throne of judgment to historical materialism, and the throne of mercy to psychoanalysis; he withdrew and hid himself in order not to return any more. But is that true that He does not reveal himself at all? Perhaps, this last contraction of His is simultaneously His last revelation? Perhaps, His regression to the point bordering on nothingness was a matter of the highest urgency, according to the wisdom that His Kingdom may be revealed only to such a radically voided world? For ���I am sought of them that asked not for me; I am found of them that sought me not���.

from Gershom Scholem's eulogy for Franz Rosenzweig (1929)

Rob McInroy reviews Wittgenstein Jr at his blog. 

Perhaps the time has come when theology must learn to live without the support of canon and classical authorities and stand in the world without authority. Without authority, however, theology can only teach by an indirect method. Theology is indeed in a strange position because it has to prove its purity by immersing itself in all the layers of human existence and cannot claim for itself a special realm . . . Theology must remain incognito
in the realm of the secular and work for the sanctification of the world.

Jacob Taubes

It was not until Christ had known the physical agony of crucifixion, the shame of blows and mockery, that he uttered his immortal  cry, a question which shall remain unanswered through all times on this earth. ���My God, why has thou forsaken me?��� when poetry struggles towards the expressing of pain and misery, it can be great poetry only if that cry sounds through every word.

Simone Weil

The figure of the crucified Jesus abandoned by God and dying without hope of resurrection, does not, however, yield the image of man���s tragic complaint against a deaf sky ��� It���s image is not the hero fighting against great odds and defeated in the end, but in the masses of helpless victims subjected to meaninglessness, waste and torture, defeated from the beginning ���

It was surely a profound experience of the pits of unredeemed humanity suffering in the contemporary world, combined with a pitiless realism regarding the effects of affliction on men���s souls that led Simone Weil to realise that any attempt to resurrect the dead God is doomed to remain romantic rhetoric ��� A God who does not exist, who emptied himself into the world, transformed his substance in the blind mechanism of the world, a God who dies in the inconsolable pits of human affliction.

Jacob Taubes

Scott F Parker reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs for Rain Taxi.

Neil Denny interviews me for the Little Atoms podcast.