Download - Sine Zine, V1. No.2
L anguage lingers — it clings to the past
like the Appalachian mountains
on an old map (now merely
standing in for decapitated
piles of rubble.)
Words have weight. And, we
may presume, a certain finality:
“It has been written!”
we say hopelessly.
“You can’t take it back!”
Linguistic endeavors are exis-
tentially artificial — attempts
to weigh down those things
that otherwise flutter into the
theSineZine.blogspot.com
past: legal records, Scripture, an educated man’s deep
thoughts — a name on a death certificate.
Words are life-support machines
attached to dead objects. Let's pull the
plug on some big ones and see what
happens!
8/2013. with E.M. Knapp; Tho.
Millary// “histories of crystallog-
raphy” by Shafranovskii and
Schuh// jean-loic nedelec// Ar-
onofsky// la jetee// thanks to
Nietzsche, “Ayn” Randi Hagi, Ted
G, John F, “Hans Christian” Early,
SZ + PR, Otto // T Stoppard
[Inc.] editor— please feel free to
copy or cite with proper refer-
ence // FREE theSineZine.blogspot.com
… let the preachers and the poets bury their dead institutions!
A s long as we’re unplugging the life support from language in the
hospice center of ideas, we might as well start at the top, with
that elusive and recalcitrant old bastard hiding on a cloud somewhere
above the bible belt. Yeah, you heavy old fool, you falsehood-in-chief,
you pretender to the power of creation — I’m talking about you, so-
called “God.” What makes you think, idle idol? Are you alive outside
of the Freudian fantasies of your happiness-seeking,
nondenominational, hell-fearing followers?
Do you fix cars and hate porn?
Do you love the taste of my tears?
What makes you different from any
other human construct?
Can words capture your essence?
N o. There is no language
exact enough —no word
quick enough, no formulation
alive enough — to capture the
reality, the actuality of god.
… let the preachers and the poets bury their dead institutions!
T his is why we must, like Elijah dancing before Ahab and the proph-
ets of Baal, ruthlessly mock the born-again rock-band TBN
crowds: because they worship a word, some ink on a page, or a piece
of dead material. Mock them to their faces, because the living spirit
laughs at our blasphemies, and our petty attempts to hold it down—
we must berate those superficial believers, those verse-memorizing
idolaters, “Your god is dead! Sing louder!” For the voices of the uni-
versal genitive principle can be heard only in silence. God is wordless.
W hen Moses asks the burning bush what word it may be
referred to by, the answer is, “I will be what I will be.”
Spirit is, according to Hegel, that which moves. By this very
simple principle, we can rule out anything that must be taught
at vacation bible school (or confirmation class, if you‘re cath-
olic,) as related to the actuality of
God. What then, is God? Can God
be weighed down with gravitas, the
millstone of language?
T he concept of gravity
implies that matter is
not inert. It has agency, the
power to attract other matter. Is this not just an-
other projection of man’s hope for a God he can
literally cling to? We are material beings, animated
perhaps, but quite unable to access that which
is in us — that which has moved within or
through us. No poem or algorithm can cap-
ture our agency, our gestures of self and God.
Therefore …
T here are only so many positions and movements that the
human body can enact, says Milan Kundera. There are a
limited number of gestures that can be used in any context.
Combine a limited number of gestures with the billions of peo-
ple who have used them — there is a point when we can flip
the axis on which we recognize people as unique and gestures
as generic, Kundera says. Perhaps it is the so-called
“individual” who is generic, and the gestures which are in fact
unique? Do gestures move through the mass of people like
pop song lyrics in a school cafeteria? Perhaps this is what the
early Christians were talking about when they referred to
themselves as “the body of Christ?” Why not? — a mass of
individuals spread across the hemisphere, united by a unique
gesture with some strange spiritual significance — the greatest
in the hierarchy of gestures, brought to a communist construc-
tion worker from a shit town in the Levant … maybe. Or
perhaps the “Resurrection of the Body” and the “Forgiveness
of Sins” are really just gestures of reciprocation that are natu-
rally built-in to life?
I s the physical act of gesturing significant not only as some-
thing symbolic, but as something that is material and real?
Or does it actually change us, its enactors? Social and behav-
ioral psychology both have something to say about this. In the
Skinnerian tradition (following Pavlov), there is nothing more
basic than the stimulus-response; in Relational Frame Theory, a
subject is always-already re-programming itself to adapt to the
situation at hand. Actions create their own inner realities: at
the same time they move in the world, taking on life greater
than their enablers. Indeed, we are not the source of that
which moves through us — but when we make the
right gestures, we become more than inert matter,
and our material bodies are assigned meaning, signif-
icance. We can become the agents of meaning by going through
the motions.
T his presents us with a problem. Is language, weighty and
malingering as we have made it out to be, a gesture? If so,
is it a gesture towards meaning, or an escape from meaning?
The acts of speech (or of writing) are certainly valid as a series
of gestures. But the reality invoked by language — the assign-
ment of meaning — is artificial. It can only point to meaning; it
can’t literally carry meaning or be meaning. And it is only
through a differential calculus of vagary that we are able to
make something resembling
meaning out of all the babel.
Thus it is possible for us to
say both “God [as con-
cept] is dead” as well as
“God Acts [as geture]” —
and not speak in circles.
I n days long past, the Nietzschean madman first broke into churches and
sang his Requiem Aeternam Deo. The Death has been proclaimed, the funer-
al held. Now the entire world marches on with solemn unstated agreement
that the words spoken by the German prophet have been realized.
God is dead, God remains dead. And we (we ourselves, with no one else to
A Joke About Death: The Comedy of God’s Funeral
By Thom Millary, Eastern Mennonite University
I n days long past, the Nietzschean madman first broke into churches and
sang his Requiem Aeternam Deo. The Death has been proclaimed, the funer-
al held. Now the entire world marches on with solemn unstated agreement
that the words spoken by the German prophet have been realized.
God is dead, God remains dead. And we (we ourselves, with no one else to
A s Nietzsche predicted, the death of God led to a worldwide
epoch of devastation, nihilism and violence. The twentieth
century brought us no shortage of atrocity and death on a soul-
crushingly massive scale. What justice, mercy, or happiness is
there in the world that could possibly counter such a violent,
existential, historical break? No blood can be shed, no victories
can be won, and no philosophies (nor theologies) can
be wrought to undo the horror of the modern era. After the holocaust, after the killing fields of Cambodia, the decade-long
bombing of Laos — after the murder in the streets of countless
advocates of freedom and peace — the world’s intellectuals have
begun purporting “the end of history.”
T he chaotic dust of the twentieth century is only just settling,
and what remains? Neoliberal capitalism atop its throne, tri-
umphant, having crushed Nazism, fascism, Stalinism, and all other
ideological challengers. And what shape does the age of unfet-
tered, market-driven global capitalism take? The world is an end-
less production line of supply, designed for the sole purpose of
assuaging our unspoken existential demand: the anxieties of fail-
ure, guilt and meaninglessness. These are the constant agonies
which the capitalist system assures us on a daily basis it has the
power to numb. “Buy this product. Listen to this
A Joke About Death: The Comedy of God’s Funeral
By Thom Millary, Eastern Mennonite University
blame) have killed him. The universal embrace of a modernist
mode of being by both believers and unbelievers constitutes an
unintentional acknowledgment that God has been put to
rest. This is a truth spoken to by existentially apparent realities
both global and deeply —inescapably—personal in nature.
music. Watch this movie. Go to this church. Surely we have some-
thing that will fill the void in your soul. And if, in all the vastness of
our mighty selection, you yet go unsated, then fear not loyal citi-
zen! If you stay in line long enough without making any waves, well,
surely our market is on the job! — ready to produce something am-
ple, for to keep your existential agonies in check.” Truly, in this
world of global capitalist Empire, God is long dead.
H ow can we see the triumph global free-market capitalism as any-
thing other than the tragedy of tragedies? We long for meaning
but are denied by an unfeeling cosmos. We long for peace, but are
haunted by a primordial violence which ravages the world around us,
and our own fragile souls. We seem designed for something true,
some absolute meaning: we crave a love that can reform the very fab-
ric of space-time, like magic. But, no matter how we yearn, there appears nothing to repair the ontological damage wreaked upon the
human spirit by the harshness of existence. Contrary to what many
religious apologists have said, this existential state of disrepair is not
evidence of the existence of some literal, absolute and immaterial
force of love that is withheld by a capricious deity. No, rather the
hole we feel that cannot be shopped-away is merely the punch line of
a metaphysical joke — a joke that is simultaneously divine and mate-
rial — and all too apparent to us, the butt of it all.
I n his 2007 work Infinitely De-
manding, British philosopher
Simon Critchley critiques the La-
canian treatment of the tragic he-
roic paradigm for ethical sublima-
tion. In other words, Critchley is
questioning whether the paradigm
of tragedy as the obvious (though
perhaps pyrrhic) victory of typical
psychological struggle makes the
struggler out as being rather too
heroic. Furthermore, in the Nie-
tzschean sense,
the only serious
f o r m
of psychological strug-
gle is the existential
one; human beings are
not (yet) ready to stare
into the abyss of nihilis-
tic despair. If we could
stare down the abyss
without being over-
come by vertigo, how-
ever, would the brief
feeling of existential
authenticity even be
w o r t h
the trouble? Though
we might for a second manage to stare resolutely into the dark depths, we still die, still are
meaningless and are still failures; nothing has changed. The embrace
of the archetype of tragic heroism has only served to briefly numb
our fear and pain of fading into oblivion.
S o how do we manage to subvert the tragedy of being? It is only
possible as long as we see ourselves as participants in the cosmic
joke, rendered ridiculous by the obvious gap between our ideal
selves (the struggler-in-vain) and our real selves (which we cannot
actually know).
B eing will never align with the ego’s conception of being; our
grand dreams of metaphysical meaning with never align with the
cosmos, and our religious, political, and personal narratives will al-
ways fall flat upon exposure to doubt and anxiety. Consider though the whispers of hope. Our lives, though dominated by modern sys-
tems of violent oppression — while simultaneously characterized by
unspoken repression of despair — contain glimmers of a profound
joy. Although we hurt, fail, and even die — for now we sur-
vive. We continue to grow and evolve. Hope and love re-
main undaunted. Even the politically-hopeless situation under the re-
gime of global capitalist Empire cannot quash the human spirit of re-
sistance that conjures insurrection, revolution, and subversion. The
flames of human freedom and peace have not yet been extinguished.
T o utilize the language of Jack Caputo, we feel a desire beyond
desire, a hope beyond hope, a passion for something we know not
what. A love that is — like the reality of God — un-nameable. The
immutable call to prayer is the wail of the atheist who has witnessed
God dying. The divine death still seems to be the collapse of our
reality, and in a sense it really is. But to evoke Fight Club’s Tyler
Durden, “This is not the worst thing that can happen.” To be sure,
we humans find ourselves in a dark night of the soul, where there is
an impenetrable gap between the reality for which we long and the
reality in which we exist. We may still struggle for
meaning, but to do so we must be able to laugh;
we must recognize the absurdity of exist-
ence. There is no telos, no rhyme or reason to
life and death. Despite the difficulty that may be
found in accepting this reality, cause for gladness
remains. We should rejoice that the comedy of
humanity is shared as the comedy of God.
call will take us is entirely unknowable. It could very well end badly.
And yet laughing along with the cosmos, we must try. To the best
of our finite, fallible, all too human abilities we must try.
C ritchley explains the transition from tragic to comedic para-
digm, as a change in the function of the superego, which is to say
that instead of harshly critical of the meager efforts of the ego, the
part of the psyche which is devoted “to higher causes” acts as a sup-
plement to the ego, allowing a shift in perspective. And of course,
W e have foolishly imagined God
to be the biggest and most
powerful object in the universe, a
supernatural deus ex machina that
would solve all our problems. But this is wrong; rather, God is
properly (the gesture of) an invitation: an invitation to risk. A
break in all the systems that are woven together by our lies
about stability and fulfillment — God is a longing that moves us
beyond comfort to a hard road of uncertainty, adventure, hilari-
ty, and love. God is a call to the Kingdom of inexplicable for-
giveness, peace, and compassion. Where this undeniably risky
the meagerness of the ego, or rather its delusions of grandeur, are
hilarious. So also is it with God; just as the human super-ego evolves
to become conducive to comedy, we see in Jesus of Nazareth a con-
ception of God that is evolved enough to show the truth of divine
comedy.
“W ant to hear a joke?” - The world desperately awaits — for
many ages — the coming of a triumphalist God, who in a
display of infinite power, will subjugate the world into a divine or-
der. Now here he is! Born in a sta-
ble. Espousing humility and lowliness, re-
buking claims to divine power, shitting and
spitting: truly human. Even more absurd,
this God is publicly executed by his ene-
mies. More ridiculous yet, he forgives them!
Yet the most subversive kernel at the heart
of the Christ joke is the moment when,
hanging on the cross, he shares in the expe-
rience of being forsaken by God — some-
thing nearly universal among humans.
I am making a case for neither atheism nor
Christianity. What I am saying is that life
is inescapably, terrifyingly, blessedly, absurd. You know it, and I know it, and God (may
he rest in peace!) knows it. Why evoke the
name of a God that I have described as lying
in the grave? Because I know of no other
name that can evoke the ridiculous hope
necessary for us to carry on the struggle in
the midst of this dark night of the soul. I
confess that I find myself in total darkness, filled with anxiety, with
despair yet to be overcome, an Empire yet to be overthrown. So
please, join me, take my hand, let’s drink some drinks, sing
some songs, start an insurrection, and tell the joke of the funeral of
God. He would have wanted it that way. Maranatha. —- Th. M.
I s the task ahead of us to advance towards a mode of thought, unknown hitherto in our culture, that will make it possible to reflect at the same time, without discontinuity or contradiction, upon man's being and
the being of language? — Foucault
T he task of philosophy has been to interrogate human existence. To do
this, it has tried to develop language into something more precise, and
has created a whole slew of confusion in the process. It is not more than a
few generations that go by using the same lexical tools before they become
obsolete. As a consequence, the trail of human thought becomes al-
most impossible to discern without decades of linguistic prepara-
tion. Meanwhile, philosophy is seen by the uninitiated as
some kind of progressive program working at
worldly ends — a misperception that it has at times
embodied. The Oxford English Dictionary was in
fact an attempt to stop linguistic drift, to transcend
the barriers of subjectivity around
which human experience fal-
ters. In the Nietzschean tra-
dition, idolatrous philosophers
are driven by the will-to-power.
(Or the will-to-transcendence,
some might add.)
Y et we have come to a slow reali-
zation in the arts that it is less
about what we can do with language than
about the ways that the gesture of language uses
us. There has been a short-circuit in our concep-
tualizing of things: philosophy — theology for that
matter — was never a means, but always an end.
It is a craft, something we do for its own sake,
something that changes the state of the game en-
tirely. Vague essences flow into one another,
I s the task ahead of us to advance towards a mode of thought, unknown hitherto in our culture, that will make it possible to reflect at the same time, without discontinuity or contradiction, upon man's being and
the being of language? — Foucault
and like flood waters, they sweep away the artifice of human certainty. In
the confusion there is a loss of identity, and we are left with only questions.
H uman identity may be an artificial construct not meant to stand up to
scrutiny, and this tells us something about the human condition in it-
self. But in the end the gestures that make us can only be assigned meaning
by one ultimate gesture of radical inclusion. The purpose of life, in other
words, is the struggling to understand life as it is. And since we are at least
partially products of gestures, we can infer that the forces that created us —
call it chemo-bio-genesis, evolution, God — are aimed at the same thing we
are: understanding, acceptance, and inclusion. A dead God who acts means
a reality that is fundamentally open to identity — so far as it is inclusive iden-
tity. Seek, and ye shall find — if you are willing!