5.9.2022
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
Thanks for being a subscriber to <Technolalia> Newsletter. Last week’s Newsletter can be found below, as well as some of the things I’ve been reading lately:
Introduction to Devotion: On Blessedness, Post-Religiosity, and Faith
At the time of writing this, I have yet to decide whether or not this will be a multi-part series or if this will be a particularly long blog post. In any event, I must preface this to those who are both familiar with the blog and those who are recent subscribers that I have written about this topic in the past and will be pulling from those writings heavily in this post/series.
If you are interested in looking back, you are welcome to do so:
I write this primarily out of spite for the New Atheist movement that makes a caricature out of Christianity while trying to avoid falling into the cliches of “reclaiming” or having been “found” again after “losing one’s path.” I am very much an atheist, but as I’ve stated previously in other posts, Christianity is one of the few religions that tackles atheism head-on; as Zizek himself says, Atheists are the true Christians.
DEVOTION
~ CANTO I - Purification
“There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.” — Simone Weil.
Purification by trial or fire is the most common form of purification that people are acquainted with. When one is faced with hardships it creates the conditions for newness. Deleuze states that thinking is like this. When we are confronted with something genuinely obscene or horrific, it forces us to think; it creates a rupture that opens up the conditions of possibility; morphogenesis.
Deleuze develops on Nietzsches notion of Amor Fati. For Deleuze, it is not the return of the same but instead the return of Difference. Deleuze illustrates this with the example of Oedipus, who has his identity fractured when he learns the truth of his origin and, ultimately, the incestual relationship with his mother. In this great break or schism, Oedipus is profoundly reconfigured in the present, and the past for the actions of killing his father and wedding his mother turns him, in his eyes, into something grotesque that ultimately can only be remedied by blinding himself.
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A reconfiguration is a form of purification.
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For most, purification implies the destruction or removal of that which is unwanted, the dissolution of waste, and the refinement into something new. When Simone Weil speaks of atheism as the purification of God, it is not the annihilation of the need for God but the reconfiguration or reconstitution of God.
Slavoj Zizek says it best when he presents his views on Atheism as a central tenant of Christianity. Being Christian is a faith that deals with Atheism head-on. In the Christian Faith, our God is killed; there is no more straightforward way to put it. It is the disruption of the Transcendent as being removed from us and brought down to the position of man. In his human form of existence when Jesus cries out, “Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” That’s the essence of human existence (being removed from God), and this act is so overwhelming that even God himself succumbs to temptation and begins to despair.
This atheism, as stated, has a radical shift for us. For one, it frees us from the institutional chains of Orthodoxy but creates a dilemma that Nietzche instantly recognized and diagnosed.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not become gods to appear worthy of it?”
This became the task for 20th-century philosophy to overcome. From Sartre’s existentialism to Camus's Absurdism, the modern secular man was seen as being radically free to either despair in their virulent Nihilism or to take the burden of existence head-on and reconstitute meaning. For thinkers like Sartre and Deleuze, this dizzying freedom frees the human-animal to constitute their values and meaning. This is the Nietzschean Vitalism found in many French Postmodernists.
Now for a generation, my generation, which has grown up not just with secularism as the predominant Religious paradigm, we are left with an even greater task. For if the 20th century attempted the reconstitution of meaning in the project of modernity which ultimately ended in thunderous failure with the atrocities of WWII and the dissolution, or contempt towards meta narratives. Our society is one that yearns for meaning yet is drenched in Nihilism and Irony.
There is an underlying current attempting to overcome this, and this will be examined in finer detail in later parts of this series. So I’ll touch on it briefly here, but this is not to confuse two diametrically poles of a spectrum.
On one side, you have a naive optimism about a return to authenticity and sincerity. Those who are seeking shelter in the very institutions that created the environment we find ourselves in.
On the other hand, you have those who advocate a superficial reconfiguration of what is often touted as “new assemblages” or “multiplicities,” which are named with the most cringe and perhaps “neo”- regressive form of spirituality, in what incredibly online people call “Network Spirituality.”
I won’t go into satisfactory resolution about what this network spirituality is. I know I’ll get some hate for painting with thick brushstrokes here. Still, fundamentally it is A neo-sincere attempt a restructure what has been lost with the Orthodox institutions of the Church, a sense of community, and neo - narrativity in which pastiche postmodern performativity, Meta-modern authenticity, and sincerity dissolve into one.
Now I think there’s a middle path or synthesis to these two poles. My main criticism of the former is its profound naivety towards deeply considering the condition humanity finds itself in. It is akin to sticking one’s head in the sand and waiting for the divine rapture. The one area that I find uplifting or worth examining is the affirmation of character and the development and refinement of Virtue for the fortification of the Soul. This development in essence is akin to a Nietzschean will to power and what Spinoza calls Blessedness, but I will leave that discussion in full for Canto II. The main criticism of the latter is its emphasis on Transhumanism or transubstantiation. It is profoundly Nihilistic and not Vitalistic. It smuggles in its Gnosticism in the form of salvation. Network Spirituality is just a bastardized form of the Human Instrumentality Project. In which Web3 can create independent patchwork monarchies that are micro narrativized - microcosmic - auto assembling monarchies. In essence, it takes all of the axioms of techno capitalist acceleration as givens. What I find salvageable in this model is its importance of ingenuity and the assimilation of current technological trends; I’m not against using tools to reconfigure oneself but like Byung Chul Han; the notion of community might be the most neoliberal notion. Still, we must not fall into the easy temptation that we are at the mercy of “the current.” That we somehow have lost all notions of agency, for this is in stark opposition to any Vitalist project.
To purify or to reconfigure, to involve ourselves in the process of creation. To see ourselves once again in the image of the creator.
This starts with reconstructing orthodoxy, not by the recreation or a “Retvrn” to that which is already lost. But to find the central orthodoxy that has always been imminent to Christianity. The atheist is the only faithful Christian, who tackles the burden of existence and extinguishes their despair not by abolishing it but by embracing it.
We see the world around us crumble, and yet we choose to create.
To be continued in
Devotion
~Canto II - Blessedness
~Links~
We will be doing an episode with Cuteness Unit regarding Miladys, keep an eye out!
Patreon Only Post: By Yung Agamben
Coronavirus and the Acceleration of Financialization: Problems and Strategies
A critical text by non-other than Decodes co-host Yung Agamben diving into Financialization and the accelerator catalyst that is/was Covid - 19.
“There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.”
— Simone Weil
(Note: The tiers in the thread below have changed since the time the thread was posted)
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-C.N.
Song of the Week for Elvia <3
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