His snores break the silence. But they are not really snores; there is no low rumbling echoing from blocked nasal passages – there is the grunt of a body in pain. Each sound brings the machine one step closer to its own crucifixion.
Was Christ’s crucifixion for anybody? Apparently. Christ sacrificed himself for us: the crucifixion was a machine – a human producing machine, bringing life out of death. A machine for others.
Each culture, Levi-Strauss tells us, is a universe – it is both in the universe, and a universe to itself. What if Christ was like this? Christ’s sacrifice needed to seem like it was for others, but in the end it was void; for no one apart from himself. Connected to the words of John the Baptist past and St Paul to come – but fundamentally alone, ruled by a logic only productive of itself.
Independence in this case, would be inescapable. In the world of the fly, Uexkûll tells us, we find only “fly things,” each Lebenswelt for each species clear and distinct. Cassirer goes a step further and asks – are not human also like this? He restrains himself from a darker conclusion, that what makes us human, symbolic capacity, also makes us utterly alone.
His snores roll through the air; his stomach bulges; a dial on the wheelchair illuminates the room, casting it in lurid greens and and yellows: a cemetery lit by energy. He always has more than he thinks, he can always do more than he thinks, and, in his self-created prison, he will die sooner than he needs to.
I slip out into the darkness. That first night in Paris – roaming the street at 4am, has remained uppermost in my mind. I could die for a morning in Paris such as that one, where the night could stretch on forever, a certain tone of ease: the space before the fire like the subject interrupted from the social.
Now I am also reminded – of diamond studded paths through Oxford in the morning and strange dragons on the floor of an apartment with you.
Independence, perhaps, is not the machine eagerly creating itself. The machine would ask for what confirms it. Independence is a morning in Paris – it is the refusal of the machine and its (self) sacrifice at the expense of its intended self-sacrifice. It is a refusal of the (inter)indepenence of the machine in favour of calling the machine into question – refusing it no matter what the cost.
This independence has nothing in it – it is restless and homeless.
This escape means leaving things (in place) even as you yourself depart them – it is quite the opposite of friendship.
In Islamic jurisprudence every act can appear as an act of worship only to those schools, such as the Hanbali, that allow no place for human rationality. Why is that?
An example. God gives his attributes in the Qu’ran (the benevolent, the wonderful, etc.) How are we to interpret them, given the anthropomorphism of God is forbidden? Rational schools claim that his attributes are metaphors, which we must interpret accordingly. The man is placed between God and man. In the work of Al Tamiyya, one cannot interpret the word of God – the attributes are not metaphors, they are attributes qua attributes, simultaneously present and absent – God’s attributes and not knowable to us.
Religion deepens mysteries. “Thus, God being concealed, every religion that does not say God is concealed is not true; and every religion that does not render a reason for this is not instructive.” (Pascal, Pensés, X:I). Religion does not resolve them.
The machine is itself. Every act is an act of worship because it its the unmitigated presence of itself and also its absence, its for itself.
Independence from this means leaving things in place even as you yourself depart from them.
