Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Over the transom yesterday came this contra-gem from Power Line:
Feminist Theory, a journal published by Sage Journals, has this on offer at the moment:
The unruly queer figure’s phallic seductions and the re/production of sexual (in)difference
Corie Hammers
Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA
Abstract
This article interrogates a psychoanalytically inflected strain of anti-social queer theory that in privileging refusal and negation, views as paradigmatic of ‘queerness’ the destructive, annihilative aspects in (queer) sex. In this view, sexuality is a product of the unconscious, thus irreducible to gender, such that gender is irrelevant to (and indeed hinders) understandings of desire. Informed by feminism, which views gender as crucial to any theory on sexuality, I expose that which ‘sexual negation’ masks through this very disavowal – that of gender and the body itself. I argue that subtending the figural representation of queer/ness is a deep-seated, albeit disguised, masculinism that, through negation, works to re-centre and re-virilise (gay) men’s sexual economies. I take up Butler’s lesbian phallus to de-idealise and thus challenge this privileging of the penis operating within this strain of queer – as only phallic sexual economies can, it seems, deliver the very annihilation we (all) seek.
Well, at least at the top, there is another American college to write off the attend/support list.
There is a type of personality who revolts against everything except themselves. Since their Revolution, and especially during the 20th Century, La Belle France produced this type of personality with fecund profligacy. Think the myriad of French malcontents during the 20th Century. How they are celebrated at home and abroad.
De-construction is their output. Their building is unbuilding. Sartre, Gide, Camus, Derrida. Foucault, Fanon, Beauvoir, Proust, Cocteau, Aflaq, Abelard, Voltaire, Rousseau.
The foregoing Abstract of an essay by Corie Hammers illustrates de-construction’s outcome, which is to say, construction of an esoteric mythos. The English, by the way, of Hammers’ Abstract is that sodomists are misogynists. She didn’t need to build a myth to make that point. It’s an ancient wisdom, an incontrovertible doctrine that can be stated quite plainly. Feminists would improve their lot by becoming theologians, or at least church historians.
De-construction as ordinarily meant is taking something apart and having no intention of putting it back together again. De-construction per se is a laudable and even necessary activity. It’s proper application is to anything whatsoever, inorganic, organic, psychic, spiritual, historical. The leaving-it-in-pieces bit merits condemnation.
De-construction of the leaving-it-in-pieces kind belongs to the permanently unhappy. They own it. Such persons don’t get that when you de-construct something, you simply make it into something else. You change its form and perhaps its function, but not its nature. Read carefully, Corie Hammers‘ Abstract inadvertently makes the point. She builds a universe tearing apart a universe.
The end of de-construction is construction. This noble irony drives de-constructors mad. Pity poor Sartre or Derrida pulling apart the nourishing world to make another one … which some malcontent, agitator, troublemaker will want to pull apart. And it doesn’t nourish anyone. Nor does pulling it apart. Such outcomes foster dissatisfaction rather than ease.
The phenomenon plays out vividly before Americans’ eyes, of late. Movement after movement agitates change only to be angry with the change wrought … and driven to change it … ad nauseum. The nature of unhappiness includes unhappiness before its fruits. The reason is, activity of any kind, even destructive activity, constructs something, even if it is only destruction. Destruction is a creation.
This living irony is ineluctable. Many grow livid and not a few fall mad speculating the phenomenon.
Life is a construct. It is called Reason, Logos. It’s origin and nature are divine, comprising a triple fugue, in fact: evolve, involve devolve. With an infinite number of contrapuntal voices intensifying mellifluence. Whatever is done to life, by life, for life, against life — whatever whatsoever — creates life. To deny something one first affirms it. To de-construct something one first professes it. And whatever pieces one makes of life remain life. One God. One World. One Race. One Caste.
De-constructores rage at the inescapable, insurmountable, undeniable is-ness of facts. The immutability of reality as reality drives the dissatisfied insane, and ultimately, violent. Inorganic, organic, psychic, spiritual and even historical phenomena can be pushed about and pulled apart ad infinitum and still remain inorganic, organic, psychic, spiritual and historical phenomena. Every de-construction is a construction.
Upon and within this reality does the New Being of God in Christ Jesus, the Lord of Life, take hold, shake, subdue and free.
Update 1: Comedy Central Does Emory University
Update 2: Glenn Newey: A Brief History of a Broken Country
Update 3: Americans not confident their government will protect them
Update 4: Reblog: Research Finds That As A Group, Only Men Pay Taxes
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
