THE LAND OF UNLIKENESS

The Old Testament reading for today was powerful, and I’d like to start by quoting it in full:

Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers, who rule this people in Jerusalem! Because you have said, “We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement; when the overwheliming scourge passes through it will not come to us; for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter”; therfore thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am laying in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation; ‘He who believes will not be in haste.’ And I will make justice the line, and righteousness the plummet; and hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and waters will overwhelm the shelter.” Then your covenant with death will be annulled, and your agreement with Sheol will not stand; when the overwhelming scourge passes through you will be beaten down by it. As often as it passes through it will take you; for morning by morning it will pass through, by day and by night; and it will be sheer terror to understand the message. For the bed is too short to stretch oneself on it, and the covering too narrow to wrap oneself in it. For the LORD will rise up as on Mount Pera’zim, he will be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon; to do his deed–strange is his deed! and to work his work–alien is his work! Now therefore do not scoff, lest your bonds be made strong; for I have heard a decree of destruction from the Lord GOD of hosts upon the whole land.

Continue reading ‘Harry Potter and Christianity, part 3–Renouncing Eternal Life’

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I hope to answer some of the questions in the comments about exactly how we should understand Word as Virus (I’m not terribly interested in what Burrough actually meant by it, though he did explicitly state that written language came first. Derrida too, right Janet?), but I’m going to start from a faraway place, Ignatius of Antioch, taken from Rowan Williams’ great book, The Wound of Knowledge:

‘My labor pains have begun’ (Romans VI). So Ignatius advances to the torture and humiliation of his death in the confidence that there in the arena his true life, his humanity, his reality, begin. The truth has appeared in human flesh and suffered human death and thereby created afresh for all humanity the possibility of ‘truth in its flesh and its death, of a real and stable (‘incorruptible,’ in Ignatius’s languge) life constituted by what the world seees as meaningless–silence, failure, death.” Continue reading ‘Harry Potter and Christianity, part 2–The Body of Life’

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I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about the relationship of the Harry Potter books to Christianity. When I started talking to my Mom about this, she said I should write something that she could give to a friend of hers who is interested in this subject, so here is the first of, I hope, a number of posts addressing some of the most interesting connections in that regard. So, first of all, Hi Mom, and second of all, howdy to William Burroughs who, though deceased, speaks through his words, one of which was that the word is a virus. Continue reading ‘Harry Potter and Christianity, part 1–The Word is a Virus’

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Is Harry Potter a Christian? Well, lets start this conversation off with the basics, and I should note that my jumping off point is the two Bible quotations which appear on two noteworthy tombs in book 7 of J.K. Rowlings masterful series (By the way, this post has spoilers galore, but if you haven’t read book 7 by now you’ve got bigger problems anyway, and I would suggest professional help) So, to the quotations. Where your Treasure is, there will your Heart be also, and, The Last Enemy that shall be Destroyed is Death. Love and Death, then, are the themes which dominate these books, but as I always tell my students when we’re examining the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is Jesus’ most extended answer to the question of what Christian love is, Jesus gives a brand new look at love, going beyond even what the prophets had envisaged, present in his teachings, the full glory of which is seen in his death and resurrection. The message of HP is this: Love, fearing not the specter of the power of death, works a greater magic in this world than any deeds of muggles or wizards. Harry is clearly not as powerful as Voldemort, or even, as the latest movie makes splendidly clear, his legions of death-eaters (Helena!), but as Dumbledore unceasingly drones, Harry has a power of which the glorious V-cake knows not. Clearly, the entrance into victory over this serpentine monster is Harry’s baptism courtesy of his mother, that is, his love of love over any of the fruits of this world (Faux psychoanalysts take note—he loves love more than he loves his mother). His life is forfeit in the way that St. Paul’s was, not a stoical suicide his, but rather the uncontainable energy released by the breaking of these rusted bonds. What effect? He gives up his life for his friends, and he does die. And his soul goes to the place where souls go (Lord forgive Joanna for saying that “it’s all in our heads”), and then he simply returns, as simply as Christ rising from the tomb with a sternly confused look on his face as in Piero della Francesca’s rendering of it, Roman soldiers slumping in earthly defeat.
Next up: We’re hoping for a masterful post by Dr. Ramey of Rowan Univ. fame on John Milbank and the surnaturel, and I’m already asking myself how one can live in a world created by and for love, in which love is stronger than death, though no stranger to it, without the storyteller himself. Even if to simply put the idea “all in our heads”. . . . .

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Just went to see Sicko a couple nights ago, and like all of Moore’s films, the images stick pretty well. First of all, I thought it was an excellent movie–compelling, funny, irritating, and earnest. All of the criticisms that one can make of Moore are probably true but ultimately not very interesting. The bottom line is he just makes good movies about important topics. This one especially I thought had a sense of improvisation, lightness and self-deprecating humor that really made it a joy to watch. He has a measured sense of his own image and weaves it deftly into the substance of his film. I suggest people watch this in the theaters too, because the reaction of the audience is a big part of the show. When Moore shows the creation of HMO’s via a white house tape of Nixon and Ehrlichmann people got genuinely angry (and foul-mouthed), and not in the pansy ass liberal way. More like that LA street riot way. And when we broke into applause at the words of a British statesman, it wasn’t a self-righteous nod to someone who is affirming our own presuppositions, but acknowledgment of how surprising the truth can be, what a good idea democracy is, and the huge potential that Americans, perhaps alone among the peoples of this earth, have to mark this world with a genuine form of it.

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I guess I should have just posted my proposal! But don’t ask me for more (that is, until the proposal gets accepted and I actually have to write the paper)

Considering the importance of the Imaginary register in children’s literature, it is no surprise that the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, the best selling children’s books ever, has some fairly typical imaginary/fantasy elements, such as wizards and witches with improbable powers. Rowling, though, has stated that her books are simply “about death”—the one element which fantasies seem to always miraculously avoid. While the genre of fantasy in its purest sense obviates death, and thus the dimension of theReal, Rowling’s book are structured such that the Imaginary realm is always running into its own limit, the paths of fantasy always being surprised by the stroke of death.
The structure of Harry’s fantasy world, and consequently the structure of the books themselves, is centered on the loss of his parents, but especially that of his father, whose specter makes an appearance in book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as part of a unique time travel sequence. Unlike most time travel sequences which are structured such that an alternative time thread must be created which runs parallel to the “real” time, and which functions as a powerful fantasy of how life could be “if only. . .” the sequence in this book maintains only one history—but with a twist. When Harry and his friends go back in time to ensure that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is able to elude capture, we realize that everything they go back in time to do had already been accomplished by their time traveling selves. This would merely be a typical time-traveling conundrum were it not for the intrusion of the Real in the form of an impasse within the Imaginary. At the end of the initial narration Harry is saved from a gruesome death by the apparition of a stag controlled by what he takes to be the ghost of his deceased father. In the second narration the time traveling Harry, in a moment of shock, realizes that it was not his father who had conjured up the saving image but that it is his present, time-traveling self that must take the responsibility to perform the difficult charm.

The time travel sequence reiterates a theme that is present throughout the whole series, namely, that Harry must come to terms with his desire that his father could save him, or the fantasy that he might never have lost him. When Harry steps into the place that he had reserved for his father by performing the conjuration himself, we have a moment analogous to what Lacan referred to as the “traversing of the fantasy.” At this moment the fantasy dies, yet inasmuch as Harry is able to act from the place at which his fantasies had controlled him, we witness a sublimation in the Lacanian sense, that is, a re-structuring of the relationship of the Imaginary order to that of the Real, such that the Imaginary does not function to block the Real, but to maintain it, as well as the subject’s minimal distance from it.

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I just finished writing up a proposal for this book on Lacan and Children’s Literature in which I argue that one of the powerful things about the Harry Potter books is the way in which the Imaginary order is always cut by the Real, by Death. Harry’s biggest fantasies concern the care that his parents, or Sirius, or Dumbledore might provide him, and as the books progress these supports get taken away from him, one by one. I also argue that the structure is that of a mobius strip, such that the opposition between the Imaginary and the Real is intrinsic to the structure of the fantasies of the characters. Rowling herself said the books are about death, which, in my opinion, the (pure) genre of fantasy has always completely obviated. Rowling, though, sets out like she’s going to give the traditional weight to the imaginary elements (the overblown powers, the ridiculous dualisms) but then always manages to be very surprising in the way these fantasies run into their very own Real limits. The books are theologically right on, as well, for the very simple fact that Harry loves because he is not afraid to die.

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Joan Copjec’s article “May ’68, the Emotional Month” which appears in Lacan: The Silent Partners (Ed. Slavoj Zizek) fleshes out Lacan’s distinction between shame and guilt in which shame is the experience, very close to anxiety, of being overly proximate to objet a, the object cause of desire. Guilt, on the other hand, is called a sham jouissance by Lacan and betrays a flight from anxiety, and thus a flight from Being. There is a play on the French word for shame (honte) and the science of being (ontology) giving us the neologism, hontology. Guilt arises because one has fixed one’s response to the encounter with the object that induces anxiety, in a desperate effort to control the situation. Copjec writes: The fraudulent nature of this jouissance has everything to do with the fact that it gives one a false sense that the core of one’s being is someething knowable, possessable as an identity, a property, a surplus-value attaching to one’s person.” (109) How then shall we steer clear of this transformation from shame into guilt, especially seeing that capitalism is founded on such a universal move of taking loans out on our shame, securing a future at the cost of Being. One helpful image that Copjec gives us is of the veil that covers this place of shame. Shall we avert our eyes from it? Shall we rip it off? Shall we tremble in fear of the priests who stand before it? Is it not clear that these are all responses which engender guilt (which, don’t forget, has its own peculiar pleasure)? Copjec urges us to notice the veil itself, to enter into its arabesques, to thank God for the distance that it affords us, the breathing room. I’ve been looking at the wonderful images on Davis’ blog, all of which are veils upon the almighty. For our words to be good words, we must speak from these terrible places, from these veils that inspire terror and unknowing. There is no way to abolish anxiety (as Auden said, it is the condition of human existence, and in this way our age is most honest) but there is a way to transform our relationship to it.

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It’s worth it just to see them sledding
Or to see a spider moving its foreleg
How moving! Its going to get something to eat!

These monks are as close to children
As spiders are to the grass
Around the vegetable garden

And when they speak. . . .
But they have forgotten exchange
But prayer is changing

A reviewer said that they were aliens
The Word comes from outside us
The Bell clangs from other side of galaxy

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Ch. 1 Q. 3 of Hall’s Theological Outlines gets into the relations of miracles to the natural order of things with Hall holding that miracles are necessary in order for evolution to take place:

The advance of the aion requires innovations, steps, and the entrance of higher forces than those previously resident in the kosmos. The evolutionary hypothesis requires this supposition; and, unless we become materialists, we must assume that the progress of cosmical development, however gradual, depends upon an involution of forces which are supernatural to the previously existing natures which undergo development.

Maybe someone (Janet?) can let me know if this is hopelessly out of date. . . . but I do like his his use of cosmos and aion, reminds me a little bit of the way the structuralists talked about synchrony (cosmos) and diachrony (aion). Again perhaps Janet can let me know if this is off or on, here or there, or neither. I am a little surprised that Hall considers these evolutionary advances to be miracles (supernatural events which inspire wonder) rather than events like the sacrament of the host, which is supernatural but invisible and thus not technically a miracle.

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