In the latest installment of the Batman series, the Joker has been wonderfully distilled to the essence of the Satanic. He is radically evil for this reason only: He does not care about money (like mere criminals), but he only cares to corrupt those around him, to show that they are just as vile as he is, and that goodness is always a ruse. Kant said that only a good will is truly good. The Joker aims to prove that this good will exists nowhere. The movie in large part proves that he is right, but for those of us who are still trying to be good, this is strangely inconsequential. As dark as the movie is, and Heath Ledger’s perfomance as the Joker is riveting, his character more often elicits laughs than gasps (of which there are a few, but not all supplied by the bad guys). The Joker is a great character because he reminds us of Satan’s basic predicament. He has refused to bend his knee to a “good” God, and has dedicated his life to distorting those who are stupid and weak enough to spend half their lives kneeling and praising. Basically, then, he is lonely and wants company. Continue reading ‘A Devil of a Joker (slight spoiler alert)’
Archive for the 'Culture' Category
This is my second time posting this … post. Anyway, the server lost the first one, or kidnapped it, or whatever.
Anyway, the original post said something like you all should read one of Janet’s most recent posts. She summarizes and builds on several months of discussion on Deep Grace of Theory. Especially interesting to me right now as I write yet another conference paper is her stuff on -ike. Rather than summarize it for you, I’m going to append a segment, and encourage you to read the entire post.
The “-ike,” of course, as my readers here will know, is a reference to this original theory of knowing, the Greco-European vision that inspired education for 2000 years in the West until the rise of science in the 17th century gave birth to a new “theory of knowledge.” The term “ike” derives from the manner in which the Greeks formed disciplinary names by adding -ike to the name of the subject matter, as in poietike, musike, logike, grammatike, physike, arithmetike, and so forth. (This would eventually yeild our “poetics,” “physics,” “arithmetic,” “mathematics,” and so forth.)
The -ike suffix, in other words, indicated that a “techne” or an “episteme” was in view. (Poietike or arithmetike were short for techne poietike or techne rhetorike, but the “techne” part dropped out most of the time.) The Romans translated the Greek techne as the Latin ars, artis, and along with this, they translated the Greek episteme as scientia, thus giving us our modern “arts and sciences.”
Yet today we tend to forget or overlook, given our deeply engrained scientific outlook in the Modern West, that while Aristotle formalized an existing distinction between the technes and epistemes as the “productive” ikes and the “theoretical” ikes, nontheless he still frequently employed either word in order to refer more generally to any formalized disciplinary practice, irrespective of its subject matter and methodology. (We would view arithmetic as a scientific discipline, for example, but while Aristotle saw it as “theoretical” and hence an episteme, it was still called techne arithmetike, just as poetics was called techne poietike. This wasn’t incidental, either, but crucial to take into our account.)
By the way, Plato and Aristotles insisted upon using fluid vocabularies because they were concerned with teaching the nature of thought itself, and so, as teachers first, they inculcated the capacity to register and attend to the complicated formal levels of organization manifested by the various kinds of things. This emergence of flexibility and deftness on the part of their students was more important to them than the modern insistence on honing an exact set of technical terms.
Victor Vazquez portrays Carribean culture through a dusty sepia lense. His images are riddled with shadows and dark recesses hiding the ghosts of Puerto Rican and island culture. These images, although employing local symbols, embody the universal problems of life and death, sex and birth, acculturation and isolation. His subjects are nearly always nude, and mainly women. They appear to be asleep or dead. Their passivity is the background to their persecution. Vazquez’s Liquids and Signs depicts living organisms oppressed by artificial sexual objects, genitalia, blades, and swimming sperm drawn large on their bodies. Sex, in these images, is not a life-producing event, but rather ravages its subjects. Sex brings death and affliction.
Continue reading ‘Death Shall Make Life His Dominion: Victor Vazquez’
The movie begins with us inside the voice of the old, soon to retire sheriff, and though ostensibly the action occurs elsewhere, we realize at the end of the film that we’ve never left this voice, in fact we’ve fallen deeper into its Texan cracks, even into its dreams. How do we know this? We know this because, like a sheriff, and unlike a movie, we miss most of the action. Sure, we come upon it in anticipation, but most of the killings are (literally) veiled from our eyes. We can’t figure out who the heroes are because they keep dying in very anticlimactic ways, right before, or right after, our attention has been called. I’m so excited that a filmmaker (two even!) have resurrected the art of “not showing”–Hitchcock definitely had that one down, as did many others, though perhaps in part out of regard for the censors. Well the censors have mostly gone home, but the viewers remain, and No Country for Old Men is described as a “violent” film or one that is “action packed,” but these lines come from censors who were once viewers. The truth is that the film simply shows us what it’s like to be an old man who is too slow, too peaceful, and too intelligent, for the world of terror.
The (very very) bad dude in No Country for Old Men is presented as our male hero: brave, loyal, trustworthy, unafraid, and most important of all, true to his word. He must kill an entirely innocent victim just because he said he will. He doesn’t enjoy evil for its own sake, but he simply performs what evil deed he must in order to live up to, even sacrifice himself for, some higher principle. He clearly enjoys his evil deeds, but whence cometh this enjoyment? We ask the same question about him that Augustine asked about himself when he remembered the theft of the pears, which he did not do because the pears were good to eat, or for any other reason, but simply to indulge in the shame of the act. Augustine actually doesn’t give us a good answer as to why he commits his crime–it is clearer in the film: Sigur Anton (bad dude) is the last man around, the only character with character, strength and values. A true hero, and yet when he crumbles into a puddle at the end of the film there shines a ray of something totally different, in the irrational refusal to live in his world of a cute girl who works for Wallmart, we see the beginnings of a glory on the far side of the American man.
Well I’m sure glad that Dan keeps himself on the theology, thus justifying this as a theology blog, cause I would like to write about Dracula tonight. I just finished Bram Stoker’s wonderful (and big) book, and then watched the Coppola film version of it. The movie is so-so (who the hell did Keanu Reeves sleep with to get these roles???); the big change Coppola makes is to throw in a love story between Count Dracula and his youthful love (way back in 1460 something). Due to Turkish treachery she commits suicide, the church (Romanian Orthodox I think?) shouts blasphemy, her soul is to rot in hell, and Dracula commits himself to evil. A little cheezy, but it actually pays off in the end, for Coppola then has the 19thc. Dracula fall in love with the British Mina, who is basically a reincarnation of his ancient Romanian darling. At the end Mina redeems the Count and sends his soul to heaven, which, though the the love story is not in the book, is pretty true to Bram’s plot, in which Mina emphasizes the save-ability of the vampires (of course they are saved by having their hearts run through with a stake and their heads chopped off!). This is, of course, the Faust myth, and a surprisingly reliable duplication of it. For even though Faust sells his soul to the devil, and messes pretty seriously with some good German souls, at the end he still gets into Paradise, due to Mephistopheles getting distracted by a cute boy angel (!!no kidding!!). I’m sure people have written scads on this topic, but what is probably less noticed is how close Harry Potter fits into (and I would argue, nicely completes) the Faust myth. Especially as concerning Dracula, in which Rowling borrows the device of the good guy and the bad guy having a telepathic communication (Mina and Dracula, Harry and Voldemort). Mina also wears a scar on her forehead where she is burned by the host, due to her burgeoning vampire blood, which cannot bear the sacrament. There are many other parallels as well, but the main theme, I believe, is the importance of redeeming the devil figure. Whether it is Milton’s Satan, Goethe’s Faust, (hell, even the damned in Dante), Frankenstein, Dracula, or Voldemort (and Snape too), it is the possible redemption of these devilish figures which really lights up these texts. I think Rowling does a great job of addressing this in her final book with the wailing baby figure which shows up in the sequence in King’s Cross station, clearly at least part of Voldemort’s soul. This is perhaps her most poetic moment. . . . In all these literary creations death and life are maddeningly enmeshed but what separates them can become razor sharp as well. There is a big difference between a dying life (that maintains itself in love as it struggles with death, as Jacob with the Angel {of death?}) and a living death, the undead, nosferatu, which, in a mockery of life takes blood to perpetuate its unliving undying death. All these Faust myths have a bit of that Germanic moral tone as well, in that we must, as Christians, look very carefully at what it means to be granted immortal life. Does it mean we have power over death, power to never die, power to rule nature and disease? Or is it perhaps the gift to die in the name of love, which is what God means by life, but we misunderstand him sometimes. . . .
A few of us here at TLOU just got word that we’re presenting at the LeMoyne College Religion and Literature Forum in April. AD and JDR will be talking about Cronenberg’s films and I’ll be talking about Andy Goldsworthy and Victor Vasquez. I’ve copied the details from the website below.
2008 Religion and Literature Forum, April 4-5, 2008
Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York
The Grotesque and the Sublime in Contemporary Culture
The 2008 Religion and Literature Forum will explore contemporary culture through the category of the grotesque and its convergence with the sublime. The grotesque evokes a variety of associations: strange, remarkable, tragic, terrible, diseased, Other/other, terror, terrorism, absence, chaos. Encounters with it evoke affective and cognitive responses analogous to elemental religious experience: fear, vulnerability, fascination, attraction. It is both captivating event and disruptive process, constructing and deconstructing identities, redrawing borders and shifting margins. The grotesque is, finally, transformative and apocalyptic as it draws out the hidden and unmasks the familiar.
Plenary Speakers
Amy Hollywood
Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies, Harvard University Divinity School, Speaker Bio
Karmen MacKendrick
Professor of Philosophy, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York, Speaker Bio
About the Conference: Call for Papers; Working Schedule
One of the most haunting aspects of Silence is the sense you get that Christianity meets its match in this land of “swamp.” That here we have a group of islands whose rockiness has proved inpenetrable to the truth of the cross, and the blazing sword of God’s love. Strangely enough, I just read that Lacan said the same thing about this land, but that he said it concerning psychoanalysis, that Japanese people couldn’t be psychoanalysts because of the way their writing system could be read in two completely divergent ways. That is, the on-yomi and the kun-yomi, two different ways of reading Japanese Kanji (characters imported from China–this of course isn’t even mentioning the two different syllabaries also used in everyday writing, whose doubleness perhaps images the dual readings of the kanji). In other words, you could have the very same kanji that would be pronounced completely differently depending on the mode of reading you were using. Before I knew this, but after I studied a very small amount of Japanese, a language which for English speakers is a cinch to pronounce but a bitch to read, I also droned on to my World Religion classes that the Japanese were fascinating because they could be in two places at once, they could be completely traditional and completely modern/techno/industrial/secular at the same time. In the West, I said, we felt torn between those two options, whereas the Japanese pulled it off so naturally, the way they might design a insurance building according to the ki streaming down the mountainside or start the baseball season off with a Shinto blessing. There is a certain nonchalance about everything in Japan, a confidence that anything can be Japanified, any word absorbed into the language, that they have the secret to digesting everything. Of course, this is the complaint in Silence, that Christianity has just become another variant of Japanese thought, that it was some kind of seed not mentioned in the parable of the sower, the seed that is planted but becomes genetically modified and grows into something else! Continue reading ‘Things that are Impossible in Japan’
As many of you know, Janet has begun the discussion of S. Endo’s Silence over at deepgraceoftheory. Here at TLOU, we’d like to investigate some of the more technical aspects of the theology behind Silence. So today, through the magic of cut and paste, we’re going to direct your attention to Janet’s and my conversation that we hope to continue here.
First, Janet quotes my early comment, and then responds to it:
“Rather, I think of it like participating in the sacraments. Our relationship to God through the church is starved if we deprive ourselves of the sacraments. Likewise, if we refuse to participate in the world in a way that conforms to our end, we lose something of the sacramentality of being in the world.”
Yes, I agree with you you about this “participation.” I suppose this is why Father Rodrigues was willing to hear Kichijiro’s confession and have him live with him in his little community. Continue reading ‘The Sacraments and Silence’
Recently J.K. Rowling revealed that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay, and that he had fallen in love with the (eventually) evil wizard Grindelwald as a youth, which partly explains his ideological mistakes made with that wizard. The revelation came when a student asked her if the headmaster who always spoke so highly of the power of love had ever fallen in love himself. I think that this is an opportunity for a wise person to say something about the current debate on homosexuality in culture and church, esp. in the Anglican communion. Unfortunately, I will speaking on the matter instead.
Latest Comments
RSS