In the monstrous shadow of worldly wisdom

Abstract

Within the long dark shadow from whence we must speak is there any sense left to register the shame of so many shames? Is there any sense to outrage? The legacy of mass murder continues under the legitimating covers of Western nationalisms and requisite preparations for the ‘free market’. Bosnia, Somalia-business as usual. What has been learned? What, if anything, has changed in the way we think about ‘things’? We have seen faces turning away from one another, but only by the light of the annihilating flames of all-consuming worldly wisdom. The wise ones, with their gods of mockery, have represented everything and everyone-every deed, every utterance-submitting all of it under wisdom’s law-the Law of annihilation and the pure identity of death. 7’ Are there today even the slightest indications of possibilities, shimmering horizons for something other than the mocking representations of worldly wisdom? Are there possibilities taking form within the agonising field of our impossible rebellion against this mimetic nihilism and its incessant rejection of a Law which cannot be represented? Perhaps, a wretched ensemble of non-peoples who, in rebellion against worldly wisdom and its pure identity of death, somehow recognise and affirm each other. Here, then, within the shadows facing the event of annihilating thought and its administration are connections and forms of thinking otherwise than worldly wisdom. The bound transcendence of the shadow dwellers is otherwise than the unbound transcendence of worldly wisdom and its easy but deadly identificational images. Without that shimmer of hope that arises with resistance to worldly wisdom and its cool administration of idolatrous representations, we would have nothing or no one to turn to other than those we once thought better of. So many refused to see that the metaphors of speculative dialectics had become immobilised in the figures of state sponsored and administered programmes of mass murder. Even afterwards, when the earth had turned ashen, many continued to enlist these graven images. And how, fifty years later, some still say that it all leaves ‘much of traditional philosophy intact’. They say that when we are overwhelmed by such massive evil, ‘the old categories do exactly what we want them to: permit us to be rational when rationality is indicated and prevent us from thinking we understand what is too horrible to contemplate’.* Yes, its all too horrible to contemplate. Let’s suspend our rational faculties in a moment or two of silent sublimity! For many reasons we are not surprised by such denials, exculpations. and