With the defeat of the Axis forces in World War II, followed 45 years later my the end of the Cold War and the rise of George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order,” the Nazi death-camp system has now gone global, that’s all. The system had to get rid of Auschwitz as any distinctive place of unimaginable horror so that the whole world could at last become Auschwitz.
Read moreTrauma and Transfiguration (3): The Transfiguration of Trauma
Sometimes, the worst mischance can turn out to be the best chance. When that happens, trauma is transfigured.
Read moreTrauma and Transfiguration (2): The Ineffectiveness of Trauma
To turn trauma, which is never there to make any effect, never meant to be “of use,” into something useful for effecting one’s own purposes, is to do with trauma what is not to be done, what is strictly prohibited. In that sense, to use trauma at all, rather than just to undergo it, to “suffer” it, is always to abuse it.
Read moreTrauma and Transfiguration (1): The Accidence, Incidence, and Intransigence of Trauma
A trauma is an intransigently incident accident—an event or occurrence that befalls someone by chance and that brooks no compromise to allow the one to whom it happens to pass through and beyond it.
Read moreIdol Worship, Idle Worship (4): Ending the Exchange
If one worships by adopting prescribed postures of worship, and going through all the prescribed motions while reciting all the prescribed prayers, and does so in hopes of reward, then one is not really worshipping at all. Rather, those who “worship” in such a way are really just doing business as usual, trying to cut themselves the best deal.
Read moreIdol Worship, Idle Worship (3): God in Community
Worship, true worship, is always idle. It belongs to the sheer idleness of life simply to be lived, and given to us that it might be lived abundantly: life to be celebrated, not circulated. When we worship truly, which means when we worship God and not some idol, we take ourselves out of circulation.
Read moreIdol Worship, Idle Worship (2): Breaking the Circulation
Water flows. Money circulates. In flowing, water always seeks a way down to the lowest levels, where it accumulates to form wells, ponds, lakes, pools, and seas. The water that falls on the heights flows down to the valleys, to gather in such deep places. Human habitations can be built beside such places, the natural places of water, and along the streams and rivers that flow into them. In contrast, money in its circulation proceeds quite differently. Instead of flowing from above down to what is below, it rises upwards into ever more rarefied heights to accumulate there, where fewer and fewer people can survive.
Read moreIdol Worship, Idle Worship (1): The Trauma of Idolatry
Whoever does not worship God worships an idol, and whoever does not worship an idol worships God. God is the trauma of idolatry.
Read morePowerful Words: Freedom of Speech
It is not the voices of the oppressors that are silenced, but the voices of the oppressed. It is they who need to be freed to speak.
Read morePowerful Speech: Disempowering Language
Free speech does not coerce, nor serve the power that does. Rather, free speech frees from coercion: It empowers. The power of speech as such is the power to free, not the power to coerce. It is the power of the open hand, not of the closed fist: of invitation, not compulsion.
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