Last night at 10:00 I submitted my grades and officially ended the spring semester. Now (with head freshly shaved) it’s time to rejoin the human race by returning to the gym, reading books and articles for fun, drinking and socializing–scandalizing–and fleshing out this virtual site.

Below are a couple of excerpts from my writing projects this term:

Irigarayan deinos and the Distance of Home

Our conception of nature—just like our grasp of masculine and feminine—is itself always already enculturated. That is, we cannot make sense of nature without resorting to culturally constructed tropes of intelligibility, without imposing human agency or scientism upon natural phenomena. Even when we attempt to make room for the inexplicability of nature (for example, relying on a “God works in mysterious ways” mindset), our conception of the mystery/mysterious is already encrusted by and ensconced within a cultural framework. We cannot conceive of nature that is not culturally formed/informed/deformed and is not a consequence of man’s greatest violence—the imposition of intelligibility. And yet “true” nature (physis) is first (at the beginning) and foremost absent of human beings. It just is—“measureless to man” and immeasurable. Only when man knowingly acknowledges that he neither has agency to grasp ungraspable being nor ability to run after receding being can he find his place, his home, as a resting place displaced—not at the center of being nor at its origin—but nearby, near-within, wherein man’s being calls forth being itself. At last being arrives but not according to man’s timetable, for it is only when man steps out from history, away from the act of historicizing, that he is able to attune himself to being’s already arriving. Only when man allows for a cultivation of the female/buddhic to be and accepts a position of repose, of rest and contemplation, does home—always already present even in its absence—draw close. When man’s fabricated home is no longer the site centered on the male to be, his true home opens up to the full belongingness of all beings.

Wounded Writing:
The Reticent Witness of Wisława Szymborska

From this lexical evidence, it seems that silence here has its own efficacy in opposition to names; silence, in effect, serves as a non-name that finds its own name in Szymborska’s poetry. Ultimately, there is no resolution to these antinomies; thesis and antithesis do not move gently toward synthesis in a semantically consistent form of Hegelianism. Instead, each image, each theme, each term flies free from any core meaning a reader might impose upon the text toward newly formed orbits of signification. This motion of silence and voice alternates back and forth like breath; every silence becomes a calling for(th), yet every shout is voiceless. This directed ambiguity resonates with the process of breathing: one cannot breathe by oneself; one cannot produce one’s own breathe. Similarly, the process of speaking and not speaking (that is, silence) alternates back and forth in Szymborska’s volume, always requiring the other and speaking through the other.

Last night at 10:00 I submitted my grades and officially ended the spring semester. Now (with head freshly shaved) it’s time to rejoin the human race by returning to the gym, reading books and articles for fun, drinking and socializing–scandalizing–and fleshing out this virtual site.

Below are a couple of excerpts from my writing projects this term:

Irigarayan deinos and the Distance of Home

Our conception of nature—just like our grasp of masculine and feminine—is itself always already enculturated. That is, we cannot make sense of nature without resorting to culturally constructed tropes of intelligibility, without imposing human agency or scientism upon natural phenomena. Even when we attempt to make room for the inexplicability of nature (for example, relying on a “God works in mysterious ways” mindset), our conception of the mystery/mysterious is already encrusted by and ensconced within a cultural framework. We cannot conceive of nature that is not culturally formed/informed/deformed and is not a consequence of man’s greatest violence—the imposition of intelligibility. And yet “true” nature (physis) is first (at the beginning) and foremost absent of human beings. It just is—“measureless to man” and immeasurable. Only when man knowingly acknowledges that he neither has agency to grasp ungraspable being nor ability to run after receding being can he find his place, his home, as a resting place displaced—not at the center of being nor at its origin—but nearby, near-within, wherein man’s being calls forth being itself. At last being arrives but not according to man’s timetable, for it is only when man steps out from history, away from the act of historicizing, that he is able to attune himself to being’s already arriving. Only when man allows for a cultivation of the female/buddhic to be and accepts a position of repose, of rest and contemplation, does home—always already present even in its absence—draw close. When man’s fabricated home is no longer the site centered on the male to be, his true home opens up to the full belongingness of all beings.

Wounded Writing:
The Reticent Witness of Wisława Szymborska

From this lexical evidence, it seems that silence here has its own efficacy in opposition to names; silence, in effect, serves as a non-name that finds its own name in Szymborska’s poetry. Ultimately, there is no resolution to these antinomies; thesis and antithesis do not move gently toward synthesis in a semantically consistent form of Hegelianism. Instead, each image, each theme, each term flies free from any core meaning a reader might impose upon the text toward newly formed orbits of signification. This motion of silence and voice alternates back and forth like breath; every silence becomes a calling for(th), yet every shout is voiceless. This directed ambiguity resonates with the process of breathing: one cannot breathe by oneself; one cannot produce one’s own breathe. Similarly, the process of speaking and not speaking (that is, silence) alternates back and forth in Szymborska’s volume, always requiring the other and speaking through the other.