587 B.c.-A.D. 70:
On Several Regimes of Signs
Challenger speaking :____ (quelle année Monsieur D?) (avant Christ etcétéra)
The god averts his face,
which must be seen by no one; and the subject, gripped by a veritable fear of
the god, averts his or her face in turn. The averted faces, in profile, replace
the frontal view of the radiant face. It is this double turning away that draws
the positive line of flight.
( English travels to us over centuries; escapes the (w)hole )
The prophet is the main figure in this assemblage;
he needs a sign to guarantee the word of God, he is himself marked by a sign
indicating the special regime to which he belongs. It is Spinoza who has
elaborated the profoundest theory of prophetism, taking into account the
semiotic proper to it.
Cain, who turns away from the God who turns away
from him, already follows the line of deterritorialization, protected by a
sign allowing him to escape death. The mark of Cain. A punishment worse
than imperial death? The Jewish God invented the reprieve, existence in
reprieve, indefinite postponement.
But He also invented the positivity of
alliance, or the covenant, as the new relation with the deity, since the subject
remains alive.
Abel, whose name is vanity, is nothing;
Cain is the true man.
This is very different from the system of rigging or deception animating
the face of the signifier, the interpretation of the seer and the displacements
of the subject. It is the regime of betrayal, universal betrayal, in
which the true man never ceases to betray God just as God betrays man,
with the wrath of God defining the new positivity.
Before his death, Moses
receives the words of the great song of betrayal. Even the prophet, unlike
the seer-priest, is fundamentally a traitor and thus fulfills God's order better
than anyone who remained faithful could.
God calls upon Jonah to go to
Nineveh to entreat the inhabitants, who had repeatedly betrayed God, to
mend their ways.
But Jonah's first act is to take off in the opposite direction;
he also betrays God, fleeing "far from the face of Adonai."
Double Detournement
re-edited
(Did you attend this lecture Mister D? That is my clandestine face so to say yes would be to trick you to say no is to betray and a line of light becoming one of disclosure eh?) (Alors on parle pas a des choses si important )
He takes a ship for Tarshish and sleeps, like a righteous man.
(We took a boat to Greece )
The tempest sent by
God causes him to be thrown into the sea, where he is swallowed by the
great fish and vomited out at the boundary between land and water, the
limit of separation or line of flight earlier occupied by the dove of the Ark
(Jonah, precisely, is the word for dove).
But Jonah, in fleeing from the face
of God, did exactly what God had wanted: he took the evil of Nineveh
upon himself; he did it even more effectively than God had wanted, he
anticipated God.
That is why he slept like a righteous man.
( slept like a stone
Under a booke)
God let him live, temporarily protected by the tree of Cain,
but then made the tree die
because Jonah had renewed the covenant by occupying the line of flight.
(Cain's protecting tree__ the sign of the outlaw)
Jesus universalizes the system of betrayal: he betrays the God of the Jews,
he betrays the Jews, he is betrayed by God ("Why hast thou forsaken me?"
[Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34—Trans.]), he is betrayed by Judas, the true
man. He took evil upon himself, but the Jews who kill him also take it upon
themselves. Jesus is asked for a sign of his divine descendance: he invokes
the sign of Jonah [Luke 11:29—Trans.].
(Yet Jesus claims his descent from Able,
and identifies himself as the shepherd ) (paradoxes abound as always don't they) (did you do theology too? yes, yes.)
(The question of Judas: taken up again and again: the theology of Judas in Gnostic gospels
and the heresiarchs)
Cain, Jonah, and Jesus constitute
three great linear proceedings along which signs rush and form relays.
There are many others. Everywhere a double turning away on a line of
flight.
(The double turning away on the line of Orthodox flight? Christ Jesu as the shepherd
is the orthodox linear flight a turning away of the awayness of the Abel Cain
"fight"?) (Prof. Challenger qualifies his statement that neither trickster nor traitor
are better than the other... remember that? Penciled note)
When a prophet declines the burden God entrusts to him (Moses,
Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.), it is not because the burden would have been too
heavy, as with an imperial oracle or seer who refuses a dangerous mission.
It is instead a case like Jonah's, who by hiding and fleeing and betraying
anticipates the will of God more effectively than if he had obeyed.
The
prophet is always being forced by God, literally violated by him, much
more than inspired by him.
The prophet is not a priest. (Nor a Lacanian psychoanalyst, policeman or spy)
The prophet does
not know how to talk, God puts the words in his mouth: word-ingestion, a
new form of semiophagy.
(The amnesiac deafmute prophet)
(Yet filled with stone words)
Unlike the seer, the prophet interprets nothing:
his delusion is active rather than ideational or imaginative, his relation to
God is passional and authoritative rather than despotic and signifying; he
anticipates and detects the powers (puissances) of the future rather than
applying past and present powers (pouvoirs).
Faciality traits no longer function
to prevent the formation of a line of flight, or to form a body of
signifiance controlling that line and sending only a faceless goat down it.
Rather, it is faciality itself that organizes the line of flight, in the face-off
between two countenances that become gaunt and turn away in profile.
Betrayal has become an idee fixe, the main obsession, replacing the deceit
of the paranoiac and the hysteric. The "persecutor-persecuted" relation
has no relevance whatsoever: its meaning is altogether different in the
authoritarian passional regime than in the despotic paranoid regime.
Pause in Plateau ~ to be continued ....
AS always ______________________ Felix and Gilles the cats of thought, the catatonia delire of consciousness___
from One Thousand Plateaus (123-4) Eng. from the ever fine translation of our dear Brian Massumi .
Yet something to come back to:
"Something is still bothering us: the story of Oedipus."
-____________________________________________________________
Tuesday Vincennes : afternoon walk : did you hear and get all of that? What was she doing there? His voice is a tangle of heaping bringing into us and escorting us to what he says: One does not ask questions of such a teacher: he's a philosopher : more and more. and more
and ....:
We went dancing that night:his partner was there, the one with the Italian
sounding name: is he... ?
A prophet too? they say so in Italy |
_____________________
