Doyle Saylor wrote,
>PS Tom is a wiseacre in starting this thread, and I recognize the >difference
>in seriousness of his message and my own. Still the point he made is >worthy
>of my attention in a serious manner anyway.
[1585-95; < MD wijssager prophet, trans. of MHG
wissage, late OHG wissago, earlier wizzago wise
person, c. OE witega; akin to WIT 2]
Verily my tongue hath worn a hole in my cheek. But I am also dead serious. I
would just add that the emptiness of the God term is potentially a
productive emptiness, although it is also potentially deadening. How can
there be different kinds of emptiness? Think of "aporia" and "hollowed out".
Aporia carries thought forward with an expectation, hollowness arrests
action with disappointment. Fortunately, hollowness can be transformed to
aporia, which is the method of Negative Dialectic.
A 17th century German dramatist wrote:
"Whosoever would grace this frail cottage, in which poverty adorns every
corner, with a rational summing up, would be making no inapt statement nor
overstepping the mark of well-founded truth if he called the world a general
store, a customs-house of death, in which man is the merchandise, death the
wondrous merchant, God the most conscientious book-keeper, but the grave the
bonded drapers' hall and ware house."
Walter Benjamin used the passage as a motto for his chapter on Allegory and
Trauerspiel in _The Origin of German Tragic Drama_. I cited it last week in
connection with the Georgia crematorium.
God as a book-keeper seems at first a peculiarly inapt metaphor, inasmuch as
book-keeping is a matter of reducing all activity to monetary value. But God
is *the most conscientious* book-keeper, which is to say there are no
off-balance sheet transactions. Mere money cannot be God's unit of account.
Compare this book-keeper God to the neo-classical "tatonnement auctioneer"
for whom vain money is the sole unit of account. One might say the only
difference is their unit of account. But that difference makes all the
difference in the world. The auctioneer is thus revealed as an imposter, a
huckster, a fraud, a false prophet (false profit).
"What if the most important questions about the attacks on the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center as historical Events transcend
the terms of the current debate and the underlying framework it
serves?" http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2002I/msg01951.html
Tom Walker
