Our Bloom Is Gone
Overheard, a couple mid-squabble:
He: You’re projecting!
She: I’m projecting? You’re projecting!
One imagines them later, him mulling over the argument and trying to explain it to himself, her staving off tedium by thinking about sex (with someone else): “you see, I think the trouble we were having there was that we were both projecting…or was it just me all along?”
While Sinthome reflects on a recent Auseinandersetzung, I attempt to summon the ghost of Levinas in order to exorcise it once again, and Voyou and IT talk about “productive” and “militant” misreadings. Sooner or later someone will perhaps remember Derrida’s polemic with Searle, and send us all back to Derrida’s “Afterword: An Ethics of Discussion”.
It’s not a coincidence, I think, that this discussion follows on from, and still bears traces of, the kerfuffle about “religion” and “secularism”. If I wanted to be naughty, and I usually do, I might suggest that “religion” is another name for productive misreading, and “secularism” a name for the “faithful”, “literal” reading of the world: the trouble with religious people, after all, is that they insist on seeing things – holy ghosts and talkshow hosts – that aren’t really there.
In any case, following Harold Bloom, I suggest that the art of productive misreading is all about knowing how to find the clinamen:
Back to the stumbling-block, the necessary
woeful impediment. See where the sandal
scuffed the stone, the inoffensive stub
peeping out of the dust. Teilhard devotes -
appropriately – an appendix to the matter:
the quantum or quotient of harm, per inch
of the way travelled. As humankind is hitched
to perfection, each loss is amortized
in advance; but as for all that trippy prose,
read theology as an art of tumbling, a fall
taken with comic grace. Or is that cosmic?
And isn’t that mythology? Whatever
precipitously grazes and befouls us stands
in each case as its sovereign occasion.