File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0301, message 10


Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2003 19:59:45 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Postmodern Religion


Eric/all

i thought afterwards that I should have prefaced the below or 
postscripted it with a quote from Lyotard's friend Deleuze "... In these 
conditions, as soon as there is this type of multiplicity, there is 
politics, micro-politics. As Felix says: before Being there is politics. 
...."

regards
steve

steve.devos wrote:

> Eric/all
> rough notes and naturally enough unproof read...
>
> You are mistaken to believe that I am having it 'both ways'. I reject 
> the use of religion and the religious imperative as a means of 
> understanding 1) the human condition, 2) the development of the 
> universe 3) as a means of justifying or explaining morality or ethics 
> 4) anything else. It is interesting as a field of mythology (as I 
> believe I have stated previously) but not as a useful reference point 
> to the human condition. I believe that Zizek and Badiou are both wrong 
> to attempt to utilise, in their specific case 'Christianity', however 
> I have not read the Zizek text (The Fragile Absolute) concerned and 
> need do so to clarify whether my rejection is well-founded and further 
> to understand whether it is interesting and perhaps as challenging as 
> Badiou and Zizek's utilisation of Lenin has been. To clarify then in 
> relation to your initial question - it has never been my belief that 
> you should necessarily accept the entirity of a writer's discourse. It 
> should be clear that in relation to Lyotard I believe that aspects of 
> his work are acceptable as broadly correct whereas others are not and 
> are unsound. The same is true (of course) with Zizek and Badiou, for 
> example, it is not clear to me that the previously mentioned work 
> related to Lenin is correct. Zizek's text 'On Belief' is as it says on 
> the cover, tracing 'the contours of the often unconscious beliefs that 
> structure our daily experience....' His use of Christianity in the 
> text then can be understood in terms of the mythology point made above.
>
> Whilst I would and do critique the 'identity politics' we have all 
> been involved in during the past few decades - it is worth noting that 
> one of the hard lessons that we learnt in the experiment and must not 
> lose is that 'everything is political'. As such whilst religion cannot 
> possibly engage with everything in the universe, politics and as a 
> result society must. I am not attempting to reduce everything down to 
> a single genre - though I suspect that Ranciere might be accused of 
> such an approach in his reworking of the 'philosophy of politics' - 
> rather that all aspects of human and non-human existence has a 
> political aspect and as a consequence 'politics' is not one but many 
> genres.
>
> Eric your last paragraph is the most difficult to answer/discuss - for 
> in your initial discourse you proposed that religion in it's ideal 
> form is concerned with 'morality and mysticism, goodness and 
> happiness' - I am not as such a theist - and profoundly disagree with 
> the idealist tendency to argue that aethism appeared as a position as 
> a result of the development of monotheistic religion, rather it 
> appeared as a rejection of the aceptance that 'transcendent beings' 
> (of any gender) exist and that all aspects of the universe, in other 
> words it is a non-vulgar materialism.
>
> It seems to me that I should engage in a counter-proposal of 'goodness 
> and happiness' and why they are problematic. To engage in these 
> questions it is worth noting that the concepts of ethics and morality 
> are problematic because there origins are in normative social mores, 
> in that they propose a 'harmonic relationship' between the public and 
> private customs of a given society in a given country and from this we 
> postulate moral and ethical good behavior. From this the correct moral 
> life of an individual was and is defined and understood. This, which 
> Hegel called "the substantial nature of the ethical", subsequently 
> produces the proposal that the norms of the good are directly anchored 
> and guaranteed in the life of an existing community but this can no 
> longer be assumed today (Adorno) The primary reason normally given for 
> this is that the community, usually understood through the state as a 
> representation of the community, has become so powerful in its 
> relations to the individual that the resultant procedures and 
> processes impose the relationships upon the individual through the 
> social circumstances. The secondary reason is that both morality and 
> ethics have become associated with a rather restricted and narrow 
> ascetic ideal  which in some sense is derived from the decaying 
> mystical and religious understanding of the societies we inhabit. The 
> notion of ethics being dealt with here is not dissimilar to the 
> standard conception of ethics which references the ideal that persons 
> should live in accordance with their own nature, this is supposedly 
> contrary to the understanding of morality as something imposed from 
> outside. (Of course in reality the now fortunately ended ethical turn 
> of recent years was actually a merging of ethics and morality). 
> However to clarify the issues with the concept of ethics from a purely 
> ethical conception of the good life or good act is reduced to the idea 
> that one should act in accordance with ones nature, an ethic and so 
> on. (This is related to Kants understanding of personality, harmony 
> and identity) . However it is necessary to recognise that for Kant and 
> consequently for us, moral and ethical issues and problems have until 
> recently always been engaged with the question of the interrelations 
> between the empirical human being and the rational human being, the 
> latter is especially determined by his own reason of which freedom is 
> a determining characteristic.
>
> sorry for the roughness again...
>
> regards
> steve
>
>



   

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