tpaine posted:

and, i got real real moist. and he was all snuggled under the covers and he didn't know what i was doin' cuz he was still sleepin. uh, he said, you can use yer hands. and he's slick in my hands, almost kinda feels like a feeish. almost like i can't even hold onto 'eem.

Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of "peace of mind," the mindless peace of complacency.

It was an implicit admission that the past spoke directly only through things that had not been handed down, whose seeming closeness to the present was thus due precisely to their exotic character, which ruled out all claims to a binding authority. Obligative truths were replaced by what was in some sense significant or interesting, and this of course meant—as no one knew better than Benjamin—that the "consistence of truth ... has been lost" ( Briefe II, 763). Outstanding among the properties that formed this "consistence of truth" was, at least for Benjamin, whose early philosophical interest was theologically inspired, that truth concerned a secret and that the revelation of this secret had authority. Truth, so Benjamin said shortly before he became fully aware of the irreparable break in tradition and the loss of authority, is not "an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice" (Schriften I, 146). Once this truth had come into the human world at the appropriate moment in history—be it as the Greek a-letheia, visually perceptible to the eyes of the mind and comprehended by us as "un-concealment" ("Unverborgenheit"— Heidegger), or as the acoustically perceptible word of God as we know it from the European religions of revelation—it was this "consistence" peculiar to it which made it tangible, as it were, so that it could be handed down by tradition. Tradition transforms truth into wisdom, and wisdom is the consistence of transmissible truth. In other words, even if truth should appear in our world, it could not lead to wisdom, because it would no longer have the characteristics which it could acquire only through universal recognition of its validity.

Edited by babyfinland (May 8, 2012 05:47:48)

Transient_Grace posted:

in tom's defense he considers it a revelation whenever he experiences bowel movements, his standards for prophecy might be somewhat different than yours.

</tompost>

does he get on his knees, face down in the toilet covered by a blanket with a sorcerer's stone in one hand while trying to "read that shit"?

babyfinland posted:

i half expect youve already encountered these of your own accord, or its also possible that ive psoted them at you before, but if not you may be interested in some of the recent judith butler 'tubes such as "benjamin and the philosophy of history" and "benjamin and kafka". of course as is typical of egs classes the topics smear and arent confined to just the particular videos that have those titles. and not just in butlers solo class but also in the one she has with avital ronell and laurence rickels. probably in avital's solo classes as well (though i havent really watched all of them, or watched them closely) plus the couple of videos she (avital) co-taught with christopher fynsk (which i have watched very closely, they're mostly oriented around heidegger, benjamin comes in as a reference point occasionally, such as a brief comparison of struggle in marx, mission in heidegger, and task in benjamin). etc. arendt herself pops up too from time to time in all of these as you might expect