OK. So. The divine purpose of law is ... to wake life to the endlessness of its immanent reality by consciously laying to sweet sleep all the purposes that bind it, above all to itself. #38 [Awesome footnote]: As figured in Nietzsche’s “heaviest weight,”
the absolutely binding-liberating principle of the eternal return of the same (Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 194) and in Meister Eckhart’s
formulation of the divine whylessness of life: “it lives without Why, because
it lives for itself. And so, if you were to ask a genuine man who acted from
his own ground, ‘Why do you act?’ if he were to answer properly he would simply
say, ‘I act because I act’” (Complete
Mystical Works, 110). In other words, the only purpose of life, which
itself properly belongs only to what lives without principle — “Hoc enim
proprie vivit quod est sine principio” (Eckhart) — is to arrive at the
purposeless Reality: “Reality is Existence infinite and eternal. Existence has
no purpose by virtue of its being real, infinite and eternal … Everything — the
things and the beings — in Existence has a purpose … Their very being in
existence proves their purpose; and their sole purpose in existing is to become
shed of purpose, i.e. to become purposeless. Purposelessness is of Reality; to
have a purpose is to be lost in falseness … Love alone is devoid of purpose and
a spark of Divine Love sets fire to all purposes. The Goal of Life in Creation
is to arrive at purposelessness, which is the state of Reality” (Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing [Beacon
Hill, Australia: Meher House Publications, 1963], 62). In these terms, the
purpose of law or the law of law, is to bring to end all the purposes that
separate life and living. The connection to sleep is articulated by Meister
Eckhart: “If a person were really asleep for a hundred years, he would not know
any creature and he would not know of time or images. [Only if you so sleep,]
then can you hear what God is bringing about in you. This is why the soul says
in the Book of Love: ‘I sleep and my heart is awake’ (Sg 5:2)” (Teacher and Preacher, trans. Bernard
McGinn [New York: Paulist, 1986], 293). The proverbial sweetness of sleep, an
absolute law of life whose intimacy therewith is shown in sleep’s suspension of
everything save breath, is sister to the wakeful captivation of contemplation:
“For by a wondrous sweetness was she [Mary] held; a sweetness of the mind which
is doubtless greater than that of the senses” (Augustine, Sermons on the New Testament, 54.1). And as anxiety is the enemy of
sleep, so is sleep a reflection of the irreconcilability of worry and justice:
“At peace with God and neighbor, thus good sleep demands. And at peace too with
the neighbor’s devil! Otherwise he will be at your house at night” (Friedrich
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra,
trans. Adrian de Caro [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 18). The
gravity of sleep indexes the sweet immanence of eternal justice, precisely
because ‘justice never sleeps’: “suppose you feel tired and fed up and that you
go to sleep. What is it that you are trying to do? It is nothing but to try to
take refuge in God — your natural and inherent state. The whole Creation
therefore has this conscious or unconscious tendency to take shelter in God the
Over-Soul … by entering the state of sound sleep” (Meher Baba, God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its
Purpose [New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1973], 101). Augustine similarly
correlates the sense of divine justice and feeling for the inner abyss in
commenting on Psalm 41:8: “Deep calls to deep [abyssus abyssum invocat] at the
sound of your cataracts … This is how wisdom is imparted, and faith is learned,
when one deep invokes another. Holy preachers of God’s word call to a deep
abyss. But are they not a deep abyss themselves? They surely are, as you know.
The apostle says, It matters very little to me that I am judged by you or by
any human day of reckoning. What a deep abyss he is! But he goes further: Neither
do I judge myself” (Expositions of the
Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, 6 vols. [New York: New City Press, 2000],
II.251-2). In other words, the apparent virtuality of abyssically resonant
communication is a sign of the hidden reality of eternal justice as well as a
real medium of worrylessness. Beautifully enacting this principle, Augustine
opens the commentary on this line by addressing the (invisible) reader as a
visible presence by means of whose interest his own commentarial effort
proceeds without anxiety: “I may be able to get through this whole psalm if you
help me by your concentration, for I can see how eager you are. I am not too
worried about any fatigue you may feel as you listen, for you can see how I am
sweating in the effort that speaking costs me. And as you watch me laboring,
you will certainly help me, for you know I am laboring not for my own benefit,
but yours. Go on listening, then; I can see you want to” (Expositions, II.251). This points significantly back to questions
of relation between media and sweetness, virtuality and justice. Is not the
theory of communication that Augustine here arrives at and dramatizes not a
form of ‘post-human’ justice predicated upon the as not [hōs mē] structure of
apostolic identity? Is not the as not — as opposed to the hope-structure of the
as if, which is actually only a mechanism for ‘having one’s own way’ in a bad
way upon the faulty foundation of assumption that the hoped-for always already
is not — precisely the hopeless ‘hope’ of the virtual as mode of relation that
calls from the depths to release identity into sweet wayless abysses of a life?
See Eugene Thacker, “The Wayless Abyss: Mysticism and Mediation,” Postmedieval 3 [2012]: 80-96. Is not
eternal justice coterminal with arts of wayless media, above all the taste of
one’s own tongue, whose aimless aim empties world of the correlational,
fake-it-till-you-make-it structure of capitalist life (hell-creating virtual
performance of salvation) in f(l)avor of the fullness the cephalophoric
paradise where law both is as if it were not decapitated and is decapitated as
if it were not?: “Justice without law is not the negation of the law, but the
realization and fulfillment, the plērōma, of the law” (Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the
Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey [Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005], 107). Affirming these questions, Scott Wilson provides a proper
figure for such media, one whose beauty lies precisely in the abyssic
alreadyness or radical immanence of its ‘perhaps’: “Perhaps some time in the
future, some hard-bodied, hard-wired assemblage self-designed to survive the
lifeless expanses of time and space will sense the sense the soft sweetness of
a-life penetrating it” (The Order of Joy:
Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment [New York: State University of
New York, 2008], 173). True dat. But I still want to save the planet and fuck up them rich folks.
[Note: Sources: JBR; Nicola Masciandaro, FB post, 27 Jan 013; JBR]