L anguage lingers — it clings to the past

like the Appalachian mountains

on an old map (now merely

standing in for decapitated

piles of rubble.)

Words have weight. And, we

may presume, a certain finality:

“It has been written!”

we say hopelessly.

“You can’t take it back!”

Linguistic endeavors are exis-

tentially artificial — attempts

to weigh down those things

that otherwise flutter into the

theSineZine.blogspot.com

past: legal records, Scripture, an educated man’s deep

thoughts — a name on a death certificate.

Words are life-support machines

attached to dead objects. Let's pull the

plug on some big ones and see what

happens!

8/2013. with E.M. Knapp; Tho.

Millary// “histories of crystallog-

raphy” by Shafranovskii and

Schuh// jean-loic nedelec// Ar-

onofsky// la jetee// thanks to

Nietzsche, “Ayn” Randi Hagi, Ted

G, John F, “Hans Christian” Early,

SZ + PR, Otto // T Stoppard

[Inc.] editor— please feel free to

copy or cite with proper refer-

ence // FREE theSineZine.blogspot.com

… let the preachers and the poets bury their dead institutions!

A s long as we’re unplugging the life support from language in the

hospice center of ideas, we might as well start at the top, with

that elusive and recalcitrant old bastard hiding on a cloud somewhere

above the bible belt. Yeah, you heavy old fool, you falsehood-in-chief,

you pretender to the power of creation — I’m talking about you, so-

called “God.” What makes you think, idle idol? Are you alive outside

of the Freudian fantasies of your happiness-seeking,

nondenominational, hell-fearing followers?

Do you fix cars and hate porn?

Do you love the taste of my tears?

What makes you different from any

other human construct?

Can words capture your essence?

N o. There is no language

exact enough —no word

quick enough, no formulation

alive enough — to capture the

reality, the actuality of god.

… let the preachers and the poets bury their dead institutions!

T his is why we must, like Elijah dancing before Ahab and the proph-

ets of Baal, ruthlessly mock the born-again rock-band TBN

crowds: because they worship a word, some ink on a page, or a piece

of dead material. Mock them to their faces, because the living spirit

laughs at our blasphemies, and our petty attempts to hold it down—

we must berate those superficial believers, those verse-memorizing

idolaters, “Your god is dead! Sing louder!” For the voices of the uni-

versal genitive principle can be heard only in silence. God is wordless.

W hen Moses asks the burning bush what word it may be

referred to by, the answer is, “I will be what I will be.”

Spirit is, according to Hegel, that which moves. By this very

simple principle, we can rule out anything that must be taught

at vacation bible school (or confirmation class, if you‘re cath-

olic,) as related to the actuality of

God. What then, is God? Can God

be weighed down with gravitas, the

millstone of language?

T he concept of gravity

implies that matter is

not inert. It has agency, the

power to attract other matter. Is this not just an-

other projection of man’s hope for a God he can

literally cling to? We are material beings, animated

perhaps, but quite unable to access that which

is in us — that which has moved within or

through us. No poem or algorithm can cap-

ture our agency, our gestures of self and God.

Therefore …

T here are only so many positions and movements that the

human body can enact, says Milan Kundera. There are a

limited number of gestures that can be used in any context.

Combine a limited number of gestures with the billions of peo-

ple who have used them — there is a point when we can flip

the axis on which we recognize people as unique and gestures

as generic, Kundera says. Perhaps it is the so-called

“individual” who is generic, and the gestures which are in fact

unique? Do gestures move through the mass of people like

pop song lyrics in a school cafeteria? Perhaps this is what the

early Christians were talking about when they referred to

themselves as “the body of Christ?” Why not? — a mass of

individuals spread across the hemisphere, united by a unique

gesture with some strange spiritual significance — the greatest

in the hierarchy of gestures, brought to a communist construc-

tion worker from a shit town in the Levant … maybe. Or

perhaps the “Resurrection of the Body” and the “Forgiveness

of Sins” are really just gestures of reciprocation that are natu-

rally built-in to life?

I s the physical act of gesturing significant not only as some-

thing symbolic, but as something that is material and real?

Or does it actually change us, its enactors? Social and behav-

ioral psychology both have something to say about this. In the

Skinnerian tradition (following Pavlov), there is nothing more

basic than the stimulus-response; in Relational Frame Theory, a

subject is always-already re-programming itself to adapt to the

situation at hand. Actions create their own inner realities: at

the same time they move in the world, taking on life greater

than their enablers. Indeed, we are not the source of that

which moves through us — but when we make the

right gestures, we become more than inert matter,

and our material bodies are assigned meaning, signif-

icance. We can become the agents of meaning by going through

the motions.

T his presents us with a problem. Is language, weighty and

malingering as we have made it out to be, a gesture? If so,

is it a gesture towards meaning, or an escape from meaning?

The acts of speech (or of writing) are certainly valid as a series

of gestures. But the reality invoked by language — the assign-

ment of meaning — is artificial. It can only point to meaning; it

can’t literally carry meaning or be meaning. And it is only

through a differential calculus of vagary that we are able to

make something resembling

meaning out of all the babel.

Thus it is possible for us to

say both “God [as con-

cept] is dead” as well as

“God Acts [as geture]” —

and not speak in circles.

I n days long past, the Nietzschean madman first broke into churches and

sang his Requiem Aeternam Deo. The Death has been proclaimed, the funer-

al held. Now the entire world marches on with solemn unstated agreement

that the words spoken by the German prophet have been realized.

God is dead, God remains dead. And we (we ourselves, with no one else to

A Joke About Death: The Comedy of God’s Funeral

By Thom Millary, Eastern Mennonite University

I n days long past, the Nietzschean madman first broke into churches and

sang his Requiem Aeternam Deo. The Death has been proclaimed, the funer-

al held. Now the entire world marches on with solemn unstated agreement

that the words spoken by the German prophet have been realized.

God is dead, God remains dead. And we (we ourselves, with no one else to

A s Nietzsche predicted, the death of God led to a worldwide

epoch of devastation, nihilism and violence. The twentieth

century brought us no shortage of atrocity and death on a soul-

crushingly massive scale. What justice, mercy, or happiness is

there in the world that could possibly counter such a violent,

existential, historical break? No blood can be shed, no victories

can be won, and no philosophies (nor theologies) can

be wrought to undo the horror of the modern era. After the holocaust, after the killing fields of Cambodia, the decade-long

bombing of Laos — after the murder in the streets of countless

advocates of freedom and peace — the world’s intellectuals have

begun purporting “the end of history.”

T he chaotic dust of the twentieth century is only just settling,

and what remains? Neoliberal capitalism atop its throne, tri-

umphant, having crushed Nazism, fascism, Stalinism, and all other

ideological challengers. And what shape does the age of unfet-

tered, market-driven global capitalism take? The world is an end-

less production line of supply, designed for the sole purpose of

assuaging our unspoken existential demand: the anxieties of fail-

ure, guilt and meaninglessness. These are the constant agonies

which the capitalist system assures us on a daily basis it has the

power to numb. “Buy this product. Listen to this

A Joke About Death: The Comedy of God’s Funeral

By Thom Millary, Eastern Mennonite University

blame) have killed him. The universal embrace of a modernist

mode of being by both believers and unbelievers constitutes an

unintentional acknowledgment that God has been put to

rest. This is a truth spoken to by existentially apparent realities

both global and deeply —inescapably—personal in nature.

music. Watch this movie. Go to this church. Surely we have some-

thing that will fill the void in your soul. And if, in all the vastness of

our mighty selection, you yet go unsated, then fear not loyal citi-

zen! If you stay in line long enough without making any waves, well,

surely our market is on the job! — ready to produce something am-

ple, for to keep your existential agonies in check.” Truly, in this

world of global capitalist Empire, God is long dead.

H ow can we see the triumph global free-market capitalism as any-

thing other than the tragedy of tragedies? We long for meaning

but are denied by an unfeeling cosmos. We long for peace, but are

haunted by a primordial violence which ravages the world around us,

and our own fragile souls. We seem designed for something true,

some absolute meaning: we crave a love that can reform the very fab-

ric of space-time, like magic. But, no matter how we yearn, there appears nothing to repair the ontological damage wreaked upon the

human spirit by the harshness of existence. Contrary to what many

religious apologists have said, this existential state of disrepair is not

evidence of the existence of some literal, absolute and immaterial

force of love that is withheld by a capricious deity. No, rather the

hole we feel that cannot be shopped-away is merely the punch line of

a metaphysical joke — a joke that is simultaneously divine and mate-

rial — and all too apparent to us, the butt of it all.

I n his 2007 work Infinitely De-

manding, British philosopher

Simon Critchley critiques the La-

canian treatment of the tragic he-

roic paradigm for ethical sublima-

tion. In other words, Critchley is

questioning whether the paradigm

of tragedy as the obvious (though

perhaps pyrrhic) victory of typical

psychological struggle makes the

struggler out as being rather too

heroic. Furthermore, in the Nie-

tzschean sense,

the only serious

f o r m

of psychological strug-

gle is the existential

one; human beings are

not (yet) ready to stare

into the abyss of nihilis-

tic despair. If we could

stare down the abyss

without being over-

come by vertigo, how-

ever, would the brief

feeling of existential

authenticity even be

w o r t h

the trouble? Though

we might for a second manage to stare resolutely into the dark depths, we still die, still are

meaningless and are still failures; nothing has changed. The embrace

of the archetype of tragic heroism has only served to briefly numb

our fear and pain of fading into oblivion.

S o how do we manage to subvert the tragedy of being? It is only

possible as long as we see ourselves as participants in the cosmic

joke, rendered ridiculous by the obvious gap between our ideal

selves (the struggler-in-vain) and our real selves (which we cannot

actually know).

B eing will never align with the ego’s conception of being; our

grand dreams of metaphysical meaning with never align with the

cosmos, and our religious, political, and personal narratives will al-

ways fall flat upon exposure to doubt and anxiety. Consider though the whispers of hope. Our lives, though dominated by modern sys-

tems of violent oppression — while simultaneously characterized by

unspoken repression of despair — contain glimmers of a profound

joy. Although we hurt, fail, and even die — for now we sur-

vive. We continue to grow and evolve. Hope and love re-

main undaunted. Even the politically-hopeless situation under the re-

gime of global capitalist Empire cannot quash the human spirit of re-

sistance that conjures insurrection, revolution, and subversion. The

flames of human freedom and peace have not yet been extinguished.

T o utilize the language of Jack Caputo, we feel a desire beyond

desire, a hope beyond hope, a passion for something we know not

what. A love that is — like the reality of God — un-nameable. The

immutable call to prayer is the wail of the atheist who has witnessed

God dying. The divine death still seems to be the collapse of our

reality, and in a sense it really is. But to evoke Fight Club’s Tyler

Durden, “This is not the worst thing that can happen.” To be sure,

we humans find ourselves in a dark night of the soul, where there is

an impenetrable gap between the reality for which we long and the

reality in which we exist. We may still struggle for

meaning, but to do so we must be able to laugh;

we must recognize the absurdity of exist-

ence. There is no telos, no rhyme or reason to

life and death. Despite the difficulty that may be

found in accepting this reality, cause for gladness

remains. We should rejoice that the comedy of

humanity is shared as the comedy of God.

call will take us is entirely unknowable. It could very well end badly.

And yet laughing along with the cosmos, we must try. To the best

of our finite, fallible, all too human abilities we must try.

C ritchley explains the transition from tragic to comedic para-

digm, as a change in the function of the superego, which is to say

that instead of harshly critical of the meager efforts of the ego, the

part of the psyche which is devoted “to higher causes” acts as a sup-

plement to the ego, allowing a shift in perspective. And of course,

W e have foolishly imagined God

to be the biggest and most

powerful object in the universe, a

supernatural deus ex machina that

would solve all our problems. But this is wrong; rather, God is

properly (the gesture of) an invitation: an invitation to risk. A

break in all the systems that are woven together by our lies

about stability and fulfillment — God is a longing that moves us

beyond comfort to a hard road of uncertainty, adventure, hilari-

ty, and love. God is a call to the Kingdom of inexplicable for-

giveness, peace, and compassion. Where this undeniably risky

the meagerness of the ego, or rather its delusions of grandeur, are

hilarious. So also is it with God; just as the human super-ego evolves

to become conducive to comedy, we see in Jesus of Nazareth a con-

ception of God that is evolved enough to show the truth of divine

comedy.

“W ant to hear a joke?” - The world desperately awaits — for

many ages — the coming of a triumphalist God, who in a

display of infinite power, will subjugate the world into a divine or-

der. Now here he is! Born in a sta-

ble. Espousing humility and lowliness, re-

buking claims to divine power, shitting and

spitting: truly human. Even more absurd,

this God is publicly executed by his ene-

mies. More ridiculous yet, he forgives them!

Yet the most subversive kernel at the heart

of the Christ joke is the moment when,

hanging on the cross, he shares in the expe-

rience of being forsaken by God — some-

thing nearly universal among humans.

I am making a case for neither atheism nor

Christianity. What I am saying is that life

is inescapably, terrifyingly, blessedly, absurd. You know it, and I know it, and God (may

he rest in peace!) knows it. Why evoke the

name of a God that I have described as lying

in the grave? Because I know of no other

name that can evoke the ridiculous hope

necessary for us to carry on the struggle in

the midst of this dark night of the soul. I

confess that I find myself in total darkness, filled with anxiety, with

despair yet to be overcome, an Empire yet to be overthrown. So

please, join me, take my hand, let’s drink some drinks, sing

some songs, start an insurrection, and tell the joke of the funeral of

God. He would have wanted it that way. Maranatha. —- Th. M.

I s the task ahead of us to advance towards a mode of thought, unknown hitherto in our culture, that will make it possible to reflect at the same time, without dis­continuity or contradiction, upon man's being and

the being of language? — Foucault

T he task of philosophy has been to interrogate human existence. To do

this, it has tried to develop language into something more precise, and

has created a whole slew of confusion in the process. It is not more than a

few generations that go by using the same lexical tools before they become

obsolete. As a consequence, the trail of human thought becomes al-

most impossible to discern without decades of linguistic prepara-

tion. Meanwhile, philosophy is seen by the uninitiated as

some kind of progressive program working at

worldly ends — a misperception that it has at times

embodied. The Oxford English Dictionary was in

fact an attempt to stop linguistic drift, to transcend

the barriers of subjectivity around

which human experience fal-

ters. In the Nietzschean tra-

dition, idolatrous philosophers

are driven by the will-to-power.

(Or the will-to-transcendence,

some might add.)

Y et we have come to a slow reali-

zation in the arts that it is less

about what we can do with language than

about the ways that the gesture of language uses

us. There has been a short-circuit in our concep-

tualizing of things: philosophy — theology for that

matter — was never a means, but always an end.

It is a craft, something we do for its own sake,

something that changes the state of the game en-

tirely. Vague essences flow into one another,

I s the task ahead of us to advance towards a mode of thought, unknown hitherto in our culture, that will make it possible to reflect at the same time, without dis­continuity or contradiction, upon man's being and

the being of language? — Foucault

and like flood waters, they sweep away the artifice of human certainty. In

the confusion there is a loss of identity, and we are left with only questions.

H uman identity may be an artificial construct not meant to stand up to

scrutiny, and this tells us something about the human condition in it-

self. But in the end the gestures that make us can only be assigned meaning

by one ultimate gesture of radical inclusion. The purpose of life, in other

words, is the struggling to understand life as it is. And since we are at least

partially products of gestures, we can infer that the forces that created us —

call it chemo-bio-genesis, evolution, God — are aimed at the same thing we

are: understanding, acceptance, and inclusion. A dead God who acts means

a reality that is fundamentally open to identity — so far as it is inclusive iden-

tity. Seek, and ye shall find — if you are willing!