neither interruption nor end

according to Christian theology there is only one legal institution which knows neither interruption nor end: hell. The model of contemporary politics - which pretends to an infinite economy of the world - is thus truly infernal.

para

alongside, altered, beyond, contrary
beside, next to, near, from
against, contrary to 


para / a presence that distends time, an already that is also a not yet, a delay that does not put off until later but, instead, a disconnection within the present moment that allows us to grasp time.

agamben / the church and the kingdom / 26

About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you

"Sojourning" translates the Greek word paroikousa . Paroikein means "to sojourn, to live as an alien," as opposed to katoikein, "to have a permanent residence, to live as a citizen with full rights." The true residence of the Christian is heaven; the time of his earthly life is only a preparation for his permanent residence with Christ. Similarly, the Church will obtain its permanent residence only when the heavenly Jerusalem of which the Apocalypse speaks has come to pass. The same idea is felicitously expressed in Preface 1 for a Mass of the Dead in the Toman Missal; dissoluta terrestris huius incolatus domo aeterna in caelis habitatio comparatur [literally: "when the house in which they sojourn on earth has been destroyed, an eternal dwelling place awaits them in heaven"]... The paroikousa formula also occurs in the address of the Martyrdom of Polycarp.

The meaning of "to live as an alien" lies behind the use of paroikia [Latin: paroecia], "parish", to designate a group of Christians in a city or territory, with a religious leader at their head and with a place in which to gather for the worship of God. But the term parochus which the Code of Canon Law uses for "parish priest" has a different origin: the parochus is a "provider" one whose function is to distribute [Greek: parechein] spiritual goods to his flock.

The Eucharist of the Early Christians / Johanny / 1992



Paul reminds the Thessalonians, "About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night. [1 Thess 5.1-2;262]. In this passage 'comes [erchetai]" is in the present tense, just as in the Gospels the messiah is called ho erchomenos, 'he who comes' - that is, he who never ceases to come. Having perfectly understood Paul's meaning, Walter Benjamin once wrote that 'every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters.

The Church & The Kingdom / Agamben

images found while teaching

Why is it that we all don't go around with guns, like Mexicans in a Peckinpah film? Imagine that. I just think we shoot each other differently now. With cameras, for example. A shift of attention is like throwing a bomb.

61

Beau Brummel designed himself as a "visual object" to assert the irreducible and inalienable intractability of selfhood.  The visual object called an abstract painting does the same on behalf of its maker's self, opening a blank space in the texture of institutionally recognized meaning.

73


hmmm

women / parrots // 1866

As you see, I am all in pieces!

You know what a Leyden jar is it's the classical apparatus for storing electricity...  There was once upon a time a celebrated physicist, a man of science, called Professor Tyndall. He was manipulating a large battery of Leyden jars, while lecturing. Through some carelessness in handling them he received a very severe electric shock. It was so severe it knocked him out. ...He recovered himself, so to speak, very nearly at once. ...He was able to address the audience and reassure it immediately. But while he was reassuring the audience, his body appeared to him to be cut up into fragments. For instance his arms were separated by his trunk and seemed suspended in the air.

 **********************

Technology as Efficacious Action on Objects . . . and Subjects
Jean-Pierre Warnier
Journal of Material Culture 2009 14: 459 DOI: 10.1177/1359183509345944
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/14/4/459

 

I have already suggested, a subject may be a subject-with-his-embodied- fountain-pen writing an article, or a subject-cum-Boeing 707 in the action of piloting.
This is where an ethnographic case may be usefully brought into the picture. In several recent publications (2006, 2007, 2009), I have tried to show that the people of Mankon (Cameroon) have a sophisticated bodily cum material culture focused on envelopes, openings, surfaces, contain- ers, the human skin, and on all the actions pertaining to the transit of substances through the apertures of the body and all kinds of vessels. People identify with containers and, since Mankon is a kingdom, the king identifies with a pot full of unifying ancestral life substances.
More precisely, for example, mothers give a daily massage to their newborn babies until they are able to walk. They work the skin of the infant with palm oil or industrial baby lotion, beginning with the shaved scalp and working all the way down to the toes, paying much attention to the folds of the skin around nose, mouth, ears, fingers, toes, genitals, buttocks, etc. They do not leave a single square millimetre of the skin untouched. Similarly, adults focus health practices on the skin. Rituals of marriage and succession are performed by anointing the skin with a mixture of palm oil and crimson camwood.
Such practices turn the bodily surface of the subject into a supple, shiny and healthy envelope. Although this is not explicitly verbalized in an emic way by the Mankon, I would gloss such practices by saying that young infants, adults, brides, grooms and successors are manufactured as leak-proof, sound vessels in order to retain healthy substances and all the principles of fertility and well-being within their skin-container. In other words, they are made to identify with material containers. No doubt, the facts that the human body itself is a container with a cutaneous envelope and openings, and that the self is built as an envelope by anaclisis on the lived experience of the skin envelope as indicated by Didier Anzieu (1985), play an important role in such an identification. This is underscored by the elaborate and extensive use of all kinds of material containers and substances embodied through sensori-motor conducts, and by the care that is paid to the openings and surfaces of people and containers alike in order to store given substantial contents and to make them circulate.