PARA/ INQUIRY Postmodern Religion and Culture Victor E ... - IMIC

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The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity andfamiliarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.) The realfoundations of his inquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him –And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful.(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations)A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer [Un texte n’est un texte que s’il cache au premierregard], from the first glance, the laws of its composition and the rules of its game [la règle de sonjeu]. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harboredin the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, intoanything that could rigorously be called a perception.And hence, perceptually and essentially, they run the risk of being definitively lost. Who will everknow of such disappearances? [Qui saura jamais telle disparition?](Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination)LISTENING FOR THE ORIGINThe silence of the Sphinx conjures up romantic expectations of receiving an answer to theageless question: “Why do you live?” Mark Tansey’s depiction of the eternal human quest forauthenticity presents this secret of the ages within a postmodern context that does much31Figure 3.1 Elihu Vedder’s Questioner of the Sphinx, 1863 (Oil on canvas, 36 x 41¾ inches.Bequest of Mrs Martin Brimmer. Reproduced with the permission of theMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA)
Figure 3.2 Mark Tansey’s Secret of the Sphinx (Homage to Elihu Vedder), 1984 (Oil oncanvas, 60 x 65 inches. Reproduced with the permission of the Curt MarcusGallery, New York. © Mark Tansey 1985)32more than simply lament the absence of the sacred or scorn the lack of authenticity inpostmodern life. Mark Tansey, for whom the lack of authenticity in the postmodern age is asignificant theme, conveys this sense of urgency surrounding individual and collectiveauthenticity in a number of his works dealing with the epistemological abyss that existsbetween the real and the represented. 1 Tansey’s Secret of the Sphinx (Homage to Elihu Vedder)(1984), for instance, points to Vedder’s The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863) in both style andsubject. Vedder’s oil on canvas depicts a man with his ear firmly pressed up against the lips ofthe Sphinx, yearning to hear the sacred secret. Tansey’s 1984 revisiting of the issue placestechnology (a recording device and accessories) between the questioner’s ear and theSphinx’s lips. Tansey’s audio-relay interrupts Vedder’s implied immediacy and expresses thepostmodern notion that the secret, if there is a secret to be heard at all, is mediated by someextra-human apparatus. There is not, as Tansey makes clear, an instance of pure transmissionfrom ancient past to the here and now. In a Derridean sense, one could say of the Sphinx that“its law and rules are not harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret” (Dissemination, 63); or, ina Lyotardian sense, that the secret of the Sphinx does not come in the form of a grandnarrative. As a result, our postmodern sensibilities must contend with the lasting illusion ofpurity contained within the Sphinx. Unlike Vedder’s original, Tansey’s recasting of theexistential crisis as an epistemological crisis calls into question the possibility of achievingan authentic existence through a supposedly unmediated transmission of the sacred from theancient past to present humanity.
Page 2: PARA/INQUIRY“For those of us who
Page 5 and 6: First published 2000by Routledge11
Page 8 and 9: CONTENTSList of figures ixAcknowled
Page 10: FIGURES3.1 Questioner of the Sphinx
Page 14: Posting
Page 17 and 18: meaning that founds philosophical i
Page 20: CHAPTER 1Paralogies
Page 23 and 24: Lyotard’s enjeu, Deleuze and Guat
Page 25 and 26: In his book Pararealities: The Natu
Page 27 and 28: acquittal. The horror of the text i
Page 29 and 30: writer therefore work without rules
Page 32: CHAPTER 2Parastructures of the sacr
Page 35 and 36: In this critical space opened by Ni
Page 37 and 38: Joyce’s Finnegans Wake the exempl
Page 39 and 40: Deservedly confin’d into this roc
Page 41 and 42: story of the sacred? Is there but o
Page 46 and 47: AUTHENTICITYThe Sphinx has symboliz
Page 48 and 49: The fact that I exist and have an i
Page 50 and 51: connection with the Columbian Expos
Page 52 and 53: through the sacred, so does the com
Page 54 and 55: appropriation of his thought and of
Page 56 and 57: use or civil meaning of the word (t
Page 58 and 59: does not mean that one is sidestepp
Page 60: of the twentieth century. As Lyotar
Page 64 and 65: The sacred of the archaic world was
Page 66 and 67: possibility for an expression of ex
Page 68 and 69: the actual frame of the panels, the
Page 70 and 71: space of the painting, and, second,
Page 72 and 73: much a part of scholarship today. A
Page 74 and 75: not merely interesting footnotes to
Page 76 and 77: many to see Eliade as a mystic who
Page 78 and 79: phenomenology. Eliade’s arrival i
Page 80 and 81: of the sacred as a child in Romania
Page 82 and 83: discursive structure to relinquish
Page 84 and 85: autonomy of the work of art. But ha
Page 86: CHAPTER 5Para Shoah
Page 89 and 90: Faurisson reveals that the Shoah is
Page 91 and 92: MEMORIES OF FORGETTINGCertainty is
Page 93 and 94:
political. Each of these ground(ing
Page 95 and 96:
totalizing discourses or a determin
Page 97 and 98:
Kantian wound often move toward a q
Page 99 and 100:
Secret fauna and flora which the re
Page 102:
CHAPTER 6Parasacred ground(ing)s
Page 105 and 106:
often exist outside (the pagus) the
Page 107 and 108:
graveyard. The sacred disfigures,be
Page 109 and 110:
death, which is another repetition
Page 111 and 112:
able to choose from a range of poss
Page 113 and 114:
eligious. Mary’s presence as a mi
Page 115 and 116:
As one walks through a cemetery, ti
Page 117 and 118:
104Figure 6.15b Clinging to the Cro
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To think not is to linger with a ne
Page 122 and 123:
PARASACRED IMAGESNor does one need
Page 124 and 125:
irreverent piety in so far as eachr
Page 126:
CHAPTER 8EpilogueParaultimacy
Page 129 and 130:
The steps, the corridor, to the plo
Page 131 and 132:
GLOSSARYI should say that in so far
Page 133 and 134:
The early writings of the French ph
Page 135 and 136:
NOTESPOSTING1 Michel Montaigne, Apo
Page 137 and 138:
metaphysical notion of effectivespa
Page 139 and 140:
and probably goes back to helios.Ea
Page 141 and 142:
“compensate” the rigidity of th
Page 143 and 144:
GLOSSARY1 Peter A. Angeles writes(H
Page 145 and 146:
Stanford: Stanford University Press
Page 147 and 148:
Riverside Shakespeare edn, Boston:H
Page 149 and 150:
Carroll, Lewis 23cemeteries 93, 101
Page 151 and 152:
painting 58; laughter as epiphany 5
Page 153 and 154:
“paraexperience” 83, 86; the po
Page 155 and 156:
postmodernism: authenticity 33;ceme
Page 157 and 158:
Thousand Plateaus, A (Gilles Deleuz
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