I think that Jean-Francois Lyotard, with his concept of the differend, identified the central problem bequeathed to us by the enslaved debtor’s (anti)imperial imaginary that emerged at the end of the Axial Age. The differend refers to a situation in which some form of violation creates a double bind by also making it impossible to litigate that violation; interestingly, Lyotard sees in the differend a feeling that cannot be articulated in language, and therefore as the source of new idioms. Lyotard uses examples like Holocaust denial and Aboriginal land disputes, but I think that the concept is at least as applicable to the found(ed) God of history. In the ancient empires it was unthinkable that the emperor himself could commit a crime, because who could adjudicate a claim against the emperor? But the Hebrew bible insisted that the emperors did commit crimes deserving of punishment and it seems to me that they were able to do so because a subsequent emperor remedied the harm (to an extent): I have in mind the crux of the composition of the bible, the period of the Babylonian exile and Persian sponsored return. I assume that very few peoples survived the kinds of catastrophes described in the bible, and the survival of the ancient Judeans had to appear as an act of divine grace—in that case, though, the destruction itself must have been divinely sanctioned, a judgment against the Jews, and the emperors carrying out the destruction, like those “redeeming” the exiles, must be mere instruments of God; a God, therefore, heading a court of appeal superior to that of any worldly emperor. “Monotheism,” then, was the invention of a new idiom in the space of a differend, and this idiom required the articulation of the privileged subject wronged by and defiant toward the emperor (placing the emperor in a double bind that God himself can be placed in) and the dispossessed masses who can see in that uncertain figure a new, redeeming, center. And “redemption” here must be taken with full reference to slavery, into which one could be thrown as a result of one’s debts, and from which one could be saved by repaying them. If it’s God who redeems you, though, you are now indebted to Him in a way far exceeding any worldly debt: human sacrifice, the only form of payment that could seem commensurate with the debt owed to the divine emperor, is cancelled by an even more incommensurate debt of ongoing devotion of your whole self. The idiom generated is one in which your entire linguistic order is transformed so as to detect and remedy anything less than complete devotion to God, and there is a great deal to detect and remedy since all of our desires threaten to derail that devotion.
Idiomatic Intelligence as Register
Idiomatic Intelligence as Register
Idiomatic Intelligence as Register
I think that Jean-Francois Lyotard, with his concept of the differend, identified the central problem bequeathed to us by the enslaved debtor’s (anti)imperial imaginary that emerged at the end of the Axial Age. The differend refers to a situation in which some form of violation creates a double bind by also making it impossible to litigate that violation; interestingly, Lyotard sees in the differend a feeling that cannot be articulated in language, and therefore as the source of new idioms. Lyotard uses examples like Holocaust denial and Aboriginal land disputes, but I think that the concept is at least as applicable to the found(ed) God of history. In the ancient empires it was unthinkable that the emperor himself could commit a crime, because who could adjudicate a claim against the emperor? But the Hebrew bible insisted that the emperors did commit crimes deserving of punishment and it seems to me that they were able to do so because a subsequent emperor remedied the harm (to an extent): I have in mind the crux of the composition of the bible, the period of the Babylonian exile and Persian sponsored return. I assume that very few peoples survived the kinds of catastrophes described in the bible, and the survival of the ancient Judeans had to appear as an act of divine grace—in that case, though, the destruction itself must have been divinely sanctioned, a judgment against the Jews, and the emperors carrying out the destruction, like those “redeeming” the exiles, must be mere instruments of God; a God, therefore, heading a court of appeal superior to that of any worldly emperor. “Monotheism,” then, was the invention of a new idiom in the space of a differend, and this idiom required the articulation of the privileged subject wronged by and defiant toward the emperor (placing the emperor in a double bind that God himself can be placed in) and the dispossessed masses who can see in that uncertain figure a new, redeeming, center. And “redemption” here must be taken with full reference to slavery, into which one could be thrown as a result of one’s debts, and from which one could be saved by repaying them. If it’s God who redeems you, though, you are now indebted to Him in a way far exceeding any worldly debt: human sacrifice, the only form of payment that could seem commensurate with the debt owed to the divine emperor, is cancelled by an even more incommensurate debt of ongoing devotion of your whole self. The idiom generated is one in which your entire linguistic order is transformed so as to detect and remedy anything less than complete devotion to God, and there is a great deal to detect and remedy since all of our desires threaten to derail that devotion.