Anı Ekin Özdemir

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Poem of the Day

by Anı Ekin Özdemir
26 blocks • 8 days ago

∆ Joseph Ceravolo (1934–1988), "I Like …

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Norman Pritchard, The Matrix, Poems, 19…

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Ian Hamilton Finlay, broken/ heartbroke…

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Stay warm

by Anı Ekin Özdemir
53 blocks • 11 days ago

Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without reward is valuable.

∆ Levinas, interviewed in 1986

Emmanuel Levinas, interviewed in 1986

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

#text

Okay. But the word embodiment feels a little problematic to me, because it suggests that the psyche is first of another dimension, and then it becomes “embodied.” It seems to me that this flesh is a psyche, that the body is already psyche. That, in some sense, matter is already spirit. The word matter, when we listen with our animal ears, sounds pretty much the same as mater (or mother) yes? It’s largely the same word. Both mater and matter are related to matrix, the ancient Greek word for womb. There is a sense in which matter is the womb of all things. The more conventional notion that matter is inert until it’s animated by spirit seems a fairly flawed notion (and a vaguely sexist one, akin to the idea that “mater,” or mothers generally, are inert or inanimate). Similarly with the body and the psyche. I’m unable to think of the body as an inert or empty vessel, nor of the psyche as some insubstantial fluff that at some moment decides to enter a body and become embodied. Isn’t psyche already bodily, doesn’t psyche have sensuous qualities from the get go?

Yet our language, today, doesn’t offer many clear ways to speak of these matters. What’s your sense of it?

∆ David Abram | “The Environmental Crisis and the Psyche: A Conversation with David Abram and Patricia Damery.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, vol. 7, no. 1, [Taylor & Francis, Ltd., C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco], 2013, pp. 104–19, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26596525.

David Abram

The possibility of the other person standing before you, face-to-face, represents a moment of terror, a moment of truth, and a possible transformation of the relationship (even its end). Levinas insists on the face-to-face because it presents the other as a reality 'effectuated in the non-postponable urgency with which he requires a response.' When the other appears through a distant communiqué, through an old physical letter, an email, or some technological mediation, the other waits for a response but lacks the presence to demand it. The body is in this way a force, sometimes a necessary one, and not a dispensable or superficial feature of human relations.

This is why we often need to go places, with and in our physical bodies, not only in friendship but also in politics and protest. The presence of the body — or bodies — demands a response. Governments and their militaries, for example, may learn through screens how much they are hated by their people, but they need not respond until bodies confront them face-to-face, in the square, in the streets, as obstructions to commerce and normal business. In this political example, if we were to conclude that the face to-face is an old-fashioned ultimate situation, we would imply that the power of our bodies is also old-fashioned.

But don't our bodies remain fundamental to our being-in-the-world? Why not meet the lover only through a screen? Why not attend every conference only at home by video calls? The answer is that we want to bring our bodies to places and people because bodies are part of the indispensable apparatus of human relationality, even today where connections are more disembodied and cellular than ever. Even if we do not need to be at the conference physically or to go to the family's house in a distant city because we can talk by video calls, we still want to go there because we recognize that as the ultimate situation. Similarly, in politics, if we really want to stop them, we will eventually need to place our bodies on the line. Speaking of a strike is not the same thing as materializing one in picket lines.

∆ Richard Gilman-Opalsky, from The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, 2020.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, from The Commun…