Dr. Freeman

G’day each and all,

A big hello from Kao San road (Bangkok)…. and a brief update on my
Euro-Asian travel adventures, where the goal of the journey is always
and already accomplished, and so never really attained… Some
memorable fragments in chronological order:

Thailand - I suppose Cold Chisel put it best in the Aussie rock
classic Kao San, “I’ve been to South East Asia, and the Answer sure
ain’t there…” Sagely advice, for IMHO we would do well to give up on
the popular Western idea that the ultimate pillar of Wisdom, the
secret spiritual treasure can be recaptured out here in the East, in
this forbidden exotic place… The ugly truth is that Thailand is
really just an Asian version of the capitalist Wild West - karaoke
bars intermingled with Buddhist theme parks and massage parlors for
Western tourists… Ko Phi Phi Island is great case in point – sublime
and majestic when first seen from afar, a kind of heaven on earth…
but up close it is a paradise of filth, a gigantic pile of shit… Go
there and see for yourself… And Patong – where civilized Westerners
come by the thousands to do the Western men do - penetrate the exotic
Other - is both fascinating and terrifying… A little friendly
advice, the best looking girls are really boys and don’t ring the bell
at the bar – or you’ll be shouting the entire bar a drink…

So to escape the debauchery of Phuket in the south I went directly to
Chang Mai in the north where I met a girl named Fhar, we drank
together most evenings while I tried to convert her to Christianity
arguing that Buddhism seeks a fictitious peace beyond the pull of
competing forces… and that in SE Asia this once noble religion has
become a blank screen for the projection of Western ideological
fantasies… this last shelter of ancient Wisdom is really just a
primitive superstition propped up by cheap tricks and magic rituals…
She is still a Buddhist - and I don’t know who I am, but we had a
memorable time together…

Europe…

I agree with Ken Wilber here: I love the southern European climate
(France, Italy, Croatia) but prefer the northern European people
(Germans, Dutch, some of the English). Unfortunately in Europe you
can’t have it all - it’s either one or the other… Nature or
Culture… I think this is what Slovenian philosopher Zizek means by
the irreducible “gap” in the heart of the Real…

Germany/Mainz – I was here for a Christian meditation conference,
which reminded me of precisely how deluded and ignorant I really am –
and that joining a monastic community would only reinforce this
illusion…

But one of the most memorable experiences was sitting at the local bar
in Mainz pretending to read the drinks menu in German, only to lookup
up and see a long pair of German legs attached to a g-string and a
topless red hot body standing above me on the bar – I open my mouth in
astonishment and this very cheeky woman begins to pour a bottle of
vodka down my throat… after which I could speak fluid German…
later that night I met and flirted with the two blonde-bombshells from
the band “Funk Factory”, who were actually on TV the following day,
apparently their really big in Hamburg…

France/Taize – a very unique place for thousands of young Christians
to come to live and worship in a contemporary style of contemplative
prayer, with some very wise and compassionate brothers running the
show… One time, we studied the Book of Job at one of the gatherings
and I learnt a lot about “letting go” of the need to make meaning out
of ones life… The shocking truth of the Book of Job (one of the
central texts Western civilization) is that God does NOT guarantee for
us in an orderly universe or a purposeful existence - Rather, God
tells Job that the whole of creation is a radical accident… and
since there is no Big Story that makes things make sense, we are
better off just accepting that we live in a world of meaningless
suffering…

So the key to deep and abiding peace is to give up the need to find an
explanation for our suffering or a “reason why” to explain what
happens to us - The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are just
a heroic fiction - nothing more - things DO NOT happen for a reason…
The secret is that there is no Secret that makes things make sense –
Yeah, the Bible rocks!

Next installment coming soon…

Cameron Freeman

In The New Wounded (Les nouveaux blessés), Catherine Malabou proposes a radical reformulation of Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis. In essence, she argues that classical psychoanalysis can no longer think Trauma as such – where trauma (the central topic of psychoanalysis) is what Lacan called the impossible/Real – an unexpected /violent intrusion or shattering experience around which our language circulates but can never directly confront…. In presenting her thesis about what she calls the “post-traumatic subject” (the prevailing form of person-hood in the 21^st century), Malabou begins with the critical distinction between the Internal and External trauma.

For Freud and Lacan unexpected shocks and violent/shattering encounters from the External world draw their traumatic impact from the way they touch a persons pre-existing Internal psychic reality… When one undergoes a shattering experience the truly traumatic core of this shock is due to the way it arouses or disturbs some already preexisting internal wound…. In other words, all external intrusions owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in “internal” psychic life: sexuality, the death drive, unconscious guilt feeling, etc … Basically, then, for Freud and Lacan, the external event itself doesn’t really count… it must first find an echo in yr psychic reality – the Real of ones pre-existing inner trauma…

Now for Malabou this no longer holds today for we live in a socio-political life world that imposes multiple versions of external intrusions/traumas – meaningless brutal disruptions that destroy the symbolic texture of subject’s identity directly – i.e. in a way that leaves no therapeutic recourse to Freudian psychoanalytical regression. First, there are the multifarious forms of physical violence: terror attacks like 9/11, the US “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq, street violence, rapes, bashings, murders, etc. There are also natural catastrophes, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. Then, there is the “irrational” (meaningless) destruction of the material base of our inner reality (brain-tumors, Alzheimer’s disease, organic cerebral lesions, breast cancer, etc), which can utterly change, destroy even, the victim’s personality. And finally, there are the destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence (social exclusion, the invisible violence of power exercised systemically the established order, etc)

Malabou’s point is that independently of the cause of trauma (social, natural, biological, symbolic) in the face of such widespread socio-political interruptions the same form of person-hood or subjectivity is produced – the post-traumatic subject, a disengaged and neutral subject devoid of emotions and lacking any kind of engagement with other people in the world…

So from this perspective, Freud’s problem is that he succumbs to the interpretation of meaning – he is not ready to accept the direct destructive efficiency of external shocks that destroy the psyche of the victim without resonating in any pre-existing inner traumatic truth. Freud always looks for the “internal” childhood trauma – but it is obviously obscene to link traumatic encounters like the psychic devastation of the Muslim terrorist in Guantanimo Bay (for instance) to masochism, death drive, Oedipal dramas and guilt feelings – No, the terrorized Muslim is not devastated by his unconscious anxieties – he is brutalized by a meaningless external shock that can in no way be hermeneutically appropriated…. it is in no way related to a pre-existing internal trauma…

The problem for the post-traumatic subject is that the story that one tells oneself about ourself is erased in the face of these direct external interruptions and so there is no possibility of a regression to a pre-existing trauma… All that is left are subjects deprived of their symbolic substance… the shock is too strong, the destruction is direct… and so what we have are the living dead, totally devastated but still aware of the void that is now ones life…

As a brief aside there is a central paradox here: the post-traumatic subject is not shut up in their private ‘inner’ worlds while the rest of us are directly engaged with reality, rather they are directly exposed to the shattering experience of the traumatic/Real without any protective screen, while the rest of us (barely) function on a day to day level by investing in a series of social codes that provide a protective screen against the irruption of the traumatic/Real…

But back to the main theme: the problem with Freud is that he cannot see that the post-traumatic victim “survives its own death”, i.e. the trauma destroys your conventional personality but you still survive… However Malabou believes that in these troubled times a new subject is emerging that is characterized by lack of emotional engagement, indifference and detachment, a living death, a life deprived of erotic enjoyment (sexual, artistic, religious or sensual)….

So if the 20th century was the Freudian century, the century of libido, so that even the worst nightmares were read as (sado-masochist) vicissitudes of the libido (sex drive), for Malabou the 21^st century is to be the century of the post-traumatic / disengaged subject – the first emblematic figure being the Muslims in US concentration camps… a radically new subject whose entire past is erased… an emotionally blank existence that is the death drive embodied…. a subject that is now multiplying in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural catastrophes, as well as masses of living dead on public transport and staring at computers in office buildings, the endless streams of mall zombies, the countless victims of family violence, and so on… The feature that runs through all these figures is that the cause of the trauma remains utterly meaningless and resists any interpretation…. for the subject has no substantive identity – no story to tell itself about itself – no inner psychic life to work with - and it is just this that psychoanalysis is unable to think…

But I tend to disagree with Malabou. As far as I can see, the experience of being deprived of ones identity – where all ones psychic substance is erased and rendered meaningless – this process is actually constitutive (definitive) of the subject itself - and the very goal of psychoanalysis… In this sense, the real lesson of psychoanalysis is that the conventional story we tell ourselves about ourselves is a survival-lie, a cheap bluff designed to radically reject any feelings of helplessness, weakness and vulnerability… and so we simply must be de-centered, disillusioned, unmasked, and left with nothing left to hold on to in order to realize our true condition… That is, we must come to accept the reality of loss, defeat and meaningless suffering to become an authentic and free-functioning person - and this is the goal of any successful psychotherapeutic practice…. So where the destructive efficiency of the many and varied external shocks/traumas in the 21st century do indeed destroy the psychic stability of the victims identity - even to the point where such intrusions they do not trigger any inner traumatic kernel of truth, when the vital-lie of one’s character (i.e. the story we tell ourselves about ourselves) is undone… instead of becoming one of the living dead we can instead: a) let go of the self-contraction, b) rest in the empty ground of awareness (Consciousness without an object)… c) rejoice in the contingency and ambiguity of those events that reside at the limits of human experience… d) refuse attachment to any single perspective… and e) playfully enact a world without the need for a “self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of Meaning” (Zizek)…

In other words, the external trauma is not so much the death of the subject but the “condition of possibility” for the constitution of an authentic and integrated subject… where the authentic subject is one that no longer needs to find a “deeper meaning” for their suffering… but can say Yes to life in a joyful embrace of paradox, which is - of course - not so much a question to be answered but an enigma to live with…

Brilliant poet W.H. Auden, on his conviction that Jesus is Lord: ‘I believe because He fulfills none of my dreams, because He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.’ But why not one of the other great teachers, like Buddha or Mohammed? Because, Auden wrote, chillingly, ‘none of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry “Crucify Him”.’”

Two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theatre, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One feels a pressing need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet. “I think I saw one down the corridor outside,” says his friend. The man wanders down the corridor, but finds no WC. Wandering further, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it, he returns to his seat. His friend says, “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just came on the stage and pissed in that plant pot.”

Click here for For Part 1

“The excitement of transcendental experience is found only at the edge of language… and the only way to find that excitement is to test those edges and those limits.” John Dominic Crossan The Dark Interval (1980)

My own approach to post-metaphysics (see the Source Code blog on this site) calls us to live with paradox - the creative tension between opposing perspectives. And since paradoxes are un-objectifiable (i.e. structurally open to Not-Knowing) and since they have no “fixed center of meaning” they refuse to be pinned down by the rational accounting of metaphysics (including an Integral Post-Metaphysics) which is still deeply conditioned by the traditional assumptions that underpin the rational-scientific demand for evidence and the quest for cognitive certainty. In other words, the paradoxical nature of reality frustrates our desire to possess or “get a handle” on the Mystery, for truth be told the mystery of God simply does not depend on what we think about it…

Historically, the foremost example of paradox being utilized as a skillful means for facilitating God-realization is found in the parabolic discourse of Jesus of Nazareth who consistently disrupted conventional wisdom (the myth of the given) by celebrating the ambiguity of those truth-events that show up at the very limits of human experience…

To draw out the key difference between Ken Wilber’s IPM and Jesus’ paradoxes we can briefly refer to the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss who famously argued that “in every system of myth we will find a persistent sequence of binary discriminations as inside/outside, up/down, one/many, followed by a ‘mediation’ of the paired categories thus distinguished.”

This description of myth is a perfect description of what Integral theory claims to do. That is, the basic contours of Integral theory perform the same specific task of reconciling or mediating opposites. The conviction that ultimate reconciliation is possible is the heart of all mythic religion, so much so that more important than the proposed solution itself (religious or philosophical) is the belief in the possibility of a solution…

Now, the opposite of myth (i.e. a story that reconciles opposites) is paradox which creates contradiction and dissonance where previously there was seamless certainty, bringing not peace but a sword. Jesus’ paradoxes are hidden in stories like the Prodigal Son and the Friend at Midnight, stories that shatter the deep structure of the commonly accepted world (which can only paste over the cracks through which the Kingdom irrupts) and thereby render clear and evident to us the relativity and historical contingency of the conventional world…

Jesus’ paradoxes they do not furnish us with easy assurance of myth but challenge us with an explosive reversal of meaning that they removes our defences and makes us vulnerable to God… In this manner Jesus’ parables show us the seams and edges of “the Myth of the Given” (traditional metaphysics) by shattering expectations and creating contradiction within a situation of complacent security…

So rather than providing a pre-packaged program of rules and procedures for admission into the Kingdom of God, the paradoxical strategy of Jesus disrupts the quest for cognitive certainty and thereby sets up the necessary conditions for the decision of faith with an ‘aporetic anxiety’ that invites and challenges one to follow to this singular teacher’s own realization of the Kingdom of God. By interrupting commonplace metaphysical assumptions with an outrageous abrogation of our fundamental laws of logic, the post-metaphysical heart of Jesus’ teachings consistently refuse to give us straightforward answers in response to our quest for what is Real, as his paradoxes call for a free movements of faith that is made in the face of an impossible situation, involving risk, uncertainty and an openness to the unexpected that is grounded in a confession of ultimate not-knowing (which is itself the very occasion of Satori or Enlightenment!)…

In contrast to the logical calculus and pin point clarity of an IPM, in view of the post-metaphysical paradoxes of Jesus an authentic faith commitment is structurally blind and takes root only when the road seems obscure and when the storm clouds of life buffet us, when we are overwhelmed, when we stumble, and fall, and yet still move forward in spite of all evidence to the contrary… For just as Kierkegaard wrote, the “infinite passion of inwardness” (i.e. Christian faith) that has nothing to do with objective explanation at all, and as such the real journey only begins when forgo all metaphysical anchors and confess that we don’t see directly where we are going…

So in my view, Christian paradox is Integral grown self-aware and self-critical… Paradox (e.g. security comes from accepting insecurity as our mortal lot) enhances our knowledge of ignorance, which is the beginning of philosophy and the heart of mystical experience… So where Mythic consolations (e.g. the AQAL co-ordinates of an Integral Post-Metaphysics) establish a world, Paradox subverts this world with a story deliberately calculated to show the limitations of myth, and shatters its presupposed categories so that its relativity becomes apparent…

And by keeping us humble through the dark night of truth, where the idolatry of metaphysics in its demand for cognitive certainty is exposed for the vital-lie that it is, we are precisely therein and thereby broken open to an encounter with transcendence…

In all in Jesus’ teachings, the Kingdom eventuates when ones world is overturned and challenged in its depths… The powerful distinction in Integral theory between exoteric (bad) and esoteric (good) religion can therefore be defined thus: exoteric religion gives one the final word about “reality” and thereby excludes the authentic experience of Mystery, and esoteric religion (paradoxical) continually and deliberately subverts final words about “reality” and thereby introduces the possibility of transcendence.

So Jesus’ paradoxes ask us why things might not be just as well some other way rather than the way we expected and presumed – they tell us that the reverse side also has a reverse side… and remind us that God, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, does not play the game by our rules…

We can conclude this key distinction between the logical clarity IPM and the enigmatic vision and challenge of Jesus with Heidegger who wrote that “in the openness of authentic disclosure (the meaning of Being) we admit the possibility of something unknown, even contradictory, to our world; for we put into question our own faculties rather than blindly measuring and evaluating what is real on the basis of these.”

And as Kierkegaard reminds us, “Everyone shall be remembered, but each became great in proportion to his expectation. One became great by expecting the possible; another by expecting the eternal, but he who expected the impossible became greater than all…”

I’ve just finished reading “The Future of Human Nature” by Jurgen Habermas, the world renown German philosopher and one of the last true believers in the ideals of the Western Enlightenment. He has a really interesting argument against stem cell research and genetic engineering that is based on a completely rational-secular point of view.

Habermas puts the question like this: Is it morally acceptable for free and rational agents such as “bio-tech” scientists to alter the genetic code of future generations? And this is the gist of his argument:

Moral agents (e.g. bio-scientists) are members of a moral community who owe duties to each other of reciprocity, mutuality and equality. But: the alteration of the genetic identity of another requires a diminution in this presupposition of equality, and cannot be reciprocal or mutual. So such an act is not a moral act, of the sort we would want done to us without our explicit informed consent. We would consider it inappropriate if we did it to adults. It is not an interpersonal act of mutual respect. So it is not a moral act.

Habermas is basically saying that there is a reduced moral responsibility for a person whose genetic code is tinkered with tailored toward someone else’s (e.g. parental, social, bio-scientists) dreams and expectations… In other words, a person who becomes aware of his programmed genetic nature will feel less free and less responsible, because the boundary between what a person is given (biologically) and what we make of ourselves (culturally) has been irreversibly interfered with…

So why be moral in the first place? Habermas argues that our current understanding of what it is to be moral presupposes a self image of ourselves as free, autonomous, self-legislating beings, and as such requires us to treat other moral agents in a way that attributes the same self-understanding to them.

This means that genetic intervention in future generations to select desirable dispositions entails prejudgment of specific life projects, which threatens the self-image of a potential moral equal, and requires us to act toward a potential equal in a way that is incompatible with the action of a moral agent. Therefore, what is at stake in bio-ethical debates is the ethical self-understanding of the species: whether or not we can continue to see ourselves as beings committed to moral judgment and action.

The bottom line: we must acknowledge the dignity of a potential human life, the embryo; and not use it as a means to any other end than its own best interests and future autonomy. That means, no experimentation on embryos, not even for the sake of advancement of genetic sciences for the improvement of present patients or future generations.

But what if we can reasonably suppose that the embryo’ best-interests are being served? Surely genetic enhancements can be motivated by genuinely good intentions, one’s that the pre-personal embryo would agree with? Can bio-ethicists anticipate consent?

I’ve posted below a clip of Nicole Kidman in The Invasion where she mentions my favorite philosopher Ken Wilber and discusses integral theory in general… Click here

³⁰In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³²So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

³⁶“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

³⁷The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Arguably the most well-known of all of Jesus’ parables, the Good Samaritan is a classic instance of the paradoxical teaching strategy employed by Jesus, as well as a foremost instance of how a moralistic misinterpretation of the early evangelists obscured what his parables are really about. For nearly two millennium the Good Samaritan has been taken by Christians as an example story illustrating what it means to be a good neighbor. We can witness this allegorical veil in its first evangelical interpreter - Luke, who takes it as an example of good behavior with a moralizing admonition appended at the conclusion: “Go and do likewise”.

However contemporary parable scholarship has concluded that in its original setting this narrative was not a pleasant tale about the friendly neighbor who does the right thing by helping a man down on his luck, but rather it is a deeply world-shattering narrative in which Jesus explodes the underlying assumptions of his 1^st century Jewish audience in regards to just who is a ‘neighbor’ and who is a ‘stranger’ when it comes to the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God.

In summary, a Jewish man having been beaten and left in a ditch to die, is rescued by a traveling Samaritan after two Temple authorities – a priest and a Levite - “pass by on the other side of the road” to deliberately avoid an encounter the half-dead man.

Now what has been overlooked in the historical development of Christianity is the fact that in Jesus’ day the Samaritans were the mortal enemies of the Jewish people and looked down upon as a symbol of moral corruption ever since they split off from the rest of the nation during the reign of King David. So where the Samaritans were a despicable race of half-breeds, the Jewish priests and Levites were considered to be the moral and religious authorities and were thus given a high social ranking within the same cultural landscape. In the context of this parable, then, Samaritan and Judean stand in considerable tension with each other, one a hated enemy of the beaten man and on the other God’s specially chosen instruments of salvation. However in the shocking reversal at the heart of this most memorable narrative, the very structure that defines the world-space of Jesus’ audience is radically inverted as a hated enemy becomes the beaten Jews greatest benefactor while his greatest benefactors (the moral and religious authorities) are exposed as social and religious outcasts.

In asking the provocative question of ‘who is the real neighbor’ the whole thrust of the story confronts its hearers with an impossible decision, one in which their world is turned upside down and radically put into question: goodness and Samaritan coincide, while badness and Jew also go together. As Dominic Crossan puts it - if Jesus’ only intention was simply to take a shot against the Temple authorities “it would have been far better to have made the wounded man a Samaritan and the helper a Jewish traveler from outside of the priestly circles.”

However, when goodness (Jew) and badness (Samaritan) undergo a bi-polar reversal the very meaning of one’s world is shaken in its foundations, and we are faced with a radical paradox that profoundly undermines everyday expectations and opens ones awareness to an altogether new apprehension of reality. For the person struggling to come to terms with the creative tension of Good/Samaritan and Bad/Jew is simultaneously experiencing in and through the language of Jesus the arrival of the Kingdom, where this embrace of apparent contradictories in the deep structure of the parable bursts open familiar ways of seeing the world with new insight and illumination and leaves us “standing firmly on utter uncertainty.”

This basic thrust of this memorable parable of Jesus is pitted against the world as it is - the commonplace myths that are taken for granted in the so-called ‘real world’. For where Jesus’ first century Jewish audience would have expected an Israelite layperson to come to the rescue - one of their own and hence an acceptable hero figure, to their horror a hated Samaritan arrives on the scene! And even as the Greek translation for “came upon him” implies that this unforeseen stranger intends is to finish off the helpless Jew once and for all, against all expectations to the contrary the Samaritan has compassion for the wounded man, his heart is wrenched open, he is “struck in his soul by a lightening flash of mercy” and goes on to exceed all normal requirement in his endeavor to restore his mortal enemy back to health.

With the unexpected arrival of the Samaritan, everything is thrown off-center as Jesus directly and repeatedly challenges the dominant religious and political structure with an “imaginative shock that can overturn worlds,” where esteemed neighbors become hard hearted strangers and a worthless stranger becomes a revered neighbor. We can see here, then, an initial demonstration of Jesus’ paradoxical reversals in the universally recognized story of the Good Samaritan: the one deemed to be a despicable social and religious outcast (Samaritan) is foremost in doing the will of God, just as those who are deemed to be foremost in doing the will of God (Temple authorities) are despicable social and religious outcasts. Or in other words, the Jewish religious leaders who initially seem to be the agents of holiness and divine favor are really objects of scorn and religious derision; while the Samaritan who at first appears to be an object of scorn and religious derision is really the agent of compassion and grace, and a foremost example of neighborly love.

In a similar vein, another key message of the Good Samaritan is that in the Kingdom help is perpetually a surprise. For after the initial shock of hearing about a fellow Jew being robbed on the road to Jericho and left to die in a ditch in a ditch, Jesus’ audience is then told that the secret of this man’s healing is in receiving help from the place he least expects - his social enemy, and that healing and grace comes only when we are powerless to refuse it. The Kingdom of God may therefore be most active in what is most unacceptable to us, and most present to us when we are forced to acknowledge the goodness of those we detest or distrust, and perhaps even to accept compassionate service from them, as Funk writes:

“God’s domain is open to outcasts, to the undeserving, to those who do not merit inclusion. In other words, all who are truly victims, truly disinherited, have no reason and are unable to resist mercy when it is offered. The despised half-breed becomes the instrument of compassion and grace – Judeans would have chocked on that irony.”

So, in reiterating the paradoxical shock of Jesus’ time honored narrative, just as a respectable Jew on his way to Jericho becomes an untouchable victim cast aside the road, what initially shows up as an untouchable victimized outcast (Samaritan) is really the respected agent of healing and a fore-runner in the ways of the Kingdom.

Therefore, by disclosing the underlying structure of Jesus’ all too familiar story of the Good Samaritan, we can now see this parable as if for the first time, as a wisdom teaching that presents an explosive paradox to Jesus’ audience in a double-edged reversal of their commonplace expectations. For whereas the forces of good (Priest, Levite) do evil; and the forces of evil (Samaritan) do good, our preconceived assumptions and unquestioned values are torn asunder and we are invited to participate in a profound shift in consciousness, an unexpected reversal where that which appears at first to be unmitigated horror is really a wonderful disguise in which the inscrutable mystery of God enters our lives in the fullest possible manner.

As such, this well known parable of Jesus is not an example story or an allegory, as has been thought throughout the development of much of the Christian tradition. For where the loaded terms of the parable (Jew/Samaritan) have lost their original strong values, the paradoxical tensions of the story have been lost. So much so that for most Christians it has become little more than a story of the friendly neighbor and we seldom realize that as it was first uttered it was more like a ‘square circle’. So the widely held literal reading that interprets this (and other) parable(s) of Jesus as only a form of moral instruction or examples of ‘right action’ (i.e. help a man in need) derives not from the Founder of Christianity – Jesus of Nazareth, but only from what was Founded - the Church. Such moral or allegorical readings thereby diminish the original intent of Jesus’ radical paradoxes, which were originally invoked to directly attack conventional structures of meaning in a “damning indictment of social, racial and religious superiority.” And by overturning our man-made religious boundaries and prepackaged value-hierarchies, there is no way of deciding who is an insider and who is an outsider in the Kingdom revealed by Jesus, which is likely to come to us like a thief in the night, and often from the place that we least expect…

Thomas Keating “The Kingdom of God is Like”

Crossan 1973, p.64

Crossan 1973, p.65-6

Giles Gunn cited in Crossan 1973, p.53-4

Crossan 1973, p.55

Scott 2001, p.60

Scott 2001, p.61

Benedict XVI 2007, p.197

Tannehill in Perrin 1974, p.180

Funk 1996, p.180

Thoman Keating, “The Kingdom of God is Like…”, K, Ch. 1

Funk 1996, p.177

FTK, Ch. 1

Crossan quoted in Perrin 1976, p.257

Crossan 1973, p.57, 65

In one of his earliest writings “Madness and Civilization” Foucault gave a fascinating portrait of Madness – what he also called Un-Reason. By the 19^th century Foucault observed that madness had been labeled a “mental illness” and therefore made an object for the science of psychology, which derided the mad and the non-rational under a hypocritical veil of morality and foreclosed on the original “experience of Un-Reason” through the confinement of the mad.

Now, beneath the modern psychology and psychiatry where madness is viewed as either a brain dysfunction or a moral failing lies its more essential truth. For Foucault, modern psychology cannot master the hidden truth of madness, for the voice of madness was closed off in the very constitution of modern psychology as a science. So for Foucault what we call mental illness (depression, bi-polar, schizophrenia) today is “alienated madness” – where the mad are made alien by our objectifying and dehumanizing sciences.

The brilliance of Foucault is that he wants to bring us face to face with madness in its original and un-alienated form, a form that is recognized in the modern world only in “lightening flashes” with names like Friedrich Nietzsche - as a kind of tragic split and radical freedom…

Foucault wants to let the truth of madness speak its own voice. In other words, rather than diagnosing and treating and the mentally ill with what amounts to little more than powerful anesthetics, Foucault wants to linger with madness for a while, to hear what it has to say…

So what do the mad know? Well, quite frankly It’s the sort of truth that would kill you… or drive you mad. The mad have been released from ordinary constraints and experienced a terrible truth…. They are extreme points of sensitivity to the human condition… And they are not Other than Us. The mad speak a truth for which we have neither the nerve nor the ear – they disturb us with the truth of who we are.

For Foucault, the mad offer a forceful testimony to the breakdown of Reason, Knowledge, Truth – they speak from a depth of experience in which both the reassuring structures of ordinary life and the reassuring comforts of scientific, philosophical or religious truth have collapsed. They experience the radical groundlessness of the world, the contingency of all its constructions, and they speak from a kind of irrepressible terror… and call to us from the abyss by which we are all inhabited. We are put into question by the mad, for they have set foot where the sane fear to tread…

In his typical transgressive style Foucault turns the tables and show how the world-view of science and reason is put into question by the mad, and specifically the madman as artist – the one who reveals the difficult truth of the human condition – we are inwardly divided, inhabited by an abyss, that we have to live within the tension between knowing and not-knowing, belief and skepticism, truth and the night of truth, the light of reason and the midnight hour when reason allows itself to be invaded by unreason…

Here Foucault rejects the idea of Truth with a capital T. The truth is that there is no truth, and we are better off making the humble confession that we don’t know who we are – our inner most truth is always already disturbed by untruth… and neither religion nor philosophy nor the human sciences can tell us who we are or what to do…

In the face of this radical not-knowing, for Foucault the most meaningful task is to refuse who we are, struggle against those who think they can positively identify who we are, liberate ourselves from the kind of individuality that the state and the social structure produces and open up new modes of self-invention… And in this sense, for Foucault freedom is fundamentally the capacity for being otherwise, a continual twisting loose from our the ways we have previously been constituted, a capacity for novelty and innovation refuses to be reduced to a fixed stereotype…

Madness is a disturbance and the disturbing thing about the mad is that they are attuned to some deep seated dissonance from which the rest of us seek to be protected… The mad disturb us because they are exposed to something the rest of us prefer to ignore… and so we are beset by an apprehensive-ness that our sane, healed, whole lives mask a deeper rupture… The Mad are a mirror of ourselves. They tell us who we are.

The whole problem of the mad person is that he/she cannot repress and deny the trauma of existence like ordinary people… And so when madness takes the form of schizophrenia it is only because the mad reflect the contradiction of a world in which humans can no longer recognize themselves… because the social world is itself marked by struggle, hostility, and foreignness…

And let’s not forget that the mad suffer from their attunement – from what they feel/experience/undergo. Their ruptured lives are the site of a wound. They live with terror, they wrestle with demons, they need healing… They lay claim to us, we who are whole, to help. We who are perhaps not so much whole and sane as just a little better skilled at repressing our madness… And so when we are called upon by the mad, we need not approach them as an object of information, but a subject in communication, and one to whom we turn with something to learn from.

The mad do not ask for scientific analysis by us but friendship, support, companionship… The healing gesture is not to explain away the abyss but simply to stand with the mad and affirm that they are not alone… that our common madness is a matter of degree, that we all inhabit the same night of truth…

And because of their terrible initiation into the “night of truth” the mad have a special kind of freedom, in spite of their painful symptoms. They can question in a more radical way than the rest of us, taking issue with things that most of us take for granted. The mad are in touch with fundamental truths about society, the “rational ego” is all in flux and fragmentation. The mad know that there is no such thing as a “whole person” and so simply stops trying to make sense, while celebrating “the numinous energies of existence in a joyous activity of free play.”

The message of the mad and the radical freedom that stems from the night of truth… is to let go and stop pretending not to be mad. Let yourself go and scream your own screams. In other words, take the plunge into Un-Reason and go against the grain of normalcy, the civilized madness of the average and mediocre. Such a person “produces himself as a free man, solitary, and joyous, a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatsoever. He had simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad. . . .” (Gilles Deleuze)

Reference John D. Caputo “More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not-Knowing Who We Are…”

I’ve recently had a paper published in the International Journal of Zizek studies titled, “There’s a Crack in Everything that’s How the Light Gets In” . Slavoj Zizek is arguably the world’s most famous living philosopher. He is an eccentric wild man with a comic wit and has recently had a feature documentary made about him (Zizek!)

This paper draws a somewhat disturbing connection between Zizek’s magus opus “The Parallax View” - and the paradoxical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (a central theme of this blog). As such, it opens the space for a revolutionary politics that can shatter the co-ordinates of the existing order with an unexpected intrusion from an altogether unheard of dimension…. So this paper is basically the groundwork for the political future of the crucified God, and as good Christians have always known - we do not need to wait for the right moment to start the revolution anymore, for the Christ-event had already happened… we can simply act as of the Kingdom is already at hand

Also, check out The Universe According to Slavoj Zizek for a brief video introduction to his absurdly optimistic and unpredictable view of the world

Thanks for reading