For Richard Antoun, colleague
In-depth background supporting Reversal Analysis (Man of peace representing war)
Too much was asked of the little bit of soul infused into Harpur College by the 60’s to sustain in the rapidly expanding State University of New York at Binghamton as a feeling-essence. Soul was always on the scarce side at Harpur College.
It’s as if the expansion and up-scaling of the physical facilities; university academic standing and outreach; sports programs; … had inflated a huge balloon with “BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY” proudly written on its side with a promise, a whiff of something special inside that “used to be there”, maybe still is, if you know how to find it. Only to discover many privately hiding dashed hopes and dreams – though many finding these completed. Life on campus --the taste, feel, resonance of its movements; its past; the seasonal cycles along the river; intellectual rhythms – becomes a container of shared student-faculty-staff larger life under its name, ever presenting fresh, new, singular precious opportunities and responsibility to live up to them, each year, semester, class, classroom, lecture. My heart is with those who meet these today, Monday, Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor day, following Richard Antoun’s stabbing last Friday.
The Soul bequeathed by anti-Vietnam war 60’s freedom front created Harpur’s unique style of multicultural unity-in-diversity, climaxed by campus uprising against unauthorized military recruitment in ’69. Afterward, the moral superiority of the point of view opposed to Nixon-Republican killing fields provided oxygen* for expanded international (but undeviatingly Israeli-centric) cultural discourse. The jewel among New York State graduate schools, set on a hill overlooking the Susquehanna River, drawing a large number of Jewish students from downstate escaping the city; faculty of finest quality and recognitions.
It would be American New York liberalism at its best. And Richard Antoun would be among its finest representatives.
Against this background, what Al-Zahrani stabbed was the entire position of consciousness surviving in Antoun’s soul. His life work would be taken in memorium as redemptive apotheosis of on-campus international multicultural liberalism. In the narrative of popular understanding, the essential inner goodness of that life and its history will be glaringly contrasted with the violent, deranged Muslim fanatic. In Jungian terms, the psychodynamics is that of a one-sided conscious development getting stabbed by its dark, other side. In Freudian terms, stabbing would be the symbolic act through which the repressed returned.
The spirit of multicultural inclusiveness, unity-in-diversity of BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY was asked to contain irreconcilable differences. Again, in Jungian terms, this would be a marriage of opposites, as in a contradictory conjunction. In Freudian terms, conflict resulting from One True (Father) God Oedipal super-ego complex, Muslim vs. Jewish, punishing themselves through each other.
What makes the differences irreconcilable is the contradiction between the text each uses for “God” – THE ONE TRUE -- which they agree on – and the token: their use of the name for different things. Two different and opposed things cannot both be THE ONE TRUE God. This is self evident. This self evident contradiction is glossed over by the self-validating predicate, THE ONE TRUE.. There cannot be two of these. THE TWO ONE TRUE GODs is a logical impossibility. This confers a sense of logical certainty to whatever it is taken to describe, by the principle that the negation of a self-contradiction is necessarily true (Aristotle). (Nec(~(p. ~p))) The gap in grammar between predicate and subject, allowing this logical construct to be predicable of Allah referred to by the Prophet, and Yhwh/Elohim referred to in the Old Testament Pentateuch, is psychosemiotic equivalent to the gap between text and token in sign use. “GOD” can be used in this self-contradictory way, as if two sides good-heartedly agreed to share logical self-condemnation by/through the Other.
"Mine is; your's isn't" is their respective actual text.
Perhaps this self-evident logical impasse might have been outgrown or culturally resolved without stabbing, if the U.S. had not made war in the Middle East. As it is, BU is asked to resolve differences, here, over which blood is shed, abroad. Binghamton earlier experienced the blowback of the Kosovo-Serbia war in a street brawl. Now, apparently, Harpur is hit by blowback of sectarian Muslim Saudi-Jordan conflicts in its offices. All in all, the philosophical bent of Antoun’s work appears aimed at reconciling just those differences based on religious fundamentalism of all sorts. This program can only succeed, however, if the notion of THE ONE TRUE GOD is stricken from public political discourse. As long as it is around, its will reproduce the very irreconcilable logical differences it’s use is intended to overcome.
Within Biblical religion, the antidote to this antinomial ONE TRUE GOD sign –use is the TRINITY, grounded in the Incarnation. It is impossible to over-estimate the difference this makes metaphysically. “God” no longer stands for something “out there” – the Creator over against the Creature; but something which, of its own initiative, has overcome the gap between Creator and Creature in some whose “in here” is Christian.
Too much was asked of the little bit of soul infused into Harpur College by the 60’s to sustain in the rapidly expanding State University of New York at Binghamton as a feeling-essence. Soul was always on the scarce side at Harpur College.
It’s as if the expansion and up-scaling of the physical facilities; university academic standing and outreach; sports programs; … had inflated a huge balloon with “BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY” proudly written on its side with a promise, a whiff of something special inside that “used to be there”, maybe still is, if you know how to find it. Only to discover many privately hiding dashed hopes and dreams – though many finding these completed. Life on campus --the taste, feel, resonance of its movements; its past; the seasonal cycles along the river; intellectual rhythms – becomes a container of shared student-faculty-staff larger life under its name, ever presenting fresh, new, singular precious opportunities and responsibility to live up to them, each year, semester, class, classroom, lecture. My heart is with those who meet these today, Monday, Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor day, following Richard Antoun’s stabbing last Friday.
The Soul bequeathed by anti-Vietnam war 60’s freedom front created Harpur’s unique style of multicultural unity-in-diversity, climaxed by campus uprising against unauthorized military recruitment in ’69. Afterward, the moral superiority of the point of view opposed to Nixon-Republican killing fields provided oxygen* for expanded international (but undeviatingly Israeli-centric) cultural discourse. The jewel among New York State graduate schools, set on a hill overlooking the Susquehanna River, drawing a large number of Jewish students from downstate escaping the city; faculty of finest quality and recognitions.
It would be American New York liberalism at its best. And Richard Antoun would be among its finest representatives.
Against this background, what Al-Zahrani stabbed was the entire position of consciousness surviving in Antoun’s soul. His life work would be taken in memorium as redemptive apotheosis of on-campus international multicultural liberalism. In the narrative of popular understanding, the essential inner goodness of that life and its history will be glaringly contrasted with the violent, deranged Muslim fanatic. In Jungian terms, the psychodynamics is that of a one-sided conscious development getting stabbed by its dark, other side. In Freudian terms, stabbing would be the symbolic act through which the repressed returned.
The spirit of multicultural inclusiveness, unity-in-diversity of BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY was asked to contain irreconcilable differences. Again, in Jungian terms, this would be a marriage of opposites, as in a contradictory conjunction. In Freudian terms, conflict resulting from One True (Father) God Oedipal super-ego complex, Muslim vs. Jewish, punishing themselves through each other.
What makes the differences irreconcilable is the contradiction between the text each uses for “God” – THE ONE TRUE -- which they agree on – and the token: their use of the name for different things. Two different and opposed things cannot both be THE ONE TRUE God. This is self evident. This self evident contradiction is glossed over by the self-validating predicate, THE ONE TRUE.. There cannot be two of these. THE TWO ONE TRUE GODs is a logical impossibility. This confers a sense of logical certainty to whatever it is taken to describe, by the principle that the negation of a self-contradiction is necessarily true (Aristotle). (Nec(~(p. ~p))) The gap in grammar between predicate and subject, allowing this logical construct to be predicable of Allah referred to by the Prophet, and Yhwh/Elohim referred to in the Old Testament Pentateuch, is psychosemiotic equivalent to the gap between text and token in sign use. “GOD” can be used in this self-contradictory way, as if two sides good-heartedly agreed to share logical self-condemnation by/through the Other.
"Mine is; your's isn't" is their respective actual text.
Perhaps this self-evident logical impasse might have been outgrown or culturally resolved without stabbing, if the U.S. had not made war in the Middle East. As it is, BU is asked to resolve differences, here, over which blood is shed, abroad. Binghamton earlier experienced the blowback of the Kosovo-Serbia war in a street brawl. Now, apparently, Harpur is hit by blowback of sectarian Muslim Saudi-Jordan conflicts in its offices. All in all, the philosophical bent of Antoun’s work appears aimed at reconciling just those differences based on religious fundamentalism of all sorts. This program can only succeed, however, if the notion of THE ONE TRUE GOD is stricken from public political discourse. As long as it is around, its will reproduce the very irreconcilable logical differences it’s use is intended to overcome.
Within Biblical religion, the antidote to this antinomial ONE TRUE GOD sign –use is the TRINITY, grounded in the Incarnation. It is impossible to over-estimate the difference this makes metaphysically. “God” no longer stands for something “out there” – the Creator over against the Creature; but something which, of its own initiative, has overcome the gap between Creator and Creature in some whose “in here” is Christian.
posted by Sid Thomas | 5:04 PM
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