As usual, Business

Last week, I posted a photo of Johnny Depp, from his role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean III. As a result of my inclusion of that photo and the current interest in the movie among the masses, TLOU has received a crazy number of hits this week. So, if you're new to this blog, and even if you're just here for the photo of Johnny, welcome. Hopefully you'll stay for the content, which I'll admit is not usually along mass-media lines.
AD and I are in the midst of a unit on Theology and Art in the adult education at St. Mark's. Yesterday, AD presented Auden's Ars Poetica, The Sea and the Mirror, a continuation of sorts of the Tempest in poem form. AD had originally hoped to record it and post it here, as our first podcast. Unfortunately, that didn't work out, but I think he plans to share an outline and/or some of the more salient points of the discussion - maybe he'll even share one of his Auden songs with us, so there may yet be a podcast!

I'm up next Sunday with a discussion of Balthasar's opus proposal, which I was delighted (and somewhat chagrined after reading a heft chunk of the Herrlichkeitto find nicely summed up in Love Alone. Per Caritatem has hosted a cool series on Love Alone, so please visit her. I'm really interested in Balthasar's turn to the irrational via the concept of Love to explain the core of Christianity and delineate the task of the theologian. So, I hope to share some of that with you all over the next few days (as I come up with it).

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In Praise of Shame

Joan Copjec's article "May '68, the Emotional Month" which appears in Lacan: The Silent Partners (Ed. Slavoj Zizek) fleshes out Lacan's distinction between shame and guilt in which shame is the experience, very close to anxiety, of being overly proximate to objet a, the object cause of desire. Guilt, on the other hand, is called a sham jouissance by Lacan and betrays a flight from anxiety, and thus a flight from Being. There is a play on the French word for shame (honte) and the science of being (ontology) giving us the neologism, hontology. Guilt arises because one has fixed one's response to the encounter with the object that induces anxiety, in a desperate effort to control the situation. Copjec writes: The fraudulent nature of this jouissance has everything to do with the fact that it gives one a false sense that the core of one's being is someething knowable, possessable as an identity, a property, a surplus-value attaching to one's person." (109) How then shall we steer clear of this transformation from shame into guilt, especially seeing that capitalism is founded on such a universal move of taking loans out on our shame, securing a future at the cost of Being. One helpful image that Copjec gives us is of the veil that covers this place of shame. Shall we avert our eyes from it? Shall we rip it off? Shall we tremble in fear of the priests who stand before it? Is it not clear that these are all responses which engender guilt (which, don't forget, has its own peculiar pleasure)? Copjec urges us to notice the veil itself, to enter into its arabesques, to thank God for the distance that it affords us, the breathing room. I've been looking at the wonderful images on Davis' blog, all of which are veils upon the almighty. For our words to be good words, we must speak from these terrible places, from these veils that inspire terror and unknowing. There is no way to abolish anxiety (as Auden said, it is the condition of human existence, and in this way our age is most honest) but there is a way to transform our relationship to it.

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