A community of the question

This quote is from Derrida’s essay on Levinas ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in Writing and Difference.

In the garden we are in the process of reviewing what defines us and whilst this paragraph is actually talking about the community of philosophers in/after the end of philosophy, for me it captures perfectly the nuanced situation that projects like the garden must maintain -  obligated to decide and to act but never in a way that closes the question, always moving forward in a way that leaves the open open.

“A community of the question, therefore, within that fragile moment when the question is not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question, and not yet determined enough for its voice to have been already and fraudulently articulated within the very syntax of the question. A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to speak, is not yet sure of its own possibility within the community. A community of the question about the possibility of the question.”

I know this seems so vague but I really feel the journey we are on is this fragile and  I fear the temptation to settle for easy short-cuts.

Rothko – The Director’s Cut

Having had chance to reflect on the Rothko show at Tate Modern, it gets to be the first post on my new blog. Any who know me will know of my obsession with Rothko over many years – for me, in its best moments, his painting opens up wordlessly  a territory that, without wishing to hurriedly name it, is a sort of pole star in my life.

In their essence, for me, his facades (they are not paintings really) are about what you feel standing in their presence, the way you encounter them, the way they change the atmosphere in the  room.

That said I found this review which captures a lot of what I felt about the current exhibition  – The Seagram Series: The Director’s Cut.

Beyond that I wanted to open up just one consideration which articulates why I consider his work so important. Here are two quotes from Rothko :

“The people who weep before my pictures, are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationship, then you miss the point.”

“When I say that my paintings are Western, what I mean is that they seek the concretization of no state that is without the limits of western reason, no esoteric, extra-sensory or divine attributes to be achieved by prayer and terror. Those who can claim that these [limits] are exceeded are exhibiting self-imposed limitations as to the tensile limits of the imagination within those limits. In other words, that there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination. On the contrary they are deeply involved in the possibility of ordinary humanity.”

In other words, his life’s obsession was to create  works that create an experience in the viewer that he was happy to call religious but at the same time he considered this experience an entirely human, material experience with no transcendental dimension / explanation lying beyond it. He didn’t call it a ‘religion without religion’ but for me his work points out a space worthy of further exploration for those of us seeking to create artistic contexts under that banner.

In lieu of an ‘About’ page

I will write a more nuanced explanation and context soon but just so I can go public here are some rough thoughts on why I am attempting to blog again.

1)I am doing an MA in Philosophy which is inevitably challenging my thinking in new ways. Whilst I am far too insecure in my thoughts on many of the texts I am studying to voice them publicly there will some responses that I will be interested in trying to articulate in the blog.

2)The garden, the project in Brighton I am involved with, is seeking to re-articulate its vision, develop a more reliable programme of activities, re-think how it operates and re-work its web presence. The vision of the garden and my own thoughts, whilst closely related are independent, so it seemed a good time to create space for me to explore my own thoughs in a way that can hopefully have a strong dialogue with those of the garden but remain separate.

3)Whilst I am extremely engaged with the whole ‘Derrida religion without religion; Zizek materialistic Christianity, Caputo theology of the event’ space (to throw in just a few co-ordinates of the current discussion) I feel that they all fail to engage adequately with our human situatedness as part of the landscape-earth-cosmos. I will save words now and shape this out better in another post but my hope in this blog is to jot on my attempts to weave a single cloth from these threads. Pete Rollins in his response to one of my posts on his blog recently said that to move away from Christianity as a ‘narrative that facilitates a more fully engaged interaction with the world would require the creating of language fit to do that’. I guess I want to try floating a few thoughts that might edge towards a possible new language. Anyway, will try to map this out better soon – for myself  – if no  one else!