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.

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!