>A friend has just sent me a quote from Nick Land and since this adds to
>the post I wrote a short while back on the politics of formalism and
>which made a quick departure from Maurice Blanchot and repeated the
>notion of being honest I thought some others on the list would find this
>interesting. In a way this may also be made to critically address the
>way that _Quadrant_ magazine carries on about honesty too. So far as I
>understand Nick is writing about a religious problem of honesty here.
>
>
>
>The great educational value of the war against Christendom lies in the
>/absolute/ truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The
>'man of God' is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the
>point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire
>metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot
>comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word,
>gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex
>of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively
>seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any
>proposition passing the lips of a priest is /necessarily/ totally false,
>excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood.
>It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or
>reality.
> [From Nick Land's paper on Pyrrho]
>
Not quite sure I follow this, Chris but does he say somewhere WHY this is
the case? Because there is no god? Because god has lied from the beginning?
Because no one can truly be 'a man of god'?
I'd really like to know. And what about 'a man of Allah'?
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
the way of what fell
the lies
like the petals
falling drop
delicately
Phyllis Webb
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