In 1977, Roland Barthes gave a lecture to an academic French audience wherein he claimed that his study of semiology grew from disgust for "this mixture of bad faith and good conscience which characterizes the general morality." The mixture of bad faith and good conscience is critical both to the paranoid reading and to the virtue signaling which has evolved in order to get ahead of the anticipated bad faith.
Is it interesting that we expect to be misread?
Is is problematic that our longing for authenticity has developed into an expository seriousness?
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The poet sits and stares at the sunrise with due disgust—she is not a morning person, not an “angel of the morning,” not one who finds release in donning lyrca and running around the block or counting her steps.
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There is a short poem by Victoria Chang which fascinates me.
To The Margin
I will never love
anyone the way I love
my memories and their cliffs.
Notice how things accumulate in a sort of negative theophany…. I will never love.
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I will never stop seeing a god in our hungers for recognition.
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Trauma is persuasive precisely because it ends a conversation – there is nothing to discuss after someone has laid human pain on the table and labeled it thus. Perhaps it is better to describe trauma as manipulative rather than persuasive; it speaks by silencing. By making speech impossible.
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The underside of the market for self-improvement is the growing aisle of trauma products. Not every behavior or thought can be credited to the burgeoning industry of trauma. In the US, the market for trauma includes sub-aisles like gun culture.
I will never stop seeing a gun in the eyes of every human who bump-stocks their American Jesus.
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Our hunger becomes text.
Our fears take shape in figurative language.
"What we know that we will soon no longer have before us, this is what becomes an image," wrote Walter Benjamin. The rotten scent of ungathered plums dangling in the air. The vines whose flowers open at night and emit a fragrance to attract nocturnal pollinators. Not all poems do their work in the daylight —-
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The language of the promise presses up against Paul Celan's poetics, or borrows from the apophatic nature of communication by depriving it of testability. The modern promise is scientific, and therefore testable, or subject to verifiability. Testing the promise is part of the nature of a promise, as Stanley Cavell said.
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What is the name for a prophet who never prophecies, or who gets all their predictions wrong? Are they still a prophet, or does their being and identity depend on having kept their prophecy? How does the prophet profit from speculation?
In the same 1977 inaugural lecture to College de France, Roland Barthes said: "I cannot function outside language, treating it as a target, and within language, treating it as a weapon."
And yet, he does. He does both. Who, shall I say, is calling?