Jack Kirby, Deleuze, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, and Levinas?
An Extract from 'The Resurrection of Thinking' (2018) -
"Our hearts are shattered and filled with hate to protect their painful vulnerability. The deepest evil tendencies in me can rise up, but I can find ways to bridge and transform them with hope and creative love. Both the act of repose and the kinetic are rhythmic polarities in a pulsating metamorphic fluid that is sometimes inward or humanlike and sometimes outward or worldlike. Creative thinking must find ways to tie together temporary organelles of every quality into a new human actor. Like Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle, we can become a super escape artist who doesn’t mind getting back into the coffin once again. The supersensible-I can slip out of any trap, but it can also turn back to face the real bottom floor of moral evil in its own most human earthly nature. But who is this new kind of human that can begin movement and slow down to a rest, this wave of supersensible lightning? Where does rest take me? What kind of self stays awake in the yonder? And these should be ethical questions.
Deleuze says, “Even Bergsonian duration has need of a runner.” We have to build and maintain our own quality of self and conscious organs here and yonder, otherwise other spirits will put us to sleep and we become an effect of their moods and deeds. We have to surf the disconnected Deleuzean planes of immanence, but without ever forgetting the holocausts that burn in the center of our own humanity, as it pulses through our times. Ben-Aharon describes the entire moral gesture upon which we can model our new self as well as the most critical world situation which is still alive today, in 'The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century.' We can only add a small extract here:
'The Higher Self of the whole Michael community, lives also in each of its single members as a special, individual higher self…It is a Christ-like being, united with the destiny of humanity and the Earth as a whole. This being now experiences the Revelation [the first stage of the spiritual Event taking place during 1933-1945] as the deepest division of its own inmost being…Never before has it been possible for fully individualized human beings to experience such a cosmic, earthly and all-human split as a self-experience…The Michael pupils felt the most tragic soul bewilderment and helplessness in face of this split because of the simultaneous occurrence with the highest Revelation of spirit community and oneness. This tremendous inner paradox and self-contradiction was caused by a fissuring of man’s whole new Earthly-Sun being. And out of humanity’s helplessness in the face of the evil surfacing from the abyss, threatening total self-destruction, there emerged a mighty soul and spirit mood.'
Can we with the greatest humility and resilience, keep this mood alive today as we craft a new self and learn to move in spirit-space? This Event is still alive today and new Events are coming from the most innovative future. To remain conscious in the midst of these moral world-riddles, while the rotation of the universe churns in us, requires the most careful, objective, and scientific scrutiny. It is not accompanied by paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, or an overly ecstatic feeling. Indeed the extensive feeling of responsibility can be painful. But thank God that the pain reveals itself to be the intensity of the neutrality of the macrocosm piercing our warm, immoral bubble.
Levinas says, “In proximity the other obsesses me according to the absolute asymmetry of signification, of the one-for-the-other: I substitute myself for him, whereas no one can replace me, and the substitution of the one for the other does not signify the substitution of the other for the one. The relationship with the third party is an incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity in which the face is looked at…it is only thanks to God that, as a subject incomparable with the other, I am approached as an other by the others, that is, ‘for myself.’"
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