John Maus Muses

On Love

Love is either of two kinds: for something or for everything.

The first kind, what we might call 'romantic' love, is the bringing-forth of a world assuming the mark of the non-being of the supplement of the disjunction between the two.

The second kind, what we might call 'perfect' love, is the bringing-forth of a world assuming the mark of the indifference, even to fundamental ontological difference, of that which anonymously 'calls non-beings as beings.'

Because the first kind is founded on the non-being of the supplement of the disjunction between the two, and the second kind is founded on indifference, even to fundamental ontological difference, we are right to think that both kinds are not, though real.

Where and when these two kinds inevitably become incommensurate, only subjection to the latter offers gladness, while only subjection to the former 'abolira le hazard.'

On Sex

If two bodies each assume the mark of the non-being of the supplement of the disjunction between the two, then this supplement can infinitely converge through them. This is what we might call 'the truth of sex.'

Though sex is something else than its truth, we must hold onto its truth, that we might encounter our beloved honestly, in our vulnerability, our finitude, and contingency, or however, to infinitely converge upon infinity and freedom together.

On Money

Representations of 'sex' often make a mockery of sex, and representations of representations, and so on, would have it that there is nothing but representation. We might call these representations 'money.'

Money reifies itself as it encourages the minimal resistance necessary for its reification. We must not identify ourselves by it, and this may even mean democratically, as rights against this or that, and soon.

On Death

Because it does not represent absence as absence, money makes a mockery of death. Money replaces the endurance of death as a possibility in the being that is itself for itself only by this endurance: Human Being.

Death, as a possibility, must be endured as our supreme challenge. Being toward the end of our being is a possibility that must be cultivated to the extent that we refuse it for eternity, where we always will have been.

On Friends

Because a relation to our own death is impossible, and the endurance of our own death as a possibility is not only our supreme challenge but also how we are ourselves for ourselves, we must enter into a relation with our own death by the death of the friend. The death of the friend also opens us to the alterity that calls us into question and open us to community.

The disjunction between friends is not supplemented, and we befriend in the friend the enemy they could become, so that by friendship we meet our own isolation, which, precisely, we cannot be isolated to meet.

On Family

If 'romantic' love is supplemented disjunction, and friendship is unsupplemented disjunction, then family is where disjunction is altogether unclear. Even where we might be disjunct from family we remain conjunct as they become the object of desire within us.

On Home

Home is where we are always going anyways so that the question of being-at-home is the question of that which keeps us homeless.

If being-at-home means the fourfold preservation of the fourfold: earth, sky, mortals, and the divinity, then that which keeps us homeless would be something like a modern city: in its destruction of the earth, in its concealing of the sky, in its unhope in the divinity, and in its forgetting of mortality.

In something like a small town, bringing the presencing of the fourfold into things, that is, being-at-home, is much more possible. In small town Midwest for instance, it is more possible to set the earth free into its own presencing because there is earth, not garbage. It is more possible to receive the sky as sky because there is sky, not skyscrapers.

It is more possible to wait for intimations of the divinity's coming and not mistake its absence because one can hear its silent call, not the stupid clamor of traffic. It is more possible to initiate our mortality because the earth, sky, and the divinity may presence, and because while in the packed metro one may know about the certainty of one's mortality, when at home in this way, one is certain about it.

(From Plan B magazine a long time ago?)