Prague Day 1

Reading Kafka to each other on the train. We arrive and are sprinted across the city to the royal gardens with its peacocks and faux cave wine cellars. We looked out across the city peering down the hills that communists used to ski over and over like Sisyphean athletes because they weren’t allowed to leave.

Prague Day 2

Our synagogue marathon day was disrupted by a marathon. We went through old cemeteries and crowded the tight walkways that snaked around, annoying people with strollers and dogs. There were hands on headstones and possible mis-hearings that aristocrats were to dirty to enter or touch . Disposable yamakas were handed out at the synagogues to help male tourists feel closer to god. Then a Kafka fun house and with a Kafka translator who spoke about the tediousness of language and collaboration. The day finished with one of the best meals of my life and a bird named Gustav.

Prague Day 3

We ate in the breakfast dungeon and set off to Radio Free Europe. A reporter with the last name Serafim spoke about jazz, liberty, and the western world; relations with the east mediated through Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Miles Davis. I kept asking myself what was being obfuscated on the tour. The reporter wanted a certain kind of question to be asked but I couldn’t tell what. I tried to prompt a conversation about the multiplicity of ways to define freedom and the limits of western bourgeois freedom becoming a universal standard, especially when it is hard to find even at its origin. Of course this was at the last minute and we were shooed back through security before any conversational momentum could build.

Yesterday, I paid a visit to the Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen (Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism) which which sits across the street from the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas. Both have some privacy from the other, produced by a stand of scrubby trees. The memorial is a singular stele of similar proportion to the stones across the way, but is of much larger size and canted more dramatically than those that make up the vast array of rectangular stele in the adjacent site. (The designers are different, however.) While the stele for the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas look as if they have been excavated archaeologically, dug and uncovered from the earth, this memorial appears as if it has fallen out of the sky, appearing suddenly, without warning. Apparently absent of any signage or documentation, there is an almost happenstance quality to this mausoleum like object: if one wasn’t looking for it, it would be surprising to come across. (Later, upon looking at the memorial’s wikipedia page, there is a low, ground level sign, but, I did not see this during my visit.)

Standing about 3.5 meters tall and 2 meters wide, the concrete block could be described as a peep show viewed through a windowed trapezoidal cut formed into one face the block, a cut who’s shape is reminiscent of neo-brutalism. Upon looking in, a viewer is confronted with a short black & white video loop of two young men, looking in their early 20’s, standing in a park and sharing a moment of intimacy: a kiss, a caress and a whisper. After the whisper, the whispered-to offers a facial expression of joy and mystery; a sly, knowing, excited smile passes over his face. Edited to present itself as seamless, the video loop was shot at the exact cite of viewing. The trees that one sees in the video are the same ones sit behind the block, putting the video it what seems like a contemporary space. Yet, due to the black & white capture, the 1.375:1 “Academy Format” aspect ratio (one that was the standard format in the 1930s), the seeming timelessness of both the haircuts and dress of the two young men; the work speaks to the presence of lost possibility, of robbed chances, of experiences never had. In further, because the law prohibiting homosexual acts by men, §175, was only truly enforceable by members of the public informing on their fellow citizens, a visitor is placed in the position of have to make the choice to allow these two people to be undisturbed as they share their private moment, engaging in what was then an activity punishable by imprisonment.

Untying the Mother Tongue Conference //12//5// Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry

Hélène Cixous

Notes taken as follows

Perpetual returning of tongues/Mother tongues are a kind of mood/’The delight of painlessly foreigning oneself’/Soul searching states/angst-with willow wisps-prehistoric cities/Dream-Traum-Trauma/Using the word yesterday even when it has been months since the moment was recorded/Spirituality crisis—she can touch it/Fluidly/She can speak of her own experiences while somehow also talking about so many critical ideas and open it up to allow another’s experience and emotion to enter in the moment/’When I go down into languages I am touched/By contact/By rhythm’/I need to derive pleasure from using language/The more we return the more the Subject gains Strength and Power/Inhabiting/ This is a memoir/’These places are so saturated in Phantasms that they are impossible to see/Here everything is lost so let us hold onto the lost.’

Untying the Mother Tongue Conference
Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Hélène Cixous

12//5

A beautiful, sonorous reading given by Hélène Cixous woven around her enduring linguistic and literary attachments from a childhood of multilingualism, where the languages spoken by her father, mother and grandmothers (French, German, English) connected her, dreamily, to the distant lands of her ancestors and their domesticated languages, creating, by extension, the personification of language as being an omi or a mama. “I multiply and divide myself in a multiplicity of languages, emotions come through in diverse language.” “Since omi is German, I am only a child of German”

Here are a few further notes from her reading:

“The heimat is never to be confused with nation. The heimat is a mixture of love and attachment, milk and tradition. The heimat is a retreat. And home, the more we return to it, the more we safeguard strength and power. Muttersprach. Language is mother, almost a more real mother than the other.”

“We must resist nationalism, it is a deceitful appropriation.” “The loss of language is the loss of those, and humanity, to connect to. Humanity is gained by learning language.”

Untying the Mother Tongue:
Daniel Boyarin: Philological Investigations

The Concept of Cultural Translation in American Religious Studies

” “Jedenfalls aber ist unsere philologische Heimat die Erde; die Nation kann es nicht mehr sein.” (Our philological home is the earth. It can no longer be the nation.)
Erich Auerbach, Philology and Weltliteratur (1952)

For many years, Daniel Boyarin has been engaged in a project to discover how or why it makes sense to speak of “religion” as existing or not at a given time and place. In this project, Wittgenstein has proven to be an increasingly consequential compagnon de route. Boyarin takes the Philosophical Investigations not so much as a work of academic philosophy but as an attempt to describe how language actually works, how human beings produce meaningful speech and writing. The central question treated in this presentation is adequacy of terms drawn from Euro-American languages to describe the cultures of alter. In order to adumbrate some answers to these questions the thinking of Talal Asad about cultural translation is pitted against that of J. Z. Smith.”

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Here are a series of notes taken during a reading given by Daniel Boyarin at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry

on May 11th, 2016. Direct quotes are in quotations, the rest are my interpretations and quick reductions.

(These notes alone are intriguing and leading without my analysis or commentary)

Wittgenstein writes that philosophy must not interfere with actual use of language, but should only describe it.

The meaning of a word is revealed by its use within the language – meaning is not representation, it is use.

Researchers must look for and see the uses of words, understanding two concepts:

1. Every new use adds nuance
2. Interpretation of a word is affected by all prior uses known to the speaker and listener.

A word is placed into context only by “half-remembered words and phrases pulled out in seemingly appropriate usages.”

Wittgenstein describes language as a game – and the basic rule for interpretation of a word is “don’t think but look – look and see if there is something common to all.”

For a word to have meaning, it must exist. If a word doesn’t exist in culture, it has no meaning. However, it is not always the case that the concept doesn’t exist and especially so in regard to religion. So what about religion? Religion as a word must exist in language for it to imply meaning independent from day to day practice.

The phenomenon of religion certainly exists in all cultures, but whether a culture has a word for religion reveals the categorization of religion/practice in a culture.

Older cultures may not have recognized the existence of religion.

Wittgenstein states that “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.”

Boyarin: “A form of life is close to culture.” To investigate a language means to investigate a culture, what a language lacks by comparison, the culture has not comprised.

Different cultures have different forms of language – which leads to the question of the possibility of translation.

Our modern Western language is inadequate to describe or understand ancient cultures. We must strive to learn their languages.

As Walter Benjamin wrote, we must turn German (or English) into Greek, Hindi, Hebrew, and not vice versa. We should not try to represent their language systematically in our own lexicon – for in this, we are stuck in our own thought and language.

As an anecdote, English merchants refused to trade with Japan in the 19th century, until the Japanese could describe, or give a definition to their religious practice/s. Hence the Shinto religion had no unifying name until it was forced to be defined by the outside.

“Semantics shift with contact with other forms of life.”

Some definitions require great lengths, books, to define, even in semblance. It is hard work to render concepts/words closely into one another.

In one study, the word ‘religio’ was bracketed out of hundreds of different paragraphs describing religious practice, in an attempt to define ‘religio’ by context alone. It was impossible to derive the meaning of the word; this project gave only the sense of the range of uses.

Religion obscures much more than it reveals. Religion is a praxis – there may not be a term for it when it is wholly embedded as a mode of existence – as not categorized, segregated from other practices.

As an example, Boyarin gives an anecdote about Judeans using a festival, Pentecost, to plot a revolution. To the Judeans, this was a normal course of action – plotting a rebellion was no different than any other praxis, as politics and religion were integral to one another.

Those who opposed the actions of the Judeans criticized the use of Pentecost as a cover for subversive scheming. Those who supported their actions praised their craft. To the Judeans it was a matter of course, not a scheme.

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The task of translating culture is not to reduce an unknown to a known.  We must progress beyond the idea that the “history that I want is the history of the present” illuminating our position by events of the past. Other language also functions as a complex language game, and shakes our grip on the notion that our rationale is superior to those of the past. We must study the validity of other language games, and stop assuming that all the past leads into Enlightenment.

The task is to listen to others, to become strangers to ourselves.

The deformation of our language is imperative in order to translate.

Religion can exist without anyone knowing it does.

We must deform/imagine our life without the word religion.

We must find others in the past and adapt our language to meet theirs.

To avoid being alone in the world: allow the other to be herself.

By allowing others to be themselves, we investigate other forms of life and the possibilities therein – we must surround ourselves with possibilities.

By deforming/converting language it changes our life form – there is a possibility of losing original language, and blurring culture, but we must continually become something new — not collapse into a singular language/culture, but to expand and allow for multiplicities of existences.

In avoiding reducing an unknown to a known – how do we know what we see/hear? In the enterprise of seeking, by turning our eyes towards our own practices in the game of knowledge, requires the removal of knowledge and NOT to seek reducing unknown to known, but finding the unknown in our own language and lives.