“You think where you are not, therefore you are where you do not think". - Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Lecture on Sigmund Freud

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.” - Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

Introduction

It is not a dire misapprehension to perceive the art of Casual Cruelty as an omniscient thought-play. More often than desired, the yearning towards a self-assured ego is trampled by a cathartic plot that could potentially maneuver the very existence of the confident anthropocentric Being (Desein). The “Tomorrow” is rendered eternally irrelevant, and the recognition of experiential evidence (the accidental confrontation with reality) presupposes, ad hominem, an aspiration for The Master as God. Man’s resolution now revolves around the discovery of the Unknown, wherein he loses himself only to find once again that he represents nothing but a desire to accommodate that which his thoughts lack. This Truth aids paranoid introspection.

It is also of relevance that Man’s oblivion of the Scripture transformed itself from Divine Word Incarnate (Initium) to a desecrated human writing (ecriture), subsequently becoming a representation of civilizational modernity. Within the inhabited linguistic system, the literariness of language lacks meaning (logos) ad infinitum, but it succeeds in propagating its essence through a haunting spectre - Thyself as the World. In other words, our cognitive faculties instantly make way for an assurance when it tackle its own self. It denies selfish actions and negates the notion of self-death as soon as it dares to overhear the voyeuristic “I”. The very instant one symbolizes the blood of Jesus and consumes the wine, one dares to interiorize the mimetic sequence of the Crucifixion within the self. Henceforth, the self suffers from an emotional plague that characterizes endless pursuits towards explaining itself, more so in a disquieting effort at describing a terrible beauty, the anxiety of being alive.

The ‘I’ and the Ideal

The power of sense attachment to the “Ideal” is an outcome of this Separation Anxiety, both from the Imaginary Father (the semiotic, pre-Oedipal, pre-juridic-legal figure) as well as through a dis-identification from the Womb. It is difficult to fathom how the external selves permeate into a body that “I” carry. Since any suggestion of a physiological escapade (suicide, disaster, calamity) carries with it the word of death, the self seeks a disposition, often called ‘love’, whose effectiveness lies in that essential part, the empty space which always remains alone. Thus, one dares assert that God is a fleshly pursuit of the Love rather than the Love itself. All notions of Subjectivist principles materialize only in concealing this Love, for it is formulated in that space which we recreate for ourselves. It is only in retrospect that we encounter the reward. The moment of reception is devoid of thought (not an ‘empty pleasure’), and logically, without thought, appreciation is impossible. Thus, one can say, all necessity for pleasure and its potency operates in a hoarded system of re-memory and that makes Man a thinking being.

According to Julia Kristeva, the forced freedom from Mother enables the infant to identify its lack, i.e., its failure to formulate an Absolute desire from the mother or attain her ubiquitous attention. Every unaccompanied moment for the child castrates it from the Object, the Thing-in-itself, or its Godly inheritance. The child, as man, quickly tends to fall apart from the antagonistic rebel to a helpless beast, seeking to clutter its abode with all signs of deficiencies. This liability humanizes the child’s ‘actionless action’ (Wu Wei) as soon as the Mother asserts her demands in the form of a recurring indifference. The being encourages for itself a guilty conscience, although silently, as if all the World saw. Man, in his triumphant Great Chain falls below the radar in his own Index. Hence he encapsulates a secular paradigm for a fabricated God, the One who is created for his own survival. This shows that Man’s self-forgetting onus lies within a ‘Nothing’.

Can Man Survive Without God?

It is to restate Voltaire’s argument (a hypothetical rigidity), that we may have ‘had to create God if He did not already exist’. On the contrary, the purpose is to emphasize that the idea of oppressive social phenomena and its hyperactive essentialism is just one form of the numerous ontological tendencies of Man. With his limited skills of Suppression and Condensation, he reveals, in a socio-cultural hemisphere, a fear of failure, of collapse, of End-in-itself. For instance, Susan Griffin shared an anecdote on how an incident of sudden vomitus or fecal calls in a quasi-intimate public space (e.g., a restaurant), reminds her of her own vulnerable body, the corpse that can decay, the bout of croaks, stinks, cramps and spasms that can produce the same discomfort and abhorrence in a crowd of ‘other’ bodies. Her own insecurities are projected onto the deficient fragments of her fellow beings.

That is why, Man can never aspire to be as well as his comrades since they are constituted of the same lacks. However, the question which arises is whether God, the Perfect-Infinite, is also bearing within himself the same absences that he has made us with. If we embody the paucity of God’s Creation, and are part of the larger picture, does that make our ‘lacks’ the very same perfection that we aspire to attain? Is it only our ‘lack’ of adequate judgment that makes us fail to see the same?

The fortuitous encounters that Man replays in his mind are but mere aspectual anomalies of Fate. The idea that God has mercy and that He watches us in our suffering is reductio ad absurdum, for it is not God’s exteriorized surveillance, but our intramural Gaze which creates a subsequent dread of ambush. These psycho-somatic warnings bind us in a slavish submission to Language. Our wish to elaborate on an event with no previous plan of action (from the human end) points at our embarrassment in facing anything out of Order. Strictly speaking, Man’s private opulence lies in discarding the limits of reason in order to categorize indications that justify his movements. Since action precedes essence, and events precede thought, Man establishes God as his confidante in life, attributing all his own dialectic suspicions onto the Inimitable, mute Omnipresence.

The Divine Narrative in Artistic Thought

Man’s refuge in the narrative can be traced through his camaraderie with Art. In his critique of “Pop-culture crimes”, Adorno cites Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (1913) as the embodiment of a cultural uproar “against its own essence as culture”. He emphasizes that Man’s ultimate motive is to reduce the all-encompassing predominance of Consciousness into a barbaric stranglehold of religion. Here, religion acts as kitsch and God becomes an over-identified non-entity for cultural production. Unlike the Hegelian formula of thought superseding and sublating into another thought, Adorno dismisses any kind of neologism by asserting that the essence of post-truth lies in Repetition. In other words, God, like an aesthetic quality of subliminal powers, reproduces himself in the machismo of hyperventilated battles for honor. Whether it is terrorist bombarding, self-annihilation or thought manipulation - all such schemes of disturbance are presented by Man (on behalf of God) as performance.

The Aristotelian synthesis of pity and fear creates the sensations that epitomizes any event as epic, and Godliness becomes a thoroughgoing artistic endeavor, which may even kill its own Creation to produce the greatest deceit that History has ever witnessed. It is no irony that Ernest Hemingway when told to write the shortest story in six words, produced a sentence that incapacitates the very idea of normative existence. Here, “encounter” and “sentence” can be used interchangeably and both contain hypermasculine meanings, for he writes:

“For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn”.

It is significant to move over to a Dostoevskian self-analysis and re-adjudicate that Man would choose Christ over Truth any day, such if Christ lies outside the Truth that we seek. Indeed, Man cannot surpass his ‘active love’ as he is bound to a series of familiar pleasures. The jouissance of the meek is in the gross vitality of the Divine. They are blessed to have inherited the Earth.

It is, thus, not a transgression to redefine the Platonic Eudaimonia not simply as ‘wish-fulfillment’, but as the ideal of “Death Wish”. To simplify, it seeks to ground its need for mobility by formation and destruction. Man is violence resurrected, and if God’s presumptuous existence circumscribes us all the time, it denotes the fact that Man hasn’t yet conquered or vanquished the circumstances which created God in the first place. In lieu of this fact, we hear Ivan Karamazov’s reassurance: “It’s not God I don’t accept… this world of God’s, I cannot agree with it”.

The process of immediate gratification is in the consumerist tendencies of Man; for God it is Nothing. Man’s sacrificial commitments often belie his own self, it offers its own flesh as an offering. If God accepted Abel’s sacrifice and Cain in turn kills Abel, it results in a double bind, i.e., of sacrificing for an acceptance of sacrifice. It is needless to say that the Anthropo-centric view chooses Reason over Myth (intellectual prowess over brutish cannibalism), whereas the presumption of atheism, once again, enables Man to choose Man (in an absence of Humanism in totality) over Man choosing God.

Patriotism and ‘Performance as Humiliation’

It is important to note that for Man, unintelligibility is placed at the heart of every argument. At any given time, you know less than k(no)w more. This theory is a conjecture on the Enlightenment model. If the idea of meaning is too faithful to be true, it loses its mysterious dynamism, to seek, to reexamine and reaffirm. Moreover, like the hedonistic debate on Capital Punishment, it is absurd to think of a world without God to be a State of Nature. For if indeed everything is permitted, it is now, in a frenzy to prove that all is well as long as God dictates the way of the world. Even if the language is conservative, God is concretized in Man’s incessant capacities, only to be acted out by His children, the self-proclaimed Sons of God with true Machiavellian virtue.

In the discourse of a hegemonic Nation-State, the macro-fantastic Almighty God is projected onto the miniaturized and micro-fantastized Fatherland. Man builds a haven of incongruous groupings, to create his own operative purgatorial dungeons (even his weapons become blessings from God). He quickly falls into the trap of heedless slaughter to satisfy the One who is by definition overflowing. This fallacy proves to be a test, for Man cannot believe or discern the existence of such a gigantic phenomenon. Since Man is motherless (detached from the umbilical cord) and lifeless (lacks the Phallus of energy), he sinks into a hole of void, an abyss. He is supremely terrified to contain within himself such vastness of Black; he perceives the Sky as the mirror of this very abyss that he seeks to forego.

Henceforth, he splits into disparate courses of action the ideals that he withdraws from himself. God is not, He becomes. As and when Man shrivels into a tiny fragment of his paralyzed self, when he chases any and every metaphor for grief and loss, when he knows that he has ceased to know - the Nothing arrives in rescue.

God and Worldly Pleasure

Pleasure is the death of Man. For it comes only with a lack. Man’s indisposed and unfit judgments seek to stop all his expertise for experimenting, interpreting and diversifying. He is a zombie, an automaton of Being, a residue of an endless misfortune, even signifying that which has not yet petrified him. One can also say that it is within the realm of the Being-in-the-World that Man problematizes the caliber of God. This is because God lacks content while He is formalistically transcendental. God is devoid of any stories, he is information-in-deficiency, a specialized System who is yet to be instructed.

Is it possible to locate Man’s need for conveyance (through pain and woe) in God’s empty page, a movement of the dark ink in a purity of the Virgin soul? For words do not arrive in isolation; rather, it is in a grueling lamentation, in a persistence of dialogue that the narrative takes shape, even if it’s not intelligible. Man can be positioned as a Scar on the free-flowing fluency of the Godly Ocean. Man is Body Concrete, the Sea is clear, mellifluous. However, it can threaten depth, draw you in with a treble of allurement. This contradiction between the Sexual and the Innocent, the Eve and the Eden sets off a longing to belong in the Modern Man.

In the 1980s, the Sunday Times published a story on how the son of Stalin, Yakov, committed suicide. The British had warned him against soiling their latrines and instructed him to clean up ‘his mess’. Humiliation proved to be the other name for this Son of God. Yes, for it is not a Freudian Slip. Kundera effectively elaborates on this event, analyzing how God has no internal excretory institution and wastage is the sole apparatus that is enveloped in Man alone. It emphasizes that Yakov could not deem himself to be any less than God. The thought (and the reality) of his own structure generating anything close to waste (of any kind) pushed him to give up his life on an electrocuted fence.

It shows that any humanizing essence of the flesh is not enough to please his sense of enchantment with his “Self”, emphasized and strengthened by his egotistic Imago. Satisfaction for Man is Other-than-himself, it seeks to outwit his lacks and concentrates on presentable ideas of excellence. Man fails to recognize that with Truth, virtue, compassion and laughter lies failure, agony, hopelessness and brevity. Even God, with his ever-merciful soul, will never be as influential for the Man as the disgrace or indignity that he faces from his neighbor.

Conclusion

Man is semantic and entails free goodness. This statement is paradoxical as freedom (towards evil) can also be a valid trope to castigate one’s presence from humanity. If we consider Man to be oscillating between freedom in truth and freedom to choose truth, the latter is ingrained within a conditional consequence wherein the capacity for tolerance of any ‘discursive un-truth’ can also be chosen by him. The question of a choice-enabling cognitive standard is reversible and unreliable. Therefore, since Man is doomed to choose all his enterprise as response to particular occasions, Man is also unreliable. (This can be refuted by the recent neurological findings of Consciousness Studies, which show that the neurons, even before we know about a decision, have already made a choice of action on behalf of us).

Nevertheless, Man is entrapped within his yearning for selfhood. With God acting as the paternal function for both good and evil, the genealogical evaluation of both of these faculties can only be placed as a component of narratology. For if Man is delimited in scope, he is limited in his tragic falsification of reality. Man knows what objective knowledge is, but his impressionistic degrees enforce him within the emotional realm. For God is the knowledge of Nothing, a transference of transparency, a counter-intuitive non-Vacant, devoid of space and defined by it. If we reflect back to Kant, the categorical imperative of Man applies to God also. Since goodness is good in and of itself, the very First-Mover is expected to be the self-actualized actualizer. If not, there could be a threat of infinite regress to excavate the causes of all causes.

Furthermore, with the same argument one can lead Man towards a sensus divinitatis, i.e., Faith in God could be acknowledged as the fundamental principle of Man’s cognitive unit. If Time is perpetual and Change is undying, then God, the Creator of timely change is also eternal. Man’s capacity for knowledge lies in recognizing the variety of Forms that outlast this change and draw from them the figure of his own Imago and that of the World’s continuous performance of the Word. 

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