Page 84 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
slaughtered. If Yahweh restores Job, the innocent turned sinner, why does he fail to restore Jesus from the cross and Josef K from the stone quarry? Whether we presume Jesus or Josef K falsely or righteously slandered, innocent or guilty of sedition against the power structures of their times, Yahweh’s dubious theodicy fails the crucified Jesus at Golgotha, as much as the Judge fails the slaughtered Josef K at the stone quarry.471
The crossed words 3⁄4 sepulcher and cross 3⁄4 enunciate the hyper-riddle: the riddle of the riddle of God’s simultaneous justice and injustice entangling Jesus, Job and Josef K in the midst of liberty: being free and not free amidst a complacent throng unwilling to de-territorialize universal lies (T223), to be examined (T226), to respond (T226).
Being free and not free, innocence and not innocent (Job), guilty and not guilty (K), the infrahuman eternally recurs: eternal in permanence, not oblivion; eternal in horror, not beauty; eternal in sameness, not difference 3⁄4 not as Plato’s or Parmenides’ sublime song of the oneness of the one,472 of the sameness of the same,473 not as beings or a nomos turned towards the light, or towards Foucault’s sympathetic sunflowers or girasoles,474 but as a terrifying mirage in the periphery of the unreal, where Plato’s cavern devours the sun and becomes Seth’s attic, where degrees of being stagnate in a muddy pool and cannot be materialized, where nothing, in existence’s twilight, “is” as “it is,” but “is” as “it appears,” where every sensory phenomenon is illusory: if laws exist, they are inaccessible or ever changing; if motion exists, it is a mirage; if motion does not exist, it is, infinitely divisible. As if an Eleatic paradox, velocity and distance do not exist, and if they do, they are only the illusions of motion.
Zeno’s aporias,475 under imagination’s wondrous spark, metamorphose into magic word games that become all too real. They fancy marvellous, infinite permutations of existential paradoxes 3⁄4 capable of overlapping Garcia Marquez’s magic realisms 3⁄4 simultaneously frighten and enchant. Suppose someone imaginary, or unseen, or Job, or K, or Jesus or Milton was to dwell in one of Titorelli’s desolate heath landscape portraits. It is possible that on a certain day, K might race from heath-tree A to heath-tree B in 20 minutes, and on another day, in 20 hours, or in an instant.
Astonished, the same being, be it Job, or K, or Jesus, or Milton, or Zeno’s Achilles, may also find himself under the illusion he journeys placidly from Eden-tree A to B, when, in fact, he cannot move, or argue, or detain Camus’
471 Jesus and Josef K shall always remain in the twilight: innocent to some, guilty to others.
472 The notion of the infinite for Plato is in relation to unity, το εν, not as a unit, or the singular aspect of things such as a man, a house, but as “oneness.” These monads are subtracted from birth and death, and hence are eternal. Hence they can no be applied to becoming and to the infinity of things in the world. Phil.,15B. Plato. Plato. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper, D.S. Hutchinson. Indiana, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997.
473 Plato’s predecessor, Parmenides, also posits this sense of “oneness.” For Parmenides, the ultimate reality of all things is fixed, permanent, and the unity or oneness beneath all things is ‘God’ or a ‘Divine Law’ (F4 and F32), in contrast to Heraclitus’ predication that all things are under constant flux. Kirk. The Presocratics Philosophers. Trans. Kirk, Raven, Schofield. UK: Press Syndicate of Cambridge University Press, 1983. See also Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. The Presocratics and the Sophists. USA: Oxford University Press, 2009. 33
474 Foucault. Les mots et les choses. Une archeologie des sciences humaines. 1966. Trans. to Spanish: Las Palabras y Las Cosas, una arqueología de las ciencias humanas. 1968, 2002. Trans. By Elsa Frost. España: Siglo XXI Ediciones, 2002. 38-40
475 The aporias of Zeno of Elea, logic dead-end propositions, cultivate the illusion of time and motion in The Dichotomy and the Achilles and the Tortoise. In The Dichotomy, a moving object, always necessitating to cross, first, half the distance to one’s goal, and before then, half the remaining distance, and before then, half of half, and so on successively ad infinitum, never reaches its destiny. In The Achilles and the Tortoise, Achilles races behind a head-starting tortoise. To pass her, Achilles must first reach the tortoise’s starting point. By then, she has moved on to B. As he traverses to B, she has moved on to C and so on, successively ad infinitum, in such a way that Achilles will never catch up to her, howsoever much he is infinitesimally closer to her. Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. The Presocratics and the Sophists. “Zeno of Elea.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 69-81
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