Luke 14:23
23 And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.
Yet it has been a long time since Engels demonstrated, already apropos of Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifier of his work, and that necessarily nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather the absence of style—asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode—desire. (Deleuze and Guattari 133)
The obvious colloquial tautology: a house is meant to be filled. Having written that, I can only grab hold of Herr Micheal Scott arguing with his beloved about his snip-snap destitutions. But when the house is empty, when those initially invited reject the festivities, the lord of the house sends out his servant to gather a myriad of persons (Luke 14:21). However, it is from a clear desperation that these individuals are gleaned from the “highways and hedges”. The lord of the house ought to have first considered those who he knew would immediately join his revelry, not those who, with their supposed birth-status, would waste the messenger’s time. Yet he didn’t, likely for the sake of upholding some ancient decorum. But even David, without hesitation, ate with Jonathon’s son as a point of honor. God would always prefer to favor ableism. He turns to Gentiles, those lacking the oral law, thus those without advanced ability, a crude ignorance, (Romans 2:14), only when the party is close to starting and no one has yet to arrive.
It’s strange to have ever considered Christianity a thing to be taken seriously. Drawing from Spinoza’s disdain for the Man-god, I think God the Father sure does waste a whole lot of time. The formation of the cosmos over a work-week, a morning to make man and an evening to pull a woman out of his ass, and, then, the dull epochs hidden in that “morning” and ”evening”, and the strict regimes hidden in that “man” and that “woman”. Too much time purposed for a meta-oblation, a redeemed Onan because it landed in His mouth, sticky, and though he could have pulled-out from the creation-project at any moment, His diction was dictated by His own Other, to temporally-restricted planning, as Lacan writes in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”: “the subject constitutes himself on the basis of the message, such that he receives from the Other even the message he himself sends” (Lacan 683).
The Other is empty. The Other rationalizes. The Other, like the Oedipus, “determines [desiring-productions’] progressions and regressions in terms of Oedipus, or even in relationship to it…the regressions and progressions are made only within the artificially closed vessel of Oedipus, and in reality depend on a state of forces that is changing, yet always actual and contemporary, within anoedipal desiring-production” (Deleuze and Guattari 129). It’s a shame that we were born into the house, and now our language and desires affirm the family-unit without question, along with: its capitalism, its shallow literature, its false histories—all that keeps the house tidy and steady on the rock. To get rid of the house, to get rid of the Other who determines the speech of the lord and the servant is our aim. But the house continues in its demand to be filled, that is the telos it posits, a means of ensuring its circuit. The lord speaks from the house; the servant leaves from the house; ab villā, dominus dicit; ab villā, servus dicit; ab villā, villa dicit.
The party is starting; the house speaks because of the constraint of time which is the contraction of the neck so that the tongue embarrasses itself in its flailing and begins to invite those that would have, upon first consideration, defiled itself and its home. It is not honorable to draw in the “undesirables” as a simple matter of filling the vacant space in the home. Heaven constituted by those deemed “swine” according to the divine ought to have spoken of God’s mercy, humility, the will-to-change, surely? The invited Gentiles into the lord’s home served to ostensibly disrupt the Judaic convention of sanctity, a sanctity maintained by means of a decorated phallus. But when God seems to subvert Himself, He only affirms that law, that Other, which has always possessed Him: the detour in time. To prolong the inevitable (an inescapable sensual conundrum I fear that I’m in) when you know the inevitable (that the Gentiles will be called to Himself for example); if the goal was prelapsarian, He ought to have stopped his move around the table of time; He ought to have tossed the table and the fiery cherubims into the immutable, peaceful campfire between perfect-man and perfect-Him. The house limits where you live and who you can invite; the house needs to be filled, with anyone, before the party begins. This contradiction in God the Father persists despite His eternity and His supposed ability to keep off the start of the party. The contradiction within God the Father rests in His being keen to His end, the shadow in the cave dripping out into the glow of the sun (Nietzsche Aphorism 125, Book III); the millenia more it will take to move beyond the threat we feel to ourselves as it is expressed in the shadow, and the rush we undertake in the simultaneous affirmative move of the Other, the safety of the home and its call.
Tied to his false sense of individual being, God the Father strives after the subduing of time (the ultimate threat to the isolated-self) and consequently warrants the contempt shown forth by Spinoza’s rigor. And “if this atomisation is only an illusion it is a necessary one. That is to say, the immediate, practical as well as intellectual confrontation of the individual with society, the immediate production and reproduction of life - in which for the individual the commodity structure of all ‘things’ and their obedience to ‘natural laws’ is found to exist already in a finished form, as something immutably given - could only take place in the form of rational and isolated acts of exchange between isolated commodity owners” (Lukács 7); hence it is that God the Father alienated himself from himself, became a commodity amongst commodities in order to affirm His own “natural law”: according to the Scriptures, without perversion (indeed, faithful to my prior exegetical methods), he offers up his labour-power whose objectification is framed with nails and wood! as an exchange for the damned ontology of humanity. The exchange of atomized commodities for the rational end of filling the house.
It must be, then, that (I)(God, the symbolic order is a parasite) must spread out upon myself with as close to an infinite repetition as possible in order to escape the house, and the lord, and the servant, and the consideration of time. To layer myself with myself, this fluctuating self, is to ensure instability; it is to affirm time rather than striving to repress it. As I alter across the temporal, I move with mud; I upset the bodies of rocks, atomic minerals, colorful fragrances—and I take it all upon myself and rid the self of fixed peculiarity. This is what style is: to let go of how what is said should be said, what should be said as it relates to content, who should be invited into the house, into my life, into my “self”; to follow the flows, to trace out the visions of the aleph without ever reaching a singular stage. Stay in the basement, stare at the stairs. Gaze upon yourself across the mirroring line of eternal recurrence. Beatriz Viterbo is dead and they’ve already put up a new ad for American cigarettes (Borges 1). And that is okay.
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