What does a faithful life look like, a life informed by stories of faith such as those told about Abraham? Rose describes the life of faith as one in which an individual is continually “willing to stake oneself again” (1992, 148). By this she means that a person with faith will whole-heartedly participate in the practice of positing concepts (norms) and testing them against reality (practice), always willing to revise the concepts they posit. A faithful person will not exempt themselves from this process; he will remain sensitive to the evidence of experience, never dogmatically holding to concepts that are not supported by evidence, to norms not supported by practice. It is thus only faith “that prevents one from becoming an arbitrary perpetrator or an arbitrary victim; that prevents one, actively or passively, from acting with arbitrary violence” (1992, 148).
694 Journal of Religious Ethics
To hold dogmatically to a view of the world, as discussed above, is to act with arbitrary violence because it is to offer reprimands that are not supported by the evidence of experience and are only based on personal whims held as dogmatic truths. A faithful person does not imagine that she can act without violence; rather, she realizes that all actions are continually implicated in violence and yet she perseveres in acting, in positing concepts and testing them against realities. In this struggle, “‘violence’ is inseparable from staking oneself, from experi- ence as such—the initial yet yielding recalcitrance of action and passion” (1992, 151).
This is why Rose opposes much contemporary religious thought, both Jewish and Christian. She takes the project of religious thinkers, from Buber to Fackenheim to Metz to Milbank, to be one of “mending the world,” which has the effect of “betraying” the hard work of living (1992, 293). In short, they lack faith. They lack the commitment to persist in the “revel of ideas and risk” that is living and instead opt for an easy out, for the fantasy of an ethics purified of law (1995, 135). The “New Jerusalems” that they posit foreclose the possibility of critical analysis of social norms, of the worldly power and worldly institutions from which they recoil. “Against the tradition from St. Paul to Kant which opposes law to grace and knowledge to faith . . . the modern congrega- tion of the disciplines—from philosophy to architecture—loses faith when it renounces concept, learning, and law” (1992, 307).
If Kierkegaard identifies and describes the problem of anxiety, the solution he offers is a lifestyle of faith, on Rose’s reading. Anxiety is experienced any time one truly grapples with the law. To live life without anxiety would be to shut oneself off from a central feature of the world; it would be to live in delusion. Living life without anxiety is like living life without freedom—possible, perhaps, but only when one understands social norms to be absolutely rigid and static.
Rose notes Kierkegaard’s two-stage move, which demonstrates the relationship between law, anxiety, and faith (1992, 89–90). First, there is a movement “from law to anxiety.” A person who is living an ordinary life in the world experiences anxiety for some reason—perhaps because of a moment of crisis when social norms are suspended. Faith allows the individual to return back from the moment of anxiety to the law. Instead of despairing indefinitely because of anxiety, if the individual has faith, he is able to go back to ordinary life. However, the ordinary life of the individual before the experience of anxiety coupled with faith is different from that ordinary life afterwards. What was before simply a life lived with “ambivalence” becomes a life lived with full-blown existential angst, with deep “equivocation” (1992, 90).
Rose explicitly links freedom to anxiety—and hence to faith. “The art of power is ‘freedom’: how to be always all-ready for anxiety” (1992,
Secular Faith of Gillian Rose 695
87).

grey skin

Grey skinned girl, walking the streets of fire, turning herself into ashes.
Post to post, the vibrance of a wooden lemon, the zest of her own divine hope.
Dust might cover her, for she would rather be unseen,
flowers may, or may not -
The winter shall not be as grey as her, and the men should not ever own,
her light feet.
Gather the world, into heartbreak, ponder around like a mute.
Grey skin girl, where will you go now?
Home is long passed so now you must flee.

who made you this way?
who made you this way?

T/E/N/D/E/R

palanquin

Dear Creature, why is it so different, why is it the same, why do you exist too much?
You are too serious.
Dear Creature, its blissful and its painful and I dont know how to help you.
I didnt come to save you.
Hey Creature, little creature, what lovely eyes you have
Why are you crying? Stop crying! Do I look like christ?

"In Ivan I have lived, in Malina I will be dying"

field notes 2

'I'm just afraid "today" is too much for me, too gripping, too boundless, and that this pathological agitation will be part of my "today" until its final hour'

I had warned him, that I'm no longer subject to his will, that I've changed, from now on I'll treat everyone the way I'm treating him, with immediate retaliation for every breach of contract

Is spirit a form of matter?          Adopt me, embrace me.          the necessity of loss          The faith, the pain, the sorrow of an absent God          'the always already'          Does it end at the logic of essence?         

Are you a lawyer of the empire?

she suffered an invasion of christianity by her judaism

The Vegetative Soul

Ruin

'The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It is experience itself: neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything.'

Derrida.

Angela: Am I pure?

Author: Purity would be as violent as the colour white. Angela is the colour of hazelnut.
I have a great need to live from much poverty of spirit and not have any luxury of soul. Angela is luxury and upsets me. I will move away from her and enter a monastery, which is to say, become poor. I chose today to wear some very old trousers and a torn shirt. I feel good dressed in rags, I am nostalgic for poverty. I ate only fruit and eggs, I refused the rich blood of meat, I wanted to eat only what's born without agony, just blossoming naked like an egg, like the grape.

A Breath of Life, Lispector

She's at it again, fainted
into a whipped up sunned out mass.
Whats she gonna do now, that all her previous advices have gone to pot?

Lightly gathering memories of saw-dust, the smell of it
Poured like cooked sugars, into tiny pyramids.
Peek inside, to find curled up, gathered up bodies
Protecting themselves from the wind and the grain.
She wants to hear it again, the whistle of a wooden instrument
Blown all the way through holes 
that make notes. How she longs to bare her sweet throat
Into the outdoors. Out of her pointed roof.

the monkey on the back, or was it a monkey wrench thrown somehow, or an elephant in the experimental writer's room?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSCQPSrlNbk

you are me

you are my action, my root
and the the only way to go forward.
In being without you, I am doing without being.
You are my pinpoint,
my depth beneath the surface,
my everlasting covenant.
You are my wine, my foot in the ground,
my hunger and my worth.
Without emblem, without symbol
you are me,
without quotation nor abbreviation
you are me,
without sensuality nor distraction
you are me.

أنت أنا أنت فِعلِي, أنت جَذرِي أنت الطريق الوحيد الذي من خلالِهِ أستطيعُ المُضيَّ. في كينونتي مِن دونك أنا أفعلُ من غيرِ أنْ أكونَ. أنت رأسُ إبرَتِي أنت عُمقي تحتَ السّطح وعهديَ الأبديّ. أنت نَبِيذِي وقَدَمِي على الأرْض وجوعي وقيمتي. من دون شعارٍ, من دون رمزٍ أنت أنا, من دون اقتباسٍ ولا اختصارٍ أنت أنا, من دونِ شهوانيّةٍ ولا ولهٍ

You are I You're real, you're a radical You are the only way through which I can go.

What if I loose and love you?

-

Because there is no Isolde in Islam, because there is only sexual ecstasy in the instant, in the ephemeral present, because Muslim death, no matter what they say, is masculine. Because to die, like my grandmother and like so many other women who know instinctively through their struggles and torments, what is a man, one "whose back one never sees," is to die like a man. In Islam all these women, the only ones who are alive right up to the moment they die - in a monotonous transmutation that I am beginning to regret grievously - the dead women become men!
     In this sense death, in Islam, is masculine. In this sense, love, because it is only celebrated in sensual delights, disappears as soon as the first steps of heralded death are danced. The first approach to the sakina, that is to full and pure serenity, is feminine moreover. But after this introduction, which is light as a woman's breath, death seizes the living, living men and women, to plunge them as equals- and suddenly all of them masculine- into abysses inhabited by souls "obedient to God."

Assia Djebar 
So Vast the Prison

I know it was an event because I was unprotected

Survival Pack
Fanny Pack
Nursing Pack
Healing Pack

C.L.

'What is called a beautiful landscape causes me nothing but fatigue. What I like are landscapes of dry and baked earth, with contorted trees and mountains made of rock and with whitish and suspended light. There, yes, a hidden beauty lies. I know that you don't like art either. I was born hard, heroic, alone, and standing. And found my counterpoint in a landscape without picturesqueness and without beauty. Ugliness is my banner of war.'

Clarice 

I don't hear you, so I'll give up

(The arts will save you)

"WE COULD BE SENSATIONAL"