Monday Workshop Cancelled — 06.02.14 — Apologies
Comments Off on Monday Workshop Cancelled — 06.02.14 — ApologiesMonday Workshop Cancelled — 06.02.14 — Apologies
We apologize for any inconvenience caused due to this cancellation.*
*In the spirit of this cancelled evening of words mattering, we thought to
at least write that the word cancel is linked to the late 14c. usage,
meaning to “cross out, obliterate, or delete writing with lines across
it.” It derives from the Latin “cancellare”, which is to make resemble a
lattice. In late Latin it took on a sense of crossing out something which
has been written by marking it with crossed lines. Cancelli are lattices,
or plural form of cancellus “lattice, grating, crossbars.” Figurative use
of nullifying an obligation, like I intend to cancel your debt to me,
comes from mid-15c. If debt is a kind of promise, and one day these
promises are cancelled, obligations nullified, what kinds of promises do
we want to make to one another. We promise we will resume this
conversation.
Also a note regarding apology, it appears the english usage emerges in the
early 15th century, “defense, justification,” from Late Latin apologia,
from Greek apologia “a speech in defense,” from apologeisthai “to speak in
one’s defense,” from apologos “an account, story,” from apo- “from, off”
(see apo-) + logos “speech” (see lecture (n.)).
We made a promise, a kind of speech, written, to host something, and now
we move away from that speech, that promise, those words. It is the same
apo prefix used in apocalypse, the word which emerges in the late 14c.
signifying “revelation, disclosure,” from Church Latin apocalypsis
“revelation,” from Greek apokalyptein “uncover, disclose, reveal,” from
apo- “from” (see apo-) + kalyptein “to cover, conceal” (see Calypso).
Its general sense in Middle English was “insight, vision; hallucination;”
its meaning as “a cataclysmic event” is modern. It is also the same apo of
apophantic speech, that is speech which moves away from, parts from
phantasma, image, phantom, apparition or mere image, unreality, and is a
speech which can be verified, as true or false, even in its preposition.
Forms of speech such as prayer and command are non-apophantic; but what
about a promise?
What the promise promises is not so much ‘this’ or ‘that’, a ‘what’
against a ‘that’, but pure unconditionality of the event that brings
together, in a lightening flash, the immemoriality of the past, and
eternity of future, so that the eternity of future may erupt at any time.
Therefore for me, this promise character of temporality, and the temporal
character of promise must bind together, at an impossible and absolute
moment the end and beginning, the Eschatos and the an-archic archè: this
is the true notion of the event, which we will call, borrowing Hölderlin’s
beautiful phrase: ‘monstrous copulation’ – what becomes in perishing away,
so that joy and melancholy, eternity and temporality, language and
silence, love and death touch each other at the extremity of time, which
is also an inception of time. This lightening flash of the moment, if it
at all can be said to have an ethical signification, can be said to be an
‘ethics of finitude’: it is the finitude of the moment that while erupting
and presencing, withdraws from and burns away, cancels all presents.
Thus this inapparition is the genuinely apparition parexcellence: finitude
that alone opens us to the infinitude, and that alone exposes us to the
being and the world, before any first, and after every last. We understand
the being and the world only on the basis of this prior and also this
infinite posterior, understood properly, manifestation.