paradox

Paradox

//"...the encounter could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe! Granted, that's a worst-case scenario."// -- Dr. Emmet Brown, //Back to the Future Part II// paradox, contradiction, irony, counter-intuitive, complexity not all the same, but a cluster of related and often overlapping concepts

Tao: interdependence of opposites. ambiguity of opposition

Woodcock: Paradox of Oscar Wilde Proudhon: "man of paradox" pride in "inconsistency" (Woodcock: "the only living thought is that which has retained its power to change"........) Proudhon: don't trust a writer who claims to be consistent with himself... Whitman: There is room in me for contradiction, I contain multitudes!" Cartoon: your illusion of a stable consciousness...

Derrida (in Collis: anarcho-scholasticism p. 19) archive is both "Revolutionary and conservative" structured by "paradoxical 'drives'" ("archival desire" and "archive fever"). Collis describes how poet Susan Howe "depicts the paradox of the (an)archive through the 'visual violence' ... of her collages." (20) Perhaps the most striking paradox in Collis' discussion of (an)archivality comes in his account of an "uncanny" experience in which, by writing a post card to poet Phyllis Webb about his research, exploring her correspondence in the National Library, he realized that the card he was writing might itself end up back in the archive where he had been — whereupon he felt himself to be "under the watchful eyes of the archons, and simultaneously to be thwarting their archontic function" of creating something "finished, closed, complete" (22). See note on futurity at: time.

Esther Perel: Eroticism, complexity and the paradox of "mating in captivity" "introduce risk to safety, mystery to the familiar, and novelty to the enduring." eroticism and egalitarianism play by different rules

Mysticism [Herbert Read... vs.Zerzan-esque **primitivism**; Bookchin's critique; Le Guin / Shevek / Odo's rejection; Anarchy Alive's dismissal] Anagogy?

theology and mysticism (see anagogy)

Tao...

In a book investigating the role of Christianity in American culture, Rodney Clapp claims that "Christians are people who must learn to live amid tensions and with contradictions. [...] We worship a God who is both three and one, and follow a Savior whom we know as fully human and fully divine. Our tradition teaches us that these are not brute or final contradictions, but that only God can experience and know these realities comprehensively, see the entire picture at once." (xii) Clapp similarly invokes "America's simultaneous embrace of holiness and hedonism, its pining love of tradition as it carries on a headlong romantic affair with progress, its extreme individualism coursing beside a gigantic, gaping yearning for community, and its insistence on innocence at the same time it revels in violence." (xiii)

Herbert Read's claim that, compared to orthodox Marxists' tendency to abjure religious concepts altogether, anarchism //is// a religion (or could become or lead to a new one), is especially interesting in this regard. Read's insistence on the importance of both art and spirituality, and his contempt for political philosophizing that fails to respect them, are aspects of his thinking that have aged well, seeming even more relevant today than when he was writing (though in ways he may not have anticipated).

Ernst Bloch's very unorthodox Marxist philosophy of art, reflected in the grandeur of his three-volume opus //The Principle of Hope//, is a fascinating example of work that attempts to break free from the dogmatic ignorance of religion, while retaining commitment to social transformation. I think Read would have approved, but I've yet to find acknowledgment of Bloch in any of Read's writings.