instauration

instrSHn/
noun: instauration; plural noun: instaurations
1. the action of restoring or renewing something.


The best litmus test of a heritage, i.e. practice(s) that transcend, or dare say,
transgress death itself will be its affordance of bounce. How will a heritage,
once instilled, sustain through rejection and abandonment if not by actually
anticipating its aversions and adversity, carrying the seeds of its own rebellion?
The generation gap is more than a clich of folk psychology; a peculiar patina
shadows every human project. Remember, make it new. Whence this nostalgia
for the new; rather, when was it nave, when disingenuous? Who knew being
home-sick was chronic? We take a lesson from time itself, like a purgative it
restores as it rejects, disinters as it covers. Being so often, this dialectic suggests
a structured heritage with inherent narrative re-generation, much as the visionary
cycle in an epic poem winds the radius of reaction around, calling the heroic
home.

First of all this heritage would have to institute meaning over sentiment, a
perception more resilient than to distinguish nostalgia from the nostos of the epic
cycle. The return is then a return to a most meaningful world, where the
sentiments of childhood are imbued with intriguing memories yet unpacked,
impasses not born of violent trauma but the bruise of first blush, merely of
immature sensitivities to mature thought, deleberat gesture has gestation. This
manner of meaning as affection would go beyond mom or dads odd hobby or
obsession, it would hold for their whole world, not region, to be sure: World-ness,
thing-ness, here-ness. But kids know that special quality of world first hand, you
say? Yes but that's the ingredient fix we are working toward because parents
forgot. Because there is no better place to at once retrieve it and inspire that
world for parents than through the literal childs eyes. It is this respect for the
childs worldness, that the parent might remember having, and the child in turn
feels valued (such a rarity for a child) and this offers the initial character for a
heritage that actually serves its purpose of binding us with meaning and insuring
its sustainability. And then in turn : why would the world-weary, in a winter bloom,
NOT want to return to that?

What is worldness if not an awe of being and, furthermore, a humility? So much
is made of parents self sacrifice, but this is descent to the psyche world of the
child is of another order than the abandonment of self narrative, the reduction to
baby talk, suffocations in comforts, or silent and tense outings to the zoo,
resented sporting events and music lessons. this is a kind of meditative self-
sacrifice to a generativity that is readly available at home and actually returns the
generative power of being back in the sacrifice. Call it the gift that keeps giving ,
but calling the tortured lives of resignation to parenting a sacrifice is rightfully
repulsive. Without the additional dimension of mutual nurture what love is in the
making? The fact is, love is not all we need, we need that love expressed as
thought-through. One who is resigned to being with family is a pitiful thoughtless
creature and children are violated by that. And that is an impass that will
doubtlessly pre-empt the family life those children grow up to expect, likely a self-
filling prophesy. If meaningful life is a sustained wonder and search it rightly
begins within the home. But if home represents an anxiety of closure and it is
transferred to the child, we have an all too familiar scenario of an inner refrain:
Who would want to relive that life?

The search does not end at home, being integrated the search is then
characterized as home. Asking thoughtful, insightful questions means being alive
and curious, sensitive, capable of discover and gaining new affection. Hence the
joy of finding like minds, akin to finidng ones true tribe.The searching begins
before the prodigal even sets out. To return home is a keeping, preserving a vital
interest in even the smallest circle of reference, its most tiny increments of being-
with: even at the very moment of awakening and the last moments before sleep.

The phrase "Look back in anger" requires us to understand that "anger" here is
not simply an emotion, anger in this phrase is a fully mature disposition of
analysis. To look back critically. So we have the two most important points of
focus in the stress of life: how do we retain thinking in the moment of anger? How
do we retain thinking in the passion of love?

The ancient Greek philosophers had a lot to say about the method of doing this.
The Stoics delineate the process mostly by elevating the role of an interior arbiter
which they called hegemonikon, that which can separate the interior responses
of passions apart form the stimuli. Then applying another consultant the
proairesis The rational faculty we use to manage impressions - to give or
withhold assent to the impression. Keeping your head when all else are loosing
theirs. This separation of factors and excersing the proper amount of consent
allows one to then ssking what is the case? Aristotle calls proairesis: the
convergence of reason and desire and it is the key to human affinity: friendship.
He did not belive children had the capacity. That in no way suggest that children
do not incorporate it when they are in the presence of it, how ever mysterious it is
at the time. The practice is critical enough and dramatic enough to perform a
bond. As adults we come to know it more fully, more critically, par excellence as
the Philosopher Derreda puts it:

Friendship par excellence can only be human but above all, and by the same
token, there is thought for man only to the extent that it is thought of the other
and thought of the other qua thought of the mortal. Following the same logic,
there is thinking being if at least thought must be thought of the other only in
friendship. Thought, in so far as it is to be for man, cannot take place without
philia. (PF 224)

So it is not merely a matter of thinking in the face of emotion, suppressing the
feelings, being objective, etc., this critical capacity will be weak if it is not
strengthened, it will be impersonal if it is not been befriended and assimilated.
Thinking is not an apparatus that is at ones disposal, it's not even an organ that
lies dormant in a healthy body until needed, like a liver or penus. Thinking is a
maturation of being, it involves the very senses from the start, how the world is
seen, the poem heard, the problem assessed, the pastime passed. And finaly to
gather this together with Derrida belief, thinking is not even possible without
love!

What about anger? Well what anger is so far removed from love? My point
abpout anger though is this: Thinking in the context of anger brings with it the
thoughtful character that one is personally, any critical thinking in the heat of the
moment will not fail to appear false to others, exactly as in the case of love: what
lover wants to hear the impersonal thoughts in moments of intimacy, those of
being elsewhere?

To return to the start, I quickly passed over the qualification of heritage as that
which transgresses death. Lots of things survive human death: wheels, clouds,
fried eggs. But nothing better than loved thought. But for those fashioners of the
Western culture of thinking we call philosophy, neither women or children were in
possession of sufficient reason to command societies helm. They were merely
alive, zoe, as Agamben has reminded. But according to Foucault no one has
been more egregious of such bio-political perversity than National Socialism, for
whom controlling the random element inherent in biological processes was one
of the regime's immediate objectives. 1 If according to Robert Esposito this Nazi
biopower, which he extends as a zeal for limiting the aleatory element of life
and death2, is contradicted by my proposal recognizing the autonomous and
heteronomous as odyssey then this nostagia is Fascisms undoing.

An individuals polization is not public, in the state how telling that the Greek
word for state, hexis, bears connotation of such malady and superstition, as
Michael Taussig reminds us. Politization occurs in the most private exercise of
thinking, especially in the domestic, where thinking is most biologically rooted
and characteristically anterior to public accommodation, that is to say, at the
occult front, who can bear face what we have done to her?


1 Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended", 246

2 Roberto Esposito, Bos xxi.






3. How naturally we entify and give life to such. Take the case of God, the
economy, and the state, abstract entities we credit with Being, species of things
awesome with life-force of their own, transcendent over mere mortals. Clearly
they are fetishes, invented wholes of materialized artifice into whose woeful
insufficiency of being we have placed soulstuff. Hence the big S of the State.
Hence its magic of attraction and repulsion, tied to the Nation Michael
Taussig ; The Magic of the State; p. 3.