Finite And InfiniteGames

The Golden Qoutes:

death in life is a misfortune, the resigned acceptance of a loser’s status, a refusal to hold any title up for recognition.
He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life
Death is not, therefore, chosen, but inflicted. It happens to one when the struggle against it fails. Death comes as a judgment, a dishonor, a sign of certain weakness.
If I accept death as inevitable, I do not struggle against mortality. I struggle as a mortal.
Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedom persons have with limits.
Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules. Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power. It is the forced recognition of a title—and therein lies the contradiction of evil, for recognition cannot be forced. The Nazis did not compete with the Jews for a title, but demanded recognition of a title without competition. This could be achieved, however, only by silencing the Jews, only by hearing nothing from them. They were to die in silence, along with their culture, without anyone noticing, not even those who managed the institutions and instruments of death.
Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it is “the last, best hope on earth.” It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels.
Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. Theytherefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.
One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others.
Society and culture are therefore not true opponents of each other. Rather society is a species of culture that persists in contradicting itself, a freely organized attempt to conceal the freedom of the organizers and the organized, an attempt to forget that we have willfully forgotten our decision to enter this or that contest and to continue in it.
Heroes of lost battles are almost never memorialized. :(
It is therefore essential to the effectiveness of every title that it be visible and that in its visibility it point back at the contest in which it was won. The purpose of property is to make our titles visible. Property is emblematic. It recalls to others those areas in which our victories are beyond challenge.
We do not proceed through a traffic intersection because the signal changes, but when the signal changes.
The theatricality of property has, in fact, an elaborate structure that property owners must be at considerable labor to sustain. If property is to be persuasively emblematic, that is, if it is to draw attention to the owner’s titles in past victories, a double burden falls on its owners: First, they must show that the amount of their property corresponds to the difficulty they were under in winning title to it. Property must be seen as compensation. Second, they must show that the type of their property corresponds to the nature of the competition by which title to it was won. Property must be seen to be consumed.
After athletic contests in which major titles have been at stake, it is common for the audience to lift the winners to their shoulders, marching them about as if they were helpless—in the sharpest possible contrast to the physical skill and energy they have just displayed.
If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and great might must be performed brilliantly.
The deepest and most consequent struggle of each society is therefore not with other societies, but with the culture that exists within itself— the culture that is itself
Conflict with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for a society to restrain its own culture
This is why patriotism—that is, the desire to protect the power in a society by way of increasing the power of a society—is inherently belligerent. Since there can be no prizes without a society, no society without opponents, patriots must create enemies before we can require protection from them. Patriots can flourish only where boundaries are well-defined, hostile, and dangerous. The spirit of patriotism is therefore characteristically associated with the military or other modes of international conflict.
Because patriotism is the desire to contain all other finite games within itself—that is, to embrace all horizons within a single boundary —it is inherently evil.
We are never somewhere in relation to the horizon since the horizon moves with our vision. We can only be somewhere by turning away from the horizon, by replacing vision with opposition, by declaring the place on which we stand to be timeless—a sacred region, a holy land, a body of truth, a code of inviolable commandments. To be somewhere is to absolutize time, space, and number.
Any culture that continues to influence our vision continues to grow in the very exercise of that influence
A people, as a people, has nothing to defend. In the same way a people has nothing and no one to attack. One cannot be free by opposing another. My freedom does not depend on your loss of freedom. On the contrary, since freedom is never freedom from society, but freedom for it, my freedom inherently affirms yours. A people has no enemies.
Finite players go to war against states because they endanger boundaries; infinite players oppose states because they engender boundaries.
The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing the people who invented it. Infinite players, however, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies. “Sometimes it is possible to kill a state without killing a single one of its members; and war gives no right which is not necessary to the gaining of its object”
For infinite players the chief difficulty with finite players’ commitment to war is not, however, that persons are killed. Indeed, finite players themselves often genuinely regret this and do as little killing as possible. The difficulty is that such warfare has in it the contradiction of all finite play. Winning a war can be as destructive as losing one, for if boundaries lose their clarity, as they do in a decisive victory, the state loses its identity
Plato suggested that some of the poets be driven out of the Republic because they had the power to weaken the guardians. Poets can make it impossible to have a war—unless they tell stories that agree with the “general line” established by the state. Poets who have no metaphysics, and therefore no political line, make war impossible because they have the irresistible ability to show the guardians that what seems necessary is only possible.
Metaphysics is about the real but is abstract. Poetry is the making (poiesis) of the real and is concrete. Whenever what is made (poiema) is separated from the maker (poietes), it becomes metaphysical. As it stands there, and as the voice of the poietes is no longer listened to, the poiema is an object to be studied, not an act to be learned. One cannot learn an object, but only the poiesis, or the act of creating objects. To separate the poiema from poiesis, the created object from the creative act, is the essence of the theatrical.
You can have what you have only by releasing it to others. The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all. The words die with the sound.
To speak, or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary of the self. It is to leave behind the territorial personality. A genius does not have a mind full of thoughts but is the thinker of thoughts, and is the center of a field of vision. It is a field of vision, however, that is recognized as a field of vision only when we see that it includes within itself the original centers of other fields of vision.
To be the genius of myself is not to bring myself into being. As the origin of myself I am not also the cause of myself, as though I were the product of my own action. But then neither am I the product of any other action. My parents may have wanted a child, but they could not have wanted me. I am both the outcome of my past and the transformation of my past.
Speaking in purely causal terms, I cannot say I was born; I should say rather that I have emerged as a phase in the process of reproduction. A reproduction is a repetition, a recurrence of that which has been. Birth, on the other hand, in causal terms, is all discontinuity. It has its beginning in itself, and can be caused by nothing. It makes no sense to say, “I was reproduced on this date and in this place.” To say “I was born” is to speak of myself as having an uncaused point of departure within the realm of the continuous, an absolute beginning not comprehensible to the explanatory intelligence.
As such a phenomenon birth repeats nothing; it is not the outcome of the past but the recasting of a drama already under way
Whenever we act as the genius of ourselves, it will be in the spirit of allowing the past to be past. It is the genius in us who is capable of ridding us of resentment by exercising what Nietzsche called the “faculty of oblivion,” not as a way of denying the past but as a way of reshaping it through our own originality. Then we forget that we have been forgotten by an audience, and remember that we have forgotten our freedom to play.
I am not touched by an other when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center— that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response.
When actors bring themselves to tears by their performance, and not as their performance, they have failed their craft; they have become theatrically inept. This means that we can be moved only by persons who are not what they are; we can be moved only when we are not who we are, but are what we cannot be.
When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within— and whoever touches me is touched as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are shattered by touching. Whoever touches and whoever is touched cannot but be surprised. (The unpredictability of this phenomenon is reflected in our reference to the insane as “touched.”) We can be moved only by way of our veils. We are touched through our veils.
One is never ill in general. One is always ill with relation to some bounded activity. It is not cancer that makes me ill. It is because I cannot work, or run, or swallow that I am ill with cancer. The loss of function, the obstruction of an activity, cannot in itself destroy my health. I am too heavy to fly by flapping my arms, but I do not for that reason complain of being sick with weight. However, if I desired to be a fashion model, a dancer, or a jockey, I would consider excessive weight to be a kind of disease and would be likely to consult a doctor, a nutritionist, or another specialist to be cured of it.
Society iswhere we prove to parents qua audience that we are not what we thought they thought we were. Since the emphasis in this relationship is not on what our parents thought of us but on what we thought they thought, they become an audience that easily survives their physical absence or death. Moreover, for the same reason they become an audience whose definitive approval we can never win
The most serious struggles are those for sexual property. For this wars are fought, lives are generously risked, great schemes are initiated. However, who wins empire, fortune, and fame but loses in love has lost in everything.
Sexuality is not a bounded phenomenon but a horizonal phenomenon for infinite players. One can never say, therefore, that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celibate, or adulterous, or faithful—because each of these definitions has to do with boundaries, with circumscribed areas and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned not with power but with vision. :| Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be part of the play.
No family is united by natural or any other kind of necessity. Families can convene only out of choice. The family of infinite lovers has this difference, that it is self- evidently chosen. It is a progressive work of unveiling. Fathering and mothering are roles freely assumed but always with the design of showing them to be theatrical. It is the intention of parents in such families to make it plain to their children that they all play cultural and not societal roles, that they are only roles, and that they are all trulyconcrete persons behind them. Therefore, children also learn that they have a family only by choosing to have it, by a collective act to be a family with each other.
The triumph of finite sexuality is to be liberated from play into the body. The essence of infinite sexuality is to be liberated into play with the body. In finite sexuality I expect to relate to you as a body; in infinite sexuality I expect to relate to you in your body.
World exists in the form of audience. A world is not all that is the case, but that which determines all that is the case.
We are players in search of a world as often as we are world in search of players, and sometimes we are both at once. Some worlds pass quickly into existence, and quickly out of it. Some sustain themselves for longer periods, but no world lasts forever.
The reciprocity of game and world has another, deeper effect on the persons involved. Because the seriousness of finite play derives from the players’ need to correct another’s putative assessment of themselves, there is no requirement that the audience be physically present, since players are already their own audience. Just as in finite sexuality where the absence or death of parents has no effect on the child’s determination to prove them wrong, finite players become their own hostile observers in the very act of competing
I cannot be a finite player without being divided against myself.
We look on childhood and youth as those “times of life” rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain so many paths open to a successful outcome. Each year that passes, however, increases the competitive value of making strategically correct decisions. The errors of childhood can be more easily amended than those of adulthood.
For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free.
The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed.
As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player’s temporality. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning.
Each moment is not the beginning of a period of time. It is the beginning of an event that gives the time within it its specific quality. For an infinite player there is no such thing as an hour of time. There can be an hour of love, or a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor.
For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.
Just as infinite players can play any number of finite games, so too can they join the audience of any game. They do so, however, for the play that is in observing, quite aware that they are audience. They look, but they see that they are looking.
The mother does not give birth to a child; the mother is where the birth occurs.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed It is as though, by learning its secret script, we have learned to direct its play as well. There is little left to surprise us.
Because of its thorough lawfulness nature has no genius of its own. On the contrary, it is sometimes thought that the grandest discovery of the human genius is the perfect compatibility between the structure of the natural order and the structure of the mind, thereby making a complete understanding of nature possible.
This is as much as to say that nature does have a voice, and its voice is no different from our own. We can then presume to speak for the unspeakable.
While our great skill lies in finding patterns of repetition under the apparent play of accident and chance, less successful civilizations dealt with the threats of natural accident by appealing to supernatural powers for protection. But the voices of the gods proved to be ignorant and false; they have been silenced by the truth.
If speaking about a process is itself part of the process, there is something that must remain permanently hidden from the speaker. To be intelligible at all, we must claim that we can step aside from the process and comment on it “objectively” and “dispassionately,” without anything obstructing our view of these matters.
There is no such thing as an unnatural act. Nothing can be done to or against nature, much less outside it. Therefore, the ignorance we thought we could avoid by an unclouded observation of nature has swept us back into itself. What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisenberg).
We are speaking now of no ordinary ignorance. It is not what we could have known but do not; it is unintelligibility itself: that which no mind can ever comprehend.
Unveiled, aware of the insuperable limitation placed against all our looking, we come back to nature’s perfect silence. Now we can see that it is a silence so complete there is no way of knowing what it is silent about—if anything. What we learn from this silence is the unlikeness between nature and whatever we could think or say about it.
But this silence has an irony of its own: Far from stupefying us, it provides an indispensable condition to the mind’s own originality. By confronting us with radical unlikeness, nature becomes the source of metaphor.
At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word “falcon.” To say that we have the falcon,and not the “falcon,” is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak as nature itself
Our attempt to take control of nature, to be Master Player in our opposition to it, is an attempt to rid ourselves of language. It is the refusal to accept nature as “nature.” It is to deafen ourselves to metaphor, and to make nature into something so familiar it is essentially an extension of our willing and speaking. What the hunter kills is not the deer, but the metaphor of the deer—the “deer.” Killing the deer is not an act against nature; it is an act against language. To kill is to impose a silence that remains a silence. It is the reduction of an unpredictable vitality to a predictable mass, the transformation of the remote into the familiar. It is to rid oneself of the need to attend to its otherness.
Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context of the necessary; stories set all necessities into the context of the possible.
Explanation can tolerate a degree of chance, but it cannot comprehend freedom at all. We explain nothing when we say that persons do whatever they do because they choose to do it. On the other hand, causation cannot find a place in narrative. We have not told a story when we show that persons do whatever they do because they were caused to do it—by their genes, their social circumstances, or the influence of the gods.
If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.
Successful explanations do not draw attention to themselves as modes of speaking, because what is explained is not itself subject to history. If I explain to you why cold water sinks to the bottom of the pond and ice rises to the surface, I certainly do not intend my explanation to be true now and not later. The explanation is true anywhere and any time. That I choose to explain this to you in this time and place, however, is historical; it is an event—the narrative of our relation with each other. There must therefore be a reason for the speaking of this verity.
I can explain nothing to you unless I first draw your attention to patent inadequacies in your knowledge: discontinuities in the relations between objects, or the presence of anomalies you cannot account for by any of the laws known to you. You will remain deaf to my explanations until you suspect yourself of falsehood.
Many of these suspicions are, of course, minor, requiring merely small adjustments in one’s views, incurring no doubt whatsoever concerning those views. Major challenges, however, are too serious to be met with argument, or with sharpened explanation. They call either for outright and wholesale rejection, or for conversion. One does not cross over from Manichaeism to Christianity, or from Lamarckianism to Darwinism, by a mere adjustment of views. True conversions consist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world. All that was once familiar is now seen in startlingly new ways.
The victorious do not speak with the defeated; they speak for the defeated.
The speech of a god can be so perfectly expressive of that god’s power that the god and its speech become identical: “In the beginning was the word. The word was with God, and the word was God.”
One is speechless before a god, or silent before a winner, because it no longer matters to others what one has to say. To lose a contest is to become obedient; to become obedient is to lose one’s listeners. The silence of obedience is an unheard silence. It is the silence of death. For this reason the demand for obedience is inherently evil.
Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefore not about anything; it is always to someone. It is not command, but address. It belongs entirely to the speakable.
The meaning of a finite speaker’s discourse lies in what precedes its utterance, what is already the case and therefore is the case whether or not it is spoken.
The meaning of an infinite speaker’s discourse lies in what comes of its utterance—that is, whatever is the case because it is spoken.
Finite language exists complete before it is spoken. There is first a language—then we learn to speak it. Infinite language exists only as it is spoken. There is first a language—when we learn to speak it. It is in this sense that infinite discourse always arises from a perfect silence.
Finite speakers come to speech with their voices already trained and rehearsed. They must know what they are doing with the language before they can speak it. Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not have had without the response of the listener
Finite speech informs another about the world—for the sake of being heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other—for the sake of listening.
Infinite speakers do not give voice to another, but receive it from another. Infinite speakers do not therefore appeal to a world as audience, do not speak before a world, but present themselves as an audience by way of talking with others. Finite speech informs another about the world—for the sake of being heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other—for the sake of listening.
It is for this reason that the gods, insofar as they speak as the lords of this world, magisterially, speak before this world and are therefore unable to change it. Such gods cannot create a world but can only be creations of a world—can only be idols. A god cannot create a world and be magisterial within it. “The religions which represent divinity as commanding whenever it has the power to do so seem false. Even though they are monotheistic they are idolatrous” (Weil).
A god can create a world only by listening. Were the gods to address us it would not be to bring us to silence through their speech, but to bring us to speech through their silence. The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure of silence.
Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing.
Infinite speakers are Plato’s poietai taking their place in the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives.
Fate arises not as a limitation on our freedom, but as a manifestation of our freedom, testimony that choice is consequent. Theexercise of your freedom cannot prevent the exercise of my own freedom, but it can determine the context in which I am to act freely.
Chaos and order describe the cultural experience of nature—the degree to which nature’s indifferent spontaneity seems to agree with our current manner of cultural self- control. A hurricane, or a plague, or the overpopulation of the earth will seem chaotic to those whose cultural expectations are damaged by them and orderly to those whose expectations have been confirmed by them.
Animal husbandry is a science, a method of controlling growth. It assumes that animals belong to us. What is source in them is to be resource for us. Cattle are confined to pens to prevent such movement as would “toughen” their flesh. Geese, their feet nailed to the floor, are force fed like machines until they can be butchered for their fattened livers.
True parents do not see to it that their children grow in a particular way, according to a preferred pattern or scripted stages, but they see to it that they grow with their children. The character of one’s parenting, if it is genuinely dramatic, must be constantly altered from within as the children change from within. So, too, with teaching, or working with, or loving each other.
Being undivided, nature cannot be used against itself. We do not therefore consume it, or exhaust it We simply rearrange our societal patterns in a way that reduces our ability to respond creatively to the existing patterns of spontaneity. That is, to use the societal expression, we create waste. Waste, of course, is by no means unnatural. The trash and garbage of a civilization do not befoul nature; they are nature—but in a form society no longer is able to exploit for its own ends.
Society regards its waste as an unfortunate, but necessary, consequence of its activities—what is left when we have made essential societal goods available. But waste is not the result of what we havemade. It is what we have made. Waste plutonium is not an indirect consequence of the nuclear industry; it is a product of that industry.
Waste is unveiling. As we find ourselves standing in garbage that we know is our own, we find also that it is garbage we have chosen to make, and having chosen to make it could choose not to make it. Because waste is unveiling, we remove it. We place it where it is out of sight. We either find uninhabited areas where waste can be disposed of, or fill them with our refuse until they become uninhabitable. Since a flourishing society will vigorously exploit its natural resources, it will produce correspondingly great quantities of trash, and quickly its uninhabited lands will overflow with waste, threatening to make the society’s own habitation into a wasteland.
Because waste is unveiling, it is not only placed out of sight, it is declared a kind of antiproperty. No one owns it. Part of the contradiction in the phenomenon of waste is that treating nature as though it belongs to us we must soon treat nature as though it belongs to no one. Not only does no one own waste, no one wants it. Instead of competing to possess these particular products, we compete to dispossess them. We force it on others less able to rid themselves of it. Trash accumulates in slums, sewage runs downstream, airborne acid drifts hundreds of miles settling on the lands of those powerless to halt its “disposal” into the atmosphere. Thousands of square miles of farm lands have been laid waste by the construction of multilane highways, or submerged by dams whose water is used to flush waste from distant cities.
Waste is the antiproperty that becomes the possession of losers. It is the emblem of the untitled.
A people does not become superfluous by itself, any more than natural waste creates itself. It is society that declares some persons to be waste. Human trash is not an unfortunate burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct; it is its direct product. European settlers in the American, African, and Asian continents did not happen to come upon populations of unwanted persons nature had thrust in their way; they made them superfluous by way of some of the most important and irreversible principles of their societies.
God did breathe life into us, but in order to continue living we had to do our own breathing.
We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it, we can only speak as it. Yet, though I speak as genius, I cannot speak for genius. I cannot give nature a voice in my script. I can not give others a voice in my script—without denying their own source, their originality. To do so is to cease responding to the other, to cease being responsible. No one and nothing belong in my script.
MYTH PROVOKES Explanation but accepts none of it. Where explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.
Knowledge is what successful explanation has led to; the thinking that sent us forth, however, is pure story.
Copernicus was a traveler who went with a hundred pairs of eyes, daring to look again at all that is familiar in the hope of vision. What we hear in this account is the ancient saga of the solitary wanderer, the peregrinus, who risks anything for the sake of surprise. True, at a certain point he stopped to look and may have ended his journey as a Master Player setting down bounded fact. But what resounds most deeply in the life of Copernicus is the journey that made knowledge possible and not the knowledge that made the journey successful.
That myth does not accept the explanations it provokes we can see in the boldness with which thinkers in any territorial endeavor reexamine the familiar for a higher seeing. Indeed, the very liveliness of a culture is determined not by how frequently these thinkers discover new continents of knowledge but by how frequently they depart to seek them.
We do not go out searching for stories for ourselves; it is rather the stories that have found us for themselves.
Stories that have the enduring strength of myths reach through experience to touch the genius in each of us. But experience is the result of this generative touch, not its cause. So far is this the case that we can even say that if we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.
Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.
Storytellers become metaphysicians, or ideologists, when they come to believe they know the entire story of a people. This is history theatricalized, with the beginning and end in plain sight. A psychoanalyst who looks for the Freudian myth in patients imposes a filter that lets through nothing the psychoanalyst was not prepared to find.
We resonate with myth when it resounds in us. A myth resounds in me when its voice is heard in mine but not heard as mine. I do not resonate when I quote Jeremiah or when I speak as Jeremiah, but only when Jeremiah speaks in a way that touches an original voice in me
The resonance of myth collapses the apparent distinction between the story told by one person to another and the story of their telling and listening
The gospel can be heard nowhere except from those who themselves
Even when it is God who is heard by the prophet, it is a god who speaks in the language and idiom of the prophet, and not in locutions restricted to divine utterance—as though that god’s speaking were itself a form of listening.
When a single voice is sufficiently amplified, it becomes a speaking that makes it impossible for any other voices to be heard. We do not listen to a loudspeaker for what is being said, but only because it is all that is being said.
The amplified voice seeks obedient action on the part of its hearers and an immediate end to their speech. There is no possibility of conversation with a loudspeaker.
The loudspeaker, successfully muting all other voices and therefore all possibility of conversation, is not listened to at all, and for that reason loses its own voice and becomes mere noise. Whenever we succeed in being the only speaker, there is no speaker at all s
Julius Caesar originally sought power in Rome because he loved to play the very dangerous style of politics common to the Republic; but he played the game so well that he destroyed all his opponents, making it impossible for him to find genuinely dangerous combat. He was unable to do the very thing for which he sought power. His word was now irresistible, and for that reason he could speak with no one, and hisisolation was complete.
The myth of Jesus is exemplary, but not necessary. No myth is necessary. There is no story that must be told. Stories do not have a truth that someone needs to reveal, or someone needs to hear. It is part of the myth of Jesus that it makes itself unnecessary; it is a narrative of the word becoming flesh, of language entering history; a narrative of the word becoming flesh and dying, of history entering language. Who listens to his myth cannot rise above history to utter timeless truths about it.
It is not necessary for infinite players to be Christians; indeed it is not possible for them to be Christians—seriously. Neither is it possible for them to be Buddhists, or Muslims, or atheists, or New Yorkers— seriously. All such titles can only be playful abstractions, mere performances for the sake of laughter. Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.