Thursday, February 07, 2008

Imagined Discontents

[A global silence from Faith and Theology by Ben Myers
“As we now go about Americanizing the globe – excuse me – as we now go about extending the benefits of universal human rights that have been discovered by a universally valid procedure of rational communication, perhaps we ought to be aware of which differences we silently obliterate, and perhaps we ought to remember that the universality of a cosmopolitan language is necessarily also accompanied by the universality of a global silence.”
— William Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004), p. 129.]
Setting up well demarcated domains of universal and individual where there exists none is the most overlooked methodological error of such analyses. To ignore the transcendental is another. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, therefore, have alerted us not to see the socio-political in isolation, and always keep the Individual-Universal-Transcendent continuum in mind. [TNM]

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