Hannah Arendt

                           The human condition 

              'This unpredictability of outcome is closely related to the revelatory character of action and speech, in
              which one discloses one's self without ever either knowing himself or being able to calculate beforehand
              whom he reveals. The ancient saying that nobody can be called 'eudaimon' before he is dead may point
              to the issue at stake, if we could hear its original meaning after two and a half thousand years of
              hackneyed repetition; not even its Latin translation - 'nemo ante mortem beatus esse dici potest' - conveys
              this meaning ... For 'eudaimon' means neither happiness nor beatitude ... It has connotations of
              blessedness, but without any religious overtones, and it means literally something like the well-being of
              the 'daimon' who accompanies each man throughout life, who is his distinct identity, but appears and is
              visible only to others.' 
              (p.190.90) 


Silence
. '[it] is an object more inhuman than
              human, since chance operations brought it into being ... [which] gives the work the alarming aspect of a
              Frankenstein monster. This situation is of course characteristic of Western music, the masterpieces of
              which are its most frightening examples, which when concerned with humane communication only move
              over from Frankestein monster to Dictator.' 
              (p/36/44) 
John Cage

"games of chance" 'postmodern' societal recombinatoric

apophantic speech/divination/chance operations/recombinatorics/sorcery/skiagraphic/scototropic/chiasmus/'writing'-'reading'....programming/re-programming--coredump/chiasma=aporetic moment

Within the heart of the crossing lies the very disturbance of its equilibrium--the place of sorcery, an uncontainable recombinatoric, the leg of unequal length of the chiasmus. there, at the bend of the mobius strip, lies a roulette wheel which the teleology of the Crossed (the embodiment of the Christos) wishes to subvert (and intentions/wishes are, by definition, necessitous to the funtioning of the Pull--and Push--from the Event At the End of Time). But the linearity (the teleology, as it were) of the legs of the cross is belied by the scotoma, the darkness, at its heart (like modernism, always based on visibility, the horizon,the sublime), which especially the most fervent know (st. John's dark night of the soul, Bataille's general economy, masquerading as a horizon).

The (un)communitive nexus of the philosophies of proximity: the Impossible, the catastrophic, the dis-aster: the very unimpeachable crossing of thought and action--techne, at its 'heart' a scotograph, 'an instrument for writing w/o seeing', the body w/o organs. The end of the xtian era means the demise of the legs (both figuratively and literally) and the ascendency of the 'darkness'of the heart--now a gaming parlor--, the shadows cast by the crossing itself. The whole economy of the so-called 'postmodern' is the economy of the game of chance, the tossing of the globe into the monstrosity of the collapse, the death of the human (always defined by the [virtual, historical] trail of flesh through time, the genealogical). All attempts to 'fix it' ('put the fix on' as they say in gaming when the tables are rigged) generate an equal and opposite reaction now. An exploded chiasmatic is now at the heart of everything, a perpetually dissolving / reappearing schematic whose specifications can never be followed 'to the letter' (that way being sorceric, always the dark philosophy of the crossroads--the interface of silence [apophanisis], fortuna, the inchoate crossings of matter, psyche, energy. These 'dead letters' do not rely on relays of posts--the technical--but, again, what seems to be the vertiginously impossible for any rational human: birth and death).

The 'prime number' generator of this crossing at infinity is, and always has been, death. But what happens when death becomes a form of archival indexing? Then birth becomes of no consequence as the recombinatoric moves to the machinic. When chance operations invade every space, the Body w/o Organs is in play. A problem: even thought you have no hands, all you can do is hold on for the ride. The advice: in witchcraft, the advice is always to concentrate on your hands in your dreams.