When I cruise the forty-three television channels available to me (and that's basic cable), simultaneously being enchanted and disgusted by much that I see (a kind of Kantian sublime), I cannot help but think that the culture in which I find myself is less articulate than ever. For this situation perhaps the 43rd President of the United States could serve as a useful emblem—a joke that is all too easy to make. But such a diagnosis of the low standard of (...) my culture's literacy might also be too easy to make. For it is the case that America's traditional anti-intellectualism reaches new heights in our current, hypermediated milieu: we now have more venues than ever to disseminate undisciplined, uncreative thought (think, for example, of all the burgeoning blogs). On the other hand, such hypermediation amounts to an explosion of symbolization. Language is everywhere, and hence there is the demand to use it instrumentally well. Again, an image from the U.S. presidency is emblematic. Think of President Clinton's infamous line to the intrepid Independent Counsel: "It depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." Such a line could represent the pervasive urge to absolutely precise articulation, controlling one's words to an extreme degree. Another emblem could be the common academic paper where a writer has masterfully summarized and explained the words of another thinker, rendering them more accessible but probably not more desirable. One could read this situation dialectically: the moment when concern for the value of language seems lowest is also the moment when the demand for controlling language is highest. Beyond dialectics, however, I take the demand for absolute articulation as a jumping-off point for considering an idea that might appear to have nothing to do with this implicit yet persistent demand—the concept of presence. More specifically, I want to consider how a particular rendering of this concept affects what we might call the divine and its relationship to an ostensibly secular culture, and I also want to consider some lines from Emerson and how they can lead one to think of the divine as presence, a presence that requires an absence, a presence that to some extent is an absence. According to this encounter with Emerson, thinking about the presence and absence of the divine has to do with the way one takes up writing. (shrink)

All of us had fallen from 100 stories.Falling is rarely a good thing. It is something to avoid for safety, and such avoidance, for those of us fortunate enough to be in good health, has been burned into the unconscious memory of our muscles and bones. Unless we find ourselves in high places, or on some kind of precipice, falling tends not to be on the mind. It is, most of the time, a surprise.But it is also always a possibility, (...) in part because of one of those characteristics that define the human—our upright posture. Without this trait that. (shrink)

Prologue: Encounter -- Confrontation -- Silence -- Mourning -- Presence -- Enlightenment -- Disturbance -- Practice -- Event -- Epilogue: Endeavor.

This essay is a philosophical reading of Don DeLillo’s novel, The Body Artist, and his essay, “In the Ruins of the Future.” Focusing on the issues of loss, mourning, and terror after the attacks of September the 11th, I argue that DeLillo gives a picture of mourning as something that occurs through a loss of language. This loss does not end language; instead, it occurs through language.