On Loss and Absolute Loss

People speak of lost works of antiquity. This refers to works of which only fragments remain. If such works are lost, then absolutely lost works are those of which no fragments remain.

This entails the numberlessness of the dead, and the reality of the void.

Some would like to deny this, saying we can speak only of what exists, and that nothing is beyond words. This is false to the body’s remembrance of suffering.

Only a body that has never had to struggle for its life can take its existence for granted.

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We survey the past from the promontory of the present. This is why Engels is wrong to footnote the Manifesto, after Marx’s death, with the observation, of pre-history, that we find evidence in the archeological record of societies he calls communistic, evidently minded to think that, after the revolution, such societies will recur, reiterated at a higher level – if we read his comment charitably. But pre-history is rather the void beyond the knowable past into which we peer, the condition of possibility that there should be history at all. Ontology is foreign to history in its focus on the phenomenal to the exclusion of the noumenal, which besides being the metaphysical, the null set to which we can only point, is also the housing of the moral.

The Church is a historical materialist if she would do justice, as she does in the document celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, observing that Christians and Jews differ concerning the figure of Jesus.

A modernist aesthetics that focuses on the materials of which paintings are made yields an art that is ostensibly secular while tacitly Christian, because rooted in the tradition of depiction of this man. This tension is the signal theme of postmodernity, coming, as it does, after a time in which men were content to deceive themselves concerning the slippage between Christian and secular universality, or to banish the Jews outright by contending the absorption of the former into the latter, and the abolition of religion entirely, of which Judaism cannot be stripped without killing it. Kant’s modernity entails, as he made explicit, the euthanasia of Judaism, and if he cannot be charged with the crimes of the Germans, his premonition of them legitimates the rejection of a modern scheme of secular universality that does not attend to this slippage.