Dialectic of Idealization: Dream & Terror
By Dr. Eugene Narrett - September 12, 2011
My theory of image work is derived from the study of Western Literature and Culture. Image work analyzes and explains the results, found in all cultural fields, of idealization, the dominant drive of what we call the West (first weavings c 150 – 1050 CE; identity formation 1050-1250 CE; elaboration 1250 {the Renaissance} – c 1790; unweaving, c 1790 {The Marriage of Heaven and Hell} – today). In the West, and perhaps in other idealizing cultures, idealization is a process of transfiguration and its core myth is a figure of transfiguration, an avatar whose metalepsis is the sangreal which translates as "sacred dish," "dish of blood" or "royal blood." The use of the "holy grail" itself is a transvaluation of the Hebrew concept that "the life is in the blood" but that, in contrast, thus forbids consumption of blood. The West makes this consumption, at once symbolic and 'real' a means of transfiguration. Most major rituals in the West require the prefix and concept "trans" before them. The West derives this transfigurative drive from the ancient Greek emphasis on metamorphosis as the primary fact of life.
The essence of Blake's transvaluation of values beginning with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell became a less mythic and gnomic force a century later with Nietzsche who, in his Twilight of the Idols uncannily adopts some of the aphoristic quality of Blake's seminal work. For example, "How the True World Finally Became a Fable," a critique of the "castrative" and "extirpative" thrust of Christianity toward the passions is like one of Blake's "Memorable Fancies."
Like most of Nietzsche's works, Twilight has many arresting and useful comments on aesthetics, idealization and their relation to eros. I will adduce them in this sketch of the dialectic aspect of image work, an agon of transfiguration that is the West's sneaky gift and related to the 'wrestling' of Socratic dialog, as Nietzsche noted [1].
In the first or idyllic stage of image work, an image ideal is imagined and the identity of the image generator or 'host' begins to move into it. This triumphant, joyous and quest-like transfigurative act is countered in the second, apocalyptic stage when the image-ideal begins to dominate and displace the host whose identity it absorbs and represents, becoming a focus of fascination and imitation. The tenor of this second phase increasingly is terror. This leads to the weakening and collapse of the cultural or individual body or 'parent cell' and the concomitant authoritarian petrifaction of the image whose demands that it be recognized as the 'true' being become more insistent as it becomes more artificial and imposed. The strains of this last phase develop a dominant elegiac mood as the dying generator, a Narcissus laments its fateful love for its image and subservience to it; in the modern world, the institutions of State, the ultimate image or persona ("mask") organize insincere and inflated memorials (and build them) to the 'sacrifice' of the culture it has encrusted and killed.
Note that "idyll" and "idyllic" derive from eidellion or "little idol"; the West's transfigurative myths, epistemology and rituals in all fields are a form of idol worship which the Hebrew Scriptures unerringly identified as an aggressive, imperial and suicidal way of being. The intersection of Greco-Roman late Classical culture/civilization with Israel was the most magnificent, productive and fissionable tragedy in history. It is apt that idol probably derives from the Hebrew avel, vain or futile, and the Greek word was used in this sense by early Church 'fathers.' Image derives from Latin imago-imaginem (shadow, image, apparition, fantasy, echo and their synonyms) which in turn derived from the Greek magik – magike or shadow work. The West's way of being makes all cultural matters aesthetic products, a magike – tekne or image-weaving, a pattern of shadows applied to transfigure the natural world. The futility and collapse of image work is shown in the West's drive through apocalypse to elegy. Post-Modern mockery and 'appropriations' are the last stage and the first stage of the West.
The dynamics of this thesis explain why the Hellenic matter with its emphasis on metamorphic imagery and transfiguration, within "the West" will increasingly absorb, deform-transform and suppress the Hebraic material. This process is readily apparent in the changing curriculum of European and, even more so, of American Universities during the past two centuries; in the growth of a culture of images; the inflation and reduction to two-dimensional, fictive quality of Western currencies; in the geopolitics by which the West first isolated, then sought to exterminate the Jews and then, via a series of 'peace' initiatives seeks to bury the essence of Israel with a virtual people for a virtual peace. It is in its relation to the Jews as much or more than in its deployment of a distraction machine of imagery that one sees the process of image work progressing from apocalypse to elegiac phases as I have indicated....
Dr. Narrett is available to lecture and his services are available as an editor or co-writer of fiction or non-fiction projects. For more information, you can contact Dr. Narrett via his website at:
http://israelendtimes.com/contact/
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jewish Eye.
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Esau and the Dialectic of Terror, by Dr. Eugene Narrett.
The dialectic of managed terror, attrition and threats of major conflict is growing in the Middle East. The client states ... in the region now are grouped into two clearly identifiable blocks... The choices are to lose oneself in everyday concerns and their imperatives and/ or to feel, at least at the edges of consciousness a heightening of terror...
Image-Work and Nietzsche's Critique of Wagner, by Dr. Eugene Narrett.
This essay investigates the nature of Esau and his relation to Ya'akov largely by means of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's wide-ranging critique of Wagner.
