In this four-week short course (meeting once a week for 2 hours), we’ll explore the extraordinary implications of Silverman’s reading of Andreas-Salomé. We’ll read Flesh of My Flesh alongside Looking Back by Andres-Salomé, from which Silverman draws some of her most exciting ideas. I remain thrilled by my first reading of Silverman’s book and want to think more deeply about the consequences of the cosmology she is sketching.
Reviewers shared my appreciation for this work:
"This is an extraordinary book: Silverman's magnum opus. In some respects it is sui generis, and yet its stakes are so high they could almost be called universal. In my opinion, this is the kind of book that one comes across only a few times in one's life. It is that important."—George Baker, University of California, Los Angeles
“… to read it is to feel that you have traveled an extraordinary distance by standing in one place. The repercussions of this book about finitude are infinite."—James Longenbach
"[this] is a haunting and quite palpably haunted look at the costs of living in illusions of solitude. Kaja Silverman's thesis, pursued over centuries of artistic work and thought, is that it is in the experience of analogy that an authentic approach to mortality is possible…” —Adrienne Harris, New York University
My reading of this book, and her more recent The Miracle of Analogy, places her account of the “saving power of analogy” firmly within the broad context of the varied cosmologies of Jung, Hillman, Henry Corbin and others. Ivan Illich has said that every culture before that of the modern, technological west lived in a world of correspondences between what is known and immediate and what is unknown. In the cases of Illich, Corbin and his “spirituals” of both Islam and Christianity, this unknown is the world to which religious experience corresponds. I have long thought that Corbin’s mundus imaginalis can and should be understood as continuous with less exalted examples of imaginal reality that we encounter in our daily lives. I will argue in this class that the very term imagination is a bit misleading be cause it is for us so closely tied to the acts of individuals. For Corbin, Jung, Hillman, and I think Illich, it is more helpful to regard the imagination “in us” as continuous with the matrix of reality in which we are embedded.
Central to Corbin’s theology is prayer, as the supreme act of creative imagination. This prayer is dialogical. The Lord and his Vassal are co-creators - simultaneously known and unknowable, each to the other - and each requires the other to exist: I am only I because you are you, in Illich’s words. This vision of the dialogical, personal basis of all reality can be explictly theological as it is for Corbin and Illich, and Levinas and Buber for that matter. But it need not be, as we see I think in Luce Irigaray, and now in Andreas-Salomé and Kaja Silverman. Silverman puts this vision neatly: “two is the smallest unit of being.”
Andreas-Salomé, discussing her relation with Rilke wrote of the resulting communion, “Two halves did not seek completion in each other. But a surprised whole recognized itself in an unfathomable totality. So then we were rather like primal siblings, before incest had become sacrilege.” And astonishingly and wonderfully, as Silverman points out, she insists that this ontological kinship is “not limited [to] human beings alone, but opens simultaneously even to the dust of the cosmos.”
To my mind this provides us with another approach to the primal animism that we find in Corbin’s reading of Proclus, in Hillman and his favorite Renaissance Platonists, and among our contemporaries such as Emanuele Coccia, Luce Irigaray and so many others who are hoping to reorient us away from the toxic effects of our modern world gone so far astray.
“Looking back” is for Silverman an allusion to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, also central to Elizabeth Sewell’s magnificent 1960 text, The Orphic Voice. The myth and it’s varied readings over the centuries is a tale of relationality. It is by means of relationship in all it’s forms that any metamorphosis in ourselves or our cultures will occur. This is the central topic for me in all of the work we have been doing in these seminars. This implications for our lives and the lives of all beings are profound. Living a life in sympathy with beings requires a radical transformation of everyday life.
I invite everyone who is interested to come along for the ride. We generally get energized and we all think it’s been worth the time. If you might want to register, at whatever level of support, please send me an email at tcheetham@gmail.com.
Everyone registered gets the recordings so if you can’t make it to class it’s ok. Full tuition is $150 for 4 classes, 2 hours each. The syllabus is HERE.
Wow! I like the inclusion of Illovich. Have a great class.