Originary Grammar and Political Grammar

Looking it over, the problem is really with any explicit agreement: either the two parties themselves decide what it means, in which case each has an interest in its interpretation and you just generate conflict; or, you appoint a third party, who can continually re-interpret the meanings of the different elements of the agreement (this is what actually happens). Declarative culture relies more and more on such agreements--perhaps it's a power grab by those with high verbal IQs--which seems to promote a more voluntary, consensual social order, but in fact institutes increasingly arbitrary power. The real purpose of making declarative order putatively autonomous is to break up the chain of command, i.e., the imperative order.

---

I drank deep of Nietzsche many years ago, and haven't gone back much since (of course, he gets referred to an interpreted all over the place, so one is always reading him)--may of these arguments hold up very well. Gans sees metaphysics as representing the primacy of the declarative sentence, and somewhere along the line he might owe Nietzsche a bit for that insight.

Sometimes I'm aware of the stylistic/comprehensibility issue you raise; it certainly wouldn't hurt to be more aware of it.

---

Well, the name of God, in Exodus, "I AM THAT I AM," is anything but a dishonest declarative. That Name-of-God as the declarative sentence is the transcendence of imperative names of god, i.e., gods with whom one could enter a transaction, an imperative exchange. To the God of Abraham and Moses, we can only give ourselves unreservedly.

The resentment we find in the Hebrew Bible is directed towards the failure of the people to adhere to divine law, with the historical catastrophes befalling the Jews attributed to that failure. There is always resentment towards the center, i.e., God, but there is also taking on God's resentment towards those who have betrayed their promise to him. This is a post-Big Man, post-imperial recovery of the originary scene--on that, I agree with Gans. I see the political implications of this differently, but only the Hebrew Bible provides a thorough working through of sacrificial logics. And only by resisting sacrificial logics can we apply ourselves to building social structures resistant to violence.

Nietzsche's mistake was in assuming that some people resent, and others (natural aristocrats) don't--we are all, in fact, constituted by resentment. (I'm pretty sure the passage you quote above refers to Socrates, since dialectics and syllogisms were the Greek speciality. OF course Nietzsche has complementary critiques of Judaism.) Nietzsche's account of the men of the future who will create new values is also different from his portrait of the archaic aristocrat. Zarathustra has resentments that need to be transcended.

Antisemitism is resentment of the Jews and there is anti-Gentile Jewish resentment. Gans sees antisemitism as resentment of Jewish firstness in the discovery of monotheism--this certainly seems to me true in the case of Christianity, which depends on the Jewish God and is thwarted by the Jewish adherence to their own "local" nationalist version of it. Modern nationalisms resent the cohesion of Jews as a foreign entity within their countries, and Jews have certainly worked to interfere with any corresponding cohesion on the part of their host countries. Modern, secular leftist Jews have certainly been, if not the inventors, especially busy and effective promulgators of certain "dishonest declaratives," based on a resentment of national and ecclesiastical orders that excluded them. Absolutism can solve this problem by ceasing to delegate certain "middleman" duties to Jews and, of course, by shutting down liberalism and therefore the left; Israel offers another solution, as it seems to me likely that secular Jews are likely to dissolve into the general US population over the next couple of decades.

---

Far from orthodox, but I practice a little.

---

So, the Jews didn't really discover anything, and what they did discover is the opposite of what they think they did (and degenerate). It seems to me the Jews must have discovered something about resentment.

---

On the sarcasm question, it could go either way. Anyway, it ain't over till it's over. Maybe the secular Jews are getting sloughed off, and a national-orthodox remnant will remain.

---

Well, I've never seen Gans write about Hinduism and I know nothing about it myself, so I'd be glad to see what you can contribute.