ernst jünger in cyberspace

mailing list archive - Re: Die Schere #15: Notes

Wahrscheinlich so ein bebrillter Pickelknabe, der heimlich unter der 
Bettdecke den HUSTLER liest.
> 
> DIE SCHERE #15: Notes
> This is a strikingly enigmatic text, inserted -- there is no evident (1) 
> connection to the previous not to the following texts -- before EJ returns in #16 
> to the topic taken up in #12. The language, both its grammar and its images, is 
> so compressed that only the initiated will grasp what EJ means to say or rather 
> to intimate here. You may, though, become one of those initiated if you study and 
> compare other passages in EJ's works where he speaks in a similar fashion about 
> what he addresses here. His topic is what is, to my mind, the secret centre of 
> his later writings: what is beyond the Wall of Time ("Zeitmauer") and the ways 
> how to get closer to it. Here he mentions collective memories of mankind 
> ("gemeinsame Erinnerungen") and experiences shared by all humans -- pain and 
> bliss -- which may take us to the threshold or may signal that beyond there might 
> be ("sollte es...geben") something we can only surmise as being greater and more 
> wonderful than anything we know here. As usual EJ presents this idea as an image: 
> beyond there might be a text of which we have only read its traces on blotting 
> paper. (2) 
> I am aware that this is a brazen simplification of a text which is deliberately 
> enigmatic. The grammar, to begin with, is ambiguous: who is the subject, the "we" 
> of this text: every human, or exclusively the few initiated readers of this text 
> who understand it and are on the same wavelength as its author? Or does a 
> visionary speak here for all mankind? Moreover, the image "Kreuzwege" is 
> ambiguous as well: it can mean 'crossroads' but also 'stations of the Cross'; 
> without further qualification it is almost empty of meaning -- unless the 
> initiated knows what specific "Kreuzwege" the Master has in mind. Similarly, the 
> statement, "we have very often encountered each other there", is vague or banal 
> for the common reader, But for those who know their EJ intimately it will be a 
> shorthand symbol for -- well, I have not yet done enough close and comparative 
> reading of EJ to dare to go on. 
> (1)You may detect, however, a link between "Doch wird jeder Punkt bedeutend -- ob 
> er merkt wird oder nicht" in #15 and the concept of the foreboding signal which 
> can be sensed and decoded by the sensitive or the elect only, in ##13 and 14.
> (2) A noteworthy new visualization of a concept expressed e.g by Plato (Politeia, 
> Book 7) through the image of the shadows on the cave wall or in St Paul's 
> "through a glass, darkly"(1 Corinthians 13, 12) 
> 
> Guenter Rebing
> 
> 
> 
-----------------------------------------------
Nele Morkel,
Librarian
Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik,
82067 Ebenhausen,Germany
Tel: +49 8178 70 265 / Fax +49 8178 70 332
email:Morkel@swp.extern.lrz-muenchen.de


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