Sufficient Unto the Day: Sermones Contra Solicitudinem

213 Pages·2014·1.88 MB·English

by  Nicola Masciandaro

Sufficient Unto the Day: Sermones Contra Solicitudinem

Which of you by taking thought [μεριμνῶν: lit. being divided,
separated into parts, dis-tracted] can add one cubit to his
stature? – Matthew 6:27

You can be invincible if you do not enter any contest in which
victory is not up to you. – Epictetus

S U D
UFFICIENT NTO THE AY
Sermones Contra Solicitudinem

Nicola Masciandaro
SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY: SERMONES CONTRA
SOLICITUDINEM
© Nicola Masciandaro and Schism Press

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy
of this license, visit: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/3.0.

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NOTE: Portions of this book have been published previously:
“The Sweetness (of the Law),” Non Liquet: The Westminster
Online Working Papers Series, Law and the Senses Series: The
Taste Issue (2013): 40-60; “Getting Anagogic,” Rhizomes:
Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 19 (2010); “Half Dead:
Parsing Cecilia," in Dark Chaucer, eds. Joy, Masciandaro, and
Seaman (Brooklyn: Punctum, 2012), 69-88; “Gourmandized in
the Abattoir of Openness,” in Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia
Symposium, eds. Keller, Masciandaro, and Thacker (Brooklyn:
punctum, 2012), 179-189; “Paradise Now: The Heresy of the
Present,” Passive Collective 2 (2012); “Becoming Spice:
Commentary as Geophilosophy,” Collapse VI: Geo/Philosophy
(2010): 20-56.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The author is grateful to Steven
Shakespeare, Eugene Thacker, and Gary J. Shipley for their
efforts and encouragement in support of publishing this
collection.

Cover: Stefano Maderno (1575-1636), Martyrdom of Saint
Cecilia, S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. Public domain image.

ISBN-13: 978-0692222416
ISBN-10: 0692222413
CONTENTS

Introduction 1

I. The Sweetness (of the Law) 6

II. Nunc Dimittis: Getting Anagogic 43

III. Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia 53

IV. Wormsign 70

V. Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness 85

VI. Grave Levitation: Being Scholarly 94

VII. Labor, Language, Laughter: Aesop and the 105
Apophatic Human

VIII. This is Paradise: The Heresy of the Present 145

IX. Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy 154

X. Amor Fati: A Prosthetic Gloss 184

XI. Following the Sigh 193

INTRODUCTION

And all those who contradict it, I contradict them and
care not a jot for them, for what I have said is true, and
truth itself declares it.
– M. E.

Like every heretic, he [Meister Eckhart] sinned on the
side of form.
– E. M. Cioran1

The writings collected in this volume are bound by a common
desire to refuse worry, to reject and throw it away the only way
possible, namely, by means that are themselves free from worry.
If this is impossible—all the more reason to do so. For such is the
inescapable condition of thinking authentically against worry, of
intellectually attacking it without fraud or self-dramatization, via
a resolution that is not “sicklied over with the pale cast of
thought.” The very intimacy of worry and thinking—a fact
forgotten in the modern loss of the sense of ‘worry’ from the
word thought—demands in every moment a form of thought that
is free from itself, not wayward or merely affective thought, but a
thinking that goes rigorously where it will without concern. A
thinking that slows its own speed and knows the scent of its
death.2 If any of the words herein fail to fulfill this free principle

1 The reader’s delight in the word-play here made between heretical
sinning on the side of form and the mystical inversion of oneself (me ->
em) will be increased by remembering that Cioran’s middle initial (M,
em) is his own fiction, a “name [that] illustrates the Cioranian paradox”
and figures “not belong[ing] to the ‘once-born’,” but to the “’sick souls’
or ‘divided selves’ . . . who strive [like Meister Eckhart] for a ‘second
birth’” (Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, ed. Kenneth R.
Johnston [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009], 8).
2 “Both thought and I are caged together in a crypt-ical illusion, carrying
each other's hallucination. The more I speed it up, the less I am myself .
. . To slow it down is to start smelling the dampness of its supercognitive
crypt” (Alina Popa, Dead Thoughts).
1