Nicola Masciandaro has an excellent post up on animals and the medieval contemplative text The Cloud of Unknowing. I must say the speculative medievalism that's emerging seems very exhilarating.
I was teaching in my graduate class on rhetoric about the real loss that post-medieval rhetoric experienced—that is, post-Ramist rhetoric in which logic and rhetoric are sundered. This broke metaphysics from rhetoric and ultimately from philosophy itself, until it became a dirty word. Everyone up to De Man is living in a Ramist world.
This is why we need speculative realist rhetorical theories and why Masciandaro's material on apophasis is very encouraging.
I'm more of a Sunn O))) guy than a black metal guy but only perhaps through ignorance.
Thank you Timothy for this encouragement, which prompts me to think about the Cloud-author's contemplative investment in monosyllabic words as a kind of animalization of the word, a bringing of logos back to where it *is* what it speaks of.
ReplyDeleteSo your initiation into black metal docta ignorantia is already under way . . . visio sine comprehensione, speculatio!
Thank you Nicola--I really enjoyed hearing the show about black metal so I guess I am underway already...
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