December 12, 2006

Sri Aurobindo is the picture of the writer-sorcerer

Daniel Gustav Anderson: Of Syntheses and Surprises INTEGRAL REVIEW 3, 2006
The spirit behind the culture, like Bradley’s Universal Justice, is really the Absolute Spirit; this is Cousins’s thesis and Aurobindo’s. Because the significance of cultural production is synthesized with cosmic significance, the stakes extend beyond the racial heritage of Hamlet and Paradise Lost toward a global ideological crisis (recalling Zizek), appropriate to the conditions of the British Empire...
26 Specifically, neither the key-to-all-mythologies, God-is-on-our-side implications of "the perennial philosophy" as articulated in Aurobindian or post-Aurobindian theory, nor the valence of paranoia (or at minimum neurosis) implicit in the synthetic model of integration according to which every detail (all quadrants, all lines) must be accounted for, gridded, and hung on the proper peg of the spectrum of consciousness or its functional equivalent, will ever survive a vigorous ideological analysis.
As the purpose of this criterion is to ensure the Integrality of a given theory, an explication of it will begin with Aurobindo. While he did not reject the more-than-Miltonic role Cousins assigned to him as a potential world-teacher, Aurobindo used his writing of Savitri primarily as a means of transformation, of becoming, for himself.29
Deleuze and Guattari30 give a precise mapping of this process, according to which a multiplicity or collective "brings a becoming-molecular that undermines the great molar powers of family, career, and conjugality" (p. 233)—the social forms held in place by the strange songs of ideology, such as the fictional "traditional" family or fictional "traditional" marriage, to give two live contemporary examples of instances of ideology as Zizek defines them. To generalize, becoming is transformative in nature, therefore potentially destructive, and potentially liberating.31 The challenge Deleuze and Guattari describe is to become something other than a belligerent bullet-brained fantasy-enforcing machine.

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