66 theory
- Heidegger, “Age,” 148.
- Heidegger, “Age,” 128.
- Heidegger, “Age,” 149.
- Heidegger, “Age,” 134.
- Heidegger, “Age,” 135.
- Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the
Limits of Reason Alone,” in Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds.,Religion(Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1998), 56. A more thorough and careful discussion than we can
develop here would attempt to identify and elaborate, in both historical and theoretical
terms, the important distinctions and relations among these three categories. - On this “mystical foundation” of authority, see especially Derrida’s much dis-
cussed essay “The Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundations of Authority,’ ” inDecon-
struction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell (New York: Routledge, 1992). - Barbara Maria Stafford, “Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains,” inDe-
vices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen(Los Angeles: Getty
Publications, 2001), 79. - Stafford,Devices, 53. As I will suggest in my conclusion, it may well be that
we would need to draw distinctions here between the sacred and the mystical, such
that the rationalized technologies under discussion here might prove to realize the
“mystical” while threatening the “sacred.” - On “the gigantic” (das Riesige) see “Age of the World Picture,” in Martin Hei-
degger,The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt
(New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 135: “A sign of this event is that everywhere and
in the most varied forms and disguises the gigantic is making its appearance. In so
doing, it evidences itself simultaneously in the tendency toward the increasingly
small. We have only to think of numbers in atomic physics. The gigantic presses for-
ward in a form that actualy seems to make it disappear—in the annihilation of great
distances by the airplane, in the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in
their everydayness by a flick of the hand.” To this one might compare the later essay
“The Question Concerning Technology” (1953), where Heidegger signals the “mon-
strousness” that reigns when nature—above all in the form of energy—is ordered
and approached in terms of the availability and manipulability of “standing reserve.”
See “The Question Concerning Technology,” inBasic Writings, ed. David F. Krell
(New York: Harper and Row, 1977), esp. 297–303. - Serres,Angels, 71.
- Don DeLillo,Underworld(New York: Scribner, 1997), 808.
- Ibid., 824–825.
- Compare, for example, the Serres or DeLillo passages just quoted to Nicholas
of Cusa’s description of the cosmos whose center and circumference are an incom-
prehensible God (itself echoing Alain de Lille echoing theCorpus Hermeticum): “Since
it is not possible for the world to be enclosed between a corporeal center and circum-
ference, the world, whose center and circumference are God, is not comprehended”;
“the world and its motion and shape cannot be grasped, for it will appear as a wheel
in a wheel and a sphere in a sphere, nowhere having a center or circumference,”
from “On Learned Ignorance” inNicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans.
Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 158, 160.