groupings who profited from the hierarchic system as rulers or agents of the system at various levels.” “When Israel used the term ‘Canaan/Canaanite’ to designate those enemies, precise socioeconomic and political groupings and functionaries within the hierarchic system were meant: Canaanite Kings, Canaanite armies, Canaanite merchants, Canaanite landowners/ overseers, Canaanite city-state officials and Canaanite gods and cults and their priestly functionaries.” “Canaanite refers to a hierarchic socioeconomic and political system peopled by kings, administrators, armies, deities, priests, etc. In short, a system and a set of roles and functionaries ideologically justified and energized by certain beliefs about gods and by cult acts resolutely geared to solidify the system and to extend the system.” (p. 587) Conclusions: Yahwism acts as an egalitarian counter to Canaanite civilizing ethos. Yahwism isn’t a ‘re-tribalization’ effort, it’s a rewilding effort of which tribalization is a necessary evil for purposes of self-preservation.
The Body and Revolt By Massimo Passamani (excerpt) The entire history of Western Civilization can be read as a systematic attempt to exclude and isolate the body. From Plato on, this has been seen as folly to control, impulse to repress, labor power to arrange, unconscious to psychoanalyze. The Platonic separation of the body and the mind, a separation carried out to the complete advantage of the latter (“The body is the tomb of the mind”), even accompanies the seemingly most radical expressions of thought. A profound liberation of individuals entails an equally profound transformation of the way we conceive the body, its expression and relations. Due to a battle-trained Christian heritage, we are led to believe that domination controls and expropriates a part of the human being without damaging her inner being. I think instead that our body has suffered and continues to suffer a terrible mutilation. And this is not only due to the obvious aspects of control and alienation determined by technology. (That the bodies have been reduced to reservoirs of spare organs is clearly shown by the triumph of transplants, which is described with an insidious euphemism as a “frontier medicine.” But to me the reality seems much worse than pharmaceutical speculations and the dictatorship of medicine as a separate and powerful body reveals.) The food, the poisoned air, the daily relations have atrophied our senses. The dreadful chit-chat tortures both the mind and the body since no separation is possible between them. “Morality is exhaustion,” said Nietzsche. To affirm ones own life, that exuberance that demands to be given, entails a transformation of the senses, ideas and relationships. I have frequently come to see people as beautiful, even physically, who had seemed almost invisible to me until a short time earlier. When you test yourself in resistance, when you fight back with someone, you see in your friends beautiful individuals, and not the sad faces and bodies that extinguish their light. I believe we really are becoming beautiful in the moment when we resist that which attempts to separate thought from action.
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