I can’t tell if I want my initial assessment of it as dependent on some sketchy binaries, poor analyses of fantasy literature (Gormenghast and the decadent phase of Minas Tirith as equivalent???) and unacknowledged recapitulations of Nietzsche to be accurate or not, because on second, more sympathetic assessment, I think the final essay in David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules just made me even more Christian.



Christian ethics and theology seem designed to resolve, dialectically, the ultimate binary he sets up - between play, as complete arbitrary freedom that entails recourse to complete arbitrary power over others (sovereignty) , and game structures, sets of absolute rules limiting, rendering predictable and ineffective the arbitrary violence of play with their own, orderly violence. For power and violence to exit this system would imply the paradoxes of the Sermon on the Mount - that the last shall be first, that the meek and poor in spirit shall inherit the Earth and heaven - and by extension that central Christian theological mystery, that the most fully giving, self-sacrificing existence, the God who would give up bliss in heaven and die on the cross for the sins of all, is given absolute sovereignty over the universe: a sovereignty that can only be manifested through the actions of the faithful, and if realized fully would look something like a unified, but not homogenized (as the persons of the Trinity already are within God?) play of the whole of existence: that is, the utopian Kingdom



Mind you, prior to reading this particularly exact articulation of the problem of play and sovereignty, when I encountered it in other contexts (Afro-pessimism, Blood Meridian - the Judge! the Dance!), my instinct had been just to say “fuck it, I’ll operate on the belief that some ethical space for resolving the contradiction between one’s own and the Other’s ability to actively play must exist, even if, or because it’s impossible”. Which is also a stance grounded in Christian philosophy, albeit one that does not imply Christianity the way the dialectical one does - Kierkegaard’s first and foremost example of this faith in the impossible, taken to its furthest lived extent which is categorically beyond saying it on a blog, was the Jewish patriarch Abraham.



I’m not sure whether there is or should be a contradiction between these approaches - although the dichotomy between them looks worryingly like Graeber’s own all over again, the dialectical solution putting all the elements of the paradox in their rigidly ordered places in its logical argument, the impossible exercising its absolute sovereignty.



All this said it might also have made me more pagan. There’s another interesting thing in Graeber, where he says that both absolute sovereignty and absolute law are abstractions, impossible in the real world. Which makes sense, and also doesn’t rule out the possibility of an absolute ethical balance of the two - but locates it somewhere in the Real, demesne of that beautiful and terrible Lady (as I know firsthand as a poet, even if some Slovenian CIA asset hadn’t derived it from a perfunctory analysis of medieval poetry). Graves and C. S. Lewis - both sides of the fence - opposed Her in the fiercest terms to the God of Christianity, but then Graves also opposed Her in binary terms to games and bureaucratic order, while Lewis opposed Her to play and sovereign freedom. Her relationship to the God on the cross may be impossible to determine until we can figure out how the Real plays into the theological equation anyway.



(then there’s this which how to even introduce this to this discussion)