Thanks! You may also enjoy John’s very fun periplum thread, to which I contributed the Stevens parody Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Periplum, which managed to not be the best poem in the comment section. A fellow by moniker Bad Jim achieved ambrosian immortality and brought back a little to share with us. Good times.

You might enjoy these lines from an old song:

If you will not when you may,
You shall not when you will, sir.

:)

God’s law … is not a moral, rigid list of do’s and don’ts just for the heck of do’s and don’ts, it is indeed [instituted] to protect us from ourselves. And the biggest [“]self[,” or source of sin,] of [any] self is indeed self[ishness]. [This is the case, that is,] If sin is in fact grounded in this notion of what is it that I want, as opposed to somebody else.

Or, pretty much what Kevin Robbins said. Sanford’s point is identifiable as a pretty standard Christian understanding of sin. In fact, I would not be shocked to hear an evangelical pastor using the “biggest self of self is indeed self” line in a sermon. The audience would understand perfectly.

However, this journey has been far more valuable to me than the destination: I’d really like to buy Salient lunch for sharing with us the majesty of #13.

I think it is a slip of the tongue, that he meant to say that the biggest sin of self is self. That is in line with Christian theology that says that sin is separation from God, and that the main thing that separates us from God is our limited, individual self, which differentiates us and separates us from God and others.

I also found this statement of interest: “But I’m here because if you were to look at God’s laws, in every instance it is designed to protect people from themselves. ”

I have to wonder if he follows the Republican line that man’s law should not protect people from themselves. If so, then the question arises, why should God’s law do that but not man’s law? :)

Attempting to extract a mystical meaning from the original is maybe more fun, but, at a certain point, mystery crosses the line into gibberish, and you have to ask yourself if that was really what he meant to say.

Following Zizek (c.f. http://www.lacan.com/zizekother.htm) Sanford asserts the inexistence of the big Other, and indeed notes the futility of the injunction to BEHAVE in the name of the big Other, and instead succumbs to its obscene underside. The big self is therefore none other than itself.

Sanford has uttered undoubtedly the most psychoanalytically sophisticated political enunciation of the nature of protestant selfhood of this century.