how many pages are there in the Talmud?

is it a traditional (ie fixed) number?

thanks.

______________________________________

PS – charlotte,

thanks for your link to the Phillip Bess article on

“PETER EISENMAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE

OF THE THERAPEUTIC”.

your link here was most likely

where i discovered it first.

to the Girard/Gardels conversation,truepeers.

The unnamed writer of this article inclines me to dislike Eisenman, though I don’t know how fair this is. I would like to see and hear more before I judge him. But, if this argument is true -

“Eisenman argues that dislocating texts sever architecture not only from sacred order, but also from a classically presumed relationship to “truthfulness.” Architecture HAS traditionally symbolized–by its beauty and durability–truthfulness, in being ultimately symbolic of the presumed reality of sacred order. This reality has its consolations, to be sure, but its demands routinely produce forms of spiritual uneasiness (a.k.a. “conscience”) perhaps too easily passed over by those dislocating angels of the modern intellect so eager to save us from our supposedly comfortable and opaque inner lives. Eisenman’s own dislocating symbolic is allegedly opposed to the notion of representing truth in architecture. But essential to Eisenman’s strategy of the dislocating text is his intended architectural symbolization of the presumed truth of the absence of sacred order–or, to put it another way, the symbolization of the alleged truth of our times, including the notion that “it is no longer possible” to believe in God.” -

then I would have to say I think Eisenman is confused, but perhaps also his critic. It is easy enough to ignore the sacred, but it is not possible, in my view, to satisfactorily explain or define the human without reference to it. All culture entails a center-periphery relationship. This essential structure is inherently sacred and sacrificial, no matter how secular and profane a person you are in using it.

Symbols, like buildings, are neither true or false. They are either appropriate or inappropriate in pointing to the sacred or profane. Their appropriateness is a question of the role they play for the people who must use them. Questions of truth and falsity, as philosophers know them, entail forms of logic and representation that have evolved over time out of the sacred sign, and whose relationship to symbols (the ostensive sign is the most primitive form of language) is several steps removed from the primitive experience of the sacred or profane. But that’s not to say that we are served by forgetting that experience if we want to know on what our ideas are founded.

The philosopher/”theorist” can forget the sacred, but not the worthy anthropologist, just as the therapeutic culture this writer so correctly critiques can promise us a utopian “self-fulfillment” while forgetting the really serious work of actually explaining why we are resentful beings (we resent the rival who we feel has alienated us from the central thing/place/sign) and what we can reasonably do about it in a fallen world of human conflicts.

But when Eisenman’s critic writes -

“Religion is also the ultimate means by which existing social orders are judged wanting, and thereby resisted, in the name of What is Right. The truth of our time and any time is that without reference to sacred order and its demands all intellectual criticism, all politics, and all social life–in many ways truly and intrinsically endless power gamesóare nothing but power games.” -

I have to hesitate. The critic’s apparent fear of our falling out of the sacred is anthropologically unfounded. It’s not possible. Just as this writer was bound to come along to remind Eisenman of the sacred, anyone who thinks we could leave the sacred behind is fooling himself whether he is nominally for or against the sacred and transcendent. And, in my view, religion need not be the ultimate means for judging the social order. There is a kind of anthropology that can take equally seriously the sacred and sacrificial basis of human society.

While neither religion nor anthropology can answer the ultimate questions, resolve the fundamental mysteries, one may well choose either religious thinking or thinking about religion to approach these mysteries. Both can be very serviceable, or lacking.

If you want to know where my ideas are coming from, here are a couple of links. First, a recent interview of the anthropologist and Christian, Rene Girard, who made profound discoveries about the sacred. He provides a timely critique of relativism (if I may link a blog that has been derided here):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/ratzinger-is-right.html

Second, here is an article on recent Berlin architecture by Raoul Eshelmann. It would suggest that Eisenman is behind the ball in respect to what is being built in that city, where a post-postmodern, or “performatist” style that respects the sacred seems to be popping up everywhere (check out the many great photos, even if the article gets too heavy going):

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0702/arch2.htm

I linked to that “Eisenman and the Architecture of the Therapeutic” article just four comments above, and Truepeers probably did do a quick read already. He was very respectful in his answer to Boojums, even though (and here’s my “dismissive” point) Boojums seems to blame Europe’s open borders and immigration problems only on Jews, their sensibilities and post-Nazi guilt and rejection of race and culture based policy. He did not mention, never mind “puzzle out”, the fact that Europe had been importing these immigrants for labor, or that many Europeans are hostile to Israel, unsympathetic to Jews and have taken up the misunderstood Muslim/ poor Palestinian cause with great enthusiasm. In much of Europe, Holocaust guilt has ebbed while colonial guilt and multiculti interest are at high tide in European politics and elitist opinion, as Truepeers mentioned. Boojums is welcome to defend his position that Europe is catering to Jewish sensibilities at its peril, but he’ll have to do better if he doesn’t want to appear as if he is scapegoating Jews for Europe’s complex problems.

“PETER EISENMAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE

OF THE THERAPEUTIC”

http://www.thursdayarchitects.com/Texts/petereisenman.html

i’ve found,for myself,it’s good

to have brakes and steering.

on that note,with regard to postmodern

nihilism and guilt…i think you would be surprised to discover

how much we might actually agree.

i doubt very much you would

enjoy hearing my views on the origins of monotheism or why the

Israeli/Palestinian conflict absorbs such a great deal of the globe’s attention.

i didn’t note in roger’s thread

where you yourself mentioned the following article,(linked elsewhere above in this thread i believe)so i don’t know if you have read it.

i came across it in the comments

the opening of the memorial has fostered,

and i found it eye-opening

because of the light it throws on the roots

of Mr Eisenman’s creative orientation and practice.

and of course,he is not the sole exponent

of the views or principles the article makes note of…we are living the legacy of the late 20th C…and the 90′s endlessly bred this stuff

to the point that some

ppl experience it as “all there is”.

____________________________________________

“PETER EISENMAN AND THE ARCHITECTURE

OF THE THERAPEUTIC”

http://www.thursdayarchitects.com/Texts/

petereisenman.html

_____________________________________________

I think it should be clear from what I said that I am against people wallowing in guilt and pity – too much personal experience informs this – today’s Germans most of all. I think it’s time to move beyond the whole postmodern culture of “white guilt”, which stops so many people all over the world from achieving their best, and so I thought to some significant degree I was in agreement with Boojums. Stand up for yourself indeed.

As for this line -

“the implications from truepeers that “only Judaism(and by association,he himself) has the keys to Everything,so listen up”…

…point to why the memorial ultimately fails:

…

THAT is a power game.

and a destructive one.

it is also a choice on Eisenman’s part.” -

I frankly find this much more silly, almost reminiscent of a tired old kind of Jew-baiting, than anything else on this thread. I am Jewish, thanks to my mother, but, if anything, I am much more heavily influenced by Christian and secular ideas, than strictly Jewish ones, reflecting my paternity and the culture in which I live, not that I would ever deny the historical centrality of the Jewish discovery of nationalism and monotheism, or the relevance of the Mosaic revelation of an unfigurable divinity for this day and age when people are readily offended by the slightest hint that one culture’s figures are being given more attention than another’s.

But for anyone to deny the mere fact of Jewish historical centrality would just be silly, a form of cultural or historical illiteracy, which would leave one unable to explain things like why the Jewish-Palestinian dispute gets more attention and focusses more passions than any other national-territorial dispute int he world by far. Thankfully, you didn’t try to deny this centrality, though you seem to be troubled by the postmodern sensibility that any kind of historical firstness not be accorded to anyone, so as not to offend anyone else.

But postmodern guilt is just a license to make no sense of history. Ideas, like those behind monotheism, do inevitably happen first to someone and some groups and are not discovered by all simultaneously. This has historical consequences, such as the HOlocaust and the role of Israel as a pariah nation today.

As for holding the keys to everything, no way. I am much more of a one key man, a hedgehog not a fox if you’re familiar with that parable. All my ideas come from the same core idea – and it is not a religious idea, though it doesn’t exclude them either – which may be tiring to others; those who know me say I’m a walking cliche. But if you’re going to criticize someone’s idea, please show the logical limits of the idea in question, don’t think you will impress serious thinkers with postmodern victimary rhetoric about power games and shutting people out.

There is nothing more sinister in our present intellectual culture than the pervasive yet simply incorrect Foucauldian-Derridean idea that language, or representation more generally, is primarily a tool of power games. Power resides in the ethical, in real world organizations of people, not in the esthetic or intellectual which is a response to power. Real ideas come from the margins and only survive in the power centers over the long term if they are true and able to expand the freedom of the system as a whole. I can talk up a storm but I have very little power over anyone. The well-educated are not often among the most powerful and the most powerful are not often among the well-educated, and for a reason. Real thinking is about deferring our desire for violent appropriation of power and material wealth.

Now there’s a statement stated boldly, because that’s the least tiresome and most honest style; but if you may allow me a personal aside, I often discover that I am not right about many things. Yet I think that it’s right not to pander to the reigning esthetic of guilt and notions that maybe one is overstepping one’s proper place when one speaks boldly (encouraging others’ free response). And so I encourage you to engage my response whole heartedly and feel no guilt when you express an idea strongly, e.g. that I am off my rocker. I am not out to humiliate anyone, just to encourage good ideas. If the latter engenders the former, something is wrong. If I’ve gotten it wrong, please shoe me how. Otherwise I will just keep thinking that one of the problems with the postmodern culture of guilt is that it encourages many, and for little good reason, to feel humiliation.

(and elsewhere)towards Jewish people

might suggest against anything “soft” or remotely conciliatory,

….and yet the dismissive replies to Boojums,and the lack of anyone willing to defend his right to puzzle out his views here,

and the implications from truepeers that “only Judaism(and by association,he himself) has the keys to Everything,so listen up”…

…point to why the memorial ultimately fails:

-it contains no hope.

-it contains no healing or space to allow the *possibility* of healing to manifest itself.

THAT is a power game.

and a destructive one.

it is also a choice on Eisenman’s part.

the more i read and consider others’ views of the work,the more confirmed it becomes

as a pseudo-sacred simulacrum DESIGNED

for desecration:

an imitation graveyard

daring the simple minded to deface it.

people have long and easily confused justice with revenge.

-gumshoe

Yes, but it is wrong to suggest that the sacred can ever be eliminated. If we lose one figuration of the sacred, we will create another. It is fundamental to our anthropology, whether – and we can never know the answer to this, a question of faith – put there by God or whether invented by the first humans when they stopped being animals.

Our problem is how are we to live with the sacred. Generally, I think it is better to work to make each individual well-centered, in touch with the sacred within them, rather than to put our efforts into building massive centers of collective attention, which is not to say that we can expect, any time soon, to eliminate all centers of collective attention or our need for them. Got to run for the rest of the day…