On being furious

The relationship between anger and thought. With a translation of a blog post from Giorgio Agamben.

It happens more than seems possible. I will read a new post on Giorgio Agamben’s blog — a thought, an ‘intervention’ — and it will surprise me: I had just been thinking something like that the other day. This uncanniness is one of the reasons I return to it so often. It’s like an intimation of a conversation that must be going on in some purer realm, with an interlocutor far worthier than I am, and parts of it have drifted into my mind like newsprint blown down a windy sidewalk.

In the post translated below, Agamben writes about seeing a statue called the “Sleeping Fury” in the Roman National Museum, and he reflects on the relationship between anger and seeing truth in a dream:

Il pensiero non è soltanto contemplazione, è innanzitutto furore. Si dà pensiero, si dà contemplazione, solo se prima vi è stato furore, se guardando l’abominio degli umani e del mondo, la mente — diceva Bruno — discesa «ne la parte più inferna… si sente lacerare e sbranare». E solo se nel nostro eroico furore riusciamo a chiudere gli occhi e sognare, si ha vera quiete, si ha visione e teoria.

Thought isn’t only contemplation; it is first and foremost fury. There is thought, there is contemplation, only if there was fury first, if looking at the abomination of mankind and the world, the mind — according to Bruno — having descended “into the most infernal part… feels itself being mauled and torn to pieces”. And only if in our heroic fury we manage to close our eyes and dream, will there be true stillness, vision and theory [Greek theoria means seeing and contemplation].

I was recently telling a friend that there is a notion in Tibetan Buddhist psychology of an affinity between anger and that jñāna which is called ādarśajñāna (“mirror-like pristine awareness”). This jñāna arises through the transmutation of anger, and it shares its energy and certain features — above all, a mirror-like clarity. As teachers have told me (in the temple monastery where I fancied becoming a monk, but also, in a strictly utilitarian way, in the English department where I fancied becoming a PhD), few things helps you articulate a critique more than being angry.

This idea is elaborated in Indian Buddhist tantra in the scheme of the Five Tathāgatas, or the Five Dhyani Buddhas, which represent the transformation of ordinary mind, in various aspects, into enlightened mind.

The anger that Agamben speaks of is something like righteous indignation (at the “abomination of mankind and the world”), and his state of dreaming suggests stillness and focused imagination.

Anyway, here’s the translation from Agamben, dated 13 November 2023:

Fury That Dreams

In the Roman National Museum, housed in the Palazzo Altemps, there is a marble head which, according to tradition, represents a sleeping Erinyes. With eyes closed, tufts of hair disheveled on the forehead and cheek, lips slightly parted, this face of a Fury — if it is a Fury, be it Alecto, Megaera or Tisiphone — rests quietly on a cushion of dark marble, as if she were dreaming.

A fury that closes its eyes and dreams instead of moaning or screaming, or shaking its serpentine hair, belies itself. Yet precisely and only the dream or sleep of a fury resembles thought. Thought is not just contemplation, it is first and foremost fury. There is thought, there is contemplation, only if there was fury first, if looking at the abomination of humankind and the world, the mind — according to Bruno — having descended “into the most infernal part… feels itself being mauled and torn to pieces”. And only if in our heroic fury we manage to close our eyes and dream, will there be true stillness, vision and theory. Our dreams are therefore not waking fantasies (daydreams), which we know are deceptive and vain, but truth which, even with our eyes closed, we cannot help but believe, because we have first seen the revenge and the error.

Thought is this calming of fury, it is an Erinyes who dreams.