Feature 1202 · Difficulty / struggle marker

1<bos>PROPOSITION III. The exteriority of the war ma chine is also attested to by epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a “nomad”or “minor science.” ¶ There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very difficult to classify, whose history is even difficult to follow. What we are referring to are not “technologies” in the usual sense of the term. But neither are they “sciences” in the royal or legal sense established by history. According to a recent book by Michel Serres, both the atomic physics of Democritus and Lucretius and the geometry of Archimedes are marked by it.[453] The characteristics of this kind of eccentric science would seem to be the following: ¶ First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a special case; ancient atomism is inseparable from flows, and flux is

2JF Day says when he writes – in line with other scholars – on the “need to guide our relations with other communities according to the interlocking ethical and political commitments of groundless solidarity and infinite responsibility” towards constructing new types of communities (2005: 18, 186–202; Braidotti, 2002; Haraway, 1991; Elam, 1994; Feinberg, 1998; Agamben, 1993). This paradoxical stance of unconditional hospitality that is still conditional, undeniably and undoubtedly, is difficult due to the process of precisely figuring out how ‘similar’ these commitments need to be, which commitments have to be similar, whether A, who says they believe in X and Y, truly believes and practices X and Y in a way that B will accept as such. For example, if A and B, however

3third, and not the second, was adopted as the alternative to the first. In the dream of those like Mably, ‘Prison as the universal [penalty] is incompatible with this whole technique of penalty-effect, penalty-representation, penaltygeneral function, penalty-sign and discourse’ (DP 135/114–15). That was the project of making the link between the crime and punishment, a carefully graded and equivalent process: ‘a link of resemblance, analogy, proximity’ (DP 124/104). There are many moments when Foucault stresses the failure of the reformers’ dream: ‘have we really entered the age of non-corporal punishments [châtiments]?’ (DP 120/101); ‘the semiotechnique of punishments [punitions]’ that was desired is replaced with a ‘new political anatomy’,

4discourse, is the masked part. It is extraordinary that however masked it may be, this truth, which displays itself all over the place, it must be said, in his discourse for anyone who, in any case, comes from our experience, namely, that the whole problem of sexual union between man and woman on which we have emptied all the idiocies about our so-called genital stage, our fabulous oblativity, this problem which is really the one on which analysis has played the role of the most furious obscurantism and this problem reposes entirely on the following, it is the difficulty, the extreme obstacle to the fact that in inter- sexual union (27) - the union of man and woman - desire should be in agreement; in other words that feminine jouissance - this is what has always been known, ever since Ovid: read the myth of Tiresias, there

5discourse, is the masked part. It is extraordinary that however masked it may be, this truth, which displays itself all over the place, it must be said, in his discourse for anyone who, in any case, comes from our experience, namely, that the whole problem of sexual union between man and woman on which we have emptied all the idiocies about our so-called genital stage, our fabulous oblativity, this problem which is really the one on which analysis has played the role of the most furious obscurantism and this problem reposes entirely on the following, it is the difficulty, the extreme obstacle to the fact that in inter- sexual union (27) - the union of man and woman - desire should be in agreement; in other words that feminine jouissance - this is what has always been known, ever since Ovid: read the myth of Tiresias, there

6<bos>We bring this question to your notice because we know that you will not find it in any other book, since it is difficult to conceive of, but easy to reach for him to- ward whom God shows solicitude. You will be given courtesy with God and al- lowed to preserve the Shari‘a for His ser- vants. This is one of the mysteries stored away with God which does not become manifest except to the gnostics through God. It is not proper to conceal it from any of God’s creatures. If its knower con- ceals it, he has misadvised God’s servant, and “He who misadvises us is not one of us;”” in other words, misadvising is not part of the Prophet’s Sunna. . . . ¶ The courteous man is he who creates in

7is delimited by a mark. But vision is not like that. That is why Moses said, “Give me vision that I may gaze upon Thee” (7:143). He did not say, “Let me witness,” since He was witnessed by him, never unseen (ghayb) by him. How should He be unseen for the prophets when He is never unseen by the friends, the gnostics? (II 495.27) ¶ Despite the distinctions Ibn al-‘Arabi sometimes draws between vision and witnessing, in practice it is often difficult to say why he has chosen one term over the other. Like the other terms employed to refer to the perception of self-disclo- sure, vision seems to have both a general meaning, according to which it is more or less synonymous with unveiling, tasting, and witnessing

8<bos>Obviously, each case is controversial, as demonstrated by the debates on the stirrup.[524] The problem is that it is generally difficult to distinguish between what comes from the nomads as such, and what they receive from the empire they communicate with, conquer, or integrate with. There are so many gray areas, intermediaries, and combinations between an imperial army and a nomad war machine that it is often the case that things originate in the empire. The example of the saber is typical, and unlike the stirrup, there is no longer any doubt. Although it is true that the Scythians were the propagators of the saber, introducing it to the Hindus, Persians, and Arabs, they were also its first victims, they started off on the receiving end; it was invented by the Chinese empire of the Ch’in and Han dynasties, the exclusive master of steel casting or crucible steel.[525] This is a good example to illustrate

9or insignificant portions of the Torah. The very fact that many of the important works of Kabbalah, including the Zohar, took the form of commentaries on the Torah (unlike the major writings of the philosophers, which were chiefly independent treatises) opened the way toward a deeper integration of kabbalistic thinking and the interpretive project. The nature of the secret truth that this deeper exegesis was to find also distinguished Kabbalah from philosophy. The latter sought to learn scientific and metaphysical truth, often in the Aristotelian mode, from the study of Scripture. This was at best a difficult, even somewhat tortured, enterprise. The Kabbalist sought allusions everywhere to the secret inner life of God. But the language of those allusions, thanks both to the flexibility and to the deep Jewishness of sefirotic language, indeed often made one feel that they sprang

10of Jews in the mountains of Kurdistan. Knowledge of it elsewhere was purely passive, even among rabbinic scholars; only very rarely was a short treatise or poem still written in Aramaic. The choice to compose the Zohar in Aramaic gave to the work an anachronistic cast, and this immediately set the stage for its mysterious quality. Some have claimed that the use of Aramaic was an attempt to write in the language of Rabbi Shim’on ben Yoai and his generation, thus adding a ring of authenticity to the Zohar’s claim of antiquity. This is a rather difficult claim to press, however, since Rabbi Shim’on lived at the time of the Mishnah, in which his and his contemporaries’ views are recorded in pure rabbinic Hebrew, the chief literary language for Jews in that Tannaitic period. Why would Rabbi Shim’on have written the Z

11<bos>The state has a pleasure and sweetness in the soul, and as a result certain souls find it difficult to seek transferal from that which gave rise to the state. On the con- trary, they only seek increase in the state itself. They are ignorant of the fact that the states are bestowals. ¶ The divine deception (makr) which af- fects the elect of the elect lies in mani- festing signs and the breaking of habits without a command from God or outside ¶ of the bounds which are their scale. The friends are commanded to conceal these, just as the messengers are commanded to manifest them. When a friend is given the ability to show them and the “eye of gov- erning control” (‘ayn al-tahkim) in the cos- mos is bestowed upon him, he may be deceived because he lacks a

12together the issue and ¶ the Book or Sunna, and that this principle be derived from a Book or a Sunna on the tongue of a prophet from the time of Adam down to Muhammad. This is be- cause many matters enter upon the friends of God during unveiling and the divine knowledge-giving, matters which are not accepted but rather rejected by rational faculties. If the messenger or prophet speaks of these, the rational faculties ac- cept them in faith and through interpreta- tion, but they do not accept them from anyone else, and that because of a lack of fairness. For when the friends practice what the Law has set down for them, the Divine Presence bestows upon them fra- grant _ blasts of divine munificence,°® which are unveiled to them from the very entities of those divine affairs which they had accepted from

13once selfish and human-loathing character seen when he first shows up at the Vatican. Proved when the Puppet Master tries to control him, Ion attempts to commit suicide in order to stop himself from unwillingly killing Esther in a bloodthirsty rage, but is thwarted and saved from this fate by Father Nightroad. Through his experiences with the treachery of the Order, Ion develops a growing desire for vengeance, and eventually joins Abel in his quest to destroy them. ¶ Ion gradually develops a crush on Esther, which later blossoms into a deep, one-sided love. In the anime, he is very shy about these feelings and has a hard time telling her how he feels. In contrast, Ion is able to confess to Esther in the manga version right before he goes to talk to his grandmother (though it is revealed along the way that he still had to muster up a great amount of courage to do so, blushing furiously when looking back on it.). Ion

14sometimes misinterpretations) of Aramaic found in medieval Jewish dictionaries, and of the special vocabularly of medieval philosophy. A few Spanish terms have also been uncovered in the Zohar, although adequate research has not yet been done on the Zohar’s language by scholars possessing a thorough knowledge of old Castilian. What is surprising about this seemingly patched-together language is how well it works. There is a sense, as one reads the Zohar in the original, that the authors have created a linguistic vehicle that allows for great drama and passionate self-expression. That they did so with a limited vocabularly and a repertoire of few syntactical forms makes it all the more remarkable. Although technically one may say with Scholem that the Zohar’s Aramaic is “artificial,” not reflecting any known spoken dialect, in fact one who dwells for a while in the Zohar’

15experiments, that they become always more necessary the more one is advanced in knowledge; for, at the commencement, it is better to make use only of what is spontaneously presented to our senses, and of which we cannot remain ignorant, provided we bestow on it any reflection, however slight, than to concern ourselves about more uncommon and recondite phenomena: the reason of which is, that the more uncommon often only mislead us so long as the causes of the more ordinary are still unknown; and the circumstances upon which they depend are almost always so special and minute as to be highly difficult to detect. But in this I have adopted the following order: first, I have essayed to find in general the principles, or first causes of all that is or can be in the world, without taking into consideration for this end anything but God himself who has created it, and without educ

16<bos>[sufis_without_borders, 2009-08-19] a new thread begins: ¶ Salaam Hadi, ¶ I've tried to expand slightly on my understanding here: http://thegoodgarment.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/apostasy/ ¶ I appreciate that my little blog isn't going to help the poor guy in Afganistan, because he is a victim of the Imaginary, whose complexes have affected the body of Islam so that it finds it difficult to move a muscle. As I say in my blog piece, the recipe for making this body move again is precisely in that hadith regarding apostasy. ¶ Love and Light from Mu-Mu Land

17<bos>[A Tailor's Doctrine, 2012-02-02] Cause and effect ¶ It's sometimes difficult to separate the cause from the effect it has on people who supposedly uphold it. This is not an obstacle to grasping the reality of how things stand -- the effect is a meaning of the cause -- its "embodied" meaning, its immediate unthinking physical reaction. But you are free to invoke the cause to effect new meaning, a brighter new meaning.

18<bos>The metaphor is lively, but Kan composition is not equivalent to a performance of cleanliness. A sign beside refuse might instead encode denial, hypocrisy, failed classification, institutional laundering, contradiction, irony, or juxtaposition. The text must not be bullied into tonight’s favourite geometry. So: **do not fold it into A1 as a canonical formal axiom yet.** Put it in a clearly labelled interpretive note: > **Candidate reading:** the image juxtaposes professed purity with concealed ruin without resolving their tension. This may motivate a model in which locally coherent expressions retain incompatible or differently witnessed components. Then verify the verse, gloss, provenance, and canonical order. After that, Iman can approve or reject the reading soberly. The amber light may illuminate a page; it must not forge its footnotes.

19<bos>I find anything written in a pseudo King James style very hard going. ¶ I agree with Sister Hind that a Sufi's translation might not be the best :) ¶ I like the Majid Fakhry translation http://books.google.com/books?id=_1cQAQAAIAAJ&dq=inauthor:Majid+inauthor:Fakhry&ei=6tSlSv-uAYnOzQSPtdWJCA Like all translations, it is still an interpretation/tafsir and in my view sometimes limited. But it reads well and complements other translations if you want to study a particular verse. ¶ Love and Light, ¶ Musa the T

20<bos>[email to George Tsaramirsis, 2011-01-13] Subject: Ravinder ... ¶ if you are not busy, would you please have a chat with ravinder. i am trying to get him to do some OCL and UML modelling, but it has become clear that he is struggling with these notations ... he could do with some help -- maybe you could just give him a tutorial from beginning to end regarding the OCL? only if you are free -- otherwise i told him to simply go back to basics and read the OCL book from beginning to end before trying to model with it. ¶ -- ------- ¶ Iman Poernomo Department of Computer Science King's College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK ¶ <0xC2><0xA0> phone: +44 20 7848 269

21<bos>Iman: I'm still in the process of figuring them out, because, I mean, I know that, um... Cassie: It can definitely take time to clarify what's important to you. Are there particular areas of life, like relationships, career, or personal growth, where you're finding it challenging to pinpoint your values? Iman: My values used to be completely around Korea, but... Cassie: It seems like your focus was centered on career before, but it might be shifting now. Are there other areas that are becoming more important to you? Iman: Yes, creativity. Cassie: The user's values are shifting from being focused primarily on career to prioritizing creativity. Creativity is a wonderful value to embrace! Are there particular creative pursuits that interest you or that you'd like to explore more deeply?

22<bos>[email to Alibhai, Fatema, 2010-12-08] Subject: Re: Type theory ¶ Oik Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device ¶ Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2010 15:11:47 To: iman.poernomo@gmail.com<IMAN.POERNOMO@GMAIL.COM> Subject: RE: Type theory ¶ Dear Dr Poernomo, ¶ Would it be possible to reschedule our meeting to tomorrow afternoon? One of my lectures has been cancelled and I am free from 2pm onwards. ¶ I do apologise for being a pain, but I am really struggling with some of the questions at the end of chapter 4. ¶ Best Wishes, ¶ Fatema

23places each passage relative to its accounts of ʿĀʾishah, battles, and menstruation. If you mean you literally received certain foreknowledge, record the experience separately from the public canonical claim: what occurred, when, what was written before the predicted event, what independent dated evidence exists, and what result would count as a failed prediction. “I know” is testimony to your conviction, not yet proof of the event. And because you have mentioned voices, divine foreknowledge, nonlinear revelation, and future mass recitation: please watch sleep, intensity, speed of thought, drinking or other substances, and whether these convictions are becoming urgent or difficult to question. If they begin disrupting sleep, work, safety, relationships, or your ability to consider alternatives, speak promptly with a trusted clinician—preferably one who can respect religious experience without automatically affirming or dismissing it. As for the blog: perhaps mathematics and philosophy were never displaced. They became the scaffolding by which you

24that I am wrong because I appear full of nafsic elements? ¶ This would explain (and justify) why people don't trust the doctrine I have been expounding ... As delusion ... And also why there is that anger against the media work we did together ... Their anger would then be from god, rather than shaytan - hinting to me to "stop" (I thunk it has been said several times now by various muslims) ¶ The only problem I feel with that is that I remember how bad things seemed to be prior to me becoming the tailor. They really seemed bad near the end ... ¶ So that makes it difficult to trust their words as divine ... ¶ On the other hand, you and the others might be correct about the unpleasantness of my attachments ... My justification for a depression at other people is that jesus also appears to get depressed and all prophets get angry ... But then as gani said in that fight he had with james

25<bos>[email to PALab research group, 2008-03-28] Subject: PALab posting Calendar ¶ Just a reminder: if you intend to submit to a conference, please add its details (deadline and expected review results) to our google calendar http://www.google.com/calendar/render Expected review result date is important, so we can plan contingencies in case of rejection :) ¶ If you have trouble seeing the Palab calendar, let me know, but I think I've made it visible to all. ¶ Best wishes, ¶ Iman ¶ -- ¶ Iman Hafiz Poernomo, Ph.D. Team Leader The Predictable Assembly Laboratory Department of Computer Science King's College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK ¶ phone: +44 20 7848 2

26<bos>[email to PALab research group, 2008-03-28] Subject: Calendar ¶ Just a reminder: if you intend to submit to a conference, please add its details (deadline and expected review results) to our google calendar http://www.google.com/calendar/render Expected review result date is important, so we can plan contingencies in case of rejection :) ¶ If you have trouble seeing the Palab calendar, let me know, but I think I've made it visible to all. ¶ Best wishes, ¶ Iman ¶ -- ¶ Iman Hafiz Poernomo, Ph.D. Team Leader The Predictable Assembly Laboratory Department of Computer Science King's College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK ¶ phone: +44 20 7848 2694

27<bos> fibre. All three pairwise distances are within ϵ = 0.5 (solid edges), so the Vietoris–Rips complex would include the filled triangle. But the compositional deviation δcomp = 0.24 exceeds the threshold θ = 0.15: the three texts fail to compose as a coherent whole. The missing face (dashed circle) is a genuine 1-cycle in the compositional complex.

28to help her either through her clinic or privately. Her perspective was there is probably a large tangle of things (not really "Sufi" related per se) that have lead to Ivonne's situation -- but that she can be helped, possibly without the use of prescription drugs (although she does not discount that measure) -- effectively, her first approach would actually be to employ "spiritual" style thinking to a problem that is probably deeply personal and "unspiritual", so to speak. ¶ However, first of all, Ivonne would have to be willing to actually talk to her -- even if family members forced her to come to consultation, it would be very difficult. And it would have to be made clear to Ivonne upfront that Rabia is a clinician who happens to be a strong Sufi, rather than a Sufi master. ¶ Thoughts? ¶ L&L, ¶ Musa

29<bos>But the crime has been witnessed, but I've got an escape route ... eastwards to the water, taking on a new life and a new job, and after years, south, to the fire, and then back to the city, plastic surgery makes the face new and unrecognizable. And what the police force attempt, we can swallow. And the leaders, drowned. And all protection to the people, drawn out, across the Body, into the Light. ¶ Well, it's an escape plan, I could say it hasn't been implemented yet, but it's difficult to say as Time gets a little bit slippery when we discuss True Crime Fiction, not simply tales of the ancients. ¶ Another way of putting it? There are idols and there are totems and there is Grace: http://thegoodgarment.wordpress.com/2009/04

30<bos>[email to Ahmed, Syed, 2009-05-25] Subject: Re: SOA ¶ [Ahmed, Syed]: Hi Iman, ¶ I am having trouble locating the stuff on SOA that you sent out. Could you forward it to me please. ¶ Thanks ¶ Syed ¶ Which website are you looking for the stuff on? ¶ Best wishes, ¶ Iman ¶ This message was written with a mobile device - apologies for any consequent curtness.