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Nomad explorations v 2.1 : genesis, eden and the grail in modernity. Barnesmoore, Luke R.

Abstract

‘Genesis’, ‘The Garden of Eden’ and ‘The Holy Grail’ are stories that have captivated the western mind (and the human mind in the iterations of these archetypal narratives in other cultures) for millennia. Though many view Modernity and Modernism as marking the death of religion and religious dogma, we argue that Modernism simply rearticulates Abrahamic-Hellenic (more generally Paternalist) social dogmas within its own logics and axioms (especially cosmological, ontological, teleological and epistemological axioms that reduce humanity to a discrete, biological, materially rational being and reduce reality to the finite world of motion, passing time and physical space); the rationalizations for social dogmas like the notion that ‘order is to be created through hierarchical domination’ may change, but the class relations therein retain their basic form. We illustrate this argument through conducting a Nomad Exploration (NE) of Foucault’s The Order of Things, which illustrates the rearticulation of Genesis in the axioms and logics of Modernity, Haraway’s Primate Visions, which illustrates the rearticulation of the Garden of Eden, and finally the nexus of primatology, transhumanism, ‘vampire therapy’, etc. (attempts at material immortality via ‘curing death’) that typify the Modernist rearticulation of the quest for the Holy Grail (san grail, sang rail). In the ethos of Nomad Exploration (NE) our teleological imperative in this journey is not to ‘answer questions’ by ‘accumulating and analyzing facts’; rather, our goal is to broaden understandings and deepen questions by providing the reader with dimensionally transformative ideas that provide access to new plateaus of perspective—in short, our purpose lies in the production of intimate, inner experience with dimensionally transformative ideas and a concomitant reinvigoration of meaning rather than in accumulating and analyzing facts.

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Attribution 4.0 International