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‘Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful’ (2021)

Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. (Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Socialist Review, 1985, p. 85)

Is it possible to be both faithful and blasphemous? At first it seems dichotomous, but when we interrogate further it becomes feasible, no longer a stark impossibility. After all, why can’t we be faithful in our blaspheming? (Stuart) 

To call a name in vein and to mean it, to cause a little titter of laughter from the hard edge created, to speak in the idiom where there is potency, to feel a little shiver of shame almost shrugged off long ago, to call forth authority and use its strength to stand at armslength.  (Helen) 

The blasphemy shows the limits of the faithful, the insult as the unbearable insult or offend, the blasphemy requires of knowledge to be effective. (Victoria) 

Blasphemy here seems to stand for a kind of passionate, pious negation. Could it then be serious the way playing is serious, and are both subversive to the extent that they are marginal? There’s something really attractive about the idea of blasphemy as a kind of faithfulness that makes me wonder what it would mean to keep blasphemy. (Ghada)