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Updating Sisyphus
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I found it quite fascinating, the similarity of the Dionysus myth and
the Jehovah myth. In both, the divine body is torn to pieces and spread
all over the world.
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One of the main Sisyphean projects of the Jewish people, according
to the Lurianic Kabala, is to re-collect the pieces of the divine body,
or the sparks, try to separate them from the dirt that had merged with
them, and re-assemble the pieces into the original whole. Even though
they never succeed in creating the original God they manufacture
mutations of God. Some are funny, some monsters, but all fascinating.
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The Re-U-Man structure is an attempt to build a protocol that will
help me merge the scattered pieces of the "I", the "I" that is torn
by late Capitalism, by the old Marxism, by the sham of Modernism,
and by the vagueness of Post-Modernism.
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It tries to update the Sisyphus myth of Albert Camus, in a world that
is even more meaningless than his, but less tragic, less heroic, but more
playful. This new updated Sisyphus does not have to carry the enormous
boulder up the hill only to have it roll down and then roll it up
again. His curse is to re-assemble the fragments of his dispersed
body only to have it shattered again over and over ad infinitum.
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He does not have the moment of repose while descending the hill,
the moment that Camus refers to, as a victory over the gods.
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When the new Sisyphus shatters, he begins to re-assemble himself
at once. Unlike the old, who uses the same path, the same self and a
continuous memory to carry the boulder up the hill, the new one has
no choice but to re-create himself differently each time. A process
that contains an element of game without a continuous personal
history--disconnected fragments of memory. Moreover, while
constructing himself, he is creating an imagined model of the
original, which he is being constructed accordingly. For the
memory of the original had been faded out.
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This Sisyphus seeks to create his own self, without hope,
without rest, but with a very strong sense of self.
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In the Re-U-Man diagram we refer to the first Sisyphus with a
capital "I" and to the second with a lower case "i".
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