Finite and Infinite Games

The myth of Jesus is exemplary, but not necessary. No myth is necessary. There is no story that must be told. Stories do not have a truth that someone needs to reveal, or someone needs to hear. It is part of the myth of Jesus that it makes itself unnecessary; it is a narrative of the word becoming flesh, of language entering history; a narrative of

The loudspeaker, successfully muting all other voices and therefore all possibility of conversation, is not listened to at all, and for that reason loses its own voice and becomes mere noise. Whenever we succeed in being the only speaker, there is no speaker at all.

What ideologists are concerned to hide is the choral nature of history, the sense that it is a symphony of very different, even opposed, voices, each nonetheless making the other possible.

Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known there is nothing more to say. History is therefore to be obediently lived out according to the ideology. Just as the warmakers of Europe regularly melted down the bells to recast them into cannon, the metaphysicians have found the meani

Loud-speaking is a mode of command, and therefore a speech designed to bring itself to an end as completely and swiftly as possible.

The opposite of resonance is amplification. A choir is the unified expression of voices resonating with each other; a loudspeaker is the amplification of a single voice, excluding all others. A bell resonates, a cannon amplifies. We listen to the bell, we are silenced by the cannon.

Indeed, myth is the highest form of our listening to each other, of offering a silence that makes the speech of the other possible. This is why listening is far more valued by religion than speaking. Fides ex auditu. Faith comes by listening, Paul said.

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.

As myths make individual experience possible, they also make collective experience possible. Whole civilizations rise from stories—and can rise from nothing else. It is not the historical experience of Jews that makes the Torah meaningful. The Torah is no more a description of the creation of the earth and early Jewish life than the theory of insti