Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 07:08:09 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Deracination


        Its started already. What does Baudrillard say about 9-11? Zizek?
Derrida? What would Deleuze-Guattari have said? Foucault? Heidegger?
Nietzsche? Etc. Inquiring minds want to know. So that we will know what the
master thinks and therefore what we think or so that we can exploit 9-11 to
debunk all this postmodern gibberish and reassert the essentialistic truths
provided by humanism and the ratio.  Things fall apart but the abstract
dichotomy that controls current academic discourse holds.  Thus the call of
the tragic possibility "still signalling through the flames" of 9-11 is
eluded. On which, consider:

        C.S. Peirce argues that experience begins when our frameworks of
interpretation are shattered.  As on 9-11.

        Which is why there will be conferences, articles, books dedicated to
a supervening need: a demonstration of how the theoretical frameworks that
define the parameters of contemporary thought are equal to the task of
interpreting 9-11 and thus worthy of their continued control over what
counts as meaningful academic discourse.  For the one thing we cannot bear
is the idea that our theoretical frameworks (individually and collectively)
are woefully inadequate to that task.  And thus, once again, the possibility
opened up by a traumatic historical event will have been lost. For what we
now need is a discourse that will enable us to think about history in a new
way: a way that sustains the power of traumatic events to expose the system
of guarantees that inform both essentialistic humanism and the various
postmodernisms; a way that internalizes Events at a tragic register of the
psyche and is thereby able to liberate the imperatives that Events impose
upon us.

        Those who seek such a way of thinking--and of being--may discover
that the book they seek already exists: Walter A. Davis DERACINATION:
HISTORICITY, HIROSHIMA, AND THE TRAGIC IMPERATIVE (Albany: SUNY P, 2001).
Its effort, before the fact, is to construct the framework we need in order
to wrestle with our current historical situation.  In that spirit I take
this opportunity to call it to your attention.  



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