Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 12:34:12 +1000
Subject: Re: festival



interesting.

>Although I agree that the festival (or disaster, or car crash, or
>burning building) emerges from pure possibility, I am not clear about
>the slip towards 'pure' identity (inseparable oneness, or the
>disappearence of difference) that is suggested by the "return" of the
>self to its center.

Eric, are you hinting that, rather than "pure identity" or "inseparable
oneness", the experience of the sacrifice is *nothingness*?  the
experience, in my view, is a detour into the Hegelian/Bataillean void; into
the darkness where there is neither subject nor object.  While there is no
subject there is no identity (not even 'pure'), nor is there an object:
there are no *things* .

So, turning to your quote from Sartre:
>"Fragility has been impressed
>upon the very being of this vase, and its destruction would be an
>irreversible event which I could only verify" [Being and Nothingness,
>40].  The event is already over even before it begins.  It becomes
>memory and discourse -- a memorandum as opposed to a monument.

The festival, in the experience of it, is nothing, but is later recalled in
memory and discourse?  It is in discourse that the traces (of the 'real')
emerge in the symbolic.

>
>I wonder if the place of the spectator, that fragile envelope of
>sentient tissue in a hat, is precisely where he or she stopped, dead in
>their tracks, and turned their eye to one vibrating problem: the
>event.

...to later become a story of the eye?

g.

Gwen Nettlefold
Masters Candidate
Philosophy Department
University of Tasmania