Date: Sun, 04 Jan 1998 14:12:30 -0800
Subject: Re: "El momento [D]e-lu(cid)-zas!


To dip back to Nietzsche again via Lacoue-Labarthe, some thoughts on "The
Fable" and "Detours." In _The Subject of Philosophy_ In "The Fable" L-L asks
what is one of the persistent questions he tracks down (a trope he uses)
through some of his essays: "We would like to ask [] wether the dream, the
desire that philosophy has entertained since its "beginning" for a _pure
saying_ [dire pure] )a speech, a discourse purely transparent to what it
would immediately signify: truth, being, the absolute, etc.), has not always
been compromised by the necessity of going through a text, through a process
of writing, and wether, for this reason, philosophy has not always been
obliged to use modes of exposition (dialogue or narrative for example) that
are not exclusively its own and that it is most often powerless to control or
even reflect upon." Looking back to your Wed. post Lucio, a _Diagressio
Inutilis_ on Kerkhoff, I am wondering how you intertwine a mention of a
Dionysian ideal, _Amor Fati_ and the medieval notion of figura and you quote
"_Figura_ as _conjuncture_ - [is] the union of actantial and thematic themes
of composition - reflect[ing] the history of a genre in the process of
constitution, reconstitution, and elaboration" (pg 319 _The Art of Medieval
French Romance_) This, for _you_ is a 'wedding,' the constitution of a
spiralling ring, a Dionysiac dythiramb where one is bound, to start reading
away from you, by an image that in "The Two Versions of the Imaginary"
Blanchot says fascinates, and as a face Levinas would say that it _obsesses_.
But notice the regression in the very history of psychoanalysis away from the
famous talking cure to what is essentially a hypnotic, magical praxis. Ecce,
rhetoric. Intoxication, wether Apollonian or Dionysian, is essential for
artistic work. It is just what makes us _forget_ ourselves, it is the
dramatic force of  whirlwinds, of dervishes writing poems on the hard
whiteness of the surface of a pearl while drinking wine. Ecce, Bacchus. It is
the advent of sacred works in chant, trance, and wild cries carrying
everything to the extreme limit of sublime images. It is the upsurge of
irrational, irregular non-sense and cracked mirrors.
    Now, you wrote furthermore, that the 'nuptial' as you figured it was in
fact _amor_ and a reading of the eternal return. Interesting analysis,
undoubtedly on the sharpest edge. The revolution word of the eternal return
does not form a perfect circle, it is cut by a cesurae that interrupts its
cycling rhythm such that in fact whirlwinds are formed which is perhaps one
of  the primal patterns of the earth, a primal flow of petrified stones white
like ash. As writing it is the very style of useless digressions cutting into
a flow of phrases, or artistic ideas if you will, and displacing them,
misreading their flowing import towards another horizon, habitually
stretching the tortured failure of the imagination towards a radical alterity
without precedence transmitting the passage of streams of chance magnetizing
the whiteness of a virgin screen. I went off on a tangent, where was I? Give
me time to gather up my wits again.

Ariosto