Date: Sun, 04 Jan 1998 17:58:05 -0800
Subject: Lacoue-Labarthe: The Subject of Philosophy




To dip back to Nietzsche again via Lacoue-Labarthe, some thoughts on "The Fable"
and "The Detour" 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." Although he doesn't extrapolate what
L-L is starting off from, is to some extent Derrida's analysis of this desire for
a pure saying as a repression of writing by the thinking of being as presence. In
my idiom, a pure saying is  meditation without an object, then, the question
becomes what happens to meditation when it is compromised by the necessity of
passing through phrase regimens? Is it not, presently, no longer adhering to the
stillness of thinking, or a pure speech? It goes without saying that I here defer
to the authority of Lacoue-Labarthe to tell you the truth of Nietzsche in what
after all is an academic essay careful to respect the boundaries instituted by
this truth making, epistemological regime. For us, that is, for me and my phrase
regimens, it is a question of pursuing the distinct gap that is opening before
us, and which constitutes our own anarchic idiom. In this case, I have made
allowance for what although arbitrary has made itself felt as a necessary love of
a fateful accident, a crack in a reasonable distinction between a distinguished
course running through discursive explanations and between the weird and suspect,
and with chance, twisted expression of fantasy where the real essence of things
makes its very superficial appearances as a "parade of sarcastic dwarves dancing,
jingling their little coin-covered jackets" while coating the screen with the
honey of learned ignorance. To each his own Zarathustra!

Ariosto