Date: Tue, 06 Jan 1998 20:26:27 -0800
Subject: Re: El momento [D]e-lu(cid)-zas! - "On Nietzsche" - "...





>  Speaking of Stoic, Quevedo's brand, as Bataille's,
> is double-dipped in the Job of old.  Recall Quevedo's "nuestro Seneca"
> and even "nuestro santo"! (hey, here's another freakin reference:
> _Francisco de Quevedo and The Neostoic Movement_, H. Ettinghausen,
> Oxford, 1972, with a bibliography to die for in relation to your
> 'Baroque-Stoic tradition-Quevedo' question governing your re-search.
> [df803 Wed 31 Dec 97]. Take that!
>

I remember, but also Lezema Lima's "nuestro padre el barroco" perhaps poking
a little fun at Quevedo? -- there is also a book which is perhaps the best,
tracing the sources and debates right through to Quevedo  and beyond that is
called _El Stoicismo_ I forget the author, its two volumes. i'll get more
particulars on it perhaps it will be in your library

>  "Rather we face the transcendence of an unreachable
> Other whose call or covenant is already in effect out recognition of
> ourselves, a call or covenant that does not constitute an a priori
> element in our identity but rather interrupts our identity in giving
> identity, a proximity that obesses us in holding us to something
> impossible for us, one that sets us apart from ourselves and from _our_
> history and gives another impossible history in which we are without
> initiative and in which we are always beginning in loss before
> proximity." (Scott in Peperzak, _Ethics as First Philosophy_, 27).
> Ariosto, is this the "reading away from [one]"?

Don, just mentioned displaced readings but also remember the threads on
Harold Bloom and misreadings and I wrote something on Shlovsky's process of
defamiliarization. I guess with that phrase I was thinking something, like
Don perhaps is thinking, of generous affirmative misreadings of others flow
of phrases which I sugested is a cut in any rhythm looking sideways at
Lacoue-Labarthes discussion of Holderlin's cesura and what seems to be a
displacement of the classical notion of tragedy that is there as well in
Nietzsche. So in a way there is no consensus but mutual contestation and
dissensus. I just remembered what Blanchot says in his book responding to
Nancy on Bataille, the one on community, that the other always contest us by
sending us in a wild chase after clouds of thought which is how I read the
quasi-concept of a "call." -- well, that's not exactly Blanchot who already
is touching on my last post. Everything seems to be constantly being
contaminated by otherness yet this is not an ecclectic confusion. I write
about reading away as a misreading that in a sense interrupts the possibility
of reading with the illegibility of what is outside language, at least a
language that is explanatory. Reading is another word for thinking, speech,
or even phrasing. The slower the reading the more it is meditative. So yes
and no I guess -- give a little take a little. [big smile] much fun.

> If so, and in belonging
> to the other proximity, we, reeling, respond to that cry or call always
> already _before_ them.

them? Have you checked out Lyotard's _Differend_ there in his Levinas notice
he writes about the difficulty of "responding." In other words, in a more
idiomatic manner, the difficulty of thinking before the proximity of an empty
screen, in adhe(a)ring to the address of clouds stilling speech so that its
rain, its stream of chance fertilize the desert that we are presently
traversing. The cultivation of a floating attention? You hear "stand firm" in
the word "before" in the quote above?

> Notice this lately? Levinas does state that
> "Obession is irreducible to consciousness even if it overwhelms it"
> (_Autrement qu'etre  ou au-dela de l'essence_, 128, _OB_,  101, see also
> _OB_, 176 and 93)

I can't tell myself how this notion is that much different than the way we
often use the word excess or impossible except for the emphasis on taking
hostages and haunting.

>
>
> So enormous that capitalizations merely slip upon the ecomony of their
> script, enjoying instead the loss in the surplus - "shared slime" - of
> our "obliterat[ion]...in the absence  of animal limits." (Bataille, _ON,
> 98).  Could this be your (Ariosto) tug upon the hemp ropes of "obession"?
> "Obsession is a responsibility without choice, a communication without
> phrases [does that include 'phrase regimens'?] or words." (Levinas,
> _idem_., 120).

hmm... let's see, the operation of phrase regimens that have a
response-ability are not the expression of an I placed in the adressee pole.
A phrase turned in this manner remains attentive to an addressor of
prescriptives impossible to avoid, to an 'obsession' which as a call, or
vibration if you will, governs the transformative operation of a phrase
anarchicaly towards its own oblivion with the arrival a period. See,
non-phrases remain as illegible residue... bearing witness to the
unpresentable which is the work of artistic play according to Lyotard. So,
yes and no, the Lord givests the Lord takests away. [much laughter] Patience
Lucio, much patience.

> Or how's about them short sessions, so short that they
> 'take the words right out of your mouth'...., and there's Lacan  re-turn.
> (see, P. Guyomard, _La jouissance du tragique, Antigone, Lacan et le
> desir de l'analyste_, Aubier 1992,
> p. 80-86). (saw-ed from 'a'-"boveda" and crypt-scripted. See?).
>
>

I see nothing, blind as  a bat am afraid, I just move a long by "touches" and
hope I don't fall into a gaping lack.

Ariosto