Subject: Active forgetting and the ruins of memory (fwd)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 12:50:28 -0500 (EST)


> 
> Derrida on page ten of _Parages_ writes that a motif rather than a theme
> is that which indicates, makes signs towards that which gets one moving
> and so is interesting; towards citation in the Latin sense of incitation
> and sollicitation. Motifs then point towards that which calls or gives
> movement as an interminable line of phrase regimens with-out genre
> constituting in their destitution immemoriality? How is it that I receive
> this call? By what posting that drives me into place without geographical
> location, into a drifting territoriality constantly uprooting itself with
> the arrival of the oblivion of a period which indicates the dissolution of
> words and their semantic import? A motif does not constitute a thematizing
> consciousness which as Lyotard reminds us effaces, closes off as a
> compromise formation that which remains forgotten.
> 	A thematizing consciousness is the very 'meaning' of the
> extermination of that which names that which it takes to be evil as
> "jews." This cleasing operation Lyotard suggests works on a feeling, an
> unconscious anxiety, "a diffuse feeling on the entire body (apparatus) of
> Europe, and one that it is necessary to escort to its dissipation in
> smoke." (pg. 27 _Heidegger and "the jews"_) What then is the "movement of
> resistance" against this resistance, this extermination? In order not so
> much to 'understand' (unless perhaps we think of understanding much nearer
> that operation of interpretation discussed by Heidegger in _BT_ in
> relation to Eckhart's notion of Gelassenheit -- letting beings be, emerge
> of themselves in the clearing) this resistance but respond to a barely
> legible 'horizon' and a barely audible murmur as the color or matter of an
> abstract line; one needs to see that a thematizing consciousness is
> dependent on memory which together with the will constitutes the
> understanding and projects themes, representations that closes off 'what'
> there is (il y a/es gibt) -- an opening or networking site whose
> labarynthian thread remains forgotten, encrypted by noise which is why as
> an effect of withdrawal this thread folds the fringes of a texture, the
> blind spots. Derrida in _Memoires_ analyses this memory as a "possible
> mourning" which as an ordinary memory is the product of an
> interiorising memory that he sees at work in the Hegelian sublation.
> T/here... it is "the other which resists the closure of our interiorising
> memory." It is the other, that as a truckload of explosives so to speak,
> blows up the structural building of thematizing consciousness and
> dissimenates nothing but pieces, smoke and ash. This precisely as I am
> indicating by my abstract lines reading and probing clouds of thought is
> how I can respond, however uselessly, to whatever disaster of human
> reason. The hardest imaginable practice is not to turn one's head
> backwards and remember through imagery that does not self-destruct and
> erase itself; and thereby forget the immemorial past that is impossible to
> remember for it has _not yet_ arrived and remains not so much the longing
> of a question but a murmuring passage on the verge of transmission.
> 




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