Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 13:09:36 -0800
Subject: Irreparable catastrophe of the texture of things




Developed thoughts do not necessarily follow a line of reasoning rather they
link up, conform to habits of our cultural ideals. These thoughts which do
away with surprise and chance can be said to be prosaic. Our narrator writes
in 'A rose is a rose...' that "to write without developing [is] a movement
that was first recognized by poetry" and brings us questions that _insist_
and do not develop or progress. Blanchot binds up poetry with a repetition
that digresses from that of rhythmic, automatic habits of cultural ideals.
Repetition "responds to the 'death drive'; it responds, that is, to the
necessity or counsel of this discretion that sets between being and
nothingness the interval that is proper to speech. Repetition effaces saying
[///] and demystifies it (_IC_ pg. 342). In this sense, language is
roughened with dissonance and that interference on the encrypted (///) edge
of words that says, "this is y/our colloquial idiom," without however, and
this cannot be over emphasized, constituting an identity -- except perhaps
that of tricksters or fakes, assistants or 'toons. Repetition, having more
to do with Holderlin's caesura, for instance, as described by
Lacoue-labarthe is not the rhythm of the machinic model of Herbert Spencer
(1820- 1903) where energy efficiency and the principle of least effort are
the most important functions. It is this model that was used by Aleksandr
Veselovskij (1838-1906) who stressed, in Russian literary theory, the role
of rhythm and rhyme, the predictability of which purportedly saves us from
wasting energy in frustrated expectation (see Peter Steiner _Russian
Formalism_ pg.. 48-49). This model is practical and makes for good prose.
Nietzsche who knew his Spencer writes in the _Will to Power_, that the drive
for knowledge  which is found on a drive to appropriate and conquer has as
its effect consciousness whose only purpose is that of a very quick
reduction of phenomena or impressions. This economy of perception can only
be accomplished with the fading of impressions (chances/surprise -- this
"fading" Nietzsche interprets as the movement from images to words to
concepts, which as a whole is an economic reduction of lived experience for
the purposes of the utilitarian preservation of the species which Bataille
displaces with his expenditure without return, and Derrida with a  gift that
remains secret. Much more could be said about this notion of the utilitarian
preservation of the species and the expenditure without return of the
potlatch. What kind of relation is it? Is it still dialectical in Bataille?
It may not be if one puts emphasis on active forgetting, remembering that in
Hegel the work of the dialectic makes up a memory, but is this an ordinary
memory as is suggested in straw man readings of Hegel for the purposes of
deconstruction intent of bringing in to play asymmetrical relations as you
have, it seems, in the stochastic catastrophic phenomena that Serres talks
about?)  that are replaced by laws or main characteristics seen in
automatic, recurring patterns. This is what Sklovskij in "Art as Technique"
(1917) calls "automatization." It is manner of proceeding characteristic of
prose perception. For Nietzsche it represents a "denaturalization of moral
values" (contrary to popular opinion in the _Will to Power_ Nietzsche
clearly defends "moral values" that are bound up with _instinctiveness_
which I am trying to distinguish as the habituation of repetition from the
rhythmic automatization of the mechanical form even if repetition does
indicate some sort of eternally recurring thing such as the "whatever"
(quodlibet) of Giorgio Agamben in _The Coming Community_? "The Whatever in
question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to
a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being
Muslim), but only in its being _such as it is_. Singularity is thus freed
from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the
ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal []
Thus being-_such_, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of
belonging ("there is an _x such that_ it belongs to _y_") and which is in no
way a real predicate [ To add to Agamben I want to remind you, to put things
in a more historical perspective, that Heidegger tells us in _Introduction
To The Fundamental Problems Of Phenomenology_ that what Kant is doing in the
_Critique of Pure Reason_ is showing that Being is not a real predicate. I
read this as saying that Being can't be looked at in terms of the ontic,
present-at-hand. Furthermore, at issue is the deconstruction of the
ontological argument for the existence of God which, if I am getting
Heidegger right, is an argument bound up with the idea that Being is a real
predicate. However, and here is my tension with Heidegger (early anyway), he
sees this displacement of the ontological argument as a move away from the
Neoplatonist and squarely an Aristotelian thing. Agamben himself doesn't
draw a strict line between Plato and Aristotle. He says further on in the
text I am quoting from, that "the being-such of each thing is the idea. []
The existence of the idea [angel/image -- schema in Kant? that the schema is
an angel is how Harold Bloom reads it in a recent book] is, in other words ,
a paradigmatic existence: the manifesting beside itself of each thing
(_paradeigma_). But this showing beside itself is a limit -- or rather, it
is the unraveling, the indetermination of a limit: a halo.
        (This is a Gnostic reading of the Platonic idea. It also applies to
the angels-intelligences in Avicenna and the love poets, and to Origen's
_eidos_ and the radiant cloak of the _Song of The Pearl_. Salvation takes
place in this irreparable image.)" (_CC_ pg. 100) The cloak or hermetic
texture that is proceeding in the manner of collage digressions or midrash
characterisric of the perverse style in later Barthes and Blanchot's
_Infinite Conversation_,  is called "irreparable" which Agamben, and this
reminds me of Nietzsche's _Amor Fati_, writes that this word indicates,
"that things are just as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without
remedy to their way of being. States of things are irreparable, whatever
they may be: sad or happy, atrocious or blessed. How you are, how the world
is -- this is the Irreparable" ( _CC_ pg. 90)) whose effect (that of the
"denaturalization of morals" to jog you memory ) is the degenerate type of
the "good man". This 'perversion,' to use Nietzsche's word, of the moral
instincts was the emergency reaction of Socratic dialectics, in Nietzsche's
reading anyway, where it represents the response to the loss of unconscious
instinctiveness and therefore the frantic search for reasons, causes, laws
from which to act and to try to approximate natural moral instincts where
one does not go around looking for proofs for one's actions. This is why he
calls for a "protracted vision" where "the stored-up integrity and
shrewdness of generations which are never conscious of their principles and
are even a little afraid of principles. the demand for a virtue that reasons
is not reasonable -- A philosopher is compromised by such a demand" (_WtP_
pg. 242, section 439 -- see also sections 423,430, 439 for more on instinct
/practicality/morality). Beyond consciousness and its effacement lies the
unconscious and its death drive. What is this effacement of consciousness if
not active forgetting?

Ariosto