Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 22:00:49 -0400
Subject: Face to face...


Ariosto Raggo writes to Lucio Privitello for the first time on Jan 18,
'97, on the Blanchot list, that Lucio writes:
> 
>Yet, Gracian's "strenght", or form of Machiavellismo, of the
> inner experience, of course, is "In a word, be a saint:...", found as a
> conclusion to _The Oracle_. Nietzsche saw this clearly in _Beyond Good
> and Evil_, # 51. In section III, of Lacan's _Television_ there is much to
> be found on the knotted practice of hide and seek of one's "dechet".
> 
>         "Cosi' a quel tempo solean per se stessi
>          Punirsi i cavallier di tali eccessi"
>                            (Ludovico Ariosto, _Orlando Furioso_)
> 
> Lucio Angelo Privitello


Dear Illustrious Lucio,

        Are you mad? So eager to post on sainthood ? It was Nietzche's 
greatest fear that he would come to be thought of as a saint. This is
why he took time to discuss "the mask". In section 270 of Beyond Good
and Evil he writes, "It is characteristic of more refined humanity to
respect "the mask" and not to indulge in psychology and curiosity in the
wrong place." The demand to reveal sources, show our reference(s), to
force "one" as it were to break with "silence" reeks of the Inquisition.
Blanchot when instead of "the mask" speaks of "secrecy" underwrites
Nietzche's (Gracian's) call to dissimulation, a sublime art of
dissappearance that has some affinities for instance with what
Baudrillard writes with respect to "seduction" in _Cool Memories_ and
which certainly has affinities with what Michel De Certeau in _Mystic
Fable_ calls the seduction of an Other which is the effect of a
"withdrawal". Michel De Certeau:


        Secrecy is not only the state of a thing that escapes
        from or reveals itself to knowledge. It designates a
        play between actors. It circumscribes the terrain of 
        strategic relations between the one trying to discover
        the secret and the one keeping it, or between the one who 
        is supposed to know it and the one who is assumed to know it
        (the "vulgar")[remind you of Lacan Lucio ?] In accordance
        with a tradition illustrated by El Heroe(1637) by Baltasar
        Gracian, the secret binds together, by illocutionary ties,
        those who hunt for it, keep it. It is the center of the 
        spider web spun around it by lovers, traitors, jelous 
        protagonists, pretenders, exhibitions[where do you fit in
        Lucio ?]. The hidden organizes a social network.
                        Mystic Fable, pg97 in English Trans.


Not really paying much attention, a little distracted by an unfamiliar
space, we stumble on archival ruins still raising dust, fragmenting
multiplying threads evoking "only in a language that erases itself"
(Blanchot _The Writing of Disaster_ pg. 14) and constructing a BwO.
There, where writing and passivity come together no longer as a
discursive reading of codes but as meditative patience, a defferal
marks  an effaced difference,-- a laceration in archival texture from
which another thread splits open and drifts... The shoring up of
fragments, a port operating as that which figures the dissolution of
symbolic codes and it's masterful reading, is the "...test of a properly
mystical text [///]  They are beaches offered to the swelling sea; their
goal is to disappear into what they disclose, like a Turner landscape
dissolved in air and light. An ab-solute (un-bound), in the mode of
pain, pleasure, and a "letting-be" attitude (Meister Eckhart's
gelazenheit), inhabits the torture, ecstasy, of sacri-fice of a language
that can _say_ that ab-solute, endlessly, only by erasing itself"
(Michel De Certeau, _Heterologies: Discourse On The Other_ Pg. 81).

	Thus unfolding, as a $/LAP, of its own kind in a gesture-erasure
thinking-_in_-the fragments, an initiative is heard, and 'Re'-sponded to
as a _sui_-Cid-[e] generis, where "patience" reveals an 'archival
texture' of many an "a"- foray-ism worthy of _exegesis_, as mentioned by
Nietzsche in the Preface to _Genealogy of Morals_# 8.

An "a"-foray-ism is never simply read, or only gives us its riddles
with  an increasingly slow, if not inturrupted reading or thinking. Such
interruption is not nothingness as what would bring death pure and
simple but a dying approximation... a pregnant pause where nothing moves
internal relations to reach after an actualization, and where subjective
expression is aborted for growing intensity. To give thought such a
distance is to go to the end of thought, to its shore and with that edge
to cut a-way from its actualization, from any need to change and only
then is there repetition "in that same bare place" (W. Stevens) where
one writes the failure of the imagination such that fragmentation
remains unknown and impossible to keep in mind. Exposure or nakedness
where the screen writes its own passivity becomes a "heightening of
forgetfulness or silence [which] carries us, carries us off, deports us,
straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with ignorance of the
unknown, [...] endlessly." Writing then is expectant of I don't know
what, it is a not-willing that takes responsibility for itself and is
the beginning of riddled exegesis. Thus Nietzsche speaks, in a crucial
condensation: "That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man,
however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its
_horror vacui. it needs a goal_ -- and it will rather will _nothingness_
than _not_ will -- Am I understood? ... Have I been understood?" (_GM_
#1). Of course the answer to his query is no, since if he was
understandable that would imply an interpretation of ascesis that
encountering a-void(ance) goes about looking for a goal in a tangled
texture rather than never-minding and learning ignorance. The emblematic
signature is that of a labyrinth, a threaded secret network. 

 What more o(a)rs the moors of how "something more exceed[s] the whole"?
It is within the paradox of "promises"? An "incorporation" as again
Nietzsche would remind us in the "Second Essay" of _GM_ # 1? Then as
now, I pen - the mask is only as refined as the hand of the artist who
crafts it. Are the "Wooden bridge[s]" burning? [laughter]. (see
Blanchot, _IC_). Is this "unfamiliar space" _Castle_ like? I'd here,
point to page 390 of _IC_, even if the mask slips over the "I" which
peers _sparagma_ (torn to pieces) to what has 'un-bound' it. 

	So(wn) it is, undone, that the "never mind[-]ing" is allowed to play in
the fields, "Happy like a broom whose whirl makes a windmill in the air"
(Bataille, _The Impossible, 18). Hasn't that been the push of a break in
how I para-graphed "a"-foray-ism; figured to 8, w/here you broke off,
pulling upon a thread? Is this what we may scent in what Klossowski
spells as "he explicated himself by _implicating himself_ in a
preconceived _interpretation_ of the 'text'." (Nietzsche and the Vicious
Circle_, p.173)? And, I will ask, to what chapter does that emerge from?
[laughter]. What is this "goal" upon the fields/feels of the symbolic?
The bawling of the "a" in search of a "cross" made impossible to score?
[laughter]. A (k)noted will taken as a 'score-card' etched upon the
sands that make tablet, ink, and erasure one; a scar-cord pulled to
dis-figure a body _sans_ "or"-gains; and possibly still, a 'scaraboid'
(nouned) without things left to charm. Ecce symbolic _sparagma_. Now,
drink! Since now we "halve" written 'face to Face..."


entre chien et loup dans
lalangue trespasses,
Lucio "a" Privi-thelos


Ari