From: Ariosto Raggo <df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: Re: Enter the Dragon & One mask replaced with another.
Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 12:26:05 -0500 (EST)


> 
> It's time to come clean, I followed the weekends posts with astonishment
> bordering on the perverse.  Fazi you, " love the smell of napalm in the
> morning." Ari you are anonymous, melting, reconfiguring, quite the
> rhizomatic substance you love to  smoke,bouncing around from pole to pole,
> theres no stopping you .  I would not like to add anything at all to the
> discussion itself , just wanted to say  that I really enjoyed reading.

  This is nothing, you just wait, it's all tension building towards the
climax, apocalypse now. That's another good story that i haven't read
in along time, the one about going down the river into the _heart of
darkness_ by Joseph Conrad. Good thing there is none of that Golden
Mean moderation on this list, extremely excessive postings only *in*
Bataille's memory, al otro lado.

> I would, for what it's worth like to tell you more about (myself).

  If you say you are worthless, okay then, so be it, you are nothing
and can't solve a mystery like jungleboard fever.

 I am 25
> and have been interested in Bataille and others for about four years now. 
> The Chief Inspector was a way into this list as quite frankly I was
> shitting myself. 

  You mean you were really $-care-d? You are getting more relaxed and
comfortable now and fast. I remember when I was 18-19 thinking to
myself in much confusion that I wouldn't mind skipping a few years to
25 when I figured I would know a lot, have more answers, be more secure
and comfortable in my own skin. Well, as things turned out, I had to
let time do it's job and when 25 came along, there were a lot more
questions, aporetic perplexity everywhere. Now I am 34 and a-("I")ring
my mid-life crisis that finds me in the darks woods on this floating
island going up in smokes sometimes with Virgil as my companion now
that the masked Lacanian phantom is getting all quiet a-gain, probably
sore that we are giving him such a hard time as if it was going to be a
smooth turn and twist back into the upward flow...try a-gain buddy. As
it turns out i know more about why in the end I know so little, almost
nothing--that non-knowledge(savoir) that Bataille communicated in an
international colloqium in the early 50's if I am not mistaken. Just
thought I would add this reference that Derrida also mentions in his
fine essay on Bataille and general libidinal economics. The idea (which
as you all know, I think of as a concept in D&G's sense which are not
propositional but more like the famous tabula rasa or the naked
intentionality of a-mystical text such as _The Cloud Of Unknowing_
where in fact the most important practice is that which the anonymous
author calls _The Cloud Of Forgetting_ which I graft in a rhizomatic
manner with Nietzsche's _active forgetting_; just to recapitulate as my
old hermeneutic teacher used to say.... He was a hard ass teacher,
lutheran pastor, brilliant if cold man who also got me interested in
studying the heretics and latin liberation theology. Spent two years
working with him and with his students, one of which was  repeating
the class, this is how slow he was, for the fourth, fifth time. We
would read up to 150 pages of sometimes heavy hermeneutic texts like
Being and Time, Truth and Method, or Dilthey for a three hour class. He
is going to die in obscurity probably. A lot of seminarians hated him,
he was hard and uncompromising blowing their stupid illusions about God
left and right. That was around 92-94  there in Sakatoon, Sask.; in
western Canada. He was one of the two or three teachers who I truly
respected... most of them, you realize once you have more confidence, are
full of shit.
A

>I am from Bristol England and have a degree in Sociology,
> although I spent most of my time reading all the usual suspects we mention
> on this list. I have also spent some time studying Postmodernity which was
> basically a literary criticism course and didn't agree with me at all. I am
> not very confident but have been having an my own relationship with these
> (anti)theorists and they have made a big difference to the way I think and
> feel. I don't know why I am writing this,(as you probably don't give a
> fuck) but  I am enjoying this list and I do not agree with Jean Dragon even
> though I would welcome his/her participation. I agree with those on the
> list who think that with Bataille (like the others we mention) it is more
> important to have some kind of intimate relationship, as he himself had
> with Nietzsche.  I don't know about anyone else but I work in a dead end
> job where there is no room for any kind of interaction about things that
> matter to me.  This list has provided me with a little space with which to
> start experimenting with, even though I am without doubt a beginner, and
> sometimes I don't know what your'e going  on about.  I have never felt
> comfortable with language and have shit grammar and all that, but writing
> is the only thing that I would like to do so as the Chief said the other
> day he is trying.
> 
>  " I never told that audience what they meant to me, what they gave me.
> Nothing     could have been more unlike a discussion, and philosophy has
> nothing to do      with discussing things, it's difficult enough just
> understanding the problem               someone's framing and how they're
> framing it, all you should ever do is                  explore it, play
> around with the terms, add something, relate it to something          
> else, never discuss it. It was like an echo chamber in which idea
> reappeared       after going, as it were, through various filters. It was
> there that I realized how           how much philosophy needs not only a
> philosophical understanding, through      concepts, but a nonphilosophical
> understanding, rooted in percepts and               affects. You need
> both."
> 
>    Gilles Deleuze from Negotiations (interview:on philosophy)
> 
> all my love 
> Richard Webb 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 



--