File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/96-10-27.132, message 127


Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 11:40:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: Re[3]: labor of dionysus




On Wed, 23 Oct 1996, Tom Blancato wrote:

> I'm not responding to everything you've written, and you've pointed to
> some really interesting things, so I'll be thinking and filling out
> interlibrary loan forms... You have some things in mind, it seems, which
> perhaps you're not quite unpacking enough? 

Not nearly enough.  I always tell myself never to jump into discussions on
this list unless I can follow them through but, right now (and for the
next couple of weeks), there's too much else on my plate so apologies,
apologies, apologies in advance.  To be honest, it might take two weeks to
get my head around some of the issues you raise in this most recent post
anyway.  But, if you're filling out interlibrary loan cards, etc, then, my
most immediate task--of seduction--as been fulfilled (if you don't have
it, fill out a loan card for Dreyfuss and Rabinow's book on Foucault and
sneak a peak at Foucault's afterword on "the subject and power; why study
power: the question of the subject, how is power exercised?").  My most
immediate reaction (beside much nodding in agreement) was to still be
slightly puzzled over how you've interpreted F's work on power (on more
than one occasion in Deleuze's _Foucault_, he'll say something like "For a
long time Foucault ..." and, then, of course, after this 'long time'
something changed and it may have very well have been Foucault's
"encounter" [more than 'influence', Deleuze's _F_, p.129] with Heidegger
that makes it possible to talk about Foucault after this long time
elsewhere.  And Deleuze says that it was "a final rediscovery of Heidegger
by Foucault.  Memory is contrasted not with forgetting but with the
forgetting of forgetting [and here I always hear the Mekons singing in
their song "Amnesia" about the subterranean histories of rock and roll: "I
forgot to forgot to remember"], which dissolves us into the outside and
constitutes death.  On the other hand, as long as the outside is folded an
inside is coextensive with it, a memory as coextensive as forgetting.  It
is this coextensive nature which is life, a long period of time . . . For
a long time Foucault thought of the outside as being an ultimate
spatiality that was deeper than time;  but in his late works he offers the
possibility once more of putting time on the outside and thinking of the
outside as being time, conditioned by the fold" [p.108-109].  So I think
that, in some respects, your accent on *forgetting* is right though it
arrives in the midst of (and applies to) F's "long time elsewhere" and not
necessarily to what follows.  A bit later, Deleuze says, "All these
determinations of thought were already original figures of the action of
thought [what version of *thoughtaction* might be found here?].  And for a
long time Foucault did not believe that thought could be anything else. 
How could thought invent a morality, since thought can find nothing
outside itself except that outside from which it comes and which resides
in it as 'the unthought'?" [p.118].  And what Foucault follows, instead,
is the line (the same line that, I think, "concerns" you, Tom) of the
outside and its folding into what Deleuze calls "zones of subjectivation." 
Now, this is all way tooooo truncated but what I'm trying to do--and
probably not very well, I'm trying to move too quickly--is show points of
connection between where you seem to be headed, Tom, and certain paths
that Deleuze (and Guattari! -- yes, of course, his "Regimes, Pathways,
Subjectivities" too: among others) and Foucault have journeyed.  You're
not quite saying the same thing but I'm grateful for that: it means you've
got something to add and not just a tracing of their map.  Boy, this is a
long paranthetical moment.  I'll stop) and, secondly, I'd want to pursue
the issue of *moral condition* and morality (this is a kind of flipness
that overtakes me and turns morality to molarity but, of course, it ain't
quite so simple: just like bottom-up and top-down--one of the points in
your post that I will absolutely say is most well-taken). 

Perhaps we can make a date for two or three weeks from now?  Maybe maybe
maybe.  Though that should preclude no one else from piping-in in the
meantime ... 

Greg, sometimes interior decorator




   

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