Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 01:21:14 +0800 (CST)
From: Liano Sharon <lsharon-AT-ms2.hinet.net>
Subject: Some questions on your Bakhtin peice




On Sun, 29 Dec 1996, Vadim Linetski wrote:

<snip>

>  throughout my work i argue there there is no need for this
> "melancholy" and "pessimism", humbly, i suggest that you skim through my
> "Nabokov and Swift, Achilles and the Tortoise: the sublime innocence, or
> the uncanny return of the referent in poststructuralist theory along the
> lines of Zeno's paradox" and "Bakhtin's words 'There is no alibi for
> being': Why Freud was not a creative writer?" - two chapters from
> _BAKHTIN LAID BARE..._
> http://www.mcs.net/~zupko/bakhtin/tabcon.htm
> - and share with me your critical remarks

	Ok, on further reading of the chapter dealing with Zeno's paradox 
I must confess that I've now read the first third or so of the paper 
several times and though I catch glimpses of things whiich I understand, 
the whole of your argument escapes me.  Some points I'd liek 
clearification on are the following:

1) what, preciesly, do you mean when you use the word "paradox"?  I have 
the feeling that you may be using it rather unclearly.  As a particular 
example of where I see a lack of clearity, you seem to misunderstand the 
structure of the Achilles and the Tortoise ""paradox" and the Liar 
paradox.  I put quotations aroound the word when refering to A&T because 
there is an important sense in which A&T is in fact not a paradox in the 
same way that the Liar is a paradox.  Namely (and this is a version of my 
quick post on this subject earlier), A&T is or is not a paradox depending 
totally on where the race is run and totally independent of who 
participates, while the Liar paradox is a paradox regardless of location 
and dependent only on the nature of the Liar him or herself.  The Liar is 
self referential (arguably the strongest kind of paradox) while A&T 
requiers consistent reference to an external referent to be a paradox at 
all, refer to the wrong race track or use the wrong method of measuring 
(referencing) it and Achilles wins hands down, no 
fancy foot work necessary--to prove this all you need to do is go find 
yourself a tortoise to race (or take an intro to calculus class).  In any 
case, I must strongly dissagree with your assertion that "the Cretan lier 
[sic] . . . itself is a version of . . . the paradox of Achilles and the 
Tortoise".  The structure of the two is completely different, and the 
difference lies preciesly in what referents each uses and how these 
referents are used.  Since referents seem to be main players in your 
argument I suggest considering the nature of the two paradoxes (" ") 
carefully.  Put a different way, A&T was a paradox for 2000 
years or so because our undestanding of how measurement worked seemed to 
disagree with observable reality.  When the idea of a continuum came 
along and it became possible to measure the infinitely small (or more 
importantly, to add the infinitely small together), it was discovered 
that A&T was not infact a paradox in our physical universe.
	The Liar is a much more complicated paradox.  First of all there 
are several versions:

1) A Cretan states "all Cretans are liars".

This is not a particularly strong paradox, as is illustrated If we 
consider 

2) A Cretan states: "All Cretans always lie"

In (1) ther may infact be no paradox since there is no guarranty that he 
or she is lying at the given moment.  "he's a liar" doesn't mean he 
always lies, it only means he lies sometimes, or possibly even "he's 
lying right now" with no supposition that he does this habitually.  The 
point I'm getting at is that for the Liar to really clearly be a paradox 
it must reference itself through all time or state speciifically the 
temporal limits of its existance as in "_This_ sentence is not true" or 
"I'm lying _now_".  Such temporally constrained paradoxes are pointers to 
much more interesting paradoxes.  For example, note that "all cretans 
always lie," while it is not constrained temporally, is constrained 
spacially--to Cretans.  Consider a stronger (?? well, lets see if its 
stroner??) version:  "everyone always lies".  In fact this is no stronger 
than (2) because the paradox descends on the individual uttering thi 
statement and not at all on anyone else in the set used to identify the 
speaker as one who always lies.  Thus a Cretan saying "all cretans always 
lie" and anyone saying "everyone always lies" and me saying "I always 
lie" produce exactly the same paradox--this demonstrates that the Liar 
paradox is in no way spacially constrained (unlike A&T) to some external 
location.  Further, the need to specify a specific (thoough possibly 
universilly quantified) time frame, together with the centrality of the 
self-referencing individual, suggests that this paradox represents a way 
of Being one's self which is qualitatively different from the experience 
of self we experience now--this suggestion arises from the necessity to 
distinguish time-in-paradox from time-out-of-paradox while spacial 
location seems irrelevent.

2) That is, secound point of clearification.  You often seem to equate 
deconstruction with poststructuralism, or with poststructuralism's method 
of deploying itself.  I don't see this connection at all.  I see 
deconstructionism as sort of the inverse operation of 
logocentrism--logocentrism constructs itself and deconstruction pulls it 
apart.  Locked in battle neiither seems to deploy any kind of life 
energy.  Deconstruction seems to be in constant need of something to 
deconstruct, if logocentrism went out the windo, deconstructioin (it 
seems to me) would eiither soon follow or take up its old enemie's place, 
in essence resurrecting it.  I have the impression that you are aguing 
against this interpretation of deconstructionism.  Can you elaborate on 
this and the relationship yoou see between poststructuralism and 
deconstruction?

well, thats it for now.  I'll try to read and understand more of your 
writting later in the week (I thought I wouldn't be able to get to any of 
it before the weekend, but I had a lucky break or two :).


Your Friend,

		Liano