Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 23:54:40 -0500 (EST)
From: TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: Re:  God help us, back to tropes


On Sun, 24 Jan 1999, Michael Rooney wrote:

> 
> One example from unleash:
> 
> }}} those who claim to be "real" or "truthful" 
> }}} are only liars anyway
> 

You should know better. Yes, there is certainly a truth to what Unleaseh
says here. He simply means that to claim that one "has *the* truth" is a
posture that is utterly anathemtic to any sort of truth or approching the
truth, like someone proclaiming "I am good" or "I am humble". He's putting
it in simple terms but it's not that bad. I don't see why you are reading
him so constantly through black and white lenses. If you know more, you
would be able to enter into so much with him, and this sidebar would
disappear, even against your protests that you are making the world safe
for thought and from Unleash. This is a "war", a tiny, tiny war. But it is
a war, pretty much, and sides, yours in particular, are organized
according to a very, very crude principle. If Deleuze is right that there
is something that effectively prevents thought named philosophy, it is,
assuredly, I think, the *war* that has been utterly impacted in
philosophy, in some kind of dialectics, in some kinds of analytic
philosophy. The "return to war" which you, with a minor degree (not a
major degree) of self-consciousness, are enacting still does not make it
to depolemicization and, as we are witnessing, thought. Such a
depolemicization is free to rise above, sink beneath, or otherwise slip
the bonds of war to ask, again, like a woman who no longer cares for the
battle of the Men, *what is really and truly being accomlished in this
war?* Warmongers will all proclaim that all that is good is being saved,
and do so with the usual miltaristic language that reveals, throught, that
that is not the case, at all. Antiwar? But this means: nothing, to you
whose eyes would seem to be completely attuned only to the bright flashes
you are passing off as light and thought. You will notice my willing
inclusion of a moment or two of polemics in my address to you here. I
suggest that this kind if inclusion of polemics is closer to what is
fruitful in philosophy, and even then, it is something that ought to be
both limited and entered into the substance of philosophical concerns, a
gesture I am likewise accomlishing even in this sentence. 

Regards,

TMB