Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:31:44 -0500 (EST)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: the extravagance of painters: derrida/guattari/foucault



Just a suggestion but I wonder what influence, if any, Foucault's "My
Body, This Paper, This Fire" [his response to Derrida's "Cogito and the
History of Madness"] may have had on Guattari's "The Role of the Signifier
in the Institution"?  There is no explicit mention of Foucault in the FG
essay but MF's response [belated as it was] to Derrida a year or two
before Felix's talk on 'the place of the signifier' at the Paris Freudian
School in Nov.1973 has perhaps some resonances with the mini-Derrida tweak
[and I think it is a minor 'tweak' and not something else] in Guattari's
essay: though I'd hasten to add that chasing down these references does
not necessarily refute mpl-k's aims to find convergences (it would perhaps
need to locate itself elsewhere then in this moment from Felix's text
however).  See especially Foucault's discussion of the Cartesian exclusion
of madness [the real crux of the split between the MF/JD enterprises, from
MF's pov anyway] and the relationship of exteriority to philosophical
discourse (pp.412-413 in vol.2 of _The Essential Works of Foucault: 
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology_).  See too FG's appreciation of
Foucault in "Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire" in the
_Guattari Reader_ and for a nice angle on the MF/JD wrangle that works
Deleuze in there as well, see Rosi Braidotti's _Patterns of Dissonance_. 
Also David Macey captures Foucault's perturbance at Derrida (and their own
master/disciple moment) in his _The Lives of Michel Foucault_. 

What's the line at the end of FG's 'Role of the Signifier' about "the
rejects of desire" and "the joys of football on TV on Sunday afternoon"?

hasty notes written on a superbowl sunday afternoon (w/ apologies to
Henri Lefebvre),

Greg


On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, michelle phil lewis-king wrote:
> > >
> > > I am the
> > > one sticking close to d+g's actual texts.. consistently having to
> > > correct your impression that Guattari dismisses Derrida's contribution
> > > when rather he specifies that there is a difference between a
> > > non-signifying and a signifying arche ecriture, specifying that the
> > > signifying arche-writing is the basis of empire while the other (in
> > > Derrida's sense) "engenders all semiotic organisation".
> > >
> > > "(b) Semiologies of signification. On the other hand, all their
> > > substances of expression (of sound, sight and so on) are centred on a
> > > single signifying substance. This is the 'dictatorship of the
> > > signifier'. That referential substance can be considered as a written
> > > arche-writing, but not in Derrida's sense: it is not the matter of a
> > > script that engenders all semiotic organisation, but of the appearance-
> > > datable in history- of writing machines as a basic tool for for the
> > > great despotic empires."m.r pp75
> >
> > You are misreading the passage.
> 
>  No, I humbly beg to point out that you are.
> 
> The "it" after the colon refers to how "that referential substance
> > can be considered as a written arche-writing",
> 
> No, that referential substance is the writing machine.. the basic tool of
> the despotic empire. It is an arche writing but not in Derrida's sense of
> arche writing. I am not misreading because the same distinction is made in
> A.O.