Subject: Re: a very deeppp letter to Chris Jones
From: Chris Jones <ccjones-AT-ceinternet.com.au>
Date: Sat, 06 Nov 2004 20:16:08 +1100


On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 03:16, ildegir sun wrote:
> Dear Chris ,
>  
> The three or four letters who will appear on the server
> are "directed" to your only care.

Fili, many thanks for the replies. No sorry needed, they were very
interesting and there is no real war between you and me or Clifford and
myself for that matter. It is a complex discussion, perhaps, and you
must forgive me for now for not saying too much more but the pills only
allow me about four hours to write or do what I need and the narcotic
makes me so sleepy. You did ask what I thought and I gave an honest
reply, albeit somewhat provocative, but honest.

I am an elitist modernist novelist, that's all. It worries me not to be
called elitist or to be even told that my writing is hated. It has even
been said that my last novel is flawed pornography and not literature as
such. Such is the pressure placed on writers, that they not write slowly
producing a book every six or even ten years between books and that they
write many more popular books for the great capitalist marketing
machine. I would rather write journalism, as I did for a living until
ill health drove me from the profession or pornography for
heterosexuals, as I have also done, to survive. Perhaps this is a part
of the war as you say you see it and perhaps do not see in that in
attacking writers for elitism you join a chorus that is being chanted
everyday at writers that set out to write what the great god capitalist
market says is not needed and will not sell. This is also an imperial
demand repeated yet again by a doxa in the name of philosophy. To refuse
such demands would produce resentiment, of course.

Perhaps I am a Platonist, of sorts, who wishes poetry to be expelled
from the suffocating heart of Romanticist philosophy and your question
was posed as philosophical, as I understood the question. I have not
read much Mallarme, BTW, except what Badiou and D&G say. I can't say
much more except what appears is that the probe head in the Face plateau
in ATP needs to be acted to be understood, so maybe this is Mallarme?
What Mark says of balckholes as illusionary and hence time as
illusionary is interesting in macropolitcal terms. I see gay and lesbian
rights politics as what D&G would call molar politics, and not a micro
politics. But then I find what Badiou says about politics being a
separate area of thought to art, philosophy and science interesting.
Perhaps, in following Badiou, there exists a great resentiment in
imperialist politics now between Continental Europe and the US Anglo
alliance. Perhaps your posts on resentiment act this out brilliantly,
for which I must thank you. 

The politics of the subject, that is another complex question. The
problem with D&G in this respect is an ambivalence in terms of the
strategic. So I don't know if D&Gian philosophy can provide much of an
answer, here. But then, can I leave this other then to say homophobia is
a type of flight, as in phobia as flight. Also, the elision of a
critique of identity in Dleuze's DR into a critique of gay and lesbian
identity politics such that there is no need for such a politics is
definitely reactionary homophobic idealism for which any in the church
of Deleuze which maintain such a doxa need the utmost condemnation. (Not
that I am saying as such of you.)

many joyous times