Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 08:07:35 -0500
From: albright-AT-world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
Subject: Bataille & Believers


Yes, I rather like Bataille, although only browsing in bookstores. I don't
own any of his books. I do own a few Foucaults, Nietzsches, Marx, and
Freud. I am pleased that Bataille likes Blake (_Literature of Evil_, I
think it's called) and then believes Nietzsche is just IT in another of his
books.

But again, I think Nietzsche was right. This ever new and supposedly
"better" flow of... stuff is not necessarily true. Just because Nietzsche
lived later and had different insights... for one thing, he wasn't a fine
visual artist, like Blake. I DO think at times that Nietzsche works well as
a poet...

As to whether I'm "a believer" or not... what has that got to do with
ethics and a concern for a better world both today and tomorrow?

I certainly have business with Foucault, because he has invaded into at
least being *considered* in the thinking of intriguing writers, such as
William Spanos's _The Errant Arts of Moby Dick_ (I liked his drawing an
analogy between Emerson-gone-amok and Ahab, as well as the analogy of the
Vietnam War incursion by the US), Ronald Hyam's _Empire and Sexuality, The
British Experience_ (really I think it's delightful what some of those guys
did for the Boy Scouts, but... that one who cried during executions, but
clearly got off during whippings? I just don't think it was...
consensual!), and then I already mentioned Jamake Highwater's _The
Mythology of Transgression_. There are... others. E-mail friends of mine
who think Foucault "invented" feminism. And then, there are the real life
people I know, some of whom really like Foucault, some of who don't. So
that's why I've been eavesdropping, and now talking. I want to learn, to
grow. I am an open "system"....

Yes, I admit that, although I don't think he's particularly "pragmatic" at
times, I happen to think William James was a visionary who saw BACK beyond
the Aristotle/Socrates collusion just like Freddie did as well as FORWARD
to a better time, whereas Foucault... well, the jury's out, for now.

And in recent books on/by W. James: Why is one person telling me that W.
James would be very anti-Foucault (in an Intro) and another person telling
me that W. James is just as powerful as Foucault for democratic
"liberation" if... Foucault doesn't somehow matter, a force to be reckoned
with?

You see, I'm not interested in "archeology" (death valleys?) as much as
trying to bring "presence" back, even if it's a more *enlightenned*
presence (in both the Eastern and Western sense of the word) into these
Dead Sea Texts and Other Signs and Symbols. For more information, I might
ponder why Daniel C. Matt thinks Derrida is yet another ripple effect
(along with Blake, Kafka, Emerson, Swedenborg) to _The Essential Kabbalah_.
Could be mere serendipity, or a ploy to sell Matt's book.....

Because the *darkest* question in philosophy is the question, not of DEATH,
but of LIFE..............

        ---Randall Albright
                  http://world.std.com/~albright/