Subject: Re: race...
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 17:36:20 -0500 (EST)


Addressing myself to the Canadian dirty laundry,

	It's not the usual anymore is it, the Heidegger guilty or not
"Guilty!", hey, doesn't he write about this somewhere with reference to
Kierkegaard?. My citizenship card says I am a canadian, my cultural
education says I am a lot of different things causing all these
interference patterns, mixing everything up into a sort of witches
brew, a collage and a hybrid. Canadians don't have an identity, no
matter what the Mother channel, the CBC tells you. And don't get me
wrong, I speak merely as Joe Blow, I am not an expert on the
constitution of Canadian identity. As far as I'm concerned to be a
canadian is to have no identity, maybe at most, the promise of an
identity. The thing about identity is that it is a product of the
consumption of a cultural memory that keeps getting recycled, by
parents, teachers, television, etc.. To bring up Nancy again (_The
Inoperative Community_), the way he puts it, is that first of all there
is no whole identity to a community but the nostalgia for a lost one
that one wants to integrate, assimilate and make whole again so to
speak--not quite the integration of resolute attunement except when it
is taken as the destiny of a particular people which is clearly how
Heidegger has taken it even if it can be said that he renounced this:

Listen to what he says,

"The motif of revelation [strong with Heidegger at first but gradually
withdrawn as an emphasis is placed on what remains hidden and therefore
impossible to bring into any kind of disclosure, and so in some way,
Heidegger can be said to agree with Levinas.], through death, of
being-together or being-with [In that European, oblique style he doesn't
say it but he mentions Heidegger here.], and of the crystallization of
the community around the death of its members, _that is to say around
the "loss" (the impossiblity) of their immanance_ [his emphasis] and
not around their fusional assumption in some collective hypostasis,
leads to a space of thinking incommensurable with the problematics of
sociality or intersubjectivity (including the Husserlian problematic of
the alter ego) within which philosophy, despite its resistance, has
remained captive." (pg. 14)

So, he is with and against Heidegger.

I can get into this some more later if I feel inclined but as far as I
am concerned immanance as I said is the fusion of the identity of a
people around the transmission of a cultural identity or memory, you
can see now, perhaps being too oblique, how important is Nietzsche's
notion of active forgetting specially when read through guys like
Klossowsky, Blanchot, and Bataille. If the list opens up a bit and
tries to BREAK the tendency to always stay really close to Heidegger, in an
almost sycophantic attachement, then without a doubt things could get
more interesting. With regards to the normative historicist approach where
what seems revelant is what Heidegger was doing in this or that situation
in this or that time, not only does that step out of the importance of
countinuing to plug away at a meditative practice such as that of
resolute attunement or active forgetting for that matter, but it also
forgets at least two hundred years of hermeneutic studies. That
approach was dealt with a long time ago. REFERENCE: Kierkegaard
_Unconcluding Scientific Postscript_. You might as well try to find out
what kind of cereal he was eating professors. rant. rant. rant.

Let me try to relax a minute here, I am getting very anxious.

So the CBC has these cultural heritage ads that I am sure you guys are
familiar with, usually they are French, Asian, or Native oriented and
rarely mixed as if we all needed to stay separate and protect our own
territories, as if I couldn't talk about Native self-government and
shamanic circles because I don't have red blood, etc..

There--you have the recycling of the memory banks, the archives.

Political struggle henceforth is about MEMORY.

Another thing, the greatest Canadian cultural export is clearly comics,
we are good at making people laugh guys, so RELAX a bit.

my two cents worth,
Crazy Feathers,
Ariosto


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