From: df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca
Subject: Re: Aisthaesis, transcendence, being-in-the-world
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:41:22 -0400 (EDT)


Allen,

In Husserl  there is this prereflective passive synthesis  which is not
the busy pondering of the infinite  flow of intentions that constitute
a phenomena but takes these as a whole. Heidegger talks about a
"preontological understanding". Levinas would insert his notion of
insomnia: "... the identity of this identical I is torn by the
difference of insomnia,  creating a void which is always recreated, not
by a detachment from  everything acquired  but by a resistance, as it
were, to any condensation of this same void, which  comes over me like
somnolence (or like the  being of the being)" (From  Consciousness  to
Wakefullness). I am saying  that there is no reason to call  this what
it has always been  called in the philosophies of the world. It is pure
prayer or meditation. Attention is  the essence of a  global, 
holistic philosophy whose strange affect can't  be  named or claimed by
the formality of  a concept  or the memory of a static tradition with
its rites and instututional set up. Memory is remembrance or "active
forgetting"  to use  Nietzsche's  expression where an enjoyable, 
joyfull  work  of mourning finds symbiotic  sympathy with that which 
is buried in the  "pagan" earth, the utterly undescribable and 
extraordinary  silence of the things themselves. There is no sense and
reference for memory any  longer when  one writes it,  one abandons
writing to the  desert of the screen, to a silence that  interrupts and
resist the  formalization of a consensus always coming to the aid  of
what is being left out of any illuminating horizon, that  which is
vanishing, fainting and loosing consciousness, withdrawing  into a
crypt of language. Writing is no-name sacred performative  action that 
bears witness to the  unpresantable, to  a shock of  alterity that
tears  the meaning of  words  apart, that  scatters them in an infinite
number of directions without a why abandoning  them to their
proletarian  destitution,  to their  exposed nakedness,  to their
second virginity, twinning  of death and birth, chiasmus of  eye  and 
mirror.

"When  they (male and female) join togather they appear as one flesh. 
>From  this we learn that  the male  alone appears as only part of  a
body:  and  so likewise  does the female. But when  they are joined
together they appear  as one body...divided things cannot survive in
the  long run, and cannot  be blessed."

Dying words of  Simeon ber Yohai.

"When the coffin was  carried out, it was lifted in the air and  a 
fire burned before it. And they heard  a voice saying, "Arise and 
come, gather together for  the wedding  of Rabbi  Simeon!"

Sefer ha-Zohar

Yours, Oh master of the obvious,
Ariosto 


-- 
                               
        


     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---