Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 16:47:30 +0100
From: Rene de Bakker <rene.de.bakker-AT-uba.uva.nl>
Subject: Re: superfluous


> "There is a real slim shady in all of us" says Eminem,
> and makes superfluous with one strike all departments
> of ethics and value philosophy. More or less like one page
> Castaneda makes superfluous the epistemological and
> phenomenological departments. When asked what
> he thought about Derrida, he laughed.
> 
> When Castaneda, in an early book, defends his scientific
> attitude (read: his superiority) over against Don Juan, by
> positing the transcendental subject behind the empirical
> subject, Don Juan replies: And what is it doing there?
> Watching, I suppose?

MichaelP:
Interesting, Rene, that Casteneda, a student of Garfinkel
(ethnomethodology), should be able to claim (qua-ethnomethodologist), first
of all, any superiority (resource) over his subject-matter (topic), and
secondly, by virtue of a transcendental subject watching the proceedings
with a superior eye (I); in displaying the rational properties of the
folk-ways of everyday members, Garfinkel's ethnomethodology was a
radicalisation of the social phenomenology of Schutz (who followed Husserl)
that surely rendered superfluous, redundant, any kind of transcendental
subject lording it over the empirical subject; moreover, even the empirical
subject is made at least questionable (as to its empiricity and
subjecthood): the concept of 'member' is defined as a competency in natural
language...


HI Michael,

Maybe he was a bad student of Garfinkel's - but Castaneda defends the
'transcendental ego' as the basis of his scientific approach, and
therewith as justification (in: A separate reality?). But even if he would
have been a good student and would have addressed Don Juan as a competent
partaker of at least two languages  - see through how much trouble he goes,
before being able to admit that Don Juan's use of the Spanish language is
superior to his own - he is dealing with an object, that refuses to be an
object and so ridiculizes the subject that needs him as an object. When Don
Juan tells him that there is one shithead in the room and that he himself
is not the one, Castaneda of course gets mad, but after that Don Juan turns
into stone, and C has to admit his superiority. But 'conceptually', he is
not ripe for it, and always again has to take refuge to his notebook to
spell it out - something that is encouraged by the Indian - who is far more
understanding than the phenomenologist. Castaneda's concepts are fit to
make everything exotic 'interesting', that is innocent - they have this
same dissolving heartless tolerance Botho is speaking of, that takes the
heart out of everything, like that 'bizon in the zoo, standing in the rain'
of Robbie Robertson. (Heart-less: without middle, mediation, that is also:
without pain, "Schmerzlos sind wir, und haben fast die Sprache in der
Fremd' verloren, Hoelderlin.) 

This would be our position, we know the old concepts don't fit anymore, we
still fare on their ontological prestige, but they can be no more than
ontic coins; the new that we make are not backed by experience, and even
when poets, apprehensibly, throw away all convention, it is seldom or never
a guarantee for originality and they appear to be influenced by something,
whether they read it or not.
So all is a question of how deep one goes. To Heidegger, new efforts can
only lead to the very old, and also Nietzsche once claims to have tied in
with a tradition, the thread of which almost seemed lost.
 

> "Will the real slim shady please stand up, please stand up,
> please stand up?" 

Is the real Slim Shady a big yellow Taxi Driver who might desert the trees
(and put them in a tree museum) and make the world a desert of parking lots
enjoyed by the inferior superfluous owners of their very own weapons of
mass destruction -- the go any where fuck every thing dreary mass mobster
yahooligans of the so-called superior democrazies with their virtual
reality tv & dv &...?


They probably too.
I hear the threefold betrayal of the hero of an old book.



> Why is there no learning from history? The answer lies
> in the beginnings of history, and is given by an oracle,
> the summit of superstition in the eye of the atheistic
> beholders. It is given to Croesus, who is planning a war
> against Persia. It says:  "A great empire will fall." 
> Indeed Allen: not revealing, nor hiding, but indicating.
> 
> Who already knows who he is, is missing the crux.
> Who can say what role is attributed to him?
> I don't know - I'm as superfluous as anyone -
> but I believe there's the whole difference.

The empire (of shady empiricism) will surely fall because it is falling
(and failing): all fall down. And what remains when the empire falls and
goes down down (deeder and down?)?

The superfluous are also an excess, a joyful over-flow; some times life is
essentially superfluous.

good morning to you Rene (cannot sleep, sand flies are swarming)   



I was somewhere else, but it got through, thanks!

rene





-----------------------------------
drs. Rene de Bakker
Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam
Afdeling Catalogisering 
tel. 020-5252368              


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