Subject: Re: deconstruction of self
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 97 00:58:29 +0100
From: Giles Peaker <G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk>


rojan, (et al)

I agree nearly wholly with your post. D&G would indeed make sense as the 
context/target. But, two questions - or rather requests for clarification.

First. What do you mean by 'simultaneously...sign and flesh' in this 
para.?
>everything that fires desire pulsates on a libidinal surface (a sexual
>textual surface) that does not, as in d and g, "repulse" organ-machines
>and take them up onto a recording surface but semiotizes them on an
>immediate (and not immanent) "all-at-once" in which everthing is
>simultaneously and intensely sign and flesh 

I thought at first you meant the semiotic in a Kristevan sense - but then 
you add 'sign and flesh'. In terms of the critique of D&G that you 
suggest, this would make sense, but, at least in my reading, this is 
accomplished not by fusion, but separation. I thought that you pointed to 
this when you wrote, further on:
>libidinal immediacy implies an impossiblity of recuperation and
>memorialization, signification and subjectification

That would be my understanding, but how at once sign and flesh if 
signification is a representation and deferral?

Second, at the end of the post you write:
>it tends towards something futural...
>
>"the future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.
>it is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can
>only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrousity..."
>
>jd (of grammatology)

I'm intrigued, could you expand on this? I can't see the Derrida 
connection at all. I can perhaps see a death involved, but the futural 
seems to run against the 'always after the event' of the self that I 
found in EL. The anxieties of self presence are surely what is at work in 
the futural, but the event (in EL at least) strikes me as constantly 
'before' (not, obviously, in the sense of cause and effect) even whilst 
it works to undermine. (P.S.  A thought has just struck me that might 
point to what you meant, but I would still be pleased if you could 
elaborate before I prematurely strip it of its embryonic state).

yours

Giles

Giles Peaker
Historical and Theoretical Studies
School of Art and Design, University of Derby, Britannia Mill, 
Mackworth Road, Derby. DE22 3BL (U.K.)
+44 (0)1332 622222 ext. 4063    G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk
Editorial Collective:Detours and Delays. 
An occasional journal of aesthetics and politics