File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9706, message 157


Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 21:35:50 -0700 (PDT)
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-crl.com>
Subject: Re: deconstruction of the impossible






Roja,

Perhaps you could assist me with your vocabulary.  What do you mean by 
"futural" in the sentence here:

> from a temporal perspective, the 'source' would be irrelevant (it could
> probably be identified as "libido" tho'), but the direction would have
> to be futural 
> i.e.: tending towards a monstrous a-topos devoid of the claim, guarantee
> or certainty of a fixed program 
> hence free to fail and reappear elsewhere

the libidinal energy is imaginative of the future, but without 
certainty?  Likely to appear anywhere in the future?

I take it that the following means that the other erotic options are 
merely to experience the immediacy of erotic intensity, without any sense 
of (genital) organs, without any sense of imaginative expectation of 
before or after.  Is that right? 

> the other options would be "regressive" (return to polymorphous
> infantilism or to a utopic vision of a pre-capitalist social "body
> impassioned with intense ambivalences anterior to all political economy"
> LE 130) or static (a spinning in place of the libidinal skin which is
> radically ex-centric to the individual: an eternal return beyond our
> ken) or the con-centric illusion of a punctual immediacy lacking any
> reference to a 'before' or 'after' 
> are there any other options?
 
About the following, do you feel that Lyotard, in LE, is as committed to 
the anti-oedipal program as D & G?  His language seems much less 
prescriptive to me than that of D & G.  Do you agree?  Perhaps that's 
what you mean when you say if it was a "float text" (i.e., unattached to 
the history of the author, or unattached to a context), then it would 
seem "devoid of socio-political context".

> if LE was a floating text then we could perhaps say it is devoid of
> socio-political content
> but in the context of lyotard's bio-graphic career this seems untenable
> the fact that it adheres to the anti-oedipal claim that desire is always
> political would seem to call for an "engaged" reading of the text
> or else what does it matter?
> LE would just be a reiteration of a-political lacanian jouissance and
> the endless litany (O the tragedy!) of missed encounters with intensity
> (ie: enjoyment as regulated discharge according to the critique of a
> thousand plateaus) 
> surely lyotard cannot be placed in the a-political oedipal camp?

Why not?  Because he was once political?  What do you feel Giles? I take 
it you do not see as much prescriptive passion in Lyotard even in LE as 
you see in D & G?  I'm inclined to read them in the same way, although I 
am new to reading LE & D & G.

> > 
> yet he does indite "absolute danger" in OG 

Could you expand on that?  Point to text?

..Lois Shawver

   

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