File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9711, message 51


From: EricMurph-AT-aol.com
Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 12:00:20 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Query - Sovereignty


First I want to thank everyone for their various and interesting responses to
all my posts. It appears this board has become very active again.  I must
confess one of my limitations is that scheduling doesn't always permit me to
log-on daily.  Thus, I aplogize for the lateness of this posting. Instead of
making individual responses, it is easier to make this post en masse. That is
what I am attempting here. 

To follow up on my earlier proposal, I will now embark into the thicket of
Lyotard.  I hope this proves to be a productive journey for everyone
involved.  My suggestion is that we focus initially on the section entitled
"Obligation" in "The Differend" with a particular emphasis on "The Levinas
Notice" supplemented by the essay "Levinas' Logic" (reprinted in "The Lyotard
Reader").  I can only facilitate this discussion.  My hope is that others
will soon become involved and make it a group effort.

For our preamble into this, however, I am going to type in  here Section 202
(The Differand; page 142) which is currently being discussed in a number of
posts. (Thanks to William McClure for his interesting comments connecting
this with the theme of sovereignity.)  To put this in context, I will also
include a few previous sentences from Section 201.  This passage is
interesting to me because it is almost a miniturization of The Differand,  it
makes interesting critiques of both Bataille and Heidegger (also finding a
hidden connection with two philosophers usually considered as inhabiting
different ends of the political spectrum), has cryptic comments to make on
humor and paganism, defines a contemporary notion of politics, and, perhaps
most importantly, states what Lyotard's vision of what practicing philosophy
entails.  (This leads to questions like "Is this differend of philosophy
true?" and "What form would this philosophy take in praxis?")  

I hope that your responses delve more thoroughly into this passage.  Perhaps,
someone who is familar with Bataille can explicate such notions as the
accursed share, sovereignity, sacrifice, etc.  Also, comments on Ereignis,
the Grand Guignol would be apprectiated. The Cashinahua is a theme found in
several of Lyotard's books.  (There are also links on Bataille  that go back
to "The Libinidal Economy") Does anyone want to discuss these?  Here goes:

#201 

            What politics is about and what distinguishes various kinds of
politics is the genre of discourse, or the stakes, whereby differends are
formulated as litigations and find their "regulation".  Whatever genre this
is, from the sole fact that it excludes other genres, whether through
indiction (slaves and women), through autonymic neutralization, through
narrative redemption, etc., it leaves a "residue" of differends that are not
regulated and cannot be regulated within an idiom, a residue from whence the
civil war of "language" can always return, and indeed does return.

#202

             To call this residue the "accursed part" (part maudite) is
useless pathos.  As for a politics centered on the emotions associated with
sacrifice (Cashninahua Notice, #7) on the pretext that it would constitute
through sufering and jubilation the infallible index that a differend exists,
and that no litigation could neutralize this differend, that would be human,
all too human:  as if humanity had some elected responsibility in
safeguarding this occurence!  Bataille lacks the Hassidic or pagan sense of
humor (and I know these two are not the same) in the greeting of the
Ereignis.  To govern in accordance with the feeling attendant upon the
sacrifice (or Dienst) [service] (Heidegger) that the differend would require
would make for a politics of false supermen.  In coddling the event, one puts
on a Horrorshow a la Grand Guignol.  One's responsibility before thought
consists, on the contrary, in detecting differends and in finding (the
impossible) idiom for phrasing them.  This is what a philosopher does.  An
intellectual is someone who helps forget differends, by advocating a given
genre, whichever one it may be (including the ecstasy of sacrifice), for the
sake of political hegemony.

There's the passage.  What follows here is my own comment.  The comments of
Lyotard on what a philosopher does reminds me very much of Samuel Beckett's
famous artistic credo:  "The expression that there is nothing to express,
nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to
express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."  If
Beckett's work gives us an poetics of the 
Sublime (which I believe is a good way to characterize it; a topic, perhaps,
for another time.) then Lyotard is formulating here a philosophy of the
Sublime, that attempt to find the impossible idiom that renders the silence
visible and empowers the empty space to speak.

As a philosopher, Lyotard seems to place higher stakes on ethics and politics
than on speculation for its own sake.  Yet, in order to practice justice, the
role of the philosopher as he describes it, is similar to that of the artist.
It means to find new rules in the game;to practice paralogy; to remember that
which cannot be remembered; to express that which cannot be expressed.  

Thus, art and philosophy must both be necessary first in order that justice
may be possible.  The question is, however, how do we practice a poetics of
justice without falling into the fascist trap, described long ago by
Benjamin, of merely making the political aesthetic?  It is on the contours of
this differend, this paradox, that both art and philosophy must engage us,
 smuggling their precious cargo across the borderlands, thus redeeming what
Benjamin himself could not do.   

   

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