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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