Subject: Re: Events
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1998 12:30:02 -0500 (EST)


Last night Mark, as i was trying to sleep, I realized that much of the
"perspectavilism" that I have been interpreting echoes the
tradition of rhetoric. He combines it with biological observations
which I am not commenting on right now, except maybe to mention that he
distances himself from Herbert Spencer's homeostatic equilibrium, the
golden mean approach that gives us the notion of beauty? rather than
the more disruptive, baroque aesthetics of the sublime? I am also
thinking, if you know this stuff, about Shlovsky's concept of
defamiliarization which also is antithetical to Spencer. Somebody
mentioned the baroque and Montaigne, a useful digression might be to look
closer at Diderot's manner which puts great emphasis on digressing and
what he calls hierogliphic force, I remember reading that, in painting,
one of the things he didn't like much is the way that some paintings
draw you into a play of interpretation and take you away from just
being there with the painting. This is the case in historical,
allegorical paintings. In other words they draw you into looking for
some cause behind the appearances giving them the illusion of depth. It
is this "illusion of depth" that sketical ways of looking at things
tends to be suspicious of, no doubt, this is Nietzsche's approach who
identified with Pyrrho strongly as did Montaigne who wrote one of the
great essays on skepticism. It is no accidental contingency of tracing
that Derrida begins his 'sketch' in the memoirs of the blind with an
epigraph by Diderot. But I fear I am digressing from the task at hand
which, if I remember correctly, was to turn some lines in the direction
of Derrida. As I write, a modest paper on D is emerging. All I really
want to do is to make some brief remarks in the most condensed manner
as I can make them, on his reference to active forgetting at the end of
_The Ends Of Man_ where he talks about the last man vs, the superior
man, a distinction that I am not commenting on, what interest me is
what he says about the superior man who at the Noontide, "awakens and
leaves, without turning to what he leaves behind. He burns his texts
and erases the traces of his steps. His laughter then will burst out,
directed toward a return that will no longer have the form of the
metaphysical repetition of humanism, nor doubtless, "beyond"
metaphysics, the form of the memorial or a guarding of the meaning of
Being, the form of the house and of the truth of Being. he will dance,
outside the house, the _aktive Vergesslichkeit_, the "active forgetting"
and the cruel (grausam) feast of which the _Geneology of Morals_ speaks."
(Margins, pg 136)

briefly, what I have just said about N and memory and consc. can be
juxtaposed with the way Derrida thinks about the "hegelian type" as a
remembering that assimilates without remainder, the restricted economy
that derrida picks up from bataille. Active forgetting would be an
essential operation in the general economy of writing. 

Here is the passage from the Geneology, active forgetting puts into
question the breeding of humans as involving the "right to make
promises" and is a "positive faculty of repression":

"to close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time: to remain
undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility
organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a
little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things
above all for for the noble functions and functionaries, foresight,
premeditation (for our organism is an oligarchy) that is the purpose of
active forgetting, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic
order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious
how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no
_present_, without forgetfulness."

(first page of the second essay) 

Ari


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