Subject: Re: Events
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1998 15:56:30 -0500 (EST)


> 
> > > deterritorizaton?
> > 
> > It can, I suupose it would depend on inventive juxtapositions which
> > both deteritorialize a concept like paralogy as well as that of
> > 'deleuzian' deterretorialization itself. I try to do, strong
> > misreadings, to use Harold Bloom's expression. I don't think there is
> > such a thing as deluzian, lyotardian, or derridean concepts because
> > there is always displacements, digressions, differential drifts and
> > such, that bring into play unknown, unforeseen readings. So yes, it can,
> > and no, not necessarily as if it were a question of us, or you, or I,
> > adequating ourselves to set notions of which it just a matter of
> > getting them right. 'Good' interpretations work if they stimulate and
> > spill writing, more talk giving rise to other phrases, other language
> > games, other events that would be singular. Isn't this Deleuze's
> > "and..." ? Lyotard speaks similarly in some places. Why couldn't this
> > lead to Derridean dissemination? or Diderot's digression? or Shlovsky's
> > defamilarization, or the rhetorician's 'turn'? and so on... (this is
> > Wittgenstein's expression. I'm very interested in invention, even
> > allowing putatively non-fictional exchanges to become fictional. I see
> > nothing wrong with somebody responding on this list, for instance, with
> > a poem, or a short story, or an online persona, or a multiplicity of
> > personas. Although, there is something to be said for being as faithful
> > as possible to the sense of what a writer is getting at...
> > 
> > Ari(...)
> > 
> 
> This raises an interesting point, I think, in the context of a "close 
> reading" of Lyotard and two ways that we can approach him:
> 
> 1) "key words" approach: identify the terms as he uses them, determine 
> them so to speak.
> 
> 2) "inventive" approach: see what ways we can play off of these terms, 
> see what drifts they set into motion.
> 
> The second seems more "paralogical" (or more in keeping with a 
> deterritorialization/reterritorialization), but I'm getting a growing 
> sense of why it makes sense to have a good sense of #1 as well.

Okay, i'll bite, can you say a bit more about this "growing sense"
that's coming to term for you? Do you suggest a sort of dictionary as
the one in the "evil book"?

I thought that I could write something on my latest melding of planes
that came to me while reading Kierkegaard's _Philosophical Fragments_
last night, mostly cover to cover, I laughed and cried, couldn't put it
down. First, it is written under the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus who
describes himself as "an idler from love of ease, _ex animi sententia_,
and for good and sufficient reasons" (pg.3). The interlocutor who
interrupts the thoughts of Climacus rather impatiently, calls him a
lazzarone and thief who has nothing new to say and borrows all his
ideas and expressions from others, to which Climacus responds with a
decisive and affirmative yes. Lazarro is a character in a Spanish
picaresque novel, a little rascal and devil. Today, we might think of
the slacker in pop culture. Often, as he writes J bids us to have
patience, not to be so hasty and eager to jump to a result like Herr
Professor the Speculative Idealist busy chattering about the system and
making negativity get to work while reason gets all anxious about the
leap. Well, it occured to me that, if the leap as the encounter of
reason with what limits it and sort of causes it to vanish, is an
interruption or wounding of consciousness, then it is also a break in a
continous rhythm that instills patience, it is a pause... in a
reckoning, speculative economy. But this key concept of a leap for me
suddenly brought to mind other key words such as "throw of a dice," and
Holderlin's caesura and i had some vague recollection about what
Lacoue-Labarthe has to say on this stuff. Maybe, these resonances will
not bear much, and I will never be able to tie the knot anywhere but,
again, i have a vague sense that they will, mostly because they
stimulated me, kept me awake, gave me a little kick so to speak and got
my lazy ass "tracking". So this morning I pick up Derrida's intro to a
collection of essays by Lacoue-Labarthe called desistance. What he is
analysing is a "certain constitutive _desistance_ of the subject. A
(de)constitution rather than a destitution." And he wonders why
constitutive since desistance puts off any constitution or essence. For
derrida L-B's work is the very trial of the ineluctable (desistance).
After expressing some doubts about "the idea of novelty," he writes
this about L-B's style: "We'll have to be patient; I'll try to explain
why. One must learn to read Lacoue-Labarthe, to listen to him, and to
do so at his rhythm (learn to follow his rhythm and what he means by
"rhythm") -- that of his voice, I would almost say of his breath, the
_phrase_ which is not even interrupted when it multiplies caesuras,
asides, parenthetical remarks, cautions, signs of prudence and
circumspection, hesitations, warnings, parentheses, quotation marks,
italics -- dashes above all -- or all of these at once [..] One must
learn the necessity of scansion that comes to fold and unfold thought.
This is nothing other than the necessity of a rhythm -- rhythm itself."
(pg. 3) To cut things short, he concludes on a word on Holderlin:
"There is no rhythm without caesura. And yet, as Holderlin reminds us,
the caesura "itself" must be arrythmic. This interruption does not have
the dialectical cadence of a relation between rhythm and nonrhythm, the
continous and discontinous, etc. It interrupts alternation [...] it is
ineluctable -- " (pg. 42)


> 
> [How did the essay turn out? Have a webby version with a URL for us to 
> peek at?
> 
 
I am being very patient with my essay, As I mentioned I found a knot
around which I can give it a relative wholeness, I'll keep up with
fragments for you and others to peek at. For my part I'm curious
about this growing sense of yours and the thread on maternity, will it
lead to Levinas as we inch towards the consensus of reading _le differend_?

Ari


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