File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 92


Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 08:50:45 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Events


Hi Ari--it's good to exchange words with you again

> 
> I can't find the D&G quote that got chopped up, what i find of interest
> with regards to a Deleuze/Lyotard thread was how the construction of
> concepts is a bringing out of events: "The conconcept speaks the event,
> not the essence or the thing -- pure Event, a hecceity, an entity: the
> event of the Other or of the face (when, in turn, the face is taken as
> a concept. It is like the bird as event." (_What is Philosophy?_ pg 21)

Here's my first of the morning thoughts:

It seems that part of Lyotard's critique of systems theory comes out of 
its disappearance of "the event": it assumes a system in which stable 
posts are in place: posts that determine reactions, exchanges, etc. The 
event of the present takes places as an "absolute virtual": "Because it 
is absolute, the presenting present cannot be grasped: it is *not yet* or 
*no longer* present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp 
presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical 
constitution of the event. That something happens, the occurrence, means 
that the mind is disappropriated. The expression 'it happens that...' is 
the formula of non-mastery of self over self. The event makes the self 
incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies 
that the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity" ("Time 
Today," _The Inhuman_ 59). This "passibility" is one of the key terms 
that Lyotard picks up in place of "paralogy"--related still to a kind of 
differential thought.

> This is why paralogy would not create new objects, an event coming out
> of an immemorial past. I'm thinking about what Lyotard says with
> regards to the effect on time of narrative knowledge that follows a
> rhythm: "as meter takes precedence over accent in the production of sound
> (spoken or not), time ceases to be the support for memory to become an
> immemorial beating that, in the absence of a noticeable separation
> between periods, prevents their being numbered and consigns them to
> oblivion, it jars lyotard writes, the golden rule of our knowledge:
> "never foget."" (_PMC_ pg 22) The competence of the expert or teacher
> is made up of the ability to reproduce an accumulated stock of
> knowledge such as all the bibliography on a writer and then deliberate
> on its truth. Teaching passes on a memory which is reinforced through
> testing. The "lethal function" of narrative knowledge is a sort of
> amnesia as well as an aphasia. This may not be any easier to understand
> Hugh but I am just jumping in and you haven't before anyways. Hi again. 
> 
> ari

Interesting that Lyotard's wife, at his "memorial service," said: "I come 
here not to memorialize Jean, but to breathe with his friends."

--mark


   

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