File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 97


From: Ariosto Raggo <df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: Re: Events
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 18:01:02 -0500 (EST)


Hi Mark, nice to see you posting here.
hey, is this list happening yet?

A couple of quotes and a quick remark:

In _The Sublime and The Avant-Garde_ speaking of Newman's now Lyotard
writes that "it [the now 'understood' as event] is what dismantles
consciousness, what deposes consciousness, it is what consciousness
cannot formulate, and even what consciousness forgets in order to
constitute itself." A little further down on the second page of the
essay, "An event, an occurrence -- what Martin Heidegger called _ein
Ereignis_ -- is infinitely simple, but this simplicity. That which we
called thought must be disarmed." This unilateral disarmament of
consciousness, it seems to me, is a crucial practice transmitted not
only through Lyotard but many other writers, French or not. It is
writting layed out as anamnesis, a "technique with no rule, or a
negative rule, deregulation" (_Logos and Techne, Or Telegraphy_ from
_The Lyotard Reader_ if I'm not mistaken, pg 54), it is a presence that
comes to the mirror and breaks it to smithereens, a "listening with the
third ear" that is a resistance, Cezanne's working-through. In
_Peregrinations_ Lyotard writes, "I would like to call an event the
face to face with nothingness." Listening with the third ear is not a
matter of concentrated attention but an attitude where "you have to
impoverish your mind, clean it out as much as possible, so that you
make it incapable of anticipating the meaning, the "What" of the "It
happens..." The secret of such ascesis lies in the power to be able to
endure occurences as "directly" as possible without the mediation or
protection of "pre-text." Thus, to encounter an event is like bordering
on nothingness. No event is at all accessible if the self does nor
renounce the glamour of its culture, its wealth, health, knowledge, and
memory." All this is no longer within the collusion of knowledge and
power. In Peregrination, the expression "it happens that..." which you
use, seems already to imply a determination of the question and so a
"What." In _The Sublime and The Avant-Garde_ Lyotard adds a question
mark which both announces and withholds, gives rise to a contradictory
feeling -- is it happening? Well, nothing is happening on my essay, I'm
not joking, this happens to me often around this time of year, this
tense staring at an empty screen or piece of paper. But thanks to
recent postings, I'm starting to loosen up my tounge a bit. I think I'll
start an essay on Derrida and active forgetting with Lyotard, my first
paragraph close to finished!

Ari


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