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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