File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2001/lyotard.0102, message 42


Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 21:03:47 -0600
From: Mary Murphy&Salstrand <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Becoming Intellectuals Without Organs


D. Diane Davis:

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate your slant on this topic and hope
to hear more from you. 

> even mouffe and laclau's gramscian "hegemony" doesn't work--indeed, it >"helps forget differends, by advocating a given genre" (Differend 142). 

It's interesting you should mention them. Today I came across the
following reference to them in "Cyber-Marx" by Nick Dyer-Witheford:

M&L reject "the centrality Marx ascribes to issues of capital and class,
now dismissed as the result of a crude, mechanistic economic
determinism.  In its place is proposed a new lexicon of difference and
discourse.  Class relations are no longer "privileged" but rather seen
as only one among a diversity of semiotically constructed identities."

Dyer-Witheford goes on to critique this as a misinterpretation of Marx,
thereby challenging the genre M&L advocate in yet another way.

>So, not a subject but a happening. At one
> point, i think in Dialogues, Deleuze calls Guattari not a subject but a happening. In "Finite Being," Jean-luc Nancy writes that we are not a being but a happening. A sublime haecceity.  ? 

Here is what Nancy writes in the introduction to "Of the Sublime:
Presence in Question":  "Representation is articulated in terms of
conformity and signification.  But presentation puts into play the event
and the explosion of an appearing and disappearing which, considered in
themselves, cannot conform or signify anything.  This explosive event is
what the tradition passes on to us in the names of beauty and/or the
subliity."

>There is a kind of soft totalitarianism inherent in democracy, and even >if it is the best poly-tick we've come up with so far, it's incredibly >problematic--and i'd argue incredibly violent.

I think I understand what you mean here, but wish you would elaborate on
this point... this certainly touches on some key issues. 

>Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe talk about this quite
> a bit in Retreating the Political (an excellent book).

I'll have to look for this book.



   

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