Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 21:43:55 -0500
Subject: Re: ethics - Levinas


D. Diane Davis wrote:

L doesn't, imho, manage to get past certain androcentric and
anthropocentric assumptions

DDD/All,

It's good to hear from you again.  I hope you can stay ahead of your
classes long enough to write to us some more.

I want to gratuitously misread your comment and suggest that while
androcentric normally refers to the masculine, it also, by means of its
root andro, links with the concept of android.  Your comment would then
situate Lyotard between the human and the transhuman: the precarious
position of both the inhuman and the infant.  The ins- and ana's- as
opposed to the pre-, the trans- and the post-.

As such, perhaps, what remains problematic are not so much the
assumptions, but the condition itself which remains unresolved and in
the midst of which even Derrida himself can offer no better diet.  (The
differAnce between pang and tang.)

Between the act of mourning, melancholia and nostalgia and the frantic
attempt to download our brains onto a computer and attach that file to a
space ship headed for the Pleiades, the system accelerates and
complexifies.

In the midst of which, Lyotard claims that "being prepared to receive
what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of
thinking." And "anamnesis would be this notification, this warning, or
obligation to stand up towards the clear mirror, through the breaking."

Words to die by, perhaps.