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From: "Thomas Taylor" <taylorth-AT-bellsouth.net> Subject: More about community and prescription Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 00:21:00 -0400 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. Hi all, I wrote the last bit before reading your bit on community, and the other one on name dropping. Glad someone said this latter. It is interesting that you mentioned "Prescription". That is the specific essay, the centerpiece of my project, really (at least that and "Mainmise"). Here it seems that the touch has very much in common with Nancy's threshold, which know from his reading of a Carravagio painting and not fro the Inoperative Community. Like I said in my last email, there is a double sense to this touch, or this threshold. In it we are open to world. That is, the world, more often than not, gently, penetrates us. These are the stakes for being open to a world. However, for a 'me' to open unto a world, or for even the me-world distinction to function as profitable hypothesis and figure, we have to stick with a bit of finitude. This finitude is marked by the skin, which, to speak metaphorically, has the simultaneous function of a door and a wall. I also liked that you mentioned contract. For Rousseau and Hobbes (God forbid I name drop and say things not issuing from the clear light of reason) the social contract is an event after which there is no turning back. We must ask: why the obsession with constitution here? They both seem to think of the event of the contract as something that happens as a singular moment in history and is furthermore, identifiable. (Pardon my spelling, by the way, I don't have a checker on this account). What Lyotard, and I presume Nancy (though the same disclaimer holds on my ignorance of his writings) hold is that constitution, or the event of the signing of the social contract hangs in suspension. Being done, but not finished. Constitution of the community repeated ad infinitum. Why I went to the skin in my last email was not to displace the question of community, but to re-frame it the rather primal and terrible context of someone like Hobbes in which we are two options: perpetual civil war or the absolute authority of the sovereign. Aside from this duality being really a load of ideological bullshit deployed for the purposes of legitimating an unquestioning attitude toward authorities, which it is I think, there is another question. Would there ever, or could there ever be a strict and final line drawn between those guys over there in the state of nature and those of us in here, in the well run, smooth and organic sovereign state? No. We know this ourselves from the experience of international politics. Take the middle east or eastern europe, which have in common national boundaries created from the outside. These boundaries, almost arbitrary, come into conflict with other less territorial boundaries: language, race, religion. The exact location of the skin is impossible to establish finally. Rather it has the character of an unfinished contract, or a contract that is always about to be signed. All for now. Pardon if convoluted. On name dropping: I do tend to revert to a kind of shorthand in emails. But also: what is the crime in working toward your own thoughts, or trying to, through the writings of others? Please give me an exact and explicit description of what this is using only the pronoun I. Anything less than that would be a contradiction of the proposition that there are no I's thinking. Rousseau, De Quincey, even Augustine (whose Confession is penetrated by psalms such that it sings rather than says) make reference to others, or are done for the sake of others. As I call it, those are the stakes in speaking with an I. Which is to say, that in so doing, one loses oneself. It is not much different than what I have been calling skin. Simultaneously a doorway and a wall. Even in classical mathematics: a point merely marks a position without taking up space. Could a point say I? In saying I, how close am I to the point? Should we just grow and think like good adults, on our own? I think the latter question bears witness to an illusion that Lyotard would like to dispel. Happy adults, happy in the voice and the homes that they own. Good readers of Kant who follow his advice and caveat, maturing as the situation demands. In this case thinking for oneself is no less than not thinking, assuming that you have understood to the letter, Kant, Euripedes, Paul, Kafka, Spinoza. I think that it is much more lazy to think for oneself (in this sense) than to read a book and try to figure it out. You know, we never get to that ideal situation of the pure white room, motionless before the fact, in which an experiment could occur without the influence of our seeing it. Contemporary drama serves as a special witness to this as does physics (Heisenberg) in which the perceiving of the event, the event's "eventness" is ultimately influenced by the many eyes that witness it and later bear witness to it. I, for one, hate to be argumentative, but some things that have been said lately provoke a counter-comment. This is a Lyotard list. He might have been into thinking for thinking's sake, but not at all for thinking that has no referent. In The Differend, the challenge is to go through the cognititive process defending it all costs, only to find that there is a residue left over, which is of course the differend itself. (as he says in the Affect Phrase). Enjoy, Rod T.

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Hi all,

I wrote the last bit before reading your bit on community, and the other one on name dropping. Glad someone said this latter.

It is interesting that you mentioned "Prescription". That is the specific essay, the centerpiece of my project, really (at least that and "Mainmise"). Here it seems that the touch has very much in common with Nancy's threshold, which know from his reading of a Carravagio painting and not fro the Inoperative Community. Like I said in my last email, there is a double sense to this touch, or this threshold. In it we are open to world. That is, the world, more often than not, gently, penetrates us. These are the stakes for being open to a world. However, for a 'me' to open unto a world, or for even the me-world distinction to function as profitable hypothesis and figure, we have to stick with a bit of finitude. This finitude is marked by the skin, which, to speak metaphorically, has the simultaneous function of a door and a wall.

I also liked that you mentioned contract. For Rousseau and Hobbes (God forbid I name drop and say things not issuing from the clear light of reason) the social contract is an event after which there is no turning back. We must ask: why the obsession with constitution here? They both seem to think of the event of the contract as something that happens as a singular moment in history and is furthermore, identifiable. (Pardon my spelling, by the way, I don't have a checker on this account).

What Lyotard, and I presume Nancy (though the same disclaimer holds on my ignorance of his writings) hold is that constitution, or the event of the signing of the social

contract hangs in suspension. Being done, but not finished. Constitution of the community repeated ad infinitum.

Why I went to the skin in my last email was not to displace the question of community, but to re-frame it the rather primal and terrible context of someone like Hobbes in which we are two options: perpetual civil war or the absolute authority of the sovereign. Aside from this duality being really a load of ideological bullshit deployed for the purposes of legitimating an unquestioning attitude toward authorities, which it is I think, there is another question. Would there ever, or could there ever be a strict and final line drawn between those guys over there in the state of nature and those of us in here, in the well run, smooth and organic sovereign state?

No. We know this ourselves from the experience of international politics. Take the middle east or eastern europe, which have in common national boundaries created from the outside. These boundaries, almost arbitrary, come into conflict with other less territorial boundaries: language, race, religion. The exact location of the skin is impossible to establish finally. Rather it has the character of an unfinished contract, or a contract that is always about to be signed.

All for now. Pardon if convoluted. On name dropping: I do tend to revert to a kind of shorthand in emails. But also: what is the crime in working toward your own thoughts, or trying to, through the writings of others? Please give me an

exact and explicit description of what this is using only the

pronoun I. Anything less than that would be a contradiction of the proposition that there are no I's thinking. Rousseau, De Quincey, even Augustine (whose Confession is penetrated by psalms such that it sings rather than says) make reference to others, or are done for the sake of others. As I call it, those are the stakes in speaking with an I. Which is to say, that in so doing, one loses oneself. It is not much different than what I have been calling skin. Simultaneously a doorway and a wall. Even in classical mathematics: a point merely marks a position without taking up space. Could a point say I? In saying I, how close am I to the point? Should we just grow and think like good adults, on our own? I think the latter question bears witness to an illusion that Lyotard would like to dispel. Happy adults, happy in the voice and the homes that they own. Good readers of Kant who follow his advice and caveat, maturing as the situation demands. In this case thinking for

oneself is no less than not thinking, assuming that you have understood to the letter, Kant, Euripedes, Paul, Kafka, Spinoza. I think that it is much more lazy to think for oneself (in this sense) than to read a book and try to figure

it out. You know, we never get to that ideal situation of the

pure white room, motionless before the fact, in which an

experiment could occur without the influence of our seeing it. Contemporary drama serves as a special witness to this

as does physics (Heisenberg) in which the perceiving of the event, the event's "eventness" is ultimately influenced by the many eyes that witness it and later bear witness to it.

I, for one, hate to be argumentative, but some things that have been said lately provoke a counter-comment. This is

a Lyotard list. He might have been into thinking for thinking's sake, but not at all for thinking that has no referent. In The Differend, the challenge is to go through the cognititive process defending it all costs, only to find that there is a residue left over, which is of course the differend itself. (as he says in the Affect Phrase).

Enjoy, Rod T.

File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0205, message 1

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