File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0205, message 37


Date: Thu, 09 May 2002 23:46:42 +0100
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com>
Subject: Re: one more try: milk and stuff


Diane/Eric

Replying to Diane has proved to be as impossible as I imagined - there 
is no imaginable way to bridge the difference that is established 
between us in our different readings of Nancy. Perhaps at some stage 
when time is available to engage in a longer more discursive piece using 
Nancy, bt until then difference will have to be accepted.  All that is 
left of the initial attempts to respond is the following:

I have thought a great deal how to respond and expand the discussion 
around Nancy and human subject/community/society. It is by no means 
clear to me that this is addressable - but perhaps it can be approached 
by my defining to a greater extent what the objects in question are.  
Prior to that though - pragmatism is a specifically American/Liberal 
intellectual virus - appealed to and engaged in by Rorty amongst others 
who desire to justify some completely spurious notion of liberal 
democracy . The reading I am interested in relating to Nancy is much 
more discreetly materialist - perhaps more a constructive empiricism 
than a pragmatics, which intends to utilize the post-Heideggerian 
perspectives of Nancy to re-interpret and understand the reality of 
currently existing communities - which are in some sense all equally 
penetrated by the destructive traditions that are the histories of our 
communities and of course the social we exist in. (I suspect we would 
make more progress if we discussed Agamben's work but never mind 
later...) Earlier we established that the primary difference between our 
readings was the acceptance or  refusal of the 'originary nature of 
being-in-common and communion' - the refusal of  origins and originary 
moments engages a materialist reading and a working with and against the 
real or reality (in this case the same thing)  beyond this at that 
earlier moment we also identified the different understandings of what 
constitutes a 'subject'  a psychoanalytically understood subject or 
being... With these starting moments - continued in this latest batch of 
mails it is not clear to me how we could reconcile the different readings.

So - originally you asked :

So I'm wondering again--eric, steve, anyone--when you're talking about
community here, are you talking about what Nancy's calling community or
what would better go under the name society or even neighborhood or
something like that? Or do we disagree about what Nancy's calling
community?


Yes to the first question - It is precisely what Nancy is calling 
community and society and yes to the second question we do disagree 
about what Nancy is calling community...

regards
steve









Diane Davis wrote:

>Thanks, Eric! Here's one more try sending the response I originally sent
>to steve last week. Wonder what happened? Anyway, I'll send you the
>lyotard piece. 
>Best, ddd
>
>--------------------------
>
>Steve, I'm happy to affirm whatever (mis)reading of J-L Nancy works for
>you, since every reading, including mine, is in some sense a misreading.
>But I do want to note that Nancy is a (post)philosopher and not--by any
>stretch--a (neo)pragmatist. His efforts in that book (IC) may certainly
>be used pragmatically, but it is not in itself a "how to" book. You may
>read it pragmatically, iow, but it seems important to keep some kind of
>distinction there. Nancy's work is an engagement with (what Lacan would
>call) the real--yes, definitely. But this is not at all the same thing
>as an engagement with real*ity*, which amounts to webs of little
>hermeneutic fictions. Nancy: "Community understood as a work or through
>its works would presuppose that the common being, as such, be
>objectifiable and producible (in sites, persons, buildings, discourses,
>institutions, symbols: in short in subjects). Products derived from
>operations of this kind, however grandiose they might seek to be and
>sometimes manage to be, have no more communitarian existence than the
>plaster busts of Marianne" (31). The community Nancy is affirming is not
>society nor any kind of product. There is no common-being, as he says
>over and over, but there is being-in-common (community), which is not at
>all the same thing. 
>
> The Sense of the World surely is more inclined toward pragmatic
>interventions. I totally agree. And the piece you mention, "Politics
>II," has been very important to me. (Interestingly, I got to talk with
>him about this piece last summer [over wine] when we were in
>Switzerland, and he was kind of stunned by it; and I was stunned that he
>was stunned. But he wrote it ages ago, and he was shocked to hear some
>of the English translations of his words and also to revisit some of the
>thoughts he did indeed write back then.) At any rate, his sense of
>community doesn't seem to me to change from one work to the next. And
>btw, the distinction b/w community and society is HIS; I'm simply
>repeating this distinction that he articulates in IC, Birth to Presence,
>"Being-in-Common," Retreating The Political, etc. I got it from him.
>
>What he's suggesting in the "Politics II" piece, as I understand him, is
>that there may be a social praxis for accommodating (rather than
>effacing) community. This would be a praxis of ty-ing, a praxis which
>would only be possible, btw, *because* there is always already
>community, originary being-toward(-others) and the "infinite lack of an
>infinite identity." In this work, he's noting that rediscovering
>community is not enough--that a praxis that affirms it and that promotes
>social organizations based on it is necessary (he's at his most
>pragmatic here, it seems to me). Though, of course, the whole thing is
>dizzyingly complicated.and he ends his thoughts in the next section
>contemplating clouds.
>
>Tying entails a non-appropriative encounter with the other. But this
>means, first, that tying involves welcoming the other as Other because
>the one who is coming--whether or not one has a "pre-existing"
>relationship with her/him--necessarily would be unknown and unknowable,
>without valid Identity papers. Precisely because s/he has not (fully)
>arrived, because s/he is (be)coming, emerging, s/he is (at least
>temporarily) homeless, a refugee in a sense--which is why s/he needs to
>be welcomed.  And/But second, to extend oneself toward this other is
>also to expose oneself to otherness and so to present oneself
>exposed--or ex-posed, posed in exteriority, outside of one's Self or of
>one's "proper" I-dentity. Offering my "I" (ipseity) up to the other's
>effraction, I am left no way to recover expenses: tying names a
>departure without the assurance of return, an ek-static (gift) event
>that, in opening toward the other, leaves "me" homeless, depropriated
>and de-situated. 
>
>Incidentally, one of the things I mentioned to Jean-Luc last summer was
>that I frequently hear a Levinasian echo in his work. He said "of
>course!" ;)  A Blanchotian echo, too.  
>
>I think we're doomed to disagree on this one, Steve. Though I can affirm
>what you want to *do* with J-LN, I just can't hear that pragmatic
>approach *in* his work.
>
>
>best, ddd
>
>___________________________________________ 
>  D. Diane Davis 
>  Division of Rhetoric (UT Mail Code B5500) 
>  Department of English 
>  University of Texas at Austin 
>  Austin, TX 78712-1122 
>
>  Office: 512.471.8765  FAX: 512.471.4353 
>  ddd-AT-mail.utexas.edu 
>  http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~davis 
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>[mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu] On Behalf Of
>steve.devos
>Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2002 5:03 PM
>To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Re: Give me some milk or else go home
>
> 
>Diane
>
>As before when we previously discussed Nancy's work/thought - our
>readings of Nancy and the use that we intend to make of his work, which
>is highly significant, varies considerably.  I am afraid I still believe
>that a more realist reading of the Nancy's 'inoperative community' is
>more sensible and useful. The abstraction you are engaging in by reading
>Nancy in this way disengages the text from the everyday and prevents
>it's usefulness in addressing and perhaps engaging in the very many real
>and virtual communities that we exist, usually painfully within. The way
>Lyotard is using Nancy's work/phrase - is in my view the correct and
>most useful interpretation to make of the work because of the necessary
>engagement with the real. 
>
>Difference here is inevitable.
>
>Perhaps we can compromise on the use of the word 'community' in Politics
>11 in 'the sense of the world' where Nancy discusses community in terms
>that are directly related to how "subject, citizen, soveriegnty,
>community - organisizes, saturates and exhausts the political space
>closing itself today...."  I recognise that our readings of  Nancy may
>not be reconcilable - and indeed in this virtual community it's harder
>to arrive at a position of mutual agreement and understanding than it
>would be normally. But nonetheless in this use of community Nancy is
>directly proposing an understanding and an engagement with the political
>apparatus that constitutes the West and consequently globalisation.
>
>consequently in your last paragraph the distinctions you are drawing out
>are unnecessary.
>
>regards
>steve
>
>
>
>



   

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