From: "Diane Davis" <ddd-AT-mail.utexas.edu>
Subject: RE: More about community and prescription
Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 16:58:19 -0500


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


One more, btw: Derrida has a book on Nancy and his continuing notion of
"touch." And Derrida suggests in it that Nancy may be the only thinker
so far who has not inadvertently slid back into humanist assumptions.
It's a beautiful work. Only in French so far, which means I can barely
read the damn thing. But there's an essay, too, that came out years ago.
I'll find the cite if anyone's interested.
 
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 Thomas
Taylor
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2002 11:21 PM
To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: More about community and prescription
 
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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