From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu
Date: Thu,  3 Apr 2003 08:07:26 -0500
Subject: RE: silence



Eric,

I should like to pick up a few of the threads you offer in your last two posts 
and lend, if nothing else, some examples I have been thinking about that seem 
somehow connected.  

First, Wittgenstein:  Your comments about his rejection of a meta-language has 
me thinking about how Levinas deals with the question of language as a "saying" 
and a "said."  Throughout Levinas's work he strives to "un-say the said," which 
may well be a manifestation of the meta-language to which W. refers.  

What's interesting about Levinas is that such language crops up in Talmudic 
readings.  For example, there's one story about a skeptical rabbi who wants a 
sign from God about the veracity of some statement.  He says if such a thing a 
true, God should show a sign by having the cheatgrass move--and it does.  And 
the rabbi says something like, "Ya, but what does cheatgrass know...if this is 
REALLY true, then the river should give a sign..." And at that instant, the 
river reverses course.  And the skeptical rabbi says, "Ya, but what does the 
river know..."  Finally God speaks.  He confirms the first rabbi, and the 
skeptical rabbi STILL refuses to take in the voice.  "What do Heavenly voices 
know..."  The skeptical rabbi eventually puts more stock in the Torah than God; 
He loves the Torah more than God.  When Eliajh goes to God, eventually, to ask 
him about this--as I remember the story--God laughs about it.  

Now there's more to this story when Eliajh returns, but for me one of the 
possible readings of this story is that even God is faced with the prospect 
of "un-saying the said" when it comes to the Torah.  Torah exceeds even God, in 
this sense, and his laughter restores--at that very moment--Torah.  

But, again, this is fleeting.  Eliajh returns and is doubted for even reporting 
on what God said.  And the cycle of said's (and the need for un-sayings) 
continues... 

At the beginning of Simon Critchley's excellent The Ethcis of Deconstruction, 
he leads with a quote by Wittgenstein from the latter's Lecture on Ethics:

"I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a 
book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an 
explosion, destroy all other books in the world."

My reading of this to some degree gets to the heart of W's skepticism towards 
meta-language (though I confess to that I'm reading this more across Eric's 
comment than any deep familiarity with W...I did read Monk's biography on 
him.)  Along with Critchley, I see deconstructive moves like Derrida's and 
Levinas as move towards this "explosion."  

Anyway, there's a few more things I should like to inquire about, but I will 
enclose them in a second postings as this one is getting lengthy.

Best, 

geof  





Quoting Eric <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>:

> Hugh,
> 
> You raise an interesting question.  Are silence and thoughts each
> singularities?
> 
> Even though I appear to be privileging silence somewhat, it seems more
> amorphous than that to me.  Like Levinas' 'il y a' there is something in
> the nature of silence devoid of uniqueness. It remains a flattening out,
> a no-thing, when the earth was void and without form.
> 
> For all its limitations, thought more than silence represents a
> singularity, an event, especially at the moment of its birth.  Every
> thought implicitly answers the question 'is it happening?'
> 
> A fecund silence is a womb through which thought matriculates.  Not
> thought as separate from matter, but an emergent property, a kind of
> DNA, the white noise becoming a humable tune.
> 
> eric
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> [mailto:owner-lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu] On Behalf Of hbone
> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 4:47 AM
> To: lyotard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Re: silence
> 
> Eric,
> 
> Perhaps each silence can be as different as each thought.  A thought is
> not
> a silence to its thinker.
> 
> The meaning of the thought is to be found in the mind of its maker.
> Each
> mind has a different history.  Each person "is" her/his history, and
> accumulation of thoughts, actions, memories.
> 
> So long as silences are  not thoughts unspoken they can be whatever you
> personal history allows you to not hear.
> 
> regards,
> Hugh
> 
> 
>