From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: silence, enfans, il y a, sublime
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2003 17:24:44 -0500


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


Steve wrote:
 
Thus I doubt the "ethical life" proposal that followed the quote from
Eric - unless the enfans can be forcibly seperated from the
psychoanalytical meanings of the child, which I doubt.



Steve:
 
You need to unpack this a little more.  As it stands, I can't make any
sense of it. 
 
Of course I am working towards a psychoanalytical approach to ethics, as
I believe Lyotard and Lacan were doing, and Badiou and Zizek are still
doing.  I see the inner child as a touchy feeling new age abomination
and I don't think this is what Lyotard meant by the enfans at all; not
at all..the enfans is closer to the inner bitch inside each of us, the
lawless bastard.
 
I also don't see how this involves me in a defense of the noble savage
(the concept of which I explicitly critiqued in my posting) or some
implicit defense of liberal capitalism as the ultimate horizon of
ethics.  Obviously, ethics and politics are not mutually exclusive. Are
you implying that in the name of good politics, one can only practice
bad ethics?
 
If your argument is one that wants to place ethics within a framework of
ecological relationships as well as human ones, I am in agreement with
you. I certainly didn't mean to limit ethics to the practice of good
manners among well-behaved adults, but rather with the struggle to
foster something which present day society cannot allow and which
remains alien to it, but which is necessary if humanity is to continue.
Think of the slaves on the southern plantations keeping alive a memory
and tradition as best they could and you have some idea of what ethics
means today.  The point is, the system of the southern plantation
extends its mentality, even today, throughout the world as it continues
to bind us libidinally to the broken earth of comparative advantage. 
 
 
eric
 

HTML VERSION: