From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 09:38:47 -0500 Subject: Re: objects and facts and monsters and Derrida Steve/All, Daston's notion of "post" and "monsters" strikes a chord w/ my recent reading of Derrida. Perhaps the latter's notion of the Post Card has, alas, "reached its destination," in the failure of the "neo-liberal counter-reformation" that you mention. Or, perhaps, the "return to imperialist and colonialism" is a "return to sender"--having not (yet) reached its destination--that is now a Post(Card) that if it does find its way back to the original address (Derrida's own lodging at house of a collegue on sabbatical at Yale?), begins to chase its way back to the sender. The dissementation of Derrida's addresses, however, will likely make this "return to" difficult. Derrida, after all, has "addressed" a great deal. Others (like Lyotard) have, too, of course. And that is to say that Daston's notion of a discourse that has "come into being" and has now "passed away"--the dead letter pile of the post?--is one i am not so sure of. You say that the "prefix 'post'" is one that appears "increasingly irrelevant." In a static sense, through a "signpost" in the ground, a post that has the prefix of a "sign," perhaps you're right. To follow, again Derrida, I note that he uses the "sign" prefix in relation to "sponge"-- actually the "S" is indeterminate, as makes "signS" of "sign" and "sponge" of Francis "Ponge." (Elsewhere he does the same with Blanchot, Hegel, and Kant) Signsponge discusses the pre-text, the signature, where he says that "it is necessary to scandalize resolutely the analphabet scientisms...before what one can do with a dictionary...One must scandalize them, make them cry even louder, because that gives pleasure, and why deprive oneself of it, in risking a final etymological simulacrum." "Lorraine Daston" is anagrammically "a denial or [a] snort." What does Lorraine deny? What does he snort at? As to monsters, if I might make this a Derrida Theme(Park) post, sez that "the future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded as a species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow" (Points pg. 387). You say that the "'post' seem to be increasingly irrelevant, perhaps because so many of the texts produced failed to address precisely what the counter- reformation was attempting to achieve." Failed to address...failed to address...the notion of "post" IS a failed address, perhaps.... At the end, of your message, you discuss the "impossibility of work" (due to jetlag). I wonder if one might discuss Daston's work in relation to "jetlag"-- the "impossibility" of the post, which one nevertheless attempts to explore, in the "lag" that attempts (im)possibily to catch up. Here's to jetlag and monsters, G. Carte(r)
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