File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0305, message 55


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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