From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 13:05:41 -0500
Subject: Re: objects and facts and monsters and Derrida



Steve,

Derrida asks, "The question is not only the one which brings on semantic 
vertigo, but the one which asks 'what is to be done?'  What is to be done 
today, politically, with this vertigo and its necessity?  What is to be done 
with the 'what is to be done?'?  And what other politics--which would 
nevertheless still be a politics, supposing this word could still resist this 
very vertigo--can this other communality of the 'common' dictate to us?" 
(Politics of Friendship 297).

"What is to be done with the 'what is to be done?'" is a listening to the 
question, a vertigo that is strategically brought, towards an(other) politics 
that will lissssssssten to the question.  

You ask, "Can you for example - actually use Derrida...to generate a political 
truth?"

Listening:  "Can you?"  "Can you use?"  "Can you ACTUALLY use?"

There's a call to ACT-tion in this "actually," is there not?  There's also 
something to be differed in "action," though...act-shun...something to 
be "shunned," perhaps.  Or, in the case of "actually," perhaps there's a call 
not so much for "shunning" but for "chewing":  Act-chewly.

Does Derrida ask one to "act-chewly" so far as politics is concerned?  Yes, I 
think so.  But does this, as you ask, "generate a political truth?"

Where's the political truth in such "entertainment"?

Steve, I'm no expert on Derrida.  I like his reading strategy, and especially 
the risks he takes in his work towards Levinas--of whom he once said, "Faced 
with the thinking like that of Levinas, I never have any objection.  I am ready 
to subscribe to everything that he says"--especially in his reading of L's work 
wherein he finds in his initials E.L.(le) the French feminine form.  There's 
subconscious invention work at play here (hear), and it's towards (two words) a 
generative strategy that gives a simultaneous Hearing of ideas.  

The question you ask--a hearing for/of Derrida, if you will--is what kind of 
action can he bring to the current political crisis?  

We've spoken on the list earlier on the matter of "silence."  One thing that 
emerged for me at least from that discussion is the difficulty of 
merging "ethics" and "politics."  Simon Critchley, a fine philosopher who has 
looked as both the ethics and politics, notes that there is a certain "hiatus" 
between ethics and politics that D (at least) do not judge negatively.

Critchley says, "The infinite ethical demand of deconstruction arises as a 
response to a singular context and calls forth the invention of a political 
decision.  Politics itself can here be thought of as THE ART OF RESPONSE TO THE 
SINGULAR DEMAND OF THE OTHER, a demand that arises in a particular context--
although the infinite demand cannot simply be reduced to its context--and calls 
for political invention, for creation" (Ethics, Politics and Subjectivity 276).

For my own part, in deploying Derrida's Post Card in relation to your (not 
Daston's, I now realize) disparging of the prefix "post"--an effort to, yes, 
playfully-seriously restore the PRETEXT of "post"--I do so in my own muddled 
attempt at "creation."

My linking strategy (a "just linking") is an effort, in my own way, towards 
a "just-ice" linking.  Imperfect, yes.  Open to debate, of course.  Just fun 
and games?  Well...

Anyway, to answer your question as directly as possible, I think Derrida (and 
Lyotard) help towards the current climate by affording inventional reading 
startegies that may well be in(ter)ventional, but whose ethical HEARING is a 
loooooooooooong process that is not readily lend itself to immediate "political 
truths."  (And if I load my response by claiming that you seek an "immediate" 
truth--"mediate," "a media" (?)--then I will rebegin and say that Derrida may, 
as you say, "fail to address precisely what the counter-reformation was 
attempting to achieve" because to achieve stasis on such points may well be a 
return to the Same.)

More on what this "Same" constitutes in a follow-up post, but I think this 
matter of "addressing PRECISELY what the counter-reformation was attempting to 
achieve" is really what is at stake here.  

What is to be done about it?

best,

geof 

   







Quoting "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>:

> G
> 
> I',m afraid that the conflation of  the movement away from  using the 
> 'post' of postcolonialism and postmodern and Daston's rather excellent 
> looking text of 'the biographies of scientific objects' is not Daston's 
> but my own and related to my intellectual suspicion that postmodern 
> thought is perhaps irrelevant to understand the present - just as 
> neo-liberal economic thought cannot offer a wway out of the current 
> socio-economic capitalist crisis.
> 
> But you did not begin to address the following - rather by the absence 
> of response appear to be confirming the irrelvance of Derrida in the 
> current socio-political climate: 'It has been something that I've been 
> thinking about for some time - that just as the range of discourses that 
> relate to the prefix '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, using terms that 
> often fail to adequately represent actions and  events, so the "come 
> into being and pass away..." seemed appropriate....' Or can you for 
> example - actually use Derrida (chosen because of the entertainment 
> below) (or Lyotard) to generate a political truth from a contemporary 
> event - i.e. the anti-war/anti-imperialist events of the past four 
> months...
> 
> 
> regards
> steve
> 
> gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu wrote:
> 
> >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)   
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >  
> >
> 
> 
>