From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 09:59:55 -0500
Subject: RE: T.S. Eliot and the epistemological break...



Eric/All, 

The Deleuzian stammerings reminds me, in another way, of Derrida's Babel, the 
story of God's proper name.  "To lose one's name by transforming it into a 
common noun name or pieces of a common name is also to celebrate it."

Nabokov, no lover of Eliot, does so by negatively in his rather pompous 
lectures by suggesting that "T.S. Eliot" is "'toliets' spelled backwards."

But Nabokov, (a.k.a. "Vivian Darkbloom") does offer, at his best, a kind of 
trans-lingual stammering.  This, of course, is what's best about Finnegans Wake 
(and this is why Derrida calls Joyce a kind of cyborg, or "supercomputer," 
or "joyceware.")  Borges, too, says as much.  

Derrida, derriere le rideau, says,  "Thus, the proper name is at play and it's 
meant to play all by itself, to win or lose the match without me.  This is to 
say that, at the furthest limit, I no longer need to pull the strings myself, 
to write one way or another.  It is written like that by itself.  When it comes 
to names, the relation between the proper and the common already programs the 
whole scenario" (Ear of the Other).

Deleuze, too, talks about "proper names," particulary in the opening gambit in 
a Thousand Plateaus w/ respect to the Wolf Man.  His howling, his name, his 
stammer.  

anyway...

Another post-carte(r),

geof


    




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

> Steve,
> 
> Doesn't Deleuze also say somewhere the true nomad is simply the one who
> stands in place?
> 
> I share some of your fears over Deleuze's extravagant praise of American
> literature as though this were still the land where the frontier never
> ended and vital flows and movements remained possible: American as the
> Magic Kingdom of deterritorialization, sponsored by Disney, Exxon and
> General Motors.  
> 
> I had a friend once who was a big fan of Jack Kerouac. He was also a
> right-wing libertarian who believed in a limited political state. For
> him, the two things simply flowed together. It was all about becoming an
> individual and getting rid of the explicit authorities. Just do it, man,
> just go and be yourself.
> 
> The idea that the economic powers of corporations were historically the
> biggest factor producing conformity and limiting dissent in America
> simply went beyond him.  So did the idea that the state does not always
> function as a repressive big daddy, but it has also had a progressive
> mechanism, one which extended greater rights to a larger constituency,
> enlarging our own imagined sense of community. Typically attacks on the
> state have usually been made by elitist reactionaries who feel
> threatened by the promise of democracy and want to restrict its scope.
> Rush Limbaugh is practically the poster child for this kind of movement
> (save the privileged white male), but Rush Limbaugh is no Jack Kerouac,
> even if he does use drugs.
> 
> One of the best pieces Deleuze ever wrote on literature was his short
> piece entitled "He Stuttered".  Deleuze argues there that "a great
> writer is always like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses
> himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his
> strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He
> is a foreigner in his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent
> foreign language within his own language.  He make the language itself
> scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur."
> 
> I would argue that T.S. Eliot could stutter at times in just this way
> and that Prufrock, The Waste Land and some other poems still manifest as
> some of the greatest stutterings in the last century.  So what if he was
> a Tory (which is not to say he should be excused) or that he help to
> erect a new canon with which to shoot down the majority. 
> 
> I think of art as being untimely in this sense. It is an attempt to
> bring politics down to the level of phrases and to create spaces so that
> something previously unspoken can emerge. I believe it was Pound who
> called poets the antennae of the race, which Ginsberg modified to 'early
> warning radar system' and the Possum himself once called 'raids on the
> inarticulate'.  
> 
> I think Eliot, despite his religion and politics, actually brought
> something new into language, and found ways for us to readjust the old
> dislocation of our sensibility. I also admire the fact that a local
> American boy from St. Louis, Mo. could manage to find a way to
> out-British the British. What kind of weird overcoding and
> reterritorialization was that?
> 
> Eric
> 
> and as for Deleuze liking those bloody tortoise poems...
> 
> What the hell are those?
> 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
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