From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 07:00:47 -0500
Subject: Re: Badiou's Beckett III



Lydia,

Thanks for this fine summary of Badiou's Beckett.  

Some riffs & drifts:

-AT-
The relation between the 'torturer' and 'victim' has particular salience in the 
field of rhetoric and composition studies.  There is much talk about getting 
students to "open up" in their writing, and for many this is considered by many 
as something akin to the power that religious 'confession' confers (as Foucault 
discusses in the first part of his History of Sexuality).  It's interesting, so 
far as Badiou is concerned, that this role is reversible, and one suspects that 
in classrooms where personal narratives are demanded--the kind of 'get it off 
your chest talk' that one might find in a psychologist's couch--that a co-
conspiracy of a kind develops, wherein certain students take up the role of 
telling the teacher-cum-psychoanalysis precisely what they think he or she 
wants to hear.  

%
The difference is w/ the writer-student or other model that 'prefers not to,' 
or what is being called in some circles the 'whatever' student.  Usually 
maligned as the un-caring, indifferent, and stubborn writer-student, the 
student that sez, "Whatever!" to such prompts by torturer-instructors is having 
a say insofar as 'whatever' is connected to Giorgio Agamben's notion 
of 'whatever singularities' who make a stand for potentiality.  That is, 
the 'whatever' students like Bartleby, becomes the "a scribe who does not 
simply cease writing but 'prefers not to,'" and thus is "the extreme image of 
[an] angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write'" (Coming 
Community 36.7).

What this signals, perhaps, is a recognition that certain students, certain 
writers have long been operating in the very domain that Beckett explores 
insofar as the ethics of silence is concerned.  

^*
Mention of Heraclitus in the first posting reminds me of a passage I came 
across in Deleuze's Nietzsche, which I am currently re-reading on Steve's 
prompting of the earlier Deleuze/Zizek discussion (I'm particularly interested, 
given how much Zizek makes of Hegel and how he does seem to ignore this 
particular work, to see how Deleuze frames Hegel through Nietzsche.)  Anyway, 
here's Deleuze on Heraclitus:

'We must understand the secret of Heraclitus interpretation; he opposes the 
instinct of the game to hubris; "It is not guilty pride but the ceaselessly 
reawoken instinct of the game which calls forth new worlds.' Not a theodicy but 
a cosmodicy, not a sum of injustices to be expiated but justice as the law of 
this world; not hubris but play, innocence.  'That dangerous word hubris is 
indeed the touchstone of every Heraclitean.  Here he must show whether he has 
understood or failed to recognise his master'"

Beckett as Heraclitean, Agamben's becoming Heraclitean w/ regard to recognizing 
the whatever singularities "with all of its predicates, the peculiar power of 
the words "as" and "such," indeed, the peculiar property of the word "And," 
which somewhere Deleuze writes so wonderfully.  

&^
Well, Duchamp gets at the same idea:  "For me the number three is important, 
but simply from the numerical, not the esoteric point of view; one is unity, 
two is double, duality, and three is the rest.  When you've come to three, you 
have three million--it's the same thing as three."

2004 H.C.E.,

g

         
 



Quoting Lydia Perovich <fauxprophete-AT-hotmail.com>:

> ...And since some Truths must exist, happiness should not be too far away.  
> It suffice it to expose these Truths to an Other’s approval and see if at 
> least some Truths might be shared.  "Le poème des nominations improbables 
> rend possible d’imaginer une mathématique amoureuse."
> 
> Then Badiou goes on to examine what kind of relationships humans can get 
> into; underlines that in Beckett to be defeated/undone is to give up on 
> one's desire.  He come up with a few basic roles that human animals can play
> 
> in all relationships. What makes a couple is a 'torturer' on one side, and a
> 
> 'victim' on the other (without ethical or pathetic connotations -- remember 
> the methodological ascesis).  The torturers' mission is to extort 
> narratives, memories, histories from the victims, whereas the victims are 
> those who had been ambushed by a fable-less torturer to provide a constant 
> supply of tales.  If those roles are ever sexuated we should keep in mind, 
> writes Badiou, that for Beckett the sexes never precede a love relationship 
> but are rather the result of it (pushed even further into contempor-ese: the
> 
> sexes are not 'biological').  The torturer and the victim are also fully 
> reversible roles and have nothing to do with an identity.  Also, Badiou 
> explains, it is the victim that is ultimately the more active one of the two
> 
> roles… 'she' can leave the torturer, and besides 'she' is the one who holds 
> the "memory of beauty, the power of narration, and the archives of all the 
> wanderings".  The torturer has only the imperative ‘Go on!’  We can call 
> 'masculine' (and Badiou writes it always between quotation marks) the 
> combination of the imperative and immobility, and 'feminine' the one between
> 
> errantry and narration.
> 
> (Jumping here over the important chapters 'Nostalgia' and 'The Theatre' to 
> finish with the concluding chapter 'Beauty, again…)
> 
> It turns out is that something does turn out. (Il arrive que quelque chose 
> arrive.) Something turns out to/for us. The mission of the arts is to 
> salvage those rare moments of exception, to shed light on them, to make them
> 
> part of the texture of our patience.  It is a difficult task but Beckett has
> 
> accomplished it. Il a disposé le poème de l’increvable désire de penser.
> 
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