File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0312, message 149


From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Adieu's Beckett and all
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 22:40:01 -0600


Lydia wrote:


PS: Since it's that time of the year, maybe we could come up with our
own 
lists of "the greatest philosophical disappointment of the past year",
the 
"best Lyotard neveu of the year", the "worst (Zizek's?) jokes", the
"least 
feminist leftist thinker", or what have you.

Lydia and all:

First of all, thank you for writing the pieces on Beckett.  He is one of
my favorite writers and Badiou is quickly becoming one of my favorite
philosophers, so I appreciate your comments ahead of the curve for when
this book is finally published in a paperback English translation.
Badiou's book on Paul was certainly one of the most stimulating books I
read this year.  (I was also lucky enough to have the chance to see a
lot of Sondheim productions this year, including Sweeny Todd, Sunday in
the Park with George, Company, and Assassins. I truly love his musicals.
I think Sondheim is a songwriting genius who manages to be tender, sad
and ironic; sometimes in the same stanza. The revival of his musical
'Assassins' was a special inspiration to me. If you ever get the chance
to see a performance of this, you should drop your philosophy books at
once and just go. It is an amazingly dark musical with a lot to say
about US culture.)

Your question about philosophical disappointment stumped me at first. I
can't really think of any particular books I've read this year that
struck me this way. In a naïve way, however, I must say I was very
disappointed in Matrix II and III. The first movie astonished me because
it managed to deal with philosophical issues such as the brain in a vat
problem in interesting and humorous ways, while remaining at the level
of popular culture. At its best it was the cinematic equivalent of a
book by Zizek. Its politics also were suggestive. Here at last was a
movie that dared to confront the society of the spectacle.  

The sequels, however, descended to the level of the old biblical epics
from the fifties and sixties. Instead of wry observations we were merely
handed a cybernetic rehash of Demetrius and the Gladiators. The politics
seem to suggest as much insight as the ugly retribalization of the Don't
Blame America Firsters. A great disappointment!

On a completely different note, I've noticed lately when I look into the
philosophy section at a store like Borders, the books that are most
prominently displayed are meaty tomes with titles like 'Seinfeld and
Philosophy', 'The Simpsons and Philosophy', 'Buffy and Philosophy' and,
of course, 'The Matrix and Philosophy'.  I don't want to condemn these
things out of hand, but I wonder has anyone here actually looked at
these things and do they have any merit? I sometimes wonder in the still
of the night if these books will not prove to be the best-selling
philosophy books of 2003.  That I suppose would be classified as a
disappointment.  

On a more political level, 2003 will always be for me the year of lies
and the war in Iraq.  As a US citizen I am frightened that my country
appears to have been taken over by a right-wing junta, as comical as
Mussolini, who has lied to the American people over the reasons for
going to war, over the economy and taxes, over the environment, over the
loss of civil liberties and incarceration without legal rights, over
unions and overtime, over health and education and over the role that
God should play in our domestic sexual life. It is simply the worst I
have seen in my lifetime (and I am old enough to remember Nixon) and it
appears that they are getting away with it. A huge disappointment.

I'll leave the bad Zizek jokes and chauvinistic leftists for others, but
on the subject of Lyotard very briefly, let me just say that I became
very interested in Machiavelli this summer; not just the sound-bite
Machiavelli of the end that justifies the mean, but Machiavelli the
rhetorician, the playwright, the lonely exile, the Machiavelli of
Gramsci and Althusser, the Republican Machiavelli, the last great
Renaissance thinker and the first modern, the man who foreshadowed
Nietzsche in so many ways.  

I think there are certain affinities between Machiavelli and Lyotard,
but I gone on long enough. That is a subject for another time perhaps.  

Happy New Year everyone! 

May 2004 prove to be the year the US gets out of Iraq and Bush gets out
of the Whitehouse.  

eric
 

http://flash.bushrecall.org/ 

   

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