File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2004/lyotard.0401, message 4


From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Adieu to 2003
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2004 09:46:36 -0600


Lydia, 

I violated your 23rd commandment and went to see 'The Hours' and hated
it. I thought it was a bad bad movie. 

I previously read the book before seeing it, so I also knew exactly how
much damage had been done translating it into cinematic terms.  The
novel is something I would definitely recommend reading, however. I
found it a very witty approach that combined metafiction with literary
criticism in a way that reminded me at times of Julian Barnes'
'Flaubert's Parrot'. 

I also finally got around to reading 'Infinite Jest' this past year and
have become very impressed with David Foster Wallace's enormous powers
as a writer as well as how sensitively he portrayed our epoch as a time
of sadness, melancholy, fear, addiction and an unbridled religious sense
of competition. (Sports and warfare being the dominant metaphors of the
business world.)

What was it I promised to do about Franzen's 'The Corrections'?  My
memory is extremely faulty these days.  

I would be interested in discussing Gramsci in greater detail in 2004
here. He has been in my thoughts as well lately.  I think US
fundamentalism acts in a way that is analogous to the Catholic Church in
Mussolini's Italy and it might be interesting to apply Gramsci analysis
of the one to the other. The end-times mythology appears to have become
our new common sense. (Lydia, as I'm sure you know, an important work of
Gramsci's is entitled "The New Prince".)

Despite the evil Leo Strauss' depiction of Machiavelli as the father of
modernity, it is probably more correct to see Machiavelli as a
Renaissance thinker, strongly influence by Rhetoric (in ways similar to
Vico, Nietzsche and Lyotard).  I read a fascinating book by Anthony
Parel in 2003 entitled "The Machiavellian Cosmos".  Parel argues that
Machiavelli is deeply involved in contemporary theories about astrology
and the four humours. Unless these factors are understood, it is very
easy to misinterpret his work. 

Certainly, his major twin themes of virtu and fortuna obviously relate
to this. Nietzsche's Will-to-Power and Eternal Recurrence seem in many
ways a further elaboration of these themes; also the Deleuzian rolling
of the dice and chaos theory and complexity theory.  

On the other hand, Machiavell's virtu seems related to Badio's emergence
of the ethical subject overcoming the contingencies of the situation. 

Contrary to Strauss, perhaps Machiavelli might be described as the first
postmodern.

Eric


 
 

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