From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Derrida's dream. On Baudelaire/Whitman
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 1997 12:24:36 -0600 (CST)


Margaret,

(1) I have not the least idea who "Digital Postmodernist is," nor do
I have much interest in Derrida's dreams.

(2) You (a) ask how suspect "are Baudelairean texts" with their (b)
"pseudo-Whitmanesque evenhandedness."

(2a) I would take it for granted, almost, that Baudelaire is with "the
enemy" (however defined). He seems even to be close to the core of
that bourgeois drive in the 19th century to equate capitalism with
nature (and thus convert all attacks on capitalism and "the bourgois"
into celebrations of the tragic human condition). I would be open
to seeing Derrida himself as being but a continuation with different
rhetoric of that same tradition.

(2b) I would appreciate your response to the following. I think you could
delete the pseudo-. Whitman's own evenhandedness seems to me as "suspect"
as Baudelaire's. After all, it was Whitman as much as anyone who founded
the tradition of reducing the destruction of one of the nastier
institutions of the modern world into a mere parenthesis in the career of
that great saint who had explicitly informed the world that keeping or
destroying slavery was a subordinate technical question to the
preservation of that union, which nearly 100 years earlier Samuel Johnson
had declared as unworthy of existence for its practice of slavery. (Wow! I
got nearly as many words into a sentence as either Whitman or James could
have.) 

Carrol

You write:
> 
> Margaret Gullette replies:

	I'm touched to be offered a dream and something like an
> interpretation (in the Beaudelaire lines). But who is Digital
> Postmodernist, who must know how hard it is to give interpretations to
> the dreams of strangers, and how suspect are Baudelairean texts that
> deal with subaltern others, with their pseudo-Whitmanesque
> evenhandedness.

> Digital Postmodernist writes:
> 
> >From my hurried notes:
> > 
> > 	Jacques Derrida recounts the following dream that he had
> > 	at four in the morning in London, thirtieth November, 1997:
> > 
> > 	"I am sitting on a terrace with some friends, a young child...a boy...
> > 	fell down off the terrace...he is dead...
> > 
> > 	"Young men, Asian; Cambodian, Vietnamese...naked...dived down
> > 	and below are naked backs. They land on them...not die...bounce..."
> > 
> > 	Derrida makes a motion with his hands, indicating how these young
> > 	men skim across the naked backs, like a stone flipping across water.
> > 
> > 	"Young boy comes, crying, mourning, would like a little brother like
> > 	that..."
> > 
> > 	"Can do whatever you want with it."
> > 
> > 	"I offer no interpretation..."
> > 
> > 	As told at the Politics Friendship conference at the ICA, 
> > 	London, 30.11.97.
> > 	
> > 	__________________________
> > 
> > 	
> > 	"I am the wound and the knife
> > 	I am the buffet and the cheek
> > 	I am  the limb and the wheel
> >             	And the victim and the torturer."
> > 
> > 		Baudelaire
> > 	__________________________
> > 
> > 
> 
>