File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2003/postanarchism.0308, message 13


Subject: Re: [postanarchism] Re: End of Post modernism?
From: Tom Blancato <tblan-AT-telerama.com>
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 23:20:09 -0400


It bothers me (I was going to say amazes...) is how little Derrida said 
about the sanctions, and more generally how the sanctions did not emerge as 
an issue for intellectuals. In the same way that Derrida could work over 
the phenomenon of 9/11, linguistically, socio-politically, temporally, 
historically, etc., mightn't or shouldn't sanctions which killed 50,000 a 
month have been taken as something calling for thought, 
deconstruction/reconstruction (enconstruction)? Indeed, in terms of history 
and the date, dating, etc., questions should be raised as to how the time 
of the sanctions is supposedly passed. This passage issues itself not in 
the staggering trauma of 9/11, although it is as concealed within that 
emergence as the sanctions were of importance for that event; it issues 
itself in the absence of any date, any time in particular. 9/11, we are 
told, is to mark a special event, something more noteworthy, yet why is the 
death of 500,000 children under the age of 5 not as notworthy, or more 
noteworthy? Indeed, from this standpoint and the standpoint of European 
activism, some kind of peace movement,etc., which presumably Derrida 
endorses, reaction (in which the "action" is assumed to be just that, even 
if it may not be; one does well to recall Heidegger concerning the idea 
that the essence of action lies in accomplishment) may well signify a lack 
of accomplishment. Perhaps these situations call indeed for something 
different from the "intellectuals". I am struck in particular how the 
logics of action, of necessary action, regarding the sanctions could not 
give a Derrida to formulate some thought on what these were. This thinker 
of the Abrahamic, it appears to me, could have done well to recognize the 
sanctions and their "the price is worth it" of Madeline Albright as a kind 
of Abrahamic cancer. For the sanctions especially called, and call 
currenty, since their time is only "over" in a degraded ethics, which 
implies a deconstruction of time and history or rather its enconstruction, 
for an action of thought especially in that their ruse was that of a 
"graceful violence", one might say, as prelude to the latter war, which, 
presumably, is far worse than the sanctions, if they themselves were not 
acts of war. All, again, begging for consideration by a thinker or, more 
broadly, thinker and traditions who seems especially fitted to draw into 
question what we are being sold as "how it is". In my view these are 
grounds for substantial, necessary and troubling critiques.

Tom Blancato

   

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