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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