From: "Pierre Petiot" <p_petiot-AT-euronet.nl>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 23:37:29 +0000
Subject: Re: completeness


Hi,

> You wrote:
> >
> >	You are right to be wary of any notion of a 'complete reality.'  The 
> sur-
> >in surreality apparently is best translated as over-."  
> 
> Sure, just like Nietzsche's "Overman."  Bataille wrote an essay _The 
> "Old Mole" and the Prefix Sur-_ in which he made use of the implications 
> of the "over-" prefix to critique Breton's (and the Surrealist's) 
> theories.

Before this discussion goes on, I would like to mention a small 
point.
The word "surreality" is not surrealist
Just like the word "situationism" is not situationist.

Could any one of you find ONE place in a SURREALIST paper mentioning 
anything like a surreality ?
Same question with "surreal"

Why invent concepts that have never been there for the most excellent 
reasons ?


>  I metaphorized this state with the term 
> "godhead" -- although I hasten to say that I meant it in no religous 
> sense.  I rather intend it to signify the huge "text" in which we are 
> all "signifiers"... "brain-cells" was the term I used (in my text, _Soul 
> and Body Two_).


Something like history then
 
> If Surrealism were truly "first and foremost 'of the lived world,'" then 
> that "ideal" I spoke of would merely be a supplement to its original 
> endeavor -- thus linking it, by way of similarity, with pretty much 
> every movement or school in the arts since Romanticism.  Surrealism is 
> first and foremost of those "lofty spiritual heights, in which one 
> shakes off the shackles of the material world and soars..." (Huysmans, 
> _La-Bas_).  I think it is safe to say that the origin of Surrealism was 
> a kind of soaring, a birth in the aether, if you will. The "man cut in 
> two by a window" who pranced across Magnetic Fields was certainly not of 
> the "lived world."

I do not understand how anything could ever be excluded of the "lived 
world". Do we have any other world for a change ?

Stating that there might be another world, is showing 
that the actual scope of this one is not really understood.

By which means could THIS world be restricted anyway ?

 
> >I have for quite
> >some time made the subtle yet crucial distinction between Surrealism 
> and
> >surrealism.  I would ask, initially, if you acknowledge such a 
> distinction, and
> >why or why not.  
> 
> "If a distinction cannot be made rigorous and precise, it is not a 
> distinction at all" (Jacques Derrida).  

"Dis-sting-uish" is etymologically "piquer entre deux"
("making a sting in between"), Derrida or not.
Whether rigourous and precise has no meaning at all
as long as you do not specify rigourous according to which set of 
rules, and how much precise.
For instance, Derrida's sentence above is neither rigorous, nor 
precise.



 

Pierre PETIOT 
http://www.euronet.nl/users/p_petiot/index.html
email: "Pierre Petiot" <p_petiot-AT-euronet.nl>