First of all, Yoni, I just finished Joe Hughes’ reader guide to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and did not get a chance to comment on it -mainly because my daily rhizomes have been focused on responding to you. This tells me that you’re presenting a flow that, while distracting me from other things I should be doing, faces me with an itch that must be scratched. And, sometimes, the only way out is through. The only way I can hope to get past the jam we have been engaged in is to focus on it for a couple of weeks.
I had planned to move on to Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy. And I tend to plan my process out in terms of my workweek. But given your clear influence by Derrida (I could see it in your Telos article -and BTW: you look like Seth Rogan (I decided to spend the next week on Derrida: a very short introduction -that is since I can easily finish it in a week between the e-book and the audio-book. Then I want to follow that with a week of just going through your work and posts and responding to them.
But before I engage in this experiment, I need you to understand a few things. First of all, I am not obsessed with or stalking you. This is purely about my process and what I can use in yours. You, for my purposes (and I don’t mean to sound mean –especially given that this comes out of respect (are a wave that I have to ride through so I can move onto other waves. Secondly, just because I am focusing on you does not mean that you need to focus on me. Once again, this discourse has been, in a metaphorical sense, a personal big bang that has set off an expanding universe of rhizomatic networks. All I need you to do is what you have been: commenting as you feel compelled to do. Even if you don’t, I still have a backlog of points you’ve made that I can easily bounce off of. Also, if and when the second part of this experiment happens, you may find yourself bombarded with a lot of writing that you may not have time to go through. Don’t sweat it. Just skim through it and cherrypick what you can respond to if you have to.
The main point is that you do not feel any pressure to do anything outside of what you normally do. This is my process. What you do outside of that is just embellishment which I can only welcome.
And since I know a little about you (via Google (you should know a little about me. First of all, I am not a philosopher. That would require a reading list I may not have time for in my lifetime. Being self taught, as far as philosophy’s concerned, I just like the idea of taking in a lot of different influences and seeing what I can produce because of them. I like to consider myself more of a writer who tends to write about what they experience, which for the time being is mainly philosophy.
(I should also point out that my primary experience with Derrida has been secondary text: what I have read about him. I have read through A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (but didn’t get much from it. I do have in my library his Specter of Marx. But that has thus far been one of those books I keep hoping to get to if I can ever get past that other damn Frenchman: Deleuze. And I mean it: damn the French and their weird obscure philosophies anyway!!!
Okay! Let the jam begin:
“I think your avant-garde proposal is very interesting but at the same time limited. I suggest you read Ranciere’s “The paradoxes of political art” in Dissensus. There he opposes Lyotard’s and suggests that avant-garde too is problematic since it demands an absolute anesthetization of life which is impossible since art and life are always separate. Life cannot be art and art cannot be life without creating a problematic situation (for example hype and artsy commodities that just perpetuate the world configuration). This is basically (and superficially) his argument but this does not mean that avant-garde is completely useless. As I mentioned earlier the project is still an aesthetic project in the sense of thinking the (re)organization of the world. That is, of thinking the knowledge the world IS in the sense of how we sense it, i.e, how we are present in the world and always “touching it”.
On this note I would to problematize your usage of the world “antidote”. I don’t think we should be looking for an antidote, i.e., a pharmakon that is absolutely good. I don’t think this is the question Lyotard was proposing but more importantly this is not the question of politics. When you demand the antidote you demand the absolute, you demands the infinite as you mentioned towards the end of your post. I agree with you we are seeing a conservative turn in world as a result impossibility to cope with the question of politics in the way it is being proposed today but in my opinion this fascist turn is precisely the infinite answer to the question that demands the infinite. In that sense everything is working out perfectly as I mentioned in my previous post. Politics in thought in absolute terms of either infinite justice or infinite love or infinite anything else and therefore always terrorist even if in a limited sense. I just believe the moment you propose the infinite/absolute answer you are just replacing one master by another (as Lacan warns the students in the “Analyticon”).
And I also agree that Derrida, Deleuze and Rorty (and many others) think the infinite but I still think it is possible to extract something different from their theories.To be more precise a “finite thinking” (as in Nancy’s book). A thinking of our limitedness and togetherness that is not whole. This is exactly your final question. I don’t like to talk in concepts of mind, I prefer the notions of Being or presence/existence but spirit is the same I think: our reality is always limited/finite in a sense, so the meaning/truth of the world is always already despite barely being it. I think once we shift the question towards this finitude, we might be able to cope with the political issue of being-together since politics is nothing more that being this “togertheness” (am I clear or have I transited into ontological gibberish?)”
Okay, focusing on:
“I think your avant-garde proposal is very interesting but at the same time limited. I suggest you read Ranciere’s “The paradoxes of political art” in Dissensus. There he opposes Lyotard’s and suggests that avant-garde too is problematic since it demands an absolute anesthetization of life which is impossible since art and life are always separate. Life cannot be art and art cannot be life without creating a problematic situation (for example hype and artsy commodities that just perpetuate the world configuration). This is basically (and superficially) his argument but this does not mean that avant-garde is completely useless. As I mentioned earlier the project is still an aesthetic project in the sense of thinking the (re)organization of the world. That is, of thinking the knowledge the world IS in the sense of how we sense it, i.e, how we are present in the world and always “touching it”.
On this note I would to problematize your usage of the world “antidote”. I don’t think we should be looking for an antidote, i.e., a pharmakon that is absolutely good.”
:I don’t think Layotard’s point was to exchange one absolute for another. He did, after all, point to postmodernism being about the undermining of all grand narratives. My blue-collarized (perhaps even vulgarized (take on it is that it primarily about pre-empting fixed semiotic systems of meaning. Hence his argument for the avant garde as an antidote. And I respectfully question your point:
“On this note I would to problematize your usage of the world “antidote”. I don’t think we should be looking for an antidote, i.e., a pharmakon that is absolutely good. I don’t think this is the question Lyotard was proposing but more importantly this is not the question of politics. When you demand the antidote you demand the absolute, you demands the infinite as you mentioned towards the end of your post.”
Now that we have wandered into the analytic study of meanings: I would argue that the word “antidote” does not describe an absolute solution, but rather a fix for a given situation or problem. I, personally, see traces of that same temporary fix in the thought of Derrida. I see Frost’s point concerning poetry: that it is a temporary stay against confusion.
As I see it, Derrida is an expression of a movement that started in Saussure’s recognition that the words we use to refer to things are arbitrarily chosen (via a human agreement (and moved on to recognize that since language can never truly reflect reality, there is no reason we shouldn’t just Play with it: Performance.
P.S., brother: the main goal is for us to get through this without ending up at each other’s throat. There can be no discourse so volatile as that which works in the second person perspective of speaking in terms of “you” which implies an “I”. As I have every reason to believe based on what I have seen of you: the point isn’t to win. It is to push our individual processes further than they have ever gone before.