Long Sunday

Deleuze and Guatarri on the national state and human rights

In a discussion of Deleuze and Guatarri's notion of the concept in What is philosophy?, one of the commentators points to p. 107 of that book where 'communication' is discussed. Starting with 106, the authors write:

If there is no universal democratic State, despite German philosophy's dream of foundation, it is because the market is the only thing that is universal in capitalism. In contrast with the ancient empires that carried out transcendent overcodings, capitalism functions as an immanent axiomatic of decoded flows (of money, labor, products). National States are no longer paradigms of overcoding but constitute the "models of realization" of this immanent axiomatic . . . .

He may as well be talking about weblogs

Despicable socialist fantasies, or dedications to the memory of "political surrealism" in literary rag, n+1 (perhaps even those without subscriptions could, you know, opine about it).  Anyway it reminded me of this.   And there's some Hegel in the monster's tail.   Mark Greif:

One of the lessons of starting a magazine today is that if you pay any attention to politics you will collect a class of detractors, who demand immediately to know What and Wherefore and Whether and How...Is it possible you have not endorsed a candidate, or adopted a party?   Within the party, a position?   If not a position, an issue?   The notion that politics could be served by thinking about problems and principles, rather than rehearsing strategy, leaves them not so much bemused as furious.

That old trick

“ To conclude once again, I will cite something Michel Foucault wrote some time ago:  'For a long time, the so-called ”left-wing“ intellectual spoke, and was accorded the right to speak, as the master of truth and justice.  He was listened to, or claimed the right to be listened to, as the representative of the universal.  To be an intellectual was to some extent to be the conscience of all.'  There is little that can be said in response to this warning.  When a number of us took part in the May 1968 movement, they hoped to be preserved from any ambition in the singular, and in a way they succeeded, through not being singled out for attention, but treated in the same way as everyone else, the strength of the anti-authoritarian movement making it almost easy to forget all particularity, and impossible to distinguish between young and old, the unknown and the too well-known, as if, despite the differences and the incessant disputes, each person recognized himself in the anonymous words inscribed on the walls and which, in the end, even when on occasion they were the result of a collective effort, never declared themselves the words of an author, being of all and for all, in their contradictory formulation.    But of course that was an exception...

A recommend

Simon Critchley is interviewed today by Mark Thwaite at the rather peerless ReadySteadyBook. An excerpt below the fold:

GOD (Donner la mort) (i)

(The following comprises two brief responses to the opening of Jacques Derrida's Gift of Death (as translated from Donner la mort by David Wills).  The first is by guest author Kenneth Rufo, who blogs astutely at Ghost in the Wire  The idea for this series originates somewhere around here. –ed. (as if))


Titular Ruminations

Ken Rufo:  What would it mean to think death as a gift? To give death? And who is
in a position to give it? A few possibilities.

First, as the title's acronym implies, we have the almighty, the
transcendent creator, the beginning and, of course, the end. Our mortal
lives are his gift to us, a Christian gift. Death is God's gift to his
chosen people, for with death comes the possibility, at least the
Judeo-Christian possibility, of transcendence. Death comes from the
diving to, in effect, return us to the divine.

Second, almost opposite in inclination, death is the gift given to us
through indirection, sacrifice, and happenstance by the poorest, the
lowly, the Other. It is their labor, their contribution, their living –
and especially their dying – that gives us so much. Our privilege, be it
that of intellectual hegemony or the means by which we blithely take a
disproportionate share of the world's natural and industrial wealth.

Third, death is the gift we give ourselves. The good (eu-) death
(thanatos), the question of how to die, of one's relationship to death.
It is here that we find the most strident split between Heidegger and
Levinas, for while Heidegger founds Dasein on an authentic resoluteness
towards one's own death, Levinas finds in this resolution a
quintessential selfishness that belies those Other that makes our own
death (and life) possible. Being towards death cannot, for Levinas, mean
only being towards one's own death, hence the near universal ethical
injunction: thou shall not murder.

Fourth, death is the gift of the other, for it is through death that we
learn of our own mortality. We can take this in two directions. On the
one hand, it is through the death of others, through the realization of
their terminality, that we come to recognize our own finitude. These
“little Ds” - Ernest Becker's name for them – help us to understand the
existential and psychological importance of death. On the other hand,
death is an exemplar, a reset, a terminal experience much like the
terminus/terminal of some machine, the interface that defines the point
at which everyday life smacks into its own heuristic limits. It is in
this sense that Bataille can talk about the virtues of excess or that
Baudrillard can speak of death as a metaphor. It is in this sense that
the tragedy of Katrina accumulates meaning.
 

Blanchot Blogging

There could be little less discreet than writing "on Maurice Blanchot."  Hopelessly redundant, in a sense, either one must accept the theory he provides, or reject it.   There is little room for compromise. 

The real work of writing alongside, that which would work him silently (though not parasitically, or simply victim to mimetic contagion) into one's thinking.  Well, I'm not sure that I'm there yet...though the danger his writing poses in such regard, is certainly far greater than most.