Learning to love the bomb

David B.'s La Bombe Familiale as translated by Edward Gauvin for Words Without Borders.

On another note:  a video of Derrida's speech from October 2004 on the 50th anniversary of Le Monde Diplomatique.  He touches especially on the theme of a "New International" among others mentioned in this post.

The Animal Question in Contemporary Radical Politics and Thought

First, I’d like to thank Jodi and Matt for their kind invitation to join Long Sunday as a contributor.   For those readers who do not know me, my name is Matt Calarco and I teach philosophy at Sweet Briar College and contribute on occasion over at I cite.  I have been meaning to post something here at Long Sunday for a couple of months, but have (much to my shame) failed to follow through.  I could offer the usual excuse of being too busy (which would not be false), but a more honest reason could be given.
 
The more honest reason is that I am never quite certain of how to insinuate myself in the debates that go on at Long Sunday, I cite, The Weblog, and other similar blogs I frequent.  The uncertainty stems from my predisposition to approach contemporary radical politics, activism, and theory from a deeply non-anthropocentric perspective—a perspective that is, I take it, not widely shared by most readers of and contributors to these blogs.  While some contributors (primarily Deleuzeans, with whom I am very close for obvious reasons) offer occasional nods to developments in transhumanist thought and radical environmentalism and their promise for contemporary political struggles (and I loudly applaud such posts, if only to myself in my living room), I almost never see any parallel discussion of the role that radical animal politics/theory/studies might or should play in these same struggles.  Similarly, the theorists who are most admired at these sites are rarely, if ever, taken to task for their brazen and dogmatically metaphysical anthropocentrism.

But, the comments on Jodi’s recent post on “A Fox” (which was in turn inspired by a post over at Infinite Thought), combined with a recent increase in attention given to animal studies by leading theorists (for example, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben) and various Marxists, made me wonder whether this state of affairs might slowly be changing.  Along these lines, I found the following comment by Anthony Paul Smith on Jodi’s “A Fox” post at I cite to be particularly interesting:

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'Another origin of the world'

As other "Theory"-literate and serious denizens of the blogosphere duly note, Specters of Marx is a book that continues to look better with each passing year.  Generous, intricate and faithful expositions of Derrida's later political thought, meanwhile, are so few and far between that a recent article by Ross Benjamin and Heesok Chang (ProjectMuse) is most welcome, and also conveniently works as a rather natural continuation of our Spivak (and Europe, and technology, and democracy) discussions. 

Suffice to say that many familiar themes make an appearance.  I provide some brief excerpts and comment below the fold, as the authors are friends and were kind enough to share a copy.   (Those interested and without Muse access may I suppose ask very nicely via email.)   The excerpts are by no means generous enough, as indeed the article covers quite a lot of ground, including responsible forays into anonymous internationalism (composed of "no one" who is , nevertheless, "not just anyone" – cf. Thomas Keenan; recalling also Blanchot's communism), Spivak's (partly just) criticisms in Ghostwriting, Derrida's distinctly atheist transformation of Benjamin's 'weak messianism' and Roland Barthes' reflections on the photograph among other things.  The bold and truly excellent SUBSTANCE Magazine was once kind enough to grant us a generous "fair use" permission to quote from its "Counter-Obituaries" issue on Derrida from some time ago...so consider this too a first step, if you will, toward a more precise engagement there. 
    
From the key orienting and introductory 'graph (or rather, a bit of graft on my part, as the  framing, justifying work performed by introductions certainly is important to get right):

As admirable as [their] aims may be, Habermas and Derrida’s proclamation inevitably raises the question of their global bias.   Although their article closes by “renounc[ing] Eurocentrism,” it seems nonetheless to reassert a particular European obligation to act on behalf of the world.    American political philosopher Iris Marion Young objects to the publication’s premise in an essay for the web-based journal openDemocracy.  She asserts, “Europe needs not globalism but a provincialism that will enable a dialogue of equals with the rest of the world.”   Young points out that the anti-war rallies of February 15, 2003 were planned at a World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in January 2003 and, moreover, took place in hundreds of cities throughout the world.   Such a “coordination may signal the emergence of a global public sphere, of which European publics are wings, but whose heart may lie in the southern hemisphere.”   Though [Iris Marion] Young correctly calls into question their geopolitical assumptions, a closer evaluation of Derrida’s key statements makes clear that his position on Europe is distinct from the one Habermas sketches in their jointly signed text* [...]   

Contrary to his press, Derrida never made a secret of his allegiance to the European Enlightenment.    Our title, “the last European,” is meant as a tribute and a provocation, a corrective to the idée fixe that “deconstructionism” seeks to corrode Enlightenment ideals.   The allusion to Blanchot’s Le dernier homme notwithstanding, it is unlikely Derrida himself would have recognized the descriptive pertinence of the phrase or accepted its eschatological pathos.   We certainly do not wish to suggest that he clung to the Continent.   On the contrary, the globe-trotting itineraries of his teaching and lecturing – in particular his numerous visiting professorships in the US – imparted a decisively non-European competence and tonality to his numerous public stances.   The topic of European identity, he admitted, is predictably tired:  “Old Europe seems to have exhausted all the possibilities of discourse and counter-discourse about its own identification” (Other Heading 26).   And yet, paradoxically, European identity has never really been taken up in the promise that it holds for the future.   For Derrida, this at one and the same time old and young identity is a fine example of Hamlet’s famous declaration that “the time is out of joint.”   In the following, we argue that this temporal rift is precisely what compelled him to speak in the name of Europe.

  The authors proceed to engage first with Derrida-Valéry in a manner that deserves to be quoted at some length, though again I will limit myself:

Valéry’s texts figure in The Other Heading, then, as telling, modernist examples of the Eurocentric idealism that continues (in a somewhat threadbare mode) to animate the West’s cultural politics.   To Jameson’s account of Derrida’s strategic use of Valéry we would only add that Valéry does not simply function as the object of an ideology critique.   His outmoded Eurocentrism also serves, paradoxically, to advance Derrida’s deliberation on the future of Europe.  Valéry forcefully elucidates the expansive limits of a high cultural European self-understanding, and thereby, points a way out from within....

* [Sadly and rather inexcusably, the actual Habermas statement co-signed by Derrida appears to be unavailable online...or at least eluding my night's efforts.]

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dualism in phlosophy

Everyone is familiar, even if they haven't come across this particular quotation from Rorty, with the comment that Western metaphysics is grounded in 'dualisms.'

'Platonism'...refers to a set of philosophical distinctions (appearance-reality, matter-mind, made-found, sensible-intellectual, etc.): what Dewey called a 'brood and nest of dualisms.'These dualisms dominate the history of Western philosophy, and can be traced back to one or another passage in Plato's writings. Dewey thought, as I do, that the vocabulary which centers around these traditional distinctions has become an obstacle to our social hopes. (Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xii)

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the fragment

Derrida on biography, the fragment and the whole story, innovation and the academy.

(Requires flash plugin on browsers - I think it's the one available for download here)

Variations on a theme: La complainte du partisan

(The following is a guest by John Barner, author of the weblog Slow Learner.)

On February fifteenth of this year, the partisan lost a friend.

Anna Marly (formerly Anna Betoulinsky) died at the age of 88, leaving behind a legacy that included two variations on the theme of the partisan. The Chant des Partisans (1943), was initially written by Marly in her native Russian and was translated, with Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, into French.  At the same time, Resistance fighter Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie penned the lyrics to another song, to a tune of Marly’s, entitled La complainte du partisan (1943).  Armed only with her voice and a guitar, Marly would travel around London to perform the songs either for BBC radio broadcasts (heard by comrades via pirate radio in France) or small audiences.  The former has risen to anthem status in France, while the latter is perhaps best known for its inclusion (in a modified form) on Leonard Cohen’s Songs from a Room (1969).  In his theorizing of the partisan, Carl Schmitt notes that a historian “finds examples and parallels in history for all historical situations”¹.  Given that I have spent a significant portion of my life as a musician and songwriter, I have written the following while searching, in a way, for a lyrical parallel in the example of Marly’s songs—a voice, perhaps, that embodies (or is embodied by) Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan.

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Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

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Briefly on The Canon (and its straw discontents)

You'd think that issues of Canon-formation and feminism would be of great interest to those concerned with the future of literature.

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Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak's most 'difficult' or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, at best, this is expressed as a bewilderment as to what might be at stake in the argument or, as a slightly different question, as a consideration of what is at put at stake in reading at a particular conjuncture. At other times, with a more or less implicit embarrassment that Spivak herself notes, the readers' gaze is averted from the discussion of 'economics', or better: labour-power and value - which is to say, that which is least familiar and proper to the aforementioned disciplines but which, as it turns out, the essay is about.  Other times, still, the confusion that results from Spivak's indisciplined writing cuts the other way. But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say  (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

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Your episteme is my abstraction, and we'll keep it

Nobody is invested here, it is said.  Nobody wants to risk taking a firm stand for Spivak.  As Terry Eagleton once announced, in post-colonial studies this dilemma is itself practically a cliché.  One must renounce just in order to belong (meanwhile "individualization belies a collective lifestyle," Ulrich Beck has muttered).  Very well though, let me play the role, or play at the role, at least (we are all role players here, to some degree, as everyone surely knows; bloggers are not serious).  There is a sort of enviable gravity to the sacrificial victim, after all.  Still, I've very little genuine desire to play at being, as Eagleton also gibes, "that ultimate source of embarrassment, [the] devoted acolyte."

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Blessing and Partage: No Pasarán; On Celan and Derrida

"No, I will limit myself here to the aporia (to the barred passage, no pasarán:  this is what aporia means)."

"...A date is mad, that is the truth.
And we are mad for dates.
For the ashes that dates are.  Celan knew one may praise or bless ashes.  Religion is not necessary for that.  Perhaps because a religion begins there, before religion, in the blessing of dates, of names, and of ashes..."

"A date always remains a sort of hypothesis, the support for a by definition unlimited number of projections of memory."-JD

One wonders what Derrida might have thought and said these past few weeks, about the re-casting of a certain enigmatic slogan in the streets of France.  One he always heard, after, as coming through Celan; one so clearly dear to his own heart.  Who could forget those passages?   But also, who would dare to write on them?

When Giovanna Borradori asked Derrida about September 11, and though I wonder if she realized it, what must have come first to his mind was another September, that of Celan's "Huhediblu"..."date of Nevermansday in September." 

Another Long Sundayan has already remarked, in suitably derisive manner, on the subject of this slogan–itself a "veritable knot of radical associations"–being recently adopted on the interweb by a group of impressively soporific blowhards, so we needn't dwell especially there.  Mark commented on the poem "Shibboleth", and later, Amie and I discussed "In Eins," which as Derrida notes is in fact a poem inside a poem, containing "Shibboleth", as it were, within.

No Pasarán.  A slogan, a pebble, with unusual powers, or something of what Nancy calls "partage":   to be capable of dividing, and at the same time blessing waters ("partition" and "partaking"...how often Derrida remarked on the theme of this...disastrous movement).  Also Shibboleth, watchword, at once demarcating a certain line or border, and a community, one marked by an act of crossing over.  A word Derrida also connects to necessary departure–departure from belonging, and in order to address the other.   A word, a pebble, like a tombstone, seeking to mark a date...

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Europe, religion and philosophy

Étienne Balibar has surely written some fine and interesting things.

Just a quick follow-up to the post below.  In poking around for Martti Koskenniemi's review of Borradori's book, I came across a fascinating talk he later gave:  Martti Koskenniemi:  International Law in Europe:  Between Tradition and Renewal [pdf].  (Koskenniemi is also the editor of this.)  An excerpt from the talk:

Before I continue, let me state my conclusion.  The fact that international law is a European language does not even slightly stand in the way of its being capable of expressing something universal.  For the universal has no voice, no authentic representative of its own.  It can only appear through something particular;  only a particular can make the universal known.  A danger and a hope are involved.   The danger is that of mistaking one's preferences and interests as one's tradition–and then thinking these a universal, a mistake we Europeans have often made.  Therefore, I will suggest that we should take much more seriously the critiques of international law that point to its role as a hegemonic  technique.  Once that critique has been internalised, however, I want to point to its limits.  If the universal has no representative of its own, then particularity itself is no scandal.  The question would then be, under what conditions might a particular be able to transcend itself?  What particular politics might we have good reason to imagine as a politics of universal law?

Elsewhere, in response to the supplement, Ben Wolfson points to a fascinating essay in this book by Jonathan Z. Smith entitled, "Religion, Religions, Religious," most of which you may find by searching within for, say, "any house of worship," beginning on page 269.

And in other (unsuprising) news, Pussy "President" in Chief gets severely rattled by a little old lady and stays rattled, practically foaming at the mouth.  For the billionth time, God help us.  Bush has quite obviously met his "philosophy" equal in fundamentalist Islam, and he is losing.  Favorite line, from the waxing "philosophical" part:  "And history has proven that democracies don't go to war!"  "What kind of mindset is it... that questions?...uh, Democracy is...is based upon, um...is a universal...is a belief."  And et cetera.

Why should we care when Bush, being pressed for actual thought, blows bubbles out his ass?  Because it proves the world's only military superpower is in the hands of only an ass with no thoughts and only beyond-facile "beliefs", that's why.

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Fresh Light

...to supplement a post at The Weblog (and encourage readers toward David's, on Badiou's Hölderlin below it)

None of the parties involved in the struggle against terrorism can afford to refrain from talking about it, but the more they do so the more they help the terrorist cause, by giving it status, visibility, and a sense of purpose...victims of a traumatic experience need to endlessly play the trauma back for themselves in order to feel reassured that they have withstood it.  This self-destructive tendency becomes a destructive weapon in the hands of the media and the political leadership.  Imagine, said Derrida, if we told the American public and the world that what has happened is no doubt an unspeakable crime, but it's over.  Everyone would then begin their own period of mourning, the preliminary step to turning the page.  All responsible parties need to facilitate this turning of the page and stop hindering it.  This is an urgent responsibility, the evasion of which transforms the enemies of terrorism into its allies.  (Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 153-154; image via remue.net)

I may not share the proclivity (or mixed fascination) for sterilized images of the zeitgeist's self-appointed spokesmen, but I do appreciate the impetus of Alain's post.   And I suspect he would agree that discussions of Fukuyama and B-Henri, while revealing things by falling rather decisively short, don't really do the subject at hand much of any justice. Which is the way I prefer to read his concluding remarks, in any case.  That subject being, broadly, the social and political role of philosophers, and even more broadly their relation to the question of Europe.

As to the former, Alain cites those two repellents attempting to  distinguish strictly between "government" and "private life", and "realistic" and "idealistic" intellectual labor, respectively.  But as Alain himself, and one savvy commenter do not fail to note, neither of these sets of bins are very helpful, or even all that relevant.

Rather, and in a manner that overlaps a great deal with John Emerson's recent forays into questions of global citizenship and intellectual responsibility in "analytic" vs. "continental" frameworks, one might more usefully distinguish, following Giovanna Borradori, between models of social and political commitment aligned with either a "liberal" or "Hegelian" lineage.

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Bourdieu vs. Post-Structuralism

Those of us who end up being associated with 'postmodernism' or 'theory' often find ourselves confused or infuriated by the attempt of our opponents to lump us into a single category. It is amusing, therefore, to read one of those 'postmodernists' or 'theorists' or -- more plainly -- 'Frenchmen' get upset about this lumping-in with people he views himself to be in competition with. The last chapter, indeed the last section of that chapter, in Bourdieu's Science of Science and Reflexivity sees him attempt to articulate -- for an audience in France at the College de France -- his relationship, that is departure from, philosophy and, consequently, his relationship to the stars of French academic philosophy. This section, "Sketch for a self-analysis", sees him go after, as it were, Althusser and Foucault (and, by consequence, Deleuze), primarily, but also Derrida. His problem with the first group is that they disavow the social sciences while taking the object of the social sciences for themselves and his problem with the second group, exemplified (symbolized?) by Derrida, is its 'aristocratic' tendencies. (Do recall, Bourdieu often revisited the theme of his petit bourgeois origins in relation to his thought, in general, and, more specifically, the context of the elite French academies.)

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Johnson on deconstruction

Prof. Barbara Johnson, in her excellent Introduction to her own translation of Derrida's essays in Dissemination, makes this very valuable comment on Derrida's method:

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Chora

"Discourse here meets its limit--in itself, in its very performative power.  It is what I propose to call here the mystical.  There is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language.  [...] Since the origin of authority, the founding or grounding, the positing of law cannot by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground.  This is not to say that they are in themselves unjust, in the sense of "illegal" or "illegitimate."  They are neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment.  They exceed the opposition between founded and unfounded...The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news.  One may even find in this the political chance of all historical progress."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 242)

"Here one notices that there are cases in which, posed in terms of means/end, the problem of law remains undecidable.  This ultimate undecidability, which is that of all problems of law...is the insight of a singular discouraging experience.  Where is one to go after recognizing this ineluctable undecidability? Such a question opens, first, upon another dimension of language, upon a beyond of mediation and so beyond language as a sign.  Sign is here understood, as always in Benjamin, in the sense of mediation, as a means toward an end.  It seems at first that there is no way out, and so there is no hope."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 285)

Let me attempt to make my general disposition, such as it is, explicit.  I am tempted to subscribe fully to Derrida's reading of, and resistance to Benjamin, and thus in certain respects against Agamben.  To subscribe fully to the disquiet Derrida outlines, and to the questions he poses, in this already much-cited, seminal essay, "Force of Law:  The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority.'"   Above all, perhaps, to not be in too much of a hurry, as Derrida was fond of saying (in that yesteryear still blissfully ignorant of "teh! serious" weblogs, we can only assume). 

There are some real differences here, as Adam alluded to earlier (Agamben calls the likewise leaping conclusion of Derrida's essay on Benjamin a peculiar misunderstanding, and understandably so, since surely it's fair to say that Derrida is addressing his remarks in no small part to Agamben's Benjamin, so to speak).  For Agamben's fullest response, as far as I am aware, the reader is encouraged to consult Homo Sacer I (above linked).  The differences here could certainly be sketched out in many ways, using everyone from Kant to Heidegger to Schmitt as one's primary filter (not to mention Blanchot, Wittgenstein, Montaigne or Pascal, Rawls or Sam Weber and so on, all of whom appear in Derrida's historico-philosophical sketch).  But perhaps some summary schematics can at this point be posed, or repeated, both for the sake of clarity and complexity (if not for the added benefit of driving the larger panopticon crazy with shades of ambivalence).  Derrida is useful in this way.   But first it should be plainly noted:  even where he claims to be leaving "Benjamin the last word," Derrida is picking up where Benjamin left off, specifically there where Benjamin states:

The realm of ends, and therefore also the question of a criterion of justness, is excluded for the time being from this study.  (279)

The question of justice, as I believe Paul Passavant touched on earlier, runs strongly through Derrida's larger project, in which the ideas of a just decision, a justice to-come, and a certain 'messianicity without messianism' are at least suggestively, elliptically or implicitly, opposed to Benjamin's (and Agamben's) perceived messianism.  Not that any of these ideas are so easily understood, of course.  But perhaps it is not merely coincidental that in another nearby essay,"Faith and Reason," Derrida's discussion of these topics repeatedly returns to a single, rather enigmatic word:  "chora" (which he borrows from Plato, and borrows it not for the first time, as we shall see).  Would it be accurate to suggest that this Platonic "chora" is invoked at least partly in response to Benjamin's meditations on "divine violence," as described, in some literary fashion, by the story of Korah?  I don't know.  It is possible, I suppose, that Derrida has been responding to this essay, in one form or another, for some time.

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“Critique of Violence” and Deconstruction

[The following is exerpted from a longer paper I wrote on Force of Law. The part on "Declarations of Independence" in particular has been quite brutally cut, hopefully not beyond comprehensibility. For those who don't know, my name is Adam Kotsko, and I normally blog at The Weblog.]

Introducing his reading of “Critique of Violence” in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, Derrida goes to great lengths to distance himself from any sense that Benjamin’s text is some kind of unique key: “One will not dare say that this text is exemplary. We are in a realm where, in the end, there are only singular examples. Nothing is absolutely exemplary. I will not attempt to justify absolutely the choice of this text. But it is not, for all that, the worst example of what could be exemplary in a relatively determined context such as ours” (263). What is the context here? First of all, of course, the context is an academic conference on Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, where “Critique of Violence” presents itself as a particularly well-suited “exercise in deconstructive reading” (264), for reasons of both structure and content. Already, though, the “complete” text in Acts of Religion contains materials adapted for a second conference on the Final Solution, materials in which, according to Agamben, Derrida “guards against [Benjamin’s concept of divine violence], approximating it—with a peculiar misunderstanding—to the Nazi ‘Final Solution’” (64). Finally, Derrida explicitly widens the context to include the whole political situation of his time: “In the Western Democracies of 1989, with work and a certain number of precautions, lessons can still be drawn from it” (“Force,” 264). And although we can’t know for sure that he knew it at the time—any more than we can know for sure that Benjamin knew the Shoah was coming—Derrida is writing just as “the European model of bourgeois, liberal, parliamentary democracy” (263) is about to experience what will seem to have been its greatest triumph, that is, the fall of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War. Once again, the internal contradictions of Actually Existing Democracy, its self-deconstructive properties, so apparent to Benjamin and others in the wake of the Great War, become all too visible.

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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.
 

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il n'y a pas de hors-texte

There is nothing outside of the text.  And that is neither becasue Jean-Jacques' life, or the existence of Mamma or Therese themselves, is not of prime interest to us, nor because we have access to their so-called "real" existence only in the text and we have neither any means of altering this, nor any right to neglect this limitation.  All reasons of this type would already be sufficient, to be sure, but there are more radical reasons.  What we have tried to show by following the guiding line of the "dangerous supplement," is that in what one calls the real life of these existences "of flesh and bone," beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau's text, there have never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the "real" supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement. (Of Grammatology Pgs. 158-159)

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Footnote: Rendering

Painting. Debt. The Commodity.

Qui me rendrà mes chaussures?

Pourquoi dire toujours de la peinture qu'elle rend? Qu'elle restitue? [Why do we always say of painting that it renders? That it restores/repays?] - Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture

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.

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London, London

There is a duty to speak precisely about such events, perhaps a need greater than ever before.  After the initial curses (or are they oaths?) have passed between lips, barely audible perhaps, whispered as they say beneath one's breath, uttered or sighed without illusion of speaking or performing homage with any adequacy or faux promises of finality (that can be known) to the loss that now marks what will remain. There is a duty to speak, after this breath maybe, but also before too much time has passed. This changes nothing?  On the contrary, I beg your pardon, but I think something has to change. 

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You Gotta Have Faith?

"You cannot address the other, speak to the other without an act of faith, without testimony. What are you doing when you testify, when you attest to something? You address the other and ask belief. Even if you lie, even if you are in a perjury you are addressing the other and asking the other to trust you. This 'trust me, I'm speaking to you' is of the order of faith." Derrida at Villanova during a round table discussion/1994

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