Friday, February 25, 2005

in lieu of a post


The incomparable wood s lot featuring M.B.
, the disturbingly fructiferous Alphonse, who also probes Sade, Bourdieu and Zizek, and Charlotte on "The Power of Nightmares" (indirectly, I think). Responses welcome to the following quotes:
With regard to the "perhaps," moreover, there exists a theological vein, in the work of Böhme, Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa, that defines God not as being--and precisely for which fact they break with what Heidegger call the "ontotheological tradition"--but defines God as "before" and outside of being, without being. They define God as "perhaps." God is the perhaps...The most impossible becomes more than impossible, otherwise than impossible. (Derrida, "Deconstructions: The Im-possible," 31)

Theories are necessary (the theories of language, for example): necessary and useless. Reason works in order to wear itself out, by organizing itself into systems, seeking a positive knowledge where it can posit itself, pose and repose and at the same time convey itself to an extremity which forms a stop and closure. We must pass by way of this knowledge and forget it...Forgetfulness is a practice...The theoretical battle, even if it is waged against some form of violence, is always the violence of an incomprehension; let us not be stopped short by the partial, simplifying, reductive character of comprehension itself. This partialness is characteristic of the theoretical: "with hammer blows," Nietzsche said. But this hammering is not only the clash of arms. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 75-76)

The correct criticism of the System does not consist (as is most often, complacently, supposed) in finding fault with it, or in interpreting it insufficiently (which even Heidegger sometimes does), but rather in rendering it invincible, invulnerable to criticism or, as they say, inevitable. Then, since nothing escapes it because of its omnipresent unity and the perfect cohesion of everything, there remains no place for fragmentary writing unless it come into focus as the impossible necessary: as that which is written in the time outside time, in the sheer suspense which without restraint breaks the seal of unity by, precisely, not breaking it, but by leaving it aside without this abandon's ever being able to be known. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 61)

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