go read

For those who may not be aware lately I've also been throwing up the odd post, as time permits, over at the new place, which is on a schedule all its own but suffice to say we're not concerned. I recommend you go take a look, especially at the more patient thoughts of others, some relatively new to the blogosuffix, who have lately, greatly, been stepping up. It's so muggy I'm surprised anyone has the will to herd words, let alone post on Bourdieu, Hegel, Derrida and Heidegger, but they're going at it. Also, I hear there's something special in the works coming soon from Alphonse and John...

At the same time, there can be no doubt that blogging is in some sense antithetical to writing. I'm a fairly diligent blogger, and I haven't written anything in months. And yet in the face of so much increasingly quality online writing (if you know where to look), those getting paid for it do seem progressively obscene and silly. (Of course 80% of what is published, paid for, reviewed and promoted, certainly including McSweeney's blabber, is complete and utter crap (and don't worry about that changing because apparently Technorati doesn't do lit. blogs? And only measures sales through Amazon?!?)...petty bourgeois crap, yes, as any "literary snob" worth hir salt will rightly and repeatedly tell you.) But then again how hard can it be, when the competition is this?

Finally, the sidebar is a living thing, I'll have you know.

Operation Margarine

Dear Jesus, why are Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman et al. sooo 1957? The sociologists say we're experiencing a cultural return to the 1950's (only without the jazz, the Beats, or anything even moderately courageous.) Well at least there's some hope, for soap!

On the other hand, there is the World Tribunal on Iraq, currently wrapping up somewhere (in a cave?) in Istanbul (God, is Arundhati Roy beautiful––all philosophic objections to the obscene preponderance of the author photo are thus temporarily suspended).


In the words of the great sentimentalist John Berger:

The records have to be kept and, by definition, the perpetrators, far from keeping records, try to destroy them. They are killers of the innocent and of memory. The records are required to inspire still further the mounting opposition to the new global tyranny. The new tyrants, incomparably over-armed, can win every war - both military and economic. Yet they are losing the war (this is how they call it) of communication. They are not winning the support of world public opinion. More and more people are saying NO. Finally this will be the tyranny's undoing. But after how many more tragedies, invasions and collateral disasters? After how much more of the new poverty the tyranny engenders? Hence the urgency of keeping records, of remembering, of assembling the evidence, so that the accusations become unforgettable, and proverbial on every continent. More and more people are going to say NO, for this is the precondition today for saying YES to all we are determined to save and everything we love.

Update: Here are the World Tribunal's Findings:

The Jury also provided a number of recommendations that include recognising the right of the Iraqi people to resist the illegal occupation of their country and to develop independent institutions, and affirming that the right to resist the occupation is the right to wage a struggle for self-determination, freedom, and independence as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, we the Jury of Conscience declare our solidarity with the people of Iraq and the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the coalition forces from Iraq.

The Istanbul session of the WTI lasted three days and presented testimony on the illegality and criminal violations in the U.S. pretexts for and conduct of this war. The expert opinion, witness testimony, video and image evidence addressed the impact of war on civilians, the torture of prisoners, the unlawful imprisonment of Iraqis without charges or legal defence, the use of depleted uranium weapons, the effects of the war on Iraq's infrastructure, the destruction of Iraqi cultural institutions and the liability of the invaders in international law for failing to protect these treasures of humanity.

The session in Istanbul was the culminating session of commissions of inquiry and hearings held around the world over the past two years. Sessions on different topics related to the war on Iraq were held in London, Mumbai, Copenhagen, Brussels, New York, Japan, Stockholm, South Korea, Rome, Frankfurt, Geneva, Lisbon and Spain.

They have compiled a definitive historical record of evidence on the illegality of the invasion and occupation that will be recorded in a forthcoming book.

Update Again: And here's John Pilger on comparing the "public" receptions of the World Tribunal and the G8 affair.

Goodbye, to Marty Jezer

Tribute by Joyce Marcel

Aestheticism/Perfectionism

Mark Greif is going to think me a stalker pretty soon, but upon re-reading his article this morning I couldn't resist sharing this. It's taken from near the end of a rather thorough, but also clear and unpretentious essay on "The Concept of Experience" in the second issue of n+1, which, if you don't have a subscription by now, then I guess you're just shit out of luck.

...I hope it is obvious why these solutions are needed now––even more than when they first appeared [this amidst a discussion of Flaubert and Thoreau]––but maybe it needs to be said. Either you know aestheticism and perfectionism as philosophy today, or you'll get them, disfigured, in weaker attempts at the solutions to the pressures of experience. The dawn of the 21st century illuminates a total aesthetic environment in the rich nations of the world, where you choose your paint colors, and drawar pulls, and extreme makeovers, and facial surgery, in the debased aestheticism called consumerism, to make yourself by buying, when you could make yourself by seeing. The radical perception of aestheticism doesn't need always-new, store-bought beauties, and doesn't feel them cloy and fade as soon as they are owned. In the debased perfectionism called self-help, each struggler against the limits of life is already considered wounded by experience, deficient and lost. He is taught to try through acknowledgement of common weakness to reach a base-line level of the "normal," rather than learning perfectionism's appreciation for peculiarity and refusal. He is kept ignorant of perfectionism's hope for a next, unique, or higher self for everyone.

I mistrust any authority that is happy with this world as it is. I understand delight, and being moved by the things of this world. I understand feeling strong in oneself because of one's capabilities. I know what mania is, the lust for powers not of the ordinary run. I sympathize with gratitude for the presence of other people, and for plenty and splendor. But I cannot understand the failure to be disappointed with our experiences of our collective world, in their difference from our imaginations and desires, which are so strong. I cannot understand the failure to wish that this world was fundamentally more than it is.

Experience tries to evade the disappointment of this world by adding peaks to it. Life becomes a race against time and a contest you try to win. Aestheticism and perfectionism make a modern attempt to transcend this world by a more intense attention to it––every day and in every situation. The concept of modern transcendence admits the hope that this world could be more than this world, though it acknowledges this is the only world there is. (Mark Greif)

nb. See also here.

Anthony Cordesman, worthwhile conservative

Remind me, why doesn't this guy have Donald Duck's job again?


Oh, and Bernie Sanders has been guest-blogging, with only minimal typos, over here.

Karl Rove, meanwhile...well let's just say there's nothing like pissed off military families and Christians shoving it up a conservative's ass...

Update: There's more on Karl Rove, of course. And Democrats Call for Rove to Come Clean or Resign. Who knows...a good patriotic crime... maybe this will be the one. There's no question it would be, if only they didn't have the ability to drown it out thanks in large part to the media monopolies that took place under Clinton. It's almost as if they made a deal: Bush gets another term, and it's Hillary in 2008. And we all know she's the closest thing to a Republican, save perhaps the newly bearded Leiberman. Whoop de fucking doo.

David Foster Wallace's

commencement speech is a tad better than Al Gore's. Perhaps relatedly, an interesting discussion of boredom on the film-philosophy listserv.

A Passage in Question

There is probably something obscene in posting a passage from the very last pages of one of the richest and most patient philosophical works ever written. Such transcribed offerings most often—and perhaps rightly—get passed over entirely by impatient blog readers. But the passage in question has been cited enough in passing, in various scholarly writings, that we may as well read it here together, while not failing to acknowledge for a moment the indisputable fact that 300-odd extremely dense pages do preceed it. Soon enough, dear reader, this blog will return to something else, more bloggly.

Most unfortunately of all, the Caputo article/review entitled, "Who is Derrida's Zarathustra?" seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Caputo is perhaps the first to comment on the certain "disquiet" and "reticence" that Derrida acknowledges, with respect to Blanchot in particular, having "inspired" this book, which is of course The Politics of Friendship. I've only read it through once, this book, so I won't presume to comment. But maybe this passage can serve as a guidepost nonetheless in starting to think about Levinas. That is my vain desire.

The passage in question "begins" with Derrida quoting Blanchot:

'It is obviously the Nazi persecution (which was in operation from the beginning, unlike what certain professors of philosophy would wish to convince us of––to have us believe that in 1933, when Heidegger joined, national-socialism was still a proper, suitable doctrine, not deserving of condemnation) which made us feel that the Jews were our brothers and that Judaism was more than a culture and even more than a religion, but, rather, the foundation of our relationships with the other [autrui].'

I shall not hazard an interpretation of this definition of Judaism, although I sense both its highly problematic character and its imposing necessity (which is of course unquestionable, from the moment one decides to call Judaism the very thing one thus defines: a question of a circle with which we cannot here engage again). Putting aside, then, what is most difficult in this definition, but supposing, precisely, that Judaism is 'the foundation of our relationships with others', then––and this will be my only question––what does 'brothers' mean in this context? Why would autri be in the first place a brother? And especially, why 'our brothers'? Whose brothers? Who, then, are we? Who is this 'we'?
(Reading this sentence, and always in view of the admiring and grateful friendship which binds me to the author, I was wondering, among other questions (more than one): why could I never have written that, nor subscribed to it, whereas, relying on other criteria, this declaration would be easier for me to subscribe to than several others? In the same vein, I was wondering why the word 'community' (avowable or unavowable, inoperative or not)––why I have never been able to write it, on my own initiative and in my name, as it were. Why? Whence my reticence? And is it not fundamentally the essential part of the disquiet which inspires this book? Is this reserve, with respect to the above definition of Judaism, insufficiently Jewish, or, on the contrary, hyperbolically Jewish, more than Jewish? What, then, once again, does 'Judaism' mean? I add that the language of fraternity seems to me just as problematic when, reciprocally, Lévinas uses it to extend humanity to the Christian, in this case to Abbot Pierre: 'the fraternal humanity of the stalag's confidential agent who, by each of his movements, restored in us the consciousness of our dignity. The man was called Abbot Pierre, I never learned his family name.')

It is rather late in the day now to issue a warning. Despite the appearances that this book has multiplied, nothing in it says anything against the brother or against fraternity. No protest, no contestation. Maligning and cursing, as we have seen often enough, still appertain to the inside of the history of brothers (friends or enemies, be they false or true). This history will not be thought, it will not be recalled, by taking up this side. (Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 304-305)

a Girardian take(down) of Derrida's Gift of Death?

Not that I agree of course, but this is certainly interesting (as in symptomatic?):

While iconoclasm is a crucially important element of our Judeo-Christian heritage, in the case of Derrida it becomes simply another rhetorical posture in the hyper-mimetic atmosphere of post-modern theory.

While Derrida iconoclastically refuses any figuration of the sacred, he still insists on the incommensurability, the absolute difference of God. As a reaction against the fear that we have lost or forgotten the sacred (or Being), and thus the source for all significance, academics have brought back the sacred with a vengeance. But as a result of iconoclasm, the sacred now takes the abstract form of absolute difference or alterity, and any attempt to understand or even discuss rationally the incommensurable is abandoned. Derrida's incantatory language--the poetical cadences of his prose, the long and rapturous repetitions--reveals an aestheticism which is at heart rooted in a deep nostalgia for the sacred. His hostility towards modern technological civilization reflects the fear that the modern forgetting of the sacred will allow for unrestrained violence. The so-called primitive ambivalence of the sacred continues then, even in modern academia. On the one hand we resent any defined figuration of the sacred for presuming to colonize the space which is essentially spiritual and thus (for modernity) individual. But on the other hand, we still long for a sense of sacred difference, an absolute sacred immune to the corrosive power of resentment.

Derrida's interpretation of Christian mystery is on the one hand directed towards deconstructing responsibility, but also, on the other hand, towards the articulation of a new "more radical form of responsibility" (27). On what, then, will Derrida found this "more radical" form of responsibility? He proposes the "experience of singularity" in the individual's "apprehensive approach to death," a Heideggerian "being-towards-death" (43). What is missing in "being-towards-death," however, is the recognition that "The real power of death is sacrifice," the death of the other (Girard, TE 241). The sacrifice of the other, specifically Jesus, is precisely what Derrida's metaphysical framework tends to displace. Whereas the death of Jesus on the Cross has ineluctable ethical implications, the "being-towards-death" does not suggest any overt ethical dimension.

Ok, predictable enough so far maybe. The author may as well be talking about Kristeva here (or Heidegger, and maybe he is!), but the final kicker seems to be a pretty gross misreading:

Derrida's argument has the disturbing implication of simply leveling all ethical distinctions. Feeding his cat becomes equivalent to Abraham's attempted sacrifice of Isaac in the Old Testament (71). Derrida represents the "post-modern triumph of the victimary" (Gans, "Moral Contradiction") taken to its logical and absurd conclusion. The assertion that sacrifice is everywhere and always amounts, pragmatically, to a justification of the sacrificial. If there is nothing we can do to avoid the sacrificial, then obviously this is not a problem we need to worry ourselves about.

Acknowledging the role of the sacrificial in human culture does not have to mean simply accepting violence as inevitable, or denying the distinction between the sacrificial and the non-sacrificial. Considered as simply another act of sacrificial violence, there is nothing mysterious about the event of the Crucifixion. Such acts of scapegoating are all too common within human history. The miracle and mystery of Christianity can be found pre-eminently in the unconditional refusal of violence and the supremely human potential for love.

Well, from one supreme human to another, I would love to hear an explanation of why not! Isn't the question precisely one of how one goes about acknowledging the role of sacrifice (and not just acknowledging, but interpreting). I mean, to deny it tout court would probably be pretty silly and sorta deconstructionistic, or "simply another hyper-mimetic rhetorical posture..."

Seriously though, if anyone feels inclined to defend Girard here, that would be most welcome. Maybe without using the word "mimetic" as self-evident, for extra bonus points? (And no I haven't forgotten about the Levinas post below.)

Update: In comments below 'archive' draws attention to this slightly more worthy article, dealing with the themes of sacrifice, 'owness' of death, and the ontic/ontological distinction in Heidegger, from which excerpted a small bit:

In Aporias Derrida largely confined Levinas to the background of his discussion. In The Gift of Death, he gave Levinas a more prominent role, although in the context of the treatment of death in the second chapter Levinas is still largely subordinated to Heidegger. Derrida seemed to suggest there that Levinas's main criticism of Heidegger arose from a classic misunderstanding of what the latter was doing. Derrida even indicated that Heidegger foresaw - "exposing itself to it but exempting itself in advance" (DM 46; GD 42) - Levinas's objection. In numerous asides throughout his works Levinas seemed to juxtapose sacrifice to Heideggerian being-toward-death, as if the latter could not take account of the former. In The Gift of Death Derrida showed that this is not the case (DM 46; GD 42). According to Heidegger, my death is a possibility that I can assume in authenticity. Although Heidegger had difficulty providing the existentiell attestation that his existential analysis called for, it would seem that sacrificing oneself for another might be one of the ways in which this happens. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that in the 1930s Heidegger from time to time promoted such a conception in the context of National Socialism. Thinking perhaps less of these references than of the inclusion in The Origin of the Work of Art of sacrifice as one of the ways in which truth happens, Derrida suggested that Heidegger's thinking as much as that of Levinas has "paid constant attention to the fundamental and founding possibility of sacrifice" (DM 46; GD 42). However, that is not the end of the matter. Levinas elsewhere emphasized the lack of an ethics of sacrifice and it is not clear that Heidegger had a good answer to why one would sacrifice oneself for another or for a cause, otherwise than to assume one's own death, and how that is possible is not exactly clear.

One question that Levinas never raised explicitly in so dramatic a form, but which nevertheless can be said to be implied by his criticism of Heidegger, is the question of whether my death is my own. According to Heidegger, "By its very essence death is in every case mine, in so far as it 'is' at all" (SZ 240). By contrast, death is in Levinas's thought other and approaches as an Other, like a murderer or a thief in the night.

How might this article speak to the particular "disquiet" at the seemingly "exemplary" status granted to Judaism by Blanchot (and Levinas) cited at the opening and serving to orient and motivate, to some degree, Derrida's Politics of Friendship?

30 Days (to give "slumming" a new name)

Finally, some Reality TV! I can only watch this guy and his girlfriend suffer for so long, but I'm glad he's doing it and it sure beats the shit out of 24.

Last Tuesday, American Progress hosted a screening of the first episode of the new series 30 Days. In the first installment, Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) and his fiancée, Alexandra Jamieson, spend a month trying to live on the minimum wage in Columbus, Ohio, where they seek jobs, affordable housing and the best possible quality of life. The event opened with remarks from Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA). Following the screening, John Podesta, president and CEO of American Progress, moderated a panel including Morgan Spurlock, Alexandra Jamieson, and Steven Kest, executive director of ACORN. Click here for video, audio and transcript of the event.

For more information: Crib sheet on living wage; economic analysis of the Florida living wage proposal.

Anyway, reminded me—responsible blog-reader that I am— of this.

Impressions Management

Butterflies and Wheels says the obvious:

This is, I believe, one of the most powerful rhetorical moves that can be made, precisely because it cannot be pinned down to errors in logic or dodgy inferences. It is hard even to establish that the move has been made. Because this is all about impressions created, not statements made, it can be claimed that anyone who interprets the mood music unfavourably has simply got the wrong impression. My perceptions, it will be argued, only reflect my prejudices.

However, it is no secret that the Conservatives are using the so-called “dog whistle” technique: saying things that deliver messages only the intended audience can hear. Since this whole strategy relies on there being implicit as well as explicit messages, the claim that things are being implied which are not actually being said can hardly be denied. The room for disagreement concerns only what those implied messages are.

Which makes you wonder just how long the plethora of die-hard liberal blogs out there will go on.

On a rather unrelated note: Call it sentimental and nostalgic (or "pre-ironic") if you must, but I still maintain the jerkiness and quirkiness of the French New Wave films (as well as their later-day manifestations such as Gilliam's "Brazil") to be a virtue, for precisely the reasons given here. Need it be said that there is no respect for disquieting silences (for the potential of silences) in Jim Carey movies such as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"? Every silence is plugged full, with a face frozen, hyper-extended in exaggerated expression. Which, let's face it, after a while makes for a boring, predictable genre movie, rather unworthy of 'philosophic' investigation. Unless of course, one is about to analyze how this genre-reflexivity itself functions as a sort of deadening, psychic safety valve in consumer society (Zizek on the cynicism of the perpetually ironic viewer). In which case, you know, good luck competing with Zizek, who simply does the 'kynicism' thing best (or rather who did, somewhere back in the 80's).

book-watch, cont.

More than a few of this blog's readers will be familiar with Elizabeth Rottenberg.


Update: Steve draws our attention to the greatest new gift on the block: a blog currently translating Kafka's Diaries.

Furthermore, fans of David Foster Wallace should definitely take a gander at Michael Ives, if they haven't done so already, namely this:


His partner, the writer Mary Caponegro, is perhaps better well know for The Star Cafe


...as well as these two genuinely haunting short story collections:



In the words of Foster Wallace with regard to the latter: "Modifiers that fit this book include: baroque, eerie, elegant, funny, good and thoroughly upsetting." To which I might have added goth and fragile. Well that's enough images for a while. The walls did seem a little bare.

reading Levinas...

I've been reading a bit of Levinas, prepping for his later stuff where he responds to Derrida. From the very beginning of On Escape, comes this passage:

This conception of the "I" [moi] as self-sufficient is one of the essential marks of the bourgeois spirit and its philosophy. As sufficiency for the petit bourgeois, this conception of the "I" nonetheless nourishes the audacious dreams of a restless and enterprising capitalism. This conception presides over capitalism's work ethic, its cult of initiative and discovery, which aims less at reconciling man with himself than at securing for him the unknowns of time and things. The bourgeois admits no inner division [dechirement interier] and would be ashamed to lack confidence in himself, but he is concerned about reality and the future, for they threaten to break up the uncontested equalibrium of the present where he holds sway [ou il possede]. He is essentially conservative, but there is a worried conservatism. The bourgeois is concerned with business matters and science as a defense against things and all that is unforeseeable in them. His instinct for possession is an instinct for integration, and his imperialism is a search for security. He would like to cast the white mantle of his "internal peace" over the antagonism that opposes him the world. His lack of scruples is the shameful form of his tranquil conscience. Yet, prosaically materialistic [mediocrement materialiste], he prefers the certainty of tomorrow to today's enjoyments. He demands guarantees in the present against the future, which introduces unknowns into those solved problems from which he lives. What he possesses becomes capital, carrying interest or insurance against risks, and his future, thus tamed, is integrated in this way with his past.
(Levinas, On Escape, 50)

spoils of war

At the bookstore, we sell far more postcards than books. This is starting to depress me. (Better than Thomas Friedman, but still.) Such beautiful pictures, all the time. The 'aura' she is dead.

Gertrude Stein (Alice) on dust:

"I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading never can do."

remediated

The naked power of blog commenting continues (am I entirely alone in lamenting that the blogosphere's second most affectedly reluctant citizen would rather read economic charts than "do philosophy"?) In any case, may I recommend that in addition to n+1, the only magazine you really need is Naked Punch (forget The New Yorker, for fucksake).

In other news, Bob Dylan and Nora Jones are playing a virtual concert on July 16 because, well, they're paid to (via).

re-screenings from an undergrad thesis

It's been online (the entire 80-odd pages) for over a year now and available to anyone willing to download storyspace (a free hyperfiction-writing program developed by a former professor and friend), but I thought I'd swallow my pride and post one of the more rambling bits of it here, as nobody reads webpages anyway...Apologies in advance for any formatting (or, you know, what is probably worse, unbearably undergrad) discrepancies.

After he left I was surprised to feel extraordinarily disgusted. I had the feeling that something shameful had happened. Nevertheless I wanted to see him again. I summed it all up by saying, What an actor! (Blanchot, The Most High, 13).

Blanchot's poetics is among other things a meditation on the meaning of subjectivity. What might it mean for the "self" to be "the same?" Can such a thing ever be accomplished in solitude? Blanchot seems to suggest that true solitude, in a sense, might only be possible through a relation to the other--one marked by an ethics of discretion.

It is through the other that I am the same, through the other that I am myself: it is through the other who has always withdrawn me from myself. The Other, if he calls upon me, calls upon someone who is not I: the first come of the least of men; by no means the unique being I would like to be. It is thus that he assigns me to passivity, addressing himself in me to dying itself. (The responsibility with which I am charged is not mine and causes me not to be I.) (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 18)

First, a banal point: In French the expression for "self" is moi-même, which of course already suggests the dynamics of a relation--namely of oneself to oneself-- at the very core of what it means to be a "self." Blanchot seeks to include the other in this relation; only through a relation to the other is the self identical or self-same. There is thus an implicit suggestion of this relation, running throughout much of Blanchot's writing, whenever he mentions the "self." In her notes, Ann Smock clarifies this point of translation very concisely:

Blanchot writes: "Dans le rapport de moi (le même) à Autrui..." Thus he makes explicit that the relation of self to others (of Subject to the Other) is also the relation of identity to otherness, or of sameness to difference...Blanchot's sentences consistently recall that to be yourself is to be identical: self-same, one might say in English. But his point is always that there is no such sameness, no such identity except through the (disasterous) relation to otherness: no identity, in other words, save by virtue of its ruination. (The Writing of the Disaster, notes, 148)

[Shame]

We can therefore propose a first, provisional definition of shame. It is nothing less than the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty. (Agamben, 107)

The peculiar viciousness of shame is precisely its double inscription; one is ashamed most of all of one's shame or being ashamed, and this is also what makes shame shame. Repeated twice (which is far more than once), shame is a sort of infinite guilt which is assigned by oneself to oneself.

In the end, shame has to be hidden, and this is what is most shameful. In order to relate in the world of human subjects, shame must continually be repressed, fictionalized and denied. The shame of hiding is inextricable from the hiding of shame. Perhaps shame is that which no other can begin to approach because one can only ever inscribe or in-gest (in-jest) it in oneself--the idea that shame can be metered out as a kind of punishment from one person to another is purely a myth; shame always only comes from ourselves. ("Shame on you" means, "remember, (God! and that he sees your secrets) and feel ashamed! (for pretending otherwise.")

In his wonderfully rich essay, "The Echo of the Subject," Lacoue-Labarthe cites Theodor Reik:

I remembered, namely, that many years later when I asked Freud for help in an actual conflict and was in a short psychoanalysis with him, I once said during a session, "I am ashamed to say what just occurred to me..." and Freud's calm voice admonished me, "Be ashamed, but say it!" (Reik, The Haunting Melody, 236)

Might shame be a secret, a unique and irreducible gift we give to ourselves, and yet which originates in a ruthless space of disappearance--a space enigmatically marked by the death of the other, for whom and in whose absence we remain unique witnesses, called to testify--however impossibly--until the moment when one dies, passing on and so even more impossibly multiplying this task? Is shame the difficulty of being a witness to the death of the other--of having to endure the other’s death in a manner both more and less intimate than any words, and perhaps any ontology, could ever delimit.

And so shame is also perhaps the voice of madness. It is the voice of Shakespeare’s fools, fellows of infinite jest, who whisper poison in the king’s ear....

Is "shame" an adequate name for what may motivate the need for two languages (at least two?)--one practical and the other perhaps more than a little mad?

(What if it is nothing less than the doctrine of original sin--as interpreted in a proto-Catholic manner--that is still, insidiously, perhaps in fact the greatest obstacle to a truly responsible decision or political Act, or even to a politics with anything resembling a future? Of course quite the opposite has been argued as well--these are unnecessarily provoking remarks not at all in a spirit of gaiety...)

"Innocent guilt" in Blanchot is also (and not just) a play on words, when read the way it was meant to be heard--in French. The word for "guilty" in French is coupable, which might be taken to suggest the "ability" proper to a "strike" or "blow," or the ability for a blow to be inflicted.
Here is the passage in mind:

For responsibility is the extreme of subissement: it is that for which I must answer when I am without any answer and without any self save a borrowed, a simulated self, or the '"stand in" for identity: the mandatory proxy. Responsibility is innocent guilt, the blow always long since received which makes me all the more sensitive to all blows. It is the trauma of creation or of birth. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 22)

Perhaps this "simulated self" should not be read purely in the light of recent technological developments. Part of the reason Blanchot employs so many descriptive terms in approaching the word, "responsibility" is that the strongest, most exigent meaning of the word simply seems to demand something more than impossible. Might "innocent guilt" be a coupable without the coup, or a coupable with the strike, the blow, or the stab itself struck or crossed out--a blow that is no longer a blow? In this sense, "innocent guilt" might be not unlike an ability without the blow, without the caput, or without the spanking.

Might this not suggest a "gulty conscience" without (original) "sin"--without either origin or the patriarch's staff? Without the snake that is also a belt? Agamben's reading of the doctrine of original sin (as not implying an Act) perhaps deserves to be more thoroughly questioned, as might his ontologizing of "shame."

On the other hand (and perhaps more accurately) "innocent guilt" might be described as a coupable without ability as such, or guilt that is without essence and so infinite, and forever beyond appropriation. (Such would also be reminiscent of course of the line Heidegger passes through "Being.")
Ann Smock makes this point:

So innocent guilt (i.e. responsibility) is the endurance of a blow whose -able has been blown up: its ability to be inflicted, its ability to be borne. (The Writing of the Disaster, notes, 148)

This might resonate more clearly with what may be argued to be Blanchot's ontologizing of 'passivity'––if an ontology that remains in itself accessible only through the realm of literature or poetry. As Thomas Wall, in his book, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, Agamben puts it:

The space of literature...the space of absolute passivity or communicativity...is the thick, crepuscular, and paroxysmatic materiality of thought that thickens into a "thing"...It is the erasure of the subject-object hyphen, the erosion of mastery, the erosion of that distance which allows us to hold the world at a distance. (Hall, 111)

Hall's reading is often quite close to that of Agamben (who clearly left his mark on Hall's manuscript)--and at stake, as always, is nothing less than a close reading of Heidegger (too close for the bounds of this paper).

Existence (or Being) takes place in poetry, not in the world (where it is disseminated in things), because poetry is without a world and without existents (or beings). But there is nothing other than the world. Language is the saying of this fatality...This is its pure exposure to irreparability, as Giorgio Agamben would say...The secret of its obsolescence is this "already no longer" that describes its origin. Already no longer a thing, neither meant nor shown, its being is its being-toward-itself, toward its death, that at each instant arrests its being-toward, like the superfluity of an instant that must endure its no longer having time. (Hall, 73)

But can the first reading here of "innocent guilt" be dismissed? That is, if there is no pure originary coup or blow––then might one in fact be empowered to Act, in a sense, however inadequately––but without feeling oneself to be infinitely delimited by this inadequacy––that is, in some sense, without shame?

In French, coup is of course by itself an extremely evocative word, lending itself to a poetics of excess and contradiction that even Mallarmé could not exhaust. Blanchot is no doubt not ignorant of this, nor is Derrida (cf. Spurs Nietzsche's Styles––the sole English translation).

A final thought: In order to begin reading Blanchot (or Derrida, for that matter) "as an American," perhaps one first has to read them as if more French than they are themselves...? (In order to read as neither, that is.)

A final link: There's some interesting stuff on Blanchot and Levinas at the new French site here. I may try my hand at a little translating if there's any interest..

Paul Celan's In Eins [In One]

Thirteenth of February. Shibboleth
roused in the heart's mouth. With you,
peuple
de Paris. No pasarán.

Little sheep to the left: he, Abadias,
the old man from Huesca, came with his dogs
over the field, in exile
white hung a cloud
of human nobility, into our hands
he spoke the word that we needed, it was
shepherd-Spanish, and in it

in icelight of the cruiser "Aurora":
the brotherly hand, waving with
the blindfold removed from
his world-wide eyes –– Petropolis, the
roving city of those unforgotten,
was Tuscanly close to your heart also.

Peace to the cottages!

As Translated by Michael Hamburger (Poems of Paul Celan). Posted in response to a discussion below, about to drop off the page too soon. (There's another one taking place here.)

Some excellent reading in French here and here.

Downing Street Version 2.0

And again (maybe the WSJ will pick this one up too...in a week and a half—click on EYES ONLY BRIEFING for the new one). And here's a cute little movie about the original.

Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art

This looks interesting.

to flowers

"Our philosophy teachers remain the flower of our secondary education. But while listening to the flower, let us maintain a place for the leaves, such as a teacher of history for example."


—Albert Thibaudet, history and geography teacher, ENS, 1927 (found in Moi's biography of Simone de Beauvoir)

In short, one wonders if those snobby Frenchwen wouldn't sometimes be better philosophers if only they were not so OBTEOTOV (or EWTSOTOV). But that's a petty, translation-insensitive complaint finally, let's face it. Here's a bit more context (describing the discours exam, again from the book with the bizarre subtitle):

In Tristes tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss gives a scathing critique of the inevitable tripartite pattern of thought favoured by the agregation examiners:

"I started to learn that every problem, whether serious or trivial, can be settled once and for all by always applying the same method, which consists in opposing two traditional views of the question, to introduce the first by appealing to common sense, then to destroy it by means of the second, and finally to pack them both off, thanks to a third view which reveals the equally partial nature of the two others. By a trick of vocabulary both of these have now been reduced to complementary aspects of the same thing: form and contents, container and contained, being and appearance, continuity and discontinuity, essence and existence and so on. Such exercises quickly become purely verbal, based on the art of the pun which replaces thought [...] Five years at the Sorbonne amounted to no more than learning this kind of gymnastics [...] I prided myself on beind able to construct in ten minutes a solidly dialectical framework for an hour's lecture on the respective merits of buses and trams." (pp.52-3)

This systmem has not changed much since the 1920s.

[...]

The ideological superiority surrounding ENS in the 1920s and 1930s was similar to that surrounding philosophy at the time. Philosophy was seen as the queen of the disciplines, the undisputed champion in the pecking order of academic subjects. It was assumed that only the most intelligent students could cope with the intellectual demands of this regal pursuit. To a certain extent, the prestige of the ENS and that of philosophy overlapped and intertwined. The philosopher supposedly had access to the highest of human realms, that of the spirit, and as such could properly consider himself an elite being. But so could the students at the ENS. Logically and in practice, the philosophy students at the school, such as Sartre, Nizan and Merleau-Ponty, represented the creme de la creme of French student life... (Moi, 52-57)

merely we link along

Smothered in Optimism as usual (I'll be adding to this post as the day wears itself). Peter Bergen thoroughly reviews The Power of Nightmares. I'm thrilled to see The Nation finally picking this up on its radar, and his analysis seems pretty much spot-on.

Still, despite my many disagreements with The Power of Nightmares, which sometimes has the feel of a Noam Chomsky lecture channeled by Monty Python, it is a richly rewarding film because it treats its audience as adults capable of following complex arguments. This is a vision of the audience that has been almost entirely abandoned in the executive suites of American television networks. It would be refreshing if one of those executives took a chance on The Power of Nightmares. After all, its American counterpart, Fahrenheit 9/11, earned more money than any documentary in history. And what Curtis has to say is a helluva lot more interesting than what Michael Moore had to say.

So there's one for the sidebar, anyway.

Also from The Nation Naomi Klein argues for a resource-oriented nationalism, the cooler son Christian Parenti reports from Bolivia (see also Blog From Bolivia for astute commentary), and Gore Vidal a bit belatedly finds an avenue to stroll his aptest phrase.

Moving on to more important matters, Mr. Iyer has a poetic review at the Brit-centric, semi-Blanchodian ReadySteadyBook, one whose central trope struck me as a rather deft turn on the Enlightenment-light language contaminating even Bary Lopez.

The standards-bearing US literary weblog The Elegant Variation carries a guest review of Chicano Sketches by Daniel Olivas.

Golden Rule Jones visits "the lot" of English bookshops in Paris and The Literary Saloon continues to review everything under the stars.