Symposia

...on Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" having now begun, on a Long Sunday. For the circuitous-inclined, a more originary plug may be found here and a more interesting one here. So far there have been excellent contributions from Marc Lombardo and Alain Wittman. Update: Better late than never.

I've also switched the comments back to blogger, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who uses Haloscan. Apologies to all deleted on the main page. By all means feel free to start again.

Alternatively, here's something by Scott McLemee on Barthes' The Neutral.

And in case you missed it (as apparently I did, by about an ocean), Zizek and Badiou and others were recently at Birbeck (extensive sound files, transcription, photos, and interesting coverage here and here.

suggestion, for Jon Stewart

So you're breaking out of character a little Jon, in fleeting moments; your seriousness is showing. Is there another genuine confrontation on the way? Granted, it doesn't take much these days, but that fuck-you flare, the shot of direct and deserving anger in your eyes, however ephemeral it may be, has got to be the most refreshing television in decades.

Why not branch out a little now, into genuinely populist territory? Maybe pass up on some vapid celebrity hairjob or two and interview, say, Jim Hightower? See here.

{The next post will either be on the philosophy of pop or a book review, or I'll delete the entire blog.}

Also, please note: I did not tell Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent. Just in case anyone was wondering.

permanent spring

So this is what the future will be, then? Warm sun on thawing mud, subdued smells, off-color and vaguely toxic floods, a permanent Spring unearned from any Winter. And for three months every year, cold nights. And never far, the sexless punishing storms. The world mushes and warms, the seasons blend; their forgotten rhythm becomes the stuff of legend. He was born in Spring, a mud-season baby. How strange to be as if condemned to one's primal experience of the world.

plugs

This American Life was good this afternoon (in their typical, about-a-year-behind-the-times manner). They aired, (or re-aired?) that guy from the My War blog, if you remember those days: Strangers in a Strange Land (Audio: Real Player). And someone even spoke up against this irrelevant emotional blackmail shit (rubbish propaganda polls that strive to say such things as, "70 percent (including 55 percent of self-described Democrats) say such criticism hurts troop morale.") In short, this talk of "morale" is just what those slumming with perma-war crooks, in their well-known fanatic fidelity to a higher (party) cause, learned to say after Vietnam (the only lesson they learned from that disaster, apparently). The troops aren't fucking babies, we don't need to protect their feelings. They're gonna do their blessed job, while trying to avoid getting killed, no matter what. What they deserve, as grown-ups, is a realistic plan. A clear time-table and some measures reasonably defined for, um, "success" in this illegal war of aggression would be a nice gesture to start (assuming that an end to all this neo-Fukuyama jubilatory free trade neoliberal bullshit all-millionaires-bootstraps-are-created-equal thing is, you know, probably not immediately in the works. Though it's good to see it finally losing some steam, I dare say). Bush, meanwhile, is obviously dead in the water (time to send Condi overseas somewhere--hell, send anyone but The Embarassment). The make-things-a-whole-lot-worse-to-gain-spin-control-on-the-global-protest-movement thing was good for a first term, but even stick-up-the-butt conservatives think he's rubbish now. Nice that the Republican drones couldn't resist one last fuck-you and-your-college-tuition spending bill before the impeachment, or painstakingly neutralcratic, endlessly drawn-out demise (depending on whether any democrats find a "politically-feasible" spine anytime soon or not). A question: what happens when he cracks up for real, can't even talk to his mother and wife anymore, is drunk 24-7 and decides to do something truly stupid? And if Cheney and Rove are busy in court that day? Or rather, as a wise man once said, if the real criminal hard-liners, Cold-War-era dinasaur wonks, get to make the calls that day...that month? Even moreso than usual? A terrifying prospect. (But no doubt Lieberman will be there, either like a traffic cop on valium: "stoooop;" or to say a mealy-mouthed piety for all our souls.)

Maybe it's time the Parrhesia Watch moved to the other place.

For those unconvinced (as if) about the need for voting reform, the excellent Mark Crispin Miller has a blog up.

Anyway, this should be enough to put these drones to bed for a while at least.

celebrity watch: Onfray anyone?

So who in the hell is this guy (rather depressingly lauded for bad reasons here)?

There is no philosophy without psychoanalysis

Well that's interesting.

This blog pretends to speak French, but then it couldn't tell you the fifth thing about Atheist/Communist/Socialist Michel Onfray...

That statement does seem to rather conflict with another one I seem to recall (from some eclectic French Theorist or other):

According to psychoanalytic vocabulary (which, I believe, only those who practice psychoanalysis can use--only those, that is, for whom analysis is a risk, an extreme danger, a daily test--for otherwise it is only the convenient language of an established culture)...(The Writing of the Disaster, 67)

Then again, it may not.

Just to continue this rampant eclecticism, allow me to quote myself quoting someone else. Perhaps a quote from Benjamin on quotations (I dunno, does it qualify as a greatest hit?) would be too much, however.

pulling rank

This morning between 4:30 and 5:00am while driving S. to the airport, I passed a black sedan with vanity plates that read simply, "Blog."

The driver, once I finally caught up and passed him in the tank Volvo wagon, struck me a lot like Markos Moulitsas.

He passed me shortly thereafter, and needless to say this also struck, in the ungodly and hazy hours of the hurtling world, everyone involved as quite profound. Fare thee well, oh Interstate stranger.

this and that

this:

But on its way to producing a new generation of lawyers and engineers and surgeons (and risk arbitrageurs and pharma lobbyists), was it so wrong for a university to indulge one department whose time was spent agonizing over the entire mission of knowledge production itself? By never firmly establishing what it itself was for, the English department cultivated habits of withering self-reflection and so became one mechanism by which the university could stay in touch with its nonutilitarian self and subject its own practices to ongoing critique. Did the theory era produce bullshit by the mountain-load? Of course it did. But by allowing "literary theory" to turn into a pundit's byword, signifying the pompous, the outmoded, the shallow, the faddish, we may have quietly resolved the argument over what a university is for in favor of no self-reflection whatsoever.

(hmm. now if only philosophy departments would do likewise, no wait; that won't happen. And to yawn at the jubilatory Sokal bandwagon's passing, staying faithful to the literary theory that is serious? I hear there was once a department concerned with "knowledge production" in Germany somewhere...)

and that:

"Making me popular is a resistance to taking me seriously"....So how can you talk; what is philosophy for? "It's not to provide answers, it's to correct the questions," says Zizek. "Terrorism, freedom, democracy: The duty of philosophy is not to explain what would be true democracy, how to beat terrorism, but to ask, is this truly the question? This is the only thing a philosopher can do. Other questions are for politicians—I mean, what do I know? Fuck it, who am I, what do I know how to fight terrorism? Every secret policeman, I give him moral right to know more than me."

Zizek's lack of seriousness is serious itself.
(Thanks to The Decline for both of these items.)

Blanchot things, not to be missed

Mark Thwaite interviews Blanchot and Genet translator Charlotte Mandell. And of course this should keep you busy for a good week.

Philosophy of Pop

Aenesidemus responds, blog-fashion to Mark Greif, whom pas au-delà continues to productively (more or less productively) stalk.

To be updated...

France, stuff

• I have this vague unease, that I'm missing all the jokes on "The Cobert Report" (the "t" being silent) because I don't watch O'Reilly. Possibly discussion topic: is there any sense in which the parody of O'Reilly verges on a sort of cruelty...(do we care)? Or risks being a sort of advertisement for him? (Everything hinges on the correct diagnosis: either O'Reilly is already established enough to not risk unduly dignifying him by merely talking about him, or he isn't. Then again, "The Cobert Report" is not the very deconstruction of dignity itself. Though you can tell the brand name theme music irks him. He's more mature than Stewart; it shows in the interviews.)

• The Agamben post on the theory of "Profound Boredom" has been updated.

• Pas au-delà correspondants in France...please stand up. Is Paris burning or what. Lou Dobbs, Daily Show fan and fascist pseudo-journalist liberal (these days) just called it "an insurgency." The BBC news mentioned something about an array of complaints, poverty, unemployment, police state repression. Is there about to be an anti-immigrant backlash (admittedly, not the most important question)? Are the so-called "anarchists" setting things on fire because they hate America? Important people need to know. Thanks.

Update: In addition to things linked in comments, I thought this was smart (via):

Fifty years ago, in a brilliant, premonitory book entitled France Against Herself, Herbert Luethy pointed out the incredible, contradictory existence of a fascist police state within an open, democratic society. This contradiction goes back to the French Revolution when the Republic, One and Indivisible, found it needed to reaffirm its uniqueness, its indivisibility and generosity by imprisoning, excluding or murdering off all who would threaten it, including of course its own children. A highly centralized authority balanced an iron repression of all non-assimilable elements with remarkable benevolence, arguing that it acted against a part of itself for the greater good of itself as a whole. The theories of a Robespierre are already colonialist: the "immigrant problem" is built into the French political system.

So the riots of the past few days were a matter of semantics even before they had begun: the people of the suburbs could be understood as either French or not-French, either weaker wards of a benevolent Mother France or elements deserving of exclusion because they were Africans or Muslims or immigrants. As a matter of fact the vast majority of actors in these riots are French citizens, many of them third- or second-generation at that. Then again, the French State has always been adept at alternately welcoming and disenFrenchizing various groups, like Jews, for instance.

And that is what Sarkozy had been doing for a while. His earlier promise to "mop up" the suburbs might have been acceptable if it had been directed at a slum in Haiti: more likely it would have passed unnoticed. But to treat other Frenchmen and women like colonial subjects of the State was unacceptable talk, even if it's done all the time in fact, and not to North Africans only.

III)
Much has been written about the meaning of crowds in the French Revolution. For my money the most common form of riot is the "People's Veto:" the crowd can't tell you what it wants, it can only tell you what it doesn't. And the fear from the Left, and the hope from the Right, is that the rioters are saying: "We don't want to be French to begin with."

It's one thing to be French, and perhaps not quite French enough, and to hope your time will come, which has been overall the narrative of all would-be French people, immigrants, Jews, or Muslims. It's another thing altogether when you give up and turn to gratuitous violence.

But turn how? Against whom? Against the State? Against Being French (now redefined as being white, or being bourgeois, or having a car and a job)? Against a MacDonald's, a symbol of neo-liberalism? That is the Pander's Box Sarkozy's opened, and it may be a lot harder to close, for him or for anyone else.

Update: see also archive: s0metime3s and Amie Marker.
Update Again: As well as Badiou (translated by IT) and Negri.

pricks

From here:

Bush's official margin of victory in Ohio was just 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Election protection advocates argue that O'Dell's statement still stands as a clear sign of an effort, apparently successful, to steal the White House.

Among other things, the GAO confirms that:

1. Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected." In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory.

2. "It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate." Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.

3. "Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level." 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.

4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.

5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.

6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.

7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.

8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.

In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.

The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives -- or less -- to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.

The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:

# The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.

# A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County

# Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems in Franklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low.

# A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.

#

# In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the "loaves and fishes" vote count.

# In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.

# In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.

# In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.

# Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate "show recounts," technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.

# In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.

# In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.

# In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that "by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon - the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better."


But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.

Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that's exactly what happened.

GAO Report

Revised 10/27/05

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via http://freepress.org and http://harveywasserman.com. Their WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, with Steve Rosenfeld, will be published in Spring, 2006, by New Press.

One can only wonder what John Pussy Kerry has to say about all this.

Update: John Kerry now believes the election was stolen.

s.a.g.p.

• If one were to begin making a list of bloggers who only most rarely suffered, in their very writing, from an inflated sense of self-importance, what would such a list look like? A start:

Acanthus Leaves
à Gauche
Alain
Amie
Consumptive
Charlotte Street
Critical Montages
Dem Wahren
Fort Kant
Paul Kerschen
Punctum
Red Thread(s)
The Decline
The Pinocchio Theory
The Rhine River
The Young Hegelian
This Space
Side Effects
Waggish

That's about as far as I got (and before I realized how potentially insulting such a lazy late-night gesture could be. Also, what's with all the Russian spam lately? And the viral infections? My Dog.

• And the DailyKosers are shocked as Bush fucks up a photo-op with black students:

To set off a student protest at this school, you'd have to be politically tone-deaf in the extreme, out of touch and flying blind. And yet, Bush did it.

God help us in Iraq.

• Oh, and The French kids don't seem to really like the Police State:

Riots erupted in an outburst of anger in Clichy-sous-Bois over the accidental electrocution Oct. 27 of two teenagers who fled a soccer game and hid in a power substation when they saw police enter the area. Youths in the neighborhood suspect that police chased Traore Bouna, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, to their deaths.

Since then riots have swelled into a broader challenge against the French state and its security forces. The violence has exposed deep discontent in neighborhoods where African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children are trapped by poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination, crime, poor education and housing.

Ah, those crazy intelligent French (courtesy of Le Colonel Chabert).

• An anonymous emailer writes in with a question:

Hey Matt,

Is there a good word that people like you and Derrida (not to lump you together indiscriminately, though I'm sure it's flattering) use to mean "a text and all the things said about it", as in "the entire universe of references to / comments on / things having some noted relation to the text"? It's gestalt, so to speak.

The term I'm seeking could also apply to referents other than texts, i.e. subjects of any kind, people, events, concepts, whatever. In fact I need both a text-specific and a general term, hopefully two different words.

I'm looking for a good word (or two) to abscond with for my metadata software. You know, we computer people are always robbing terminology and repurposing it; this is an ancient and honorable practice (found in every field of study of course, not just computers, we're just notorious for doing a whole lot of it and all of it in the last 50 years). I hate to invent when I'm sure there is something with exactly the right sense out there somewhere for the taking, already.

By the way, one inverse term I'm using is 'venue', as in 'virtual place' (like your blog is a 'venue'). The general term I'm looking for would mean, among other things, "all references to a venue", as in everyone who goes there, comes from there, talks about it, etc.

So I need name(s) for that distributed entity which is everything that names or refers to a venue (or other generality), or a text (specifically).

I know you guys have names for everything of semantic importance in meta-relationships. Even if what you and I think of as metadata (in our daily use of it) is on rather different scales (like, the cosmos in your case versus the atomic nucleus in mine?), the 'physics' behind the terminology ought to transfer via analogy, I hope.

Update: it can be short as well, the word. Anyone? I can vouch for his motives and they are pure, as driven snow.

Funnier Valentine

I first learned of top mp3 blog, Said the Gramophone, from Steve Mitchelmore about a year ago. Now it seems I've won the opportunity to post a song or two there myself. What an honor this is. So in the spirit of self-aggrandizing and radical dictatorship genuine and spontaneous fleeting curiosity, I'm more than open to any suggestions readers may feel like sending (songs, via email, that is, the more obscure and gem-like the better), reserving of course the right to go ahead and post what I was going to anyway in order to be ridiculed quickly off the stage by their legions of pop-ish fans. Seriously, those guys know their music, and I'm a little intimidated. Whatever else it may be, the internet is a real swell way to share the gift of music. So back to changing the world in the next heartbeat, sure, but not until we learn from music a thing or two about the wait.

Gaurdian, of something or other

The British journal performs a bit of a hatchet job on Chomsky, poor fellow. Right up there with Howard Zinn, Chomsky was positively revolutionary to read back in high school, and for that I will be forever grateful. Nevertheless this cantankerous quote was interesting, regarding the Internet:

It's a hideous time-waster. One of the good things about the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you can put up any kind of nonsense. If the intelligence agencies knew what they were doing, they would stimulate conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions ... There's a kind of an assumption that if somebody wrote it on the internet, it's true.

More on why this is interetesting on Long Sunday shortly.

In the meantime, do waste a bit of time with Agamben, if you like.

Update: Chomsky responds to the Guardian genre drivel, having finally seen a copy:

It is a nuisance, and a bit of a bore, to dwell on the topic, and I always keep away from personal attacks on me, unless asked, but in this case the matter has some more general interest, so perhaps it’s worth reviewing what most readers could not know. The general interest is that the print version reveals a very impressive effort, which obviously took careful planning and work, to construct an exercise in defamation that is a model of the genre. It’s of general interest for that reason alone.

via Qlipoth.

animalia encore

Sounding a lot like Berger is Agamben (glossing Ernst Haeckel and Heymann Steinthal, whoever they are):

What distinguishes man from animal is language, but this is not a natural given already inherent in teh psychophysical structure of man; it is, rather, a historical production which, as such, can be properly assigned neither to man nor to animal. If this element is taken away, the difference between man and animal vanishes, unless we imagine a nonspeaking man – Homo alalus, precisely – who would function as a bridge that passes from the animal to the human. But all evidence suggests that this is only a shadow cast by language, a presupposition of speaking man, by which we always obtain only an animalization of man (an animal-man, like Haeckel's ape-man) or a humanization of the animal (a man-ape). The animal-man and the man-animal are the two sides of a single fracture, which cannot be mended from either side.

from The Open: Man and Animal, page 36

See also here. As for me, please don't hesitate to join in else where.

read this or

here; or here

or here (PDF) (via); or here; or here (more parenting/torture fallout (via))

or here; or here...

something for readers of Umberto Eco here (or: here)...


Update: Punctuated by such silence, this becomes a rather rude gesture of a post. In lieu of apology I'll link to some more things: the co-editor of Latino Boom says a few words; Ellis Sharp deserves a reply (and will get one); and apparently I'll be posting for The Weblog and Said the Gramophone this week if I can get my act together. Suggestions for the latter (in the form of a worthy song) more than welcome, if you've got one. I'm thinking Chris Smither. Shazam (nobody reads updated posts anyway, you bloglined slaves).

..

The following is a blockquote. I did not write it. Guess my relation to it and reasons for posting as you wish:

Are there students? No doubt for themselves there are students. Students who say to themselves, we are students. But they are barely taught. The students are no students, but units of resource, and are barely taught. So too are subject areas units of resource, they barely exist. There is no Philosophy, not any more. There's no English Literature, not any more. True, there are professors of Philosophy and professors of English Literature, there are still a few people who remember how it was when there were universities, but they are coming up to retirement. There are a few professors around, but the university is keen to pension them off, to get rid of them, so the takeover can complete itself.

'The university'? I refer to what-was-a-university. What was a university and is a university no longer. They are leaving, the professors, stunned and bewildered. What happened? When did it occur? Get out, they tell themselves, and get out. Meanwhile, the new breed are taking over. I am one of them. Rat-like, desperate, looking to earn revenue, to bring money into what-was-a-university. Rat like, desperate, running along in the maze as quickly as possible and dreaming of ways to bring money into what-was-a-university.

For we have to earn money, we know that. We have to bid for money, we know that. What matters is to bid for money, to bring money in, and to swell what-was-the-university's coffers. What matters is money, is revenue, and what-was-the-university's topslice. Because the what-was-the-university has to make a little profit, there has to be a topslice. You teach to make a profit and your research must be tied to profit. Forget Philosophy, forget Literature, those are long dead.

Update: Somwhat more optimistically

somewhat inevitably

The popular take-down of Agamben, albeit at some length. Daniel Binswanger has clearly bothered to bone-up enough to produce what is known as journalistic pap, interspersed with the odd correct sentence, if only to lend him what is known as the aura of authority. If you recognize yourself in this intended audience, do bear in mind that you're not intended to be taken seriously. As for 'bare life' well, you know I hear it means something like this.

Beatitude: Blanchot and Death

(Following on from here...)

"I" die before being born. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 101)

I believe only in death, and precisely in death as impossible, for which reason I am obsessed with, curious about, and convinced of mortality. (Derrida, "Deconstructions: The Im-possible," 18)

But there is another kind of interruption, more enigmatic and more grave. It introduces the wait that measures the distance between two interlocutors--no longer a reducible, but an irreducible distance. (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 76)

Conversely, political speech--Blanchot refers especially to the "terrible monologues" of Hitler--often seeks to eliminate silence altogether, and so perhaps also the exigency that is an incessant dying (The Infinite Conversation, 75).

To think the way one dies: without purpose, without power, without unity, and precisely without "the way." Whence the effacement of this formulation as soon as it is thought--as soon as it is thought, that is, both on the side of thinking and of dying, in dis-equilibrium, in an excess of meaning and in excess of meaning. No sooner is it thought than it has departed; it is gone, outside.
Thinking as dying excludes the "as" of thought, in a manner such that even if we suppress this "as" by paratactic simplification and write: "to think: to die," it forms an enigma in its absence, a practically unbridgeable space. The un-relation of thinking and dying is also the form of their relation: not that thinking proceeds toward dying, proceeding thus toward its other, but not that it proceeds toward its likeness either. It is thus that "as" acquires the impetuousness of its meaning: neither like nor different, neither other nor same. (The Writing of the Disaster, 39)

Presence is only presence at a distance, and this distance is absolute--that is, irreducible; that is, infinite. (Blanchot, Friendship, 218)

Language, in its attentive and forgetful being, with its power of dissimulation that effaces every determinate meaning and even the existence of the speaker, in the gray neutrality that constitutes the essential hiding place of all being and thereby frees the space of the image - is neither truth nor time, neither eternity nor man; it is instead the always undone form of the outside. It places the origin in contact with death, or rather brings them both to light in the flash of their infinite oscillation - a momentary contact in a boundless space. The pure outside of the origin, if that is indeed what language is eager to greet, never solidifies into a penetrable and immobile positivity; and the perpetually rebegun outside of death, although carried toward the light by the essential forgetting of language, never sets the limit at which truth would finally begin to take shape. They immediately flip sides. The origin takes on the transparency of the endless; death opens interminably onto the repetition of the beginning. And what language is (not what it means, not the form in which it says what it means), what language is in its being, is that softest of voices, that nearly imperceptible retreat, that weakness deep inside and surrounding every thing and every face - what bathes the belated effort of the origin and the dawnlike erosion of death in the same neautral light, at once day and night. Orpheus's murderous forgetting, Ulysses' wait in chains, are the very being of language. (Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside)

My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness. (Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 323-24)

Derrida's emphasis on radical aporia extends to "belief" in this manner: "belief" in its strongest affirmative sense requires that the thing one is believing in remain unbelievable. That is, "if one only believed in what was believable, the concept of belief itself would disappear." (In Derrida's reading, Heidegger never attempts to acknowledge sufficiently the act of belief that allows him to say "we" in the first place (Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge"). According to Derrida then, if anything would seem to require an act of true belief it would be atheism. Atheism is precisely the belief in death. Death, only ever knowable by the other, from the distance of the witness becomes, in a sense maybe, the new God.

Giving urgency and meaning to language, given to each other through the act of witnessing, death is the condition of possibility for any community, ethics or just relation toward the other. Blanchot's writing is obsessively occupied with the experience of the death of the other, which is a "limit-experience" because it exposes the subject to a certain fragility that is unavoidably at once immediate and inaccessible.

What calls me most radically into question? Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being before death or for death, but my presence in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself another's death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community. (The Unavowable Community, 9)

The death of the Other is one of those overwhelming events which reverberate throughout L’arrêt de mort [Death Sentence], and indeed all of Blanchot’s fiction. In such events, the Other affects me, or concerns me. and at the same time escapes my scrutiny. The traditional directionality of Western thought is inverted. I am no longer able to refer the advent of the other person to my thought of that person, or to a space of figural substitution in which my fantasy is able to play freely. Instead, my thought is taken away from me, estranged, singularized, and necessitated, by the Other’s attraction. Metaphor gives way to metamorphosis. I am altered, and drawn outside of myself, in an encounter that does not even occur in the time of my own interiority but precedes the constitution of myself as someone capable ot having such an encounter. Just as my thinking is sustained by a pensée that exceeds my capacity to think it, so in its turn that pensée is generated in the violence and surprise of a happening that it is unable to adequately formulate. Just as writing is not a self-sufficient action, but is drawn into and impelled by a broader movement of compulsion, so the obsessive repetition that initiates thought is itself exceeded in a moment of contact. The impersonality and nonintentionality of passion implies, not isolation, but engagement with an Other. Before the unhappy subsistence of the “I,” there is the shock of the Other’s touch. Prior to the very constitution of my subjectivity in obsession, there is the singularity of a glance or a voice that summons me. (Shaviro, Passion and Excess, 153-154)

Through this contact--an incommunicable intimacy or touch existing, or pre-existing 'outside' of language--it is perhaps the other who is granted something like the potentially earth-and-self-shattering power of God, and precisely as she gives, by withdrawing. The indifference that normally permits communication (as well as violence) is shattered by an even greater indifference. Can this touch even really exist? And yet it does. There is a willing for it, although a willing that does not belong to anything except perhaps this willing itself. Something takes place. (The disaster...happens.)
Something beautiful takes 'place', but not because it is pure, only because it is bound up with a yearning or a willing toward a purity it knows to be impossible. Something enigmatic and yet extremely simple. Something without cure. Speaking of Mallarmé, Blanchot writes:

"If it gets finished (the tale), I shall be cured." This hope is touching in its simplicity. But the tale was not finished. Impotence--that abandon in which the work holds us and where it requires that we descend in the concern for its approach--knows no cure. That death is incurable. The absence that Mallarmé hoped to render pure is not pure. The night is not perfect, it does not welcome, it does not open. It is not the opposite of day--silence, repose, the cessation of tasks. In the night, silence is speech, and there is no repose, for there is no position. There the incessant and the uninterrupted reign--not the certainty of death achieved, but "the eternal torments of Dying." (The Space of Literature, 118-119)

Death always means: the death of the other. But death itself remains unpronounceable; we know only dying. Is then the witness in fact the one who dies? With something of a crude finger, I would like to point to a passage that should really not be pointed to in this way, without being read in the full weight (or full 'lightness') of its context. (But then again, maybe context is not so all-important after all.) It comes from a work of Blanchot's "fiction," and yet it may express things better than any theoretical argument ever could. At the same time, we are led to believe it is nothing less than an intensely personal act, almost a confession, the writing of this story, his words, writing as a witness, in a sense the closest thing to him-self that will have been possible, and so to cite it merely as support for some "theory" may be another violence toward Blanchot (or at least until several years ago, it would have been). Now it is something different again, but let us listen:

She had fallen asleep, her face wet with tears. Far from being spoiled by it, her youth seemed dazzling: only the very young and healthy can bear such a flood of tears that way; her youth made such an extraordinary impression on me that I completely forgot her illness, her awakening and the danger she was still in. A little later, however, her expression changed. Almost under my eyes, the tears had dried and the tear stains had disappeared; she became severe, and her slightly raised lips showed the contraction of her jaw and her tightly clenched teeth, and gave her a rather mean and suspicious look: her hand moved in mine to free itself, I wanted to release it, but she seized me again right away with a savage quickness in which there was nothing human. When the nurse came to talk to me--in a low voice and about nothing important--J. immediately awoke and said in a cold way, "I have my secrets with her too." She went back to sleep at once.
...As I listened without pause to her slight breathing, faced by the silence of the night, I felt extremely helpless and miserable just because of the miracle that I had brought about. Then for the first time, I had a thought that came back to me later and in the end won out. While I was still in that state of mind--it must have been about three o'clock--J. woke up without moving at all--that is, she looked at me. That look was very human: I don't mean affectionate or kind, since it was neither; but it wasn't cold or marked by the forces of this night. It seemed to understand me profoundly; that is why I found it terribly friendly, though it was at the same time terribly sad. "Well," she said, "you've made a fine mess of things." She looked at me again without smiling at all, as she might have smiled, as I afterwards hoped she had, but I think my expression did not invite a smile. Besides, that look did not last very long.
Even though her eyelids were lowered, I am convinced that from then on she lay awake; she lay awake because the danger was too great, or for some other reason; but she purposefully kept herself at the edge of consciousness, manifesting a calm, and an alertness in that calm, that was very unlike her tension of a short time before. What proved to me that she was not asleep--though she was unaware of what went on around her because something else held her interest--was that a little later she remembered what had happened nearly an hour before: the nurse, not sure whether or not she was asleep, had leaned over her and suggested she have another shot, a suggestion which she did not seem to be at all aware of. But a little later she said to the nurse, "No, no shot this evening," and repeated insistently, "No more shots." Words, which I have all the time in the world to remember now. Then she turned slightly towards the nurse and said in a tranquil tone, "Now then, take a good look at death," and pointed her finger at me. She said this in a very tranquil and almost friendly way, but without smiling. ("Death Sentence")

A sentence of death, spoken with a finger, is passed from the dying to the witness. The witness receives a death sentence, with an exchange of looks, and for a death that is not his. The affinities shared by this passage and the meditations on God that are pursued by Derrida in The Gift of Death are striking.

One hesitates to read too much. But with that worry in mind, it might just be noted that in Blanchot's story the character of the nurse (if she is a character, as well as--perhaps?--a real person) occupies an interesting position as a sort of mediator between the narrator and "J." The death worn on the witness's or narrator's face can only be seen by a third party or a second witness. In a strange way, then, the nurse is not unlike a sort of priest, mediating between a God (the narrator--death)--a God who sees in the other (J.) in secret, without himself being seen-- and J. herself. But the story also lends itself to being read in an opposite direction (and this is part of the performative ambiguity--if such a thing can be said without raising to many eyebrows at once--of the text), whereby J. is clearly the figure of God ("you've made a fine mess of things")--a God whose omniscience (seeing every secret) with regard to the narrator is a profound comfort, although one that is at once "terribly friendly" and "terribly sad."
In any case, much more might be said about this passage, and this story where every act of naming may or may not be quite deliberate. Could it have been written--and can it be read--by someone who hasn't felt these things as well? Blanchot writes of having once been convinced he was about to die, before the firing squad. He miraculously escaped, but it would seem an experience that left him forever marked by death. An "alertness in that calm"--isn't this also the "passivity" of which The Writing of the Disaster speaks at such length? A friendship without friendship, a gift without giving--these are the aporias that Derrida transforms from Blanchot's logic of the 'neuter'. In his reading of Blanchot's récit, "The Instant of My Death", Derrida elaborates:

Life can only be light from the moment that it stays dead-living while being freed, that is to say, released from itself. A life without life, an experience of lightness, an instance of “without,” a logic without logic of the “X without X,” or of the “not” or of the “except,” of the “being without being,” etc. In “A Primitive Scene,” we could read: “To live without living, like dying without death: writing returns us to these enigmatic propositions.”
The proof that we have here, with this testimony and reference to an event, the logical and textual matrix of Blanchot’s entire corpus, so to speak, is that this lightness of “without,” the thinking of the “X without X” comes to sign, consign or countersign the experience of the neuter as ne uter, neither-nor by bringing it together. This experience draws to itself and endures, in its very passion, the thinking as well as the writing of Blanchot, between literature and the right to death. Neither...nor: in this way the witness translates the untranslatable demourance....The neuter is the experience or passion of a thinking that cannot stop at either opposite without also overcoming the opposition -- neither this nor that, neither happiness nor unhappiness (Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, 88-90).

There is of course also a 'weaker' sense in which the phrase "death sentence" may be read. As precisely a sort of entirely banal prohibition against dying--a living death instead of a dying life, if you will. For example, the political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, currently serving his twenty-second (24) year in solitary confinement (and in support of whose case Derrida wrote, years ago, to then-President Bill Clinton), has been given such a "death sentence."
To presume to pronounce the other's death--is this to exercise the violence of a sovereign, as if one could ever justly assume adequate authority over whether the other lives or dies (the implication being that one had then somehow mastered one's own death); moreover to justify this power as the condition of possibility for any relation at all to the other, or indeed of any politics--such might even be the definition of injustice, mightn't? Derrida's critical reading of Carl Schmitt in The Politics of Friendship would point away from such a politics. Where Schmitt would affirm the permanent threat of war between sovereign nation-states (annihilation, even, extending without limit the exigency of the Cold War's logic of "deterrance") as the condition of the political, Derrida would rather dream of something else, and not only because he sees in Schmitt's analysis a dangerous sanctioning of a certain sanctified or legalized "killing without murder." With regard to Schmitt, Derrida writes (and it is well worth reproducing at a little length for the playful echoes of Blanchot's questions and indeed Blanchot's style that appear):

One can infer symmetrically that there is no friend without this possibility of killing which establishes a non-natural community. Not only could I enter into a relationship of friendship only with a mortal, but I could love in friendship only a mortal at least exposed to so-called violent death--that is, exposed to being killed, possibly by myself. And by myself, in lovence itself, in an essential, not an accidental manner. To love in love or friendship would always mean: I can kill you, you can kill me, we can kill ourselves. Together or one another, masculine or feminine. Therefore, in all cases, we already are (possibly, but this possibility is, precisely, real) dead for one another...Let us not forget that the political would precisely be that which thus endlessly binds or opposes the friend--enemy/enemy--friend couple in the drive or decision of death, in the putting to death or in the stake of death. We were speaking of the political enemy at the beginning of this analysis. A hypothesis, then: and what if another lovence (in friendship or in love) were bound to an affirmation of life, to the endless repetition of this affirmation, only in seeking its way (in loving its way, and this would be phileîn itself) in the step beyond the political, or beyond that political as the horizon of finitude, putting to death and putting of death. The phileîn beyond the political or another politics for loving, another politics to love, for love (à aimer)? Must one dissociate and associate together differently pólis, politeía, philía, Éros, and so forth? If a choice between these three hypotheses and these three logical chains were simply or clearly possible, we would make that choice, we would choose one immediately. In this very place.
Hence we must be patient at the crossroads and endure this undecidable triviality. Without it--and this is the thesis and the decision--no decision would be possible, nor even any friendship. There we are. In this very place? No, there.(The Politics of Friendship, 122-123)

No doubt what then began for the young man was the torment of injustice. No more ecstasy; the feeling that he was only living because, even in the eyes of the Russians, he belonged to a noble class.
This was war: life for some, for others, the cruelty of assassination.
There remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer but to come, the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? the infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond. I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. "I am alive." "No, you are dead." ("The Instant of My Death", 7-9)

This lightness neither frees nor relieves of anything; it is neither a salvation through freedom nor an opening to the infinite because this passion is without freedom and this death without death is a confirmation of finitude. Yet here is a more affirmative response, if not a more positive and more assured one...We could appeal to all of Blanchot's texts on the neuter here--the neither-nor that is beyond all dialectic, of course, but also beyond the negative grammar that the word neuter, ne uter, seems to indicate. The neuter is the experience or passion of a thinking that cannot stop at either opposite without also overcoming the opposition--neither this nor that, neither happiness nor unhappiness. (Demeure: Fiction and Testimony)

Taking issue with the formula often attributed to Kafka--"Write to be able to die--Die to be able to write"--Blanchot in "The Work and Death's Space" responds:

At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes in order to be able to die is an affront to common sense. It would seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any approach on our part, without our bestirring ourselves at all; yes, it will come. That is true, but at the same time it is not true, and indeed quite possibly it lacks truth altogether. At least it does not have the kind of truth which we feel in the world, which is the measure of our action and of our presence in the world. What makes me disappear from the world cannot find its guarantee there; and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This explains why no one is linked to death by real certitude. No one is sure of dying. No one doubts death, but no one can think of certain death except doubtfully, the brittleness of the unsure. It is as in order to think authentically upon the certainty of death, we had to let thought sink into doubt and inauthenticity, or yet again as if when we strive to think on death, more than our brain--the very substance and truth of thought itself--were bound to crumble. This in itself indicates that if men in general do not thing about death, if they avoid confronting it, it is doubtless in order to flee death and hide from it, but this escape is possible only because death itself is perpetual flight before death, and because it is the deep of dissimulation. Thus to hide from it is in a certain way to hide in it. (The Space of Literature, 95)

In the "brittleness of the unsure," thought finds its necessity. The real is fragile, and this is precisely what makes it real. However, the real has already been forgotten, and then remembered. Following in the steps of Nietzsche, and perhaps even skipping a mountain peak every now and then (though we could argue about whether he reaches the clouds), Blanchot emphasizes that memory is always a function of forgetting.

Impossible necessary death; why do these words--and the experience to which they refer (the inexperience)--escape comprehension? Why this collision of mutually exclusive terms? Why efface them by considering them as a fiction peculiar to some particular author? It is only natural. Thought cannot welcome that which it bears within itself and which sustains it, except by forgetting. (The Writing of the Disaster, 67)

However, returning to the phrase: “Prevented from dying by death itself." One way of approaching this enigmatic statement might run more or less like this: if death as such is only knowable or realizable through the experience of watching the other die--of witnessing the other in their absolute mortality from a perspective and necessary distance that they themselves will never know--then this “death” is also in some sense a pronouncement of immortality, signifying the impossibility of one's own death.
But in another sense (and there are many--Derrida has quipped in Demeure that “years could be spent on this sentence alone”--which is most convincing coming from him, but in any case), if one thinks this sentence with a different emphasis, one placed not unlike invisible quotes on “dying” rather than on death, then, again, the aporia might be said to be placed on dying. In this sense, one’s need for a kind of dying--an infinite dying, in fact--would be violently abridged by the imposition: death. (In a sense it is the same everyday imposition of calling someone by their name, which is at once to reference a time when such a call cannot be answered, but only the name itself will echo.)
In other words, it is essential to be able to die without in fact dying, to die without death--otherwise the ethical demand of death is not addressed, and "death" becomes only a kind of epithet or slogan hurled at the living. One can never be through responding to the dead, or rather to the demand placed by the enigma of their disappearance. Just how one remains faithful to this infinite demand (and what being "faithful" might mean) without, as Freud once said, being “unconsciously afraid of the dead and because of this hidden awe...often led to speak in overpraising term," is not a simple question (Lacoue-Labarthe, "The Echo of the Subject," 158). Freud, for one, might suggest that it is also a question of shame.

It is a question whose tone has been uniquely and permanently altered by the events of the second World War. It may be a question of an “ethics without redemption,” but, paradoxically, also one of lightness, and perhaps, above all, of friendship.

To be truly responsible, in the strongest possible sense of this word--a word that is so important in linking Blanchot and Derrida, and in a manner that may finally open beyond either one of them--requires a negotiation of the aporia of dying. Dying is at bottom an impossible contradiction that can never be resolved with any finality, through the mantric or numbing false comfort of any formula, program or prescription--there is in fact no “at bottom” at all.

The "I" that is responsible for others, the I bereft of selfhood, is sheer fragility, through and through on trial. This I without any identity is responsible for him to whom he can give no response; this I must answer in an interrogation where no question is put; he is a question directed to others from whom no answer can be expected either. The Other does not answer. (The Writing of the Disaster, 119)

The inessentiality and necessity of dying, for any ethics (as essentiality necessarily devoid of essence), can only be approached by first acknowledging the impossibility of doing so. (Which is not, of course, what anybody likes to hear, and it may be only too easy to underestimate the power of this dislike.) But then as soon as one chooses an approach--a decision that is always in some sense "mad"--so Derrida follows Kierkegaard--one is constantly in danger of letting one’s style seduce and subsume the meaning or obscure the stakes of one’s intervention. In fact there is no avoiding this obscurity, but only degrees of patience.
If in fact every interpretation cannot help but transform what it interprets, then one is still responsible for how one goes about transforming, deforming, and reforming, even if the result is always failure. There might be a kind of relief in this, if it were not also the greatest burden in the world: how to fail responsibly and in failing, disappear (or nearly disappear)...with style (but not into style). To fail so that in failing, there is still genuine risk.

"Prevented from dying by death itself." This sentence plays on the many readings made possible depending on which language--general or restricted, weak or strong--is heard, and when. In the end, every reading might amount to much the same point. But there might also be a kind of violence in reducing the enigmatic quality or multiplying expressiveness of such a phrase to a single point, because the inability of language to express the full weight of such a point is also part of the point. That is, to dismiss such phrases as mere "word play" is to miss hearing the serious tone of the game--one refusing to be excused from aporia and contradiction.

The phrase, “prevented from dying by death itself” must finally be read in the light of the camps--where "light" is not a 'lightness' at all; it is perhaps a blinding glare, a "night without darkness," or a day without dawn.

"Prevented from dying by death itself." Is this not the self-sacrificial "leap" that is required of 'belief'?

Yes, let us remember the earliest Hegel. He too, even prior to his "early" philosophy, considered that the two deaths were indissociable, and that only the act of confronting death--not merely of facing it or of exposing oneself to its danger (which is the distinguishing feature of heroic courage), but of entering into its space, of undergoing it as infinite death and also as mere death, "natural death"--could found the sovereignty of masterhood: the mind and its prerogatives. The result was perhaps, absurdly, that the experience which initiates the movement of the dialectic--the experience which none experiences, the experience of death--stopped it right away, and that the entire subsequent process retained a sort of memory of this halt, as if of an aporia which always had still to be accounted for. (The Writing of the Disaster, 68)

See also, not unrelatedly...

love of blogs

Charlotte Street:

Equally, there are philosophers, thinkers, whose ideas do not, so to speak, bear repeating. To study Walter Benjamin’s Theses is one thing; to turn them on the present, to re-open what the book of canonisation has closed (but without mentioning Benjamin, without the dutiful nod), to take him at his word rather than simply ‘editing and annotating’ his words, this would have the scholars calling the police.

and:

The accusation against Zizek (see comments thread here) is that this citation of Santner is somewhat disingenuous. Luther Blisset links to the actual Santner piece (2003, I think) which, it turns out, cites Zizek’s own Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) as support for his argument. It would appear then that Zizek is citing as an authority/source someone who is citing as a source/authority Zizek himself. John Holbo refers to this referential circle as a ‘Munchausen’ tactic. Zizek has used Santner as a “sock puppet” another commenter states, and adds with obvious glee that this is the “killer” point against Zizek, and a suitable cue to “dismiss” him as a “clown”. Draw your own conclusions. Of course, those who are interested in Zizek are perfectly capable of recognising the lazy or ‘clownish’ elements, without seizing on these as convenient escape clauses...

John:

(Recall that Trilling is complimenting Forster for his liberal imagination; it brings to mind a joke of Terry Eagleton's that Carl once quoted to me—I hope I remember it correctly: The liberal imagines that there will still be chocolate-chip cookies in a thousand years.)

Spurious:

Are you a philosopher, then?, I ask W. No, he's not a philosopher he says. For a start, he doesn't know any maths. For a start, the pair of us know nothing about maths. What about that book about maths, I ask him, that's on your shelves. And indeed, there it is, the book on maths, on the shelves. He doesn't get very far, says W., just as he never gets very far with his ancient Greek.

AvW:

The first half of the film argues fairly unambiguously and persuasively and even with a kind of passion that the action genre is the product of the sadistic imagination of sadistic, avaricious appropriators. That in this sense it is deeply anti-humanity. Then the action unwinds inevitably toward the 'But' to this Yes, its excuse, its forgiveness; the genre is in the end the giver of life, that which alone can nullify death, can infallibly punish the wicked and monstrously evil and reward the brave and good, the place of redemption and moral certainty for the rôle, the tabula rasa, that is humanity.

The Last Action Hero can't decide about action films, but it's indecision is its own theme and mode of production. It leans toward action films on several axes - of narrative, style, generic value-ordering - and strongly against them on the built-in 'values' liberal-interpretive plane. The film demonstrates, as if at a trade show for genres, the ideological flexibility of the action genre by having the narrative enact its othering and condemnation (in the inner, and fascist, fiction) and recuperation and redemption (in the outer, and liberal one) simultaneously.

A more thoroughly liberal gesture is unimaginable.