>I believe life to be a question mark; a certain veil of ambiguity hangs
>over it and surrounds it with mysteries. This by no means implies that
>life is empty, negative, useless, etc.,
So far so good, Mr. Raggo: no need for belief in here though, life is de facto
a question mark, an open process of experimentation, for as long as it is not
reduced to reactive life.
> but rather the distension of a being yet to be defined
What being to be defined? Being is defined at every moment of life, as the
being of becoming which is to recur in alterity. Tension, distension (evoking
Reich's formula for "orgonotic pulsation"), isn't that the rhythm of breath,
the rhythm of life, the cycle of the eternal recurrence at the level of the
micro-cosmos? What distension is there to be defined that is not already here
and now, and there and then?
>This puts the accent on an infinitely postponed future
Yes, if there is distension of a being yet to be defined, this certainly puts
the accent on an infinitely postponed future... could that be the returning of
Christ instead? Or is this a matter of a Derridean ragout de poulet?
>The implication lies with the abyssal extension of
>the active forms of interpretation that at least put into question many of
>the "positivities" of Western culture, of the concept "life" and "being";
If we can make sense of your ragout: who cares about the values or so-called
positivities of Western culture? Only Derridas and Baudrillards, the
intellectual trash that spends its life deconstructing the deconstructed in
order to sell books about...well, nothing at all, giving vacuous lectures and,
enfin...making the same kind of living as every other intellectualoid strumpet!
Famous positivities they are- specters of science, knowledge, religion, morals-
in the eyes of the beholder, all those hashed and re-hashed divine and human
values (the value of deconstruction) that pretend they are superior to life and
its powers of creation!
>Nietzsche is trying to interpret the
>temporal process of interpretation and its non-coincidence with "truth";
>interpretations are active while our whole metaphysics seems in many ways
>blind to this positing potential, the active form of inferring.
Even though Nietzsche invokes precisely the art of interpreting, his
interpretation is not what one usually means by it: what he sought was the play
of forces, natural and social, behind the signs, as signs of power and
powerlessness. Not some being in itself. Moreover, the art of genealogy is
inseparable from the double affirmation that is intrinsic to Nietzsche's
doctrine of the eternal recurrence; but here, the matter of discovering the
positivity of life is hardly a mere question of intuition, or an active form of
inferring (more like ferreting out...). It requires will to power and mastery
of one's reactions. Deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction is a
pointless task. The point is not to replace the deconstructed with another
construct, but to find the process for open construction of life-affirming
values, situations, etc. Constructs do not have to be closed systems. But
deconstruction for its own sake is one such closed loop.
>Rather,
>there's a certain passivity and suffrance built into the metaphysical
>notion of "truth."
Any notion of truth is a capital investment. A philosophical notion of truth,
and at that metaphysical, can only represent a negation of the living, a
negation of the material and energetic realities of the living, no matter how
deconstructed. If this is what you are getting at, we won't quibble.
>This thoroughgoing critique I think needs to be
>acknowledged before we jump in too quickly with the idea of "positivity",
>with what might amount to no more than a new variation of an old
>empiricist habit.
What thorough critique needs to be acknowledged? Maybe a clinical critique.
But a critique of metaphysical notions of truth to the benefit...of an
infinitely postponed future? And as for jumping in, what is wrong with dawning
the habit of the empiricist? Who but the experimentalist can expose the
inversion of life committed by dialecticians fond of making their life a
process of critique (of things they know not)? The philosophical notion of
truth is not to be confused with the scientific notion of truth (nor is either
to be confused with a religeous, aesthetic or moral notion of truth), and not
just because of the operational criterion of the latter; there is far more to
this than meets the unprepared eye. This is a good terrain for us to do
battle, if you so wish - or leave it indefinitely postponed.
>Rather than attacking everyone on this list (for
>whatever reason you think it necessary) maybe a little careful thinking is
>in order. Say it, don't snarl it.
Careful thinking is desirable if the point is to communicate something. You
could begin by being clearer yourself, instead of emulating the Derridean stew;
after all, being, the being of becoming, is hardly empty! (That is where it
all started, remember?) As for attacking everyone on this list and, with
reason at that!, we believe we have not done so: your statement is untrue, an
easy generalization. But had we done so, which for good and obvious reasons we
haven't, what's wrong with attacking and snarling? Combat, combat, is what it
is all about here. The hammer. When is the last time there passed a wee bit
of sheer communication? If our writing sounds like snarling to you, maybe you
need to take the earmuffs off. You might even find a joyful deconstructing...
But perhaps you have drunk the Derridean Koran too-
>In many ways the differential element as
>Deleuze describes it is really the "play" of forces, the differences
>beneath which there are no things in themselves, no "truth", but the
>temporality of interpretation or becoming.
There is no being in itself because being is the affirmation of becoming, the
very consistency of the process of the living. But this hardly means, for
instance, that space void of matter is empty of energy (ah yes, the roots of
being empty), or that it is _not_ an obvious and empirical _truth_ that the
motion of the electron in the atom is an example of perpetual motion. So much
for the positivities of Western culture (such as space is empty; there is no
perpetual motion: there are no absolutes in life...), and for your Derridean
criticism that there is no "truth" to becoming!
>The supreme act of will to
>power seems to posit this becoming as the only form of being which itself
>implies that being is no more than a vanishing vapor or a trace, a
>differentiality, rather than something that can be opposed to the world as
>it is, i.e. as its depiction or truth.
A vanishing vapor, a trace - that sounds aethereal. Bueno, a differentiality?
There is no doubt that metaphors displease us. When is the last time we
clamored for something as opposed to the world as truth? Your baudrillardesque
discourse, like the master's, gets lost in this dialogue with itself playing
all the roles at once. Consider the electron, again and for instance: does the
simple experimental _truth_ that it is engaged in perpetual motion imply a
truth opposed to the world? Or is it that embracing the world resulted in such
simple truths that science, "philosophy" and religions deny? It is false to
speak of truth without connoting one's meaning, either to establish it or
disestablish it. After all, facts are facts but for most they are fiction.
Some even claim facts are untrue. No, the earth does not translate around the
sun or a virtual center of motion...
>What Nietzsche is explicating (and
>this would require some more careful reflection) is the structure of an
>ellipse, a lack that would need to be read between the masks, the rhetoric
of ER, if you will, that involves deferment, women, and death.
Yes, rhetoric, that is what the Derridean speech brings us down to; a bit like
Mr. Rhodes and the question of semantics. And then the ellipse - but not as a
physical reality, a corpo-reality of motion, no. As a figure of speech. This,
Mr. Raggo is where we draw the line. Ellipse as a line of flight, as a
cyclical line, we could address that. After all, our posting on the Eternal
Recurrence attempted to provide precisely the basis for the description of the
singularities of the living as an undulatory cycloidal motion of massfree
energy in the context of defining forces and power. But figures of speech and
metaphors...ce sont les femmes qui s'en vont.
Yes, the best of Bataille comes out in his reading of Nietzsche. As for the
excess of play, the last time we looked, it still appeared as an excess of
excrement pouring out of reactive life.
>That's my direction in this labyrinth
>as well, my way of threading a path between your dissecting needling. I,
>of course, welcome such jabs even from such grave heights.
Heights? We think not, Mr. Raggo. Maybe distances. Undeferred differences,
that's all. After all, life without noise would not be a mistake, but an
impossibility. The music is in the ears of the listener.
We will leave you to such nonsense as the truths of Derrida:
"This is why I will not say that the concept of matter is in and of itself
either metaphysical or nonmetaphysical. (...) The concept of matter must be
marked twice (the others too): in the deconstructed field - this is the phase
of overturning - and in the deconstructed text, outside the oppositions in
which it has been caught (matter/spirit, matter/ideality, matter/form, etc).
By means of the play of this interval between the two marks, one can operate
both an overturning deconstruction and a positively displacing, transgressive
deconstruction." ("Positions").
Les conneries des I-cons. Les conneries des vaches. What is there left of
Nietzsche's double affirmation of life in thought and in action? The negative.
Deconstruction and...deconstruction. Deconstruction is...overturning. And
overcoming is deconstructing, positive deconstruction. Monotony Inc (at least
Debord's hegelian negative was far more lively than the Derridaesque circus!).
Everything by the negative, in the negative. Being is empty...a new mot
d'ordre. One last ideology of achieved nihilism, for those who are ignorant of
life. Texts for students who, after so many times of reading and rereading
them, finally get the vague certainty that there must be something there to be
understood. After all, it is Derrida and they sweated so much to read through
it. Is this the critique you want us to acknowledge? Clearly it is asking too
much for a little construction (beyond the myth of the complicity of origins,
that divine agency of arch-writing...). For a little realization that matter
has its own positivity, not in itself but by virtue of massfree energy and the
play of inertia...Matter and energy: neither metaphysical nor nonmetaphysical;
they are physical reality: matter as frozen energy, and energy as pure
kineticism. In the interval between the two: chaosmos, the unending
construction of positivities.
Lambda C, still laughing and despite Derrida's grave cackling ("nostalgia of
being"...for god's sake!).
PS - "Since rotation and movement in space of the sun are simultaneous, the
Copernican circles and the Keplerian ellipses became invalid, while the
numerical values remain" (W. Reich, "Contact with Space").
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