If there is not a world, as such, not a cosmos, a totality (in the sense Levinas takes it to necessarily be or mean), then there is not a supra-monde as such, either. Rather, since there are only worlds, only these provisional schemas of cosmos made as a matter of the syntax of perception, the possibility of an extra world, an eschatology, an ideal, is there in that multiplicity, that replication or fraction of "world." (I do not believe in the supernatural because it requires me to believe in the natural. It requires the assumption that I know what the natural already is.)
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The extension/abstractions of Gödel: the method is also demonstrating what it represents. Along the axis of the representation, the system has to remain open, unencompassble, because always capable of further transference, meta-. It's simply the mathematical, logical syntax way of expressing this, what is also a realization of set theory: that any system that defines a totality must immediately produce something outside that totality, namely, the name, the defining gesture, the frame of the frame, the outside of the frame.
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[What] [is] point? [What] [is] line?
(Stigme and gramme.) While watching soccer match, World Cup, ball falling backward inbounds along line, thought about the bearing of the sense of the line, its perpetuation relative to space, its perpetuation of the relation of space. What is the materiality of the line? As Derrida says, the sign is more material than the material, more ideal than the ideal. Thus, the suspicion, the jealousy, of the ideal towards the sign, writing, graphe. What it would have to represent, as far as any realism of the line is the limit itself, a division, an edge, a transformation, a difference. As such, the line is, precisely, no thing in itself, but, if this is possible to say, relation "itself." It is what gives things without being thing. But once instituted as the formal representation of this relation, the graph line laid on top of the line, so to speak, what is this material?
An assembly, a bearing -- for the material of space -- spatialization, topo-graphics, of material, materialization of space -- but also materialization of the representation of the difference of the material. The line is drawn. And this graphe must be done with a material. Same for point. Point, line, plane. They cannot be resolved as object, except inasmuch as they are the very ob-jection of objection, thus ideality. A point cannot have absolute existence lest it cease to be a point and become an area, an "actual" space. But thus likewise, redoubled, for line, which is the extension of point, without of course being reducible to point, but also thus this area. And so on for plane and dimension.
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There's nothing to understand about death. Death is the end of understanding.
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"Having" a thought. What could "having" mean when it comes to thought? Cf. Aristotle when he discusses "having" in terms of literal and figurative. A thought passes, one proposes thoughts, or has them proposed as with dreams. To "have" thought then can no more do away with this transience than with the citation factor this also entails.
§ This branches off -- but which would be the trunk, here, the crux, the most significant or fundamental problem of "have" in general, Aristotle's distinction a slippery slope into an abyss for the literal. Note also the political aspect: "having," property, as seisure (put in possession, lay claim, seek, to place), as "holding," as the presumption of an exchange, an operation, not a state. (Everywhere, an assault on the state.) Cf. Mauss about the sense of meuble carrying over to modern law, v. the older order of the "thing" as the gift, the link of exchange, how the laws had to re-impose this sense of transfer of land.
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On seeing "Lions and Hyenas" program again: Genetics, instinct or the biological program. Animachine. Impetus as opposed to instinct. Inertia, then?
Middle English impetous, from Latin impetus, from impetere, to attack : in-, against; see in–2 + petere, to go towards, seek; see pet- (note especially senses of "wing," "flight,, "falling" and "water").
The fall into the world, into things.
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Suppose for the moment that there is no literary future. Suppose we were to discover that some time in the future there will be no future for literature. No more literature? Does literature with no more future mean no more literature? Is literature no more than its future? Suppose at this moment that one has a future. Already a different moment from the previous supposition. Already a different putting under, a different posing, of one moment or the other. Already the time of a holding in imagination, a pre-tending, of holding other than what holds. Already literature -- already what literature is already.
Isn't the future this no future? Isn't that the force or power of the future, despite the apparent paradox? Because of it? For there to be future, there is not, precisely, a future.
For it always strikes me, especially with respect to literature, that there is too much having a future. That one of the paradoxes of a sort of literary society is taking too seriously this business of the fiction of the future. They hold up this fiction of a literary future all too easily. The future is not a fixed value, not the quaintness of a pet past, not nostaglia. The story we always know how will end is a literature of no future.
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The difference between good and evil is always that between the same and the other.
The risk of even an analysis such as that of Sonntag is the methodological naiveté of the monstration. The risk of absolving an infatuation with "evil." As if, again, it were as easy a distinction as in something like Tolkien's world. Knowledge -- absolute knowledge. As Levinas showed, the gesture towards the other is not (a) knowledge.
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Le temps-tension.
Of oblivion, plenitude. Of being full or empty. Of being connected or unfettered?
The circle: full/empty.
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From death. From death to life. The reason behind reason, the hole of reason. Cf. the passage of Derrida on Aristotle on the passing of the sun from sensation, thus incomplete knowledge or imperfect metaphor (the whole essay about the "proper" in metaphor). ["White Mythology" in Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass, U. Chicago, 1982, p. 250.] See especially paragraph beginning, "First consequence." Other consequence: the property of this absence, the property of the unknown, the temporal or tropic aspect, which would, apparently yield empiricism, all empiricisms, or the form of empiricism, that a cycle of some thing as operation or behavior is the known, what has been the fait accompli, as perception. Is this interval, this intermittence, then, this principle of the "improperly known," not generalizable, not general? Not least because that which does not present itself is essence?
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Photos lie. (Down, forgotten.)
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Identity is also self-estrangement, the appropriation by others. The reaction to this, a sort of homoiotic, egocentric blindness, the kneejerk appropriation of all things to a set of presumptions, is, (even) paradoxically, as little individual as it is social. It's anti-individual and anti-social, a sociopathology as the social. It's the abstraction, homogenization, of the individual and the social, the self and the other, into a kind of identity which produces the problem Blanchot suggested -- diagnosed, proposed, identified -- in The Unavowable Community: a fusion which lifts the problem of the individual to that of the community. The community itself becomes this sociopathic egocentrism. The hive, at least in the rhetorical sense, since the object of the metaphor does not have this "ideological" aspect. It's precisely the sort of lockstep impulse that was to be feared in the paranoid fantasy of "communism." It's not a great step here to fascism, but perhaps slightly less conspicuous is the way in which the paranoia belongs to this fusion.
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No two things can occupy the same place at the same time.
Aside from the vicious circle posed by the matter of logic, here (axiomatic and refinements of language, nominalism, set theory, idealism, etc.), what is the point, necessity, manner, effect of saying this, of making such a statement?
What does it mean to have to make this statement?
The law of non-contradiction: the imperative carries the contradiction.
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History -- to possess and dominate history itself, this is a matter of the reference and the referent, too. The record. To possess the record of history is to make suspect: hagiography. Too personal. To be nothing but an object of history is to not be active in writing it. The poles, the aporia, like that of toys. Too passive, too active. Who doesn't take account of this, that is, who is left only to react to the effects, the sense of this, not consciously: a tyrant?
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There is no such thing as nothing. Also since there is no thing.
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The poem of the expression of the poem. (Poesis -- cf. etym.) Before the poetic, before the explicit practice, or
mode, of poetry, there is already poesis. And poesis is always already "metapoesis." Without "regress" or recursion, account would not be possible (metapherein -- carrying over) -- rhebus. Time, temporality, can only cut this way. What does it "mean" to see a city from above? To "hold" it? Encompass it? Ever represent it? The stop sign in the rain through the cafe window -- what does this instant, tableau, frame, stroke, mean? How does one express its specificity? (The two fish swallowing each other.) Design, emblem. The problem, perhaps via Husserl, of disentangling expression and indication. Is it possible for the stop sign to ever be free of pathos, atmosphere, effect?
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"Consciousness." As such? ("We love life not because we are want to live, but because we are wont to love." -- Nietzsche.) The myth of the purely "rational" "grasp." As well as problem of subject/object division from all directions, there is the matter that what "consciousness" is depends on a passion -- a situation of passion, always a disposition, and this, too, a passing -- an instant, temporality, timeliness, and the movement (temporal) of an encounter. How could "consciousness" -- rational, instrumental -- be possible without the articulation of a pathos? The "philosophical" disposition itself, the disposition or sensibility, would be this articulation of life as a "presence" to lose. Without a perceiving act, a person to articulate it as such, what sense does "survival" make? In other words, with what Derrida says of the meaning of "I am," the semantics or grammar is also disposition, the psychology of it.
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To sense -- Impression or atmosphere. Reaching. A tactile apprehension? Perhaps reducible to infant instincts, groping, wanting, take in, suckle? Is this what sensing is? Sensing as wanting to get to the sense, which happens by passing. Evocation, then, is not simply a deferral to the thing, but the sensation of the "thing" itself, thingness, because (as with the caress) there is duration, interval. Complicated by representation, since the sense, just so, is "expressed" by this other, by figure, reminder. The wonder or awe of the representation, the spell of the cave paintings, is that sense is called: this is the astonishment of resemblance, which as well presumes the difference of the "things" so resembling. The ob-ject is this subjectivization.
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To what extent Nietzsche appropriates the realization of the "will to power," to what extent he adequates, reduces again to an adequation, as if recognizing it were a matter of copping to it, suffices to cop to it. The post-critical would resemble the pre-critical, amount to the same (the Machiavelli issue). The problem then the same as that of Joseph Campbell, or the methodological, nonetheless often overarching teleology of sociology or anthropology, the appropriation of what is impossible to avoid heuristically, a la the form: man must, a society must, one must, etc. Are organisms a product of design or are designs a product of organism? This is the organic question, the question of organization. Nietzsche gives us to understand this, and at the same time runs in comments to the effect of, perhaps runs the risk of, reducing this play at superiority to something for its own sake (as in his own criticism of "art pour l'art"). Analogous to the ego psychology aberrations of Freud which think the use of any Freudian awareness stops at the institution of gratification, self-justification, thus shirk the critical faculty of this analysis of ego, which would, by definition, be self-criticism.
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Nietzsche willing nature -- remarks on Lamarck and the notion of altering genetic traits for implications that Nietzsche wants to believe -- wills -- the idea of willing nature, rather than Darwinian natural selection. Can the case be made that it's the pious, the immanent believers, that have come up with the best arguments and evidence for this lack of the grand design? Cf. also Einstein, Goedel.
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Going along -- running with it -- sense runs through it. Cf. stasis/motion problem general, again. "Sense" of things, always passing, trailing, traces of thing are always running through, passing, making operate. The station presupposed by this method of -- well, precisely? -- "stating" it, as if there were some rest, some zero grade to meaning and motion (itself become static in that form of expression), happening, operating, acting (and meaning is this operation exceeding the active/passive, cf. Blanchot). (Implications with Kant, the "thing-in-itself.")
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The pattern floats.
The pattern does not see itself.
This is the agency of its perception.
(Tile on the bathroom floor again, mesmerization, in between state, neither unified nor fragmented, neither immersed nor entirely separate. The plane of city lights which look like there is no ground. The "zone." "Be( )longing" as this distance from which measures this sensation, the removal. The passive reception of the world, inside/outside.)
"Immersion" as a subjective sense can only presuppose distinction.
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The concept of nothing. Equivalence of nothing and no thing. See other languages. History of the concept. Negation. Beckett: "To think of nothing, one must think of it as if it were something." Stein: "anyone is more interesting doing nothing than something."
Take up Leibniz, passages on reduction, then ones beginning with "nothing." How this suggests Kant and Locke, famous "place" or "presence." We get to it, as if, this way. That there is no pure nothing, no pure absence -- would always be a matter of what. A matter, precisely. A matter of matter. The matter of matter. Matter. (Cf. Sartre's Being and Nothingness, if he takes up this matter as such, also Hegel's idea of negation.) Pure presence and pure absence. Pure absence is as if a presence, the form of present. There is a nothing that is more nothing than nothing, but less than that -- mythical? ideal? -- nothing: the nothing of difference, relation, that is not the thing nothing, the absence in the form of a presence, as the special case of presence. (And this is really another fascinating thrust of the matter: whether an ideal nothing, the concept of nothing, is more nothing than a "real" or differential nothing, or greater than, and what that means when it comes to nothing.) If nothing can be made a thing, then a thing can be nothing.
"Nothing" also represents context, relation, position, syntax, and this works to produce the position, the positive, presence, thing, noun. The expression "the concept of nothing" itself represents this flickering: does it "mean" the idea proper to the thing nothing itself, or to the no-thing nothing, or does it mean the lack of a concept of anything else, any other thing, thus also anything at all? Which was? The example of the limit, a limit, term or word, as Blanchot suggests with "death." If the ability to use this term, the ability to refer with it, to it, by it, does not depend on a logic of proprietary correspondence, adequatio, if, in this sense precisely, there can be no thing for "nothing" to refer to, then obviously (not only) language, reference, is possible without such logic, etc.
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As some write because they want to be a writer (or some don't write because they want to be one), rather than being a writer because they write, some want to have written. In an analogous way, writing itself is split, is factoring or difference itself, and this is particularly my case. I write, or more frequently do not write, because I want writing, because I see it or think of it as more generalized, as a process so much broader than the act itself, than even the process of concerted composition including the mental preparation towards a particular end or for a project. Writing is the playing with everything, the play of everything, the sense of things, whether any expression of this ever makes it to the page. It's very easy to to see how this can be loss of writing, of the task or act, just as in another sense, writing as a value can be lost in a presumptive effect, when it is subordinated to an ulterior. But does one ever have "writing" flush? I'm not a writer, I'm writing. (See XS, 151.)
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Little lot -- the bit by bit, the nothing of action (negation, lack of positivity), ungraspable, unfixed.
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Dream of dream. The catch-22 of science, including psychoanalysis or psychology. Cf. philosophy, too.
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The universal, the smarmy. Music and science. The symphonic soundtrack (Japan), movie "theme," "scientists and their bloody childish reading habits." "The language of cinema is universal."
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Satiric or symbolic -- parabolic violence (or art) v. pristine or objective violence. Sublimated v. direct.
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To "see." "Visions." For something to occur in thought, be seen as such. The difference between miracle and fiction. Attribution, inspiration. Suggestibility. Voices in the head, etc. Authorship. As Socrates attributed his thought or inspiration to a transmission, as if he were only a receiver. When the dancer in "Das Tanzlegendchen" "sees" the cherubs, etc.
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The way: the broadest sort of, what, "enlightenment," aggrandizing, crossed with the sense of propriety. Tao with my way, my right of way (see below). And what does "way" mean for propriety itself? Proprietary vector, movement, action, compared to static property.
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The problem with identity is in thinking that the process of identifying is ever done. As if we could know, beforehand, everything that anything would come to be. Sometimes even the use of someone's name is as presumptuous as horoscope, or whatever scheme of fixed value.
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Alone in space waiting. There is always the compass, the enclosure, the din of this abeyance, as if the event would come to pierce the veil of chattel, of persistence, and drain away emptiness. Idleness is as pure passage, gives the counting of time outside any purpose. But even this sense is space. Waiting room.
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Explaining yourself without making a creed. Letting the other be, without giving up yourself. The sense of this when it's a matter of predilection, desire, pleasure. (What can also be repression is another('s) desire.) Levinas on "sacred" -- that which is not property.
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Metaglobin -- The "principle" of metaphor, the "reduction" to reduction of "principles" of attraction, clumping: gravity, hemoglobin (but of course further than that, molecules, atomic, subatomic particles), thinking or consciousness or mental process (a schema of "pure" distribution), any "force." The fact that a "natural force" reaches a point resembling mystification, where no further explanation can be given for its fact. But this apparent limit, this cliff, of explanation, is so precisely in terms of "thing" and the causality attendant to it. This "force" would be rather a sine qua non than a teleological or causal argument, and also the demonstration of "pure" relation itself, what makes no "thing," but gives "things."
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Gender is used to ennoble, generalize, to rationalize self-interest, just as religion or anything else. No less true for women than for men.
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Together and alone -- verging on recognition. The other becomes part of the solitude.
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What you wouldn't do for a face you don't know what is behind.
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The desire to climb Mt. Everest -- why would you question it? Because it is there.
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Beauty -- vigor and health, according to Nietzsche. Order, according to others, scholastics. But what of the beauty of an iceberg? Beauty as aporia? The ungraspable, or rather unencompassable, along with the sensation of grasp. This sense of order has as much to do with this disruption, and with relation or interworking, that appeal as an implicit design -- which is not. Beauty as the astonishment that returns us to the world, as if to discover qualities we thought outside it. But thus the "world," the cosmos, is not "known," could be nothing but this discovery. This "beauty" makes us outside, tourists in the native land. Alienated in the very remarking of our bounty.
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The other's eyes, the look, the gaze. After Hegel and Sartre, what to add about seeing the other? With imago and psychoanalysis, the complication of one seeing the self, the form of the self, divested from the self. And a sym-path-ic or sympathetic experience "prior" to subject/object. In fact, the subject is first the other. But the more poetic expression of supplication in eyes.
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I lead a figurative life.
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Have the courage to be a coward.
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Posing the question that divides the matter sets the terms. Via an article on the Situationists and the "dépassement" of art, these questions. How to link [relier] the revolutionary exigency to the practice of art? What is the new theater of the class struggle? Why concentrate the critique of society on its culture? Questions on these questions. What is a society apart from its culture (see below)? Again, like Beckett and his termites, as if a sheer mechanical function, simply because it didn't make art, could leave behind paintings or poetry like residue? Also, what would the expression of "overturning" a society be in -- be -- but culture. A matter of culture. Does one inadvertently, necessarily fall into a form like that of Goering, propagandistic, Machiavellian, instrumentalist, or the line of Hanns Johst attributed to him: "Whenever I hear culture, I unlock my Browning"? As Nietzsche suggests in Daybreak, the error of Prussian military culture was to think French culture could be conquered, somehow bested or won or even acquired that way.
See also in the same article the bit about destruction of cinema and the film that is nothing but black and white screens. This raises the question of the "radical" in critique of revolution. The "root." Would art have to be reduced to a monolithic form to avoid another?
Also comments about the tabula rasa, "starting over." A history of movements to erase history. What art has not been born of this? What work doesn't begin with a clean slate, a blank sheet -- and if it doesn't cover the work of the past (like a palimpsest), buries it with another layer of sedimentation? The problem, same for intransigent or naive ideologues and "radical" opposition overturning, is this acceptance of a form as a totality. The bourgeois as totalitarian as an "explicit" regime, and the latter with its equivalent of bourgeois hegemony, it's morality, its transparency.
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Nothing makes belief in success like failure. A maxim and a trap.
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I ran across an essay on line comparing Heidegger to Eastern thought. The writer coined a term, after some famous German philosophical ones translated into English, "Being-in-the-Way." I laughed when I read that because the way I "heard" it was not like "tao," but as an obstacle, a hindrance, extraneous. But the laughter wasn't just ridicule, or to be dismissive, because that's actually a very good expression for how I see things, how I see "us," meaning any of us, how I see myself: superfluous, extraneous, gratuitous. I don't know if something like that could be of comfort to anyone, but to me, that's the way to lightness, the lifting of great weight, the source of grace.
To make it less graceful, but possibly more clear, I will add that one isn't hospitable to a stranger by saying, "Come into my house, now here is what's important, honor what is sacred to me, honor my god." One isn't hospitable by saying, "Let me show how I'm good to you." One is hospitable by saying, and to one's self as another, "How am I in the way?" This is not the same as self-sacrifice, as one is certainly not hospitable by lying down and rolling in ashes, turning a debt of pity to the stranger. To then be more effectively selfish -- as all exchange has a selfish interest, even hospitality -- one gets out of the way as much as possible to let the other honor what she will. For honor, too, must be made a gift and one must be able to receive it. Respect demanded is not respect given.
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Relativism relative to what? This word "relativism" always spoken as if an apotropaic, defensively, apologetically.
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Article on Machiavelli in Magazine Litteraire. That a society lasts. Inflection of teleological problem. See the following discussion of differences between antiquity and Christianity for a society. The problem of a society, what it is, what constitutes it. To "create" myths. The problem is expressed in this. Autochthonous. Are myths "created"? The component of belief -- of cosmology. The social insects, for example. Mimicry for another (two prongs -- the mimicry of mimicry). Is an ant colony a society? Is a beehive? When does a society have a conscious intent to be a society, as if the ur-planners sat down and aimed at the result generations hence, and invented or selected their mythology, their belief system, shopping it from various ones available? One society? Unified? Also, the talk of natural history of societies, this bad anatomy of historians -- what society do they refer to that failed (and corollary: what society hasn't failed, has not failure within it all the time, is not a matter of failure), that was not a society or did not exist? Barbarians? Culture is wherever humans are, like an accretion, an excretion. Also the problem of sociology of religion in this proposition: no society without religion or respect or sacred, etc. The error is what is the purpose of religion? Same as for "society." This remark (no society) is immediately a fold, a limit, of the function of religion itself. No doubt a ruse of justifications. But to think of religion in this way is to no longer be within one.
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Movies like throw pillows, like luxury hotel rooms, chocolate on the pillow, great social palliatives. Even catharsis comes to be used as bath oils.
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Refrain. Walking outside on the fairest night in a while (from work at Heller on Bush St. in San Francisco, if such "facts" matter -- and this is precisely the matter), thinking of coming through the winter (if mild here), then of the situation of this in larger scale, my life, daily repetition across the years, what future to look forward to beyond a certain seasonal horizon, when even this will be lost, lost again forever. "Lost." Then in a cab on the way home, began to think of Nietzsche's eternal return. It suddenly struck me a whole new way, a superb sort of joke in another sense, that the eternal return would amount to -- nothing. It returns to the same events, and suddenly, a lifetime is repeated in the same way the little movements within it are -- psychological, but I thought of as music, refrain. There is no "progress" along a scale, no resolution of all the world and universe in one great event, no promotion or demotion, nothing gained or lost. Eternal return to the same life, all epochs before and after absorbed there in that perception. This is the eternal return. This is perhaps the same retort Nietzsche meant by it, but the difference is the forgetting, repetition and this figure itself of the return in this life amount to the same, with the necessary lack of connection to any other. Cf. Borges: eternity is the form of desire. Motion/stasis. Always the moment of the freezing of the moment, or the wish to, lost in time, the flow of passing that makes this even possible. Eternity, a true ever-presence, would have no such sentiment.
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Science, history, "events," as the skeleton to the flesh of mundane significance. Thought of while reading about the Martian meteorite and possible evidence of life on Mars. The way these events play in daily affairs, with even sillier aspects of science, fame, etc., then they remain after all the daily significance is forgotten, including this ordinary countenance.
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Seeing the folder-binding metal pieces scattered all over the sidewalk, thinking of them as insignificant, ignored, trash, an end of selling and economic consideration. What would the seller of such goods think if he were to pass them, if he gave them any thought at all? Thought of stating this in terms of Heine's "The Greek Gods," where he sees the clouds as the airy remains of the gods.
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"Literature and the Right to Death," Blanchot, in The Gaze of Orpheus, (Station Hill, 1981, p. 44), the paragraph beginning, "A hope which is naturally problematic." About language and what it negates, the comparison of what is meant v. logic. This follows up "life" being another word revealing impossibility, what Blanchot says about "death" (cf. also "Living On: Borderlines"), a similar, related, but also different operation by the word "life." If "death" is that which cannot have a referent, not as testimony, it already renders "life" indeterminate in a way, in two famous ways: afterlife and nothingness. But life, in its own right, has a problem. What can "life" comprehend? To what can it refer, since I am never outside of it to grasp it? Every "thing" in life then takes on this same indeterminateness, fills up, becomes this expanse, this horizonless horizon.
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What do humans have to fear but humans? This clamorous preparation for any harm, any enemy, produces precisely the power we have to fear. Those who prepare for war make war.
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The Torah -- Idolatry of the word, of the text, as the object. The text as the sacred object. The ark, the curtain (parochet, a link to the veil of the holiest of holies, the refinement of the sacred, see below), the cabinet, the crown, the mantles (cloth coverings for the Torah), etc., all the pomp of the object of the text. Apart from, or at the same time as, the interesting aspect of the object of the text itself -- the literal object the text is and not that it refers to -- as the idol itself (cf. Blanchot's comments on the notion of a Kabbalah cosmology and the text as what comes before things), and the socio-historical, anthropological, as well as ideological, matter of this reverential status conferred on text, word, law, there is the same situation as for any other object of such sacralization: simultaneously materiality and idolization -- and this is what idolatry, but also making sacred, does. Is this a reduction of Judaism, or someone's religion? Isn't Judaism, or any religion, a reduction or relegation, of any other? Isn't that what making sacred is?
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Some of us have humility. Some of us cannot muster pride, and must hang our heads in shame or try to get away quickly from the arrogance of religion.
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One must account for errors. If there is abstraction, error, then it is in nature, too.
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Nature as a reflection of tidy, mollifying minds.
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If language refers to a thing outside it (to be more precise, if things outside language have logical priority, if language depends strictly on them), how is it possible to have "language" itself? How is it possible to refer to it, have it be what is at once referring and outside itself to refer to? What is that referring to? Where does (that) reference take place? "In" language? "Outside" language? "Between" language and its other? What other?
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The past behind us -- belongs to us, is apart from us, claims us, makes us strange, makes us apart, makes us together. The eccentricity of belonging.
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Spiteful reverance.
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God is conceit.
All content this page unless otherwise noted © 2009 Greg Macon
The event -- which by essence must remain unforseeable and thus non-programmable -- would be what exceeds the machine. What is necessary to try to think, and because it is difficult, is the event with the machine . . . But to accede, if this is possible, to the event beyond all calculation, and thus as well all technique and all economy, it is necessary to take account of programming, the machine, repetition, calculation. Also as far as possible, where one is not prepared or disposed to expect it.
-- Derrida, in De quoi demain . . ., Fayard/Galilee, 2001, with Elisabeth Roudinesco, pp. 86-87.
"sine qua non pour qu'une societé perdure" [my emphasis]
