Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 23:53:20 -0500
Subject: Re: Query


Sorry for the silence with which I have responded for the last couple of
days. . . I've been following the discussion (but has it really become a
discussion? for after all Eric has a point when he says people raise
questions but nothing sticks. . .people also throw around names but we
never really talk about other related authors. . ) but I am somewhat
confused. . .I seem to get some posts and not others. . . the last
things I got were four consecutive posts by Eric, some in which he
seemed to be responding to other posts. . . but which?  I do not have
them, I do not think. . .or (very possibly) I am so dense I cannot
follow even this as superficial and flighty as it has been. . . I also
get the sense that some of you did not get some of my posts. . . For
example, Jon did you get my nasty note in response to your snipe at
Hugh?  did anybody get my diatribe about Capital?  if you did, then is
it so boring or so wrong as to not even respond, not even to trash me or
make fun of me?. . .damn, talk about silence and the differend. . .where
did Levinas come up, I missed even that. . . anyways, a brief response
until I am sure my posts are getting through and until I am sure this
will stick for a while 'cause I do not want to waste my time again
rambling if nobody recieves it or if nobody cares. . . yes, I think
there is a lot in the Lyotard/Levinas relationship, even more than in
the Derrida/Levinas one even though the later goes much more out of his
way to claim the affinity, lineage, and hence even the
property/propriety, almost as if he owned him. . . I do not think
Lyotard on his part explicitly claims such affinity. . . anyways I do
not think it matters much (at least not to me). . .what matters to me
(and here I will continue to insist even if through a different route on
what I was insisting before) is that the Lyotard that turns towards
Freud and Kant (and away from Nietzsche but especially Marx), the
Lyotard of "Le Differend" (which I for one do not consider such an
important book, but only one more formulation of thetired theme of the
other and language) as oppossed to the Lyotard of "Libidinal Economy" is
as mystical and idealist (in both the technical and pejorative sense
which given Hegel I think are very much the same or should be at least
to all these frenchpost-structuralists) as the Levinas who spends a life
pondering the ethical responsibility to the "Other" and does so
admirably as long as the "Other" remains a formal, abstract and empty
category but who then writes an essay on the incident at Sabra and
Shatila in which the other suddenly becomes actual Palestinians and he
can no longer deal. . .