Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 16:15:30 -0800
Subject: Re: [Fwd: The scandal of obligation]


EricMurph-AT-aol.com wrote:
> 
> Further thoughts on #202
> 
> I appears that Lyotard sets up a number of binary oppositions in this
> passage:
> philosophical/intellectual, differend/genre, impossible idioms/ecstasy of
> sacrifice,
> humor /politics of false supermen.
> 
> Both William McClure and Mark Bowes have been commenting in recent posts
> about reflective judgment/determinant judgment in a similar way.  My question
> is whether this can be mapped onto the schematic mapped in #202.  In other
> words, is a philosophical application of determinant judgment possible?  Are
> there times when reflective judment is merely intellectual?  Can we say that
> bearing witness to the differend and linking genres is what philosophy does?
> 
> Also, Ariosto seems to imply that there is a way for philosophy to engage the
> "residue" without resorting to "useless bathos" and that a possible defense
> for Bataille may lie along these lines.  Is it possible to defend Bataille as
> a philosopher?  Or, does his philosophy swerve in the direction of
> dangerously human, all too human politics?
> 
> Other questions
> 
> Can anyone shed more light on Lyotard's references to the Grand Guignol or
> Ergeinis?
> 
> William refers to page 278 of a book entitled "Reading Lyotard". Do you mean
> "The Lyotard Reader"?   There is a passage on that page that seems to relate
> to your discussion:  The self does not proceed from the other; the other
> befalls the self.   One thought that occurs her is that if alterity is not
> limited to persons as Levinas seems to do, but extended to the face of
> things, (in other words, objects too have a face and their own alterity -
> everything from arcades to dilapidated lawn chairs) then it might be argued
> that our interiority is generated via "chocks" (as Benjamin describes it in
> his essay on Baudelaire).  In other words, the alterity of the other as other
> befalls and shocks the self.  These shocks further our recognition and
> increase our interiority.  They also further our alienation.  I hope I am not
> going off on too much of a tangent here?
> 
> Hugh, would you give the section numbers of  the "weird" sections at the end
> of "The Differend" to which you were referring?
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Eric,

Try nos. 260-264. 

Some of the problems I have, not with weirdness, but with understanding
are, and this happens in reading other philosophers of course:

1) Greek words of unconommon usage.

2) Words like interiority, exteriority, which have an ordinary meaning,
but are used in specialized ways in texts I've never read.

The referenced paragraphs have a special use of "providence" which seems
akin to deity, but if God is dead we can use Nature etc., but then he 
goes on to "finality", "exchange" etc. 

"gaining time" is used in a special sense through much of the last
chapter, "The Sign of History".  I think of titles to property,
and claims against property, as mortgages, bonds, or stockholder claims
against corporate assets and income, as wealth which entitles the wealth
holder to benefit from the labor of others.  So in a way its gaining 
time although we each get only 24 hrs. daily.

Italo Calvino once remarked that the more time you "save", the more time
you can waste.  Sort of a gain.

No. 262 seems clear enough, but I disagree.

I suppose it was written before 1983 when the French version was
published, and in the preface Lyotard admits to starting Le Differend
after publication of Economie Libidinale in 1974.

Anyhow the computer revolution, instant stock trades and money
transfers, 
offshore offices to avoid taxes, country-hopping for lowest wages,
almost 500 billionares, scads of billionaire corporations, and the worst
aspects 
of "globalization" were a sign of history yet to arrive.

Resisting hegemony of the global market may not be in legitimation 
through tradition, but I don't know what the idea of a cosmopolitical 
history means. And  and puny and corrupted as they are, civil
governments
and worker-voters would seem to provide the best resistance we've got.

Hugh

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> Ariosto - thanks for the reference to Cezanne - I'll check it out - From what
> I can tell- most of Lyotard's writing on art is more connected with modernism
> (NOT POSTMODERNISM!) and twentieth century art.  Translated into English are
> a study of Duchamp and another on Francis.  There is an essay in the Reader
> on Barnett Newman.  There are quite a number of other monographs on
> contempory artists that are still untranslated Also, he wrote some notes for
> a show entitled "les Immateriaux".  This is discussed in some detail in an
> essay on the Postmodern Sublime by Paul Crowther in the book
> "Judging Lyotard".