Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 23:49:24 -0500
Subject: Re: Query


Hello Again:

	I think you are quite right, obligation arises from being first and
foermost, constantly and unavoidably, always already an addresse. . .
but what is the specific nature, structure, mechanism and phenomenology
of obligation per se? How do selves, constructed as they are by
multiple, constant, different and mostly conflicting, calls experience
such obligation?  Are we to think that obligation is itself constitutive
of this constructed and constantly re-constructing self? And how
exactlyto deal with conflicting addresses when by their very nature
these cannot be fundamentally ranked, prioritized, lexically ordered,
etc.?  Is a self most obliged then to the most "powerful" or "forceful"
of the given myriads of calls?  And if the answer is indeed about power
or force can we still legitimately talk about "obligation"? 
Intuitively, and I think I am perhaps very wrong here, "obligation"
denotes freedom and autonomy to me.  Thus if the response to the
addresses is enmeshed in relations of power and force I would think that
we are talking about something more like coercion than obligation. . .
in this sense Althusser's discussion and elaboration of the concept of
"interpellation" seems more on the mark (or at least given my very
heterodox and cryptic Marxist leanings, which despite their heterodoxy
are still Marxist nevertheless, more satisfying to me. . .)  I think
that a real consideration of material relations (of Capital) is
deterimentally missing in "Le Differend" and in most of Lyotard's works
after "Libidinal Economy", a book which by the way Lyotard himself has
called "the evilest" of all that he has written and which I find to be
the best. . . anyways, What do you all think. . . can there really be
any real "obligation" given the questions of power and force?  Am I
absolutely wrong in intuitively associating "obligation" with a Kantian
type of freedom (and I say intuitively because this is really a gut
response, I have not given the matter much thought, much less have I
tried to sketch out how this association actually works)?

Waiting thanfully for what I am sure will be very stimulating responses,

Arturo