Ontological Whisperings

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Syrinx / Larynx: A Full-Throated Ease

Under construction

No Blogs for a While

Hi

Just to say my wife gave birth to twins a couple of months ago after a difficult pregancy which explains why I haven't posted anything and won't for a while yet. Still, enjoy the content already available and will be back sometime in the future.
William

From "Lines out of Space"

Is is worth

it now that I said it it
seems so much more realer
somehow is this the apparition
trembling in the moisture
gathered on the yellowing bluff

on trains many things happen but no more than anywhere else
movement-containment-they-are-isolating
put something in a box any old crap it becomes my gift to you
a man is holding his nose in such a way or seen without due care and atten-
that I think his hand is his nose for a moment

I am not a talker a day decoder
will I tell the others about the nose, about elvis here and michael jacksons over
there is it worth it it is an unlikely thing a
precious but unlikely thing a mirage of light dispersing in
the shattered clouds resting on the lee

with each comment on it you add on to it
I watch a tourist chase a map in a small capricious wind
in reaching for the glass I knock it further from my hand
death isn’t in the detail but the accumulation of detail is
the way one talks with death
or

A GHOSTLY MIST OBLITERATES ALL WITH ITS BILLION PARTICULATE SMEAR

Legends

Read only masterpieces; write only rubbish. Read only masterpieces; write only. Read only masterpieces; write. Read only masterpieces. Read only. Read!

Agamben's Idea of Prose and Derrida's Writing: Are they the same thing?

Met with Sean Gaston in Oxford yesterday and we spoke for a couple of hours about Derrida's Signsponge. Towards the end I raised an issue about Derrida's conception of the event of literary inventiveness leading on from issues discussed in Signsponge.

If, as Derrida says elsewhere, there is very little literature, and yet if, as he says in Signsponge, Psyche and Shibboleth, the moment of invention is intrinsic or potential in all inventive/literary language, how can it be that it happens so rarely. The logic of invention, that singularity immediately is disseminated into generality and yet in doing so generality is destabilised by the presence of non-translatable singularity either as a trace or a potential, means that invention is fleeting certainly, but not as Badiou would have it, rare.

I suggested to Sean that the issue was that while invention is a potential in all writing,it occurs only rarely at which point its effects are inscribed within the text, effectively infecting the text's claims to stability and authorship and thus disseminating the trace of singularity throughout all writing in effect. Thus is happens only on occasion, but the reverberations of the trace of this are present in writing. Otherwise how would one explain the scarcity of literature in contrast to the omnipresence of the logic of the trace inherent in invention and thus all writing?

Sean's reply was that he felt the issue resided in reading, that the event occurred in reading, and that I assume only certain readers can activate the event through its encounter. Part of a wider project he has to suggest that for Derrida all thinking is reading.

We did not resolve this issue but it led on to our considering the difference between literary invention (rare, singular, with finitude) and philosophical prose (common, general and without finitude). Poetry that can be signed versus philosophy that cannot. I suggested that in fact the age old antagonism between poetry and prose as Agamben terms it is not between two genres of writing but two moments in writing, that of the singular, which is occasional, and the general which is common. That writing is dominated by the law, but that said law can only function due to the event of singularity and is permanently deconstructed by the presence of the event which also can only occur through the immediate betrayal of the event by the generalities of the law. Thus all writing is prose, with the potential for poetry within.

We then gave examples where in Derrida it was meaningless to call a text philosophy or poetry, for at certain points the text was both: Glas, Envois, Signsponge, Cinders and so on. Sean said that for Derrida there was no poetry or prose, there was just writing.

This led me to a rather exciting proposition which I will just outline here. In the controversy between Agamben and Derrida, Agamben dismisses the trace on favour of a messianic idea of prose wherein the divisions between poetry and prose, singular and general, would disappear and a language would come into place, a being in language, that existed beyond difference. His criticism of Derrida being that the arche-trace disallows any way out of differentiation.

Yet, in fact, Derrida's conception of writing is just such an idea of prose. For in Derrida's writing while the role of differance is essential, he never ending oscillation between the trait and the re-trait, fist as Gaston explains, erases the difference between time and space as it is both time and space, and, as I hope to have shown, the overall effect is that differentiation between poetry and prose becomes simply a rhythm, mostly prose, sometimes poetry.

This being the case Derrida's writing is Agamben's idea of prose. Which might explain Agamben's odd blindspot in reading the trace in Derrida and his regular attacks on the one thinker who, in fact, is in almost complete agreement with him on all other issues.

Reading Derrida

It behoves upon us to read Derrida as he would have read Derrida if he were not Derrida.

If Derrida were alive now, in his thirties, faced with the massive presence of the dead Derrida's ouevre, how else would he read him than in a "deconstructive" fashion?

The only respectful way to read Derrida is to read against the grain of his texts. Anything else is mere hagiography.

Badiou's criticisms of Derrida are, as are all such criticisms, poorly judged based on a representation of his work which is simplistic and misleading. Yet his criticism of the reliance of post-Heideggerian philosophers on a certain rhetoric of late Romantic defeat and melancholy is a point well made.

Not that Derrida cannot also be a funny and affirmative philosopher, but there is an over-reliance on the derelict topographies of melancholia and loss. Spectres, prosopopeia and the like are extremely attractive tropes in Derrida's work but perhaps Badiou is right and they suck him into a Romantic discourse of ending and remnants which disallows a reading of him in an affirmative mode.

For me there must be two simultaneous readings of Derrida.

The first is a meta-philosophical reading. Derrida the philosopher of the trace. A reduction of Derridean singularities to a singular contribution to the theory of the trace as a mobile space-time nexus as Sean Gaston describes it.

The second is quite the opposite, a lapidary, occasional, singular Derrida where one reads the moments of his work as moments, without ever succumbing to summary and generalisation. The Derrida of poetry, the Derrida of lines, numerical Derrida, Derrida and animals.

Thus my reading of Derrida will be a set based on only one multiple, and at the same time a set which includes all multiples.

Derrida must be read as a proper name. As both singular, and as multiple, one and the many.

Negotiating a reading of Derrida against the grain, undermining Romantic rhetoric, that exists in the paradox of the proper name as both singular (Derrida of the trace) and multiple (the encyclopedic Derrida) strikes me as the only post-Derridean way to read Derrida that is neither ridiculously dismissive (Badiou, Agamben, Habermas) or mere hagiographic commentary.