“We need a transformation of language, a transformation we can neither compel nor concoct. The transformation does not result from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases.”
Martin Heidegger, The Way to Language
“Excellence of diction means clarity and avoidance of banality. Now, clearest is the diction that uses standard terms, but this is banal: the poetry of Cleophon and Sthenelus exemplifies this. Impressive and above the ordinary is the diction that uses exotic language (by ‘exotic’ I mean loan words, metaphors, lengthenings, and all divergence from the standard). But if one composes entirely in this vein, the result will be either a riddle or barbarism—a riddle, if metaphors predominate; barbarism, if loan words. For this is the nature of a riddle, to attach impossibilities to a description of real things.” Aristotle, Poetics
Two quotes, one from Heidegger, one from Aristotle, will calmly and strategically open the place for our discourse, the first of its kind, into the recondite and tenebrous doctrine of the meaningless, or that which is not, for that is the task of this thinking. We will follow these axioms as closely as possible and uphold their values and intimations as sacrosanct.
“Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—‘there are only facts’—I would say: no, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish only fact ‘in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.
‘Everything is subjective’ you say; but even this is interpretation. The ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.—Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.
In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretation otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—‘Perspectivism.’”
Nietzsche, Will to Power
To interpret a corps perdu. How did Derrida understand that?
This will be a[1] will to meaninglessness, a will to say nothing, which will be to say nothing, seriously;[2] (as all scholarships full of scholarnaughts are, as we will see), against Parmenides’ dic(k)tum “Never shall this force itself on us, that that which is not may be;/While you search, keep your thought far away from this path.” Indeed, we will dare to utter the sound, “that which in no way is.” A heterogeneous and dense dismantling of meaning in which meaning, bewildered by its horizon, gets all troped up and simultaneously tropes all over itself when it is said/written that “that which in no way is” or that “that which is not” is. The anxiety that meaning has exerted throughout a certain historico-phallic discourse, generally known as philosophy will now be reflected, refolded so that the anxiety of meaning will now be meaning’s anxiety. In this anxiety and anguish, in this remark, the signifier will be liberated from the signified—significantly. Yet insignificantly.[3] A will to say nothing: a comic interruption of a serious (lets be serious) discourse that has generally occupied and operated within the space under the title of scholarship. This serious discourse (lets be serious) had operated for centuries without interruption, in an ostensible unicity, in a pure auto-affection which did not seem to borrow from outside itself, without any accessory signifier or any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity, until first Nietzsche then Derrida arrived on the scene—writing; a serious discourse (lets be spurious) now in a comedic crisis, a stiff language now being loosened up—writhing. But when was scholarship ever taken serious? Hasn’t scholarship always “been taken” and hasn’t scholarship always taken—removed meaning from the texts it studied? And where did it cast this “meaning” (mise à l’écart)? What did it do to it/with it? Isn’t scholarship a “mere” attachment to the philosophico-phallus, just as Petronius has written? “[A] huge crowd surrounded him with applause and the most awestruck admiration. You see, he had such enormous sexual organs that you’d think the man was just an attachment to his penis.” But who has the phallus[4] (meaning) when scholarship takes the meaning, ships if off? Is meaning a fallacy, a phallus? Is it phallusy? When meaning (the phallus) falls, how does one bring it back up? Can meaning be erected once destroyed? Can the male-centric discourse of philosophy do such a thing? (Or should meaning, a meaning-fallacy, be reinterpreted according to a hymenology, a hymenated discourse intent on raising the phallacy of meaning within the context of the textual phallacy meaning—should the phallus-text become a con-text? Where is the meaning? In the phallus, in the ribald textual skirts, in its folds, in the context of rienterpretation. Meaning is a fallacy, the defining phallacy of Western Civilization. It must be troped off at all costs. Scholarship. Where is the ship of scholars going? Can it be heading somewhere, and can the being-heading of its heading be beheaded or beheld? Can meaning be held, is it beholden to anyone, or is it felicitous, éperonical?) These scholarnauts, these scholarnaughts—perhaps arrive at poetic endness in Charbdys (mettre en abyme), perhaps they met their own deconstruction in and out of a mimed heliotropic metametaphor simultaneously, or, through a reorganized or double reading writing written reading writing they were lost in a chain of signifiers and carried off to an ahegemonic negative space of an Aufhebunghole where Hegemon of Thasos endlessly and iambicly disseminates on them with a preternaturally huge phallogocentricism. And the scholarnaughts missed it. Or will miss it.[5], [6],[7],[8],[9],[10],[11],[12] Thus the missness of any missive must, according to a “logic” of that-which-is-absent (presence), forever remain fractious in any text in which it inhabits, which is all texts. That is what this will be about. But this will also be a bout with the dubious nature of aboutness, which will come about, but only once we are on the way to an aboutness that is prior to, and has priority, to what is currently being-about, being brought about (which is being-brought-about), in this about. Right about now.
Could this be a literary affair? A philosopher’s liaison with lascivious Literature instead of “Logic,” “Meaning,” “Seriousness,” and “Truth”? Is this the first philosophy to have an affair?[13]—Did Plato? Did Nietzsche? Did Descartes? Did Derrida? Or is philosophy itself a literary affair, the literary affair par excellence?
As perilous interpretation,[14] this is also a perilous criticism that wants to risk reasons as well as reason, and is side-splitting, and as side-splitting, is a side-splitting reasoning, which is to say (write), of course, that it reasons sans-fondically. After the fact, After The Fact. After facts, post-truth, but neither from the beginning nor the end, comfortably within and without, the comedic space par excellence, laughing after all these closings, these ends—an opening, a disclosing along the closings of a losing-loosening, now lewd now lucid, that loses its head to end up at an open-ending, which is an upending that unpins the historico-dialectic-ontotheological discourse of science itself.[15]
In a style that carries on, a nonlinear, noncircular, vertiginous movement or transport or send-off or send-off of a send-off already sent yet which still has to be sent, that while it carries on gets carried away and carries away, and as a carrying on and carrying away a simultaneous destabilizing and reinscribing (rien-scribing), remarking for a necessary rereading. As an unweaving of weaving-ness, this is perhaps a leaving, a leaving from Being into—out-in Nonbeing. A sure departure to naught, to naughtyness, to say yes to nihilating. Very naughty.
A collection of accidental essays,[16] full of contingent or arbitrary signs and an obituary of signs orbited on and exhibited along (but not in) the expressive field by crepuscular sighs of a discipline of question whose entire discipline is now in question from within and without, which is neither within nor without. The moment of these critical productions, “where” they take place, is neither here nor there, and their reinscription (a gesture, which will be later commented upon, that will become rienscription) the Derridean gesture par excellence, is set to work to interrupt or decenter the “whereness” or locus, a central locus, of a locution that has lost its awareness of just how radically a-where theoria is. Thus such deconstruction is a-where, wryly.
To conclude, which is to begin (again), sans fin, this scholarship is a celebration of Thoth’s thought, which is to say, among other things, that it is Thothful; it is a celebration of supplemental logic, of a logic of the supplement: “The system of these traits brings into play an original kind of logic: the figure of Thoth is opposed to its other (father, sun, life, speech, origin or orient, etc.), but as that which at once supplements and supplants it. Thoth extends or opposes by repeating or replacing. By the same token, the figure of Thoth takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for.” And, as Derrida, the obtuse, labyrinthine god of esoteric postmodern philosophemes and disrupter-god of writing’s regular spacing par excellence, writes, in a “writing that absolutely upsets all dialectics, all teleology, and all ontology” that, “In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and representative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be.” This scholarship, like Thoth, “repeats everything in the addition of the supplement: in adding to and doubling as the sun, [it] is other than the sun and the same as it; other than the good and the same, etc.” It is “[a]lways taking a place not [its] own,… [it] has neither a proper place nor a proper name. [It’s] propriety or property is impropriety or inappropriateness, the floating indetermination that allows for substitution and play.”[17]
[1] Ibid.
[2] But what can “seriously” mean absent a being-meaningness or being-true (that is, the true being or true beingness of such an onologicalaty, however dubious) of seriousness as such? It must textually mean a series-slyness or a sly seriousness, which is always already a rewritten seriousness or a rienscription of meaning-seriousness or being-seriousness, the there-absentness of nonseriousness. Perhaps the problematic of seriousness posed as such is best ordered around the blind spot of seriousness/nonseriousness (already caught up in an hierarchy within the larger discourse of Western Philosophy itself).
[3] It is an emergence that makes the grammè appear as such (that is to say according to a new structure of nonpresence) (Of Grammatology p. 86)
[4] Are we playing with Derrida’s phallusies? Is there more than one? Is that proper? Is this proper?
[5] For more on such a notion, see “Noteworthy Structures: A Defense of the Current Hegemony of the Footnote, A Reply to H.L. Buckford’s controversial ‘Against Underwriting.’” in Journal of Historical Dialectics.
[6] Cf. “Flaubert’s Meretricious Revisions/Incisions” in W. H. Bain’s dauntless criticism of recent and current scholarship regarding the method of Flaubert’s word choice and writing habits. Particularly insightful is the chapter which speculates that Flaubert indeed discovered le mot juste, yet, to spite the bourgeois, fooled a prostitute into burning the notebook in which he had written it.
[7] One must learn to avail oneself of linearity and moreover, “reading along the line” or reading “by the book.” Perhaps now we are just beginning to be able to pose such questions no matter how systematically threatening they may appear to be.
[8] A comparison of lexicological arbitrariness in writings Plato and Nietzsche is warranted, oriented around a reading of Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines which itself should be read through Derrida’s monolithic Glas. One would thus not only read and see differently, but hear and here differently.
[9] “Verse and Dwelling: How Holderin, Rilke, and Heidegger Inspired a New Architecture,” Architecture’s Thought 7, i (Spring 2007) is illuminating in this context.
[10] Supra p. 2-3
[11] Supra p. 66-81
[12] For a scurrilous rebuke of nineteenth century nihilism see the prominently neglected Helvetius A. V. Delacroix’s Ex Nihilo: From Authentic Anxiety to Radical Meaning, which I will quote in extensio: “As one will have no doubt noticed, there is no such thing as nothing, as non-being; there is no being-meaningless or being of meaninglessness; there is only being and only meaning, and thus existence is radically valuable. Try as one might, meaning always come to be, is always produced. From what? Meaning. There is so much meaning, and meaning is so expansive and manifold, that meaning gets confused with meaning, and meaning covers meaning, which means meanings exist within meaning; if there is “nonmeaning” it is only a form of meaning, only an interpretation of meaning. Nonmeaning, nothing, nothingness, meaninglessness are failed concepts, boogymen who frightened those too scared of Being to get out of bed in Its tremendous darkness to discover Its tremendous light. As soon as there is man, there is meaning, and as there is man, there is meaning.” (p. 337)
[13] Cf. “Sin and Syntax: Kierkegaard’s florid relationship with Literature” in Logos Reconsidered.
[14] “Such a stratum of readability could eventually be translated with no loss into any language which disposes of a certain material, après le détour.” Derrida, perhaps.
[15] Obligatory.
[16] Question de temps.
[17] If the preface appears inadmissible today, it is on the contrary because no possible heading can any longer enable anticipation and recapitulation to meet and to merge with one another. To lose one’s head, no longer to know where one’s head is, such is perhaps the effect of dissemination.
Derrida, Dissemination
To tympanize philosophy--could that mean to tympanize purpose?
The "issues" that will be explored on this blog will be utterly meaningless since they are of a political nature. To the reader's suprise, I do not hate the "person" "Obama," nor the "political" version of "Obama," nor the brand name "Obama," nor even really care about what he does or does not "accomplish" in the contemptible realm of American politics, since such accomplishments are always-already nugatory, and I would honestly rather conjugate random latin verbs while observing a hyperhairy hermaphrodite play air guitar to Metallica's Enter Sandman than endure a prosaic "speech" of Oblahma's.
I am a philosopher as Plato and Nietzsche were, and will only visit upon the lower realms of politics when I am being burned by an intellectual tedium that does not allow me to explore, with the necessary temerity, the more elusive and more bountiful questions of philosophy. Alternatley, this past-time might have borne the name of The Idleness of a Philosopher.
This, therefore, will be a "literary" critique (and here all educated readers will understand a joke, for it is not possible for a politician to be literary [which I suppose will be the sport of this blog to show], unless perhaps he appears in Shakespeare) of the brand name that is commonly signaled to in the Media as "Obama." I will try not to launch any incursion into the brand name's "ideas" for I know that it/he has none, and do not wish to dignify a mere politician (or the noisome occupation itself) by engaging it on philosophical planes. Moreover, I do not understand this project to be involved with "Obama" at all, but the bourgeois event "Obama," which I have sagely rewritten as "Oblahma" for "his" voluble, untremendous "speeches" which the huge media jackoff has shockingly deemed eloquent, sophisticated, and poetic. Of course I understand such a judgement by one of the weightiest and most fatuous elements of postmodern existence to be always-already de minimus, but trying to annoint a political tool with such attributes is contrary to all good taste. I have picked up the pen in defence of Literature while the rest of the blockheads were content to see her assaulted.
I will critique the language, and the "bourgeios culture" (solecism indeed) that surrounds "Oblahma." Alternatley this blog might have borne Voltaire's golden dictum as its title, Ecrasez l'infame! which would here mean "Crush the Bourgeois!"
