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<p class="MsoNormal">Simon,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thanks for sharing. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Reading this, and other texts written in the
last few weeks
by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito and Bruno
Latour, I can’t
help also thinking about the ‘trap of the event’. In
letter to Jean-Paul Sartre of 18 July, 1953, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
has this to say about the
relation between philosophy, politics, writing and events:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">‘I have in no way renounced writing on
politics… What I have
decided to do since the Korean War is a very different thing. I
have decided to
refrain from writing on events as they are unfolding. This has to
do with
reasons that belonged to that period, and also with reasons that
are permanent.
… I have suggested a number of times that what the journal [<i
style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Les Temps Modernes</i>]
should be doing is
not take hasty positions, but rather propose lengthy studies. ...
What I had in
mind was to act as writers, a type of action that consists in a
back and forth
between the event and the general line, and which does not simply
consist in
confronting every event (in imaginary fashion) as though it was
decisive,
unique and irreparable. This method is much closer to politics
than your method
of ‘engagement continue’ [continuous engagement] (in the Cartesian
sense).
Indeed, precisely in that sense, it is more philosophical, because
the distance
it creates between the event and the judgement one passes on it
defuses the
trap of the event...’</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Interestingly, Wendy Brown quotes this passage
from Merleau-Ponty in her
chapter on ‘Moralism as Anti-Politics’ in Politics Out of History.
To the ‘trap of the event’ and the ‘terms of “the event”’ she adds
the ‘trap
of existing discourses’. <br>
</p>
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</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Best, Gary</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br>
</p>
<p>-- <br>
Gary Hall<br>
Professor of Media<br>
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Faculty of Arts
& Humanities, Coventry University<br>
Website <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.garyhall.info">http://www.garyhall.info</a><br>
<br>
Latest:<br>
‘Anti-Bourgeois Theory', Media Theory, Vol.3, No.2, December,
2019:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91">http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91</a><br>
<br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 05/04/2020 01:00, Simon wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:c297002d-8062-bd20-8d48-002a42e55ac2@zoho.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------</pre>
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<p>Dear <<empyreans>>,</p>
<p>I would like to pass on to the list Levi Bryant's article "<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/announcement/view/21?fbclid=IwAR3Mce3ny1uoYptruUjRhgiob-ql-zvdke3sGqPqJt62MGNaMECTwkemoCQ">A
World is Ending</a>," because it both has much to commend it
and offers much to contest. For example, I find it strange that
one who has written so well about Deleuze should think the
Kantian transcendental framing of thought is what the current
situation might reveal to be a fantasy. <br>
</p>
<p>"An entire way of thinking, frame of thought, appears to be a
fantasy that dreams of escaping our bodies and imbrication in
matter."</p>
<p>But to commend it I find the symptomatic status of toilet paper
and the fragmentation of things formerly unified under the
supermarket.</p>
<p>Mortality, Bryant writes, has itself surrendered to an analytic
critique: our lives in any one life have fallen apart. <br>
</p>
<p>I would rather suggest this is what happens in experience but
that it is seldom noticed. It happens as experience, takes the
form of experience and is its formation: the apodictic
experience of geometry Stiegler borrows from Hegel; or that
experience of mathematics' demonstrable proofs of which Spinoza
writes.</p>
<p>Our lives in any one life--our households in any one home--our
states and nations in any one state or nation--should we from
this or must we from this infer the unity of a past passing
through an apocalypse of the present and its fragmentation to a
future unity which is such that it can be--or should be--or must
be--revealed?</p>
<p>A community to come... of the same... promises the same... when
communicability--whether through the transcendental frame or
through the porosity of borders and bubbles and bodies--reveals
itself to be, is the problem, or question?</p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>Simon</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">_______________________________________________
empyre forum
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a></pre>
</blockquote>
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