[-empyre-] the end of the month

[Alan Sondheim]

I want to thank everyone as well, particularly Sandy and that other Sandy
that provided an open closure at this point. Taking up one of the points
he makes below,
> If we circled to some degree, it would be because of the irreducibly
> human and worldly problems at the center of the topic of "Pain,
> Suffering, and Death in the Virtual." No "progress" is desirable or
> possible on this topic.
- it strikes me that the core of the discussion has also been repetition, 
the repetition of trauma, of PTSD, which is subject-ive, inhabiting the 
subject, body of the subject - as well as the repetition of death itself, 
which is across subjects and bodies. And has been eloquently discussed 
here, these are within us, rediscovered and uncovered by all of us, 
perhaps in similar ways to the discovering and uncovering of sign and body 
themselves. So another month would another experience be, different and 
the same, always differand to sign and body, differand to traumatic pain 
an death. I wish I had learned more about the practice of healing, and 
even more about plausible afterlives (I live within what, for me, is the 
misery of absolute atheism).

Some of the people we know are in real troubles as a result of the 
hurricane, let's do what we can, reaching out, on a practical level as 
well. This is only the storm of the century (here) (this year).

Thank you everyone!

- Alan


On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, Charles Baldwin wrote:

> I thank Maria for beginning the ending of the month by noting the full circle of the discussion. To some degree we were suspended between moving examples of forms (genres?) of expressing/giving words to pain and suffering, and - on the other hand - impossible examples (the impossibility of examples) of the inexpressibility of suffering at the core of the organism.
>
> Maria nicely stated that this full-circle "gives us a chance to consider the past month with a certain vividness." *Vividness* might be a term for intervention of events (such as Sandy, *events* as the weather or the world's noise). Vividness, as well, brings us back to art, another of our persistent concerns. In this sense, the aesthetic sense of vividness offers as term for the intervention of names (such as Sandy, names as the voice that expresses events in all their contingency).
>
> If we circled to some degree, it would be because of the irreducibly 
> human and worldly problems at the center of the topic of "Pain, 
> Suffering, and Death in the Virtual." No "progress" is desirable or 
> possible on this topic. What would it mean to leave this behind? How 
> could we? What would we be without the topic of pain and suffering? The 
> topic will continue, we have no choice.
>
> I want to thank everyone who participated in this months discussion, including invited guest discussants Monika Weiss, Deena Larsen, Johannes Birringer, Jonathan Marshall, Fau Ferdinand, and Maria Damon. In addition, I particularly want to thank my co-moderator Alan Sondheim.
>
> - Sandy
>