[-empyre-] waving?

[Gary Hall]

Simon,

Thanks for sharing.

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:

‘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 [/Les Temps Modernes/] 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...’

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’.


Best, Gary



-- 
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Faculty of Arts & 
Humanities, Coventry University
Website http://www.garyhall.info

Latest:
‘Anti-Bourgeois Theory', Media Theory, Vol.3, No.2, December, 2019:
http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91


On 05/04/2020 01:00, Simon wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Dear <<empyreans>>,
>
> I would like to pass on to the list Levi Bryant's article "A World is 
> Ending 
> <https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/announcement/view/21?fbclid=IwAR3Mce3ny1uoYptruUjRhgiob-ql-zvdke3sGqPqJt62MGNaMECTwkemoCQ>," 
> 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.
>
> "An entire way of thinking, frame of thought, appears to be a fantasy 
> that dreams of escaping our bodies and imbrication in matter."
>
> But to commend it I find the symptomatic status of toilet paper and 
> the fragmentation of things formerly unified under the supermarket.
>
> Mortality, Bryant writes, has itself surrendered to an analytic 
> critique: our lives in any one life have fallen apart.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> Best,
>
> Simon
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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