After-Math:

Rereading as the Last Man: The Arche-Fossil and Arche-Trace

Ferdinand de Saussure has an appendix with a section in “Linguistic paleontology” and

Pictet in his General Course on Linguistics.

“Linguistic paleontology” Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and

Semites, a Match Made in Heaven trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard UP, 1992.

Adolphe Pictet

“The year 1859, which saw the publiation of Darwin’s Origin of Species, was also the

year in which a monumental “essay on linguisitc paleontology” appeared under the title

Les origins indoeuropeenes ou les Aryas primitifs (Indo-European Origins, or the

Primitve Arays). Its author, Adolphe Pitctet (1799-1855), belonged to one of the leading

families of Calvinist Genvea. . . . His method was that of a linguistic ethnographer in

search of words capable of bringing the primitieve Aryas back to life. What did the Aryas

pass on to their descendants—among whom Pictet counted himself—other than their

language? Language is the only way to rescue Aryas from the obscurity of centuries.

Pictet therefore embarks on a journey of “linguistic paleontology,” tracking the destiny of

words. His mission: to revive Indo-European meomories in a Chrisitan Europe that is in

search of an even brighter future. . . . Taking as his model new techniques in analyzing

fossils, he hoped to give voice t the vestiges of the Arian vocabulary as other scientists

reconstituted the life of an animal—its feeing habits and other behavior—forma few

bones: “For words last as long as bones, and just as a tooth implicitly contains parts of an

1

animal’s history, a single word can lead to the whole series of ideas associated with its

formation, Thus the name linguistic paleontology is ideally suited to the science we have

in mind,” (p.14).” (93; 95; 96)

A history of philology is missing. Nota need to be filled—another retracing, unfolding

narrative. Read the lack of the history , even as valuable as a conventionalone would be,

as symptomatic of a blindness to publication history, to files, to the archive, retrieval,

storage, and so on, due to fantasy of reanimation—bringing back to life.

Language as repository of primitiv eimagrey, p 97.

Revised and augmented 2009. “Fossils”

Christine Kenneally, The First Word:

The Search for the Origins

of Language. This book grows out

of Kenneally's conviction that

investigating the evolution of language

2

is a good and worthwhile pursuit—a

stance that most in the field of

linguistics disparaged until about 20

years ago. The result is a book that is as

much about evolutionary biology as it is

about linguistics. We read about work

with chimpanzees, bonobos, parrots and

even robots that are being programmed

to develop language evolutionarily.

Kenneally, who has written about

language, science and culture for the

New Yorker and Discover among others,

has a breezily journalistic style that is

3

occasionally witty but more often

pragmatic, as she tries to distill

academic and scientific discourses into

terms the casual reader will understand.

She introduces the major players in the

field of linguistics and behavioral studies

—Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Sue

Savage-Rumbaugh and Philip Lieberman

—as well as countless other

anthropologists, biologists and linguists.

Kenneally's insistence upon seeing

human capacity for speech on an

evolutionary continuum of

4

communication that includes all other

animal species provides a respite from

ideological declamations about human

supremacy, but the book will appeal

mainly to those who are drawn to the

nuts and bolts of scientific inquiry into

language.

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention [Paperback]Guy Deutscher The linguistic chain that

connects the boasts of an ancient

Sumerian monarch to the jests of

5

Groucho Marx is long and convoluted,

but Deutscher retraces it, fascinating

link by fascinating link, identifying the

dynamic processes that have

continuously transformed and renewed

the world's diverse languages. Even

when delving deeply into ancient

manuscripts and temple engravings,

Deutscher interprets every linguistic

mutation as the consequence of

evolutionary forces still observable in

today's living languages. Readers see in

linguistic fossils from Mesopotamia

6

traces of the same conversion of living

metaphor into conceptual lattice still

taking place in modern English, German,

and Indonesian. What Deutscher

demonstrates most clearly is how

linguistic structures that look like the

product of deliberate artifice can

emerge from entirely natural processes.

Predictably, when he probes the

linguistic developments before the

advent of writing, the author must

frequently substitute his own

speculations for solid evidence. Entailing

7

just enough technical detail to tempt

readers into professional sources (listed

at the book's conclusion), this

introduction to fundamental linguistic

principles opens to nonspecialists a rich

theoretical vista.

Using language himself in a lively and

engaging way, Deutscher, an expert in

Semitic languages at the University of

Leiden in Holland, identifies two

principles—the desire to create order

out of chaotic reality, and the urge to

vary the sounds of words and their

8

meanings—providing the direction by

which language developed and

continues to develop. Rather than

search for the prehistoric moment when

speech originated, Deutscher says we

can most profitably understand the

phenomenon by taking the present as

the key to the past. Using a wide array

of examples, he delves into the back-

formation of words (making a noun into

a verb), the evolution of relative clauses

from simple pointing words (that, this)

and the turning of objects into nouns.

9

On the question of whether language is

innate, Deutscher takes a middle path,

asserting that our brains are wired for

basic language, but that linguistic

complexity is brought about by cultural

evolution. Deutscher's entertaining

writing and his knack for telling a good

tale about how words develop offer a

delightful and charming story of

language.Jacques in a Box

Language itself is language. The understanding that is schooled in logic, thinking

of everything in terms of calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this

proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical thing twice--language

is language--how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to

get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already.

10

Martin Heidegger, "Language," 188

Maybe it really is better to write without an addressee.

-- Jacques Ranicere, The Flesh of Words: the Politics of Writing, 145

Heidegger said in a moving way: one of the most silent and timid of men suffered

the torment of being obliged to cry out and, enigma following enigma, what was a

cry risked becoming idle chatter. Nietzsche's admonition, "the written cry of the

thought"--a cry that took form in the disagreeable book that is Zarathrustra--in

fact came to be lost two ways: it was not heard, it was heard overly well; nihilism

became the commonplace of thought and of literature.

--Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 143

Differences of speed do seem to be determining. The rhythm differential counts

a lot for me; it governs practically everything. It’s not very original when it comes

down to it, you only have to be a driver to know this: knowing how to accelerate,

slow down, stop, and start up again. The driving lesson applies just as well to

private life and accidents are always possible. The scene of the car accident is

imprinted or overprinted in quite few of my texts, like a sort of premonitory

signature, a bit sinister. That said, I don’t believe that speeding up on the political

highway has been, as you suggest, the result of media pressure.

--Jacques Derrida, “Others are Secret Because They Are Other” Paper Machine,

153

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. "Le dernier philosophe." L'Imitation des modernes. Paris: Galilee, 1986. 203-225.

REMARKABLE CREATURES

Translating Stories of 11

Life Forms Etched in Stone

James G. GehlingPUZZLE Many of the creatures found in the fossil record from the time immediately preceding the Cambrian are so unlike modern forms that deciphering what they are and how they lived continues to challenge paleontologists. More Photos »By SEAN B. CARROLLPublished: July 26, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/science/

27creatures.html

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

12

JD's Tour des Babels in Acts of Religion and ran acrossthis passage last night (I underlined it the last time I read it) andthought you might want to use it in your MOPI essay:Strange debt, which does not bound anyone to anyone. If the structureof the work is "sur-vival," the debt does not engage in relation to ahypothetical subject-author of the original text--dead or mortal, thedead man, or "dummy" of the text, --but to something else thatrepresents the formal law in the immanence of the original text.  Thenthe debt does not involve restitution of a copy or a good image, afaithful representation of the original: the latter , the survivor, isitself in the process of transformation.  The original gives itself inmodifying itself; this gift is not an object given; it lives and liveson in mutation. . . .(117)

“postmaturation (NachriefeO of a living

organism ..

13

From its height babel at every instant

supervises and purprises my reading: I

translate, I translate the translation by

Maurice de Gandiallac of a text by

Neaminwho, prefacing a translation, takes it

as a pretext to say what and in what every

translator is committed—and notes in

passing, an essential part of his

demonstration, that there could be no

translation of translation. This wil have to be

rememerbed.

Organic growth idea of hioly language in WB

in JD’s terms becomes a a mutation.

Connect to Paul deMan on Derrida on task of

the translator

14

Strauss could have added another salient feature: the circulation of more or less

clandestine class or seminar notes by initiated disciples or, even more

symptomatic, the rumored (and often confirmed) existence of unpublished

manuscripts made available only to the enterprising or privileged researcher and

which will decisively seal one interpretation at the expense of all rival modes—at

least until one of the rivals, will, in his turn, discover the real or imaginary

counter-manuscript on which to base his counter-claim.

Paul de Man, “Dialogue and Dialogism,” The Resistance to Theory, 108

Pre-Human

And can we connect the question about Homo Sacer (the vicitm) to the

conclusion, the fossil and the arche-trace, from the sacred man to the last

(sacred) man? I think we need to return to Agamben in the conclusion since we

will have started with him.

15

Comments about theory and theoretical in The Last Man (dir. 1964), first

adaptation of I Am Legend.

conclusion on last man after extinction—Finite Thinking by Nancy along with Meillasoux.

The Last Man on Earth—first adaptation of I Am Legend

Film within a film scene followed by a flashback which includes the making of the film within the film.

Buries wife and dog but cremates everyone else. Witchfinder General as Deathfinder General—the zombies are like vampires—mirrors, daylight, and stakes through the heart, plus garlic on door and crosses as well.

Ends with the last man freaking out at the freaks.

This book has its roots in conversations I had with my wife as we were driving around Massachusetts in the late 1990s. She noticed the various storage units that were sprouting up. We came up with the idea for a book of photos of these storages units and calling it Self-Storage (activating the pun). That was one of our many fantasy books. When we were watching Max Payne, my wife called attention to the self-storage scene, and, inlight of my reading, I knew I had a book. I organized a course accordingly. But the book only really took off when Julian asked me about the relation between that course and another I was teaching the same semester, on death in film. Initially, we planned to write a book on things and storage unit but recognized as we put the book together, that we were really writing a book on the archive. After a few months of talking about writing the book, but for reasons neither of us could understand, we were unable

16

to write the book together. Julian kindly and generously allowed me to write the book without him.This book would certainly not be what it is were it not for the many enlightening conversations I had with Julian over the telephone. The book was written in a state close to mourning of the book not to come.

Ronell, Dicatations: On Haunted rting, note 15, p. 201, has an interesting

endnote on the “motif of the straying seaman and “the lost seaman.”

Pandorum turned out to be terrible, but worth the waste of time

because there is one scene in which a woman biologist, who looks and

fights like a Laura Croft knock-off, describes a huge area of a

spacecraft as "Noah's ark,"saying the test tube (DNA?) samples are

"the archive" of humanity-and lamenting that about a third of them

have already been lost.  The film actually has a kind of Noah's Ark

happy ending, with the Earth's population finally arriving (in pods

(after only an Adam and Eve couple seem to have survived) at another

life sustaining planet (Earth blew up in the meantime, and the

spaceship landed, but in the ocean). A mutant vampire cannibalistic

like species (they look just like the mutants in remake of Omega Man)

is wiped out. The white captain turns out to be the villain and is

"left behind" as a sort of sacrificial victim.

Definitely a "bio-Hope-ocalypse" film.

17

More overt in its ark-ive theology than 2012 but even worse as a

film--seriously derivative.  But the bio-archive angle is new.

To be included in a footnote in our conclusion, perhaps.   

Hence reading returns for us front and center of our book as

something closed, hidden when opened, something that offers resistance

(to hackers, forgers, terrorists, aliens, and so on).   We see reading things

and processing people as passing through from outside to inside (the

assumption almost always being that the container has no value and that

what it contains alone has value) as inevitably to having to pass around.  We

float this book and invite the reader to pick it up, turn it over,

read it back to front, or linearly, to treat it as a random access

document that can be picked up or pushed aside as the occasion

demands.  Intoxication, abandon, habit forming, pleasure /

frustration, opening to find promise of content disappointed by the

empty contents. We are interested in the temporality and spectrality of things, in

prehistory, history, and posthistory, anteriority of the arche-fossil versus arche-

drawing, arche-writing (the trace), and judgment. The reinscription of

eschatological structures into empty, linear, homogenous time in accounts of last

things.1

National Geographic: Aftermath - Population Zero (2008)Product DescriptionAftermath: Population Zero investigates what would happen if every single

18

person on Earth simply disappeared. Drastic changes to the environment animals running wild Meltdowns and explosions all over the world. This is what life will be like on earth from day ten to one year after humans vanish from existence. This is the astounding story of a world we will never see.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Rating: NR UPC: 727994753124 Manufacturer No: 1000039824

Life After People: The Complete Season TwoProduct DescriptionWelcome to Earth: Population 0. If humans vanish from the face of the earth, what happens to the world we leave behind? HISTORY offers another amazing glimpse of what that might look like. Expert engineers, biologists, geologists and archeologists create scenarios while CGI effects present haunting views of our planet's future. What will happen to our iconic structures? What creatures will take our place? Will our garbage outlive us by one million years? When the imprint of man has faded, LIFE AFTER PEOPLE explores the humbling and fascinating possibilities.

Life After People (History): The Series--The Complete Season One (2009)Editorial ReviewsProduct DescriptionWhat would happen if every human being on Earth disappeared? This isn t the story of how we might vanish it is the story of what happens to the world we leave behind. Building off the success of the HISTORY two-hour special Life After People, this series continues the exploration of a world wiped clean of humanity, in even more vivid detail. Each episode is a stunningly graphic examination of how the very landscape of planet Earth would change in our absence, using cinematic CGI to reveal in scientific detail the fate of every aspect of the man-made world. What happens to the millions of animals that supply our food? The chemicals stored in industrial complexes? Which animals take over subways? Do satellites fall to Earth? When does Mt. Rushmore wither away? Every episode will unfold in the hours, days, months and years after people disappear and will combine three to four different kinds of stories, from animal outbreaks to structural collapses, building to a unique visual finale. Welcome to Earth, population zero.

Which Part of Werner Herzog’s 3-D Cave Painting Movie Don’t You Understand?By DAVE ITZKOFF 2

The Box as a film about human extinction.

The Last Book

19

Introduction to Derrida, The Work of Mourning, the editors note that he often talks

about the dead person’s last words of final book. In the eulogy for Louis Marin

he talks about the ”last book” and uses the phrase several times, especially in

relation to the way the temporality of reaing and writing is not reducible to a

future anterior even though he has just said that Marin effectively knew he was

going to die and knew he would not see the publication of his last book and how

all Marin’s books are written in a way that makes them posthumous even while

Marin was still alive.

Derrida, Work of Mourning obit on setting Catholic eucharist as the default for

mourning in Louis Marin and again in Sarah Kofmann, this time connected to the

book and body, to the last book and not being able to close—suspending the

Christian notion of the last judgment, keeping the gift and legacy in play as

opposed to giving a dead reckoning. You can give an account of someone dead,

of yourself, of the survival of the dead, of the way they living are posthumous in

writing, even give an account of yourself that does not settle accounts, pay off

debts, close the book, cross a name off a list.

Tell me why we wait for death. Marin’s last book will have helped me think this.

To think what which in fact regards each of so singularly, namely, the law of what

does not return of come back, if what comes back to us only there where it can

no longer come back to us, and so comes down, lie mastery, that is, like the

20

fiction of force, to the incontestable authority of death, to the very inexistence of

the image, of its fantastic power, to the impresence [sic] of a trace.

Louis Marin knew that this authority begins before death, and that death begins

its work before death. Death’s watch [veille], the time of this book, had begun

long ago for Louis Marin, well before the eve [veille] of his death.

This is also why this book cannot be closed, why it interrupts itself interminably.

And however prepared I might have been for it, I read it too quickly, in a sort of

haste that no mourning will be able to diminish or console. It happened to me too

quickly, like Louis’s death. I feel as if I were still on the eve of reading it. (164)

“As if respect for this certainty were still a debt, the last one, owed to the friend.”

(160)

“And this is what secretly links the gift to death” (164)

“Well never have the time.” (163)

“To speak this evening of the last book of Marin as I might have spoken in

another time and in more conventional circumstances of his most recent book.

(158)

“With a certain time of reading” (158)

“survival effect” (157)

that we are all looked at (each of us singularly) by the one who, with each page,

will providentially deciphered and prescribed, arranged in advance , a reading of

what is happening here, of what makes the present scene possible, foreseeing

and watching over it with the benevolent regard (since it is he who watches out to

watch over us) and with all the love of someone who can say, at the moment of

21

dying, even if it is not Christ or Christian, hoc est meum corpus, which is given for

you. Do this in remembrance of me (Luke 22.19) 160)

Sarah Kofman

At first I did not know—and I still in fact do not know—what title to give to these

words.

What is the gift of a title?

I even had the fleeting suspicion that such a gift would be somewhat indecent: it

would imply the violent selection of a perspective, an abusive interpretative

framing or narcissistic reappropriation, a conspicuous signature that is Sarah

Kofman, Sarah Kofman alone, Sarah Kofman herself, ever there [la-bas], beyond

here, well beyond me or us here and now. Sarah Kofman who should be spoken

about whom I hear speaking.

Sarah Kofman

Would d then be the best title, were I not afraid of being unable to measure up to

it.

Finally-since the question remains the gift and of what it means to give a title—it

seemed to me more just to speak, and for just this reason, of the gift in Sarah

Kofman, of her gifts: those she gave us, those she left us, and those she too

perhaps received.

The title would then be

Sarah Kofman’s Gifts

And here are a few possible subtitles, to give you some idea of what I would like

to say:

22

Here There

Open Book, Closed Book

Protestations

Here and there we find the body and we find the book, the open book and the

closed book. And protestations. Between the two, between here and there,

between the body and the book, between the open book and the closed one,

there would be, here and there, the third, the witness, the terstis, testimony,

attestation, and testament—but in the form of protest or protestation.

For when I say body, I mean the living body as well as the sexed body—as if

thus testament, the oldest and the newest: “this is my body,” “keep it in memory

of me,” and so, “replace it, in memory of me, with a book or discourse to be

bound in hide or put into digital memory. Transfigure me into a corpus. So that

there no longer be any difference between the real presence or of the Eucharist

and the great computerized library of knowledge.”

This great eucharistic paradigm, was first of all, and perhaps will always remain,

what is proper to man I mean to the son or the father. For is this not a scene of

men? No doubt, as long, that is, as we keep to the visibility of the scene.

We will perhaps talk later about the veil of a certain Last Supper scene, I mean

the Last Supper [Cene] of the Holy Table. (168; 169)

The eucharist is thus a scene of reading, of transfiguration rather than

transubstantiation.

The obit ends with

23

“On October 15, 1994, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Nietzsche’s

birth, Sarah Kofman took her own life.”

She is both Jewish and a suicide, and yet Derrida reads her legacy rather

expansively in Christian terms.

Her father (French) was interned, deported to Auschwitz, and died there. “The

children were given French names to conceal their identities” (165). She lived

with her mothering hiding with a french family during the Occupation.

The obit of Sarah Kofman ends with her suicide in 1994. In the eulogy that

follows, Derrida singles out her last essay, published in 1995, entitled “Conjuring

Death” for attention because it is “unfinished,” because he can “read this both

posthumous and living” text, and because the text itself is about the cory and the

book, about the way Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicholase Tulp,

1632, is the doctors reading their books and not looking at the cadaver (Derrida

says he prefers corpse because it is like the French “le corp”

He cites a passage “which he mentions life three times in this place where book,

cadaver, corpus, and corpse exchange places” (177).

The editors have an endnote that hints but does not say that the text was

published posthumously and quotes thee editors’ note that preceded the original

French publication of the essay (that again acknowledges SK’s death without

mentioning it). The editors of the French original read the essay in entirely

secular terms: “Sarah emphasized that this pairing of the cadaver and the book,

both of them open and offered to the gazes of the doctors surrounded by objects

24

situated in a play of light, offered, quite beyond the conventions of the genre, a

representation of the scientific method. The book, a sum and source of

knowledge, at once confronted and supported by the materiality of

experimentation, gives a new impetus to the discourse of science, its texts and

its commentaries” (p. 293 n. 1 in Selected Writings: Sarah Kofman ed. Thomas

Albrecht with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Introduction by Jacques

Derrida. (Stanford UP, 2007).

Derrida’s reading of the essay follows the mix of dry obit and critical eulogy in

which he recasts her suicide as a kind of burial in his essay. She becomes a

kind of Ophelia who protests against, resists Christian burial, protests against the

transfiguration of her texts even as she makes them readable only by giving them

away in relation to a last supper.

Mu-seal-ization

What is (not) happening in Planet of the Apes.

The past cannot be sealed by being put on exhibition.

The past cannot be kept under wraps, but it cannot be put in its

proper place and time either.

Students connecting (on their own) de Man's Concept of Irony to

Freud's Uncanny in their questions, focusing on the problem of

25

definition in both cases (neither the uncanny nor irony can be

defined).  I love teaching.

Plan-it of the Apes

Reading of The Planet of the Apes museum scene and forbidden zone cave

excavation sight scene in relation ot the discovery of Lascaux scene and film

discussed by Bataille in relation to the photo by Ann Althouse of the Hall of

Human Origin exhibit at the NY Museum of Natural history, where we see the

first man before the first man.

The ape couple in the photo are anthropomorphized and presented an entombed

work of art. They are a kind of Adam and Eve of Adam and Eve, a couple we are

26

to assume is reproductive (not sterile) and who will have or may already have

children. The have no clothes though the ape’s penis is exposed. It’s like Adam

and Eve not being aware of their nakedness before they fall. They apes are also

enclosed int a large sphere the top of and bottom of which is cut through by the

ceiling and floor. The photo is taken with a wide angle lense giving the space a

fishbowl, funhouse effect. The couple are not made to scale, apparently. They

are half-size pre-humans.

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/02/fisheye-view-of-museum-of-natural.html

Hall of Human Origins is featured in the end of the movie "Election".

In Planet of the Apes, Taylor (Heston) stumbles upon his crewman stuffed as

part of an exhibit. It’s an uncanny moment where he recognizes, from behind,

that the present has been museumified, or that the history of the exhibit has

nothing to do or does not share the same temporality or continuously represent

the temporality of the time of man, shown (not) to be the origin of apes. The

museum and the funeral hall (church?) seem to be part of the same building.

Taylor turns himself into a exhibit at his trial, exhibit, Man, but the apes do

monkey hear no, see no, speak no evil. The partially excavated site of the cave

in the forbidden zone cannot be turned into an exhibition, however, but must be

blown up so that its exhibition cannot be red and turned into evidence (legal and

scientific). The odd thing is that it’s not a real caveman site but a modern man

living in a cave site—perhaps after the blast. But the time of the site is just as

27

uncanny and mixed up as the itme oof the museum. The prison is also a kind of

zoo for scientific experiments—again Nazi like—cutting out his brain, as Taylor

put it, or castration. Reproduction ahs to be reproduced. Zaius is for a kind of

anti-experimentation theocrat who knows but thinks no one else must know. The

decision for ignorance may be regarded as evolution or devolution given that

man ended his world through nuclear destruction and faith in science. The

human have become zoe, not bios, while the apes have become bios, not zoe.

But his attempt to close down things has already fissured in the separation of

caught humans into cages (the one outside), cells, and exhibitions as well as the

connection between secular and sacred spaces, museum and pyramid (coffin as

a sarcaphogus), and the apes are continually shown to ape man when evolving

between apes as we the audience know them. They are still apes and so

reproduce the worst of men from the most primitive to the most advanced, a

distinction collapsed in the cave turned dig site.

No digging your way out of the problem. Man is just a wash up (final shots),

beached.

Adam and Eve are called up in the film by Taylor.

There is always away in which the maternal is skipped over—the woman

astronaut is dead on arrival, the plunge into the water, the neohuman as mute,

the doll that can only cry, not actually pronounce words, though Heston takes the

doll ot be roof that humans were there before the apes. Somehow the apes

28

evolved while humans devolved. Kind of like Marker’s La Jetee in which the

present and future can be imagined, but not the past. The one scene in which

the Man does not have his eye mask on is the followed by the one scene with

movement when the Woman, in close up, opens her yes. But it’s not an eyeline

match shot as it is near the end of Twelve Monkeys between the boy and

Madeline Stowe as Willis is shot dead.

The museum scene in La Jetee--zoe and bios—the Man and the Woman

(another rkind of Adam and Eve,but vertiginized) are more aliev than the stuffed

animals--another museum scene to conect to the museum scene in Planet of the

Apes.

Desire to go back to the past leads to a retake of Vertigo--now the

Man goes to fhis own death, not to the WOman's, as Scotty did to Judy

by fetishitically forcing her to reanct Madeline.  He refused to give

up the fetish in order to get an acccontig of himself, to figure out

what happened and what his own viretigo means. Instead, he scapegoats

her because of attachment to the necklace.

The Man in La Jetee is split between adult and child--can't recognize

himself, but does see himself, sort of; by contrast, Scottie doesn't

think that Madleine may be seeing him in the dorr with the mirror on

when she buys fower is in Macy's if he can see her.

29

“Not a slip-up anywhere

maybe a little one in the history of

the Resistance?

SO all you can do is go back to

the story.”

Georges Perec, 53 Days

A great epigraph—because of the doubleness of the resistance—a confession,

self-examination, already records the fact that the key has slipped and remains in

the files.

Perfect place for thinking about theoretical futures. Meillaseux suspends rhetoric

and also takes the Jew out of the Resistance, to create a seamless narrative

about correlationism in which there is nothing to go to back.

Perec’s novel is kryptonite to QM’s.

Perecotheque Nationale

Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, ed. Trevor Winkfield

30

L’Arc No. 68, 1977

“Scrumptious compendium of articles by Harry Mathews [sic] and Georges Perec

(who create a fake Roussel text), Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Ricardou and Fremon;

drawings by Baruchello and Adami.” (263)

Raymond Roussel

Publisher: Aix-en-Provence : L'Arc, 1977

Edition/Format: Book : French

Publication: L'Arc (Aix-en-Provence), 68

Notes Revue de la Bibliotheque Nationalionale No. 43 Spring 1992

“Lavish overview of the mouthwatering cache of Rousseliana discovered in

storage in 1989 and subsequently purchased by the Bibliotheque Nationale. To

be begged, borrowed, or Xeroxed at any cost.” (264)

Foregone Conclusions

31

Shoah, Disc Four: The last interview ends with the guy saying that he thought he

was the last Jew alive on earth and that he would just wait for the Germans.

Then a final shot of the train. The End.

In Moses and Monothesism, Freud refers to the Leit-fossil and also to the fossil.

Here we may call again on the custom of circumcision, which—a kind of

“Leitfossil”—has repeatedly rendered us important services. (46) From now on ,

the Jewish religion was, so speak, a fossil.” (113) Katherine Jones translation.

Introduction: "Not the First Philosophy, but a Last One": Notes on Adorno's

Thought, by Rolf Tiedemann

Can one live after Auschwitz? : a philosophical reader

Theodor W. Adorno ; edited by Rolf Tiedemann ; translated by Rodney

Livingstone and others. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2003.

In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto, says he dreamt

that if he survived he would be the only person in the world, the last man.See

First Era, Part Two at 101:33.

“Like images in a film, the epic theater moves in spurts.  Its basic

form is that of shock with the individual, well-defined situations of

a play collide. The songs, the captions, the gestic conventions set

off one situation from another.  This creates intervals which, if

anything, undermine the illusion of the audience and paralyze its

32

readiness for empathy."

Theater is understood through another medium--film--and its disruption

(the interval as a kind of unexpected intermission).

Derrida’s Aporias: Dying On responsible decision p. 16-17

only vulgar time, only vulgar death, p. 14

uncanny comes up p. 67

on p. 67, as two lines of the page,  Derrida mentions a key passage from B and t

(two sentences) and finally cites it on p. 69

Mentions the nearing end of his essay on p. 62 and again on p. 72.

“principle of ruin”, p. 73.

The full scale deconstruction of Heidegger occurs after the break on p. 72, really

kicking in on pp. 74-78

“anachronism”, p. 66, 81

Reference to Aries's work on the history of death as a "footnote" p. 80 

33

Heidegger disassociates "Verfallen from the original sin and from any morality as

well as any theology"(77) but "neither the language nor the process of this

[Heidegger's] analysis of death is possible without the Christian experience,

indeed, the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic experience of death to to which this 0

testifies" (80). 

It may even engage the political in its essence. p. 61  

Might we read the first section (pp. 1-22) as kind of autobiographical exposition of

what is to follow?

In what Derrida calls "these detours" on p. 21 (to describe the previous 20 and a

half pages), Derrida does a characteristic kind of self-citation but in a different

way, this time three times (pp. 13-20), the first time historicizing his earlier work,

dated he says from "twenty five years earlier" (13) an essay in Margins of

Philosophy on a note in Heidegger, into his essay.  "Allow me to recall it" (p. 134)

So it seems to be a reshelving moment for Derrida, an indexing that is also a 

quasi intellectual autobiography. "I was then trying to demonstrate" (14).  It does

not read smoothly, however, as a narrative.

The second self-citation moment (and more typical of Derrida) is on p. 15.  the

endnote is standard (in giving the full biblio info for the references--Derrida gives

only the titles.

34

in this case, he fames the self-citations in terms of his prior discussions of

"aperotology or apertography" (15). 

The third self-citation is really quite exceptional: it includes two very chunky

excerpts from The Other Heading, connecting the second self-citation to politics:

"These examples were not fortuitously political" (17).  Neither are the quoted

chunks identified as being from the Other Heading.  Only the translator includes

endnotes identifying them.  They are unmarked self-citations. 

"before ending this backtracking that has the form of premises--forgive me, I

need to do so" 917)

This turn to Nazism comes at the end of a discussion of hostage wars and how

they depend on specific kinds of transportation and telecommunications

systems. 

Derrida's critique of histories and anthropologies of death (culture of death) really

cracks open questions about death that historians and anthropologists

unthinkingly presume to be always already answered and not even if need of

being questioned. 

Derrida also has a great line on death as a metaphor in history and anthropology

that goes unrecognized as such. 

35

I have gone back to the section (49) of Being and Time Derrida discusses (he

focuses on it because it is in his view exemplary) and will read 47, 48, and 50 too

(Derrida mentions them in passing). 

What looks like an epigraph on the page before p. 1 turns out to be the book’s

subtitle, which Derrida comments on on p. 64 (bottom).  The subtitle also

appears the same way on the title page, but not on the book cover, the book

spine, nor on the copyright page (which gives only the original French title, which

is the same as what appears on the title page, when the Stanford UP translation

was originally published in French as an essay in a French book with a different

title).  The epigraph / subtitle border crossing / confusion may be just a function

of the book’s graphic design.

Living on the L/Edge/R

Speaking of narrow footholds, and the problem of paying off the debts of

reading.

The Life and Death of Languages.3

Hegel, whom Derrida calls in Of Grammatology "the last philosopher of the book

and the first thinker of writing" Test Drive (26).

Check out Test Drive pp. 69-71

What abotu test spin, by the way?

She goes to ego psychology in Freud in a very original and interesting

36

way, but the results are really bizarre since she uses "probe" and all

kinds of masochistic metaphors to describe the beginning of moral

consciousness. I wrote in the margin "this is very Dr Phil" before she

actually uses "tough love."

Testing is "self"-starting in her account (surprised she missed the

pun), calls forth a scene of torturing ("respect gained by submission

and surrender") by the other and by the self, who "disappears" the

other.  Reality testing becomes a kind of strip-searching.  Very weird

inversion of the usual scene of moral consciousness as the antithesis

of s&m.  The section begins with a weird apparently autobiographical

account of  "X" getting hepatitis.  My boring reading:  Maybe Ronell

is making a brief for her own masochism, self abuse (if she had

deconstructed use and abuse, and how the self, like the object, comes

about through violent testing, her turn to ego psychology as being

about disavowing but revealing the always already violent scene of ego

formation might have been more convincing and more critical (seeking

out reality becomes the desire to be fucked over, which  the other is

only too happy to oblige).  A strange lapse, LIKE SHE WANTS TO BE HIT

OVER THE HEAD WITH HER BOOK.  (The caps are an accident, but I've left

them uncorrected.)

Also, Der letzte Mann (aka The Last Laugh) [Masters of Cinema DVD ~ F.W.

Murnau

37

The German, as you know, is The Last Man

Maurice Blanchot, “The Birth of Art” in Friendship begins by engaging

Bataille on the Cave of Lescaux.

His essay “Museum Sickness” engages Curtius on the difference between

books and painting and says that Curtius ignores recording media like

long playing records.  He ends the essay by engaging translation and

then the following essay is on translation.

It's a great film about an old guy in failing health who is the doorman at a famous

hotel.

It has nothing to do, though, with last man scenarios. More an every(last)man

kind of thing.

Werner Hermacher's Hegel, Preloma--Reading Hegel and his point of departure

is the last

philosophy thing (it made me think of Fuyama and The End of History).

I recall, vaguely, that Adorno writes on endingsin Aestheitc Theory.  Anyway

something to

pull into the Last Man scenarios chapter in relation to Herzog's film.

 The end of art : readings in a rumor after Hegel

Eva Geulen ; translated by James McFarland.

Author: Geulen, Eva

Published: Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2006.

38

Maurice Blanchot, “The Birth of Art” in Friendship begins by engaging Bataille on

the Cave of Lescaux.

His essay “Museum Sickness” engages Curtius on the difference between books

and painting and says that Curtius ignores recording media like long playing

records. He ends the essay by engaging translation and then the following essay

is on translation.

"Oedipus talks of the Last Philosopher with himself. A fragment from

the History of Posterity

I call myself the last philosopher because I am the last human being.

No one talks to me other than myself, and my voice comes to me as the

voice of  a dying man. . . . Another besides me dies, another besides

me, the last human being in the universe: the last sigh your sigh,

dies with me--the prolonged Woe!  Woe! sighed about me, the last of

the men of woe, Oedipus.”

F.N.

Cited in The Good European:  Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image, p. 84

F.N. as “the last philosopher” Ronell, The Test Drive, p. 158; “firstlings” (p. 159)

Deconstruct-a-dis-ability (Memoirs for the Blind; Telephone Book on Bell’s deaf

mother.

Reading Ronell's Test Drive chapter on Nietzsche's The Gay Science this

39

morning.  It's good.   She has internalized all of her telephone book metaphors,

dropping them in the exposition in that that is very clear--useful for us when we

do the Shakespeare book--in that her repetition undoes the resistance to reading

she advertises in her user's manual to the Telephone Book.  Still a dense read,

though.

intro to FN's Ecce Homo, p. 116, Cambridge UP

"One mistake after another is calmly put on ice, the ideal is not refuted, it is

_frozen to death_. . . ."

FN keeps repeating the word frozen and the phrase frozen to death.

I also will write a book, I cried--for whom to read?--to whom dedicated? And then

with silly flourish (what do capricious and childish as despair?) I wrote,

DEDICATION

TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD.

SHADOWS, ARISE, READ YOUR FALL!

BEHOLD THE HISTORY OF THE

LAST MAN.

Mary Shelley, The Last Man

Oxford World Classics, 466

Derrida's response to Blanchot's The Instant of My Death

40

The Last Man is not only the title of another of Blanchot's books. The

eschatology of the last man is marked in the phrase that states in the mode of

fiction ("as if") that the end has already taken place before the end: "as if

everything had already been done." Death has already taken place, however

unexperienced [sic] its experience may remain in the absolute acceleration of a

time infinitely contracted into the point of an instant. The screenplay is so clear,

and it describes the action so explicitly in two lines, that the program is

exhausted in advance. We know everything with an absolute knowledge.

Everything, all of it, has already happened because we know what is going to

happen. We know the screenplay; we know what is going to happen. It is over; it

is already over from instant of the credits. It begins with the end: as in The

Madness of the Day, it begins with the end. We know it happened. "As if

everything were already done," it already happened. The end of time.

Jacques Derrida, Demeure, 62

Ronell's Test Drive chapter on Nietzsche's The Gay Science She has

internalized all of her telephone book metaphors, dropping them in the exposition

in that that is very clear-- --in that her repetition undoes the resistance to reading

she advertises in her user's manual to the Telephone Book.  

Laure : the collected writings

41

Laure ; translated by Jeanine Herman.

Author: Laure

Published: San Francisco : City Lights Books, 1995.

 book

LIBRARY WEST General Collection

PQ2672.A7825 A24 1995

Werner Herzog's

Encounters at the End of the World would work well in

the last chapter.  The scientists watch sci-fi disaster films, and in

one scene they watch the film Them!  The film is framed as a Western (Herzog’s

autobiographical detour),

so going South is about going off the map--it's a

geoimaginarypolitical aesthetic that plays on the spatial and temporal

sense of end, the convergence of which makes all kinds of encounters

possible. I really like the film.   It's kind of scary at points, but

far less grizzly than Herzog's Grizzly (also a film we might watch).

Herzog's art of dwelling 

Betsy remarked of some of the longer takes underwater that Herzog

knows how to "dwell" in the film by staying with the shot, taking time

beyond the shot's narrative function.  I thought of pursuing that

thought along Heideggerian lines--film travels but also dwells at or

through the end, or "almost like art," dwells by refiguring what it

42

might mean for human life to end.  The word "world" in the film's

title would support the Heidegger tack.

Read and discuss

Some notes on Derrida’s “Typewriter Ribbon, Inc.”

Arche-performative, amber insect used against Meillassoux.

Set up the “what to do with Derrida and de Man?” question in relation to the end

of Typewriter Ribbon as an answering machine (go to Ronell on answerability

and responsibility, the charges and debts one incurs when picking up the phone

and Derrida on the crank call from “Martini Heidegger” in The Post Card).

The answering machine as not a machine but a figure, a figure of failed

processing of de Man, or reprocessing de Man’s interests in the writing machine

and formal materiality in relation to de Man’s related interests in success and

failure (Schiller succeeds in the Kleist essay; the sublime and failure in Kant and

Materiality). Derrida takes the history of the book as physical matter and turns it

into tropes: typewriter ribbon, pen, ink, letter to follow (did it arrive?), editing,

proofreading, rewriting and re-editing all become tropes for a historicism that

cannot archive the event, or does so as a problem of cognition (though, as you

say, Derrida seems to be aware of the event-ual archivization of the even of his

43

delivering a script made to sound like he is talking with out a script (maybe with

notes).

Maybe answer-dis-ability? (again, Ronell on the deaf and A G Bell)

If we think about Derrida doing a kind of WB act (Books of the Mentally Ill) in

reading himself, the amber anecdote as written when the subject disappears,

when he goes on automatic, we could also say that his “exhumanization” of de

Man, his rehabilitation of de Man’s name, involves not only making clear the

mechanics and materiality of de Man’s own writing machine, his own rhetorical

modes, but in unchaining de Man’s writings from a tendency to drive toward

death (or the totalizing negative tropes of parabasis and irony). Note on

Rousseau’s prefaces” The chain that leads from Tasso to translation . . . to

beheading.” In Excuses (Confessions)

The death trap at the end of the Kleist essay (“deadly” is the last word of the

essay), and the reference to the “funeral march” on the page before it. Or de

Man’s reference to the lethal aspect of writing. Or in the Kleist essay, the

chiasmatic formulation of Baudelaire and Kleist followed by a progression in

which Kleist outdoes Baudelaire—disarticulation of entities about words to

disarticulation of words. For de Man divisibility of the letter leads to the loss of

phenemonalization and hence to a failure of cognition; the sublime becomes

microloigcal, a disappearing of reading that resembles the “elmiation” of reading

de Man criticizes I the Hypogram and Inscription essay and which concludes by

stopping short of giving us the interstingly fragmented essay (why does he need

the Riffaterre to do the Hugo reading and vice versa? There is a space between

44

the two sections. It would have seem to prepared us for, namely, on inscription.

De Man ends the essay with an entirely negative definition of inscription (what it

is not). Where de Man finds a trap, a threat, that is mortal, Derrida finds a

spectre, an archive (like the amber) in which writing is trapped without knowing it,

like the insect, but also preserved as living and dead. The space between

machine and event is a loss of processing and cognition (archiving) but for that

reason is capable of imagining the future as a “sooner or later” at which point

something will be revealed. There is no chain in Derrida. Derrida is not

anestheticized de Man so much as going back to de Man’s own attempts to

protect against find “shelter” from the danger of poetry as posed by Heidegger in

Elucidations of Hlderlin and which comes out in de Man sometimes as outbursts

of anger at other critics. Sometimes he is very controlled and ironic an as in the

de Man “Bakhtin” essay (in your brilliant reading). Other times, he seems less in

control or feels a need to act out violently, as in the end of the essay on Holderlin

where he spends several pages at the end lashing out at another philologist for

no apparent reason).

This “violence” tends to center on truth and falsehood (as in Rousseau). Another

example is when de Man goes after Riffaterre (I am avoiding Riff-a-tear) in

“Hypogram and Inscription” when he goes after R for misreading of Hegel.

Another name for this violence is dogmatism. De Man does not to hesitate to

use words like “correct” and “fallacious” in totally unequivocal ways. He gets at

45

empirical examples, in hits case saying that Hegel does not say what Riffaterre

says he said and other examples are the two mistranslations de Man discusses

in Task of the Translator. In thus case, it is a matter of making WB say the

opposite of what he said. The tone in the WB Task of the Translator essay is

good humored and the tone of “Hypogram and Inscription” is not, but both

moments are basically dogmatic. There is no question that de Man has identified

basic errors and corrected them, as well as elevated Derrida (the only French

man who can read) above Riffaterre).

Note: The praise for Riffaterre is amazing too, not exactly a back-handed

compliment or just “he’s great”, but the movement from saying that the theory

may be behind the practice to concluding that in fact the theory may be ahead of

the practice. Nice irony, as if de Man were acknowledging one could only be

behind or ahead (though he does not say so).

(In addition to the dogmatism, one could include defensive moments, like Derrida

complaining that his detractors have not read him--not just misread him-- as if to

read Derrida means that if you read you may disagree on particular points but not

detract, especially in many of the interviews in Points and de Man saying in

Resistance to Theory don’t say this if you don't have tenure, as if looking ahead

to danger for his students. And one could add, if one were uncharitable, self-

indulgence—or seeming self-indulgence—the self-referencing and self-citation in

Derrida’s texts and notes; the prefaces of de Man that refuse coherence).

46

I was thinking that de Man has to perform a kind of violence as he rewinds, as

you have put it, and that the rewind takes place twice, not once. In the

“Hypogram and Inscription” he rewinds Riffaterre to the Hegel moment and then

corrects him. This correction (of a dogmatic, rhetorically excessive sort—

Riffaterre mentions Hegel only in passing; R is not writing an essay on Hegel)

then allows for a break, a space between Riffaterre and the Hugo poem which a

movement forward of course, in he essay’s structure, but a movement

backwards, all the way back past Riffaterre to a poem by an author of whom

Riffaterre wrote a book. Then the event that didn’t happen in Riffaterre can occur

—de Man presents in the form of his beautiful “Riffaterrean” reading of the Hugo

poem, which, incidentally, he never translates into English. He writes in English

about a French poem.

In other essays, he translates the foreign language quotations.

Sidebar: I was remembering “The Double Session” (Séance) of Derrida. So the

repetition as double (two Rousseau versions of the same anecdogets, even

Rousseau’s self-bi-furcation as R juge de JJ) seems crucial to what Derrida is

doing with de Man and for his reading of what de Man does (which is to repeat

himself, though unself-consciously, in excuses confessions whereas Derrida

does so quite self-consciously, and keep s multiplying repetitions and doublings,

coming close to the uncanny but refusing to go there, as if he were rebooting

Freud (whom he ever names--just straight to Lacan) too. Maybe we could pun

on boot (kick in the pants and get a kick out something), like hit (drug high and

physical abuse). OK. Maybe not.

47

Poetry needs to be taken seriously (and philosophy) because it poses a danger.

What kind of danger is something Derrida seems indirectly to returning to via a

post-mortem. In de Man’s case, interpretation is also a danger.

Philology thinks it is open, that it does no violence, as Heidegger the philosopher,

anti-philologist does, but de Man deconstructs the distinction by pointing, albeit

through irony or just quiet sarcasm, that the philologist preserves the text through

violence by deciding among variants.

So the space / time between event and machine is like WB’s standstill, a moment

that opens contact with the dead, with the dead as victim, and perhaps in de

Man’s case, de Man as victimizer turned self-persecuting victim (can’t confess or

be excuse or be forgiven). So Derrida’s “cut out” and cut off” near the end of the

Typewriter Ribbon essay are about reediting de Ma producing a new edition that

does not actually exist in print (it can only be assembled out of texts published

when he was alive and when he was dead. This assemblage takes the form of

“de-monstration” and goes perhaps to Derrida’s (neo?) dogmatic corrections of

De Man’s micro error, the omission of two and then the addition of one word, and

mistranslation versus de Man’s critique of Rousseau’s omission of stories. In

Typewriter Ribbon (TR) Derrida is going in the direction of de Man’s micro-

corrections (by focusing on and also in the direction of de Man’s totalizing

48

assertions (this is wrong, this is right). I thought of he end of the Kleist essay by

de Man where he actually performs an operation, namely, cutting “Einfall” in two,

turning, without any real justification from “Einfall” (in the text) to a word in the

word “Falle” not in the text. I use these metaphors (operate, cut) because the

second story in Kleist’s Puppet theater story is occasioned by the possibility of

having dancers with prosthetic limbs (like the puppets’).

The answering machine would be our trope for the teletropical “machinations”

(Derrida’s pun) that we have earlier placed under the heading of the book, which

Derrida is still preoccupied by in his essay Typewriter Ribbon. The process of

reshelving now gets dramatized as a lapse (“I don’t know why I’m telling you

this”). Derrida does not explicitly (but we can do so) turn the issue of resistance

to the states capacity to process people and our capacity to self-store into a

question of the arc-hive (bad pun on insects) or arche-hive and by re-

connecting / disconnecting deconstruction and psychoanalysis(differently from

Ronell since Derrida is not going telephonic but postal). Derrida is not saving de

Man or saving the text so much as he is cutting it out and off (not hanging up, not

hung up) to resuscitate by turning oneself into a quasi-(answering) machine, that

cuts off (your time is up) as if arbitrarily.

Derrida is turning processing into reprocessing, recutting de Man (like a DJ),

replaying him and remixing him but scratching, not blending. There is no story to

49

tell between machine the event—archivalization cannot be narrated, only

reprocessed, remixed.

Other Derrida texts Living on Borderlines; The Pit and the pyramid in Margins of

Philosophy.

Paper Cuts:

Derrida’s E(li)-m/a/n-ations of De Man

The title of the essay:

“Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink: (2) (‘within such limits’)”

The words “Typewriter Ribbon” alludes to the first title de Man used and

discarded for “Excuses Confessions,” namely, The Purloined Ribbon (which

would have clearly to the Lacan and Derrida debate over Poe’s “The Purloined

Letter.” See p. 286

50

“Limited Ink” refers, punning on Inc and Ink, to Derrida’s Limited, Inc, a response

to John Searle’s critique of Derrida’s reading of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory in

How to Do Things with Words. Hence, one presumes, the number “(2),” though

the title is full of repetitions, as we can see.

“Within Such limits” is a quotation from Austin’s “A Plea for Excuses,” which

becomes clear on p. 283. Why it is in parentheses escapes me, though the

parentheses suggest typographical limits that frame the limits of the quotation

marks), so there may be a little allegory of iterability (citation) in relation to

typographic marks here.

Note: Derrida adds “two subtitles” to his title which are not actually in the subtitle

(p.284)

Note: Derrida has a dream title on p. 282 “”Apropos of apropos, apropos of all

the meanings and all the use of à propos and the à-propos in French.” See p.

292, 295.

Note: Derrida mentions but does not read the chapter on Promises in Allegories

of Reading, and he does not discuss de Man’s discussion of the postface

(second preface) to Julie at the end of de Man’s essay on Bahktin in The

Resistance to Theory.

51

Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink: (2) (“within such limits”), originally published in

the French edition of Derrida’s Papier Machine (2001) as the last essay, is

divided into seven sections, each headed by a roman numeral except for the very

first.

Omitted is reference to de Man’s reading of Derrida reading Rousseau in “The

Rheotic of Blindness.”

Summary of each Section Psychoanalysis,

paratexts, and de

Man

Allegory: What does the

text want? De(ad) Man

(Walking)

First Section (unnumbered) pp.

277-85

The first (unnumbered) section

begins with questions about the

possibility of thinking the machine

and the event, the human and

the machine, the organic and

inorganic otherwise, in terms of a

future monstrosity that will not

look like a monster; proceeds to

comment on the conference title

What is the relation

between he figure of he

monster (that will not

resemble a monster) for

the future to the self-

spectralization of

Derrida in the final

paragraph as well as to

the amber and arche-

performative? Is there a

post-mummification, an

evisceration that is also

52

and poster; then asks to be

excused (283) for not treating the

subject (283) and comments that

Austin excuses himself (284) for

introducing a topic he will not

treat; Derrida offers compromises

(playing on promise?); “a propos”

comes up as a kind of metaphor

for two kids of relations,

necessity and chance.

Derrida mentions “the destiny of

all the other words [De Man] puts

to work” (285) without explaining

why he uses destiny here and

elsewhere in the text rather than

destinerrance (esp. after invoking

the postcard on p. 284)

Given all the oblique comments

relating titles to excuses, Derrida

sets himself as a kind of guilty

party who is in good company; he

also seems to put into play the

an embalming,

encrypting, and

reanimation, that is the

opposite of the arche-

performative? Is the

difference between the

insect and human

important or not? It

seems that it is not,

although the organic and

inorganic, living and

dead are. A distinction

between the prehuman

and human doesn’t need

to be deconstructed.

53

meaning of title as legal claim,

which will come up as the issue

of inheritance and legacies later.

At stake (in the conference title)

is de Man’s legacy (afterlife). He

turns to “titles of nobility” on pp.

289; discusses the footnote , p.

296, gets into a close reading of

old lady in Confessions and her

fart, automatic, last words after

the fart. Issue of age, both

Rouseauand Agustine being 16;

Marion as Virgin Mary

The main point is to recognize a

machine that resists (in

Catholicism and Protestantism) a

mechanization of all speech acts:

“oaths, acts of sworn faith: jurer,

conjurer, abjurer, to swear, to

conjure, to abjure of forswear”

292) Otherwise guilt is endless—

Rousseau feels guilty for feeling

54

innocent. (293)

Second Section (I) pp. 285-301

Derrida compares Rousseau to

Augustine, notes the similarities,

the same ages (16); then sets the

two in relation, as a genealogical

tree, an archive, a cryptography

(288); Rousseau knew Augustine

by heart, but indirectly; Rousseau

never read Augustine (289-90)

Footnote and

Oedipus on 296;

possibility of

psychoanalysis, p.

297

Third Section (II) 301-14

Derrida begins discussing

“Excuses (Confessions” as a

displacement of the last word

(making the last word the next to

last), 302 and links it to

forgiveness; rereads de Man’s

recourse to Derrida’s

“supplementarity” to explain the

lack of closure in Rousseau

(excuse leads to guilt which

“Destined to the

virtuality of the

‘sooner or later,’

the archive

produces the

event no les than

records or

consigns it.” 303

Derrida’s own

autobiographical

Derrida “accuses” de

Man and Austin of not

thinking about the victim

(308); yet Derrida

imagines printing only in

terms of the book being

a victim, not the reader

(who may get paper cuts

from it as well as

metaphorical wounds)

55

requires more confession which

takes the form of excuse and so

on). No exoneration is possible.

Close reading of Rousseau which

leads Derrida to assert that “no

confession is ever innocent”

(306) after mentioning de Man’s

use of writing machine to

describe Rousseau’s text.

Repeats his “initial question”

(raised on p. 297) on p. 307

about the machine and event, the

machine and repetition; Derrida

also repeats himself on p. 336;

deconstructs de man’s distinction

between verbal excuse and

referential crime; 310-12;

Concludes “Every confessional

text is already apologetic, every

avowal begins by offering

apologies or by excusing itself.

Let’s leave this difficulty in place.

It is going to haunt everything

anecdote about

de Man’s

dedication of

Allegories to

Reading, with the

letter to follow.

Mentions de

Man’s death in

1983 and the

scandal;

Lacaninism, p.

308-09

56

that we will say form here on.”

(313; ends by deconstructing de

Man’s distinction between the

Confessions and the Fourth

Reverie. The repetition is

1 For example, check out the endnotes to

Agamben's "Benjamin and the Demonic" in Potentialities. Every time

Agamben cites a Jewish text other than WB, he uses an English

translation of a text written by Scholem. He never gives the original,

but says "cited in" where is uses "in the original" when giving the WB

German reference. Why the difference? Because Agamben apparently

does not know Hebrew and cannot afford to admit his lack of knowledge

openly. Why? Check out this strange sentence in the body of his

text: "Those who have in some way studied Jewish mysticism--in

particular those who have read the magnificent books that Scholem

dedicated to its resurrection--are familiar with . . " (143).

The formulation here is highly evasive--is Agamben one of "those

who?" And does "in some way" mean reading only Scholem "in

particular?" Why can't Agamben use the first person here? Because

Agamben, while lauding Scholem, nevertheless uses materials he finds

only in Scholem to counter Scholem's reading of WB. Agamben's

knowledge of the cabala and "the tradition of Jewish mysticism" (143)

appears to be based entirely on his reading of Scholem's essays and

57

already in the Confessions (314)

“The ‘text machine’ has just

arrived on stage” (304); “A

moment ago, we met up with the

expression ‘text machine.’” (316)

anthologies (read by Agamben in translation). To admit this would be to allow his

entire philological edifice to collapse since that edifice depends on

Agamben's ability to lay claim to knowledge "the tradition of Jewish

mysticism" (143) that Scholem lacks.

The first five pages of Agamben are stunning. Just totally

first-rate. But then he goes off in this weird way so he can

"Grecify" WB, which is in some ways reasonable response to Scholem's

"Judaizing" of WB (critiqued by Weber very effectively) in pluralizing

Judaism (but stopping short of “Judeities” [Derrida] to skip over to a

reconstructed WB moved from Jewish Messianism to Greek ethics. (See

the repetition of the sentence at the top of p. 145 and the middle of

the page, just above the number "VI.") Agamben he says he can “abandon the

figure of the angel” and get to “the true goal of this chapter” on p. 148, but takes

an immediate detour in section VII to shift his discussion of WB from angelology

to demonology, before getting to what he wants to do on p. 151. So one might

ask why Agamben even bothers with the first nine pages. Moreover, why, after

abandoning the angel, does he return to it in the last two pages of his essay? “If

we now return to the image of the angel with which this chapter began?”

58

Fourth Section (III) p.314-29

Links the event to the archive,

the archived event (314); does

the close reading of de Man’s

omission of “quite old” (317; asks

Begins “Let us

return”

Lacan “Purloined

Letter” 316

2 Which Part of Werner Herzog’s 3-D Cave Painting Movie Don’t You

Understand?

By DAVE ITZKOFF

Can there be a 3-D movie about a work of art that predates the discovery of

perspective? If anyone can make such a film, surely Werner Herzog can. The

Guardian reported that Mr. Herzog, the director of “Grizzly Man” and

“Fitzcarraldo,” is working on a movie that will take audiences inside a French

cave containing drawings that are more than 30,000 years old. In a video

interview on the blog of Roger Ebert, the film critic of The Chicago Sun-Times,

Mr. Herzog said that he had been given permission to film inside the Chauvet

cave in the southeastern Ardèche region of France, whose walls are decorated

with more than 300 images of rhinoceroses, bison and other animals. (Due to the

risk of damage to the drawings, the site is usually restricted to visitors.)

“It’s still tough to bring equipment down,” Mr. Herzog said in his interview with Mr.

Ebert. He added: “For each shot, because the technology is not really advanced,

we had to build own camera from zero using a specific configuration of lenses

59

the same question he asks on p.

318 on p. 321; gets into

typewriter ribbon after citing de

Man, pp. 322-24; links it back to

the textual event ((p. 315, 324);

arrives at a different account of

De Man does and

doesn’t speak

(317)

Uses de Man’s

quasi-Freudian

and mirrors. We are doing something nobody has done with 3-D.” No distributor

or release date for the film has been announced yet.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/which-part-of-werner-herzogs-3-d-

cave-painting-movie-dont-you-understand/?ref=movies

Werner Herzog's cave art documentary takes 3D into the depths

The film-maker has taken his 3D camera among the rocky fissures and 30,000-

year-old cave artwork at Chauvet in France

From his film about the hostage survivor Dieter Dengler, Little Dieter Needs to

Fly, to his examination of the life and death of the eccentric grizzly bear activist

Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog always seems to have an eye

for stranger-than-fiction scenarios that make for fascinating documentaries. Over

on Roger Ebert's blog, there's news of a new Herzog project that might represent

his most important venture into factual film-making yet.

Herzog has apparently been given permission to film inside the Chauvet-Pont-

60

repetition: “this event has already

the structure of repetitive

substitution, a repetition of the

confession in the confession.”

324-25

metaphors of

mutilation and

dismemberment

(318)

p. 322 (de Man

quotation omits

d'Arc cave, a site in the Ardèche department of southern France that contains the

earliest known cave paintings, dating back at least 30,000 years. Even more

intriguingly, Herzog is planning to shoot much of the film in 3D.

The Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994, cannot be accessed by tourists, as the

French authorities have deemed the risk of degradation to be too high, so

Herzog's film might be the only opportunity for the rest of humanity to view the

site. The paintings depict lions, panthers, bears, owls, rhinos and hyenas,

suggesting a vastly different fauna at the time of the paintings to that of modern

France.

"It's a film that I'd like to make because I'm so fascinated about cave art," says

Herzog in a series of filmed interviews on the blog, which we've reposted here.

"It's still tough to bring equipment down. You are not allowed to touch the wall or

the floor or anything. I can have only three people with me, and I can use only

lights which must not create temperature. For each shot, because the technology

is not really advanced, we had to build own camera from zero using a specific

configuration of lenses and mirrors. We are doing something nobody has done

61

Moves to Austin on excuses (327

—28), takes an autobiographical

turn (Algerian Jewish rite) and

ends by saying we will take a

detour (329)

something “ . . . .”

with 3D."

Herzog will narrate the film himself, which comes as welcome news. His familiar

Teutonic brogue adds so much enthusiastic flavoursome fervour to his

documentary films, and the interviews suggest that we're in for another uniquely

skewiff vision.

"What is also strange," Herzog reveals, "is that somebody [in the cave] started a

painting and then they left. And it's known that 3,500 years later somebody

continued the painting. And then a bear that hibernated over it left scratch marks.

And over the scratch marks there was man, bear, man, bear, man, bear, man

[over time]. It's like time does not occur – it's completely fantastic."

Despite his adoption of 3D for the project, Herzog is not an out-and-out convert

to the new technology.

"I do it [3D] very reduced and as if it was the most natural way to do it," he says.

"3D will always have one major problem, and that is when you look as a human

62

Fifth Section (IV)

This section turns to the archive

and the amber (330-33) insect 54

million years ago; inside this

account Derrida embeds a

rereading of Rouseau’s two

Oedipus 333;

insect incest typo

anecdote abut his

page proofs;

Turns to the cut,

pp. 333-34; the

being, normally only one eye looks dominantly at things. The other eye is mostly

ignored. And only in specific cases – if somebody approaches you – all of a

sudden the brain starts to use both eyes for establishing depth of field and

understanding space.

"But it tires you when you are a spectator at a 3D movie, because you are forced

to see with two eyes and two images superimposed. So 3D, in my opinion, will

only work, in my opinion, for the big firework events like Avatar."

It's a fascinating subject matter, but these types of films traditionally suffer from a

dry and worthy approach that makes it hard for viewers to truly engage. Herzog

offers something more colourful and distinctive, partly because the film-maker

himself is just as captivating as his material. And yet he never overwhelms his

subject matter. Does the prospect of seeing the film-maker crawling through

rocky fissures and uncovering never-before-seen artwork, like some Germanic

David Attenborough, have you salivating?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/apr/13/werner-herzog-cave-art-

63

beginnings of the Confessions

I don’t know why; I didn’t know

why (331; 333); you will have to

believe me (333)

Returns to “as if that opens IV on

machine is cut as

well as cutting

(334)

documentary-3d/print

3

64

p. 335; this section sends with a

paragraph redtating the opening

question about even and

machine “In a word and repeating

myself. 336

DECEMBER 16, 2009, 4:32 AM

Q and A: The Death of Languages

Yale University Press

A week or so ago, co-vocabularists were invited to post questions on the

future of communication to the French linguist Claude Hagège – author of

“On the Death and Life of Languages.”

Mr. Hagège’s detailed and thought-provoking answers are below:

Q.

Who says English is going to dominate forever? Last I checked, India and China

are ascendant and the US is in decline … – Brian Bailey

A.

Hindi (the most spoken language in India) and Mandarin Chinese might replace

English as dominant languages some day. But two reasons at least lead one to

think that the process could be long:

65

Sixth Section (V) 336-47

Theis section ends with the

climax of the essay, the turn to

The printer cut the

Rousseau edition

(i) Hindi is not widespread outside Asia, and there is presently no special effort to

promote it worldwide. As for Mandarin Chinese, it is true that a great number of

Confucius Institutes are scheduled to be built by China in various countries, but

we cannot know today the result of this decision;

(ii) The publications (books, internet, etc.) in English cover all domains of

knowledge, let alone the presence of English in all other activities. These traces

of the worldwide spread of English will not disappear.

Q.

What role, if any, do you think that arts play in the survival of a language? –

Adam

A.

I would tend to think that arts play a rather limited role in the survival of a

language. This applies, in particular, to painting, sculpture and architecture,

which are particular types of communication, able to deliver messages by using

other means than words. However, historically, many traces of extinct languages

are transmitted to us by linguistic messages which accompany works of art. For

instance, many old religious buildings, shrines, temples, churches contain

66

the arche-performative.

Seventh Section (VI) 347-58

Announced as exit or tribute

music to de Man in the form of

supplemental footnotes which are

supplemental

footnotes—returns

to the query about

footnotes as

swollen feet

Does de Man want to

eviscerate or exonerate

de Man? Or both? Is

their relation Oedipal (a

“supplemental”

inscriptions. Archaic mints exhibit carved words which keep traces of Latin,

classical Greek, Pharaonic Egyptian, Sumerian, Coptic, Turkish, etc. Poems in

Classical Chinese often accompany Chinese paintings. Finally, old forms of

various languages are conserved in musical works in which the melody is

accompanied by the words of one or another language.

Q.

In your study of languages, do you distinguish between what is commonly

referred to as British English and American English? If so, how do you apply that

distinction in terms of assessing the health of a spoken language? I am also

thinking of various forms of French, Spanish, and German that are not

considered regional dialects. – Henry Krawitz

A.

The existence of various forms of a spoken language can both prove its health

and bear signs of its split. Due to continuous relationships across the Atlantic, the

American form of English has not become a language entirely different from

British English, even though many phonetic, lexical, and, to a lesser extent,

grammatical features are not the same on both sides of the Atlantic, and make it

67

part of the body of the essay.

There’s kind of an aftershock in

this section: the deconstruction

of materiality and formalism, or

materiality without matter and

Oedipal. footnote)? Why does

getting to the question of

the machine and the

event mean rereading

De Man on Rousseau

possible to assign a certain way of speaking either to British or to American

English. But at the same time, the spread of a language in many parts of the

world can generate increasingly diverging forms. The English spoken in India, in

Thailand, in the Philippines, to take three Asian examples, and the English

spoken in Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria, to take three African examples, are

different enough to have given rise to a new discipline within linguistics, namely

the study of N(on) N(ative) V(arieties) of E(nglish). It is not ruled out that these

Englishes might some day become as many different languages.

This evolution is less likely in the case of French and Spanish. The reason for

that is not far to seek. There is no established norm of English, that would be

imposed, whether after the British or the American model, on all those who

express themselves in this language. As opposed to that, other languages which

also have an international vocation are much more unified. Such is the case of

French, which is official or widely used in the 70 countries of the OIF

(Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie). Forms of French that are not

considered regional dialects, like those used in Quebec, southern Belgium or

Romance Switzerland, are more or less modelled of Parisian French, even

though there are phonetic and lexical differences between them. This is largely

68

formalism without form. De Man

was as much a materialist as a

formalist.

Ends with two strange

paragraphs about de Man and

(who read Derrida

reading Rousseau? Is

there a reading of de

Man’s career, his

autobiographicity as

due to the permanent communication between the speakers of these forms of

French. Similarly, lexicographers and grammarians from all the countries which

speak Spanish, in Europe and Central and South America, gather regularly in

order to establish a common norm for this language, even in its spoken form.

Q.

A language is irreplaceable, just like an animal or plant species. And those of us

who love languages know that a language is not just words: it mirrors and defines

a way of life, a way of thinking, a unique view of reality. My question: at what

point do we declare that a language has died? – Paulette

A.

A language is declared to be dead when the last, generally old, people who still

spoke it die without having transmitted it to their children and grandchildren. Thus

the two, mutually related, criteria are: death of the last speakers and lack of

transmission.

Q.

Dear Prof Hagège, Many thanks for fielding questions on your research from this

forum. I know that the Gaelic League struggled during the 1890s over which

69

Derrida’s “common innocence.” always already De(ad)

Man (walking?), de Man

writing under a death

sentence for crimes he

cannot confess or

dialect to use for teaching Irish to the organization’s exclusively English

speakers. They eventually chose the Irish spoken in Connaught over that of

either Munster or Ulster, in part, because of its unique influence on the English

also spoken there. Remarkably, some also thought the English spoken in

Connaught closer to older forms of spoken English, not least that of

Shakespeare. I hope, then, that you might speculate on the role played by

hybridity in preserving and protecting endangered languages. Best wishes, Adam

A.

Thank you for adducing the case of Connaught Irish, which seems to dovetail

nicely with the idea (hopefully not quite a speculation!) that hybridization may, in

certain situations, protect a language, by conserving important parts of its original

structure while, at the same time, importing other components from languages

whose pressure might appear as threatening, but becomes, in that way, an

enrichment and a diversification. To the cases of the Copper Island language and

Mbugu, mentioned in “On the Death and Life of Languages,” Connaught Irish

may be added as a further convincing illustration.

Q.

70

excuse?

Dear Mr. Hagège: have you found similarities between the way languages grasp

the world? Thank you so much. Carlos Salas

A.

There are differences and similarities between the ways languages grasp the

world. To begin with differences, let me mention only two examples among

many:

(i) It is impossible in Mandarin Chinese to say something identical to English “a

book.” Between yì (“a, one”) and shū (“book”), this language requires the addition

of another word: běn, called a classifier by linguists because it refers to the class

of objects to which books belong. Thus, while English does not need to assign an

object to a class, Chinese imposes this assignment on speakers. Therefore,

these two languages do not grasp the world in the same way, since the existence

of classes of objects, a universal property of the world such as viewed and

organized by human societies, is expressed here and left unexpressed there;

(ii) The expression of a meaning which is called semelfactive by linguists, namely

“occurrence of an event at least once in the past” varies widely through

languages. Mandarin Chinese says, for example, John qù guo Yingguó (John go

71

Elim/a/nation as emanation and elimination (getting rid of, killing off, excremental)

and emanation (spectral, immaterial)

SEMELFACTIVE England) “John has been (at least once) to England.” In

Japanese, on the other hand, one has no choice but to say John ga Eikoku ni itta

koto ga aru (John SUBJECT.MARKER England to went fact SUBJECT.MARKER

exists) “the fact that John has been to England exists,” which may be considered

a complex way of wording this meaning. In English there is an interesting

difference between John has gone to England and John has been to England.

The first sentence implies that John is now in England, or is on his way there,

whereas the second sentence simply says that on at least one occasion John did

in fact go to England. This difference between go and be in English makes it

possible to differentiate between a past event in general and one which is

characterized as having occurred at least once. But English, unlike Mandarin

Chinese, has no specific form to express this last meaning. Thus, we see that the

occurrence of an event in the world, namely a meaning which is the same

everywhere, is expressed in fairly different ways by these three languages.

However, there exists an important activity which clearly shows that even though

the ways languages grasp the world may vary widely from one language to

another, they all build, in fact, the same contents, and equivalent conceptions of

the world. This activity is translation. Any text in any language can be translated

72

Relates to isse of paper as supoort, paper and machine (commented on by

Derrida in the reface of Paper Machine, and the cuts to Rousseau’s text by the

prtiner, tot he making equivalaent of rewriting and reprinting. Paper comes up in

the essay as phycial matter (conventional history of the book); also anecdote

about Derrida’s page rpoofs.

into a text in another language. These two texts express the same meaning. We

can therefore conclude that despite the differences between the ways languages

grasp the world, all languages are easily convertible into one another, because

humans interpret the world along the same, or comparable, semantic lines.

Q.

What’s your take on whether distinct dialects (say, of widely-used languages

such as Chinese or Arabic) will survive increasing globalization and a limited

number of dialects of those languages being taught to nonnative speakers? Also,

what languages native to the Americas still survive today, and in what

capacities? Do these tongues have a future? – Allison.

A.

Increasing globalization concerns international commercial relationships rather

than private communication. It is unlikely that Arabian dialects, which are

constantly used in oral exchange, will be ousted by literary Arabic, which is not

spoken as a common conversation language in any Arabian country. The same

can be said of Chinese dialects, let alone Chinese languages other than

Mandarin, like Cantonese. Despite the spread of standard Chinese, which is

73

Insect nto cognizant; the question of Rousseau and cognition is raised by Derrida

at the end f his chapter on Rousseau in Of grammatology and by de Man in The

Rheotirc of Blindness. For Derrida thequestion is about rousseau knowing (it’s

not a psychological account fo Rousseau); in de Man, it’s not about Rousseau,

taught in schools, languages and dialects spoken in China are not threatened by

globalization. The forms which are taught to nonnative speakers are not dialects

whose number would be dwindling, but standard forms. Furthermore, nonnatives

are a minority if compared to the masses which use a variety of dialects.

As far as languages native to the Americas are concerned, the pressure of

Spanish in Central and South America and English in North America has

certainly brought about, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a

decrease in the number of languages (the problem, here, is different from that of

dialects of widespread languages like Arabic or Chinese mentioned above).

However a number of Indian communities are striving to revive their vernacular

languages, or to foster its widest possible use, and to preserve it against the

perspective of extinction. In the US and Canada Athabaskan languages such as

Chipewyan and, especially, Navaho are strongly supported by teaching and

maintenance in everyday life, and the same is true of some Algonquian

languages. In Mexico, Nahuatl (Aztecan) and Quiche (Mayan) are also backed

by maintenance efforts, and widely used. In Peru and Bolivia, the same applies

to Quechua. In Chile the Mapuches have so far resisted the pressure of Spanish,

and succeeded in preserving a wide use of their language. Paraguay has even

74

it’s about the text knowing, about its slef-deconstruction (it does not a Derrida to

deconstruct it).

For de Man breakdown of cognition occurs in passé from tropes to performance;

for Derrida cognitive breakdown is not explicit thematized as an issue of

gone as far as making Guarani an official language on the same level as

Spanish.

The future of these tongues depends on the will of their speakers to maintain

their use. Judging by the strength of their identity feeling, which commands this

will, it seems that some, at least, of the languages that coexist with widespread

international languages might survive for some time.

Q.

What role do language immersion schools play in arresting the extinction of a

culture or language? Do these help to maintain the cultural identity of a

marginalized group? Also, what benefits does immersion show over book

learning coupled with language coursework? Specifically, I’m curious about

Native American language immersion schools.It’s a fascinating topic, thank you.

– Jared

A.

Immersion schools have the power of arresting the extinction of a culture or

language and maintaining the cultural identity of a marginalized group. An

example which I mention in my book “On the Death and Life of Languages,” Yale

75

deconstruction, but may be obliquely referenced in the insect in amber anecdote

eliminated from Derrida unconscsiously, or emanting from him.

supplemental footnotes

University Press, 2009, is that of the Peach Springs experiment in Arizona (p.

227). Beginning in 1975, the immersion schools program succeeded in curbing

the erosion of Hualapai, an Indian language formerly spoken there on a wide

basis. Immersion of course does not rule out book learning and language

coursework. They are all combined to strengthen the effort to protect endangered

languages.

However, there is a problem with these immersion schools. When children finish

their courses in these schools, they resume their relationships with a society in

which English is dominant. The only way to maintain the knowledge and practice

acquired in immersion schools would be to give the threatened Indian language,

within the tribe or community which has decided to promote it through these

schools, an official status on the same level as English. Such an extension of the

results obtained by immersion schools is not impossible, despite obvious

practical difficulties in everyday life contexts, which put the Indian language in

permanent contact with English. This extension requires an important financial

support. This support itself implies a strong identity feeling, as is often found

among Indian communities whose languages are endangered.

76

also insect, silk worms—Acts of Religion

“I cut off here, arbitrarily.”

The essay has been decouple from the collection, Papiers Machine.

Q.

With the exponential growth of technology, accompanied by a proliferation of

technical terms expressed the same across languages, will the richness and

nuanced expression across languages be diminished. – annieR

A.

The proliferation of technical terms that are expressed the same across

languages as a result of the exponential growth of technology does not

jeopardize in the least the richness and nuanced expression across languages, if

only because what we express in our interpersonal relationships has little to do

with technology. Let us take affects and feelings as examples. No one has

reported, so far, that the many ways that exist, across languages, to declare

oneself to somebody one loves are by no means diminished by the growth of

technology. Let me mention examples from my book, A Language-Lover’s

Dictionary of Languages (French edition: Paris, Plon, 2009):

“I love you” is expressed by “I want you” (te quiero) in Spanish, “(you) are (a)

love(-source) (to me)” (suki da) in Japanese, “I love towards you” (aku cinta pada

mu) in Indonesian, “I love a part of you” (!) (rakastan sinua) in Finnish, “I wish

77

Desire or what drives the essay or part of the project is (can’t say de man aloud

without rehabilitate him, not to treat, the machine set of operations that script a

discussion of truth and falsehood and what it tries to means to return to

something that has been pronounced guilty, takes us back to the opening of

good (things to happen) to you” (ti voglio bene) in Italian, “to-me from-you love is”

(mujhe tum-se pyar hê) in Hindi and many other languages spoken in India, “love

I-have-you” (maite zaitut) in Basque, “to me you me-love-are” (me shen mi-kvar-

khar) in Georgian (Georgia, southern Caucasus), “I I-you-love” (she ro-haihu) in

Guarani (Paraguay).

Other affects and feelings are expressed in very rich, diverse and nuanced ways

across languages, whatever the impact of technology in our lives. For example,

shame is “seen,” or “eaten,” etc., in such languages as Swahili (Tanzania), Ewe

(Ghana and Togo) or Mandarin Chinese; illness “has” me in Moore (Burkina

Faso); hunger and fear are “on” me in Irish; “my friend is sick” or “she is happy”

cannot be expressed in that way in Japanese, where one has to add a word

meaning “apparently” or “allegedly,” because for speakers of this language, ego

cannot refer to affects or feelings that s/he does not undergo him- or herself. “To

be boring” or “to be bored” are expressed as “to have a millstone around the

neck” in Dutch, “to get out from the elbow” in Hungarian, “to talk with one’s lice”

in Subcarpathic Gypsy, “to hunt flies” in Moroccan Arabic, “to have one’s anus

torn out” in Maithili (India), “to suck the marrow” in Yiddish.

78

Derrida’s essay, whether one day there be the mergence of a machine and event

(alive dead problem in the issue of the stained name de Man or the stain of he

name).

The machine of de Man’s writing machines

To the best of my knowledge, such expressions, far from being threatened by the

growth of technology, continuously flourish across languages.

Q.

This article briefly discusses how the loss of a language can erase its original

and creative conceptions of reality from the pages of history and the minds of

humanity. With that in mind, what are the most interesting alternative conceptions

of reality embedded in languages and their grammar that are currently dead or

dying? What, if any, linguistic-metaphysical ideas should we be trying to save

from extinction? – Ian K

A.

Interesting conceptions of reality are embedded in dying or dead languages and

their grammar, which should be saved from extinction (cf. “On the Death and Life

of Languages,” Yale University Press, 2009 (pp.191-203):

· Many ideas are drawn from the observation of living (zoological, botanical)

species, reflected in names that point to the way they are perceived and to the

properties that tribal societies have discovered in them. This kind of relationship

with nature tends to be lost in industrial societies, and has much to teach us on

79

33-34—the machine is figured as is the cut pp. 333-34

This is Deleuzian—the machine is cut and cutting of the living human body (334)

He is pitching the confessions and the amber that falls between the machine and

the event as something that can’t be processed.

the links we should keep with our environment, for our health and our social

harmony, let alone our happiness itself;

· Many extinct or nearly extinct languages were spoken by tribes whose chiefs

gathered people in order to give them instruction on the behavior to be adopted

in various circumstances, on the way to express one’s solidarity with neighbors

and other members of the tribe, and on a number of principles which guarantee

the moral health of a human community;

· Initiatory languages (for example Damin, the initiatory language of the Lardil

tribe in Mornington Island (Northern Queensland, Australia) ) exhibit a

sophisticated blend of abstraction and concern for concrete details, which

assumes a whole body of subtle mental activities, very suggestive for present

research in cognitive sciences. The same applies to the existence of three or

even four past or future tenses in certain endangered languages in Africa and

Papua-New Guinea, each of these referring to a precise moment in time.

· Many endangered languages have special grammatical tools that are obligatory

in every affirmative sentence, and that indicate the source of the knowledge

expressed by the speaker: observed reality, hearsay, eye witness, inference,

80

The amber archive is set up by

Discontinuity would be felt in the performance of –we could tolerate the shift

more easily because there would be a pause, there would be a man talking.

Typewriter ribbon is literally about the textualizing and archiving of an event

(reprint) and it will be inadequate to the event as it overcompensates in other

ways.

logical deduction, etc. This characteristic, very often present in Amerindian

languages like those of the Amazonian forest in Brazil or those of the Sioux

family in the US, is entirely absent from European languages, and has much to

teach us on the relationship we have with our own discourse.

Q.

I am an American studying Arabic and often ask myself this question: How can

we reconcile (1) preserving world languages, their beauty and history, with (2)

the increasing need for foreign language speakers to know English if they plan to

succeed in many cases? I’ve had many debates on the importance of Arabic in

the Arab world but some have responded to my support of fusha by saying “are

you going to make them study that in the classroom when English could give

someone a better life?” It is a huge question which has numerous subquestions

but I would like to hear your thoughts. – Dot

A.

Teaching English as a language which can more easily provide a better life and a

profession does not prevent foreign language speakers from remaining faithful to

their vernacular language as the only one able to express their most personal

81

WB on the blast of metaphorical time out of existence—like the 54 million

moments years ago. There’s always a leveling function that occurs with the

deployment of the device of biological time

thoughts and feelings. It does not seem that the two are difficult to reconcile,

since the domains of use of the two languages, say Arabic fusha (Classical or

“pure” language) and English, are quite different, as are the circumstances, in

peoples’ lives, in which one or the other is used.

Q.

Suppose everyone woke up tomorrow fluently speaking, writing, and reading the

same one language, in addition to the one(s) they now speak.1. What would

happen? My guess is that the benefits of our all being able to understand each

other would be great and we would soon gravitate towards having most of our

communicating being done in that language. We would even more quickly

become a one language world.2. Would that be a good thing? How could it NOT

be a good thing? – Charles Foster

A.

The advent of one and the same language for the whole world instead of the

present diversity is both unlikely and infelicitous:

(i) It is unlikely because it is in the nature of languages, like living organisms, to

become more and more different from each other, if only because the cultural

82

Overreacting out and undereactingin to both de Man’s death

You can only process through the cut, through incest and

backgrounds of human societies, i.e. the backgrounds from which languages

have been formed, are deeply different;

(ii) It would be infelicitous, because the cultural, and hence linguistic, diversity of

the world is the main factor of its richness. A one language world would be an

unbearable world, in which people would be bored to death.

Today, the language which would come close to the “ideal” of a one language

world would be English. But then, speakers of other languages which are also

widespread, like Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc., could say: “why not our

language?”.

Q.

Phenomena come and go and to try to “preserve” a language is a useless

endeavor. And why would you want to? It is a tool and when its need disappears

with the culture new languages come up.Trying to preserve everything that ever

was at the expense of new developments crowds us out of the crucial

continuance of life. If you try to stand still you die. If you evolve and grow you go

to higher levels.It is a feature of nature to change continuously, to shed the old

no matter how beautiful. The spirit that creates leads us to new experiences

83

Punning on de Mans name because a symptom of pronouncing de Man’s name.

It’s a symptom (our verbal play is an attempt to make explicit the problems posed

by the name; you can’t

always. – rowdy 68

A.

To try to preserve a language is not a useless endeavor. Languages are much

more than communication tools. When one tries to preserve something that

existed before, it is far from being at the expense of new developments, nor does

it by any means crowd us out of the crucial continuance of life. Would one say

that Roman and Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance paintings, sculptures and

castles, Venice palaces, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms

chamber-music are works that make us stand still? Quite to the contrary,

preserving masterpieces inherited from the past enhances our own creativeness.

Languages are not technical objects or industrial devices that can be abandoned

once used. They are creations of our minds, and preserving them offers us

seminal conceptions of the relationships between man and the universe.

Shedding the old when it isn’t useful anymore is conceivable, but endangered

languages are not obsolete systems that no society needs. They reflect various

very interesting human cultures which make part of human civilization (as

recalled in my “Language-Lover’s Dictionary of Languages,” French edition:

Paris, Plon, 2009). Furthermore, they can be revived. When Hebrew became, by

84

Insect is unable to cognize that it is being archive; that dimension is being lost;

Agamben on the tic; Derrida forecloses the discussion of the animal, but it looks

like anthropomorphism when it returns as the insect.

the collective decision of a human community, the language of a state, it had

disappeared from spoken usage two millenaries earlier. Just because they

express endlessly varying identities, human languages do not fall into oblivion

when they fall into disuse.

Q.

Aside from Hebrew, Gaelic, and to a lesser extent Welsh would you please

discuss any other models for language survival and/or revival? In the case of the

above mentioned languages, what do you think are the main reasons for their

relative success? Can lessons from these cases be applied to maintaining other

languages currently under threat of extinction? Finally, in all three of the above

cases, these languages were preserved because the respective linguistic

communities were committed to preserving them. To what extent are other

languages currently suffering extinction falling out of use because the given

linguistic communities are VOLUNTARILY letting them fall out of use? In a word,

these languages are dying because no one wants to speak that particular

language any more – speakers of that language believe greater economic,

social, educational benefits are available to them if they assimilate to the local

dominant language. If language death is voluntary, if the death of a language

85

Double beginning of Rousseau’s double confession is an even that is archive

and iso and machine and that is equivalent the insect in amber and that is

equivalent to de Man’s writings. You can only do the de Man reading in relation

to the elliptical to insect amber and insect and incest typo. Mines him response

as symptom. Like WB and books by the mentally ill.

arises from the preference of its speakers to assimilate to some other language,

who is anyone to say that is a bad thing? – cadmus

A.

Economic and social pressures are a capital factor in the process that leads a

language to fall into disuse. The promoters of Hebrew, Gaelic and Welsh, to

which Cornish should be added (since it is in the process of being revived even

though it died at the beginning of the XIXth century), were not submitted to strong

pressures from a foreign society imposing assimilation on them. This, on the

contrary, is exactly what happened to Amerindian communities submitted to the

pressure of English in North America and Australia, and Spanish and Portuguese

in Central and South America. It cannot be said that “the given linguistic

communities are voluntarily letting [their languages] fall out of use” because “no

one wants to speak [them] any more,” or that “speakers of [these languages]

believe greater economic, social, educational benefits are available to them if

they assimilate to the local dominant language.” This is not the result of a free

choice.

The proof is not far to seek. As recalled in “On the Death and Life of Languages”

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What funds the errancy of he archiving of his of writing into print, insect incest is

completely automatic, unconscious.

Arche-fossil, extinction of the memory , he stages it in a way that he’s extinct; he

is recalling this anecdote only because he is mechanically, it’s a lapse in an

argument, so it has a zero degree rhetorical efficacy to it. I don’t know why, here

is why—writing is happening in spite of subjectivity. Argument Meillasoux is

(pp. 123-124), in Australia and North-America, the Anglophone school was a

death machine for Aboriginal and Indian languages. It was explicitly stated, for

instance, that Indians should be “civilized” by removing their children from the

“barbaric” influence of their native tongues and transferring them into prison-like

boarding schools where the use of Indian languages was absolutely forbidden: all

infractions were severely punished, and Indian languages were portrayed as

diabolic creations, hated by God, whom children were ordered to obey

absolutely. Thus, the belief that Indian languages had no future was very early

hammered into Indians, and it is fairly doubtful that speakers abandoned them by

free choice.

Q.

How do you think the Irish language (Gaeilge) will fare out and the continuing

effort to revive it as a second language in Ireland? It is true that the successful

effort to ban it by the British, when they were in power in Ireland through 1920,

caused major problems for the Irish. Having one’s own language is a great

source of pride and individuality. To be forced to abandon it caused the reverse

emotions. – Jim Conlon

87

about the rhetorical function of the archive, then this moment of lapse in Derrida’s

text (like WB) we have a figurative failure of rhetoric.

De Man draining off the history of the sublime in Kant and Materiality

A.

Irish is, along with English, one of the two official languages of Ireland. It is taught

in schools in gaeltachtai, namely regions in which it is still present as a mother-

tongue, whose use is linked to traditional activities, representing only 10% of the

Irish population. In fact, the pressure of English, geographically close and

economically dominant as it has been for centuries and centuries, is so strong,

that even though Irish is not really on the brink of extinction, it can be considered

an endangered language. It is quite true that “having one’s own language is a

great source of pride and individuality.” But this feeling has often been strongly

combated by those who wanted to impose their language on communities whose

language they eradicated, as illustrated by the fate of Indian and Aboriginal

languages in North America and Australia during the XIXth century (see answer

to Cadmus’s question above).

Q.

To what degree do languages change over time in relation to the flexibility of

syntax and size of vocabulary (I do not assume that all systems evolve toward

more flexibility and/or larger vocabularies). Do these variables lead to different

capacities for those using a particular language system to express ideas,

88

As de Man says in essay on WB in Resistance to theory: The inhuman can be

called God (Task of the Translator) but nothing mysterious about it, but that

doesn’t stop it from working

Sin of this pleasure cannot be effaced because it is reprinted and rewritten it is

being confessed (304-05)

Can you assimilate de Man to Deleuze (308)?

emotions? – Peter

A.

The evolution of languages is cyclic rather than unilinear. Synthetic languages, in

which grammatical meanings are composed together into complex verbs and

nouns, become, across centuries or millenaries, analytical languages, in which

grammatical as well as lexical units tend to correspond to independent words.

This evolution is attested by languages for which we have documents extending

over a very long period, like Egyptian between remote pharaonic dynasties and

present-day liturgical Coptic. As far as vocabulary is concerned, periods of

relatively “impoverished” lexical stock are followed by opposite periods of

expanding lexicon. The reason for this evolution of vocabularies is mostly extra-

linguistic: social and technical “progress” is generally reflected in richer

vocabularies.

Q.

Between languages there are “translatable concepts,” for example the English

“dog” vs the German “Hund” but there are also “untranslatable concepts” like the

German concept of “kitsch” or the Hebrew concept of “chutzpah.” As a result

89

Bakhtin essay like the WB essay but without the close readings, attempts to

intervene in the reception of Saint Bahktin and Saint WB while saying things that

are deeply antithetical to the people who are saying “yum.” De Man tries to bring

back what fans of MB leave out: dialogism is not about intersubjectivity.

English uses these concepts as loan words, because we do not have these

concepts in our language.And therein lies the contrast: surely language, as a

medium of communication, should be able to describe these “foreign

phenomena”? Why is it, that we can have similar words for certain concepts but

completely lack words for others? Also, similarly, do the connotations of a

particular phrasing vary among different cultures? For example, would the

learner of Polish, with a more versatile syntax [in general] interpret a particular

phrasing in a particular way, in comparison to English with its much more “fixed”

word order? – Jeffrey

A.

The reason why a language can have words similar to those of another language

for certain concepts while it completely lacks words for others is simply linked to

the cultural background of every language. Loanwords are created in a language

in order to introduce a notion which does not exist in its cultural background of

this language. When a loanword enters a language, it is interpreted by its

speakers with the meaning it has in the source language.

Thus, American English chutzpah comes from Yiddish, which borrowed it from

90

Machinic function of de Man as signifier in Derrida’s text—has does this relate to

the occasion, the oral delivery, which then gets printed and archived.

Derrida is de Man off from the shelf where he’s been put by his detractors and

reopens texts for reading, including his own copy with the inscription. Like

Unpacking the library—he is not in control of what happens.

Going with the idea about the paper being delivered in person, at an important

Hebrew, in which it referred to the attitude of a person who, having killed his

parents, throws himself on the mercy of the court saying he is a poor orphan.

English could of course translate this word by “shameless audacity,”

“presumption-plus-arrogance,” “brazen nerve” and the like. However, only the

word in its original (Hebraic) form contains the whole richness of this concept,

and all the implications linked with Yiddish humor, so that it is much more

significant and suggestive as a loanword than when it is translated. Likewise,

kitsch, from Bavarian kitschen “to sell old furniture as if it were modern,” kept all

the implications of its origin when it was borrowed into English around 1926, as a

word expressing a content which did not correspond to any reality in British and

American cultures, and therefore did not appear as nameworthy.

We can conclude that concepts for which no word exists in a given language are

often those which do not appear as nameworthy in the culture reflected by this

language.

This situation applies to vocabulary, but much less to the various types of

phrasings. Assuming that in Polish (and other Slavonic languages) syntax is

more versatile than in English with its much more “fixed” word order, this does

91

conference as an oral delivery event (in the narrow sense of

event) that allegories its own event-ual  printing and

archivalization, I notice that Derrida distinguishes (p. 359) in the

last paragraph of the essay between de Man as a spirit or ghost (358)

that would answer and object to Derrida and de Man's text.   "His text

not entail that the learner of Polish would interpret a particular Polish phrasing in

a particular way, distinct from the interpretation of the corresponding English

phrasing. The crosslinguistic variations in word order, and in syntax generally,

are characteristic of various linguistic types but have little or no impact on the

content of sentences: one and the same semantic content can, depending on the

language, and even within the same language, be expressed by various syntactic

constructions.

Q.

My guess is the languages most likelyto go into disuse are those in localities

where a prominent language of commerceis taking over extensively and few

peoplefeel the need to continue using the “old”language. As when a language in

a jungleor mountain hinterland gives way toSpanish or Portugese in Latin

America, e.g.Languages that are spoken only, and notwritten, which have no

national function,but more of a tribal local function, yet arestill surviving, I’m

thinking, are likely toremain extant if in a remote enough regionthat it’s not so

much influenced bycommerce and the power of a nation.Are these at least some

of the factorsthat send a language into disuse? – Michael Dennis Mooney,

Albany, NY

92

will answer for him" even if he cannot answer in his own name.  "That

is what we call a machine. But a spectral machine. By telling me I am

right, it will tell him he is right.

Then the pun on "machinations," a co-spiriting, or con-spiring that

"best-intentioned" (recalling or forgetting that the way to Hell is

A.

It is quite true that languages that are exposed to the pressure of prominent

languages of commerce are most likely to go into disuse, and even more so

when they are spoken only and not written, and have a tribal local, rather than

national, function. Nevertheless, those, among them, that are spoken in a remote

enough region, far from the influence of commerce and power, are much better

preserved. Other factors also prevent a language from falling into disuse,

especially the following two: (i) an identity feeling rooted in deep ethnic

consciousness and (ii) a culture rooted in an old, and constantly recalled,

tradition. Examples are Kamsra, Andoke, and several Cariban and Arawak

languages spoken in north-western Brazil and south-eastern Colombia, where

Spanish and Portuguese are dominant, or Hinukh, spoken in north-eastern

Caucasus, where Russian is strongly present.

Q.

At Expo 86 in Vancouver, I saw a marvelous thing. The English statement,

“Language is the glue. Without it, culture falls apart.” Simple statement, complex

concept(s). This powerful statement was translated into all the written languages

of the First Nations of Canada. It was absolutely stunning and I’ll never forget it.

93

paved with good intentions).

What happened to reading as unreading or misreading? To error?

So if pronouncing de Man's name is a problem (Derrida does so twice on

358--Paul de Man") and rehabilitating it (sooner or later) is

connected to puns, I was thinking about the cut in relation to the

body and in relation to the letter in Derrida and in de Man (where I

My question: What should ordinary non-linguists like us do toward preserving

languages, dialects, vocabularies, and the like? – Tom

A.

Thank you for reporting this statement, a stunning and marvellous one indeed.

The answer to your question can be found in chapter 9 of “On the Death and Life

of Languages,” whose title is “Factors in Preservation and the Struggle against

Disaster.” To sum it up, the best non-linguists can do, in North-America, towards

preserving languages, dialects, vocabularies and the like is, among other

possible actions,

(i) Participating in associations which, in the US and Canada, work to obtain from

local and national governments a recognition of the importance of Indian

languages (prosecuted and led to quasi-extinction during the XIXth century) and

cultures, such as those of the Algonquian, Athabaskan, Haida, Na-Dene,

Nootkan, Penutian, Salishan, Tlingit communities, to name just a few;

(ii) Participating in funding the creation of schools and the appointment and

payment of competent teachers;

94

think there is a drive to smaller and smaller divisions of the letter

and word; what I meant by sublime is that there is a drive towards he

collapse of reason by the micro rater than the macro) and the pleasure

of imagination is the pleasure of autobiographical anecdote as relief.

I decided to play out Derrida's machine metaphor as an answering

(iii) Participating in the training of linguists and ethnologists belonging to Indian

tribes, in order to foster the publication of grammars and dictionaries, which

should also be financially helped;

iv) Acting in order to introduce the knowledge of Indian cultures as one of the

important topics in American and Canadian TV and radio programs.

Q.

In an attempt to understand the current ongoing Holocene Extinction event, in

which millions of entire species are being removed from the DNA pool, cannot

languages be seen as another living structure facing extinction from the activities

of the too-successful human species? Classical Sanskrit, Classical Greek, and

Latin are three well known examples of languages that have had world impact,

but are no longer current. Their influence is still evident in our existing western

language structures, however. Nothing remains the same, and everything is

always new, even if built on the ruins of what has been. Isn’t the problem really

about mortality and the inevitability of uncontrollable change? – Wanderer

A.

To some extent, languages can be seen as living species which, like other such

95

machine and looked back at "Excuses (Confessions),"  reading as a

message left on Derrida's machine. I stumbled upon this:

Both stories have to do with mutilation and beheading . . . thus to

omit suppression is, in a sense. . .  to preserve an integrity. . . .

If the stories that have been omitted threaten the integrity of the

text ). (297)

species, face extinction, but the “activities of the too-successful human species”

cannot themselves be the factor leading to the extinction of languages, since

languages are part of the very definition of the human species. This is the reason

why most human societies have always cared for dead languages, by keeping

traces and testimonies, like the countless texts in Sanskrit, Classical Greek,

Latin, and even Sumerian, Pharaonic Egyptian, Geez (old Ethiopic), Classical

Chinese, etc. It is therefore not quite true that human societies are powerless

against “mortality and the inevitability of uncontrollable change.” If it were true,

how could Hebrew have been revived to become the language of the state of

Israel today, knowing that it had become extinct as early as the sixth century BC,

when it was replaced by Aramaic, the language which Yeoshua of Nazareth

spoke, like all other Jews, his contemporaries? There are, besides most of the

Bible itself, countless texts in Classical Hebrew. The “only” thing which was

needed, in order to revive a language whose death went back to such a remote

past, was an enormously strong collective human will. This is exactly what

happened in Palestine in the first decades of the XXth century! We can conclude

that human will can, in certain circumstances, have enough energy to counter

social and human changes as well as physical changes in the world, by opposing

96

De Man is talking about whole narratives that are omitted.  When

quoting de Man, Derrida sometimes uses ellipses; he omits parts of the

text (see p. 304 and 322) and cites de Man doing the same to Rousseau

(315);.

Derrida's quotation on p. 322 omits four sentences from Excuses

a neg-entropic force to its blind entropic evolution.

Q.

In Mumbai, there is a political group trying to save Marathi, which they claim, is

dying due to the exponentially growing cosmopolitan population of the city. They

are causing such a nuisance by forcing (even violently, sometimes) people to

display signs only in Marathi, have shops write their names in Marathi, and other

such things. They even attacked a movie producer and his office because in his

latest release the actors kept referring to Mumbai as Bombay (its old, non-

Marathi name!) Its ridiculous! This is not the way to try and save a language. It is

very disturbing to see the youth in Mumbai behaving the way they are. I’m sure

they can find a better way to promote the use of Marathi among the new

generation. Probably by coming out with better quality movies, theater plays, and

fun entertainment. What other ways would you suggest in such a case? Thanks.

ShachiiBom… uh, oops! Mumbai, India – Shachii

A.

On the first page of her book “Marathi” (London and New York: Routledge, 2004),

Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande writes: “For my parents, who gave me the precious

97

(283-284) One clause is "the ribbon substituting got a desire which is

itself the desire for substitution."

I don't mean to suggest that the Derrida quotation of de Man, the

ellipsis, is a symptom.  Nevertheless, the typographic marks might

have some bearing on de man's notion that Kleist disarticulates words,

gift of the Marathi language.” This author is probably one among many lovers of

Marathi, the mother tongue, I suppose, of Salman Rushdie, and also a language

important enough to have caused the leaders of the Indian Union to give the

political and administrative status of a state, named Maharashtra, to the territory

where it is spoken. Of course, the importance of this language in Mumbai is

great, but it is also true that (Indo-Aryan) Gujarati, Hindi, and neighboring

(Dravidian) languages like Telugu and Kanara, are also spoken in Mumbai, as

well as other languages, due to the “exponentially growing cosmopolitan

population of the city.” Forcing people to display signs, and shops to write their

names, only in Marathi, as well as condemning the use of the old name Bombay,

are regrettable attitudes. There are better ways to promote Marathi. Among

these, I would suggest

(i) TV and radio programs;(ii) The insistence on Marathi in elementary and high

schools;(iii) Official suggestions to literary authors to use Marathi rather than

English in at least some of their works.

Q.

What is your opinion on the future of Chinese language? – CHANG

98

and his account of the materiality of the letter at the end of the

Kant essay.  The canonical text in de Mans hands becomes the sublime

as the unreadable and the unreliable because of the text's scale (too

small to be visible--hence a materaility that is formal or without

matter, without phemenonalization) and because  always rewritten and

republished (recut, on a larger scale)

A.

There is no official effort, so far, to promote Chinese beyond its traditional zone

of influence, namely Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, where, along with imported

Chinese written characters (hànzì), Japanese (through their adaptation as kanji),

Korean and Vietnamese (among many other languages in that region) imported

an enormous amount of Chinese words: they constitute more than half the

vocabulary of these three languages, as components which are labelled Sino-

Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese respectively. Today, the Chinese

view English as the language by which China can become more open to the rest

of the world. This does not mean that the enormous capacity of other countries’

sinization which has characterized Chinese culture through the past centuries

could not manifest itself again. Chinese communities are present in many parts

of the world, essentially in Asia, to some extent in North-America, much less in

Europe and Africa, despite recent efforts in the last case. But they do not

promote Chinese, at least today, outside Chinese-speaking groups. The situation

might change if China continues to appear as one of the leading powers in the

world. Moreover, it should be pointed out that a great number (over 1000) of

Confucius Institutes are scheduled to be built by China in various countries

99

Perhaps part of the reason writing won't go away, that it remains and

remains as a stain, is that cutting is not just stopping or cutting

off, but a cutting off that preserves, paradoxically, the integrity

(pun here?) of the text that in Derrida's case is doing the answering;

hence his pincher move on de Man to close read de Man's tiny omission

worldwide, but we cannot know yet what will result from this decision.

Q.

If you were to select one endangered language to learn, and so help preserve,

on the basis of its linguistic originality and ability to express ideas in ways not

found in other languages, what would it be?– Ryan

A.

An endangered language I would select on the basis of its linguistic originality

and ability to express ideas in ways not found in other languages would be

Seneca, a northern Iroquoian language. In 1993 it was spoken by fewer than 200

people, on the Tonawanda, Cattaraugus, and Allegany reservations in western

New York State. It deserves to be learnt and so helped against extinction.

http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/q-and-a-the-death-of-languages/

100

of two words (quite old) and his tiny addition of one word (ne /not).

De Man's text has to be repaired in effect because of two errors of

quotations.  Its "intergrity" requires it be recut, so to speak, by

Derrida (hence Derrida's tendency, in my view, in Typewriter Ribbon

to unify all of de Man's works (published while he was alive and

posthumously) make them speak of machines and matter.  So the space or

gap that cannot be processed / made sense of by being archived)

between the machine and the event is literally the gap between Paul de

Man's writings published while he was alive (on the machine) and those

collected after his death (on matter).  Hence too the necessity of

recourse to anecdote--the anecdote about inscription is not part of

the archive, or only part, perhaps of Derrida's archive now (that he

is dead).  It has to be told.  Wonder if Derrida knew he was dying of

cancer when he wrote Typewriter Ribbon. I think he did.

Derrida’s elimination versus de Man’s dissemination (or rereading de Man’s

dissemination as always already eliminations?

As is . . . the case . . . in

ontotheological hermeneutics, the

sole purpose of reading is to do

away with reading entirely. Ina

strictly formalistic system, reading is

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at most a clearing away of the

referential and ideological rubble,

prior to the undertaking of the

descriptive analysis. Reading is a

contingent and not a structural part

of the form. Yet . . . Riffaterre was

never willing to endorse the

elimination of reading that stylistics

implies. . . . The only French

theoretician who actually reads

texts, in the full theoretical sense of

the term is Jacques Derrida. . . .

Hegel, who is often said to have

“forgotten” about writing, is

unsurpassed in his ability to

remember that one should never

forget to forget. To write down this

piece of paper (contrary to saying it)

is no longer deictic, no longer a

gesture of pointing rightly or

wrongly, no longer an example or a

Beispiel, but the definitive erasure f

of a forgetting that leaves no trace, I

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is, in other words, the determined

elimination of determination.

--Paul de Man, “Hypogram and

Inscription,” in The Resistance to

Theory, 31; 33; 42-43

The most interesting part of Typewriter, Ribbon Inc, is fourth section, in which

Derrida abruptly from a discussion of Jean-Jaques and Maman sort of incest and

her infinite forgiveness, to the discovery of an archive on 330, “Several weeks

ago, in Picardy, a prodigious archive was exhumed and then deciphered.

Inlayers of fauna and flora found, protected in amber, some animal or other,

some insect or other (which is nothing new) but also the intact cadaver of another

insect surprised by death, in an instant by a geological or geothermal

catastrophe, at the moment it was sucking the blood of another insect, 54 million

years before humans appeared on earth. Fifty-four million years before humans

appeared on earth, there was once upon a time an insect that die, its cadaver still

visible and intact, the cadaver of someone was surprised by death at the instant

it was sucking the blood of another! ”

330-31)

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“54 million years before humans appeared on earth. Fifty-four million years

before humans appeared on earth”

Talk about the amber insect as the arche-fossil!

(odd that 54 is used at some points and “fifty-four” at others)

Derrida stages the fossil as a problem of the archive:

But would it suffice that it be but two hours before the appearance of any living

thing or other, of whoever would be capable of referring to this archive as such,

that is, to the archive of a singular event at which this living being will not have

been, itself, present, yesterday, an hour ago—or 54 million years before humans

appeared, sooner or later, on Earth. . . . There are many , many things on Earth

that have been there 54 million years before humans. We can identify them and

analyze them, but rarely in the form of the archive or a singular event and, what

is more, of an event that happened to some living being, affecting an organized

living being, already endowed with a kind of memory, with project, need, desire,

pleasure, jouissance, and aptitude to retain traces” (331)

Why the turn to the archive, which is rhetorically unprepared for, in section IV?

Why the self-consciousness: “I don’t know why I am telling you this.” (331) to

which he returns, obviously in a fake out move: “I didn’t know , a moment ago,

why I was telling you these stories of a archive: archives of a vampire insect of a

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vampire insect in the process of making love 54 million years ago”—and archives

as Confessions.

And then Derrida gives his excuse: But yes I think I remember now, even though

it was first of all unconscious and came back to me only after the fact. It is

because, in a moment I am going to talk to you about the effacement and

mutilation of texts, about the falsification of the letter, about , and so forth. Now

—and here you’ll just have to believe me because I am telling you the truth, as

always”?

But this truth claim is rather bizarre given that he is talking aobut Rousseau and

restates as his excuse what he had already said after saying he doesn’tknow

why he is telling us this. “Perhaps because I’m planning to talk about cutting and

mutilations, and “insect,” like “sex” refers to cutting and means cut or uncuttable,

in French, and goes back to the singular event that is archived, “to be confided

without guarantee other than an aleatory one, incalculably, to some resistant

matter, here to amber. (331-332). The repetition is not exact, but quite similar,

and the first excuse sets up another autobiographical moment about the typo in

the proofs of his essay (insect was incest).

Why this turn after the micrological readings of what de Man omitted (Deja vieux,

p.317-18 to get to de Man on materiality p. 319, and during which Derrida

repeats the same question on p. 318 and 321 (“Why does he cut the

sentence . . . .” / “Why did de Man forget, omit, or efface those words” (“quite

old” “deja vieux”) making his extensive reading also excessive (Derrida risks the

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conflation of the two words throughout the essay) and does not ask to be

excused when he is excessively accusing de Man, even persecuting him, while

giving de Man every out possible (see the paragraph “Excluding a concern for

economy . . .) on p. 321 for the error of omission (after having deconstructed in

classic Derridean fashion (310-11; see also p. 314, where he again says that was

in the Reverie was already in the Confessions, and the non to the next section

where, after admiring de Man’s essay as canonical, he further spells out that

what de Man regards as a temporal succession is not really one, and then again

on p. 316 where what seems localized and then disseminated is always

disseminated throughout the entire text, quoting de Man), also by way of

repetition excusing and forgiving (312; see “Every confessional text is already

apologetic. . .” and “we are always already in the process of excusing ourselves,

or even asking for forgiveness, precisely in this ambiguous and perjuring mode”)

and remarking between repetitions “Let us leave this difficulty in place. It is going

to haunt everything that we will say from here on.”)

So how is this use of “haunt” for what is an aporia that covers the entire text

related to the final paragraph of the essay?

How is the placement of this metaphor between the repetition of the same point

and to play on apropos in the first section and the build up to the climax of the

essay at the end of section V on pp. 335-36 on the “arche-performative” and the

archive just after a discussion cuts by the editors to the sheets of paper of made

by the printers (the pun on paper cuts here does not occur to Derrida) as a figure

of traces:

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Right on the cut sheet, one can see traces . . . of a dozen additional lines that

have been effaced but that remain as vestiges of the effacement. They remain

as, but as illegible traces. . . . This confirms the vulnerability of the effaceable

object. The archive is as precarious as it is artificial, and precisely in that very

place where the signatory puts on guard, appeals, beseeches, warns against the

risk pf whatever might come along, as he says to ‘annihilaet this work.’ . . .

Sooner or later, the worse can happen to it. . . . it is now at the ehad of the

Confessions ,. . . it is the performative ever of the performative, an arche-

performative before the performative. Younger or older, than all the others, it

concerns the support and the archive of the confession, the very body of the

event, the archival and autodietic body that will have to consign all text

events . .. in the same vein. Arche-performative, the arche-event of this

sequence adjures to save the body of the inscritpitons, . . . .(345-46)

In the last section, Derida starts to impersonate de Man: “de Man never says, it

seems to me . . .. De Man, it seems to me, in his thinking

And Derrida defines in a kind of second, quieter climax materiality as not a thing

but resistance; it is not even a matter of the body. . . this nothing operates, it

forces, but as a force of resistance, It resist both beautiful form and matter as

substantial and organic totality. This is one of the reasons that de Man never

says, it seems, to me, matter, but materiality. 935)

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A related issue, that might help us ot formulate “De(ad) Man (Walking” as oour

answer to the question what to do with de Man now?, is how to read De Man’s

archive in relation to the amber insect and the cut pages, the archive as

decomposable, vulnerable, in the paraLacanian terms Derrida keeps bring up,

particularly the letter (he recalls the Poe debte, implicitly, though not as explicitly

as he does in Outwork: Prefacing” (which is still below the surface there).

De Man and the letter first comes up in an anecdote:

Paratextual / autobiographical moment where Derrida cites “a dedication, of an

’inscription,’ if I dare to cite it, of Allegories of Reading, dated November 1979:

‘Pour Jacques, en effacable amitie, Paul (For Jacques an ineffaceable friendship,

Paul’).. This ‘inscription’ in ink was followed in pencil, by two last words: ‘lettre

suit.’ Yes, ‘letter follows.’ You know at least something of the rest, the

posthumous continuation. De Man dies four years later, in 1983, leaving us with

the now notorious legacies for a virtually indeterminable ‘sooner or later.’” (p.

305)

Derrida had just commented on p. 304 that efface is linked to exoneration and

defines the autobiographical . . .”the guilt has been displaced from the written

thing to the writing of the thing, form the referent to narrative writing”

Then de Man aain comes up in rleationto the letter ono. 351,in which Derrida

effectively answers his early questions linking the maching and the event tp the

materiality of hteletter to in effect think further about hiscriique of Lacan (errida’s)

turning on the divisibility of the letter and its disinterrance. Derridakeeps talking

about de Man’s destiny. Kind of weird. But the point I ma trying to make is that

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Derrida now links about divisibility and materiality with the archive in terms of

dismemberment, mutilation etc to produce a reading of de Man:

“the project not only of showing the politico-performative autobiographicity of this

text of de Man’s, but of reapplying to it in a quasi-machine-like way that he

himself writes on one of the first objects that offered itself, namely, the text of the

Confessions—and the texts of a few others [so de Man is a Marion-nette]. If the

Confessions . . cannot be a text of pure knowledge . . . , well then, likewise, the

performativity of the de Manian text prohibits one form reducing it to an operation

of pure knowledge. (351)

The question for us might then be whether Derrida is recuperating de Man by

assembling from his living dead corpse a kind of Frankenstein’s monster (recall

the metaphors of monstrosity at the beginning of the essay) and operating on it to

reanimate it by chaining it to Rousseau; that is, Derrida is unifying the corpus of

de Man at the expense of the De Monic. Derrida is a De Maniac who, like de

Man wants to save a certain kind of formalism. Whereas we would want to hang

on to the survival of or by disfiguration de Man himself demonically allegorizes in

his prefaces , as you have so brilliantly read them—the essays don't add up, go

anywhere, need to be excused, etc). So the crucial paratext is less the footnote

that the pre-face (or pre-disfiguration) or face before the pre-face as arche-

performative.

We might think about the prehuman as the occasion for Derrida’s “eliminations”

of de Man as his preservation in amber.

We’d read with Derrida with / on De Man and against him / them.

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Assuming the risk, though de Man does not do so himself, I would say that there

is a materiality without matter, which , moreover, allies itself very well with a

formality without form. . . and without formalism. . . De Man in his thinking of

materiality it seems to me, is no more materialist than he is formalist. P. 350

Is Derrida eviscerating de Man here?

Thought about your title going postal in relation to posthuman. Wonder if this

essay is derrida going postal: it’s very hard to gauge the aggressiveness (or lack

thereof) of the essay, to know if he is joking or not at certain points, and, because

of he essay’s exposition, it’s difficult to gather together a “he” even though

Derrida refers to himself quite frequently in the essay) as a point of reference to

decide these questions.

archival “54 million years” “story” about the insect in amber that is sucking blood

when it does. “I don’t know why I am telling you this.” Then two pages later,

Derrida returns and refers tot that moment and offers some explanation. But the

phrase “54 million years ago” keeps being repeated in a “quasi-machinal”

manner inhte midst of a confessional narrative that exposes Derrida—I don’t

know why I am telling you this). The points Derrida makes are strangely

structured and gathered together. Bizarre exposition at this point in the essay.

We don’t get an actual anecdote until we finally get tot eh insect incest typo,

which again is a confessional, unverifiable moment (you have to believe me).

But there are frequent moments of self-referential personalization, and the text

reads very much like the lecture that occasioned it, far more than, say, “Force of

Law,” which also begins by inscribing its occasion. Since resistance is at the

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center of the machine for Derrida (though he does not put resistance in

psychoanalytic terms), he links up his autographical-subject-narrative reading of

de Man with the a propos references and repetitions to paratextual features—the

poster the invitation, his title, which repeats itself “A propos of a propos,” and he

repeats the phrase in the paper (Derrida also writes all about the title in Before

the Law), then to the footnote—is it always Oedidal—a swollen foot that stops

progress, and thento the final section, the “tribute” to d Man which takes the form

of “supplemental foontoes.” So does this chain of paratextual references, which

is in xcuses Confessions)”, in relation to the machine and the wound

(Dismmerbernt, beheading—de Man spells out “the chain” of substitutions in the

last sentence of a footnote on Rousseau’s prefaces) perform a barely legible

“allegory” of repetition in non-psychoanalytic terms, which is what de Man seems

to want to do, even as de Man invokes Freud, and Freudian terms (uncanny,

repression). Derrida says de Man is too psychoanalytic and not psychoanalytic

enough. Is here a repetition that returns to the return (of the spectral, the self-

spectralization) in the final paragraphs) and to a text (de Man’s) which turns to a

text about return in narrative form (Rousseau’s Confessions to Fourth Reverie),

which Derida then rereads by returning to De Man’s reading of Detrida’s reading

of Rousseau in “The Rhetoric of Blindness”? While praising de Mna, Derrida

also seems to bury him: he makes the same move on de Man’s mistranslation of

a passage to which he adds “ne” and then turns into “not,” thereby making

Rousseau say the opposite of what he clearly said that de Man made on Harry

Zohn and Gandillac in “The Task of the Translator” in which he detoured into a

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funny anecdote about Derrida uses the wrong translation (instead of the German

original). And just as De Man there says Derrida could have explained his

mistranlation, so Derrida gives even more clearly a reading of eh Rousseau

passage which would justify its mistranslation (the mistranslation says what the

correct translation really means to say but does not). Similarly, Derrida’s reading

of de Man’s Excuses 9Confessions0 mrepeats the same kinds of moves that de

Man makes. De Man keeps repreating himself as he sets up an opositin

between the Confessions story and the Reverie repetition of the same story).

What seems like a succession turns to be a repetition already happening in the

first text. So Derrida turns to the repetition of the sentence about excuse at the

end of Book Ii in Confessions. And he also multiplies frames to read de Man with

himself and without himself—he reads Excuses in relation to the chapter that

precedes it on promises to make the point that the “referential” or verifiable

moment in the excuse already depends on a performative (a promise) and he

reads both of these essays in relation to a substitution of the old lady (who dies

of cancer) with Marion that de Man misses, or chooses not to read, a temporality

of too late and too young, worked out in de Man’s oeuvre as an implicit

opposition between texts de Man published while he was alive and texts that

were recorded (by audiotape, though Derrida makes no comment on this

physical machine) and collected and published posthumously. So Derrida can

then ventriloquize de(ad) Man(walking) at different points in the essay, refer to de

Man and link up terms such as “materiality” in the latter essays on Kant to

“Excuses (Confession)” where de Man doesn’t use. But the ventriloquisms is

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very explicit and inconsistent—he does not consistently say “this is what de Man

would have said, if head lived). He is not speaking for de Man, nor does he unify

de Man’s texts by connecting machine and event, machine and excuse, as a

question Derrida keeps reiterating. Derrida plays around (though not in a

particularly playful manner) with the cut, as he cuts up, of talks about getting cut

off from his own initiative, but doesn’t stop (he writes 80 pages, plus notes!).

The ending (last two paragraphs) of “Typewriter Ribbon Inc” is very strange in

that Derrida regrets that de Man is not there to object but then cheerfully says

that de Man who would agree with him and that he would agree back with de

Man. It’s a happy ending. And here’s the final deictic “here and now”) the

strange multi-temporality of reconciliation and transcendental exoneration.

The text ends with a strange moment of invoking de Man—two final paragraphs.

“common innocence.”

But Derrida also seems to parody Rousseau when he says “you just have to

believe me” as he relates the insect / incest anecdote about the typo in the proofs

(is there a joke here on “proof?)”: he is writing in a kind of de Manian /

Rousseauian mode but using his “a propos” model of not exactly free association

to tell the story (and it parallels loosely his comments on the literal cutting of

Rousseau’s copy in the printed text and refers the reader to Peggy Kamuf’s

discussion of it in Signature Pieces—he also blesses Geoff Bennington with

another gratuitous footnote—a parody of Oedipal reproductions of Derrida?) but

what de Man might call a random, chance, aberration (the transposition of a “c”

and “s” by the printer). For Derrida, is this still dissemination? I was thinking

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that an alternative, more death oriented version of deconstruction might be called

“eliminations” (it would include the spectral, the paratext, the excremental—see

Derrida “Outwork: Prefacing” on Hegel’s paratexts as excremental, waste). To

put it psychological terms, Derrida does want to waste anything or to waste

away. The repetition as cut is a suspension that halts the Oedipal death drive

because de Man cannot be dead Man walking, just dead man stumbling.

Derrida also seems to be parodying the attacks on de Man (late stuff is all crap

because we know from the early stuff that he wrote Nazi crap), and to my mind,

strangely does not mention de Man’s discussion of reading Lukacs in terms of

early and later in Blindness and Insight.

Repetition (both rhetorical and analytical—the same texts, already about

repetition) for Derrida puts in play an arche-performative quasi machine that

“writes” reading as para-auto-bio-thanto-graphy.

Perhaps play off Darwin’s origin of the species and also come back to

passport-al-ing

Tomorrow's Eve.  Sci-fi

novel abut Thomas Edition inventing a living doll--like the bad Maria

in Metropolis.  Very indebted to Frankenstein.  The first few chapters

are the most interesting to us because they are about Edison's regrets

that speeches and sounds of the past have not been recorded--like

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Jesus's sermon on the mount, etc  Edison is very Christian but also

very mystical.   He comes off a bit like the inventor in Blade Runner

that ROy murders.  A French guy wrote it.)

Moon, which could go in our conclusion very easily (a sci-fi film--I liked it a lot--

sort of

reminded me of Silent Running from 1974, a more overtly eco-film). Moon adds

clones to the mix—what goes missing is the father’s voice—when the clone

hangs up—and the other clone only hears the daughter, now the substitute for

the specular relation with the mother. The father’s voice returns at the very end

in voice-over as a rejection of the clone—a nut who should be locked up). So

there is no reentering mother earth.

Moon adds clones to our list--and oddly enough I was just wondering

this morning when reading Derrida's Animal that I am why he doesn't

talk about cloning.

Clan of the Cave Bear just to see if cave

paintings showed up in it and lo and behold, images from the Cave of

Lescaux are used in the opening title sequence.

a "priest's refuge" in Beau

Geste, and returns at the end of the film (it is mentioned).

Derrida talks about

leaving traces and traces in the animal book, and I was

thinking about my boy scout camping trips and how the model scout was

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the one who left nothing behind, left the place as he found it.  It

was very conservation/. eco.  In a sense shelf-life is all about

leaving your stuff behind, but in the material way you described via de

Man--as in a sense garbage and eventually dust (to dust) yet also a

legible archive (like a gravestone, which of course also turns to dust

and becomes unreadable over time).   Strands of thought relating to

mourning and also about the anthropomorphism of animal conservation

and species preservation--the animal becomes the species that leaves

no trace behind (that is thereby a figure for human identification as

a seemingly better life form but which actually allows the human to

elevate itself once again above the animal).

Helll Boy is sort of like this—Raiders of Lost Ark sort of the opposite—harnessing

the power of preservation of certainlife and destruction of its enemies (chosen

and not). Arhceology calls forth divine sovereignty as act of Nazi extermination

(like Inglirious Bastards remake).

In films like Stagate, traces of the past always beomce signs of past exploitation

—as in Stargate and Emrrich’s 10,000 B.C. oreven Indepndence Day (the

starship htat Will Smth shoots down).

In non-human civilization is readable, that left itself behind, can be read

anddefeated. In Stragate, the strargate circle is literally a decoder ring. The

civilian knows how to read it, not the military. A restartgate.

Digging Your Own Grave

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I could be bounded in a

nutshell, and count

myself king of infinite

space.

Hamlet

Infinite Geste

Infinity also comes up as a problem in de Man’s discussion of “Obession and

“Correspondances” in “Anthropmorphism and Trope in Lyric.”

Before Infinity versus After Finitude?

Can you hear the pun on "digging?"  To dig something was slang in the

1950s in the U.S. for liking something.  It continued into the 60s but

died out along with groovey by the end of the 60s.  The slang meaning

may be too distant to be audible to people younger than me.  But of

course the primary meaning would be the negative one.

So maybe Hamlet could come into play here--as a way nto thinking about

Perec writing himself into his own death

Another subheading for the conclusion

The Pleasures of Premature Burial

---another way of thinking about the storage unit is an expansion as

oppsoed to say, getting rid of yourself through garage sales,

donations, and moving to a smaller home (your home becomes you coffin

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and you delude yourself, by giving stuff away, that the you can take

the stuff you kept with you.

I think we could go off of de Man's "true 'mourning' "--that is to

say, off the notion that there is no such thing as true mourning, but

something other than melancholia too.

A kind of failed mourning that is true, related to the truth being an

army of tropes.  You can stage your own death, write yourself into

your death.  I guess we could bring in Ex-humanization here (if I can

manage not to go entirely senile soon).

No folding of card hands in Lifeboat; cards stacked metaphor in Kleist esay.

The War on Error

Luc besson, Le Dernier Combat

Wall paintings by aborigines in Walkabout

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Drawing on a vase / pot that the hero finds as he goes back for his girlfriend. No

cave paintings.

No cave paintings in 10,000 B.C. Roland Emmerich film.

Check the original.

Tristes Tropes

Alternate Endings

Deluge (1931), New York scale model is swamped by Tsunami. The statue of

liberty is not destroyed.

In Deep Impact, the State of Liberty is destroyed (low angle shot of the face /

dead falling underwater. In Resident Evil: Extinction Simulation of Statue of

Liberty in Las Vegas is partially buried in sand, as at the end of The Planet of the

Apes

State of Liberty is pushed off its pedestal in The Day After Tomorrow and an

overhead shot shows it cracking under pressure of the ice but not disintegrating.

It’s still there at the end of the film.

History Channel series “Life After People.”

Lincoln Memorial in the end of the remake of Planet of the Apes.

119

It is manifestly by design that Heidegger goes against the established canons of

literary scholarship. He relies upon a text whose unreliability must have been

known to him, and engages in detailed analyses, referring to manuscript

corrections, marginal notes, and the like, without verifying for accuracy, at least

without doing so enough. He comments upon the poems independently of one

another and draws analogies only in support of his own thesis. When a passage

is at odds with his interpretation . . . he simply sets it aside. He ignores the

context, isolates lines or words to give them an absolute value, without any

regard for their specific function in the poem from which he plucks them. . . And

one could go on listing Heidegger’s heresies against the most elementary rules

of text analysis. However these heresies are not arbitrary because of a lack of

rigor but because they rely upon a poetics that permits, or even requires,

arbitrariness.

Except fr htat last sentence, one could saythat Agamben does the same thing

with WB on the demon. Agamen’s lsitof refereces to it by WB is the most

comprehensive of any. But his reading of each example is highly selective and

ignores the Fausitian dialiectic in which the angel / demon is caught. The angle

is wounded (Jacob’s struggle) in the hip, a kind of displaced cicumcicssion, by

which the angel becomes a tempter, even as a figure of light. The angel is

between the sacred and the profane. Mestipoheles is a demon because he is a

figure of Enlightenment. He brings Faust the promise of technology, youth,

better standard of living, knowledge, erotic fulfillment (already corruption), travel.

120

SO the State too takes this same form under secularization: we will give you

progress, we will care for you, we will make your everyday life better and easier

for you. Ignore the prohibition. Come with me. This is the discourse of desire.

Two models of dealing with thepast, neither of which works:

In the United States, we say “turn the page” Nw is not he time for anger. We

can’t look back,ta would be vindictive. We must start again. That is the only

discousrse in the U.S> The problem is htat it produces repression. The past is

not redeemed in the future because evil has been repressed, continues.

In Judiasm, the future is the not yet—the surce is the not-yet, the future that

hasn’t arrived and htat allows for correction. But in Isreal, there is an excess of

correction—not only the victims of he Holcoaust, but the ivcitms of Isreal’s

occupations. The gallery of victims is too big to manage.

So some engagement with the demonic is inevitable. Some version of Faust is

necessary for the possibility of justice.

Read WB’s essay on Krauss as demonic in relation to Karl Krauss’s essay on the

creature (Rosa Luxemburg and the Nazis beating the horse to death).

121

Hoelderlin publication after WWI was an event. Discovery of some new mass. ,

all in relation to mourning WII and appropriated by Communists, Nazis, etc.

Being and Time as a work of mourning for WWI.

122

123

Kleist’s letters on his Kant crisis (reason is not universal but just one

perspective).

Unmo/o/u/rned

Spare Life

124

We could ask now only what happens to bare life and the varieties of shelf-life as

a response, but the proliferation of what counts as bare life or of the forms of

bare life as apprehended by the State, and hence what counts as the exception,

as bare life, and sacrifice. Related major issues to biopolitics and bibliopolitics

(bio-biblio-politics?) would be the exception, sovereignty, secrecy, and the

decision.

For Agamben, it was homo sacer and is now homines sacrii.

For Ronell (PMLA “Misery of Theory”), it is the refugee, not the citizen, and

sacred alien that allows for a hailing that is not a heiling (a polis that is not Greek,

but includes brown skinned women—from Holderlin’s “Andenken”), a departing

that doesn’t stay behind, a listening rather than an overwhelming stupefying

wonder.

For Bataille, in The Cradle of Humanity, the exception is prehistoric man.

So part of the question is what is bare life after WWII?

By framing question of bare life in this manner, we could address the return to

the theological that bothers QM and also the possibly encrypted anti-Semitism of

his book in terms of a problem of the uncanny theological, theological uncanny

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faced by Agamben and Derrida and also between Derrida and Scholem and

Scholem and WB.

Scholem might seem too Judeocentric (the Jew as elect, at home; only the Jew

as the victim); Agamben too Catholic (his account of homo sacer is based

entirely on Roman law); Derrida too easily cosmopolitan (everyone is a sacrificial

victim; no origin; no title to a place).

Derrida on the binding of Isaac in The Gift of Death

These three monotheisms fight over it [Jerusalem], it is useless to deny it by

means of some wide-ranging ecumenism; they make war with fire and blood,

having always done so and the more fiercely today. Each claiming its particular

perspective on this place and claiming an original and political interpretation of

Messianism and the sacrifice of Isaac. Isaac’s sacrifice continues every day.

There is no front between responsibility and irresponsibility but only between

different appropriations of the same sacrifice, different orders: the religious and

the ethical, the religious and the ethico-political, the theological and the political,

the theologico-political, the theocratic and the ethico-political, and so on; the

secret and the public, the specific and the generic, the human and the non-

human. Sacrificial war rages not only among the religions of the book and the

races of Abraham that expressly refer to the sacrifice of Isaac, Ishmael, Abraham

or Ibrahim but between them and the rest of the starving world within the

immense majority of humankind and even those living (not to mention the others,

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the dead or nonliving, dead or not yet born,) who don’t belong to the people of

Abraham, or Ibrahim, all those others to whom the names of Abraham and

Ibrahim have never meant anything because they don’t conform or correspond to

anything.

The Gift of Death, 70-71

There is thus no easy binary between Derrida and Agamben but different

problem of universalization the exception-the homo sacar—either in an anti-

Semitic manner, as with Agamben, that levels car accidents and concentration

camps, or the multicultural weak messianism (WB) and cosmopolitanism of

Derrida.

These attempt to singularize or universalize bare life founder on the repression of

the Jew at the center of Western philosophy: the Jew as the particular, incapable

of universalization is overcome by the Greek as the universal, hence the founder

of philosophy and also the model of the body (strong, as opposed to the weak

Jewish body—see Sander Gilman; Freud, Moses and Michaelangelo).

Abraham’s silence (a kind of infrasilence in which a secret inside a secret

remains unknown to Abraham) means that the condition of secularization is

theological but also that theology is impossible without secularization.

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No one would dispute that the very brief narrative of what is called the sacrifice of

Isaac bound . . . leaves no doubt as to this fact: Abraham keeps silent, at least

concerning the truth of what he is getting ready to do, as far as what he knows

abut it and also as far as what he doesn’t know and will never know.

Concerning God’s precise, singular call and command, Abraham says nothing

and to no one. Neither to Sarah, nor to his own, nor to humankind in general.

He does not reveal his secret or divulge it in any familial or public, ethical, or

political space. He does not expose it to any part of what Kierkegaard calls the

generality. Kept to secrecy, kept in secret, kept by the secret that he keeps

throughout this whole experience of asking forgiveness for the unforgivable that

remains unforgivable. Abraham takes responsibility for the decision. But it is for

a passive decision that consists in obeying, and for an obedience that is the very

thing for which he has to be forgiven; and in the first place, if we follow

Kierkegaard [Fear and Trembing], to be forgiven by the very one whom he will

have obeyed.

Literature in Secret trans David Wills (U of Chicago P, 2008), 128.

Derrida ends with a different account of decision than Schmitt’s.

This is the responsible decision of a double secret doubly assigned. First secret:

he must not reveal that God has called him and asked the greatest sacrifice of

him in the tete-a-tete of an absolute covenant. This is the secret he knows and

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shares. Second secret, super-secret: the reasons for or sense of the sacrificial

demand. In this regard Abraham is held to secrecy quite simply because the

secret remains secret to him. He is therefore held to secrecy not because he

shares God’s secret but because he doesn’t share it. Although he is, in fact, as if

passively held to secret he doesn’t know, any more than we do, he also takes

passive and active responsibility, such as leads to a decision, for not asking God

any questions, for not complaining, as Job did, of the worst that seems to

threaten him at God’s request.

Literature in Secret trans David Wills (U of Chicago P, 2008), 129

Response:

Maurice Blanchot, “The Beast from Lascaux,” in A Voice from Elsewhere trans,

Charlotte Mandelll (SUNY, 2007), 41-52.

Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) has a villain who asks “Am I the last man?” The

plot involves the possible extinction of man due to globral cooling. If a

spaceship, Icarus II, can successfully drop its bombs in the sun, then the sun will

get back to its normal heat, and light up the world, for a really nice day.

Quest for Fire plays off of 2001 and Planet of the Apes  (I love Rae Dawn Chong

in

it) but it's really quite sentimental and sort of Encino

Man-ish--becoming human means, first of all, going on a quest romance

for fire (already very New Age) and then learning not to be a

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cannibal, how to laugh, how to fall in love (don't save your  your

girlfriend from being raped and then rape her yourself!), and even how

to talk to the animals (Caveman talking / grunting as Dr. Dolittle  /

Tarzan of the Apes to wooly mammoths and give them food).  But there

is also a really strange thematic of castration that runs through the

film that works counter to this sentimental narrative.  The ape attack

begins right after a cro-magnon guy rapes a woman (who doesn't seem to

mind).  It's a kind of Friday the 13th effect--sex followed by lethal

punishment.   A cannibal seems to bite the hero's genitals off, and

then Chong seems to "kiss it well" by giving him a blow job later.

It's all registered in the hero's face, so we can't see what is really

going on in either case.  I suppose one could read the film as a New

Age-Promethean story in which circumcision (cannibal eats the foreskin

rather than castrates the hero, who is then initiated into a discourse

of desire?) replaces the vultures eating the liver (there actually is

a vulture scene, come to think of it).  Chong's fellow captive (mate?)

is missing an arm from below the below, which the apes cannibals are

still eating. he gets left behind, apparently just about dead from

loss of blood.

10,000 B.C. Roland Emmerich (2008)

It turns out to be a kind of prequel to Stargate, against that the aliens turn out not

to be gods. But it has a sort of Chariots of the Gods, ancient Egypt aspect of the

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plot, and it’s like Apocalypto in that a relatively harmless tribe that hunts woolly

mammoths ends up getting enslaved after the father goes in search of we don’t

know what—somehow the mammoths are dying out, global warming is

happening, so he looks for seeds, which show up at the very end of the film. So

the Cro-magnons (sort of dark whites) go back too planet them.

The society is matriarchal, even though men carry the white spear.

It’s the end of the beginning—so it is a sort of sci-fi about man getting off being

carnivores and becoming vegetarians. The black tribe is already vegetarian and

live in a much warmer climate. Since there is a huge herd of mammoths, who

also survive in the warmer climate to help build the pyramids, it’s unclear why

they don’t just migrate south and the the tribe follow them.

There are several characters who die along the way, one of whom is sacrificed

and throw of the pyramid and lands looking Jesus on the cross. But the hero is

more like Moses-he crosses the sand. But there is no red sea.

Reference to Gladiator (as one), Lawrence of Arabia (goes across the desert at

night).

But there are no miracles, only slavery. The Moses hero doe manage to liberate

the slaves in an uprising—throws a spear—kind of like Spartacus combat.

And girl comes back to life (Pocahontas and the three mother) as the matriarch

dies, breathing.

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SO it’s New Age Ice Age—multicultural, pretty much. Even the main slaver is

pretty good—steals in order to free the girl and get her to marry him.

Also reference to troy when she is shot ad even a reference to Last of the

Mohicans. “I will come back for you and find you.”

The dramatic motivation is largely inexplicable—the substitute father dies, the

matriarch dies so tat the couple may unite—the girl referred to as the child with

blue eyes even though she is an adult—the end of the films says that the legend

of the child of the blue eyes begins with her death. But then she comes back to

life.

Anachronistic meet and greet gestures between men (acting like contemporary

soldiers).

Georges Bataille, Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture (Cambridge,

MA: MIT, 2005)

Notes on Notes for a Film on the Caves of Lascaux

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. . . humans are always endowed, in human eyes, with human dignity. Humans

count for something. In principle, an animal does not. We send animals to

slaughter, and we hardly blink an eye. True, our own kind did as much with other

human beings in Germany not so long ago, but in t the end this was an

enormous scandal, and then, despite everything—I apologize for such an

offensive example-in Germany no one thought of pulling human bodies apart as

if they were animals. . . . humans see themselves as transcendent in relation to

animals. For a human being, there is a discontinuity, a fundamental difference

between an animal and himself. An animal is nothing, or, if you prefer it is a thing,

whereas we are minds, and when has a mind, one necessarily counts for

something. Except—there is an exception—what is true for us is not true of

prehistoric man. For the men of prehistory—even if we’re talking about human

beings that anthropologists call Homo sapiens, our truly complete brethren, like

Cro-Magnon man, who not made not only tools but also art proper—insofar as

we are able to judge them, animals were in principle no less like them than other

human beings. . . he confronted the animal not as though he were confronting an

inferior being or a thing, a negligible reality, but as if he were confronting a mind

similar to his own.

“A Visit to Lascaux,” 48-49

. . . the obvious indifference of the men of the Paleolithic to the final outcome; in

other words, they were indifferent to the state of a cave wall after a drawing. The

condition of the cave wall was so unimportant to them that they would not erase

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or cover over the older images, generally resulting in a muddle, contrary to every

principle of composition.

“A Visit to Lascaux,” p. 50

These fascinating figures on the cave walls are beautiful simply because their

authors loved what they depicted. They loved them and they wanted them. They

loved them and they killed them.

“The Passage from Animal to Man,” 75

It has become commonplace today to talk about the eventual extinction of human

life. The latest atomic experiments made tangible the notion of radiation invading

the atmosphere and crating conditions in which life in general could no longer

thrive. Even without war, the experiments alone, if pursued with a little

persistence, might themselves begin to create these conditions.

I do not intend to talk to you about our eventual demise today. I would like, on

the contrary, to talk about our birth. I am simply struck by the fact that light is

being shed on our birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears

to us. In fact, only recently have we begun to discern with a kind of clarity the

earthly event that was the birth of man. Similarly, you would find only scattered

elements of what I would like with you tonight in books. These elements have

been available to us for so short a time that we have not even had time to

elaborate a true synthesis of them. I myself only just compiled the results of the

research I had devoted to the question in the past few months.. . This lack of

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maturity will not astonish us if we keep in mind that the capital discovery in this

domain, the one I will discuss with you in a moment, dates back to September

1940.This is the date of the discovery of the extraordinary discovery of the

Lascaux cave.

“Lecture January 18, 1955,” 87-88

These first paintings, those form the Altimara cave near Santander, were chiefly

responsible for the tremendous hostility of the Spanish Jesuits toward prehistory.

We assumed that they had these wonderful bison executed on the Altimara

ceiling to discredit history. Since then, the Church’s opposition to prehistory has

so completely been resolved that the most eminent French prehistorian is now a

priest.

“Lecture January 18, 1955,” 90

The monumental frescoes that we admire so much in Lascaux are nearly intact.

They abruptly bring us into the world of prehistoric man without any transition,

and they give us a representation of this world that is as clear, as striking, as

delicately sensitive as any painting left us by the generations closest to ours.

“Lecture January 18, 1955,” 90

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In this lecture, Bataille showed a film the title of which is no unknown, according

to the Gallimard editor, and the end of which had been cut off the reel and stolen

before Bataille showed it to his audience:

What I have just said also restates the meaning of the film that will now be

projected before you. Perhaps this film does not show exactly what would be

most important to show you, mostly because one of its former users seems to

have taken an interest in it that he absconded with the most significant part. The

end is missing, which would have shown you the essential elements of the cave,

perhaps not in the way it should have been, but you’re going to see it anyway.

After the film, I will do my best to sort out fact from fiction. In any case, my slide

presentation afterward will, I hope, remedy the mutilation of the film in a

satisfying way.

“Lecture January 18, 1955,” 92.

Even the film’s no lost title appears to be somewhat disjunct from the film.

I would only like to point out before beginning the film that the first few images

you will see of figurations are not from the Lascaux cave but from he caves of the

Cabrerets. . . Despite the title of the film, Lascaux is seen later only in a rather

limited number of figures.

“Lecture January 18, 1955,” 92.

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The editor supplies the flowing endnote, the last in the volume, on Btaille’s pans

to make a film about prehistoric paintings:

The first page of notes included here appears on the backs of two postcards from

Lascaux. Two additional postcards include, on one, an enumeration of

civilizations from Stonehenge to the Renaissance and, on the other, a list of

Bataille’s then–current work in progress. This list reads: “Preface to Mourir de

rire, Lecture on Laughter, Film on prehistory, Next: 1Article on Hemingway

signed Jean Delwaux, 2. prehistory, 3. notes: press notes 1953 and new

publications, See Bandi Art prehistorique (Ouevres completes, vol. 9, p. 480).

Each of the remaining pages represents a distinct note for this film that was not

to be.

“Appendix: Notes for a Film”, 210

The notes are a kind of film treatment rather than screenplay, but have a

narrative arc that suggests a disaster film with a beak ending, perhaps less dark

than loop back to the future in Chris Marker’s post-apocalyptic, Holcocuastal La

Jetee, but a creation of life conceived as a tragedy of violence and war

Something like a parody the Fantasia Rite of Spring sequence:

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The earth before life, represented by the desert, without trace of plant or animal.

Sunset. A violent wind stirs the sand. We hear the long dark moan of the wind.

Darkness falls and the starry night invades the screen animated by an almost

intangible movement, elements of slippage, of recoil

DAYS AND YEARS CENTURIES, AND MILLENIA SUCCEED ONE ANOTHER,

IN A VANISHING POINT OF THE UNIVERSE THE EXTENDED EMPTINESS

OF THE PLANET, ALTERNATIVELY, GORGES ITSELF WITH LIGHT AND

SINKS INTO NIGHT. SLOWLY THE STIRRING OF WATERS . . .

Batialle has Haydn’s Creation and Water music play over a “blinding fulmination”

of a “storm . . . SLOWLY, TRAGICALLY, THE TUMULT OF WATERS WILL

RAISE THE UNHAPPY WONDERS OF LIFE. THUNDEROUS LIFE SPRINGS

FROM THE DISORDER OF THE ELEMENTS LIKE ELECTRICITY FROM THE

DISORDER OF STORMS.”

The waters calm, the tide of the ocean withdraws, and the camera goes

underwater to film fauna and rare microbes. All seems good:

THE EARTH LITTLEBY LITTLE COVERED WITH VEGETATION AND ANIMAL

LIFE ABOUNDS

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But the proliferation of what seems to be a still life painting and hen Disney

panoramic helicopter shots quickly takes the form of a secular, Darwinian

Armageddon:

Moss and mushrooms . . . insects, tiny landscapes of moss, insects and

mushrooms. Vast stretches, coastlines, shoreline herbs and flowers, flying fish

on the waters. Then birds. Birds devour insects in flight. An immense variety of

small animals and insects tear each other to pieces.

“Appendix: Notes for a Film”, 185

there's a Dr Who (most recent series) in which there's a library planet which in

order to save its human users transports them into worlds it creates out of

books in its holdings--all very much aimed at the adolescent viewer...not sure

it repays much scrutiny--but if we're inventorying...

Inkspell? Also an adolescent fantasy film.

Cover of YFS issue “On batialle” has identiy card on the cover.

Shelly’s The Last Man alludes to Robinson Crusoe. It also has clear parallels to

The Tempest, although the play is never cited (Othello, Julius Caesar, The

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Winter’s Tale (a character is named Perdita), Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice,

and Sonnet 44 are).

Verney, the narrator and hero, after a shipwreck (recalled 457) that kills the

other two remaining survivors, makes his way (“journey”; “pilgrimage”) to Rome.

p. 458, he breaks his wand, his recorder of days, since time no longer has any

meaning. The book is self-consciously about its own writing (“streak these

pages”) but as a manuscript, not a printed book, that will have no reader.

On p. 456 he decides to journey to Rome and leaves behind a sign in each town

he searches and finds deserted “I would write up in a conspicuous part of each,

with white paint, in three languages, that ‘Verney, the last of the race of

Englishmen, had taken up his abode in Rome.’”

P. 46 Verney affirms his decision to live in a city, Rome, not the country, after he

nearly kills young billy goat.

If those illustrious artists had in truth chiseled these forms, how many passing

generations had their giant proportions outlived! And now they were viewed by

the last of the species they were sculptured to represent and deify. (461)

He takes consolation in the wonders and relics of Rome. He visits the Vatican (p.

465).

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I endeavored to read. I visited the libraries of Rome. I selected a volume, and,

choosing some sequestered, shady nook, on the banks of the Tiber, or opposite

the fair temple in the Borghese gardens, or under the old pyramid of Cestius, I

endeavored to conceal from myself, and immerse myself in the subject traced on

the pages before me . . . Ah! While I streak this paper with the tale of what my so

named occupations were (465)

During one of my rambles through the habitations of Rome, I found writing

materials on a table in an author’s study. Parts of the manuscript lay scattered

about. It contained a learned disquisition on the Italian language one page an

unfinished dedication to posterity, for those who profit he writer had sifted and

selected the niceties of this harmonious language—to whose everlasting benefit

he bequeathed his labors.

I will also write a book, I cried—for whom to read?—to whom dedicated? And

then with a silly flourish . . I wrote,

DEDICATION

TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD

SHADOWS, ARISE, AND READ YOUR FALL!

BEHOLD THE HISTORY OF THE

LAST MAN.

I will write and leave in this most ancient city, this ‘world’s sole monument,’ a

record of these things. I will leave a monument of the existence of Verney the

Last Man. At first I thought only to speak of plague, of death, and last, of

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desertion; but I lingered fondly on my earthly years, and recorded with sacred

zeal the virtues of m companion. They have been with me during the fulfillment

of my task. I have brought it to an end--I lift my eyes from the paper--again they

are lost to me. Again I feel that I am alone.

(466; 467)

I ascended St. Peter’s, and carved on its topmost stone aera 21000, last year of

the world!

He decides to leave Rome and finds a boat by the Tiber to leave in:

Tiber, the road which is spread by nature’s own hand, threading her continent,

was at my feet, and many a boat was tethered to the banks. I would with a few

books, provisions, and my dog, embark in one of these and float down the

current of the stream into the sea . . . These are wild dreams. Yet since . . . they

came on me, as I stood on the height of St. Peter’s, they have ruled my

imagination. I have chosen my boat, and laid in my scant stores. I have selected

a few books; the principal are Homer and Shakespeare—But the libraries of the

world are thrown open to me—and in any port I can renew my stock. I form no

expectation or alteration for the better. (469)

Neither hope nor joy are my pilots—restless despair and fierce desire of change

lead me on. I long to grapple with danger, to be excited by fear, to have some

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task, however slight or voluntary, for each day’s fulfillment. I shall witness all the

variety of appearance, that the elements can assume—shall read fair augury in

he random bow—menace in the wind—some lesson or record dead to my hear t

in everything. Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high,

and the moon waxes or wanes, angles, the spirits of the dead and the ever-open

eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney—the LAST

MAN.

THE END

(470)

Leaves of mourning By Anselm Haverkamp, Vernon Chadwick

Roman noir speculations of the day: I believe Hoederlin's “Mnesomsyne three

versions, the third being a reconstruction that de Man rejects in R of R) is the

encrypted poem that Weber wants to return to. Haverkamp has an essay on

it in the YFS Legacies of de Man issue, and a chapter on it in the book above

( a kind of tribute to de Man).

Maybe we should think (if only as always to be deleted subtext) a little about

tribute criticism, the cover (as in pop music) as cover up (silencing the

original, mimesis as turning voice back into noise), and of tributary

(Hoederlin's The Ister). Going with the flow? the URsprung? or swimming

against a rip(ped) tide? Or not. Do you know the film The Ister? Alternately

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really great (especially the interviews with Lacoue-Labarthe) and really,

utterly boring.

Heidegger's book on the poem is fantastic.

Soylent Green (1971) and I Am Legend (2007) notes

There is an obvious pun in the title on soil as in earth (dirt for planting) and soiled

(dirtied). Also the color coding is red, yellow, and green (not blue).

Sol’s favorite color is also a mix, orange.

So green is a late addition that is not a product or just a by-product of soylent

yellow and soylent red.

The truth that “soylent green is people” is established first through a book with

two volumes about the Soylent corporation, taken by Thorn (Charlton Heston)

from Simonson’s (Joseph Cotton) apartment after Simsonson is murdered

because he is unreliable.

Then Sol (Edward G. Robison) goes to the public library. Only old people are

there. There is a woman judge with a German accent. She makes the

determination of the crime, and so Sol euthanizes himself. It’s a 20 minute show

after you drink some kind of painless drug (a woman and a man administer it)

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with a Cinerama, 180 panorama (Disney like) nature movie with the last

movement Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (Pastoral, same sequence from

Fantasia) playing. Sol and Thorn (on the side of the Soylent Corporation) talk at

one point, but the music deafens Sol’s words. But Heston seems to get it. SO he

goes back to the public library, but it’s already four guys and bad guy waiting for

him. Shoot out at shelter where priest was offed by the bad guys after talking to

Thorn about confessing Simonson (Joseph Cotton).

Thorn gets proof (very invasion of he body snatchers) at the end, but he is dying

and no one gets it. There is some casting of two black male actors from

blacksploi films.

The film ends with the nature film that Sol saw when he died at what he calls

“home” (an assisted suicide center that has no religious ornaments—looks sort of

Roman), only now it takes up the full widescreen. So we are like Sol, the

spectator watching a film while the earth is dying. The end titles roll with the film,

until the title comes up at the end with a sunset that is almost over.

The opening title sequence is very experimental—a montage of photos of

industrialization using split screens (in two, in three, and four) with very cut

cutting from one to the other. What Alvin Toffler then called Future Shock, and

the sequence is very much indebted to Woodstock’s split screens (1969) though

not its slow pace. Editing is at what came to be known as MTV speed. The

serialization of factories (assembly lines, moving form farms to cities, traffic

congestion, black and white to color, whith the splitting of screens and the cutting

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faster and more frantic the closer we get to 1972) and people processing are

equated. Soylent Green is the product of contemporary capitalism, a greening of

America that masks a kind of human cannibalism and destruction figured as

overpopulation, an unsustainable planet. The ocean is dying, plankton are dying.

Hence people turn into people feed. Recycling turns into cannibalism. Waste

treatment plants and corporations are the same. They take waste (human waste)

and recycle). So film itself works as a corporate commodity, a film reduced kind

of waste “treatment.”

There is pointedly no concern with religion except for the Catholic priests and

nuns running the shelter and being overwhelmed and Sol being marked as

Jewish (“Lachaim” he says twice) and all of the people in the library are marked

as Jews, very post-Holocaust, Judgment at Nuremberg). But the Judge is an

atheist. “God? Where will you find him?” Sol’s answer is to look for him at

home, by committing assisted suicide.

Thorn drinks and smokes dope! And he would sleep with a young black woman

(who looks like Grace Jones) or “furniture” but doesn’t. Instead he sleeps with a

21-24 year old prostitute who looks like she just walked off a Playboy centerfold

shoot.

I am Legend 

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I Am Legend is a 1954 science fiction/horror novel by Richard Matheson about

the last man alive in Los Angeles.

Two different versions of the ending of I am Legend on BLu-ray (DVD too, I

expect), the second with a different, closer to 28 Days Later (which also has

two endings) and Children of Men, the first a kind of Left Behind messianic

insnaity.

The film departs from The Omega Man (1971) in locating the action in NY

instead of LA, giving a backstory that begins during the logo, with a

radio, morning talk radio broadcast, then a TV interview with a

doctor (the actress looks like Miranda Richardson or Emma Thompson) saying to

the black newscaster that she has found a vaccine and answers Yes when

asked if she has cured cancer and then continues intermittently until

we discover that the hero stayed on Manhattan and sent his wife and

daughter away who were killed in a helicopter crash in front of his

eyes, and in having the lead role played by a black man, and in

giving the hero a German shepherd dog named Sam.

The first dramatic scene is similar to The Omega Man, except that the

hero is hunting, in this case deer.  Just as he is finally about to

take a shot, a lion takes down the deer.  He is about to shoot the

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lioness when the father and cub come along.  So he can't shoot.  He

also tears up when his wife and daughter fly off (we see the shot

several times).

But then he runs into a Spanish woman and his son,  and hook up with

her (though there is no sex scene), and she is a religious kook who

believes in God’s plan.  The theatrical version ends with the hero

sacrificing himself so she and her son can escape to a colony in New

York.

The alternate, no doubt original ending makes much sense since it involves the

hero doctor returning the corpse of the woman (about 18) t her mate, then cut to

an exterior daylight shot of the lion family, and then the car driving off with a all

three, the same woman voice-over, but repeating the radio call the hero (Wil

Smith made earlier, and was the place of his rescue by the woman) made earlier

in the film. The theatrical release seems geared to a Palin we’re philo-Semitic

until the Jews all die before Jesus comes back right-wingers. The “original”

ending, dubbed “controversial” on the plastic wrapper of the Blu-ray, makes the

film more into a Bambi movie, with the kind of the life is a jungle metaphor for

urban life literalized into the Lion King family (nuclear to boot, and the mom is the

hunter) and the post-white “blended family’ learning the lesson of not

experimenting on animals because and infected people (the same way), because

treating infected people like animals is to (a) misread their desire to save each

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other as suicidal, and (b) to reproduce the logic of the holocaust. The scene in

which the hero sends his wife and daughter away is a total Holocaust moment,

with the army checking for infection and letting uninfected people go forward and

others kept back (a white woman and her daughter cry out for help to Will Smith,

and he doesn’t supply it or even answer them). He has photos on his laboratory

wall of all the people he treated with his various drugs but who died. It looks very

Hollowcaustal.

On the theatrical version, the gates literally open as the Spanish woman finds the

colony God has spoken to her about. So it’s just plain crazy theology, left-behind

racism, EXCEPT that is multiculturalism racism (no sex between Hispanic and

black man, but the black man does sleep with his interracial, two colored dog) in

the bathtub who he has to put down after it is attacked by rabid dogs.

There’s also a couple of really weird moments in which the Spanish kid is

watching Shrek and we get Shrek talking about a concentration camp (in coded

but clear terms) and of course Eddie Murphy as the donkey (black people as

ogres or asses; King Kong is in the not too distant past given the third remake).

It’s a terrible film, but I will teach The Omega Man with it to show the students

that (a) a low production values can make for a much better film, and (b) to get

them thinking about race and cinema, even if in simplistic terms, show that the

seemingly racist Omega Man is the opposite and the seemingly anti-racist I am

149

Legend is in fact totally racist. Will Smith has to like his dog and cry all the time to

show that he is not AN ANGRY BLACK MAN, GODDAMMIT! MOFO! But htat

don’t make no difference. Cuz, like, in both versions, the black man must die!

The woman lioness and the Spanish woman rule the roost. And even the Lion

King came attached to a critique of its voice-over racism (the hyenas like the

crows in Song of the South—which I loved as a child and still do, by the way—it

is NOT racist).

The most interesting thing about the film, and here it connects with your

Raymond Williams chapter, is the various ways in which media are all storage

devices with nothing new to store; all one can see are reruns. Will Smith

watches a TIVO recording of a Kathy and Regis show at breakfast and has

memorized an entire sequence of dialogue form Shrek (“I like Shrek,” he says, in

one of the film’s many failed attempts at humor). He also visits a DVD rental

store, and the second time we that the porn rack still has porn videos, not DVDs,

or videos that don’t look like videos or DVDs. The cases are actually some

fabricated object—too big for DVDs and yet too narrow for videos. The porn

covers are in soft focus and hence not quite legible, but they remind me of ‘80s

porn.

Smith talks to a woman mannequin (more transvestism in the “mann—equin?”)

as if he wanted to take her on a date. (Willy Murphy and those transsexuals on

Sunset Blvd?) The mannequins are all young women sporting wigs, except for

150

the clerk and two mannequins outside on the street, so we are definitely talking

woman as masquerade, not so living doll here).

So the ghost of Mary Shelley writing about the last man in narratorial drag returns

here, the book printed with the author as anonymous after the first edition, in a

weird, hard right way.

The infected people are also hunters. Smith falls into a trap after shooting apart a

male mannequin on a street. He is a terrible shot when it comes to animals (he

never shoots one) but a crack shot when it comes to mannequins.

The Last Man on Earth (1964) (Italian: L'ultimo uomo della Terra) is a 1964

Also, The Last Man ends with the last man visiting Rome, and statues in the

Vatican, where art fails to console. So it would be a nice connection to Angels

and Demons.

After Weber's response to my emails and seeing this book, the first chapter of J.

Hillis Miller’s For Derrida--a dumb pun in the title--taking sides as the gift-- i s

titled "A Profession of Faith"(!), I thinking we could reframe our question for the

conclusion as "What's the use of Derrida without de Man?" In other words,

there's a mourning within Derrida for de Man that keeps being fresh off the

repressed by the "mourners" of Derrida. We could think about the deaths of

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Derrida following Derrida's own "Deaths of Roland Barthes." I remember reading

Eagleton saying that Derrida's Memoirs for Paul de Man was an embarrassment.

The Feeling in Theory book is pretty interesting in opening up this kind of territory

for analysis.

Heart Burn After Reading, Brainfreeze

Rather than heart warming reading experience of reading this book.

The Last Philosopher

The Lapsed Philosopher?

Nietzsche on the good European and the last man.

Last Resorts

Battlefield Earth (Scientology sci-fi)

Mindbody as unified, unsplit, “rared” entity.

(Processed of file parts into a single document.

Sunshine (film about extinction); 28 Weeks Later.

Close Shave Reading

Saw and Resident evil Extinction as shaving off part of the dress of he heroine

near the start of Extinction. Also the movie Saw, in which two people are

chained up, and the Doctor has to saw off a part of leg to escape, which proves

impossible because by doing so he inflicts a mortal wound, committing suicide

inadvertently. So bare life in these films because a process of shaving and

sawing off protections (clothing) and parts.

152

Box of masks 271

The sight of them tears us apart because we have become so attached to them”

“The Great Art of Making Things Seem Closer Together,” SW 2 : 1, 248

"Soylent Green is people!" in Soylent Green

Soylent Green is about death management in face of an insupportable population

explosion. So can euthanize yourself and seem to be cremated. You die

listening to classical music and watching a nature film—it’s like a panaroma, as I

recall, an early Disney prototype. Heston tries to stop Robbison, but he wants to

do it. And he seems to die peacefully.

But Heston discovers that the bodies are actually being taken to a secret factory

were they are processed and mixed with the lentils (soylent green). So people

are processed as food. Vegetarianism turns out to be cannibalism.

Judgment Daze After Tomorrow: Burn Before Reading

In the library scene of The Day After Tomorrow, books become things. Here’s

the hilarious thing about the scene. Most humanities academics, freaked out by

budget cuts and their non-replacements since the early 90s, sincerely and really

want their “work” to work, to be useful (see Stallybrass). They want it function,

be of service to humankind, improve the world, if not save it (the Protestantism

and Catholicism, in other words, of “secular” criticism). “Forget Heidegger.

Things break down?! You’ve got be kidding. Let’s get back to work everybody!

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Stop yer yackin’!” These self-sacralizing, self-sacrificing (please nail me to the

cross, if that helps you save everyone else; women and children first, through,

please) academics tend to ask “what cultural work is that book doing?” What

quotation can I find that is pullable (as you said)? Pull me, please. Right? (OK, I

am being mean, but just for heuristic purposes.)

Back to the film. In the New York Library scene, after the Library has been

frozen over and the people inside who have decided to stay put rather than leave

to find help (those people die!), books turn out to have an entirely new and totally

life-saving use value in a totally utopian way, just not the utopian academics

weren’t careful enough when they wished for it. After the world is nearly

destroyed, becomes attain a new use-value as they become perishables, fossil

fuels for heating. So the moment our books have the most useful value is the

moment they have become obsolete, the library as storage unit reconceived as a

hotel, once they are recycled, used for burning.

There is one kind of hangs on to one book and doesn't want to lose it.

he's the sorter as saviour, the librarian as / curator as commandment

of the crematorium.

First chapter will develop infra--infra on Duchamp, infrared

reflectography in art history, infracirculation in de Man--surfaces,

spaces, inside the inside, or extopy as its Other in de Bakhtin.

put against the intrapsychic in Freud, circumfession in Derrida

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Beowulf-- about the transfer--the disc as the attachment of data--the

film was on the cusp of transition from digital to celluloid projection

, on the hand, and digital to digital projection, other. The opening title sequence

is about the disc's allegorization of its inscription on a disc that has to be inserted

and "reattached," run through software on the hard drive. No longer a film about

transferring

analogue media to digital but about filming with 3D cameras and

special effects so that even the actors become part of the Bluescreen.

Crisis of digitalization

How many narratives are there to spin? Forms create a set of impoverished set

of narratives about transitions between media—that might enable to juxposition

of Prospero’s library on stage—the different media technologies recycle of the

book, of the medium, of writing of an archivable source of narratives with

renewed and renewable energy.

Self-storage as a rewinding mechanism, a return to the moment of failure to

make for new microadjustments that have macro-implications for theory (of

reading). We could contrast what de Man calls the “technics” of super-reading

(which, of course, wound, dismemberment, draw blood, yet miss the mark, fail to

hit, turn into misguided guided missiles) to the tool reading (reader as tool) of

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Harman, who needs to watch Fight Club, particularly the scenes with the

apartment designed for easy living first populated with things and later exploded.

We could think of the storage-unit as a house or home as well (I think I called it

homelessness away from home—an uncannily uncanny home-more-or-less

space and temporality)

Medium specificity in new media theory.

The Virtual Life of Filmby D.N. Rodowick

As Rodowick argues against medium specificity, he utilises some of Cavell's

ideas to suggest “artistic activity consists not in discovering the essence of a

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/books/08/47/virtual-life-film.html

N. Katherine Hayles is all for medium specificity.

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/mediumtheory/janbaetens.htm

Hayles, N. Katherine. Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-

Specific Analysis Poetics Today - Volume 25, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp. 67-90

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We might fall on opposite sides of this debate, which would be really productive,

if it turns out to be the case. (I am not convinced by Hayles, who seems to be

humanist rather than post-humanist. She just uses adjectives to load her dice—

flat versus deep—not surface versus deep, where surface can be valued more

than depth). I read her title and I think she’s cheating.

The Rodowick book is good, but he kind of cheats too. Like almost all film

theory, his is pointless (his argument has no consequences for practice, nor does

it have any for theory, except to frame it in yet another crudely chronological

narrative of lie and death). The material and virtual are initially set up as

opposites (celluloid and digital are matched to them) and then deconstructed

(Celluloid film was always already virtual. No, really?!). Since I never bought the

initial opposition, I found the book to be a kind of Set-Up (to use the title of a

great must see it if you haven’t film noir) for Rodowick’s shadow boxing.

Global warming has to be refigured as global freezing—first the flood, then the

freeze, then the thaw (and renewal of the nuclear-meltdown-marriage-family for a

younger generation). Kindle as reference to Fahrenheit 451, elemental inversion,

inside of freezing, finding a survivalist narrative that enables the burning.

Tom Leach adaptation

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator

157

Metaphorology

Tracing of the trope of the shipwreck

Lucretius, Nature of Things, Book II. Scene of philosophy is when you’re on a

beach watching the ship go down and there’s nothing to do it about.

Lifeboat in the 40s

Frozen speech in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier

The use of fire of fire to melt frozen words, guys trading with the Muscovites.

Reply for about how much they want for the furs freeze.

Frozen River.

Words condense back into words, sound of an avalanche

But the addresses have already gone home.

Do you know Guy Maddin’s film, Careful?

After-Math

158

(the numbers don’t add up; dial 666 . . . . )

Also, statue of liberty scene at the end of Saboteur, and he recent reopening of

the top of the Statue of Liberty, closed after 9/11.

In Planet of the Apes, there’s a subtle Egyptian strain. When Heston goes to

sleep in the spaceship, he folds his arms over the way mummies do. Then, he

coffin for a gorilla funeral looks like an Egyptian sarcophagus. We link the library

and the museum up in these disaster movies.

The hologram library scene in the Time Machine remake would work well too.

Disaster films as allegories of the end of cinema, videogames being the cause of

the disaster, producing narratives that are cartoonish, clichéd, and populated by

carriacatures rather than characters. Resident Evil: Extinction being a case in

point. Ex-Stink-tion—it’s rotten. Planet of the Apes as open satire of anti-

evolutionists and of racism (the sequels become much more overtly about race

wars in the U.S.).

Omega Man etc must be based on Shelley's novel--hey, we gained an inter-text.

Yes, and check out these images of the kindle edition! Small shows the kindle

device, the large does not.

159

160

It occurs to me that we are implicitly framing the question about whether the

impoverished narrative of media transitions can be expanded, complicated,

multiplied, or otherwise renewed also as a question of genre--noir and sci-fi.

Genre perhaps serves as figures of garbage containers in which trashed

narratives of transitions have been thrown away, all more or less generic in the

worst sense of the word (predictable, derivative, etc). Can one tear / turn / kindle

/ burn a new page in the genre bound narratives of the book as medium?

161

We might in turn challenge the turn away form texts to genre taken by Guillory

and Moretti, which acknowledges that narratives of the novel are over and

instead can be replaced by crunching them as books into protodigital data while

still taking the form of the printed book. The genre poverty of criticism sucks

even more than does the narrative poverty.

Another Last Man narrative, of course, is Planet of the Apes,though you get

Adam and Eve, first woman, or cavewoman—her outfit is very similar to Raquel

Welch in 10,000 years B.C. I suppose we should also look at these films as

disaster films too—like the elemental inversion from deep freeze to bright flame,

we have the post-man extinction narrative (Resident Evil: Extinction just came to

mind; its beginning echoes the ending of The Planet of the Apes, but with the Las

Vegas replica of the Statue of Liberty mostly buried in the Nevada sand) and its

inversion, the pre-historic man who is learning to survive sci-fi narratives.

Emmerich recently remade 10,000 Years B.C. I rented it, but found it totally

unwatchable and so stopped after about five minutes.

On After Finitude:

162

The title itself suggests that “anteriority” is not a chronological concept but a

logical one; it’s about priority. It’s a variation of the metaphysics of presence,

with the thing, already “tracified” as remainder, and works like speech in

Derrida’s deconstruction, to precede writing. For QM it’s a metaphysics of

absence.

On the afterthought. The “after” is not only about Derrida (for whom here rally is

no such thing) but aslso Freud Nachtraglichket, or deferred action) and Walter B

(the ruin, the fragment).

QM’s account of empirical science misunderstands its CSI, detective nature;

hence its unphilosophical character. It is not philosophical discourse; it is not

speculative in a philosophical manner; rather, empirical science (concerned with

arche-fossils) engages in a fantasy of total reconstruction, using deductive

reason to narrate an historical sequence of events and actors in cause in effect

terms, starting with the effects of event and tracing them back to their causes in

actors. It is about necessity, not contingency; because of these effects, it

necessarily follows that a crime was committed (or was not) by “y” person. I call

this a fantasy because “evidence” is damaged and / or misread all the time,

sometimes resulting in an innocent man or woman being charged and convicted

of a crime she or he did not commit. Empirical science does not produce positive

knowledge but knowledge and fiction (error); moreover, its chain of causality

leads to an infinite regress (what caused the big bang to bang?) or to its negation

by theology (God caused it). In any case, we have to have faith in empirical

science; it is not exempt from religiosity.

163

use a historiciist frame for the book--what

> happens to bare life after WWII?--as the overarhcing box of hte book.

> 1. Technology (potetial for progress (higher standard of living, easde

> of getting around,e tc) and detruction (what ooks liek progress may

> itself be destructive). heidegger versus Derrida adn Ronell

> 2. The tstae and violence; ervolutionary violence political theology;

> crisi of liberal deomcracy.; the camp as image of modernity for

> 3.  The work of art

> 4. The failure of secularization; the return fo religion. I am

> thinking here of the need to engage mdoern art (20th ct) in at least

> two ways.  I am scannig an inerlibrary loan booka t the moment called

> Mortaility or Immortality, and it's all about the sovreignty of

> curators, deciding what art lives adn what dies.  it's actualy

> stuningly parallel to the question of human life, and would also work

> well witht he Train and degenrate art and also the rinzhorn colelction

> of art by psychos.  But the other conenction woul dbe surrelaism adn

> the dossier in conenction with the chapter on Mr. Klein and the

Counterfeiters .

Conclusion: After Extinction: Passing Last Judgments by Arche-Fossils

on Arche-Writing

Is there more to be said then re s/helf-life on the properties of different media to

gather objects that might become or be actualized as things--Sabotage enacts

164

the process, slows it down:  movie theater, sand, that wonderful exchange

between policemen re oranges / cabbage / banana skin outside the movie

theater, short-hand...

Was just rereading the Anthaneum Fragments (skipping around) and found

this one, again.  (He is also totally hilarious).

It's always a strange, rather suspicious feeling when one thinks one

knows that such and such is going to happen. And yet it's really quite

as strange that we should be able to know such and such is as it is

which no one ever notices because it always happens.

No. 218, p. 47

Yes, so the failure of the Thing is really the failure of any-Thing to be the Thing.

"It's your any-Thing," as a failed thing qua object.

By the way, the Wunderblock exhibition can tie in WB to Foucault as well,

enabling us to reread Agamben / late Foucault on biopower in relationto early

Foucault's Madness and Civilization, giving us another chance to bring madness

back on the table.  I don't like early / late stuff, so consider this shorthand.

Seems like madness is now a four letter word.

165

Back-to-Back to the Future

on the desire for the new

The Agency

(as a way of "turning" the fetishism of things doing things in relation to the

briefcase chapter, with the Agency meaning the CIA.   Politics meets Schreber,

as in Dark City (a sci-fi worth seeing, maybe one we could juxtapose with Deep

Impact, which I never saw, or The Day After Tomorrow, a kind of unknowingly

melodramatic take on the disaster film).

And some d(r)afty thoughts and another subtitle I jotted down in the car on the

way home from swimmng for the conclusion in connection with your remarks and

puns yesterday and the day before

Garbage Dispos-all?

Does QM's notions of ancestrality and the arche-fossil pose a mortal threat to

deconstruction and Derrida's notions of hte trace and arche-writing? QM seems

166

to think he's "rida Derri" once and for all.   We think not.  Even if QM has

managed to nuke Derrida, Derrida's nuclear waste remains radioactive and

hence a problem:  how and where to dispose of it? Let us reformulate the

question then:  What is to be done with Derrida?  Is he done, as in stick a fork in

him? What would Derrida do?  With his remains, that is.  Certainly, given his

essay in Abraham and Issac in Judeities he would not turn himself into a Holy

Jew.  Derrida is a leftover, a residue, that can be eaten up as a never ending last

supper.

Re what you're saying re QM: I think that the question of whether the arche-fossil

can keep Derrida from coming back, can keep us from coming back to Derrida is

key.  If QM is rida/derri he manages it only at the cost of the figure of the witness,

and by positing extinction as the predicate for knowing anything. If this is not a

metaphysics of bare life I don't know what is?   

De Man, “Return to Philology,” “to those who are attentive enough to notice

them” (on close reading). The “didn’t notice / didn’t witness” conflation by QM

with respect to Kant (as Kant’s failure to read his own text closely enough) is

actually a return of close reading in a spectral form. Of the many self-

deconstructing moments in QM’s text, this is the least obvious one and the most

significant. He can’t get “rida” reading deconstruction because he has to “read” in

order to witness its deconstruction as a failure to notice.

Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck (Hardcover)

by Ricky Jay (Author), Rosamond Wolff Purcell (Photographer)

167

Ex/Think/ction (versus Afterthoughts on the Uses and Uselessness/

Usefulness of Things)

The moral force of QM (and GM) and the religion of things is that hte

example of the arche-fossil is that the thing before the thing returns

to reveal itself as a Last judgment on the solipism of our species.

But the forgetting here is precisely that the arche-fossil is not a

fossil, just as Derrida's arche-writing, whose term QM appears to

mimic, is not writing, not even before writing in the sense that it

has no temporality, but it certainly contents Levi-Strauss's "Writing

Lesson" (writing as a means of power from without) and Foucault's

incerceration of madness via the Cartesian cogito.  The violence of

metaphysics is violence before the letter.

What can learn from thinking QM with JD, then?  But things always

return, as QM wants them to, but always in an uncannily theological

form, a form QM cannot recognize and theological because he has

reduced the religious to monomania, fanaticism.  Hence neither

dogmatism nor fanaticism can ever be abolished; indeed, to paraphrase

De Man, those who now claim to understand the return to religion

the most clearly (QM; Zizek in The Monstrosity fof Christ and

elsewhere) are the most dogmatic of philosophers and the most fanatic

168

of theologians.

DeMania

On After Finitude:

The title itself suggests that “anteriority” is not a chronological concept but a

logical one; it’s about priority. It’s a variation of the metaphysics of presence,

with the thing, already “tracified” as remainder, and works like speech in

Derrida’s deconstruction, to precede writing. For QM it’s a metaphysics of

absence.

On the afterthought. The “after” is not only about Derrida (for whom here rally is

no such thing) but aslso Freud Nachtraglichket, or deferred action) and Walter B

(the ruin, the fragment).

QM’s account of empirical science misunderstands its CSI, detective

nature; hence its unphilosophical character. It is not philosophical

discourse; it is not speculative in a philosophical manner; rather, empirical

science (concerned with arche-fossils) engages in a fantasy of total

reconstruction, using deductive reason to narrate an historical sequence

of events and actors in cause in effect terms, starting with the effects of

event and tracing them back to their causes in actors. It is about

necessity, not contingency; because of these effects, it necessarily follows

169

that a crime was committed (or was not) by “y” person. I call this a fantasy

because “evidence” is damaged and / or misread all the time, sometimes

resulting in an innocent man or woman being charged and convicted of a

crime she or he did not commit. Empirical science does not produce

positive knowledge but knowledge and fiction (error); moreover, its chain

of causality leads to an infinite regress (what caused the big bang to

bang?) or to its negation by theology (God caused it). In any case, we

have to have faith in empirical science; it is not exempt from religiosity.

End with

Angels and Demons—as a return of the theological, a erconclatioon of science

and symbolgy is cosmological terms. The book in a box is also a kind of fetish in

that it is cross cut with close ups of the Pope being dressed by the cardinals,

given various accessories. And there is a close of the gold ring, replacing the

destruction of the silver one at the film’s beginning (a cross marked , then a d

hammer blow). So the Galileo mss and the pope’s ring and vestments, his

investiture, are made cinematically equivalent, and moreover, occur just at the

threshold of the pope’s greeting the crow at Vatican Square from his balcony, the

amer exiting out from behind him and moving up above, like the helicopter (it is a

helicopter shot) but from above, looking down, rather than from below, looking up

at it. So the miracle of the camera’s movement becomes a means of science

and religion becoming a helicopter (that’s also the vehicle that delivers Hanks,

170

even though the Vatican guy who gets him from Harvard says there is a jet

waiting for him. Then we cut to a helicopter flying into Rome with Hanks aboard.

So flight is suspended, as the Pope becomes a helicopter Dad of the professor

turned archivist / banker and container of religious heresy a printed anti-matter).

>

> I was thinkig of using Da Vinci Code--the comuter siulation scene as a

> way of going from these films through the loopp of the detective novel

> genre turned religious hax genre and even more useful is Angels and

> Demons.  The"message" of hte film is htat science nad religion can

> co-exist.  But it's relal a film about the Last Pope.  AT the pope , it

> utrns out, has been murdered by a right wing, anti-sciecne priest.

> The head of hte police has been killed because the bad priest pope

> kiler has set him up.  But when the woman (as n Da   Vinci Code)

> recoverss journals hte good cop has taken form her and hidden in her

> desk, TOm Hanks sees a computer adn it just so ahppens to ahve a tape

> on it showing the bad pope beinghte the bad guy he is. The cardinals ,

> who still have nto voted a new cardinal and hten decided to vote in

> the bad pope, and shown this video, adn then confrontthe bad pope, who

> runs off andimmiolates himself.  What's really weird is tha the had

> seeme d to the miracle pope, .  he takes abomb on a helicopter and

> hten paractes out and the helicopeter with bomb blows up but does

> little damage, and no one is even injuredl.  The bad pope falls to

171

> earth, right in the Vatican square, but is aopparently dead.  But no!

> He is alve.  So when it seems like he is going to become pope, it

> appears that he, who clals the old Pope his father, ahs managed to

> escape the sacrificial ecnomy of Chritianty since he is a Jewsus who

> didn't die and whois not wounded.   But the film cannot ed this way

> because the bad pope's success always, in fact, depended on hte

> atheiest Hanks character to track down the killer.  And here , if you

> ae still reading, si what is really intersting.  Hanks and hot girl

> find a missing mss (probably the only one in existence) byGalileio,

> adn the owman ripsot a page which has secret wrting (you'll love) that

> can eb erased with water) that hse ri[psout adn htey leave.  Later he

> reads a different book by Berinin, but we don't knowif the stolen page

> has been returned.  At the end of hte film, after Hanks has helped

> save the one cardinal (of four) form being murdered, and htis guy is

> ano whte new Pope about to greet the crowd., another cardinal who had

> seemd like a bad guy butis actually a good guy gives Hanks a box,

> which Hanks opens, and it; is hte Galileo mss (Hanks had wnated to

> read it sue he could write the second volume of a book but the Vatican

> would not allow him access).  So now he gets the book in this case,

> but nly as a loan.  in his alst will adn testament, he has to return

> to tis "home."  I already know the screen captures of this sequence I

> would use.

> So the good cardial calls Hanks ""son," adn it is clear that for the

172

> new Pope to scuceed in every sense, there has to be a hiatus in which

> the real "meisseiah" or son sent by God, is nto a meber of the

> Catholic Chruch but remains a professor outside of the Vatican,

> writing about it.

> So thebox is this weid holding, transitional place, like a bank (Hanks

> says the Vatican is a bank at on epint), in whcich Hanks gets to

> borrow the book, which is presented to him as if it were a gift.

> Butthe relaly crazy thing is that then the cardinal moitons hte hot

> girl in and she are made to reclal or invited to recall or wonder if

> she ever gave the page back.  Is the book completeo r mssing its

> crucial page?  No way to know, although we are are supposed to assume

> that e book is complete.

Angels and Demons.

The James Bond (Bourne Conspiracy) like plot involves the theft of one

of three (Hly Trinity!) containers of anti-amatter cntaed by sinctists

ding a sort of nuclear tunnel experiement.  The "father" the

expierment has an eye torn out by the thieve sohe can scan his way in

(a riff on Thunderball), and hte "daughter" hot girlis borderline

heretical.  Ithink the fahter even says a kind of inadvertent

prayerlike"GOd help us."

So thetheological and scientific are embedded but pointedly NOT in bed

with each other.  Even the Oedipus eye thing / Electra complex (she

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finds the eyeball on the floor after noticing blood on hercheek after

scanning hersr own eye to gain entrance) is there to vanish away-te

abasolvo, edpipus Wrecks (no more).

So the crucial plot opposition is between matter and anit-matter,

finding the container so that matter and anti-matter do not collide.

The war that the bad priest imagines between science and religion gets

displaced onto the called back into service Hanks as anti-Vatican

versus Vatican, in a sort of reconciliation (symbologist prof critic /

hoax exposer versus Vatican mafia and its closed archive of secrets

that would blow it up if exposed).

But the Galileo book that is loan that is the gift of a lifetime,

literally, then becomes a version of the anti-matter bomb, a

container, in the form of Galileo, that works like the container of

anti-matter.  the symbologist bomb can be, if not defused, then, have

an extended battery life (the bomb blows up because its battery runs

down) as long as it is on loan for Robert Langdon's (Tom Hanks) life.

The Galileo book in a box becomes the anti-matter in the container

matter, and Hanks says he will try to treat the Vatican gently, as he

is asked to do by the bad now good cardinal, in the future.  Galileo

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is anti-matter book, and Chruch is matter.

But as I said, the page form the book is missing.  So here's anotehr

infra example of someting missing, and someting hidden inside of what

is supposed to retored and capable of functioning as a reconcilation

of enemeies.

Plus, the film has to ahve a Judas charceter, the bad priest who wants

to be Pope.  but this Judasifciation, so to speak, is also halted,

sort of,whena newscaster says that the people want him to be

canonized because the Papacy has lied and siad hteat he heroically

died form injuries after parachuting.  So it appears that Judas will

become St. Judas.  The news reprots other lies / cover ups made by the

Vatican as well.

the hot girl is going back towork as a scientist and Hanks is TOTALLY

chaste.  There is no hint of even a desire to kiss her (she doesn't

have the prettiest face, but what a bod! and dressed in a nunlike all

black outfit come to think of it.  Her form fitting dress is shirt and

shirt are what make, in my subjective response, really hot, even

though she is a far, far cry from a Bond girl).  Hanks is sort of

turned into a  priest, a single man who actually has to wear a priest's

suit at one point, minus the white collar, which he discards with a

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facial expresion of disgust, or at least major annoyance.

So Oedipus-sy-Medus-over has his / her revenge after all.

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