“…to put it playfully and with a certain immodesty…” (JD, epigraph)

November 21, 2013

Party/Melancholia Week

Unethical Readings from SPAT Fall 2013:

I present you with some random phrases that were spoken throughout the semester. I think these were mostly Mike’s quotes, but I’m not entirely sure. I also think it’s pretty great that some of these don’t work until they are written down.

“There are no identities, there are chains.”

“You live in the whirlwind.”

“If you don’t play games, what do you do?”

“Not a critique, but an unfolding, a making explicit.”

“Wild pansies is equally adequate.”

“When you don’t…How do you?”

“When Zizek says ‘Are we always not…’, well, yes for you, dude.”

“Should I replay that toilet?”

“My growing Heidegger fasci-nation.”

“Language is good for beings, but not for Being.”

“A cigar is always divided.”

“Be excellent to each other.”

“When you explain the hand gestures, you begin to make sense.”

“para-cites”

- I don’t know if this understanding of our parasite discussion in Derrida was ever made explicit, but this is such an awesome pun when written down.

“Giggling Derridean ladies…”

“The slash difference is not a difference. But it is.”

“Don’t bind me, bro.”

“Pale-ontologist.”

“When you quiver that…”

“I’m a one-trick pony, what can I say?”

Unethical Readings (Cohen)

“…at once leaden and foppish.” (240)

“…mimes the 90’s…” (242)

“…caricature of deconstruction…” (244)

“…only seductions to rally the troops…” (244)

“…another generation, assuming it has its chance?” (245)

“One might have wished for Derridean texts…” (245)

“…battling against a ‘bad reading’ of him.” (246)

“Trance wars.” (252)

“…the way hands are never specularly doubled or aligned to begin with. On the one hand…” (247)

“…presented as warm milk to the kids, withdrawing the tequila shots…” (247)

Ethical Readings

“Two words haunt any ecologically attuned consideration of the historical hour in which our increasingly globalized world currently finds itself: one…is ‘anthropocene’; the other, lurking as a grim potential, or even an unfolding reality, within the notion of the anthropocene is ‘ecocide.’” (Rigby, epigraph, 239)

“In its way, the planetary collision mimes the cinematic arrival of the term anthropocene—or what I will call one of its two antipodal poles of non-sense.” (240)

“The anthropocene, nonetheless, is like a falling knife, in the irreversible sense of Von Trier’s balletic collision—something that cuts through the blather, and it indexes extinction as if with a backglance.” (240)

- Can we talk about Figure 1 in this article? It’s not just a frame from the film, but a screenshot of an illegally downloaded .mkv file that is being played in a VLC player. In fact, that might be the same file that I have of the film…

“Some eye, or some thing, must witness and confirm this arc, this mark in geomorphic and biomorphic time.” (241)

“But the term anthropocene is a placeholder, non-semantic, a non-word and non-name that does not adhere to any binarised sense and cannot be deconstructed.” (241)

- Binarised in the sense of a structural relationship between signified and signifier? How can it be not these things? Is it a simulacrum? Or is it the exact opposite: the thing that can only exist in the physical world and not be co-opted by the world of signs? Are those necessarily opposites?

“Even its ‘time’ is plastic, since it above all marks the time at which it emerges as a speech act (or marketable brainfart, gratis Crutzman).” (241)

“Instead of trying to play against the idea of the ‘linguistic’ by moving outward, the concepts might be at war with the ‘ethical’ Derrida would be generalized, intensified, rerouted nanographically.” (242)

- Cohen also uses the word “nanologically” (243). Why this move? Is the nano the only frame/circumference where Derrida works?

“That would be ‘later on’—perhaps generations, after the current phase of remembered contact and consignation efforts are gone.” (243)

- What is the role of memory here? I’m not certain of this notion that there is a radical change when the personal memory dies. It at least might suggest that memory isn’t already incredibly mediated even within personal memories.

“It is interesting then, that if one allows the anthropocene to read ‘deconstruction’…it would be possible to select what is relevant, rather, to it. It reads back.”

- Why is this unique to the anthropocene? Don’t we have to have some notion of context when dealing with any process/method/approach/practice in the context of a specific concept?

“The perspective of the anthropocene provides the violence necessary for a selective redefinition.” (244)

“One cannot but be struck that being ‘close’ to Derrida the individual seems today less a mark of initiation, of genealogical pedigree or translatorial identification, than a guaranteeof a submissive limit which J.D. discounted in advance (really, ‘Derrideans?’).” (244)

“But if Derrida occludes ‘climate change’ from his writing—would not address or write to it—it might not be accidental. Addressing it would have stripped a rhetorical backdrop of his writings, which relied on a stated commitment to a Euro-centered responsibility (as if) to the future—an inhibiting Euro-centrism.” (246)

“In it (it deserves real attention) one is left with a cipher and a dissimulation.” (247)

“In all of this, cinema is to be heard as double and a double of itself (at war with itself)—there are the movies one recalls, and there is the cinematic operation and sheer mnemotechnics that recasts the spell drug, or trance as a machinal iteration.” (248)

“One can read this today, perhaps, because the ‘era’ of cinema is technically dead, over and accomplished, like a species getting to have a geological era named after it.” (249)

- I’m going to need some more explanation on how cinema is dead, dude.

“The answer seems simple: deconstruction might bracket the rhetorical artefaction of a ‘late Derrida’ when read as if that were a movement into the world or a telos of J.D.’s writing rather than a rhetorical innovation among others.” (251)

“On the one hand, as said, the term manifests the essence of anthropomorphism at its peak of narcissistic self-congratulation—anthropo-narcissus gets a plaque named after it stamped in the geological record. On the other hand, it seems distinguished for practicing auto-extinction, ecocide.” (251)

“Or more positively, might not a cohort brewed in rhetorical skills of the rarest sort open interrogations of the ‘something else’?” (253)

“Is survival really that necessary to assert (I mean, today?)—and, once it is asserted, does that not guarantee ethical contaminations, calculation, simulation, that is, failure? (253)

“It is also clear that if the ‘anthropocene’ implies ecocide, and the current global regimes accelerate or seal this process, and if these same do so through a totalization of mediacritic trances, then there is—even for the most peace-seeking among us, like myself—an implicit war within the global disposition.” (254)

1. When has there not been this implicit war? Is this something truly ‘new’?

2. Why put anthropocene here in quotes? Does that set it aside solely as a signifier? Does that set it fully apart from the ‘actual’ anthropocene (or anthropocene)?

“McQuillan asks: what has ‘deconstruction’ been doing since Derrida’s death if the franchise seems to only have accelerated the disappearance which he predicts? In particular, he suggests, Derrideans have avoided all attempts to dialog with the critical market place (or ‘new’ names), have avoided the ‘contemporary’ (what Derrida could not do), have avoided environmentalism or ‘climate change,’ and seem to retreat into an auto-immune posture increasingly irrelevant to new graduate students or a defaulting Humanities edifice in general.” (255)

“Instead, Derrida gave us specters.” (255)