tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post7059186421275232250..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: The Loving Hope of Working Groups and Humanist Desiring-RevolutionsCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-35758292871142863882007-11-09T20:54:00.000-05:002007-11-09T20:54:00.000-05:00Post of the Week Award (a mon avi)Post of the Week Award (a mon avi)Jen Boylehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17499103171867074782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-43674527741455104212007-11-05T12:47:00.000-05:002007-11-05T12:47:00.000-05:00Eileen:These thoughts are most welcome. thank you...Eileen:<BR/><BR/>These thoughts are most welcome. thank you for spending so much thought in relation to my conversations with Sarah. I have been taking my time to sift through these thoughts and the commentsdr4. Hopefully I will continue to do so. <BR/><BR/>I am perhaps most excited at your reading of my thoughts as a desire to reconcile the Edelman line with the Caputo line. And, I am thrilled at your continued vigilance with respect to Bersani as 'lumped' in with the no future group. Right--for one, Bersani takes a turn to--of all things--a radical dispersed-subject Ontology which certainly does verge on the mystical (the last chapter of Forms of Being in particular, I think), while Edelman follows a seriously Lacanian line of thought. Additionally, Bersani, I do not think, has a 'no hope'-mentality even as he challenges us to imagine a world without human subjects in a rather utopian way (he loves that last image in _Contempt_), the gist here includes his final alternative thought of beings as part of the world--horizontally integrated with the surroundings. This kind of statement is closer to the Ethics of a late Derrida (with respect to the name, his cat, for instance) than it may appear from the disparity of their Critical approaches and of course Bersani's twist of ontology). <BR/><BR/>See, for me, Bersani--in particular _Forms of Being_--, offers a very different hope for this project than Edelman. And yet, what I hear in Edelman is the vigilance--the same vigilance--of resistance to closure, or belief in the ability for negative critique as an essential ethical function of the critic (the problem is the Edelman would disavow this "Ethical" line as future-minded, as interested in building civilization as we know it as too "healing"--this vigilance is also found in our beloved Derrida.<BR/><BR/>So, those are the hints I am following in terms of actually rigorously thinking these problems by readings of extent critical texts. <BR/><BR/><BR/><BR/>I also want to suggest, in response to this, and to Sarah's comments, a formulation for inquiry that responds to my and Sarah's anxiety about communal work and the right of individual freedom within them, as well as Sarah's reservations about affect in terms of where that term falls in the construction of a n intellectual community (see her comments on <B> <A HTTP://WRAETLIC.BLOGSPOT.COM HREF: HREF="" REL="nofollow"> Wraetlic </A> </B>. To echo Derrida's use of "the scene of writing" (a la "Freud and the Scene of Writing"), I am thinking of "Affect as the scene of intellection" and "Affect as the scene of intellectual community/communal production." <BR/><BR/>And it is under that thought that I want to respond to JJC, Eileen, Karl et. al. on the important problem of how giving beyond economy might entail an act of self-denial. I would propose to distance the kind of community we are talking about here (I think)from the kind of community interpreted by Zizek as that of a materialist reading of Pauline Christianity, in which all difference is "suspended" by the "Cause"--in which you are still jew or gentile, but it is *as if* you are not or that this does not matter. It does matter. And to "give beyond economy" must be thought both outside/over-and-against the American Evangelical formula of "redemptive suffering" or in fact actively seeking "service" (lots of Evangelical Youth organization teach/enforce "service," as a practical act of love by volunteering a summer to work at proselytizing summer camps etc. And, plenty of American individuals remain in brutal relationships because they believe they are, in compromising their freedom, necessarily committing acts of love). <BR/><BR/>And this is perhaps a final thought about why this kind of giving is more difficult to think than we wish it to be: I am thinking of Derrida's <I> The Gift of Death </I> and the problem of giving to one happening so often and so easily at the expense of all others. Everyone here seems to want, as Sarah says, a "Web" of affective lines.<BR/><BR/>Thanks everyone for engaging in this so heartily. This is a wonderful post and discussion.dan remeinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-68225486239551008162007-11-05T10:27:00.000-05:002007-11-05T10:27:00.000-05:00Sarah Rees Jones: I forgot to ask yesterday, could...Sarah Rees Jones: I forgot to ask yesterday, could you give us the url of your new blog? I would love to add that to my own links.<BR/><BR/>Karl: thanks for the reference to/reminder of the Harwood essay on "The Franklin's Tale," which I've been meaning to read for a while now; from your description, it sounds like something I would agree with, although I don't take much pity on the clerk, regardless of his "lowly" social status or the fact that he doesn't get paid. In my mind, everyone in the tale makes selfish mistakes, even the wife [in agreeing to the game]. The clerk basically agrees to help the squire [who is also a sibling, right? or is that in the Italian version?] trick the wife, the squire asks her to play a game she can't win, and the husband is kind of guilty for taking the wife for granted and also asking her to keep a pledge while also lying about it. Etc. etc.<BR/><BR/>Sarah B.: I'm glad if I can help in any way to lessen your anxieties about collectives. Obviously, historically these have been responsible for some seriously fascistic and dogmatic types of oppression [Simone Weil could never bring herself to join a group, even those of which she was enamored: the Marxists, the Catholics, or the Free French movement]. I am wary all the time of the ways in which groups can "kill" the individual--if this topic really interests you, the most eloquent defender of what might be called the Whitmanesque individual against the group is George Kateb [see, especially, his book "The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture"].<BR/><BR/>Adam: thanks for the affirmation!<BR/><BR/>Cheers, EileenEileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-82592757141004926092007-11-04T16:26:00.000-05:002007-11-04T16:26:00.000-05:00Excellent, excellent post. I'm joyed to read the ...Excellent, excellent post. I'm joyed to read the Deleuzeguattari, stuff in particular.Rachel Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09514816247989239714noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-32559272845802273632007-11-04T09:31:00.000-05:002007-11-04T09:31:00.000-05:00On the Franklin's Tale, Eileen, you may want to lo...On the Franklin's Tale, Eileen, you may want to look at Britton J. Harwood, "Chaucer and the Gift (If There Is Any)" <I>Studies in Philology</I> (2006) 26-46, which reads the FranT with Derrida's discussion of the gift, that giving that must occur without any 'self-keeping,' that ruptures the symmetries of exchange, circulation, and reciprocity: but here I wonder if the emphasis on rupturing symmetry, and also the emphasis on unproductive expenditure (is this the same as un<I>directed</I> expenditure?) also occludes the affective contact made by gifting. Given this post, with collaboration in part understood as a gift of our selves we make to community and that community makes to us, ideally in love, we certainly don't want to lose affect. (nor, and this is an aside, do we want to lose the materiality of the clerk's labor. If my notes on the Harwood are correct, his discussion doesn't adequately account--and I use this verb self-consciously--for the clerk's labor, the figure in the trio in the FranT's final question, who might stand for the member of the group in Bagley's group work who does all the 'real' labor: is giving up (or "abandoning": it also has the bivalence I want here) love or giving up labor "most fre"?)<BR/><BR/>==<BR/><BR/>So much depends on the metaphor. What happens to freedom when we refuse Zizek's metaphor of the Act as suicide? For example. <BR/><BR/>I've been trying <I>not</I> to bog myself down in the tyrannical impasse of futurity (so much depends on a mixed metaphor). A few weeks back, I had suggested as an aside "the not present" as an alternative to "the future." What happens if not being present is our preferred metaphor? Something unpayably indebted to D&G no doubt. We can desire and hope for and even work for something whose time, whose being is simply not here, at this moment, in this space; that something might be before us (in both senses), it might be parallel to us, but whatever it is, wanting it (or trying to imagine it, or simply making a space for it by knowing that now is not all), need not lock us into servitude to some telos, nor does it bind us into nostalgia.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-75378030793617828542007-11-03T14:56:00.000-04:002007-11-03T14:56:00.000-04:00the last part of this post is especially beautiful...the last part of this post is especially beautiful, eileen, and addresses a lot of my discomforts about the working group. i've been thinking about this sort of affective collaboration a lot lately, mostly because the idea makes me (like dan) so uncomfortable. i, like many other grad students i know, never liked "group work" as a child. really, i don't like it much now. but this is less an issue of collaborative dynamics than of trust - too often collaboration is a forced endeavor with people/ideas i don't intellectually trust or particularly respect. this is why adding love to this equation is such a terribly interesting idea - because it goes beyond the "simply" emotive into many other territories - etymologically both into trust (belief) and desire (libido). on a very pragmatic level, this seems to be the sort of thing that can help to break people of fear-based ideas that other people will necessarily "pollute" or "degrade" one's work. when one gives gifts to lovers, one knows that the gifts themselves are part of the affective relationship, and despite releasing a certain amount of control, those gifts remain in the affective web between the two (or more) people.sarah bagleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10674532163424405180noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-70011260507072052292007-11-03T10:02:00.000-04:002007-11-03T10:02:00.000-04:00I have committed my morning [and liekly, into the ...I have committed my morning [and liekly, into the afternoon] to finishing my "Heroic Age" essay, but I wanted to say briefly here that "The Franklin's Tale" is my absolute favorite story of Chaucer's [with "The Clerk's Tale"--its antithesis, in a fashion, but not really, running a close second], partly because of the way in which is "breaks" with all sorts of normative conventions [while also lapsing into some of them: the husband, for instance, telling his wife that truth/troth matters more than anything else--even their own wedding vows!--then telling her not to tell anyone where she's going when he sends her off to the friend who loves her and wants to sleep with her]. I also take "fre," of course to mean "generosity" [duh, the glossary tells us that] but with a contemporary sense of freedom still attached somehow, as JJC so beautifully outlines. Generosity--radical generosity--as JJC says, and I agree with him, really *is* a gesture that disrupts the normative order of things and goes against all constraints and is completely selfless, which requires a giving up of something very precious: your own self-interest. But in an answer to Chaucer's question, "who is most free?" I always think the answer is no one, at least in his tale, because to one extent or another, each character is trapped in a role they are partly compelled to play out and the supposed acts of generosity [the husband letting the wife keep her "promise," the clerk forgiving the debt, the knight sending the wife back without sleeping with her--i.e., also forgiving a "debt"--could have easily been avoided by better motives/actions that could have voided the later predicamnts [and both love *and* marriage in this story are constructed as sites of impossibility, almost, as regards the *giving* of affection & love].<BR/><BR/>More later, and thank you, JJC, for such kind comments and provocative questions, to which I will return.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-47370954409946043392007-11-03T08:10:00.000-04:002007-11-03T08:10:00.000-04:00I hope you don't mind that I am linking my new blo...I hope you don't mind that I am linking my new blog to this one. Several of the issues you discuss here: the relationship of the past to the future but also collaborative approaches to research and teaching are going to useful to what I hope we will be doing there.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-74285004464056815982007-11-03T07:13:00.000-04:002007-11-03T07:13:00.000-04:00Any moment a young man in his PJs or a small girl ...Any moment a young man in his PJs or a small girl in her nightgown will interrupt me, but I want to thank you for this beautiful post, and for making me a philosopher on a morning when the identity assigned to me was sleepy walker of dogs and maker of breakfasts.<BR/><BR/>There is so much here: it is consummate Eileen Joy, but dan, sara, Foucault, Bauman, D&G, Readings are all interwoven in your meditations, making this a true communal moment, as networked as it is book-linked. A question, going back to your recent invocation of that recent King Arthur film, a Pelagian masterpiece where Clive Owen gets a rousing speech about freedom (cf. the similar bombast in Mel Gibson's patriotic Braveheart). What exactly does freedom mean, especially personal freedom, and what is its relation to love? (I love, by the way, the closing lines of your essay, and thank you for the love that obviously entered the post's crafting). Freedom means something more than absence of constraint, and the ability to live to as a heroic individual ... I'm wondering, really, about the medieval resonance of the word. The closing of the Franklin's Tale has the narrator asking which of the three men was most free, and by that he means most generous (elsewhere in the tale "free" does take on the resonance of acting in a way that is outside of constraint, a surplus that places you outside of the established social order, e.g., conventional marriage). So, is freedom a kind of generosity? Is that what makes it so potentially transformative to the moment in which it is performed? Is freedom a gift to world that may not want to be transformed: that is, is true generosity (as opposed to charity) the thing that disrupts the disciplining of bodies and subjectivities -- the constraint -- in the present that Dan rightly brings us back towards? Is generosity catalytic because it can't be accommodated back into its originary moment, since it disrupts the social relation into which it enters?<BR/><BR/>OK, once more: thank you for your generosity in laboring over a blog post so profound.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com