tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post114063165216080668..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Against Allegory (More Medieval Animals)Cord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1141416983100451642006-03-03T15:16:00.000-05:002006-03-03T15:16:00.000-05:00What a kind thing to say!I agree to be the spectre...What a kind thing to say!<BR/><BR/>I agree to be the spectre that's haunting Cohen, but given your productivity, I think ghosting you would ending up ghosting me.<BR/><BR/>The whole genealogy thing, btw, is something I've been working out a bit for my reading of <I>Des Grantz Geanz,</I> which, someday, I'll get out into the world in a completed form.<BR/><BR/>But first there's the whole blasted finishing the diss. thing, which requires that I limit my pleasures: for instance, I saved up commenting on your blog for a week until I'd plowed my way through my grading.<BR/><BR/><I>more active and deleuzian, like "line of flight"? </I><BR/><BR/>You're right. Typology doesn't work. For your suggestion, I'm tantalized but also totally lost because all the Deleuze I've read are his scattered things about animals and becoming. With that in mind, my project for subway reading for the next six months is just developing professional competence in the big names: so I read Agamben's <I>State of Exception,</I> finally read the whole of Foucault's first volume of the <I>History of Sexuality,</I> Sarah Kay's intro to Zizek, and now, rereading <I>Location of Culture,</I> but with a better understanding. Sheesh. Deleuze and G. are on the list, I guess, but I also realized the other day I know <I>nothing</I> about Habermas, which means I don't get about 1/2 the jokes on Bérubé’s site.<BR/><BR/>Too much to know!Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1141410818398587562006-03-03T13:33:00.000-05:002006-03-03T13:33:00.000-05:00Karl: wow, this is good stuff. Will you be my ghos...Karl: wow, this is good stuff. Will you be my ghostwriter?<BR/><BR/>Love the points on intermarriage, undergirding/undermining function of dungeon space -- and especially the important clarification of Lingis. You are so right about is movement away from weary dualities like inner/outer. I wish I'd never used the word inner -- it was really far too medieval, and not fithful to Lingis or to the actual vectors of SGGK.<BR/><BR/>I don't know about typology rather than allegory, since Christian typology is so bound up in Christian confidence in supercession. How about something more active and deleuzian, like "line of flight"?Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1141341400703305242006-03-02T18:16:00.000-05:002006-03-02T18:16:00.000-05:00Excellent stuff JJC, particularly the SGGK materia...Excellent stuff JJC, particularly the SGGK material. Just a few marginal notes<BR/><BR/><I> A land that is being subjugated by newcomers is imagined to be capable of devouring its occupants </I><BR/><BR/>Intermarriage a kind of production that is a swallowing up, too, in the way that what results is a new creature of an intermingled genealogy that is not quite either one of its progenitors. <BR/><BR/><I>Their shared setting is also important: both tell narratives that unfold in the dungeons of castles, architectures linked in the English mind to conquest and upheaval. </I><BR/><BR/>Just a note: internal spaces that are the unseen centers and foundations of these structures, which are nevertheless hollow spaces that weaken the foundation<BR/><BR/><I>Alphonso Lingis has written eloquently of the animal we carry within, and the ways in which this inner alterity scatters the human:</I><BR/><BR/>Since we are animal, we don't carry an animal <I>within</I> except in the sense that we deny animality. I offer this point only as a correction of nuance, because I think the metaphor of <I>inner</I> alterity isn't useful enough: alterity crawls over our surfaces and extends them both into us and out into the world beyond our comprehension, restlessly undoing whatever limit we want to set ourselves, most signally undoing the boundary between inner and outer.<BR/><BR/>With that in mind, what the Lingis offers is a way out of the impasse of imagining that by “recognizing our animality” we return to ourselves a reunified self previously split by our refusal to include “our animal part.” Instead, his point seems to be (and here I'm just restating your point about scattering the human) one directed against all boundaries of self through his recognition that the purportedly separate, self-sustaining human subject operates within, with, and via a multitudinous, irreducible set of creatures who accompany us always, allow us to be, and are, for the most part, unknown to us; and we are probably as unknown to them as they are to us. It is not that we are animals; it is that I am animals and thus cease to be an I. This relationship between these animals cannot be classed as symbiotic but rather as a shared, and ever shifting, being comprising innumerable things that are only in a system of relationality, disclosing that being, far from being merely an inert, isolatable noun, is rather always and only a gerund (and so I stumble into a kind of subjectless pantheism?). <BR/><BR/>Again, not that I'm saying anything you're not. I just think that the metaphor of innerness suggests an esoteric truth, a core to be uncovered, and the idea that there <I>is</I> an inner somehow separate from the outer: that is, an operation of allegory.<BR/><BR/>Instead, just a suggestion, could we think in terms of typology rather than allegory? In allegory, the sign seems to drop away once we realize what it signifies, whereas in typology, the sign persists. This suggestion is as far from perfect as it is from being worked out; and the immediate problem seems to be that the in typology the thing being signified dominates once it is disclosed (i.e., in large part, once interpreted, the meaningful of the Ark is primarily its anticipation of the church...): hell, I dunno.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1140979626303691582006-02-26T13:47:00.000-05:002006-02-26T13:47:00.000-05:00Hey, JJC. On venemous reptiles, from Evans' Crimin...Hey, JJC. On venemous reptiles, from Evans' Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (a lovely, wild read): <BR/><BR/>[here, Evans begins "a chronological list of excommunications and executions of animals from the ninth to the nineteenth century"]:<BR/>"A few early instances of excommunication and malediction, our knowledge of which is derived chiefly from hagiologies and other legendary sources, are not included in the present list, such, for example, as the cursing and burning of storks at Avignon by St. Agricola in 666, and the expulsion of venomous reptiles from the island Reichenau in 728 by Saint Perminius." (Evans, 265)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com