Out they all set, then, on this exciting journey, full of vigour and overwhelmingly inspired by their sense of purpose, dedicated to one object only. Between thirty million and five hundred million of them, if one is to believe the educated guesses.

But only one penetrated the pellucid zone to reach the nucleus.

Why only one, since they were all equipped with the same determination and attributes, the lashing force of the tail and the nose tipped with corrosive enzyme? As ever, it is the first home who defeats the others. Perhaps that is why it is called the human race. How many others have had that thought? I know of none.

Then the primary tragedy occurs, the unity becomes the dyad, already it is beginning to divide, the cell, to split, for it is natural and destructive, the division of cells, basic.

…

But the cells are already specialized, some bent on a career in the spinal cord, others certain of a vocation in the spleen, the cornea, the coccyx. One or two brave cells have it in mind to aspire to becoming sperm themselves, one day, in the fullness of what needs to be termed time.

“Fortunately, women have been having babies without the help of the medical profession for many millions of years, so the chances of complications or of your doing anything to assist are relatively few. In order to justify your presence at the sacred moment at all, therefore, you should have seen to it that you had the appropriate period instruments at the ready, to wit: umpteen pairs of Waugh’s Long Fine Dissecting Forceps, one Urethral Bougie to be used in the unlikely event of your needing to examine the common bile duct, four of Moynihan’s Gall-Bladder forceps, Geig’s Myoma Screw, Westheim’s Angled Scissors, three Vulsellum Forceps, one Wrigley’s Short Midwifery Forceps, five Payr’s Crushing Clamps, one Doyen’s Retractor, four Willett’s Scalp Forceps, Bonney’s Uterine Depressors, and Clover’s Crutch for trussing up the patient like a fowl if necessary; which latter is not necessarily uncomfortable, either.”

And he was not finished yet:

“So away you would have gone, then, learning from your midwife, hoping for the best, leaning ever so hard on dear old Mother Nature.”

He had done.

Were any of these fearsome instruments needed? Did they notice her blood group was rhesus negative? Did the bag burst or leak, was Me heralded by a torrent or a trickle? Who remembers? Does it matter, again, now?

We have there two orders of order: sequential and jussive. (JD: Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 1)

Hristina Tasheva worked for years cleaning houses in Amsterdam.

"Tasheva has collected hundreds of notes used to communicate with the people whose houses she cleaned, with messages such as: ‘Hi Hristina, how are you? Do you please want to clean the fridge? Thank you. The cat is back home. Nice weekend.’

[ … ]

Tasheva, who studied agricultural economics in Bulgaria, thought she was wasting her time. She feared that if she had children, they might call her stupid for leading such an empty life. To do something meaningful, she started taking photographs of herself at the houses she cleaned." (Do you please want to clean the fridge?)

[ … … … ]

“A phantom can…be sensitive to idiom.” (Archive Fever, 85-86)

“…the archive is made possible by death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation.” (Ibid, 94)

“The last door opens, of course, at the last sentence of the book. A remarkable and necessary notion, decisive precisely where nothing is decided. It is not by chance that this last door takes the form of a promise, the promise of a secret kept secret. What happens when a historian promises to keep secret on the subject of an archive which is yet to be established?” (Ibid, 71)

As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us.

- Bataille, L’Art, exercise de la cruauté

The image above was created by Martin Klimas, who describes the process in the following way:

The shooting environment must be controlled and kept consistent. The lighting is clear and direct, head on. My background is neutral, but bright enough so that the shattering object completely stands out. I drop the figurine from the same height in complete darkness while the lens of the camera is open. When the figurine hits the ground, the sound triggers the lights to go off for a fraction of a second. I do this procedure many times or until I find the one frame that is just right. I keep just one such picture for every figurine.

- Interview with Rosecrans Baldwin, The Morning News.

So here we are again; at the double-paralysis, the uncanny encounter with technology.

¶ One

Klimas, self-decribed as “in [one] sense a sculptor, but [with] only a 5000th of a second to build my sculpture,” is in fact the curator of the camera’s monuments.

One could not capture these images; the precision required is too great. One needs an array of prostheses: audio-sensors, custom camera circuitry and photodiodes, an onboard computer … At this rate of speed, our hands are dumb, paralyzed.

The photograph is too fast for us: It is the time equivalent of the incessant scientific photographs of DNA or the Milky Way.

¶ Two

One initially inclines to read these photographs as monuments to the destruction of porcelain, cassette tapes, cellular phones, flowers. As one looks, however, this inclination itself self-destructs - the images memorialize something that we all know we must have missed.

Now (but from a “now” that is clearly too precise) the uncanny surfaces: More and more, one cannot help but see instead monuments rendered to the unfazed, precise and complicated computer-controlled camera that captures moment after moment of the fall.

Everything is wrong, one realizes. These images are perverse, fetishistic…

But the trap is not reducible to the bait. It supposes not only the hand that places it but the end pursued. What happens to someone who takes the bait? What are, for the individual who gives into fascination, the consequences of his weakness?

- Bataille, Ibid.

God is a shout in the street! - Stephen Dedalus

Jacques-Alain Miller is right here: “[Google] is the cataract: the ostentatious white of the page blackens suddenly, the void is overturned by an onslaught, succinctness becomes logorrhea.” And wrong here:

What is sure is that it is stupid. If the responses proliferate on the screen, it is because they are mistaken. The initial signal is made of words, and a word does not have a single meaning. Thus, meaning escapes Google, which encodes, but doesn’t decode. It is the word in its stupid materiality that it memorizes. Thus, it is always up to you to find in the haystack of results, the needle that is meaningful to you.

Whatever Google’s brain is, it is always passing just short of thought’s grasp: not dumb or stupid or brutal, just some other intelligence … no syntagm rendered for “thought” applies.

Meaning is inverted. Words, which sag in all their stupid overdetermination, operate here on an entirely different plane of immanence (to use that good Deleuzo-Guattarian parlance) - they are crystalline, brilliant, indisputable in their materiality, their absolute weight in bytes.

Thought is a sieve for Google; they are wildly, totally other. Whatever decision Google makes it does so from the “negative part of [the] negation” (Badiou) of thought. It does so, one might say, in total excess of thought, and from an order that escapes desire or meaning.

“God doesn’t reply; Google, always, and immediately.” But it replies with a sort of charade - the kind of frenetic and only vaguely descriptive gesticulations of foreigners asking for directions - PageRank is a kind of waving and pointing, while Google chatters on, largely for its own benefit, in its mother tongue: volume. We can read the gesture: Make sense of this. Make sense of my ludicrous volume.

Any encounter takes place entirely in this difference, in the rift between between an order and a desire trying to communicate. Difference differing: “Thus, the necessity for it to pose as an axiom its fundamental kindness.”

Leo Strauss was first brought to my attention by Carl Mitcham back in 2004, by way of Harvey Mansfield’s insidious A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy. Since this time, one of two things has happened: One, a lot of people had Strauss brought to their attention, or two, I noticed a lot more people paying attention to Strauss. At least, paying attention to some people in the Bush administration who have been labeled Straussians, or labeled themselves as such. (Incidentally, it seems that even the most Straussian of the cabinet/PNAC Straussians may want to re-identify, in their interesting public stance on the “War on Terror”, as Mansfieldian, which is at least terra firma.)

Apparently, 2007 is the year where another group of Strauss apologists (this is starting to become somewhat of an American philosophical tradition, isn’t it?) take Strauss back, so to speak. Which has, I have to admit, sort of caught me off guard. Books have been released this year on Strauss and Arendt and, perhaps even more bizarrely, on Strauss and Levinas.

It’s not usually in my interests, nor is it in the interest of the way that I see the blog as a way of abetting philosophical discourse, to be topical. But I am nonetheless a citizen of this information glut, and from time to time, something like this is going to catch my eye.

I’d like to frame my piece on the late-blooming “was Strauss really not as politically-charged as the world seems to interpret him as?” discussion in terms of a piece of Derrida, this time interviewed for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies (vol. 7) in 1994. Here it is:

Thinking’s task today is to tackle, to measure itself against, everything making up this programme of contamination. This programme forms the history of metaphysics, it informs the whole history of political determination, of politics as it was constituted in Ancient Greece, disseminated throughout the West and finally exported to the East and South. If the political isn’t thought in this radical sense, political responsibility will disappear. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this thought has become necessary only today; rather, today more than ever, one must think this machine in order to prepare for a political decision, if there is such a thing, within this contamination.

Methodologically, Strauss’ strategy (and here is the seed of his charged “noble lies”/”deadly truths” agenda) for interpreting the classics, and Plato in particular, is couched in the notion of philosophical texts offering both an exoteric teaching and an esoteric/”true”/privileged teaching, which was concealed from the general reader. Let’s look at the text:

Philosophers or scientists who hold this view about the relations of philosophy or science and society are driven to employ a peculiar manner of writing which would enable them to reveal what they regard as the truth to the few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions on which society rests. They will distinguish between the true teaching as the esoteric teaching and the socially useful teaching as the exoteric teaching; whereas the exoteric teaching is meant to be easily accessible to every reader, the esoteric teaching discloses itself only to the very careful and well-trained readers after long and careful study.

So here’s the aporia that we can lens using the Derrida interview quoted above:

1. “On each occasion one will have to make complex gestures to explain that one is acting, despite contamination, in this particular way, because one believes that it is better to do this rather than that, that a particular act chosen is in such and such a situation more likely to do such and such than another possible act. These gestures are anything but pragmatic, they are strategic evaluations which attempt to measure up to the formalization of the machine.”
2. “There’s no way out…one has indeed to assume the risk of being misunderstood, continuing to think in modest terms what is after all exceedingly ambitious, in order to prepare for these responsibilities - if they exist.”

Which is to say that the way in which Strauss is styled or framed by his partisan (or non-partisan) successors, now or to come, is both entirely his fault, and was entirely unavoidable. That is, Strauss either chose an Heideggerian gesture of silence, or else paid a Nietzschean price for esotericism. And here is the point: these two strategies operate in the same register; or, in the same contaminated machine of global politics.

What Strauss fundamentally failed to do (and that which he could not fail to do) was to appropriately, “think this machine in order to prepare for a political decision, if there is such a thing, within this contamination.” Any topical political silence in which he indulged - be it in the shameful Heideggerian order or the esoteric Nietzschean order - was nothing more than a failure on his part to anticipate the “absolutely unprecedented responsibilities of ‘thought’ and ‘action’…” (Derrida, Of Spirit) inherent within his textual gesture.

This gesture of silence, this self-insistence on esoteric meaning is what allows Strauss to be continually refigured next to Levinas, Arendt, and Nietzsche, as well as Wolfowitz and the American neo-conservatives. This aristocratic gesture, narcissistic bait, inevitably failed appeal to deceleration in a obviously accelerating world…

But of course, what we are calling the Heideggerian and Nietzschean orders here doubtlessly contaminate each other … … …

Shawn Barber

¶ The point arises, somewhere, where perhaps an Apology is required for a blogging philosophy. Philosophy, after all, is traditionally (in that recent tradition) the domain of books.

¶ The blog post is writing brought to the borders of immediacy (the Internet: writing contaminated with speech?) – envoys, dispatched (envoyé) already on the way (inviare) – in blogging’s best and definitive moments…

¶ In time, to write like one speaks: We live right at the heart of the “tele-”, at the heart of the dispatch, “its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands…” (Jd, The Post Card)

¶ (My) post as the measure of (my) thought – or, a measure, a timing – fragments for the reading life meted out, a/rhythmic readings … here, there … a double-scansion. Me, then you. Head down. Back bent, hunched over a keyboard. Tele-touch.

¶ Interstices upon interstices: collapse time and time reasserts itself.

¶ The philosophy blog is the domain of fragments, in all their “torn intimacy.” Thoughts, then paddings and margins, caesurae… … …

Continental Philosophy, several days ago, posted this video, for which I have taken pause several times:

The interviewer asks Cixous, “So particularity and universality are not … opposed to each other?” to which she replies, “oh, no.”

Oh, certainly no. On the one hand: Universality is “universally accessible” and particularity is “particularly located”. Nothing - which is to say no-thing in particular - is universally located or particularly accessible [JLN: “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared.”]. These adjectives are modal functors of Being separated from comparison or reciprocal measure by immediacy, access, immediacy of access. They don’t even occupy the same circuit.

Certainly not. On the other hand: One decides that in fact the difference is not located somewhere at the referent - of course, always, referents or nothing - of universality and particularity, that these circumscriptions do not describe or represent a world that is a circuit of their sameness and difference, but merely suture a gash at the heart of representation.

For instance, Ghandi’s “..way of being typical[ly] Indian was also a way of getting close to all other religions, and all other philosophies in the world…”

The strategies, the movements of any artistic or ideological work, for ontological reasons (and yes, that syntagm can only operate on an ontic register), can only get close to the irreducible difference (here: gender or cultural difference) of shattered and incontrovertibly particular being, because, although there is no being-in-general, political work must be done.

And of course, there is work (the work of representation, closure, the West), and then there is the nudge, the touch, of Being. All at once, universally in particular. Which is to say, operating here at the joint, we are all a little ambivalent.