Sorglose Nacht

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.