On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, ann klefstad wrote:
> To me the subtext that produces D's
> discourse has to do with the post-Holocaust perception of the faithlessness of the
> body. A rhetoric was needed that both subverted and transcended physicality.
> Language filled the bill, became the human in lieu of bodily presence.
>
I am not sure about the comment above, but I agree with what you say below, and
think that you're really on to something here, Ann.
The role of language and linguistics in Derrida's thought -- and that of the
French intellectuals following Barthes, Foucault, Althusser etc. is determined
by the status of linguistics as a new science -- and also of the anthropology of
Levi-Strauss -- in the French intellectual field of the 50s and 60s. The new
French philosophers used the new concepts of linguistics and anthropology to
attack traditional philosophy.
In this connection, I would say that their work shares a certain something with
the notions of bodily presence that you invoke below (as could be seen from
their interest in --and respect for-- Merleau-Ponty).
> And intermedia, and the american a-g, has very much to do with bodily presence,
> with a sort of taoist or zen or antiintellectual american notion of simple
> presence. Of the establishment of the physical through realtime attentiveness to
> what's in front of your nose eyes ears skin. A sensuality that has little to do
> with attributions of meaning and much to do with a notion of individual as conduit,
> through which the world flows into the world, never pausing for the
> differentiation that produces meaning.
>
> All of which is absolutely expressible only through action and sensation, not
> through discourse. This is taking the long way round, though one does, this way,
> reach a coign of vantage from which the immediate can be watched, though not
> experienced.
>
I agree -- and I wonder if this is where Derrida could come in with
the criticism of logocentrism (the privileging of discourse and a pure
intentionality over the "body")?
But it raises the question, what is the body? what is experience and sensation?
--These are the radical questions that Fluxus addresses in a non-discursive but
in a certain sense "philosophical" way. It actually puts into question the
question "What is...?" --to make a Derridean/Heideggerian observation.
cheers!
George
