Cobbler Ross
(Feb 04/06)
I have awakened--perhaps not. How would I know (one know) if I (if one) were not dead, breathing, wheezing, lapping grubs of disagreeably damp air? This disconcerts me, so terribly so. Perhaps, maybe, perhaps, I have always been dead, yet to awaken, to live a life living, not a death dead dying, a Heideggerian misstep, an ontological charley horse, an inaccuracy in logic, an existential trip-up. In 1968 the intellectual landscape in France changed, and with it the desire for a raison d’ ere, a philosophical rebuttal: student uprisings, resurgence in Marxist dialectics, an end to Hobbesianism and capital greed and gain. We needed less structure, so the Sartreans and Althusserians gave us Structuralism and Postmodernism. We needed more structure, so the Foucaults and Lacans offered us Truth as Power and an Unconscious structured like language, lacunas, pedagogical onerism, philosophical missteps. Foucault died from Aids related complications, Sartre with a pipe in his mouth, Lacan left early, analysis interminable, and Althusser from an irresolvable depression brought on by matricide and shoddy reasoning.
I have awakened--perhaps not. How would I know (one know) if I (if one) were not dead, breathing, wheezing, lapping grubs of disagreeably damp air? This disconcerts me, so terribly so. Perhaps, maybe, perhaps, I have always been dead, yet to awaken, to live a life living, not a death dead dying, a Heideggerian misstep, an ontological charley horse, an inaccuracy in logic, an existential trip-up. In 1968 the intellectual landscape in France changed, and with it the desire for a raison d’ ere, a philosophical rebuttal: student uprisings, resurgence in Marxist dialectics, an end to Hobbesianism and capital greed and gain. We needed less structure, so the Sartreans and Althusserians gave us Structuralism and Postmodernism. We needed more structure, so the Foucaults and Lacans offered us Truth as Power and an Unconscious structured like language, lacunas, pedagogical onerism, philosophical missteps. Foucault died from Aids related complications, Sartre with a pipe in his mouth, Lacan left early, analysis interminable, and Althusser from an irresolvable depression brought on by matricide and shoddy reasoning.
Count Juan
(Jan 13/06)
Your Kef pipe, Mr. Goytisolo, is viscid and tacky with resin, from the leaf, or the pod, or the stamen, or perhaps from the piddle on the mosque of your lips. Had you met Michel, no doubt the kef smoke and sodomies would have been flying, like fucking ninety, perhaps a hundred, perhaps more. In the scholars barrio, or a too-hot bathhouse, rocksalt and myrrh stiffening the angle of your mans’-laughter. Contagion’s all round, keep a starched upper lip, blood-borne and angled just right, pineal to prostate, cud-chew to tailbone. The philosophy of the sodomite, the effervescent aftertaste of mothballs and lubricious jellies, like fucking ninety, breakneck fucking fast, maybe faster yet. Taking that Deleuzian maxim to the frontier: ass-fucking the philosophical monster, giving birth to the post-postmodern bastard monster-child. Kef up the good work, you deserve it. Before you try your hand at deconstruction, you first need to have mastered the drawing of the hand, the fingers, angles, nebs and shoals, then, and only then, you are ready to destroy and rebuild, or reconstruct. The deconstructor is a first and foremost a constructor, a conductor, a master of primal imagery. All artists worth their weight in saltpeter, Bacon, Riopelle, Bosch, Bruegel, Schiele, even Caravaggio deloused of conceit and bad manners, mastered the hand before shattering it with the hammer of deconstruction. Derrida wrote an exegesis on geometry and formal logic long before his posterior assault on grammar, meaning and textuality. His was a reasoned hammer; not a child’s carelessly swung ersatz maulstick.
Your Kef pipe, Mr. Goytisolo, is viscid and tacky with resin, from the leaf, or the pod, or the stamen, or perhaps from the piddle on the mosque of your lips. Had you met Michel, no doubt the kef smoke and sodomies would have been flying, like fucking ninety, perhaps a hundred, perhaps more. In the scholars barrio, or a too-hot bathhouse, rocksalt and myrrh stiffening the angle of your mans’-laughter. Contagion’s all round, keep a starched upper lip, blood-borne and angled just right, pineal to prostate, cud-chew to tailbone. The philosophy of the sodomite, the effervescent aftertaste of mothballs and lubricious jellies, like fucking ninety, breakneck fucking fast, maybe faster yet. Taking that Deleuzian maxim to the frontier: ass-fucking the philosophical monster, giving birth to the post-postmodern bastard monster-child. Kef up the good work, you deserve it. Before you try your hand at deconstruction, you first need to have mastered the drawing of the hand, the fingers, angles, nebs and shoals, then, and only then, you are ready to destroy and rebuild, or reconstruct. The deconstructor is a first and foremost a constructor, a conductor, a master of primal imagery. All artists worth their weight in saltpeter, Bacon, Riopelle, Bosch, Bruegel, Schiele, even Caravaggio deloused of conceit and bad manners, mastered the hand before shattering it with the hammer of deconstruction. Derrida wrote an exegesis on geometry and formal logic long before his posterior assault on grammar, meaning and textuality. His was a reasoned hammer; not a child’s carelessly swung ersatz maulstick.
