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“Whether they are collective or individual names, the pre-Socratics, the Romans…all the proper names which come and go in Nietzsche’s texts are neither signifiers or signifieds, but designate intensities on a body which can be the body of the Earth, the body of the book, as well as Nietzsche’s own suffering body: I am every name in history…There is a kind of nomadism, a perpetual migration of the intensities designated by proper names, and these interpenetrate one another as if they are lived on a full body. The intensity can be lived only in relation to its mobile inscription on a body, and to the moving exteriority of a proper name, and this is what it means for a proper name to be always a mask, the mask of an operator.” (Deleuze)
I’ve been looking for the doubled site between Deleuze and Glissant on the question of nomadic thinking and rhizomatics. Read the rest of this entry »
Glissant’s exposition and creative development of the concept of rhizome—and all attendant conceptions of times, memory, history, and the nomadic—gives his Poetics of Relation particular complexity. The problematic is really quite straightforward: what and who is the subject? The primary aim – even hope – of Glissant’s work is to produce or render a sense of Caribbeanness, a Caribbean subjectivity, which is something Fanon did not (could not?) accomplish. Why not Fanon? Fanon was the first to live his thinking, to paraphrase Glissant, and this “living” of his thinking delimits his theorizing of subjectivity. Now, Glissant’s remark sounds like praise of militancy, a kind of he-really-means-what-he-says admiration, but Glissant means here to underscore the fact that Fanon returned to Africa – both as a theorist and as an activist. Fanon, then, was seeking Africa, a root, a mother, a home. His work on negritude certainly gives plenty of evidence for Glissant’s remark. Read the rest of this entry »
No matter the passage of now over forty years, the question of the relation of language and transcendence raised in Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics” is decisive. On first glance, this is a simple matter: to speak/write is to traffic in the logos, so any move outside being or essence (in a word, the ‘logos’) is stalled before it begins. This is not to say that transcendence is muted or erased. Rather, transcendence is interrupted in the same measure that it interrupts. The overstep on Levinas’ part is the failure to catch site of this reversal of interruption. Thus, Derrida captures his critique of Levinas in the single phrase “the dream of a pure heterology.” Read the rest of this entry »
