Heidegger

In a message dated 31/12/2006 08:54:25 GMT Standard Time,
michael at sandwich-de-sign.co.uk writes:
Jud, in your usual haste to rapidly demonstrate your enormous sophistic wit,
and without here commenting on the vitriolic mash-up you evidence below in
your ‘response’, you have not noticed that your respondent is one Marie
Mainil and *not Allen* (and not at all in the style of the Allen I know…
and different email address to boot); equally, another of your recent
respondents is one Les Smith and *not Lee Smith*.

A little less speed and a little more respect perhaps in the new year…

regards

michaelP

Jud:
The fault is not mine but the obvious young person [beginning psychologist
manqué and apparent newbie to computers - judging by how and what he/she
writes] posing as *Allen* who signed the message as *Allen.*

Look again at his or her message. HE or SHE is the one who must apologise
to Allen and me/I.

This is the first time that somebody has posed as somebody else on this
list. The fact that this craven idiot concealed his or her true identity
from this list and posed as someone else is highly suspicious anyway.

THERE IS NO MENTION OF *MARIE MAINIL* ON THE E-MAIL I RECEIVED!!!! [see
original e-mail reproduced below] and the name is entirely new to me.

He/she signed as: *ALLEN,* and the poseur has even spelt it right, for it
is a somewhat unusual spelling of the name here in Britain. The fact that it
had a different e-mail address is irrelevant, people change them and some
have more than one etc. En passant Allen has always misspelled my name as
*Judd* anyway.

It is a shame that due to this young incompetent sap Allen got the sharp
edge of my tongue, but my comments re: *The book which should never have
been written* (*Being Jewish - Arselicking Heidegger* as I heard it
referred to in my university) and my critique of him as a traitor to his own
people is nothing new. I am sorry however that this critique had to be
reiterated at a festive time of year.

What I DO expect is an apology to Allen and me from the so-called *Marie
Mainil* for the disruption he/she has caused by sending an e-mail purporting
to come from another member of the list.

I reproduce the original message from this person below and it will be seen
that it purports to come from Allen.

Jud, firstly, I can see why the confusion might have arisen in you because
of the supposed ’signing’ of “Allen”: because I know that Marie Mainil is a
member of this list (just look at the list membership list, and, she has
posted to this list before), it seems to me that the “Allen” at the end of
her speech came from a previous conversation between yourself and Allen and
Tympan (whose segment follows in Marie’s post) and does not constitute a
signature (in fact, and unfortunately, she has not signed her post this
time). Some of this kind of confusion arises, I think, because of the
opening up of postings to HTML (different colours, font sizes, bold, etc),
whereas earlier it was plain text with a clearer sense of who is quoting who
etc. Again, Marie’s speech is not at all in Allen’s style. At least give her
the benefit of the doubt.

Secondly: as for “my comments re: *The book which should never have been
written* (*Being Jewish - Arselicking Heidegger* as I heard it referred to
in my university) and my critique of him as a traitor to his own people is
nothing new. I am sorry however that this critique had to be reiterated at
a festive time of year.”: your ’sorrow’ sounds as hollow as your
sophistry… And, just as sadly, you confuse “critique” with crude vitriolic
attack: a critique should bring out salient and pertinent features of
another’s thinking, not merely throw bombs.

regards

michaelP

Jud,

Amongst your many services to this list is the opportunities you present for
the
diagnosis of philosophical pathologies, that is systemic errors you make
that seriously
infect any semblance of philosophical sensibility you might have once had,
the
possibility of which you might even have been born with–who am I to say.

The most tiresomely repetitious of these pathologies goes all the way back
to the
sophists, most notably Gorgias. It manifests itself most generally as the
fear-of-being-affected, more specifically, as the unwillingness to confront
the proximity
of rhetoric to philosophy. Now please listen carefully.

The fear-of-being-affected correlates with an obsessive need to be in
control, most
specifically through the power of reason. As is true of most obsessions,
reason itself
is used to fend off any possibility of overcoming itself. The very idea of
such
self-overcoming, itself overcomes the sufferer with a potentially lethal
deficient form
of rhetoric, which has come to be known in our time as “critique.” This
deficient
rhetorical form can be self justifying to a fault, making it impossible for
the sufferer
even to hear, let alone comprehend any ideas which might expose him to the
dreaded
open-ness which he associates with a complete abnegation of the independence
and
integrity of the self. This integrity and independence he feels an
overwhelming
obligation to protect , using the iron-clad capacity of reason to turn
away anything
that stands in its path back to itself, often with an ingratiating wit and
charm which
endears the sufferer to himself to a degree which sometimes results in
anti-social
behaivior, fortunately of a rather benign variety.

Now as to the unwillingness to confront the proximity of rhetoric to
philosophy. The
problem here is an inability (congenital or not, I cannot say) to recognize,
let alone
appreciate the constitutive power of language, a power often associated with
the Greek
“Poiesis,” whose relationship to truth as the Greeks conceived of it, we can
discuss at a
later session, should you choose to engage what I have to say with a good
faith effort
(words deliberately and carefully chosen) to keep the more extreme
expressions of your
obsession in check.

It might be encouraging to recollect the sophistic heights of Gorgias’s
expression of the
obsession:

Being does not exist,
If it did exist, it could not be cognized,
And even if it could be cognized, it could not be communmicated.

I have known some talented obsessives in my life, but few if any could come
up with such
an apparently thought-tight “conundrum”

Further realizing how hearing about fellow sufferers, especially well-known
ones, can
give one so afflicted some hope, I give you the best and the worst of so
called
“analytical” philosophers.

Best wishes for this new year and all those that might come, though at this
point, one
has reason to doubt.

Allen

under control.Quoting GEVANS613 at aol.com:

[Hide Quoted Text]
The rhetorical dimension of language is “of language,” we being only
partially at cause and not clearly able to understand. What I’m trying to
say here
is that in some, or large part we are subject to language and can act only
through it. I don’t think even Spinoza’s artful attempt to contain language
within a geometric frame outsmarts the determination of language to force
its
will upon us.

I think the best we can do under the circumstances is to think language as
such, language as it wants to be thought, observing our capacity to be
affected
even as it is being affected.

Jud:
Language has no *rhetorical dimension* nor does it have a *will* or the
capacity to *want* anything. Such things are in keeping with the fantasies
of
the painted savage cavorting before a baobab tree in an effort to influence
the
spirit which resides within its gnarled trunk to cast or remove a spell from
some smelly, shit-encrusted fellow anthropophagite.

No sign has any feelings. A traffic-light doesn’t give a flying fig whether
the car drivers that allow it to control them, suddenly decide to ignore the
rules of the road which they themselves have invested in its shiny pole and
flashing circuitry and smash themselves to bits in the sequel of such a
stupid
semiotic snub.

To start off the seventh year of the twenty-first century with the
suggestion that being human entails being concerned with either
subjectively accepting
and acting passively in response to the agenda of a personified language,
or
attempting to outsmart *the determination* of a personated language to
force
*its will* upon us. is utterly bizarre and evokes an image of a hairy,
unkempt creature with pronounced eyebrow ridges and a jaw which cries out
for the
attentions of a maxillofacial surgeon and orthognathic surgery, sitting
before a modern computer in a centrally-heated modern room banging his
calloused
hairy hands up and down incomprehensibly on the mud-bespattered keyboard.

It is HUMAN BEINGS who produce, generate, and agree the meaning of the
signs
we call *words* and *traffic-lights* and they have no agenda, will or
determination of their own. We can make such signs effective for
communication, or
alter the combinations and with it the effective outcomes as Heidegger did,
with the resultant communicational obfuscation, and the ratcheting-up of
anti-Semitism and with it the rhetorical road-deaths of the camps.

Tympan has a far better grasp of this rhetorical process, as can be seen in
his passage below, for he rightly identifies the *you* and the *your* and
the
*yourself* and the *children, friends or wife and lover* and the *women* and
the *men* and *Deleuze* that rocks and is rocked by the bark of language
and
NOT a *willful* *language itself* intent on allowing either intelligent
communication or semantic bedlam as the whim of the moment takes it.

But the personification of langauge apart…The Season’s Greetings to all!

Tympan:
Well yes this is what the study of rhetoric is all about,– fine feelings
that we get from polishing this surface so that it becomes more smooth and
graceful and all that jazz. No matter what, you are selling yourself
whether it
is to your children, friends or wife and lover. The tropes are similar but
the
actual words are different and with the latter I think the body is affacted
in a more erotic fashion. Drowning can be a scary thing or not… listen to
how women discuss and spin the sort of ideas men like Deleuze and us
express in
our own way:

regards,

Jud Evans.

Posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 1:55 pm
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback