Eric Dolphy did wonders with this tune, but I kind of like this version with the sharp contrast between McLean's attack and Waldron's comping, as if to say the song both is and is not a minor blues.
I've left the blog alone quite a bit lately while I've been pursuing math—I hadn't studied math properly since grade school and now I will need to pass a calculus class for my biology degree, so every day it's math, math, math, math and math. It's all going swimmingly but I've let my readings in philosophy slip while I cram for exams. I've no intention of giving up the blog, or philosophy.
The presence of the listener is inscribed in the utterance. It is I who speaks, Jacques says, but we who say. He asks, "What happens to the philosophical status of the person if we replace the individual's cogito with the proposition 'I speak, but we say'? (Difference and Subjectivity, p. 9) For one thing the refutation of "I do not exist" becomes problematic.
But should we allow such a distinction between speaking and saying? Is there a speaking that says nothing, a babble that isn't somehow destined for language? Is there an impersonal babble? Perhaps. Perhaps necessarily.
What of the inscription of the presence of the listener in the utterance? This echoes an idea of the intertextuality of the utterance while at the same time it responds to Buber, to a sense of that everything in discourse is affected by relations between the I and the you. The listener is not merely referred to but is there in the interlocutive event. Present. We won't shy away from the idea. It's difficult. How do we describe the presence of the listener? How does the listener appear? As the "other side of language," i.e., perhaps it need not be apparent at all? As an ethical constraint? Imperative? Does the listener present us with an imperative for coherence, for example?