I've been reading Steven Shaviro's Pulses of Emotion: Whitehead's "Critique of Pure Feeling" (pdf, ht larval subjects). One of the more disconcerting ideas presented–quite apart from the notion that I might want to attend to the Zambezi's feelings–is the suggestion that repetition is not only possible, but impossible to avoid. "To establish a particular spacetime location is always, first of all, to affirm repetition, and thereby establish a difference, by referring to elsewhere and elsewhen, to other stretches of space and other periods of time" (p. 12). So if I still hold that repetition is impossible, which I might, though I haven't committed to the position yet, and I accept that Whitehead's argument is sound, must I therefore hold that spacetime locations are illusory? In which case, would illusions be the more interesting realities than possibilities? Hmm.
Labels: feeling, repetition, Shaviro, Whitehead, Zambezi