A list of books I may get around to reading next year, in no particular order:
Material Phenomenology, by Michel Henry (trans. Scott Davidson, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). This one didn't actually escape from Powell's but came in the mail while I was at Powell's. Page 123, sentences 4, 5 and 6: "In representation, the ipseity of the I is inscribed in the following way: I represent myself. That is to say, I present something as myself, as my ego or yours. But why is what is put before me a me or you?"
Difference and Subjectivity: Dialogue and Personal Identity, by Francis Jacques (trans. Andrew Rothwell, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). "As we can see, the terms of the interlocution–the agencies, or positions, of utterance–are determined in the first place by speech, for their determination forms part of the meaning of the proffered messages. It therefore follows, rather than precedes, the establishment of the dialogue. Once the principle of the primum relationis–or primacy of the relation–is defined in this way, we must resist the temptation to ask: relation between what and what?"
Loneliness as a Way of Life, by Thomas Dumm (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). "I had a gnawing fear of her. She seemed to pay attention to me only when I caused trouble, so I guess I caused as much trouble as I could. When I threw tantrums, she would lock me away in a cubbyhole closet under the staircase in the dining room."
Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, by Adriana Cavarero (trans. William McCuaig, New York: Columbia University Press). "In choosing him as the instrument of horrorist destruction, Verloc basically counts on this very factor. It is worth emphasizing that the paradigmatic innocence of Stevie has both an ethical and an intellectual valence. An eternal child, he is not only excluded by definition from the realm of responsibility and guilt; he does not know what he is doing because his mental retardation–and not casual, or arranged, innocence–prevents him from understanding it."
The Ethics of Memory, by Avishai Margalit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). "Although it takes (at least) two for sexual relations, the defeated partner can declare, like Baudelaire: 'I am the wound and the dagger.' Baudelaire did not necessarily believe that he is the Alpha and Omega in bringing about the wound. But he had an important part in bringing it on himself."
Human Posture: The Nature of Inquiry, by John A. Schumacher (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). "Let us now consider the same experiment in a quantam mechanical context: [a figure is shown]. We suppose that the microscope is an electron microscope, and that the deflected particle is an electron. What must we say in quantum mechanical terms?"
Metamorphosis and Identity, by Caroline Walker Bynum (New York: Zone Books, 2001). "The response is not imitatio or even love but admiratio, a reaction that to Bernard conjures up distance and strangeness, the word for what we feel when we cannot approach or be like. These themes are also reflected in the fourth sermon for Christmas Eve, where Bernard, again referring to Christ as physician, connects the miraculous mixture of the virgin mother, fertile yet uncontaminated, breached yet intact, with the fertility of the world and the hope of resurrection. Thus for Bernard, the mixture–whether hybrid or marvel–is double, twofold, a joining of contrarieties."
I'm still in the midst of Casey, Levinas and Kuzminski and have a few books kicking around from the library.
The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency has issued a smog alert for Seattle where I happen to be visiting. Should I logically conclude that the sunshine has an ugly side? Or would that be the meanest form of obscurantism? Anyway, here I am cooped up in a hotel room with Kristeva and Winnicott and no inclination to really write. So here is a list of some books I've picked up in Seattle (with one exception either used or deeply discounted):
Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town, by Leela Prasad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir (trans. Bernard Frechtman, New York: Citadel Press, 1948).
Mothers in Mourning, with the Essay Of Amnesty and Its Opposite, by Nicole Loraux (trans. Corinne Pache, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Man and People, by José Ortega y Gasset (trans. Willard Trask, New York: Norton, 1957)
Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective, by Dan Zahavi (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, by Luce Irigaray (trans. Mary Beth Mader, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
History, the Human, and the World Between, by Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
The Philosophy of the Present, by George Herbert Mead (ed. Arthur E. Murphy with a preface by John Dewey, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1959)
Sharing the World, by Luce Irigaray (London: Continuum, 2008).
The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement, by Albert Murray (New York: Pantheon, 1996)
Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile, by Harold Skulsky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)
The Vocation of Man, by Johann Fichte (trans. Peter Preuss, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
Another performance of the same tune, with Eric Harland replacing Al Foster on drums:
The first performance sounds better to me because of the intensity of the performers and because of the communication between them. They are all listening to each other and playing off of each other. Communication is especially pronounced in Hutcherson's last chorus and the beginning of Tyner's first solo chorus (Bobby Hutcherson plays vibes, McCoy Tyner plays the piano), but the entire performance illustrates a creative process of improvisatory musical dialogue.
Bruce Ellis Benson's The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge University Press, 2003) appropriates the idea of improvised dialogue to engage in a hermeneutics of a wider world of music making, in fact the whole world of music making, though he is not an ethnomusicologist, nor does he reference the ethnomusicological literature on improvisation. (I'll blog some of that ethnomusicology soon enough.) Benson intends to critique a notion of music as reproduction, and perhaps also music as repetition. Whether this will take him towards a deeper critique of reproduction or repetition I can't yet say. I'm hoping Benson's critique will suggest some ideas to me as I continue to think about repetition.
I'll be away from a computer for the rest of week. When I return I intend to dig into Benson's book. Also in the lineup:
Sartre and then Casey on imagination;
Kristeva on melancholia;
Cavarero on narrative;
More Nancy and then Derrida on Nancy;
Derrida on Husserl;
Attali on the labyrinth;
Merleau-Ponty and then Barbaras on Merleau-Ponty;
Hagi Keenan on "the hidden face of language";
Nagatomo on the body;
Assorted musicological monographs;
Anything I'm forgetting;
Anything that crops up, which it will;
Maybe some more math because I mean to do infinity to death;
Gemma Corradi Fiumara reminds us that the "auscultation" of written texts has been limited to inhabitants of the Gutenberg Galaxy (The Other Side of Listening, p. 30). Given the number of books published annually, does it make sense any longer to speak of inhabiting the galaxy of books? In my corner of the galaxy there are hundreds of books, and tens of thousands in the nearest institutional library. I'm hard pressed to make it through one book a week, though I may consult many more. Nowadays an avid reader with a high book life number could make a dent in Project Gutenberg, but just a dent.
Can we still then speak of communities of readers? That may be a dishonest way to characterize academic intellectual spheres. Professors, translators, editors (one can hope), publishers, reviewers, librarians, students, bursars, airline attendants, code monkeys, authors: all their specialized, unequally valued skills and more are required to make up a contemporary intellectual community, or a minor bookish form of life. Perhaps the practioners of a particular bookish form of life agree upon a language, as Wittgenstein might say (Philosophische Untersuchungen I, No. 241). Are there more and more reading lists that don't contain within their pages all the language one needs to thrive in a bookish form of life? Do contemporary bookish forms of life accept more and more slippage in their languages? Along with every "These are the books you should read!" comes a "Those are books you should not read!" If I sit down to read The Libidinal Economy it will not be because anybody has recommended it to me but because I intend to enjoy it, which is another point I mean to get at. Can "These are some books you might enjoy" institute an agreement on a form of life sufficiently sophisticated for academic culture?
If listening involves an openness more fundamental than the openness of the question, as Gadamer suggests, then Corradi Fiumara's question of why this has this not been a topic of philosophical discussion acquires a certain probity (pp.28-29, citing Truth and Method, pp. 324-325). (I'll note that the if might excuse her from engaging in a pensiero forte.) Corradi Fiumara's philosophy of listening celebrates anomalies (p. 49). The anomaly of the openness of listening appears as anomaly from within a paradigm of hermeneutics; I'm not sure if she means to abandon the hermeneutic paradigm altogether, or, if so, whether there is a name for the paradigm that thinks listening. It may be consistent with a kind of pensiero debole. Corradi Fiumara notably makes frequent references to Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition as well as the works of Gianni Vattimo, and Priogine and Stengers. I'm unsure of whether she has a deep commitment to postmodernism; I'll wait to read her more recent books before probing that question further.
Corradi Fiumara draws our attention to the pleasures of auscultation with an argument that reminds of Kuhn's idea that discoveries cannot unequivocably be attributed to particular individuals at particular moments (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 55). She says:
In an open organization of knowledge, even the experiences of pleasure and displeasure might become intsruments of philosophical research as they no longer function as ends in themselves but are amenable to be used as intermediate passages towards a more complex equilibrium. An experience of pleasure may not be confined to the status of an occasion of enjoyment but may be transformed into the announcement or uncovering of unapparent features in the complexity of interactions. Similarly the notion of pain may no longer be relegated to the noncognitive level of frustration but may enhance an awareness of features and factors which cause disturbance. The less pleasure and displeasure are regarded as mere fluctuations of one's inner life the more they can be introduced and used in the enrichment of our philosophical concerns.
(p. 46)
Kuhn and Corradi Fiumara, in their critique of the individual and of the occasion, are operating under a shared ethos of late Twentieth-Century thought. Beyond that, I think Corradi Fiumara has appropriated Kuhn's critique into a metaparadigmatic thinking of her problem (which also speaks to a kind of ethos). There are, nonetheless, elements of a paradigm in her thinking: "complex equilibrium," "complexity of interactions," and elsewhere, a deterritorialization of knowledge (p. 51 and passim). Are these in harmony? That is, if we begin to think a deterritorialized pleasure of auscultation, are we still interested in equilibria, or are we interested in disturbance? Do the pleasures of reading precisely disturb the complex bookish forms of life even as these forms of life celebrate more and more fluid bodies of texts? Is pleasure intrinsically a more unsettling basis of agreement than vocabulary or "the texts themselves"?
I'll be taking a little break from blogging next week. My reading list for the new year is already getting pretty full. The list includes books that are on the way from Amazon, books that I never got around to opening, and books checked out on interlibrary loans. Here are some titles that I'll be looking into:
Hiroshi Kojima, Monad and Thou: Phenomenological Ontology of Human Being.
Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology.
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness.
Michel Henry, The Geneaology of Psychoanalysis.
Jacques Derrida, On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy.
Daniel Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.
Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason.
Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History.
Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening.
This list isn't exhaustive. I'll probably visit a bookstore over the holidays, and I'm sure I'll be using the library in the new year.