Waves

These Waves

[T]he inner narrative of Phallos ends with Neoptolomus's rejection of the moral conflations of organized religion, and leaves Neoptolomus and his partner Nivek contemplating the Heraclitean flux of the universe, the certainty of loss, and the utter unknowability of the future — which is to say, the certainty of its novelty: the certainty of the arrival, even in the midst of loss, of new persons, new stories, new data.

Kenneth R. James "Discourse and Desire, Muddle and Need: Radical Reading In and Around Phallos" essay in the enhanced and revised edition (2013) of Phallos by Samuel R. Delany.

These Waves of Dying Friends in conversation with Acquired Community. (Words from Michael Lynch as revisited in imagination through a persona created by Jane Byers)

And so for day 2282
13.03.2013

On Rockwell on Dialogue

Some notes triggered by Geoffrey Rockwell's A Unity of Voices: A Definition of Philosophical Dialogue

The successful dialogue, the one that teaches, is judged to be the one that brings the reader close to identifying with the humiliated (the respondent) or the humiliating (the interrogator) and allows the reader to break the identification and in so doing also leave opinions and faulty reasoning behind. In this sense, the dialogue works along catalytic principles. This reminds me of Ricoeur's notion of appropriation. Of course, the catalytic model of dialogue relies on solitary reading. And certainly does not account for rereading. [The "of course" is not so self-evident. What is aimed at is a reader able to occupy multiple subject positions hence to interrogate.]

But there is something to be found in an hermeneutic of suspension of suspicion — where the readers know about the rhetorical mechanism & choose to feign (or not) seduction. This is a highly complicated response but one I believe that is near the dialogue with the ineffable that Rockwell hinted at in his opening chapter on Heidegger.

And I wonder how much Rockwell's remark about a dialogue by Heidegger ("Dialogue is recursive." p. 33 "Chapter 2: The Danger of Dialogue") can be generalized to all dialogue. At least the turn upon itself can be activated in the reading.

And so for day 649
22.09.2008