hello, i would have very likely studied under you as a graduate student (my parents are both Cornell alumni) if not for a psychotic break i had during in my undergraduate years at UVM. Richard Sugarman (UVM) had inspired me to Emmanuel Levinas already in those years, however. And so I also undertook to begin reading Derrida (Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Positions, and very few others), mostly in order to cull for critiques of Levinas, my "master" Sugarman's favored hero or master-thinker. i have since, thank the sway of Infinity, remodeled my approach to both Levinas and Derrida, significantly, and even in interminably more and more concrete and more hyper-determinate fashion. i sooooo miss the opportunity to have studied with you, you genii-haunted vessel, you. your translations into English are some of my most favorite readings ever after modernized American English translations of Don Quixote. hahaha. i am an animal that is defined by laughing at itself. [
“Sexuality is amenable to ethical considerations only to the extent that it involves someone or something else beyond the individual: other people, or a principle. Liberal ethics are typically expressed in terms of other people; conservative ethics in terms of principles. Thus a liberal will typically disapprove of sexual actions if they hurt another, a conservative if they contravene an impersonal principle. Very social organizations, such as the military, resist anything that lessens control over its members. Sex, which is tantalizingly close to the social and involves other people in individual ways, seems a provocation to highly social organizations that impose constant attention upon their members.”
—Brian Fleming, ‘Discussion Please, Not Coercion: On repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, New Haven Review (winter 2012)
"Coherent discourse is one. A universal thought dispenses with communication. A reason cannot be other for a reason. [...] Reason speaking in the first person is not addressed to the other, conducts a monologue. And, conversely, it would attain to veritable personality, would recover the sovereignty characteristic of the autonomous person, only by becoming universal. [...] The function of language would amount to suppressing 'the other,' who breaks this coherence and is hence essentially irrational. A curious result: language would consist in suppressing the other, in making the other agree with the same!"
—Levinas, *Totality and Infinity*, B., 5. (pp. 72-3, Lingis translation, Duquesne)
Sex and ethics, the appurtenances of their interfolding become apparent in military studies, for me, here and now (then and there). Sexuality is ethical, as Levinas also teaches (in famous passages of ‘The Phenomenology of Eros’, see also: Totality and Infinity), as opposed to the totalitarianism of “the third”, or centralized-hierarchized, formally rational and logical discursive communities – such as, again, the army (also the anti-capitalist revolutionary party, though, as well). ]
again, i so miss your company, books do not make you "present" enough for me, perhaps. i do feel as though i've somehow participated in the unrolling of your ego-formations, in an asynchronous temporicity of textuality, however. (((haha, how erotically ornamental a turning a phrase that was, though, hihihihihiiii))). [
A highly salient gesture of my Infinitism at present is apologetics. Imagine my clasped hands tremoring to merely indicate you, the aggrieved. Aggrieved, because if Infinitism is the absolute and total genre, or pure (cardinal) genus of creation, as I believe it to be so, how to explain the failure of others, like more than one among you already, to acknowledge this faith as I do? But already my avenues of justification are so wonderfully simple, and so variously eloquent, I hazard only the following “core-sample” in reply: the fact of non-belief, or otherness, to Infinitism is a fact upon which Infinitism hinges itself --- otherness, wherever it appears, being among the most potent marks for encountering Infinity more fully. So that insofar as Infinitism is a genre, or generically limited element of my world, and thus not itself Infinity, or the Infini-ting (a somewhat queer neologism, which mixes noun and verb in a singular grammatical case, or even grammatical element, namely the post-fixed patois [Jamaican] note of “-ting”, and thus “thingness”, or noun, but also “-ing”, as in the English verb-ending --- but perhaps more on this etymology later), Infinitism is otherwise than itself. There is no proper definition of Infinitism, no final destiny for its meaning, no foreclosure of its transcendental historicity --- Infinitism, whatever mass-cultural cache it may ever acquire, might also be stricken from all linguistic usage, “as such”, and its truths would remain, would inexorably be included under new generic forms. For Infinitism is a form transcended over from content, or is a form only insofar as itforms the form of this transcendence itself --- thus also, when properly observed as always-already transcendent of its content, and thuslywithin itself, it proves to be only beyond itself, or a totally generic process of reformulation, a pure mutability. That affirmed, I also must affirm the following phrases, however periconsistent (my neologism) or juxtapository (my neologism): the unique invariant, or immutable, of this mutability, or its identifying element or atomic name, is itself subject to the transcendence that is only inadequately, inconsistently--as incompletely--observed conditioning it, and so beyond any final expression. (As the term “relative permanence” [Whitehead] very neatly suggested before this, even the principle of change is itself subject to change.) There is also no possible annihilation of the invariably varying condition, or transcendental content, of Infinitism, least of all by resentful and avaricious texts of critique. Perhaps at most there will be the forgetting, by erasure, by misreading, or even by excessive popularity, etc., of its name, or nominal form. Grounded in being cut-off from its content, thus welcomed as infinitely separate, as arriving only in transcending us, the Infinitist poets, as it were, or each of those who is (forgive), as a “former” of the world, cannot be otherwise than to be otherwise than this. This is why I apologize, I am never “right” with what is infinite, my words, in any of their senses, are never the same as infinity’s sense. Only apologize. Only apology respects the paradoxes of separation, of otherness, of absolute transcendence, by which Infinity is directly faced and addressed.
Reconciliation, or forgiveness? is a somewhat different (but now massively interesting to me) question, more later.
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Thank you so much for blessing me with your blessedness, you blessedly lovely blessed-one, you. O! the blessedness! It is too blessed. Out-blessed and over-blessed and hyper-blessed, O! --max.
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