IN ABSENTIA

For Vincent F. Hendricks

Incantare

I’m waiting for the logician to plug himself into some fake deconstruction on my TV. Instead we get the God talk, a second time around: “perhaps we are not meant to know certain things.” Oh, really? I left my professorship in the Arctic behind for a pink meteorite hitting Grand Canyon. What explosion of yellow light! Not even the aurora borealis can compete – I try to convince myself. If this is a game we play, who is teaching who about the law of absence?

Convocare

Epistemology of citation: there’s nothing new under the sun. “Would a book of knowledge be a sacred book?” asks Jabès, only to answer to himself, “No, because knowledge is human.” The pink meteorite hit a surface creating a splashing sign. V spreads its long legs. Everything is contaminated. Says Frère Jacques: “Of course – as is always the case as soon as there is a law, the law – all deceptions, transgressions, and subversions are possible.”

Excitare

In the church of deconstruction every word that afflicts is made to symbolize something, look like something else – that something else which is always already something else. Women as the high priests demand explanations from men. But men confuse them with Brunhilde, The Valkyrie. But this is good enough. Close enough. Nicholas Royle takes the stand: “Excitation: This term, in so far as it could be described as such (it would be no more a term than “the unnameable,” or “deconstruction”), is pronounced so as to conceal as best as it can the heterophonic pun it nevertheless harbours, like a foreign body. Excitation, that is to say, cannot be read without a logic of ex-citation, of that which dispossesses, ex-propriates, or para-cites every citation. Excitation would have to do, among other things, with an absence of quotation marks. Be alert to these invisible quotation marks, even within a word: excitation.” The V takes her sword and swings it over the black head. Siegfried, or Sigmund, asks: “What do you want from me?” – To deconstruct “nothing.”

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Comments

lektor said…
I would collect all these philosophers, put every one of them on one small shanty boat and send them on a long journey at sea, with only one book on board. Functional Analysis, by Peter Lax.

“No, because knowledge is human.”

Jabes, wait and see. You know shit.
Camelia said…
Herr Lektor, first off, methinks that you’re confusing Der Ring des Niebelungen with Der fliegende Holländer which has a shanty boat in it, carrying an undying philosopher suffering from an unending love. Now, sure the mathematicians would apply some vector spaces to their heads to test the endurance of their axioms. Jabès was a poet, primarily, and only then, and then reluctantly, a philosopher. As a poet he would go into the desert, let wind work through his bald head, and, then get over it. Now, some would say that such a remedy is not very poetical but then, what is it that they proved in the Banach-Tarksi paradox: you go in with one head, and out pop two of the same – of the same. Second off, are you jealous again? Like I said before, to you and the other: come and see me. There’ll be more besides functional analysis. But I’m not sure I’ll want to spare you a good Wagner blast. You’ll think you see the immanent and intrasubjective numbers, and forget all about the headache caused by the desire to go the rational way, go for a final analysis: no infinity, no cry. Here, we want it all: the tears, the blood, the knowledge.
lektor said…
My g-d, I have always suspected that my spiritual father was wagner or at least my spirit served him as violin cleanser. I know all about siegfried and his cohorts of valkyries but my deepest wish is to take all these perfect creatures and take them through hell once in a while.

One day i'll drop by, and on that day the earth will spin infinitely fast at least for one second.

no infinity, no cry? hmm, you definitely know something.
Camelia said…
You are definitely ready. The Valkyrie is ready. The spin will take care of itself. That's what I call elegance in mathematics - and philosophy - and even logics.

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