Saturday, April 16, 2005
- THE INOPERATIVE Mr. NANCY: A Daunting Piece of Meaningless Mumbo-Jumbo. Agustin's Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy: "The Inoperative Community".
On April 11 Carla undertook with remarkable courage the task of reviewing what a I consider a worthless piece of charabia, the French word for gibberish: Mr. Nancy's "The Inoperative Community." (Privately, most of the students I talked to were in agreement with me on that one.) Consider the following sentence:
"The absolute must be the absolute of its own absolutness, or not be at all. In other words: to be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone -- and this of course is contradictory" (p. 4)
And it gets worse:
"This rupture (analogous, if not indentical, to Heidegger's distinction between the ontical and the ontological) defines a relation to the absolute, imposing on the absolute a relation to its own Being instead of making this Being immanent to the absolute totality of beings ... Ecstasy answers --if it is properly speaking an "answer" -- to the impossibilty of the absolutness of the absolute, or to the 'absolute' impossibility of complete immanence." (p. 6)
I could go on and on like this -- in fact, I must have understood only a couple of sentences in more than 40 pages of madness. What's going on here? I wish I knew (*). Carla admitted that she spent some time "looking for books that teach how to read this book." One hypothesis is that the use of charabia creates a strategically important sense of awe. The reader, bewildered by the complexity of the language, submits to the writer: "If he says such complicated things, he must be a learned man, a savant."
Once the sense of awe has been created, the author drops a bomb from time to time, in a language that --surprisingly-- becomes very plain. Thus, "our liberal societies inflict no less intolerable forms of suffering" (compared with communism). Nice try, Mr. Knows-it-all! But you know what? I just don't buy that phenomenal absurdity.
Mr. Nancy does not produce any piece of evidence to prove his point. There are no comparative statistics of income per capita; there is no mention of the freedom of the press and religion and --I almost forgot-- no mention of a slight detail: the number of innocents massacred in Gulags, cultural revolutions, killing fields, deportations, etc.
But readers are so impressed with Mr. Nancy's empty talk about "immanence", "operative immortality", "being-ecstasic of Being", etc, that they proceed to uncritically "buy" his nonsene wholesale. Carla herself appeared to succumb to the Frenchman's literary charme, when she said that "the US are now implementing oppression in Irak."
Yes, yes, that's what she said. The first free elections ever to take place in an Arab country? Women voting? That's oppression, man, don't you see? Once again, the butcher of Baghdad --a sunni dictator who really oppressed the shiite majority, and who used chemical weapons against his own people-- is not even mentioned. New evidence shows that "at least 290 grave sites containing the remains of some 300,000 people have been found since the American invasion two years ago" (**). But it's the American oppressors, stupid!
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that Mr. Nancy's paper is a fraud, a hoax, a chimère. That's not unusual: a group of MIT students has just written a piece of computer-generated gibberish that was accepted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
The paper bears the very nancyesque title "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." Charabia!
(*) For more info on gibberish and the "post-modern" school, see Alan Sokal: "Why I wrote my parody", and John Miller & Mark Molesky: "Jacques Derrida, R.I.P. The legacy of deconstruction", NRO, October 13, 2004.
(**) Robert F. Worth: "Iraqis Find Graves Thought to Hold Hussein's Victims", New York Times, April 15, 2005.
On April 11 Carla undertook with remarkable courage the task of reviewing what a I consider a worthless piece of charabia, the French word for gibberish: Mr. Nancy's "The Inoperative Community." (Privately, most of the students I talked to were in agreement with me on that one.) Consider the following sentence:
"The absolute must be the absolute of its own absolutness, or not be at all. In other words: to be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone -- and this of course is contradictory" (p. 4)
And it gets worse:
"This rupture (analogous, if not indentical, to Heidegger's distinction between the ontical and the ontological) defines a relation to the absolute, imposing on the absolute a relation to its own Being instead of making this Being immanent to the absolute totality of beings ... Ecstasy answers --if it is properly speaking an "answer" -- to the impossibilty of the absolutness of the absolute, or to the 'absolute' impossibility of complete immanence." (p. 6)
I could go on and on like this -- in fact, I must have understood only a couple of sentences in more than 40 pages of madness. What's going on here? I wish I knew (*). Carla admitted that she spent some time "looking for books that teach how to read this book." One hypothesis is that the use of charabia creates a strategically important sense of awe. The reader, bewildered by the complexity of the language, submits to the writer: "If he says such complicated things, he must be a learned man, a savant."
Once the sense of awe has been created, the author drops a bomb from time to time, in a language that --surprisingly-- becomes very plain. Thus, "our liberal societies inflict no less intolerable forms of suffering" (compared with communism). Nice try, Mr. Knows-it-all! But you know what? I just don't buy that phenomenal absurdity.
Mr. Nancy does not produce any piece of evidence to prove his point. There are no comparative statistics of income per capita; there is no mention of the freedom of the press and religion and --I almost forgot-- no mention of a slight detail: the number of innocents massacred in Gulags, cultural revolutions, killing fields, deportations, etc.
But readers are so impressed with Mr. Nancy's empty talk about "immanence", "operative immortality", "being-ecstasic of Being", etc, that they proceed to uncritically "buy" his nonsene wholesale. Carla herself appeared to succumb to the Frenchman's literary charme, when she said that "the US are now implementing oppression in Irak."
Yes, yes, that's what she said. The first free elections ever to take place in an Arab country? Women voting? That's oppression, man, don't you see? Once again, the butcher of Baghdad --a sunni dictator who really oppressed the shiite majority, and who used chemical weapons against his own people-- is not even mentioned. New evidence shows that "at least 290 grave sites containing the remains of some 300,000 people have been found since the American invasion two years ago" (**). But it's the American oppressors, stupid!
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that Mr. Nancy's paper is a fraud, a hoax, a chimère. That's not unusual: a group of MIT students has just written a piece of computer-generated gibberish that was accepted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
The paper bears the very nancyesque title "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." Charabia!
(*) For more info on gibberish and the "post-modern" school, see Alan Sokal: "Why I wrote my parody", and John Miller & Mark Molesky: "Jacques Derrida, R.I.P. The legacy of deconstruction", NRO, October 13, 2004.
(**) Robert F. Worth: "Iraqis Find Graves Thought to Hold Hussein's Victims", New York Times, April 15, 2005.
# posted by Agustin @ 6:55 PM 
