re: <eyebeam><blast> Trauma & Beauty

[Clifford Duffy <cwduff@alcor.concordia.ca>]

        **** Jason Kaufman it is interesting that you can write with
some feeling, intelligence and some elegant passion. What is not so
interesting were the things which you said about Bracha Lichtenblong
complex and rich posting about Beauty and Trauma. ******
        Jason Kaufman ... you write these rather sarcastic sounding
words about an artist and theorist who has forged with great labour a
vocabulary based on her own thinking and I add, her practice as a
psychoanalyst.  Now you speak in your post [quoted below] as if coining
neologisms was intellectually and perhaps morally suspect. Further one
can read below your sarcastic remarks your suspicions about the value of
the practice which might lie behind this theory which Lichtenberg has so
carefully constructed,and I add with many years of work under her belt.
When I say work I mean work: as a painter, as a writer of psychoanalysis
as well as in several other domains of feminist theory. And you scoff in
an off hand way at what you so dismissively refer to as neologisms. As
if coining a word were not the perogative of thinkers, poets and
theoreticans. And Derrida and Deleuze and Lyotard and Guattari and
Genet, and Tzara, and Cixous and Leduc and DeBeauvoir and Irigary and
Levinas and Jabbes and countless poets and writers like Roheim and Laing
and Tzara and others and Barthes and DuPlessis and Bloom and Stevens and
Joyce and Grand Dame of Semiotic Theory Julia Kristeva is also the
Mother of the lovely Term intertextuality as if All these Persons Did
not Invent WOrds.! Why this exasperation inthe face of Invention?? Why
this small reaction in the face of Imagination?? Who cares if you have
never seen so many Neo-Logisms in One text even were it as short as the
fuse which burns at the rate of NanoSECOND. No One cares. It is not
important. Bracha Ettinger Lichtenberg HAs Invented the Terms she needs
which Makes her machine work. And that is what counts. And if that
machine is demanding of its reader, well so be it. The reader can always
go away and read another Text. But be cautioned be prudent. You wont get
away so easy. HArd work is every where in Artand theory. In Deleuze I
find  terms like Body with Organs. In Derrida I am lost in the richest
explosion of philoneologisms and sememes and morpheme play and
etymological richness of perhaps any Philosopher in the 20th century.
Why should a thinker rest easy with a simple vocabulary? Why should she
do that? Rimbaud said over 100 YEARS AGO IN HIS  LETTRES - lET The
Visionary Speak in Unheard  of Languages and UnHEARD of Forms. As Did
Artaud when he was forced to Explain to Jacques Riviere his own poetry
and how it did not conform to the norms of any poetry including that of
the SUrrealists. Deleuze has written a beautiful essay about LOUIS
WOLFSON and his marvelous way of managing language. How the author
invents means and methods of making words work through a complex
strategy to achieve his goals. You on the other hand contribute nothing
to the discourse. You say this work of Bracha's 'almost makes sense.' I
say it makes sense on its own terms and not those of an American
moralist. I refer to your own self-description as American and as one
who wishes to speak of a 'western morality' etcetera. This was in an
early posting of yours.You call her writing 'almost a parody' etc. A
parody? Why because you dont understand it and dont have the humility to
admit so even to yourself? So you must attack it in terms that you
understand. Not very keen intellectual discourse is what I say. And even
as far as sarcasm goes you are not very fast nor very entertaining...
You say it almost makes sense. Sense in your world? Sense can be many
things Jason, many things. Tristan Tzara wrote in 1918: And I don't
explain because I hate common sense. Are you writing out of that vaccum
of meaning called common sense? What sense doesn't it make sense to?
WHose sense?Whose epistemology? Whose ontology? Yours? What is that
ontology you are speaking out of? What art have you praticed? What
writing have you done that dares to take language beyond its norms and
to be inventive and that takes risks with both language and sense?
        Shared experience you reduce to a model of everyday sharing and
miss the complexity involved in what Lichtenberg is referring to. You
attempt to summarize what you have read too quickly. You make an
assumption about a vocabulary which you have not mastered nor even begun
to fathom. You don't know the richness behind this work nor its history
its connectedness with previous theories in psychoanalysis: clearly
Bracha alludes to Lecan Freud and numerous others in her work. Her
demanding work her hard work, her work which reflects and indeed creates
a complex texture of thought provoking languages which challenge each of
us to ask ourselves what WE mean when we say Mother, Father, Shared,
Experience. Then you call up the pathetic little stingy word of current
and not so curent American psychology and self help groups - EMPATHY! I
mean really this little word EMpathy. What does it mean Empathy? hAve
you show any Empathy to the author whose work you attempt to be caustic
about? And even there you fail and you Fail because you not very good at
satirizing something without really loving and understanding and having
been hurt by it, Yes, hurt by it. Because All the great Satirists have
been Hurt by what they Satirize. And you have not been hurt but were
rash and quick to judge what you did not understand. And why? WhY I
don't have the faintest idea as to why. I can only respond to what you
showed in your words because you tell us nothing about your point of
view and your experience with these matters. Finallment Finally you
reveal your own lack of critical insight by ending your posting on this
weak word 'interesting' which trails off into an ellipsis. What a
strange way to sign a perceived attack on a thinker. A trail of dots
electronic ones at that. That go nowhere nowhere like your comments
which went Nowhere nowhere and meant nothing nothing.

        On April 8 1998 09:34:33
 Jason Edward Kaufman wrote:

> That's quite a model Bracha Lichtenberg offers. I have never seen so
> many neologisms in such a short text. It sounds almost like a parody
of
> art-crit psychobabble -- yet it sort of makes sense. Our inherent
> connectedness with others springs from our partial and unconscious
> experience of our mothers' subjectivity -- I assume she refers to
> prenatal being fathers' sperm?) which creates a psychic arena that
> admits the possibility, perhaps the necessity, of shared experience
with
> others. Bracha, couldn't you have squeezed in the word "empathy"
> somewhere? Interesting....
>
> Jason
>
>


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