I’m a bit reluctant to address your Adornian concerns on Wildly and Sinthome’s behalf, since I’m ventriloquising in the post, and so, from their point of view, this sort of problem might arise due to how I’ve represented them, or they might reject the concern on some other basis – I don’t want to risk further misrepresentation of their position :-) My impulse is to read both of them as not reaching for the sort of… apocalyptic break that worries you, but this is the sort of territory where it’s better to let them speak for themselves.

On a larger scale, everyone knows exactly what they want: an entirely new life. So Dale Carnegie proclaims: “I’m talking about a new way of life” (27). On the new VH1 show The Pick-Up Artist, Neil Strauss’s friend Mystery tells his disciples, “This is about building a life.” (All competitive reality shows, and all makeover-style reality shows, are based on this craving for a new life via deus ex machina.) But on the small scale, product by product, interaction by interaction, there is no new life. There is a promise, a glimpse: enough of an interruption of normal life that the world stands still. That’s the soul of the advertisement.

I mean, of course “sedimentation” in Merleau-Ponty is more or less borrowed from Bergson and Proust, and of course a novelist like Proust will yearn with all his soul for real newness, and the cleansing, shattering break with the familiar. He longs for it just as sincerely as he longs for comfort and repetition — most famously, the repetition of the madeleine.

But at the same time, we live in a society where novelty is packaged and sold; we certainly have no way to be sure that people who (for example) live a highly sedimentary, rural life want to be broken free, like an action figure pried out of its plastic casing.

In other words, this desire to break free has both a cyclic and erotic component to it, and a disturbing potential to be satisfied by simulated breaks. It’s not that there isn’t real revolutionary potential here, but rather that the figures of the cleansing flood or sideways displacement that underlie the notion of the “elsewise” seem, to me at least, to risk substitutive satisfaction more than a Benjaminian re-constellating — the same, but summed differently, transfigured. And this is also a way out of the oneupmanship of otherness — the sense, in writers like Derrida, that one is trying to be still more other than what you thought was other. We’re talking really other!

I do believe you reiterated precisely such a distinction in your anxiety…

You’re assuming that I think my content would have been any better than my form… ;-P

But no – sorry: I hadn’t taken you to be encompassing Marx in what you had written above – I was just thinking through the issue myself – as in, reminding myself of a thread about “no abstract negations of abstract negations” ;-P – just part of the real abstraction issue I’ve been obsessing about in recent writing.

Still sleepy, though… ;-P

Yeah, no, I get that it can be grasped systematically in some sense, but of course as always escaping the totalising system (capitalism) that supposes itself as such. In some sense, I guess I think of the kinda systematic-non-system of deconstruction. Derrida’s approach is in some sense systematic – it’s finely attuned to how and why and where the symbolic (or exchange economy, or…) produces that which exceeds it; an understanding of these resonant gestures makes reading his work a lot easier (having attempted it as a little undergrad and flailed around like a crazy person before working out this approach). But again, Derrida’s approach is also always altered by its engagement with each ‘topic.’

But of course, this isn’t the kind of reflexive systematicity I’m really evoking here; it’s the systematicity that presumes itself adequate in advance to every moment, and then is troubled by its own totalising gestures which ensure it cannot see such troublingness.

And now I can’t recall precisely why I thought this significant, so I’m going to go away and try and make Merleau-Ponty make sense of time for me… and sympathies of the most sympathetically guilty kind for lack of sleep!

I’ve tended to read Marx as very specific about, in a sense, it being distinctive that something could adequately be grasped systematically – not to argue that nothing other than the reproduction of capital has “systematic” properties, but that the theory is, in some sense, expressive of its object, such that it is the “real” or practically generated abstractions within capitalism, that must be expressed abstractly. Some of those abstractions, in Marx, then carry critical potentials – they “denaturalise” things in useful ways, as long as we don’t fall into the temptation of naturalising the forms of denaturalisation themselves… ;-)

(Apologies if this makes no sense – very tired this afternoon – too little sleep last night!! I’m sure this comes as a great surprise… ;-P)

I am struck, however, but an amusing point about a lot of philosophy: the more strongly it tries to systematise, the more it is troubled by the very result, in its tendency to deny a space of newness. I feel like I ought to read Arendt on natality somewhere in here—my only real experience of this concept has been via others, but as I understand it, there’s something about things being recognised and experienced as new, about that, in fact, being the really significant point, rather than their uniqueness (if that makes sense). Of course, none of this really responds directly to *this* post (except to point out yet another theorist also concerned with this ;-P) so feel free to ignore :-)