Softly, Softly

There’s a village. A Kurdish mountain village in Eastern Anatolia. One night a wolf comes and kills many chickens and ravishes a lamb. Next morning everyone leaves the village, the men with rifles, the women with dogs and the children with sticks. It is not for the first time this has happened and they know what to do. They are going to encircle the wolf. Slowly the circle closes, getting smaller, with the wolf in the middle. Finally, its no larger than a small room. The dogs are growling. The men are holding their ropes and rifles and the end is very near. So.. you’ve guessed what they’re going to do. Wait. They slip a cord over the wolf’s neck and attached to the cord is a bell! Then they disperse and let the wolf go free.

Last night I witnessed Alain Badiou, performing an intriguing lecture, as part of the Birkbeck Adieu Derrida series. Perhaps others will offer a summary of the whole. Below is a bitty paraphrase of a section of the lecture, a section concerning Derrida.

Derrida's goal: to inscribe the inexistent

Our experience of the world is always an experience of discursive imposition. Our being- in-the-world is being marked by certain discourses - our needs, pleasures, experiences are organised and channelled by these discourses. But there always exists a point that escapes this imposition. And this can be called a vanishing point.

The task of Derrida is to localise this point, this vanishing. The problem, the question = what is it to seize this vanishing point as vanishing. Well, it cannot be ‘seized,’ only localised. That is, thought can be brought into the proximity of this point. You can’t show it as there – look, it’s there (pointing).

To show the vanishing point while letting it vanish. Now Badiou then circled around this point, pursuing (so to speak) a number of figures – the figure of the hunt, the map, the path, the clearing in the forest. Each of these constituted an ‘approach’ to Derrida, a different approximation.

Now, I read somewhere that Badiou’s philosophy is, by design, 'indifferent to the language in which it is conveyed' – that is, it does not seek to embed thought in a privileged language from which it is inseparable. Not exactly contradicting this, but to me slightly surprising, was a whole excursus which seemed to somehow perform its own subject matter. That is, it pursued something it did not wish to catch.

So:

Derrida is the contrary to the hunter. The hunter hopes that the animal will stop. So that he can put an end to the vanishing of the animal.

Derrida hopes that the vanishing will not cease to vanish, that it can be shown without any interruption of its vanishing.

To show from a good distance the localisation of this vanishing.. to get as close as possible. ‘Softly, softly’ (whispered)

Derrida’s ingenuity = in resisting the discursive imposition so as to be able to say, ‘the vanishing point is in that region’. (In Glas he localises the vanishing point between the impenetrable conceptuality of Hegel and the relentlessly perverse Genet.)

The vanishing point is the treasure. I have a map. It is vague, but it is enough – or is it – to stop walking on the treasure. It’s a question of tact.

What allows Derrida his ‘approach’ is a ‘speculative gentleness’. And he uses a ‘vanishing language’, a language which slips through our fingers, and must be allowed to do so, so as to experience a kind of vanishing without ‘capturing’ it.

Badiou ends with the suitably gnomic: ‘The vanishing spring is summer’.

nb May I add that through the intermediary of some forbidding footwear I was introduced, briefly, to two eminent bloggers.

nb here is a Badiou interview.

Here's a clearer overview of the lecture. Et ici.