GRGR1: Discussion opener for section 1

[Paul Murphy]

> 4)  "It has happened before but there is nothing to compare it to now"
>     Why nothing to compare it to if it has happened before? What is
>     *it*, anyway?

Immediately and obviously, 'it' is the screaming.

Let's go further:

This sentence does indeed appear to be a paradox, one which sets the 
stage or opens the curtain (to use the theatrical metaphor TRP soon 
deploys; the operative polysemy of the opening paragraphs refers us 
both to the theatre of war and to theatricality, site of role-playing, 
personae, artifice, narrativity in the Aristotelian sense of 
emplotment, plot as sequence of events and as conspiratorial scheme).

The paradox refers to a central aporia of the philosophical 
understanding of history: "it has happened before" asserts a 
continuity, a chain of events in which repetition is made possible; it 
has happened, it has been, and may happen again. Here history is put 
into the perfect tense, a classic Heideggerian strategem, as in the 
Historicity chapter of _Being and Time_: historical time cleaves into 
the inappropriate chronologies and aggregations of discrete events 
examined by historians (where the past is what has passed by or passed 
away), as opposed to the sense of history as having-been, which may be 
reactivated in memory, 'repeated' as possibility (an existential 
dimension Heidegger contortedly refers to as 'Gewesenheit', 
having-been-ness).

GR, like V., will present a case for history as repetition, 
specifically as a litany of genocides, catastrophes, wars; the Herero 
and the Kirghiz will become 'cases' of history happening before, 
already happened, doomed to be repeated. To throw Marx into the mix: 
happen again as tragedy, or as farce? Or both?

"There is nothing to compare it to now" gainsays the continuity / 
repetition hypothesis, asserting discontinuity, break, rupture. A 
singularity occurs or eventuates, an unprecendented historical event 
irrupts (catastrophically? disasterously?) The screaming of the rocket 
announces or portends this new event, this new turning or caesura in 
historical time. Leaving Heidegger (or Foucault) out of this for the 
moment, the familiar (and still contested) formulation of the unique 
is the Holocaust as a unique event in human history. GR circles around 
this question (endlessly).

"It is too late", the next paragraph begins. ("Rien a faire", answers 
Beckett). Too late to rectify, to repair, to counter?

Cheers,
Paul Murphy