GR & death

[Paul Murphy]

Much obliged to David Casseres for articulating a reading of GR much in
sympathy with my own. The protagonist of the book is the Bomb, not Slothrop
or whoever else. It's about technologies of death (alright, let me qualify
that by saying that it's *about* a lot of things, but allow me some
leeway). Death as that which is most proper, non-relational, insurmountable
in the full-blown existential-ontological significance of the phenomenon
(as Heidegger puts it so eloquently), hence the book's dedication. I think
Andrew did a bang-up job of pinpointing this in his ultimate GRGR post, to
which I did not respond (and AD seemed upset at the lack of response, but I
just thought it was bang-up and abstained from adding a 'right on!' message
at the time).

But also death as culturally / historically / scientifically delivered
(tramsitted, mediated). Hegel said in the Phenomenology that the
Understanding is a medium of death, by means of which the phenomenon is
mortified or rendered inanimate by the process of analysis; a process which
reflects the immeasurably significant transition from quality to quantity
in Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, a process which later informs Husserl's
_Crisis_  account of the "mathematization of nature." Horkheimer and Adorno
then draw the most rigorous connection between the development of Western
Civ under the aegis of enlightenment and the "mimesis of death", as is
evident in the reification / fetishism of late modern society.

TRP knows all of this (even if he hasn't read the people mentioned, he just
knows it) and offers hints or portents or inklings of ways out of the death
which surrounds and determines us, especially in M&D. Ways of encountering
nature and other human beings outside of the paradigm of scientific and
cultural domination which guides Mason & Dixon through the Pennsylvania
wilderness but which continuously gets contested by 'other' modes of
encounter (like Feng Shui, for instance). Ways of Seinlassen, of
letting-be, perhaps -- sure, Levinas decries the streak of paganism in
Heidegger, but I still hold the description of 'earth' in "Origin of the
Artwork" to be a powerful antidote to scientistic hybris (and Heid's earth
is really Heraclitus's -- *physis kryptesthai philei*, 'nature loves to
hide').

Blahblahblah,
Paul