gnostic and Gnostic

[Dave Monroe]

Not sure what Terrance is concerned (?) I or anyone else might be holding my
breath over--getting to the point, The Point, of Pynchon's fictions?  Again, I
agree, though I think we all agree we can posit some provisional points being
made, certainly, we've been positing a few, albeit often diametrically opposed,
such points on Pynchon's behalf here ...

I might not have been as clear on my agreement avant la lettre with Otto here on
a sort of generalized "deconstruction" as an emergent feature of (at LEAST) the
60s as I was on my acknowledgement that Pynchon was very unlikely to have been
influenced by Derrida's particular deconstruction(s), even by the writing of
Gravity's Rainbow, and, certainly, not before (that initial salvo of Derridean
texts published in France in 1966), but, well, agreed, as well.

My point, however, was to disentangle any easy elision of Derridean and
Pynchonian "deconstruction" (Lyotard's peculiar postructuralism, his taking up
of the Kantian sublime and Wittgensteinian language games, being another thing
entirely), and I think the three of us, at least (at LEAST), can agree on that
much.  A familiarity with Derridean deconstruction has helped me in reading
Pynchon's own possible decosntructions, but I think that, if anything, they more
share a common ancestor in that Nietzschean deconstruction of, say, pain, or teh
master/slave dialectic, or ... but I'm not entirely sure at what Terrance's
response was directed, or to what ends, and I think we're just enough out of
phase today for me to receive clarification before i go any further so ...

Otto Sell wrote:

> Terrance wrote:
> >
> > Forget it. You are not holding your breath are you? Forget
> > it. Not gunna happen, not never. It's a game. You can play
> > or not. Don't expect anything more.
> > The text is whatever. Come on Dave, it's not Gnostic or
> > gnostic or some "Gnostic" religion in India or Iran or on
> > Tralfamadore, it's a game. Come on, it's nothing to do with
> > TRP or V. or any text he's written, hell, he's never read
> > JD.
>
> He does not need to have done. The word "deconstruction" may be an
> "invention" by JD but the necessity of the process itself for describing our
> "brave new world" properly has been seen by several others, including TRP,
> too.
> Additionally I point to my post from December 2nd (re: pomo) since every
> other thing would be redundant.
> And all these guys/gals are fools?

Not at all, and might I add, say, such neglected to forgotten works as ...

Ogilvy, James.  Many-Dimensional Man: Decentralizing Self,
    Society and the Sacred.  New York: Harper, 1977.

Butler, Christopher.  After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary
    Avant-Garde.  New York: Oxford UP, 1980.

Oops, gotta run here, so ...