Pynchon and fascism

[Paul Nightingale]

Thanks to everyone making me work here.

On analysis ... I think the term would be textual analysis, bearing in
mind the way 'text' includes the relationship between words-on-the-page
and (a) what is elsewhere called context and (b) the act of reading.
I've mentioned P's reading of a reading in the "O's intentions" passage.
His writing in that passage could've been designed (I'm not trying to
second-guess him) as an illustration of Derrida's point that nothing is
outside the text. To say the real world (material actuality) is out
there somewhere is one thing; but the moment you think or write about
it, that real world is implicated in the text.

That is how I read (interpret?) jbor's paragraph about where the text
starts. In a sense it never starts and never ends, and when I said the
model I offered was a starting-point I didn't mean there was nothing
that pre-existed it in terms of reading. Call it an intervention as
opposed to starting-point.

However, Foucault does distinguish between origins and historical
beginnings: "What is found at the historical beginning of things is not
the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other
things. It is disparity." I suppose that "dissension" or "disparity"
among things is where I find my reading obsession with oppositions.

The 'thing' in question might be a concept like fascism, or the kind of
behaviour we label fascist, or the way the term is used, or the way
behaviour/usage changes etc. I think P writes in such a way as to
highlight, not so much the way such meanings come about, but rather that
'we' are always implicated in such processes ... what I mean when I say
he's asking how we know what we know.