Ethical Diversion

[Paul Mackin]

On Jul 4, 2006, at 4:34 AM, Clement Levy wrote:

> Hi,
> I tried to follow your various arguments on Shoah in GR, and didn't  
> want to take part, until I found this, which you don't seem to have  
> quoted yet (a comment by Stefan Mattessich on a famous page in GR –  
> Viking page numbering).
> I'd be glad to hear what you think about it. I find the idea of  
> "muted presence" very good (and true), but can't get everything as  
> soon as it turns to be about Derrida and Heidegger. Anyway, it  
> might be worth quoting, regarding that thread.

Isn't it just that, with the mention of  Derrida, Heidegger,  
metalanguage, etc., we are meant to be reminded that we have reached  
a  point beyond the reach of language.   The names of the theorists  
and the basic concepts are simply shorthand, code words.

Impossible and monstruous project of the father  . . . .

Even God can't explain it . . . .

Who can explain it
Who can tell you why
Fools give you reasons
Wise men never try . . .

>
> "The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the  
> breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked  
> corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be  
> stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men’s penises hanging,  
> their toes clustering white and round as pearls . . . each face so  
> perfect, so individual, the lips streched back into death-grins, a  
> whole silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke . . .  
> and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying,  
> coughing, losers . . . . All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been  
> the other sidee of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper,  
> this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the darkness outside . . .  
> all this time". [432-433]
> This outside, this negative space where ther preterite (“loser”)  
> body lives its peripherality to the evacuated, machinic center of  
> textual being, and where a certain kind of “individuality” is  
> murdered for an abstract bureaucratic ideal, exists not only for  
> Franz but for Gravity‘s Rainbow to the extent that the Holocaust is  
> never directly submitted to its parodic mutations of form—indeed,  
> its exteriority or muted presence in the background of the novel is  
> quite conspicuous. Dora would seem to be a radical limit to  
> Pynchon’s strategies, the arrest or suspension of the joke, the  
> moment before its consummation become the travesty of its own  
> travesty, the text ceasing to be a joke and returning to a  
> seriousness it repeatedly denies itself. Pökler’s “writing” is  
> presented as one possible destiny for writing in general, one  
> version of what Derrida, paraphrasing Heidegger‘s notion of  
> “metalanguage” in his essay “The <i>Retrait</i> of Metaphor,” calls  
> the temptation “to occupy the place of form, of formal language,”  
> an “i . . this mastery of form for form’s sake” (“Retrait,” 18 ).
>
> Stefan Mattessich. Lines of Flight, Discursive Time and  
> Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. Durham– 
> London: Duke University Press. 2002, p. 159-160.
>
> Best regards.
> Clement
>