Petillon

[Paul Mackin]

On Sep 28, 2006, at 1:30 PM, mikebailey at speakeasy.net wrote:

> I did an Abebooks search on Pierre-Yves Petillon, and find he was a  
> frequent contributor to a French periodical called "Critique" in at  
> least the 60s, 70s and 80s...

Maybe this is P-Y Petillon, Jr.

>
> Is he one of those po-mo guys? He seems not to be in Wikipedia.
>
> while dabbling around from that, found and just read the Chomsky  
> diatribe on po-mo http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on- 
> postmodernism.html
>
> but that dates from 1995.

Has post-modernism been discuss all that much since then?

>   Seems he had significant differences with Derrida at the time.   
> The diatribe jobates (to use an M&D word) rather lengthily and  
> ramblingly, (he said calling the kettle black.) but basically says  
> that if that school has any fresh insights that can be put into  
> simple terms, he challenges any proponents to explain them to him.

If he's talking about explaining Deconstruction, any explanation-- 
simple or complex--could probably itself quickly be deconstructed.  
This doesn't seem to bother some people but it probably would Chomsky.

>
> I know that Deleuze and Guattari figure in Vineland, so I should be  
> itching to read them...(got to get hopping on "Education of Henry  
> Adams first, though - and I've determined I need to read the  
> companion piece too, something about Chartres) ... also, didn't  
> Deleuze actually die in a rather Pynchonian manner:  
> defenestration?  I think it may be significant that the D&G Italian  
> Wedding Fakebook that saves Billy Barf's bacon is found not in  
> their van, but in the Wayvone library -
>
> just as a recent East European relatively non-violent revolution  
> (don't remember the details, our neighborhood anarchist was telling  
> me about it) bore the hallmarks of a campaign strategy suggested by  
> a prominent left-anarchist thinker and apparently co-opted by the  
> State Dep't or somebody

Or by people discussing the Pynchon Japanese Playboy interview.

Whimsically,

P.

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>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Dave Monroe [mailto:monropolitan at yahoo.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 04:52 PM
>> To: 'Chris Broderick', pynchon-l at waste.org
>> Subject: Re: "exhausted by Mark Z Danielewski's dense and overly- 
>> complicated tome"
>>
>> From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her
>> Errand into the Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying
>> of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell (New York: Cambridge
>> UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...
>>
>>    "As The Crying of Lot 49 nears its end, the
>> Tristero, which has been looming up all along, comes
>> dangerously close to losing the teasing
>> epistemological uncertainty it has retained thus far
>> in the novel.  As Oedipa stumbles along a railroad
>> track ... she remembers things she would have seen 'if
>> only she had looked' (179) ....
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>    "The Tristero underground has so far been implies
>> to be a motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian
>> drop-outs, an archipelago of 'isolates' having
>> 'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
>> tatters.  But suddenly, in this last rhetorical leap,
>> the Tristero broadens its scope to include, in a
>> grand, almost liturgical gesture, all the outcasts of
>> American history....  By the end of the novel the
>> Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a
>> ghostly underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic)
>> but a real, 'embattled' underground about to come out
>> of the shadows.  No longer hovering on the edge as a
>> cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the Tristero has thus
>> far represented is almost revealed as a version of
>> 'the other America' that Michael Harrington described
>> ....  This America is 'the America of poverty,'
>> 'hidden today in a way it never was before,'
>> 'dispossesed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as
>> 'internal exiles.'
>>    "Looking back on the novel from the perspective of
>> its finale, it coul almost be viewed as a New Deal
>> novel, concerned with gathering back into the American
>> fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...." (pp.
>> 149-50)
>>
>> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706
>>
>> --- Chris Broderick <elsuperfantastico at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I certainly don't think that the Tristero is an
>>> empty signifier ...
>>
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