Homage to Friends

Something in your last post sparks yet another re-beginning: the sense of collage as an "homage to friends."

I think you're on to something here ...

Eleanor Kaufman has written a book on Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, and Klossowski entited -The Delirium of Praise-, and it leads w/ this quote from Mark 5:9

Then Jesus asked him, 'What is your name?'
'My name is Legion," he replied, 'for we are many.'

Kaufman's work is an effort to explore the "friendships" of these French intellectuals, such that she claims that "Deleuze and Foucault are not so much individual writers adn thinkers as they are a mode or a configuration or even a constellation" (70).

Or, Bloc.

"They are a multiplicity that encompasses, in every gesture or evocation, a vast network of domains that might be variously classified as philosophical, the political, the personal."

Or, Popcyclical.

"They are not one thinker or even one unit, but rather an approach to thought--which is also a singularity--one that traverses a wide array of discourses."

In plainspeak: Lots of inside-jokes.

"The concept of such a thought-configuration is nowhere better articulated, in fact enacted by being articulated, than in their corpus of mutally glorifying essays. Such a mode of ENCOMIUM AS CONVERSATION, neither critique nor original, might best be characterized as the replication or double of that which it describes: thought as pure event, thought as theater, thought as style or gesture."

In other words, within this friendship --this delirium of praise-- there is a movement towards thinking thinking's thought ...

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I don't know if it is fair to think in terms of friendship w/ regards to Fredric Jameson. Certainly he has his clan. But how much time is spent BLOCKing other clans and other bands ?

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Insofar as our students are concerned, of course there homage to friends is much more "private," though from an outsider it may appear much the same. The very idea of High School, after all, thrives on a sense of different packs all sharing in the event called prom. It's no wonder that their collages should contain lists of favorite songs from those events and that they should come across as "the same old song" --THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME-- even as it seems so different for the students and their friends.

The difficulty I think is in moving this sense of friendship to wider fields.

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As another example, I'll use Thomas, mostly to see if he's still listening in. When he writes, I would say that his work is, in a sense, an homage to friends. In one of the essays that Byron mentions in the essay T sent out, Thomas mentions Marilyn Manson. I bet he had friends that he used to talk about MM with.

The difficulty was his using that friendship such that one might hear Ross Winterowd's arguments differently.

Thomas doesn't exactly shut down Winterowd, however. It's just that his alternative friendships come through.

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I don't know, k. I guess what I am trying to say is that I like being friends w/ folks that have friends. That doesn't mean they have to be my friend back. In the movie, Adaptation, one of the pivotal scenes in the movie is when Kaufmann's brother says: "You are what you love." And this love does not necessarily need to be reciprocated.

For me, when I read Eleanor Kaufman, I find this sense of the ENCOMIUM AS CONVERSATION a rather profound idea.

Students, in their collages, of course, are making little memorials to their friends. It might not seem like much. But I would claim so much is work of friendship. Listen to Keroauc-Ginesberg or Coltrane-Coleman or Cixous-Derrida or Davis-Ronell ...

Deleuze does this, as I mentioned, in thinking of Guattari and his rodeo ride ...

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Is there room for friendship --the delirium of praise-- in utopia ?

seems to me that by its definition utopia is, in some sense, there in advance.

maybe your sense and jameson's sense is a slouching towards utopia ...

i don't know. i know that thomas used to like to point to his FRUITopia, but that's a different topic.

... utopia ... fruitopia ... uTROPE-ia ... uTOPOI-ia ... dsytopia ...

reminds me of my friend in S.F. wrote his MA thesis on Dystopia in road literature and he used, after a conversation we had, Edward Abbey's -The Fool's Progress- ... I mentioned this story of stopping in the cemetery in Copeland, KS when we ate at the Arby's on the way to the airport earlier this summer...

Thanks again for lunch, btw.