[...]barthe --> identification (the self-becoming of the Self) has always been thought as a matter of examples (+ their appropriation) --raven--> (paradoxical impera­tive) “imitate me in order to be what you are”

wolf in sheep's clothing (Aesop's “A Case of Mistaken Identity”)
a wolf thought that by disguising himself he could get plenty to eat. Putting on a sheep­ skin to trick the shepherd, he joined the flock at grass without being discovered. At nightfall the shepherd shut him with the sheep in the fold and made fast all round by blocking the entrance. Then, feeling hungry, he picked up his knife and slaughtered an animal for his supper. It happened to be the wolf.
-->  a character that does not belong to one can involve one in serious trouble



[*]fable: (name of the) *literary thing* that aime to *teach responsibility* --Keenan-->  self-understanding of the free subject (<--fable--we are exposed to something in language that troubles the possibility of that understanding)

[in my lecture performances with] fable [I aim to] offer an allegory-of unreading, of reading without limits and without guarantees --> freedom

governmental concepts:
•subject
•agency
•will
•choice
•freedom
•rights
}--deconstruction-->  limitation of ethico-political responsibilities

for Keenan: **question of respon­sibility = question of freedom**

the free community of rational beings cannot simply be (regulatively) invoked

calculable & programmable law

responsibility: (names the predicament in which) *coincide the necessity/inevitability of action & the failure of law*

•politics (and ethics) --name--> the urgency and necessity of a response
•responsibility (and freedom) --name--> the impossibility of response with guarantee

           ethical =/= actual
                |                   |
impossibility =/=  totality of what is

***impossible =/= not-possible***
--Derrida--> the impossible occurs at every moment (that belong to the effort of reading)

“have we not acquired the right to say everything?” (Sade)

who reads, and how, a text addressed to no one?
what status does it have?


[Lode Lauwaert]
for Blanchot Sade (libertine aristocrat novelist) was the writer par excellence
we should think about Sade in explicitly revolutionary terms [Sade's work ~= Robespierre's Reign of Terror]
•Sade's ideal of society is a reactive reality (it takes form specifically in reaction to something external) --> undertaken endlessly efforts against modes of social organization that are based on an stable internal point of reference
in Sade:
1. selfishness has an ontological (not a moral) meaning : ‘the essence of man = negation of the value of the other's existence’ (+ a destruction of the positive meaning other people have in normal life) =/= being-for-the-other
2. characters with theocentric universe (who deliver extended theological discussions)
3. blasphemous passages (negation of God's existence) --> Sade’s specific philosophy of nature (reference to nature is enough for a proper understanding of reality)
4. *every type of destruction always ultimately serves nature* --> nature (by virtue of her desire for optimum production) is forced to destroy her products continuously [--then--> how to annihilates nature?] --(essence of Sade's world)--> **radical negation**

each individual negation involves affirmation (of the other, humanity, God, nature) --Blanchot--> (Sade's oeuvre =) a movement of radical negation that is nothing but its *negative power* (it never affirms something)

Sade = permanent resistance + radical negation (of the other)

“nothing resembles the virtue as a great crime.”
(Blanchot > Sade)

Blanchot's interpretation of the Terror + French Revolution (<== Hegel)
revolution --> freedom (formerly situated in a divine sphere) operates from a purely immanent perspective
the idea of efficacy of the freedom --> destroys what is given radically --✕--> old regimes
--(understood absolutely)--> Saint-Just and Robespierre demanded that the new French citizens lived out their pure freedom in a radical way

break free from:
•(highly personal) pleasures
•(highly personal) affairs
•

Blanchot + Sade --> *one cannot use one's freedom to establish a new political order*
freedom not contaminated by a particular creation --> Reign of Terror = (a horrible state of) “between” the overthrow of the old & the establishment of the new regime
(~~> contemporary Iran's political state's endless resistance)
•endless resistance =/= enduring constitution (~= institution)
•negation =/= affirmation

Sade's three different forms of inconvenience:
1. cruel tableaux vivants --> emotional inconvenience
2. contradictory unreasonableness (for example “religion should be abolished  ==> a republican man to be a good husband and father” + “family should be destroyed, all women belong to all men”) --> intellectual inconvenience
3. (grotesque goal of) Sade aims at describing the whole of reality (seeking to say the last word about reality, *to say everything*) --Blanchot--> *the fury of writing* or *the revolt of writing* (Sade = abundant prolific excessive writer, *writing in an exuberant way* [while in prison for 32 years]) --> anesthetic inconvenience

Blanchot's Sade = ideal writer
•we should not understand Sade's oeuvre in an intellectual way (there is no message or insight)
◦disappearance of meaning in the materiality of language -->{death of content ==Saussure==> ‘the signifier'}--> reading Sade = accessing the rough meaningless materiality of language itself
•we should not understood Sade's content as a reflection of an authentic self (un moi profond) --> Sade as a person disappears into the background
◦we should not understood his writing as an instrument he uses to express content --> ‘language = an independent reality’ (=/= Sade as a master of language)

(Hegel and) Sartre --> literary works must be engaged and should express the author's involvement with reality
(for Sartre:) writer: someone who thinks about the
current course of the world and who wants to change the world with his literature
--> “language = a loaded gun” (literature should be understood by reference to the message)
=/= Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Ricardou, Eugène Ionesco
=/= Sade > Blanchot: writing need to bring the reader in touchwith the materiality and the autonomy of language


we never read just once

logos: the word that names and relates properly --> great truths are told in the light of day and discourse

Sade --Blanchot--> search of a new lucidity (pursued by clear assured decisive aifrma­tiom =/= interrogatory mode)

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[D+G]

the intersection of concrete forms ==> abstract figure
[bringing objects close to each other produces story*]

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my engagement with other apass participants, a form of critique as part of an ‘ecology of practice’ (Stengers)
-what are the questions (i could ask) that make you the most articulate?
-to feel what questions, passions, modes of attention animate one another
-to find yourself moved by their concerns
-what we articulate with our bodies? --> what do our gestures mean?
-what do they activate? ----> they don't always enact a precise language --(rather)--> gestures as organs for feeding, feeling, and grasping***
-(sensing) the trajectories, moods, and intensities the other apass participants get caught up in, attached to, inhabit, to catch you in your acts,
(why knowing together?) **worlds come together through collective action and how they attract, repel, enroll, animate, and incite (tahrik تحریک, eghva اغوا) us. [...] worlds are “lived [compositions] with tempos, sensory knowledge, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields.” (Stewart)
-(engaging) in a form of critique that detour into descriptive eddies (گرداب کوچک مخالف) and attach to trajectories
-(through this i am making myself interested in) what (theoretical, philosophical, artistic,) storytelling, as one ***consequential practice*** among many, make possible in the collective task of building and sustaining livable worlds ----> taking texts as worlds, taking [...]