Mar. 25th, 2015

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At first I thought they were doing some kind of Derridean thing with the Alexandria wall, but it seems like they're actually after the mutual critique of two irreconcileable points of view, so as either to praise a golden mean or present the conflict as a duck/rabbit toggle, where knowing it is one might enable some mock-up of a mean where one toggles every now and then as a matter of principle, or is wary of those who don't accept the other point of view's right to exist. Moderation either way, though taking the latter approach at least leaves you unsurprised at the paucity of fellow moderates, or I guess moderations-surfers, in the world.

Every binary opposition's mama has a favorite, though, and at the moment that seems to be the planned community's side, which is screwing things up less dramatically than Rick is. Of course the final episode may be about Michonne ironically imprisoning the one person who can save them all because of his disbelief in walls. Which would bring back Derrida, I guess. But I doubt it will be that clear a bait and switch.

Because the amusing thing about Rick's position is that his belief in the nonexistence of walls amounts to a logocentrism - wall denial is his wall. This echoes the big problem with Derrida generally, or anyway the second big one after the shakiness of his long copula chain of Plato = Forms = Western notions of truth = the verb "to be" = linguistic representation. That second big problem is that deconstruction is immediately deconstructable, rendering it wholly useless even for creating uncertainty. What's outside the assumption that "any judgment that a thing is so excludes evidence that it cannot be sufficiently so" (my words and not his, to be fair) is the possibility that it might not exclude that evidence. Logic doesn't even get you as far as a word not being a thing, that least helpful of deconstructia - you need a dab of empiricism to establish that, and empiricism's caught in the net. To say words aren't things we have to know something about both.

The writers are thinking about war, terrorism, mortality, not refuting, holding up, or making fun of Derrida. Maybe a couple of them read bits of him or heard him described and he made his way in that way - and conceivably also Foucault, what with the abandoned sniper tower. But what they're channelling is The Road, more than anything else. The Road bind, where the boy needs to enter into ethical relationships with others to want to live but these endanger his survival, superficially resembles the pharmakon one, where any tiny inaccuracy in your confinement of "truth" to specified limits will necessitate that the contingencies grounding the declared truth your wall is based on will also contain undeclared truths that undermine it.
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Some upcoming books:

May - The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, Bloom
August - Last Comes the Raven, Calvino
August - The Written World and the Unwritten World, Calvino
October - Conversations volume 2, Borges & Ferrari

Those two mysterious McCarthy books on .uk have been rescheduled for 2016.

Former of the two Calvinos is his first volume of stories from '49 or so. Most of the contents are reprinted from other English volumes, so it's mostly for completists. Early Calvino's way underrated, though, so I'll be happy to see the new stuff. Other volume is essays.

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