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Warning Concerning Copyright Restrictions The Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted materials. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If electronic transmission of reserve material is used for purposes in excess of what constitutes "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. AV ITAL RONELL Technology - hizophrenia l El e cl'IIII Speech - University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln & London Sometimes I absolutely dance with apprehension around the telephone, /he receiver al my ear. and ye/ can '/ help divulging secrets. Kafka, "My Neighbor" minationen [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955]). And if Classified we were to follow a reading that creates a kind of strategic enervation? ♦ 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, L'oubli de la ph!Yoso- ♦ &. I, 12 The translation repeats the exclu- phie (Paris: Galilee, 1986), 56. sion of Husserl. The relationship of rumor to a telephonic logic is by no means contingent, as ♦ 2. Laurence A. Rickels, in Aberrations Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning, 288, con- of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (De firms: "Gerlich/ (rumor) is linked ety .. troit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 395, mologically lo Ruf (call) and even in the six offers a line on the yes-saying that accrues to the teenth century, for example, was virtually telephone by treating the postulation of a no: synonymous with Geschrey (scream). That is, "Freud argues that there is no no in the uncon Ruf, which means not only call but also name scious: instead, things are more or less and reputation, is related to Gerlich/ which, as a cathected- besetzt (occupied). According to collective noun, signifies a great many, if not too both Freud and Kafka, there is no no on the many, calls." phone." The yes which the telephone calls to it self should at no point be confused with ♦ 7. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe presented Nietzschean affirmation, however, which re as supplement to his thesis an interpretation of quires a double yes threaded through the eternal Heidegger's politics (La fiction du politique: return of the Same. This is why it is necessary to Heidegger, !'art et la politique, [Strasbourg : As begin with the telephone as the pose of sociation de Publications pres les Universites reactivity- a suspension , as Rickels argues, of de Strasbourg, 1987]) which further permits us the no. to understand Heidegger's engagement in terms of the call : ''Les enonces (sur l'Allemagne, sur ♦ 3. waiter Benjamin, "Berliner Kindheit le travail , sur l'Universite, etc.) sont purement um Neunzehnhundert: Telephon," in 11/umina et simplement programmatiques et s'organisent tionen, Ausgewahlle Schriflen (Frankfurt: Suhr du reste en de multiples 'appels' [The statements kamp, 1961), 299 - 300. (on Germany, on work, on the University, etc.) are purely and simply programmatic; these ♦ 4. See the syncopated drama of frantic statements are organized, moreover, according telephone calls and incarceration in Janet Le- lo multiple 'calls']" (18). Before considering the vine's "Dul of South Africa, " New York Times question of Heidegger's calls, Lacoue-Labarthe Magazine, September 20, 1987, section 6. elects lo situate a reactivity of deafness: "Eire ou • se dire 'heideggerien' ne signifie done rien, pas ♦ 5. The topos of enervation as critical plus qu'etre ou se dire 'anti-heideggerien .' Ou impetus can be situated with in a historical typol plulol cela signifie la meme chose: qu 'on a I ogy of mood, or Stimmung. The age of nerves, manque, dans la pensee de Heidegger, l'es while no doubt beginning lo stir in the corpus of senliel ; el qu'on se condamne a rester sourd a Nietzsche's works, has acquired its peculiar la question qu'a travers Heidegger pose l'epo heuristic value through Wal ter Benjamin, who que [To be or lo consider oneself a "Heideg has introduced the "rights of nerves" as a princi gerian" does not mean a thing, not more than ple of reading and valuation in his essay on Karl being or considering oneself "anti Kraus: "He found that (the nerves) were just as Heideggerian." Or rather, this means the same worthy an object of impassioned defense as thing : that one has overlooked what is essential were property, house and home, party, and con in the thinking of Heidegger, and that one is thus stitution. He became an advocate of nerves" (Re condemned to remain deaf to the question that flections, trans. Edmund Jephcott [New York: made its mark through Heidegger]" (16). See Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978], 261 ; 11/u- also his review of Victor Farias's Heidegger et le • Nazisme in Le Journal Litteraire, no. 2 (Decem terns. For a well-considered reading of the Third ber 1987-January 1988): 115 - 118, which in Reich and general technology, consider Jeffrey more general terms argues that Heidegger's po Herl, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Cul litical involvement with fascism is neither an ac ture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich cident nor an error but ought to be treated first of (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, all as a fault in thinking. Heidegger, however, be 1984). The detail of Herf's book is presupposed gan establishing a philosophical distance to the by our argument, of which two phrases can be state in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and provisionally isolated at this time: "Although through his Schelling (1936), where he very technology exerted a fascination for fascist intel clearly disputes the confusing mergers of the of lectuals all over Europe, it was only in Germany ficial philosophy of value, the concept of world that it became part of the national identity" (10). and lived experience (Erlebnis), as well as anti "German anlicapitalism was anti-Semitic but Semitic discrimination in philosophical thought not anti-technological " (9). See also Gert {particularly in terms of Spinoza). Lacoue Theunissen, "Der Mensch der Technik," in Der Labarthe reminds us of Mrs. Heidegger's article Deutsche Baumeister, no. 2 (Munich, 1942), and on girls in the Third Reich, which, if you ask me, L. Lochner, Goebbels Tagebiicher (Zurich, is laced with some of Mr. H.'s rhetoric. 1948), to get a sense of the "pure present" and abolition of History desired by National Social ♦ 8. Jacques Lacan , "The Field of the Other ism. In his review of Suzanne Lorme's transla and Back to the Transference," The Four Funda tion of J. P. Stern , Hitler- Le Fiihrer et le peu mental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. ple, introduced by Pierre Aycoberry (Paris: Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 203 - Flammarion , 1985), Eric Michaud suggests naz 260 ; Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XI, ism's desire for disjunctive instantaneity and the 'Les qua/re concepts fondamentaux de la psy techno logica l imperative. The Fuhrer's rhetoric, chanalyse ' (Paris: Seuil , 1973). though full of jarring contradiction (his dis course concerning "the Jews in each of us," his ♦ 9. A number of somewhat unmapped ac speeches against speaking and for pure action, cess roads to fascism have been discovered by etc.), in its perlocutionary character, tended to way of the aestheticization of forms in the total stress a "Fuhrer-unmittelbarer Entscheidung," itarian state. An aesthetic will to power has been a kind of unbendable immediacy (1030). This most recently treated in Lacoue-Labarthe's Fic immediacy tends to be held together by a notion tion du polilique, where the author discerns the of magic and the "mag ic vision " that the Fuhrer roots of a "national aestheticism.'' Our decoding attributes to himself and grafts onto technology. systems are engaged here on a more technolog Michaud makes a footnote out of this link which ical register of commanding utterance. We at needs a magnifying gaze to set it in relief. After tempt to situate the peculiar idiom of nazism citing Herman Rauschning's Hitler m'a di! as does, no doubt, Lacoue-Labarthe (Paris: Cooperation , 1939) on Hitler's sur historically after the death of God , when the passingly magic vision which allows him to transcendental ceiling came crashing down and overcome the Christian God, he adds: "II est vrai every body was on the line. The telephone in que la technique a permis cette illusion de toute stalls itself as directory assistance for all other puissance et surtout d'omnipresence divine du technological executions, asserting a place of a Fuhrer: de !'automobile a l'avion, de l'effigie nearly traceless politics of denunciation, ideo inliniment reproduite a la transmission radio logical clarification (Heidegger on the phone to phonique, la technique pouvait donner ce senti Jaspers praising the Fuhrer's beautiful hands), ment de l'immediat propre a la fulgurance de extermination . The committee for the Wannsee l'action magique, qui dissout les barrieres de Conference of 1942, where the "final solution" l'espace et du temps sensibles. [It is true that was passed, depended on the telephone, initiat technology allowed for this illusion of the divine ing a whole politics of telephone ordering sys- omnipotence, and especially the divine omni- presence of the Fuhrer: from the automobile to pension in Germany of plans to build an atomic the aeroplane, from the infinitely reproducible bomb and advances in aviation . The representa effigy to radiophonic transmission, technology tions which Hitler understood and to which he could give that feeling of immediacy known in had access were, in terms of what was projected the fulguration of the magic act whi ch could dis as possible- if necessary, global destruc solve the sensible barriers of space and time]" tion- relatively crude and simple.