7. Is there love in productivity? Is the notion of productivity—trauma, irruption, etc—necessarily masculinist and/or erotic? Is eros necessarily a discourse of lack (and thus falling within masculinity)? Eros is, after all, between poverty and resource. Can there be a discourse of creativity that is not intrinsically masculinist without also falling prey to the naïveté of “giving birth” (since this is obviously not what it means to be “feminine”)?
Instead, the answer must be in the limit (or, convertibly, in the “between”). The limit is neither masculine nor feminine (even, perhaps, the “feminine” that deconstructs discourse, logic, symbol). The limit is the point of indiscernibility—[either/or]/[both/and]. It is out of the limit that creativity is possible. The limit is virtual. The limit, therefore, allows us to refigure the transcendence/immanence problem. The novel is immanent (since there is no “no-where”), but also transcendent (it comes “from nowhere” insofar as it is indeterminate, invisible, etc, and insofar as the limit is itself not a place).
The “immanent” aspect of the limit ultimately is the question of origin—is there an “origin” to the world? The origin must be double—infinitely productive. The duality of origin is defined by the limit.
3 comments:
no question in my mind that this is as significant as it is lovely. my only worry is not that your description is wrong, but that 'limit' turns out to be a misleading or one-sided name for the phenomenon being described, that the choice of term clashes with the work to which you're putting the word.
a more substantial comment soon. just got home from the last day of logic.
-your blank
This is why I need to find time actually to work this out rigorously instead of going through the goddamn Politics again. :/ I am, however, curious to know what these counter-valences might be, since knowing that might be positively productive.
How does the end of road feel?
I also put it more clearly, jb, in our brief conversation than these notes. What I should have done was to talk more about the way in which the limit helps us to get around the problem of having to affirm either: (a) the identity of identity and difference or (b) the difference of identity and difference. That's what I meant by the immanence/transcendence problem. Hopefully I'll have time in a month or so to go over some algebra so I can justify my use of the term 'limit'.
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