Self/Other or Singular (was Re: Intellects, and a bit on desire and scarcity)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Angela wrote:
>Either self and other are contained
>within a version of representational dialectics, where nothing is held in
>reserve or escapes the dialectical embrace; or self and other are
>indistinguishable and hence not even the propulsion to the
>ethico-political.  It's not surprising, then, that various writers (as
>various as Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze) look toward Spinoza, Nietzsche and
>others outside the dialectical traditions, and hence why the term
>'singularity' has been raised as a way of working through the
>irreducibility of other to self -- not so much, then, a problem of
>Habermas' 'generalisation of the other', but I would say a problem of the
>generalisation of self.

"Working through the irreducibility of other to self"?  We are back to the
Existentialist Reformation, then.  Kierkegaard, Sartre, etc.  Why should we
stay with the Self/Other problematic (be the Other reducibile or
irreducible), though?  The Self/Other problematic "makes-sense" only in the
world of Theology & Romantic Love, and we don't want that, do we?  The
irreducible Other = "God" (as in Levinas) = "Woman" (as in Derrida).

"Singularity" doesn't improve the poverty of philosophy either.  Peter
Hallward writes in "The Singular and the Specific," _Radical Philosophy_ 99
(Jan/Feb 2000):

*****   One way of approaching the question is to ask whether the
fragmented plurality of subject positions are to be conceived as so many
perspectives defined in some sense through their relations _with_ each
other [e.g., multiculturalism], or rather as the _singular_ derivation of
one absolute, self-differing force -- fragments, that is, of a single
immanent unity, _without_ constituent relations among themselves [e.g.,
much of what is called postmodernism].  Is our postmodern heterogeneity the
space of a _specific_ plurality, or of what, after Spinoza, Deleuze would
call one self-modifying substance, one singularity-multiplicity in which
'everything divides, but into itself'? [16]...[A] _singular_ individual is
fundamentally self-individuating, beyond relationality as such.  In the
absence of others, the singular properly creates the medium of its own
existence (its own _expression_, in Spinoza's sense).  The singular is
a-specific.[17]...

[16]  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, _L'Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et
schizophrenie_, Minuit, Paris, 1972 / _Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia_, trans, Robert Hurley et al., University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1983, p. 91 / 76.

[17]  'In-difference with respect to properties is what individuates and
disseminates singularities' (Giorgio Agamben, _The Coming Community_
[1990], trans. Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
1992, p. 19).   *****

Whether the Infinite (1) divides itself into Self/Other (e.g.,
Protestantism, left-Hegelian dialectic, etc.) or (2) endless singularities,
the fact remains that both perspectives are based upon a Platonic idea.
Again, historical necessity and contingency disappear, for there is no room
for history in the eternal Tea Ceremony.

Yoshie