“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Eventful

Wlad Godzich asked me what constituted an event in my implicative view (see below and here), and it took me a while to reply, but as it's quite relevant to the talk on textuality here goes:

1) A Whiteheadian “actual occasion,” a concatenation of an ongoing process.

2) In a different mode, Derrida's notion of l'avenir, an irreducibly unpredictable future.

I recognize that there is more than asymmetry between these answers.