Friday, June 17, 2005

Standard Issue

I wait
for each one of you to confess
Leonard Cohen


Laura wonders whether her issues are "pangrammatical", forcing me to wonder what a distinctly pangrammatical issue is, i.e., what I'm doing here.

Pangrammatical homologies are articulations across the divide between thought and feeling, concept and emotion, philosophy and poetry, theory and practice. So in that sense much of what Laura is up to these days does indeed seem immediately pangrammatical. She notes that theory and philosophy somehow go together (are somehow substitutable) and that this is somehow (actually quite precisely) opposed to the poetic practice. ("Precisely" because the designation "poetic practice" is pangramatically homologous with "philosophical theory", whatever else they mean.)

A pangrammatical homology is the likeness that obtains between two expressions, A and B, such that A is to knowledge as B is to power. E.g.

A: Science is the theory of the real. [Heidegger's definition]
B: Politics is the the practice of the ideal.

are balanced qua knowledge and power and are therefore pangrammatically homologous. They are equally articulate, i.e., they present experience in an equally articulated formula, but they address different moments of experience (namely, the empirical and normative respectively.)

The ultimate joint in this endless articulation of all the uses and usage of the world is that between the concept and the emotion (perhaps only because I don't trust thought/feeling as an articulation) which parcels out the tasks for philosophers and poets.

How stale or profitable all this is, only God knows, who fixes the canon and all the other fights.

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