Re: moderator?

Anyone can *try* to moderate, but no one should feel like any question is
too stupid or... bring up what may seem like a point that the
self-appointed moderator has not chosen to focus on, in my opinion.

That's one of the reasons I love the Internet. The flattening... the way
students and teachers need to engage each other in conversation. Maybe
we'll all realize that we're ALL students, really, just at different levels
of discovery.

Still holding back further comments of my own...

Like seeing how others perceive Foucault, directly. Blake called this
"diabolical" reading-- direct text to reader relationship. I think I've
already implied that Foucault is standing on Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche,
but either Foucault's own work sinks or swims on its own merits, and where
he's taking these thoughts... is going to be his own thing.

And it's going to be Randall's Foucault (a work in progress), X's Foucault
(a work in progress), and... more... or else, if you have him all summed
up, I have a little bombshell for you from D.H. Lawrence, which ties into
both Derrida and the Kabbalah (Daniel C. Matt did a great paperback of this
in 1996, HarperCollins, called _The Essential Kabbalah_, mentioning Derrida
as influenced by it, too):

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Now a book lives as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed, it dies
at once. It is an amazing thing, how utterly different a book will be, if I
read it again after five years. Some books gain immensely, they are a new
thing. They are so astonishingly diffeent, they make a man question his own
identity. Again, other books lose immensely. I read _War and Peace_ once
more, and was amazed to find how little it moved me, I was almost aghast to
think of the raptures I had once felt, and now felt no more.
"So it is. Once a book is fathomed, once it is _known_, and its
meaning is fixed or established, it is dead. A book only lives while it has
power to move us, and move us _differently_; so long as we find it
_different_ every time we read it. Owing to the flood of shallow books
which really are exhausted in one reading, the modern mind tends to think
every book is the same, finished in one reading. But it is not so. And
gradually the modern mind will realise it again. The real joy of a book
lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different,
coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning.....
"We shall now see the reading public dividing again into two
groups: the vast mass, who read for amusement and for momentary interest,
and the small minority, who only want the books which have value to
themselves, books which yield experience, and still deeper experience."
---From ONE, _Apocalypse_ by D.H. Lawrence

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

---Randall Albright

http://world.std.com/~albright/



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