AK,
Just to be sure, "no self but in other" is a quote from Keelan. If you are
right in how you take the phrase (am I reading you correctly?), I'd agree
with you-- sounds like a formula for 1984! Actually, I took Keelan as
suggesting the Derridean/Levinasian commonplace that "self" is simply not
possible without "other".
But it's "self" and "other" as hardened binaries that in our century have
underwritten atrocity, isn't it? You can drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima
because they're yellow Japs, or you can have a killing ground in China or
Cambodia becasue they're decadent bourgeois intellectuals. The Nazis
certainly didn't see themselves as "one" with the Jews!
By "legal self" I mean the poet signing his or her poem like he or she does
her renewed driver's license. My use of Outside was awkwardly redundant in
the sentence, which becomes clear, I think, without it. I was just trying to
throw Spicer into the mix, I guess.
Kent
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Anastasios Kozaitis said:
"No self but in other" certainly sets up a very prejudicial world. Does it
not? Is this not the very base of the ideological positions that caused a
great deal of damage in the 20th Century and the 21st for that matter:
Nationalism, Racism, Classism, etc.? I do not use these in some sort of
politically correct way, but in short "no self but in other" is definitely,
at least in my eyes, road to objectification, exotification, etc.
Now, how this leads to experimental poetry is another issue, and maybe
there is some reason to why experimental poetry is not experimental, at
times.
Kent, what do you mean by "legal self" and "a whole Outside of *ethical
poetic praxis*"?
--Ak
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