I finished the first draft yesterday and posted copies for comments. So
exhausted I was wobbling on my feet. but that is to be expected from a
mad galliard dancing across the spatial history of Western thought from
Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Einstein,
Weiner, Lacan, Tomkins, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari and with
(absolute)entropy, Prigonine flipping over the edge of infinite space
into pure time plane mystic outside the outside of the limited
durational time of reading where there is no outside the text, passing
by the limits of deconstruction. Only a god can save us now, as I doubt
Heidegger would be much use.

The contractual arrangement inverted. Mere mortal referees having to
sift through 54 footnotes in 5400 words not as a dead academic apparatus
but active device to read the mind of God: These referenced footnotes
could be read as an archeology or as rhizomatic nomadic distributions
interspersed between a white wall of signification and blackholes of
subjectivication in a face system being queerly transversed.

I simply had to include Dean Kiley on deconstruction in the footnotes:
See also Dean Kiley, “Elementary, My Dear: Ross Watson and Queer
Gloss/es”  'All that hard work by Paul Taylor, Judy Annear, Adrian
Martin and Paul Foss, doing vanilla-Derrida deconstructions of the
mimetic original/copy ratio logics ( A+:B-, A-:B-, A+B, A=B, A/B=C)' 
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/visarts/globe/issue4/dktxt.html

(Vanilla is gay slang for ordinary uninteresting conjugal style normal
homosex as distinct from leather, S&M, fist fucking, daisy chain, drug
fueled orgies.. that's real sex!)

I may have moved a bit too quickly with a gothic modernist queer
wrenching in taking the Oedipal trigonometry in the logic of Lacan's
objet (a) into euclidean space by virtue of the sine relation between
divergence and into non-euclidean space in one sentence, but let the
referees puzzle over the logic... that should take at least a week. Let
them empty the lake with a spoon!

Why I am destiny...

Dionysos against the Crucified; you have been understood!

-Have I been understood?- Homosex against the Crucified...

best and many joyous times,

Chris Jones.

On Fri, 2003-05-16 at 01:42, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
> Hi Christopher,
> 
> Thanks for your post, and yes, you are right to draw attention to the more that my sentence left out. I particularly like your phrase about the social contract of impossible tasks: "the effect is to link two worlds through the relation of impossibility." Exactly so. 
> 
> Of course, in fairy tales, the impossible is often the task through which one must go to obtain the possible. The one, assigning the task does so expecting it to be impossible so that the other will be prevented from obtaining the possible. Whereas the one undertaking the task does so, out of such desire for the possible, that the impossibility of the task is undertaken with hope or hopelessness, but still undertaken. It's a social contract between very different scales of value and power, the king or queen who commands the lake be drained with a spoon, the girl or boy (usually rustic) who takes up the task. Hence, your remarks on the scale of value, I think, since, at the beginning of the contract, there is no sense in which the one assigning and the one assigned are of equal value. The definition of the task, along with the definition of what is possible or not, resides with the one assigning the task. The one taking on the task really in a sense 'has no choice,' since to not undertake the task would be to remain valueless and without possibility and so undertaking the task, for all it may seem impossible, is the only hope. 
> 
> And, yes, hopes lost are among the worst of things, except perhaps having no hope at all. 
> 
> Best,
> 
> Rebecca
> 
> Rebecca Seiferle
> www.thedrunkenboat.com 
>  
> -------Original Message-------
> From: Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: 05/14/03 05:31 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Impossible Tasks
> 
> > 
> > <snip>
> ... an impossible task [...] like those tasks in 'fairy' tales, the whole
> point being to make certain that no one ever returns from the lake one was
> supposed to be draining with a spoon. [Rebecca S]
> <snip>
> 
> A little more to it than that.
> 
> Because impossible tasks frequently form one side of a social contract
> which
> one party is willing but unable and the other able but unwilling to
> perform,
> the effect is to link two worlds through the relation of impossibility.
> Various versions are possible: elegant refusal of a suitor, welching on a
> deal or what happens in Shakespeare's version of how to do business with a
> member of the Venice ghetto (from which the word derives).
> 
> Two other points might be noted.
> 
> Acceptance of this sort of bargain means accepting the truth of two
> presuppositions: that the impossible task can be done (at some possible
> world) and that the promise or obligation is a true one (at _this_ world).
> We tend to accept the truth of presuppositions unless they're egregiously
> false.
> 
> Since *value* is frequently proportionate to *difficulty*, there's also a
> scaling problem: *harder = better* until, that is, you reach the end of
> the
> scale, where *impossible* (like infinity) disobeys the rules. Hope, in
> this
> sense, may be better than fulfilment but hopes dashed (because they've
> become impossible) may be the worst thing of all.
> 
> CW
> > 
> -------Original Message-------
> From: Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: 05/14/03 05:31 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Impossible Tasks
> 
> > 
> > <snip>
> ... an impossible task [...] like those tasks in 'fairy' tales, the whole
> point being to make certain that no one ever returns from the lake one was
> supposed to be draining with a spoon. [Rebecca S]
> <snip>
> 
> A little more to it than that.
> 
> Because impossible tasks frequently form one side of a social contract
> which
> one party is willing but unable and the other able but unwilling to
> perform,
> the effect is to link two worlds through the relation of impossibility.
> Various versions are possible: elegant refusal of a suitor, welching on a
> deal or what happens in Shakespeare's version of how to do business with a
> member of the Venice ghetto (from which the word derives).
> 
> Two other points might be noted.
> 
> Acceptance of this sort of bargain means accepting the truth of two
> presuppositions: that the impossible task can be done (at some possible
> world) and that the promise or obligation is a true one (at _this_ world).
> We tend to accept the truth of presuppositions unless they're egregiously
> false.
> 
> Since *value* is frequently proportionate to *difficulty*, there's also a
> scaling problem: *harder = better* until, that is, you reach the end of
> the
> scale, where *impossible* (like infinity) disobeys the rules. Hope, in
> this
> sense, may be better than fulfilment but hopes dashed (because they've
> become impossible) may be the worst thing of all.
> 
> CW
> >
>