To enable comments or to disable them? I appreciate the University Without Condition over at Adam Kosko’s weblog: this is an impressive initiative because what binds its participants together is a text. The text provides them with something like a horizon – ‘something like’ because the word horizon is itself confining. Perhaps I might put it this way: the University Without Condition brings its participants together within a horizon that breaks because of what they read.
To enable comments or to disable them? On the one hand, it is wonderful to welcome readers – to experience the gratitude that one is read, or of the joy of a shared love or a shared concern. But there is a danger, beyond an exchange of greetings, in the simple confidence that discussion is possible. It can become a matter of a regulated exchange, of a mutuality and reciprocity which endangers precisely what blogging permits: the happening of peculiar community, an affiliation which occurs through the acknowledgement of a common problem, or a set of problems. A ‘common’ problem which permits nothing mutual or reciprocal even as it is borne by all; which calls for a response essayed in an idiom which is the blogger’s own and can only be the blogger’s own. Perhaps the University Without Condition indicates another way of thinking about this …
What is that line from Blanchot? Friendship for the writing which excludes all friendship. Friendship, perhaps, which demands the protection of the idiom of a particular blog. I like the idea, say, of a blogging persona, of what Pessoa has called a heteronym, and rather wish that I have remained anonymous throughout (but then I am, writing here, the one I am in the world only in the same way that Roseanne, of the TV sitcom was Rosanne in the world).
The old dream of philosophy, from Socrates onwards: the student appropriates philosophy for him- or herself; it is matter of making arguments in one’s own name, of being responsible for what one writes or says in view of establishing the truth. Remember the scorn Theodorus shows in the Theatetus for those followers of Heraclitus the Obscure who repeat without understanding what their master wrote. But there is another dream – a writing which prevents this appropriation and deprives one of one’s name. A writing without responsibility.
Perhaps such a writing might be said to be responsible in another sense. Perhaps it is necessary to withhold discussion so that something else can begin. Perhaps to reply to a blog is to do so on your own weblog, which is to say, in that space where you might be able to construct an idiom, to respond to a shared problem in your own way. ‘Your own way’: do not think this a return to oneself, to the self, a reclusiveness or an anti-socialness. It is a question of allowing a writing to happen in which a gift occurs without mutuality or reciprocity. To happen and to proliferate across the blogosphere, leaping from one blog to another.
Lars Iyer's Blog 