The Idiot

I've not published but given a few talks on the role of humor as a mode of political resistance--this is the modality of the Field Marshal. Coupled with this is the role of the idiot, akin to Bartleby the scrivener, who "prefers not" or who cannot speak in a mode which is intelligible in our world. Enter Lyotard and the differend:  “It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means. One loses them, for example, of the author of the damages turns out directly or indirectly to be one’s judge. The latter has the authority to reject one’s testimony as false or the ability to impede its publication.” (8) What would it mean to give the victim standing? Lyotard goes on to say: “To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new signification, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim.“ (13).

For further resources, consider: "We know, knowledge there is, but the idiot demands that we slow down, that we don’t consider ourselves authorized to believe we possess the meaning of what we know" –Stengers "Cosmopolitical Proposal". 

Yvonne the cow as difference

How can we think difference in itself? It is a question posed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. Examples of D's thinking are hard to come by since the question bears upon the unrepresentable. Animality offers a mode of engaging difference in itself. Cows are domesticated beasts but for Yvonne the cow, domestication is merely a camouflage. She has not only taken herself out to pasture, she kept running and is in full on wilderness. Some in Germany are hunting to kill her. The State says she posses a threat since her corporality, her animality that was used for commercial gain in milking, has turned into a possible weapon should she step onto a road and get hit by a car. Others, animal welfare folk, want to bring her into the fold and give her a safe home. But Yvonne is having none of this dialectics. She has receded into the wildnerness and humans can't find her. Recall Heraclitus: "Nature loves to hide." But really, must we seek it? Can it not be into and of itself. Allowing Yvonne to be is a recognition of a difference in itself, one that cannot be domesticated but roams of its own accord.

The Event & The Differend

The animal revolution is an event. To understand what this means, consider Bill Readings on Lyotard’s concept “the event." Lyotard's event “disrupts any pre-existing referential frame within which it might be represented or understood. The eventhood of the event is the radical singularity of happening, the ‘it happens’ as distinct from the sense of ‘what is happening’” (Introducing Lyotard xxxi). He goes on to say “The event is the occurrence after which nothing will ever be the same again. The event, that is, happens in excess of the referential frame within which it might be understood, disrupting or displacing that frame” (57).

Of course, the concept needs to be developed for the revolution. To do so, (note to future self), look at Lyotard’s The Differend (p 79-80 & X). This event and its wake: “It is not in their power to pass over in silence what they cannot speak about. Insofar as it is unable to be phrased in the common idioms, it is already phrased, as a feeling. The vigil for an occurrence, the anxiety and the joy of an unknown idiom, has begun” (80).

Lyotard’s “differend” takes into a logic of the supplement which exceeds and undoes the laws of the current regime. How is one to express the error of anthropocentrism within a humanist world? One would need a new world and new language: “To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. . . . The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be.” If, following Hiedegger, language is the house where humans dwell, then a new language calls for new tenants. The event as “unstable state” wrecks the house of language and simultaneously constructs something new, a new house and new residents, “new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents.”