Bouvard on Girard's Critique of Discourse Fashion

Here's that Girard quote:

@slooperbia50068 We could work with it as long as we insisted that there's a lot more to "pure politeness" than he grants. Trillions of words of pure politeness on various levels, in various registers. But then the question of what, exactly, is "politeness," presents itself.

@slooperbia50068 To anyne realizing "politeness" has exceeded its normal bounds.

@slooperbia50068 A kind of pure, direct, exact reciprocity in gesture?

@slooperbia50068 "Language — ‘discourse,’ as it is known today — is much less important than the current fashion would have it." This is not the only time I've seen him try to get some mileage out of insisting on how "unfashionable" he is. Maybe there is a name for this in mimetic theory.

@slooperbia50068 Or maybe it's a kind of snobbery.

@slooperbia50068 Insofar as any intellectual advance must be against some common sense or "fashion" it is indeed difficult to avoid this. But it's the kind of gesture one can notice oneself making and learn to restrain it. Being unfashionable doesn't make you right, and lots of people can be

@slooperbia50068 interested in important things. In this case, it does seem that Girard flaunts his unfashionableness so as to distract attention from the poverty of his understanding.

@slooperbia50068 Yes, of course, but I think it's always been possible to see that language is where Girard reaches his limits. Otherwise, the originary hypothesis would not have been necessary.

@slooperbia50068 Agreements not to broach certain topics are just modes of deferral some of which, of course, may turn out not to have been as necessary as they seemed.

@slooperbia50068 The way I think about it is that each new scene is needed to "verify" or validate the previous scene and, by implication, all previous scenes--kind of like a blockchain. We are responsible for the closure of the current scene but also for leaving marks enabling its future

@slooperbia50068 verification or authentication.

@slooperbia50068 The problem with libertarians is that they skip over the mimetic crisis layer directly to the deferral, so they can make interesting proposals while projecting the danger onto others rather than seeing it as constitutive of deferral itself. But I don’t think they must remain

@slooperbia50068 locked away from mimetic knowledge. Kaufman is probably better in this regard than most. My “charge” was in a specific context, which I don’t recall right now.

@slooperbia50068 I remember now—that whole stupid Chud thing—the guy going around spouting racial insults at blacks. It’s a perfect example—you can’t respond to words with violence! As if the whole history of humanity wouldn’t refute that.

@slooperbia50068 The crisis is part of Gans's mdel as well.

@slooperbia50068 Yes, there is no once and for all deferral.

@slooperbia50068 I wouldn't be the best person to provide a bibliography, but wouldn't faith based in revelation have to culminate in apocalypse as a kind of end of history? It seems to me that's where Marxism, liberalism and maybe other modern "faiths" got the idea from.

@slooperbia50068 It's pretty much synonymous with "revelation." The first revelation requires one but, it seems, only one, more. The one is never enough logic is right, but that the second takes care of things once and for all is wrong.