Chris Fynsk Evening Lecture, 2010

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

The students are required to attend evening lectures given by the faculty each evening as part of our curriculum. Chris Fynsk was the second person to give an evening lecture during the August sessions.

Here Fynsk presents a preface to reading Blanchot's The Instant of My Death. The story isn't very long and so he read it in its entirety.

There is a sentence in this text which is already this "step not beyond" (9). We have here, then, a compassionate Blanchot.

This is an account of Blanchot's escape from a Nazi firing squad and for reasons unknown.

I asked Fynsk the following in light of the heady discussions we'd been having in the Manning/Massumi classes for the last couple of days.

"This fictive self, can it only be completed in the telling?"

The phrase "peut-être" comes up a couple of times at a key moment in the text:

In his place,  I will not try to analyze. He was perhaps (Il était peut-être) suddenly invincible. Dead -- immortal. Perhaps (Peut-être l'extase) ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.

I think the choice to translate "peut-être" as "perhaps" twice rather than "maybe" in the second instance is a really interesting one to make.

If we're talking about compassion in Blanchot's thought I think we ought to consider deeply that these "peut-être"s are multiple calls to a mode of interbeing that is immanent and emergent. I say this because the root of the term perhaps is "hap" which we, in English, get from the Icelandic happ meaning "fate." Happenstance, happening, happiness, perhaps - these terms all reflect a relationship not unlike Nietzsche's amor fati. They are driven by the engine of event-ing, which sounds like Blanchot's "lived matrix of future thought."

"Hap" is an event. One finds happiness in aligning something like their lot, their fate. Is compassion also an event, such that the fictive self is completed in the telling?

(I've written about this etymology before)

Fynsk replied that, "We are not consummated (another word I offered as he thought about the question and jotted the notes to the etymology of "hap"), not completed. Writing is a becoming other - a passage that disrupts fate."

Avital Ronell suggests a PhD topic to us: Consider the ecstatic falls in the development of Modern thought - the epic falls of both Rousseau and of Barthes; these untellable near-death experiences.

As the conversation continued I thought about the difference between event and advent:

• event -- e (out of) + venio (come)
• advent -- ad (to, near) + venio (come)

Chris Fynsk Evening Lecture

Chris Fynsk gave an evening lecture wherein he discussed how Jean-Luc Nancy might inform our thinking about cuisine. If memory serves the title of the talk was Image en Cuisine, and the ideas came to him after having the rare opportunity to dine at elBulli, voted the best restaurant in the world numerous times over the last several years.

He's working with Nancy's propositions concerning art as well as the image of the food itself with its suggestions of mimesis and participation.

We begin with the image because Ferran Adrià (the head chef of elBulli) is primarily concerned with deconstruction - particularly how the image is mobilized in the distended time of the meal.

• an image appears in its presentation of itself, through its sameness - an uneven dissemblance that unattaches from itself
• the image comes upon us by detachment of its traits, its trace - a play of approach and withdrawal and overcoming

There are two forms of dissemblance in Heidegger:

1. withdrawal (Nancy's favorite)
2. a play of dissemblance, where we can't tell

• the latter gives art its ambiguity or opacity as art, dissembles itself, it remarks

We enter into a savory world with elBulli, an infusion through penetration which touches our own intimacy. There is a sixth sense that is enticed when Adrià touches upon our terroir.

In order to understand gourmandise we must first understand hospitality

• the real presence of the image in cuisine obliges us to practice a new form of hospitality
• with Adrià's approach there is an interruption of the taking of the Host (referencing Communion)
• There is a double play of participation and mimesis which brings about a synesthesia
• Stimmel - you can't think a ground effectively without the stimmel of Dasein according to Heidegger

There are two phases of the culinary image:

1. visual and olfactory - a visual form of brilliance; often the visual presentation gives one pause because we don't want to disturb its presence
2. the moment of truth - an experience of vast ...

The element of hesitation: "Can I eat this?" is always present in cuisine.

• "Is this thing edible?" Upon putting into our mouth, after disrupting presentation, when the culinary habitus is disrupted, it occurs to us that we might not be able to digest this.
• That we might not be able to digest this, or that it may kill us
  

We appreciate what exceeds our expectations in presentation

• elBulli can't avoid whether it's good or bad tasting
• the guests were forced to rethink their expectations of what taste can be

If there is a rhythm in the image of the dish, there is also a rhythm in the sequence of the presentation of the dishes

• Can we align this rhythm with the rhythm of hospitality in mitsein?
• How would we describe the end of the meal?

What is the meaning of this meal?

• an intellectual stimulation which touches on memory and perception
• Groundlessness in the empty-centered bread which is shattered before we eat our dessert

[END OF LECTURE]