oaths of (the) orifice

Music: Now It's Overhead: Dark Light Daybreak (2006) (Some)one reckons that contractarian thinking was always-already rigged from the beginning. Someone gets excluded. Why else [get] pact? There's always a third to the contract, this outsider other thing.

I am reminded of the cover of a "news rag" I saw this morning in the check-out line at Randall's: "A Boomer's Guide to Aging Parents," a sort of how-to for decisions about assisted living. You didn't chose to be here, but you take care of them (and shame on you who do not). We're all third things at one time or another.

There are other contracts. Pateman's "sex contract," the basis of marriage and, so she suggests, all contracts (always over bodies, bodies, and more possessed bodies).

There is the contract of speech as such, the gesture of babble, too. I am intrigued by Anne Defourmantelle's comments in her riff on a series of seminars Derrida gave on the topic of hospitality:

Now speech is the only human quality that cannot be forced by anything other than itself---we commit perjury in words---and it is from the very inside of language that it has been forced, from a rationalization elevated to the height of an unimaginable perversion. No form of barbarism, no eruption of violence, no terrorist act, however radical it might be, had systematized the radical lie at the very beginning of speech. I see in the phenomenal development of the image and the media the after-effect of a broken pact with speech.

There is a relationship suggested (on the facing page, where Derrida "speaks") here between the radical lie---the dishonesty of utterance made more famous by Sartre, that what I just said is not quite true precisely because I said it in time---and the "foreigner question": "What, pray tell, is your name?"

The law of hospitality (in this sense the "right of hospitality," not in the key of Derridan absolutes) does a little violence in the slippage between word and deed, or speech and rationalization, for at the very root of the question is a natural distrust---the distrust upon which all oaths and pacts are premised. Whence this distrust? Defourmantelle says it is in the erosion of the word, as in, "you have my word."

Is it no longer possible to ground one's promise in speech? Can I give you my word? Or is Defourmantelle right (in both the media ecological and ethical senses, that speech no longer has purchase "in meat space")?

Matthew says that when a lawyer was teasing Jesus about the force of law, he responded in earnest: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." These commandments are spoken and, of course, the image of thought one gets when reading the bible is that they have force only in interpersonal encounter; the ethic of the new covenant has the tenor of "face-to-face."

Well, I'm just thinking aloud and, admittedly, in a confused and half-baked voice. Reading Derrida today really got some things moving along in my head, not the least of which is the centrality of speech to publicity and pacts. I know the "right of hospitality" and the law is inevitable, and that absolute hospitality is impossible (yadda yadda badda bing). Still, the meeting place of bodies in all these thought experiments is a speakeasy (or living room); we are haunted by speech more than ever. Still thinking aloud: how does the pursuit of contemporary EVP phenomena link up to the ethical? And would we rather a disembodied voice come knocking?