Reading The Loop by Jacques Roubaud, part 11
**map 1: §16 --> §17 --> §I80 --> §17
map 2: pp. 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 251, 252, 72, 73, 74, 75**
I propose this distinction-opposition as a transposition of the one proposed by Sloterdijk in his Critique of Cynical Reason between cynicism properly speaking and what he calls "kynicism," that is, briefly stated, between what is imposed from the top down and what, on the contrary, looks up from below (69).
This is an important distinction. I attempt the latter rather than the former, but it's not always possible. I think especially when one is young one tends (if one tends in this direction at all) toward cynicism. Plus also, when one is young, one only thinks one knows what the bottom looks like. Though I suppose that is always true. Each bottom is false. One looks up, stamps one's foot, and hears a hollow reverberation.
I suddenly feel like I have written this before.
I will add, since this touches on an essential feature of the conception of my Project, that in this general refusal of obedience, I adopted a particular strategy, which was not to imitate a revolutionary gesture but to seek and to choose a multiplicity of master figures (the fatal illusion par excellence, in politics as in art, is that of the "tabula rasa"): hence Queneau; but also Raimbaut d'Orange, Cavalcanti, and Mallarmé; but also Gertrude Stein and Trollope and Kamo no Chomei, So much (and this list is hardly exhaustive) for poetry and literature. But there are other things besides poetry and literature. I had masters in mathematics (Claude Chevalley, Jean-Paul Benzécri), and elsewhere, in each of the disciplines taken up as a part of the Project's implementation (252).
Julio Cortázar and Georges Perec. Robert Walser and David Markson. Matthew Goulish and Dan Beachy-Quick. Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell. Terry Riley and Steve Reich. People Like Us and Matmos. Lydia Davis. John Cage. Lanny Fiegenschuh and Mike Peterson. David Byrne. Beth Nugent. Scott McCloud and Jim Woodring. And on and on.