In responding to Jon Beasley-Murray’s latest rejoinder ‘Missing a trick’ it is clear that a number of issues are starting to stack up. This is a shorter response than previously because, like him, my concern is that the debate is losing its central focus and the productive basis for dialogue, especially in relation to the issues raised in my last post, ‘The war on errorism’.
For Beasley-Murray “something always escapes” which is how he approaches Louis Althusser’s text Machiavelli and Us in wanting to highlight those elements that evade us, that are elusive, that escape our grasp of the text. My response is that the something that escapes in Beasley-Murray’s reading is the very dispositif configuring text and context. This is a direct engagement with his reading of Machiavelli and Us (despite his bellyaching) and his claim that “something always escapes”. But much more is escaping.