Sounds like a great idea to me, you have to have a story line and just a chronological history will not capture attention or reveal the passion this point of view requires to exist. The struggle of anyone is the struggle of us all. Understanding the isolation of the individual thinker seems most revealing by concentrating on an individual story.

Nietzsche and Foucault suggest that chronological history is a forgetting, a construction of power... so yeah, please subvert away... your point that ideas/histories arise not solely out of the mind of an individual but out of that mind in relation to its times/ideas -- and that society's conception of the past--already indicates that your 'history' seems likely to be part of the counter-memory... cool. an unhistory, perhaps?

If you ever attempt to unravel strings of tangled Christmas Tree Lights, it really doesn't matter at what point on the string you begin to work, just work it!

A new 'vision' or even frustration could lead ya to put down what you have worked on, to pick up again in a new area...

But when its all said and done, the lights will come on! : )

thanks. but I fear there won't be much of the anti-history JM calls for here. (worthy as such a project might be) I want this history of disbelief to read, to be a good read, so I will shamelessly be making use of narrative and the idea that people, interesting people, contribute to the development of ideas. Shelley is an example:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/mitchellstephens/archives/2005/12/shelley_an_opinion_so_diabolic.html
the topic, I hope, is significant, the ideas challenging. and I may, as mentioned above, mess a bit with traditional form. but I won't surrender the desire to tell good tales.

sorry, Mitch: 'anti' never entered my comments. 'un' a very different prefix. please take note of etymology, which i find important (and you read Derrida so I assume you understand this as well). why pose a conflict between 'telling a good tale' and 'messing a bit w/ traditional form' ? as if they are either/or ? you are, i attempted to endorse, already breaking traditional historical parameters of narrative causality in attempting the present structure as described in this post (duh, not to mention having people respond to you on a blog as you write the thing?). Please don't enforce NYT (mis)understanding of deconstruction as 'not a good read, not readable, a surrender' to the pleasure of the text. recommend "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" to anyone interested in the idea of 'counter-memory'.

fair enough.

Etymology, Keyrizt, one more thing I know nothing about. Un v anti. So many words and word parts. What does it all mean?

And what the fuck is fair enough? Diplomacy must be part of your NYC lifestyle or is the NYU lifestyle?

JS: on the surface, both these prefixes obviously signify 'against'... As one compelled for some reason to engage in seemingly endless hair-splitting in effort to push beyond the surface of mainstream usage of language, hoping for even the slightest alteration of reality in the act of dialogic encounter, differentiation here takes on significance for me. One way of thinking it comes from this kind of thing:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/un-

If you look up 'anti-' you basically just get "against." Period. The binary opposite of : there's no room for nuance; only re=action. I prefer "un-" to attempt a way, through language, to get out from under the dead-end of binary thinking: seek to put into practice what Julia Kristeva termed 'revolution in poetic language.' Not meant to be pretentious or arrogant; simply an effort to think language as difference...... appreciated Mitch's diplomacy, wherever it comes from.

I understand and agree, anti=a in athiest, which is why I don't like the word. The believers should be arealityists.

I find, usually, the harder I try to make a point the less likely I do.

Not believing in anything I just sit,
listening to my breathing
After thirty years
It still goes in and out.
--Albert Coelho

thanks....and: don't underestimate the revolution that breathing in and breathing out accomplishes: reality alters with every single breath (doesn't it?)