What I will have said, I address to "Jim" and to any of you in as much as "Jim" might be in your thoughts.

Jim and I used to talk on the phone. It was a kind of party-line conversation. I don't know if you know what a party line used to signify. When I was a kid, between 5 and 8 years old, my parents and I lived way outside the city limits of Houston, TX. We had a party line; that is, we shared a telephone line with another family in our area. Often my parents would pick up the receiver to make a call and the other party was on it. Actually, more often than not. Trying to get a call out to another was like trying to reach the proverbial excluded third party. I remember overhearing more conversations between my folks and the other party on line than a conversation with a third party (the normally intended audience for telephones).

The conversations I had with Jim on the phone, which were like none others that I have ever had in my life with another, were comparable, party-line telephone calls. We talked about You. The always intended, yet uncanny Audience, the ones we wanted to reach. We talked about what your expectations might be, and of course we talked about our differences concerning what and how we wanted to communicate to you. To be sure, we talked about much that we agreed about, and we talked about our careers and we talked about domestic things such as our families, our kids playing soccer and basketball.

A call would usually begin with hellos but without additional niceties, for there was always a cut to the chase. There is one particular call that I especially remember. I had just walked into the house with the last bag of groceries that I had purchased and a satchel of books that I had earlier checked out of the university library. The phone rang. (Ringggggg, Ringggggg.) I picked it up and Jim said, "Hello, Vitanza." From his saluation, I knew what kind of conversation it was going to be. When he said, "Hello, Victor," it meant a domestic, local call; when he said, "Hello, Vitanza," it meant a long distance, business call. I said hello and immediately preempted him by saying that I just got back from the library with a load of books on aesthetics. At the time, Jim was writing Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures and I was writing Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric. We both knew that we were writing sections on Aesthetics and politics and we both knew how difficult such a combination of loci were. I mentioned to Jim that I had just checked out Josef Chytry's The Aesthetic State and several other books; and he mentioned to me that he was reading Martin Jay's article "`The Aesthetic Ideology' as Idology." We continued the conversation on this theme for another 10 or so minutes, exchanging bibliographical references, all related to the problem of what Paul deMan labelled "the aesthetic ideology." Much time has passed, though there were intervening party-line conversations. Both books are in print now. I see what Jim had to say; he has not, as far as I can reasonably assume, seen what I have had to say. I can only imagine. Aesthetically and politically. Politically and aesthetically.

As I was telling another audience a few weeks ago, most, if not all of our arguments, are with the dead, yet very much alive. Often, I feel like Bellow's Augie March, writing letters of disagreement, or on occasion agreement, to the dead, yet alive. Virtually, I feel like an Augie on a party line. Dialing the numbers, waiting while it rings (Ringgggggg, Ringggggggg). And then someone picks up the phone, saying hurriedly, "Hello!"

And cutting to the chase I would have said: "Hello, Jim, I just got your book and though I have yet to read it, the cover looks like road kill on a rural Texas highway and the book smells like a sun-baked turd from an armadillo." There would be sardonic laughter and he would say, "Just a second Vitanza, I'm finishing up mentoring a student." And I would hear Jim say a few words to one of his graduate students at Purdue and then say, "Now, I have to take care of Vitanza." And he would continue, without transition, saying, "And I have your book . . . it was sent to me today . . . you understand, I would never buy such a satanic book, nor leave it lying around for young ones to read. . . . Let me tell you that your book cover with a background of aqua satin sheets looks as if it were done for a David Lynch film—which is a perfect match up, given your film noir approach to a history of this profession." And the repartee would continue, back and forth, punctuated with much good humored laughter. Later the snippets of biting critique would have been heard and counter-responded to in passing. But always eventually with so much laughter! It was always a virtual roasting!

Jim, as he often claimed, was a "laughing Marxist." The only one that I ever met.

(Ringggggg, Ringggggg).

"Hello."

"Hello, Jim, it's me."

"Oh, Hi, Victor. Glad you called. I've got a seminar tonight and I plan to tell my students about you. I mentioned your name last week and the class paused and asked, `Victor? Who's Victor?' And then one of them said, `Oh, yes, you mean Victor Villanueva!'"

After his laughter would have subsided.

I would have replied, "Jim, I just finished your book and I see that you mention my name on page 69 and direct your comments on postmodernism to me. I have to tell you, by the way, your response is a straw-man argument. Who in the hell is David Harvey to speak for you as a worthy critic of PostModernism with all of its peverse complexities? And then you turn to Martin Jay and his saying that Lyotard does not `afford much in the way of positive help with the choices that have to be made.' You merely suggest in passing that you read Just Gaming. Jim, return to the repressed and this time give us evidence that you actually read Lyotard and that you yourself understand his notion of justice. And Jim, What about Kant himself? Did you read Kant? The modernist father of aesthetics? Did you read what Lyotard has said in the Differend and in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime and elsewhere about Kant's third critique? and its givenness to radical heterogeneities. And Kant's fear of what he saw in his thinking of the sublime. His attraction to and repulsion by the Ugly, the Monstrous! And Lyotard's own incipient fear of the sublime? in relation to justice. And yet, what Lyotard says about the sign of history? Jim, why do you rely so heavily on Harvey and Jay's readings? On secondary material? to be dismissive? Where are your own readings of Kant and Lyotard's texts? Why support your important position with their shakey testimonials!? Are you preaching only to the already converted? If either Harvey or Jay can be found lacking, the house that Jim built falls . . . and like a house of cards."

Jim would have said to me, in a counter-wicked way, "well, I think I read your book, too; but it's really hard to say or know. You see, I think that your book does not really exist because the audience here cannot understand the book or follow its overly detailed and serpentine-byzantine lines of thinking; and if they could understand the book or broken lines of thinking, they could not communicate the intuitiveness of the book because your position is too evangelical; and if some of them could communicate it to others in the audience here, what you have to say in the book would just scare the holy shit out of everyone! Victor, it's such a melay-knee-al thing you wrote!" And so on. And so on. And so on . . . the discussion would . . . will have gone. The unending life-in-death death-in-life, conversation.

I know, I know: though there is a "so on," it's rife with the conditional mode. I would like to think, however, that the conditional is the mode of hope. The conditions for the possibilities of hope for a revalution of justice, the most difficult of key, everyday words and concepts. Justice. Our task with Jim is to rethink justice.

Jim had party-line conversations with all of us. Some gentle. Some caustic. Many in laughter. In the healing balm of laughter. He best knew how to balance work with laughter, laughter with work. Jim had conversations with all of us. And had conversations with many of you . . . no, with all of us . . . and especially the multitudes who have yet to enter our field's or discipline's conversations. Conversations about composing justice. Collaboratively! Composing justice for Jim was not a division of labor but a co-labor of work and laughter.

Earlier, I said that our conversations, our arguments, are with the dead, the past. Our arguments are not only with the past but with the future. With a co-labor of past and future. With What will have been. And so much has been and will have been because of JB's exuberant laughter. His making party-line conversations possible. Lest we forget, Jim's praxis of laughter was never laughing at, but was—and must continue to have been—laughing with. And therein lies the condition for his, no, our perpetual rebeginnings on our own, more global, party-line.