Erik D. Lindberg writes:
>I know I'm splitting hairs, but that's what this discussion is, it seems
>to me, largely about. The importance of this hair splitting *might* be
>apparent in my response to your next post. I think that textual
>deconstruction (or literary deconstruction) naturally has a different
>object of inquiry, but with a similar "approach." I see literary
>deconstruction as providing an allegory for the sort of work that
>Baudrillard and Foucault do, for they treat institutions, power, and
>cultural practices *like* a text. The benefits of deconstruction, I
>think, is the self-reflexive energy with which it makes us think about
>HOW we read (reading as opposed to consciousness as there vehicle for
>change
Erik,
I am intrigued by your *......* You might want to check out a
deconstructive reading of Foucault -- assuming you have not already -- by
Rudy Visker, _Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique_.
Visker entire book is dedicated to the quotation marks:
"Do 'Foucault's' quotation marks exhaust his problematic? Are they not
rather an expression of the difficulties he has with his problematic? Are
they not rather an expression of the difficulties he has with 'his'
problematic?"
1) I can't imagine Focualt spending an entire book on the problematic of
quotation marks or Nietzsche's umbrella. This seems to me again to
illustrate the difference between Deconstruction and Genealogy.
2) I agree with you the genealogy shares Deconstruction's dismembering of
tradition, but I think that genealogy of Nietzsche and Foucault create more
of narrative counter-history. Suffer through Derrida, as I have, and you
don't find a synthesis. Read his commentators and you might construct
counter-history of the death of logos and the phonocentrism, with the
celebration of writing and differance. However, the fact that Derrida has
been popularized in this way by American literary circles -- America: the
citadel of homogeneity both intellectual and cultural -- is frightening.
We find much more of a deliberate "story" or narrative in Nietzsche and
Foucault, a white lie or fiction, that is, a new story to serve as
substitute for tradition. Whether it is Nietzsche fable of how good and bad
became inverted or Foucault's fable on how the prison disciplines shaped the
mindset of schools, factories, and all of modern life, we should not forget
that these counter-histories have a narrative center of a sort. Derrida's
work -- and not his apologist like Christopher Norris -- is a true
anti-story, not another story to substitute, but both a rigid and playful
critique. You might note that Derrida is one of the few contemporary
philosohers who does not get into culture-critique. You name it, Marx,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Habermas, Adorno,
Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Foucault, and Baudrillard, among others
has condemned modern culture, or what Kierkegaard called over a century ago
the present age. This shows Derrida's discipline in avoiding a romanticism,
the deliberateness of his critique.
------------------
>I know I'm splitting hairs, but that's what this discussion is, it seems
>to me, largely about. The importance of this hair splitting *might* be
>apparent in my response to your next post. I think that textual
>deconstruction (or literary deconstruction) naturally has a different
>object of inquiry, but with a similar "approach." I see literary
>deconstruction as providing an allegory for the sort of work that
>Baudrillard and Foucault do, for they treat institutions, power, and
>cultural practices *like* a text. The benefits of deconstruction, I
>think, is the self-reflexive energy with which it makes us think about
>HOW we read (reading as opposed to consciousness as there vehicle for
>change
Erik,
I am intrigued by your *......* You might want to check out a
deconstructive reading of Foucault -- assuming you have not already -- by
Rudy Visker, _Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique_.
Visker entire book is dedicated to the quotation marks:
"Do 'Foucault's' quotation marks exhaust his problematic? Are they not
rather an expression of the difficulties he has with his problematic? Are
they not rather an expression of the difficulties he has with 'his'
problematic?"
1) I can't imagine Focualt spending an entire book on the problematic of
quotation marks or Nietzsche's umbrella. This seems to me again to
illustrate the difference between Deconstruction and Genealogy.
2) I agree with you the genealogy shares Deconstruction's dismembering of
tradition, but I think that genealogy of Nietzsche and Foucault create more
of narrative counter-history. Suffer through Derrida, as I have, and you
don't find a synthesis. Read his commentators and you might construct
counter-history of the death of logos and the phonocentrism, with the
celebration of writing and differance. However, the fact that Derrida has
been popularized in this way by American literary circles -- America: the
citadel of homogeneity both intellectual and cultural -- is frightening.
We find much more of a deliberate "story" or narrative in Nietzsche and
Foucault, a white lie or fiction, that is, a new story to serve as
substitute for tradition. Whether it is Nietzsche fable of how good and bad
became inverted or Foucault's fable on how the prison disciplines shaped the
mindset of schools, factories, and all of modern life, we should not forget
that these counter-histories have a narrative center of a sort. Derrida's
work -- and not his apologist like Christopher Norris -- is a true
anti-story, not another story to substitute, but both a rigid and playful
critique. You might note that Derrida is one of the few contemporary
philosohers who does not get into culture-critique. You name it, Marx,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Habermas, Adorno,
Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Foucault, and Baudrillard, among others
has condemned modern culture, or what Kierkegaard called over a century ago
the present age. This shows Derrida's discipline in avoiding a romanticism,
the deliberateness of his critique.
------------------