>I'm not sure who has read the Spanos book Heidegger and Criticism, but it
>seems spanos' critique of Derrida "the indifference of differance" is
>similar to foucault's--that emergence is left out. However, Spanos also
>critisizes foucault for ignoring ontology.
>
>loren
hm....are/were you a debator? I've never heard of anyone outside of debate having heard of spanos.
it seems to me that spanos is saying that heidegger and foucault, the two most important thinkers, were both blinded in their insight, which is, of course, paul de man's phrase. Foucault's excessive focus on "sociopolitics" prevented him from seeing such things as "enframing" and "the age of the world picture," whereas heidegger's focus on ontology prevented him from seeing things such as the evil of nazism, even though he later made a reference to gas chambers in the context of a criticism of the technological mindset. A synthesis of heidegger and foucault enables "oppositional intellectuals" to avoid the mistakes of both.
this synthesis is more explicitly noticeable in the new spanos book: "America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire," in which spanos shows the "ontological origins of occidental imperialism." the disciplinary, classificatory tables and the truth discourse of the West, combined with a calculative/technological understanding of Being, allow us to "level" and "enframe" the Other into a "docile and useful body." The rhetoric of problem-solving and "improvement" adds inevitability and moral necessity to acts of imperialism. Resistances to this liberal humanist/democratic, such as the "falsehood" or "errancy" of the communists or "savages," must be made to fit the "true" discourse of the West.
Spanos is not anti-Derridean, however. He shows that, in the Vietnam War, Americans fought with the assumptions of and expectations for presence and closure, which the NLF and NVA subverted, leading the Army to engage in genocidal practice. Spanos argues that the task for oppositional intellectuals is a discourse of resistance based on the Vietnamese strategy in the war. We must subvert the assumptions of presence and closure on the level of discourse, and allow humanism to defeat itself.
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.
--Jean Baudrillard
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