Subject: Re: canadian kids in the brig (WARNING: long and includes theory stuff)
Omlor@aol.com
Date: Sun Feb 11 2001 - 13:25:14 GMT
Lucy-Ruth describes the young man in trouble in Canada:
"He had made a number of threats to various people and had apparently gone
out of his way to be strange, alienating himself from his peers and then
reacting aggressively when they picked on him for it."
Post-Columbine or not, if we arrest every teenager that fits this description
our schools are going be nearly empty.
As to the responsibility of an author for the way his words are read, this
seems to me a very complicated question -- the case of Nietzsche and the
Nazis comes quickly to mind. On the one hand, the Nazi reading clearly does
a good bit of violence to the Nietzschean text. On the other hand, I suspect
that there must be something, some sort of closing itself off, within the
work, that at least holds that reading or allows it to be heard, even if
those who hear it that way have bad ears (always a concern of Nietzsche's
after all -- ear size, ears and their relationship to intelligence). I do
know that in *Ecce Homo*, Nietzsche egomaniacally predicts this reception/
interpretation problem. There Nietzsche says,
"I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of
something monstrous -- a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound
collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything
that has been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am
dynamite. ("Why I Am a Destiny")
How to read this? In addressing the question of writing and signing texts
and the responsibility for how they are heard, in a book called *The Ear of
the Other*, Jacques Derrida discusses the problems involved with reading
Nietzsche's texts and their readings. He begins with a plan, as he read
Nietzsche's plan for education, entitled *The Future of Our Educational
Institutions*.
"This of course complicates the protocols of reading with respect to *The
Future of Our Educational Institutions*. I give notice at the onset that I
shall not multiply these protocols in order to dissimulate whatever
embarrassment might arrive from this text. That is, I do not aim to 'clear'
its author and neutralize or diffuse either what might be troublesome in it
for democratic pedagogy or 'leftist' politics, or what serves as 'language';
for the most sinister rallying cries of National Socialism. On the contrary,
the greatest indecency is *de rigueur* in this place. One may wonder why it
is not enough to say: 'Nietzsche did not think that,' 'he did not want that,'
or 'he would surely have vomited this,' that there is a falsification of the
legacy and an interpretive mystification going on here. One may wonder how
and why what is so naively called a falsification was possible (one can't
falsify just anything), how and why the 'same' words and the 'same'
statements -- if they are indeed the same -- might several times be made to
serve certain meanings and certain contexts that are said to be different,
even incompatible. One may wonder why the only teaching institution or the
only beginning of a teaching institution that ever succeeded in taking as its
model the teaching of Nietzsche on teaching will have been a Nazi one
(23-24).'
And later JD does ask those questions regarding Nietzsche's future and how he
is heard in other ears as he reads the language of Nietzsche on a certain
order of education necessary in order to avoid degeneration and notes the
appearance of a troublesome word.
"The word 'degeneration' proliferates particularly in the fifth and last
lecture, where the conditions for the regenerative leap are defined." [One
passing aside: there does seem always to be a warning about the *dangers* of
leaps in reading in Derrida's discussions concerning the effects of
reinscription of the most troublesome Laws that are posed by certain readings
and certain texts...] "Democratic and equalizing education, would-be
academic freedom in the university, the maximal extension of culture -- all
these [according to Nietzsche's lecture] must be replaced by constraint,
discipline, and a process of selection under the direction of a guide, a
leader or Fuhrer, even a grosse Fuhrer. It is only on this condition that
the German spirit may be saved from its enemies -- that spirit which is so
'virile' in its 'seriousness,' so grave, hard, and hardy; that spirit which
has been kept safe and sound since Luther, the 'son of a miner' led the
Reformation."
Nietzsche, of course, then goes on to blame the "misfortune of today's
students" to their not having found a such a leader who might direct them
towards "an eternal order." Derrida paraphrases N. and then responds:
"This preestablished ordinance or ordering of all eternity is precisely what
the prevailing culture would attempt today to destroy or invert. Doubtless it
would be naive and crude simply to extract the word 'Fuhrer' from this
passage and let it resonate all by itself in its Hitlerian consonance, with
the echo it received from the Nazi orchestration of the Nietzschean
reference, as if this word had no other possible context. But it would be
just as preemptory to deny that something is going on here that belongs to
the*same* (the same what? the riddle remains), and which passes from the
Nietzschean Fuhrer, who is not merely a schoolmaster and master of doctrine,
to the Hitlerian Fuhrer, who also wanted to be taken for an intellectual and
spiritual master, a guide in scholastic doctrine and practice, a teacher of
regeneration. It would be just as preemptory and political unaware as
saying: Nietzsche never wanted that or thought that, he would have vomited it
up, or he didn't intend it in that manner, he didn't hear it with that
ear. Even if this were possibly true, one would be justified in finding very
little of interest in such a hypothesis (one I am examining here from the
angle of a very restricted corpus and whose other complications I set
aside). I say this because, first of all, Nietzsche died as always *before*
his name and therefore it is not a question of knowing what he would have
thought, wanted, or done. Moreover, we have every reason to believe that in
any case things would have been quite complicated -- the example of Heidegger
gives us a fair amount to think about in this regard. Next, the effects or
structure of a text are not reducible to its 'truth,' to the intended meaning
of its presumed author, or even its supposedly unique and identifiable
signatory. And even if Nazism, far from being the regeneration called for by
these lectures of 1872, were only a symptom of the accelerated decomposition
of European culture and society as diagnosed, it still remains to be
explained how reactive degeneration could exploit the same language, the same
words, the same utterances, the same rallying cries as the active force to
which it stands opposed Of course, neither this phenomenon nor this specular
ruse eluded Nietzsche. (27-29)"
At this point Derrida seeks to analyze the utterance-producing machine that
is heard by so contradictory a pair of ears. Finally, he asks,
"In a word, has the 'great' Nietzschean politics misfired or is it, rather,
still to come in the wake of a seismic convulsion of which National Socialism
or fascism will turn out to be mere episodes?" And here Derrida cites the
prophetic passage from*Ecce Homo* about "something monstrous coming in my
(Nietzsche's) name," and concludes:
"We are not, I believe, bound to decide. An interpretive decision does not
have to draw a line between two intents or two political contents. Our
interpretations will not be readings of a hermeneutic or exegitic sort, but
rather political interventions in the political rewriting of the text and its
destination. This is the way it always has been -- and always in a singular
manner -- for example, ever since what is called the end of philosophy, and
beginning with the textual indicator named 'Hegel.' This is no accident. It
is an effect of the destinational structure of all so-called post Hegelian
texts. There can always be a Hegelianism of the left and a Hegelianism of
the right, a Heideggerianism of the left and a Heideggerianism of the right,a
Nietzscheanism of the right and a Nietzscheanism of the left, and even, let
us not overlook it, a Marxism of the right and a Marxism of the left. The
one can always be the other, the double of the other (32)."
But, Derrida argues, this certainly cannot absolve the language and
strategies of those texts and allow those signature to pass into the future
without responsibility (this, in fact, would be the gesture of the
"politically naive"). Rather, the signature is begun at the moment of
writing but not finished each unique time until the moment it is heard. The
responsibility is doubled back onto us, into our ears, since the worst sort
of hearing in this case *is* afforded by the texts -- we must have keen
ears. And this is not only the case with Nietzsche or "post-Hegelians." JD
reminds us:
"It is rather paradoxical to think of an autobiography whose signature is
entrusted to the other, one who comes along so late and is so unknown. But
it is not Nietzsche's originality that has put us in this situation. Every
text answers to this structure. It is the structure of textuality in general
A text is signed only much later by the other. And this testamentary
structure doesn't befall a text as if by accident, but constructs it. This
is how a text always comes about."
Therefore, while it is of course preemptory to suggest that Nietzsche's
rhetoric in the essays on Education are indictments of all the work of this
"great mind" and therefore these texts should disappear from the Academic
nation -- a result that would only make them into a problem to be dealt with
through acts of silencing -- through the refusal to hear or to recognize
(indeed the horrible irony of such a gesture is frightening); it is *just* as
preemptory to hear only with ears partially listening -- ears that would
silence several of these signatures, utterances, rallying cries that *do*
remain possible in the ear of the Other. For the result of this turning of
an ear away from the unpleasant may have effects every bit as devastating as
the ear that hears only the worst.
This, it seems to me, is the beginning of a complicated lesson and double
warning about reading with many ears...
Sorry for the length, but I wanted to take my time even here in this world of
hyper-messages and quick reading.
--John
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