Re: Restored (and a final story for Luke and Daniel)

Luke,

First of all, *Writing and Difference* is a collection of essays, each of
which reads a specific philosophical text, engages it, and creates an
interpretation and formulates a response. *Illiberal Education* is People magazine
gossip about university life, without a trace of serious scholarship.

One is a fairly canonical philosophical text, the other is cocktail party
chatter.

The fact that you even seriously compare these two books reveals more about
the level of your own particular intellectual "truth" (and apparent fondness
for simplistic political propaganda) than anything else you have written. And
offering a reading of W&D that amounts to saying nothing more than it "is full
of b.s." makes it almost impossible to take you seriously as a scholar or as a
reader.

But no matter. I'll respond to your post and then offer you and Daniel a
little story before I leave for the weekend.

(Incidentally, no one sued D'Souza because no one in the field took the book
seriously. It was quickly seen to be a simple-minded piece of cable-news
political grandstanding.)

Now then, you try refining your definition but still suggest that Alice, in
her class, sought to "deliberately confuse or bewilder students."
"Deliberately" here is your word, and you should be ashamed of it. This is nonsense. And
it simply does not deserve a civil response. And it's stupidities and gross
caricatures like this that made D'Souza's book such an ill-informed joke.

And if you think "empowering" a critic is "obfuscation," then I'm afraid you
do not know what either term means.

And Luke, for future reference, here is a general rule: underlining something
does not make it true.

Still nowhere have you ever showed me a single passage in any of Derrida's
many writings where he rejects absolutes or order or coherence of any sort. You
now argue that this is only your "own interpretation of the consequences of
Derrida's work" (and therefore an ideological and rhetorically laden reading
imposed internally, no?), but you have failed to cite even a single line that
actually supports this reading. Over and over Derrida speaks *against* reversal
and against overthrowing the tradition. In fact, in his interview for the
Journal of Advanced Composition he speaks explicitly about the importance of
coherence and the tradition. Indeed, he says it very clearly: "I'm in favor of
the tradition. I'm respectful of and a lover of the tradition." In *Women in
the Beehive* he speaks explicitly about not simply "overthrowing" any of the
dualisms and hierarchies of order and coherence, about "resisting such a simple
reversal at all costs." And in *Positions* he writes explicitly about there
*not* being any "transgression" beyond metaphysics or logic -- in fact he
describes his own work not as a rejection of anything at all, but as a "general
determination of the conditions for the emergence and the limits of
philosophy..." He is accounting for and analyzing the legacy of a tradition, not rejecting
any part of it. He insists on this. And in the last third of *Glas* and in
his work on Nietzsche and on Joyce, he speaks explicitly about reading texts
always "affirmatively," about "saying 'yes' to the text twice," and about his
entire project being "an affirmative one." So your silliness about him
"rejecting" order or coherence of any sort in just a sad phantom of your own desire,
I am afraid. That's what happens when you believe the gossip rather than
study the texts.

Now, as to your stuff about absolute, "external meaning"... (And as my last
post demonstrated so clearly in its final full paragraph, your own failed
attempts to delineate this distinction in any practical terms or to provide any
method for separating or formulating the distinction which does not visibly and
immediately collapse into the very "internal" rhetoric of power and desire
that you would like this concept to transcend, reveal that this distinction is
simply vague wish-fulfillment masquerading as argument and cannot be maintained
in any actual analysis of discourse.)

Let me tell you and Daniel a little story before I leave.

Heidegger more or less began his philosophical career engaged in a critique
of the Hegelian concept of "Spirit" (as it develops in Hegel's
*Phenomenology*). He was very insistent in his writing to argue against Hegel's formulation
of "Spirit" as an absolute and transcendental truth (at the end of Hegel's
masterwork). He claimed that it was this lapse into the realm of Idealism that
got Hegel into so much philosophical and logical trouble.

But, as Heidegger's own career progressed and his work developed, the very
same term started creeping into his texts. At first, it appeared always in
quotation marks, as if it were being pinched between the fingers and held at a
distance, to insure with a gesture of self-consciousness that it would not become
in any way Hegelian. He would write of "spirit" ("Geist") as if he were
being extra-careful.

Then, an interesting thing happened. Finally, the quotation marks not only
disappeared but Spirit, as a noun and as a concept, evolved rhetorically and
theoretically into a cultural and historical Absolute. Finally, in the
"Rector's Address," Heidegger started writing phrases like "the true Spirit of the
German people."

Now here's the thing. In his work, Spirit became an absolute, an external
truth value, a transcendental concept, at EXACTLY the same time that Heidegger
joined the Nazi party and gave himself over to the fascism of the National
Socialists.

There is a lesson here that extends beyond the blinds of Heidegger as a
thinker.

And on this, I must tell you, Derrida and I are quite different. I am much
more extreme than he is (he is, as always, rather careful about reading these
texts and analyzing all aspects of them and all associated contexts).

And so I will just go ahead and say this.

I believe that an unshakable faith in one's Truth as an external Absolute has
caused more horror and violence and destruction between human beings than
anything else on the face of this planet throughout history.

And I think we should learn from the past, so as not to repeat it, and I
think we should be much more careful about such fatal nonsense, and I think we
should somehow just get the hell over it. And I think the philosophical mythology
that you are trying to perpetuate is one of the most dangerous ones that
exists and has been throughout the ages. Even a cursory glance at human history
clearly demonstrates this.

And I'll leave you with that and invoke the words of my own personal
intellectual hero, Eric Cartman:

"Screw you guys -- I'm goin' home."

--John (who'll be back next week, but will probably no longer feel like
discussing any of this by then)

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Received on Wed Jul 16 20:26:02 2003