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.)
John O.
 
Is that canonical with a capital C? I never know, what with your rhetoric's
of power and such. So, who canonizes text in your profession? Is there a
ceremony that the unannointed may watch? So, all these posts are about your
intellectual truth versus Luke's? If it is yours and not his and t is lower
case why do you brow beat him? Or is your truth just about being a critic
and everything is subject to criticism and that criticism can be based on
any method or lack there of which is also subject to criticism ad nausea.
So, should we capitalize Scholar and maybe Serious? Again, I never know
what the proper structure is around here.

Take heart Luke, that 'almost' is all that separates you from the society
of Serious Scholars and modern academic hell. You better treat John O. and
Jacques with more respect or that guardrail of almost will be withdrawn. In
this rhetoric Luke, apparently propaganda is only appreciated if it is
complex. For shame, you brought cocktail party chatter (knife) to a Serious
Scholarly (gun) fight. Next thing, John will be calling you an intellectual
greaser.
Daniel

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.
John O.
 
Shame? shame implies shared values and big T truth. Should chocolate Ice
cream be ashamed if you like Vanilla better?
Daniel

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.
John O.
 
You mean like a big T truth for us to apply to our lives?
Daniel
 
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.
John O.
 
John, true, no - True True, I agree but it also has caused oceans of
selfless acts on the behalf of others, it has brought relief and joy to a
sea of humanity more than anything else on the face of the earth. It seems
to me that your unshakable faith in this axiom can be, like a gun or hammer,
be used for good or evil. So who is being simplistic?
Daniel

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.
John O.
 
That was one of the best tied bundle of staves and axes I ever saw. You can
see the pride in your work, bravo. You managed this all without a hotel
room off the free way and no stickiness at all, opus bonus dulces vitas.
Daniel
 

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 O.
 
It seems that the more appropriate Cartman quote for you would be, "Respect
my Authorita!", notice the capital A.

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

 
Luke, I was wrong this it is not a gun fight it is a hand grenade fight, a
toss over the shoulder and he's out of here.
Daniel

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Received on Thu Jul 17 10:59:17 2003