Trevor I introduced the idea of 'style matters' in philosophy as a way to introduce the gap that exists between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy.
I introduce style to highlight:
*the disturbing relation between Australian and European culture. When not enclosed into wilful provincal isolation for most of the 20th century, Australia then became over receptive to the most difficult and strangest of the European writers. Australian radicals welcomed the French poststructuralists with open arms;
*the shared ground was a philosophy aligned with literature, criticism and art.
*the deconstruction of the liberal culture in Australia that resulted in lots of polemics about postmodernism and a battle of the schools in the philosophy institution;
*despite the family overlap the gap between Australian and European culture still exists because of the vastly different historical experiences. Hence the seismic tremors and aftershocks of Continental philosophy and deconstruction in this country.
Those whom you call French postmodernists may well be progressive in your sense. I don't know. I don't live in France, so I cannot judge them in their historical context. And I never meet Derrida when he visited Australia to talk about painting at the Power Institute. So my relation to them is through the archive; an archive that has become part of the creative industries. By this I mean that Derrida's individual creativity, skill and talent is seen to have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of his intellectual property. Hence the Derrida industry.
In my academic context here in Australia the French poststructuralists (Foucault) and postmodernists (Baudrillard) stood for a different style. Different style here means possibilities of reading and writing philosophy differently. That is how their content touched me.
They opened up doorways for me to step through. Stepping into fresh air after trying to breath in the stale air of a claustrophic academia. That means taking philosophy into different places where it has never been. It means philosophy engaging with concerns that it once turned its nose up- in disgust---eg., literature, sex, pornography etc.
Bataille is different. There is more, much more depth. He is more personal and less academic. But I came to Bataille through Derrida. I did not know what I'd walked into with that doorway.
I was quite comfortable with the structuralist levelling of high literature and its reading of cultural phenomena. Unlike many conservatives in the literary or art institution I had no desire to defend literature or art from the radical structuralist attack. Both institutions were in need of deconstruction. I saw the French poststructuralists as deconstructing the philosophical tradition and so continuing to drive the ethos of philosophy as critique.
A limited critique since they accept the old story of philosophy being invented in Greece, becomes a sedimented modern tradition in northern Europe, and its Platonism is inverted by Nietzsche. Even Heidegger works within it, as his destruction of the tradition, as something made and fashioned through a process of repetition, is primarily concerned with the retrivial of the positive tendencies of the philosophical tradition in the light of technological enframing by instrumental reason.
It's an old Greco-European story that is tied into, or a part of the history of, European imperialism and the metropolitan powers of European colonalism. This particular culture was then represented as universal. We were both educated within it, even if this traditon was given a Marxist reading.
Maybe we should begin to read the closed Greco-European philosophical tradition in terms of violence and metaphysics.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 24, 2003 10:44 PM | TrackBack