|
December 21, 2003
Trevor you previously dismissed a lot of the late 20th century French philosophers as a bunch of academics looking for a new line on which to build a career.
My response is that historical context is important. I can only relate to these people (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Irigarary etc ) in terms of their reception here in Australia. They were strange guests who spoke very differently even for someone who had read a lot of German philosophy. They were guests who were eventually domesticated, for all the turbulence they caused within conservative ranks.
In spite of this domestication, the effect of Derrida was that his writings opened up the conservative philosophical culture in Australia, which had given up on reading the classics. He also helped shift philosophy away from the old problems and arguments to texts and reading. Hence he was attacked by those who wished to preserve the institution of philosophy unchanged and were hostile to different ways of writing, new pathways of reading, new vocabularies around ethics, subjectivityand politics.
And it was a different way of writing and reading. Just look at Derrida's Glas with its split into the two columns on Hegel and Genet. That text has a very different critical and intertexual style in terms of Hegel scholarship and indicated that a work could b not be understood by itself by only in relation to other texts.
I would also agree that a lot of those who embraced continental philosophy in Australia saw themselves as iconoclasts destroying liberal humanism. Though they enlarged the canon of philosophical texts they elided the German connection (Nietzsche & Heidegger) that had feed French philosophy since the 1940s.
The new iconoclasts were actually conservative in their understanding of how philosophy was practised---ie., it's style and rhetoric--- and the form and function of philosophy. They actually helped the institution of philosophy stay together during its political crises-- such a long way from the destructive spirit of Nietzsche towards the philosophical tradition.
Maybe we should see them as wily conservatives who barely threatened the entrenched division between literature and philosophy, had little understand of romanticism or the currents of modernist art.
|
Style is deceptive, especially where Immoralist influence rumbles along, as yet you are the first I have come across, like my Eagle and my Serpent, that, in your case more Pirsig, headed in the right direction under his own steam and merely by being a man of today, you have travelled further in the right direction than Foucault or Derrida ever did... the conscientiousness of your spiritual pursuit places you above them, their phraseological echo feigning of Immoralist rhythm by no means expresses the real two-step of our vibe, merely importunity expressed in the fact that they wrote at all: a battle I have fought hard 'publicizing myself too soon [Genealogy]', but now I speak to you not in a book, I ask for no payment and I do not want the 'heights' of the 'famous philosopher' - though of course I fantasized of it on a scale they could not have even dreamed in their wildest, why? 'The oblique path - it was called 'path to truth'... [Ecce Homo, 'World Honoured One' in Sanskrit]'
An example is Derrida's Glas and its splitting, these men spoke 'above' the crowd with their references to others by means of merely copying. 'Only in certain sense are we scholars' - I have not read Foucault, or Derrida, whose scholarship is from where his 'intertextual' style 'grew' and only looks like Nietzsche.