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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

So little time « Previous | |Next »
February 28, 2004

Trevor,
I do read your work, even if my comments on your posts are few and far between. The reason for this is at the moment I'm working fulltime and that means long hours. This will last until the end of March. I've little energy after a 10-12 hour day---the Canberra pole involves up to 14 hours a day living amidst chaos.

This high intensity political life is sometimes called organized or creative chaos, but I often experience it as hopeless chaos. It is working on issues in a burrow whilst listening to parliamentary debates & media commentary on the television, fielding calls from the media, whilst responding to things unravelling around you. It's living chaos, where time or life is marked by images from TV and reality is defined by what the news said reality had been an hour ago. It's a world where you drown in information, whose historical span is a few days.

You step outside Canberra on Thursday evening, catch the commuter plane back home, only to discover that all that happened in Canberra made little impact in Adelaide. What in the hell was the point of all that, you ask yourself?

You can see the reasons for my current attraction to a philosophy of becoming, intensity and event.

I have no idea about the Hegel quote. Hegel was a patriarch for sure, with all the stuff he wrote about the family in the Philosophy of Right. The standard stuff about women being inferior to men and keeping to their place in the family. Typical 19th century bourgeois fare.

On the other hand, desire is the dynamic that drives Hegel's master servant dialectic.

I haven't read Derrida's old text Spurs so I cannot really comment on the Hegel quote. From the bits that I know of it, the text engaged with a certain essentializing of "woman" in the US seventies feminism. This deconstruction called critical attention to some of feminism's assumptions whilst contesting the phallocentrism of Nietzsche, Freud etc. The context is to object to more conventional/traditional representations of femininity.

What sits behind this is Heidegger's metaphysical reading of Nietzsche which Derrida contests. That is rarely discussed.

I've so little time to read this sort of material these days. It is hard for me to shrug of the feeling that reading modern philosophy books is mostly a waste of time. I've taken the pathway of the primacy of the practical over the theoretical that is expressed in for instance, in Gadamer's rehabilitation of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis that is based on praxis and ethos.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:24 PM | | Comments (0)
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