philosophical conversations

Heidegger, Nietzsche, will to power

Volume 3 of Heidegger's gigantic Nietzsche book is concerned with will to power. It interprets Nietzsche as the thinker of the consumation of metaphysics. Heidegger says:

"In the thought of will to power Nietzsche anticipates the metaphysical ground of the consummation of the modern age. In the thought of will to power, metaphysical thinking itself completes itself in advance. Nietzsche, the thinker of the thought of will to power, is the last metaphysican of the West. The age whose consummation unfolds in his thought, the modern age, is a final age. This means an age in which at some point and in some way the historical decision arises as to whether this final age is the conclusion of Western history, or the counterpart to another beginning. To go to the length of Nietzsche's pathway of thought to the will to power means to catch sight of this historical decision."

the closure of academic philosophy

In a recent post on Enowning there is makes a good comment about our philosophical culture.

In this culture

"....many authors are not interested in the wide dissemination of their papers. They come from a tradition of exchanging ideas within a tight circle of specialists and striving to be published in certain prestigious journals. To them, being widely read, being popular, is not a concern, or even antithetical."

Enowning says that in a philosophical culture:

"There are people who are genuinely interested in philosophical subjects and eager to discuss it with other enthusiasts, and then there are those that have made an institutional career out of philosophy, and need to please their patrons to get grants, tenure, and get published. And there are the clever few that manage both, getting both the respect of their peers, their books sold in bookstores, and their ideas spread. I don't think there's anything wrong with being published in specialized journals, but in the long run, what's the point of doing philosophy, or anything else for that matter, only to have your work gather dust in a few libraries?"

This weblog grew out of the academic philosophy and its outreach in the form of a philosophy cafe as an attempt to keep the conversation going, it has been spurned by academic philosophy. Even though it discusses similar material (Adorno, Heidegger, Hegel, Bataille ) philosophical conversations is not even listed on the philosophy jammm website.

Notable exceptions are this and this.

Different Nietzsche's

Just as we can talk about an American Nietzsche (Arthur Danto, Tracy B. Strong, Richard Schacht, Alexander Nehamas, Kathleen Higgins, and Gary Shapiro) so we can talk about Klossowski's Nietzsche and Deleuze's Nietzsche.

The latter work off Nietzsche's biological metaphysics of a multiplicity of conflicting forces of bodies, yet both move away from Nietzsche.

Klossowski ignores the processes of valuation whilst his conception of interpretation through the everyday codes in consciousness gives us a pre-social body.

Deleuze downplays the will to power as the stronger force that is commanding and ruling. What Deleuze stresses is that a stronger force does not exercise its power for the sake of negating a weaker force but only for the sake of affirming its difference. The differential of power between weaker and stronger is what Nietzsche, in Deleuze's reading, calls the will. The stronger the power of a force, the stronger the will, the stronger the desire to impose itself as pure difference.

This is quite different from Nietzsche who places the emphasis on power: on the stronger directing the weaker. Valuation is the will to power: a willing to be stronger, to grow----will as power.

Maybe we can contrast these kinds of readings of Nietzsche with those of Heidegger, even though the judgments of Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation are mostly negative. That reading interprets Nietzsche as the prophet of nihilism, as an advocate of human subjectivity or self-insurrection (as lord of the earth, seeking a destined technological dominion over the earth), and diagnosed Nietzsche as embroiled in the same metaphysics he identifies and tracks.

Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche is dismissed as getting Nietzsche wrong--(misinterpretation) whilst the (mis) interpretations of Klossowski and Deleuze are celebrated as innovative and insightful. Heidegger's Nietzsche is what needs to be put to one side.

Deleuze: on the pathway of difference

I'm struggling with Deleuze as I realize more and more that dialectics represented the system that Deleuze most detested. In reading the dense Repetition and Difference I'm trying to avoid simply condemning Deleuze's reading of Hegel, and his treatment of Hegelian multiplicity and becoming.

In the Preface to Negative Dialectics Adorno writes:

"Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept. Bergson as well as Husserl, the standard-bearers of philosophical modernity, innervated this, but shrank away from it back into traditional metaphysics. Bergson created, by fiat, a different type of cognition for the sake of the non-conceptual. The dialectical salt was washed away in the undifferentiated flow of life; that which was materially solidified was dismissed as subaltern, instead of being understood along with its subalternity. Hatred of the rigid general concept produced a cult of irrational immediacy, of sovereign freedom amidst unfreedom."

A pathway has been opened up or disclosed. On this pathway---on this line of thought--- we find the discrete, the alienated, the remaindered, the repressed, the fragment,' diversity', 'otherness', and multiplicities. Is this not the pathway travelled by Deleuze and his conception of a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference "more profound" than a contradiction and a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation?

What does that mean? Does it not mean an attempt to work out a non-contradictory, non-dialectical consideration of difference that is not envisioned as a simple contrary (negation) of identity? Is it not an attempt to work out a non-dialectical account of becoming? We can make some headway here with the help of this.

According to Deleuze in Hegel's dialectics the difference between one entity and another, what allows us to identify it, is established in contrast to what it is not. Why is this difference "external" to the entity in question or the properties that make it up? Because difference is unnecessarily translated into negation. In Hegel's terms, it is only via the universal that the particular becomes accessible to knowledge, the universal being the negation of the particular.

Subsuming difference under negation is a major mistake Deleuze imputes to the dialectical tradition. It is the detour through negation that keeps the dialectical conception of difference "external" to difference itself, or difference in kind. If we want to reach difference in kind, we cannot address the entities and their properties externally, by negatively comparing them to all others, but internally, that is, by asking what are the "things themselves" rather than what they are not.

This ignores Hegel's notion of internal relations and the internal dynamics, the tendencies within a entity, emerging properties and development, but never mind.

Deleuze's line of thought here is that a thing is the expression of a "tendency" and a tendency is a phase of becoming. A tendency can express itself only insofar as it is acted upon by another tendency and, therefore, tendencies never come isolated from one another but always in pairs. These tendences are expressions of relational but antagonistic forces

What is suprising is how biological Deleuze is. This is an organic metaphysics that reaches back to Aristotle, even as it destabilizes essentialism and turns its back on Hegel putting wheels on Aristotle.

Klossowski, Nietzsche, Eternal Returrn

I've started reading Klossowski's 2nd chapter of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle this afternoon. The chapter is called 'The Experience of Eternal Return' and I cannot make much of it.

People are advised to read Trevor on this.

In the chapter the eternal return is briefly described in Nietzsche's words as:

"...act as though you had to relive your life innumerable times and will to live it innumerable times---for in one way or another you must recommence and relive it."

I was bored. I kept on looking outside at the trees and the spring rain lightly falling. I watched the waves rolling across the bay and the birds darting here and there. I struggled to return to the text.

I was annoyed with all the soul stuff that turned it into a mystical experience of ecstasy, revelation and renunciation. Zarathustra is a mystic surpassing his own limits, living outside meaning and sense; a mystic caught up in the image of a circle arising out of intense emotional chaos beyond knowledge and communication.

Why is so much fuss made of all this romanticism I kept wondering. It reeks of Bataille and hallucinations.

I bounced out of the literary words that purport to describe Nietzsche's 1881 Sils-Maria experience, that is supposedly unintelligible on Klossowski acccount.
We can contrast Nietzsche with Klossowski.

In Ecce Homo written in the autumn of 1888, Nietzsche writes the following passage:-

"The fundamental idea of my work--namely, the Eternal Recurrence of all things--this highest of all possible formulae of a Yea-saying philosophy, first occurred to me in August 1881. I made a note of the thought on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: 6,000 feet beyond men and time! That day I happened to be wandering through the woods alongside of the lake of Silvaplana, and I halted beside a huge, pyramidal and towering rock not far from Surlei. It was then that the thought struck me. Looking back now, I find that exactly two months previous to this inspiration, I had had an omen of its coming in the form of a sudden and decisive alteration in my tastes--more particularly in music. It would even be possible to consider all `Zarathustra` as a musical composition. At all events, a very necessary condition in its production was a renaissance in myself of the art of hearing."

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche describes the ecstatic moods of poetic creation thus:

"Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition in one, it would hardly be possible to set aside completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy, which profoundly convulses and upsets one--describes simply the matter of fact. One hears-one does not seek; one takes--one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly--I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy such that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one`s steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes;--there is a depth of happiness in which the painfullest and gloomiest do not operate as antitheses, but as conditioned, as demanded in the sense of necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces wide areas of forms (length, the need of a wide-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of an inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The involuntariness of the figures and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all perception of what constitutes the figure and what constitutes the simile; everything seems to present itself as the readiest, the correctest and the simplest means of expression. It actually seems, to use one of Zarathustra`s own phrases, as if all things came unto one, and would fain be similes: `Here do all things come caressingly to thy talk and flatter thee, for they want to ride upon thy back. On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth. Here fly open unto thee all being`s words and word-cabinets; here all being wanteth to become words, here all becoming wanteth to learn of thee how to talk.` This is MY experience of inspiration. I do not doubt but that one would have to go back thousands of years in order to find some one who could say to me: It is mine also!--"

Oh well, back to my struggles with Klossowski.

Deleuze & Klossowski

Just a quick point, Gary. I've got about five minutes before I have to leave to give a lecture on Proust, so my thought is elsewhere.

Klossowski dedicates his book on Nietzsche to Deleuze but Deleuze's book on Nietzsche is, from memory, nothing like Klossowski's. The latter's book is unique, Deleuze's less so. Once again, from memory, it is more a book against Hegel than on Nietzsche. In particular, it is a polemic against dialectics. Adorno comes to a similar point at the end of Negative Dialectics regarding the limits of dialectics as metaphysics - I mentioned this earlier during our heated discussion on Heidegger but I think you misunderstood it then. This is why I thought Deleuze and Adorno were rather similar. They both see the limit of dialectics. The difference is that Deleuze wants to bring this about through an act of will. Adorno, on the other hand, wants to complete the negative process, to bring about the end of dialectics objectively.

Deleuze: a note

Now that I have some time to myself I've started reading Gilles Deleuze's doctoral thesis, 'Difference and Repetition', published in 1968. I had flipped through this complex big book written in the traditional academic style when I was working the long hours in Canberra, but I had neither the time or space to sit down and read it.

What I was able to read was part of the smaller Dialogues where the emphasis is not on correctness of ideas, but on new and different ideas. This text highlights how my training in philosophy was a plunging into the history of philosophy (analytic, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno etc) with its dangers of scholasticism. There were few gusts of fresh air to take us outside the academic confines of the history of philosophy. Nietzsche was the gale of fresh air blowing through the musty corridors.

Deleuze makes a good point in Dialogues when he says:

"The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the repressor's role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so's book about them. A formidable school of intimidation which manufacturers specialists in thought--but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking."

I haven't read Deleuze's book on Nietzsche, even though it is deemed to be a key French study on Nietzsche, which would help me to make sense of Klossowski's text on Nietzsche. From what I have read, Deleuze's text is about Nietzsche's metaphysics expressed in his 'The Will to Power'; an expression that constructs reality as a plurality of forces, with the play and interaction of forces forming the basis of existence.

Dipping in and out of it on the plane to and from Canberra I had noticed that 'Difference and Repetition', was about metaphysics. It marked the (poststructuralist) turn away from Hegel and Marx towards Nietzsche and Freud in French culture, was a rejection of the metaphysics of representation (model-copy scheme), the transcendent and the universal. It also develops a philosophy of difference that creates a new ontology of change (the the flux of existence) that is freed from a subordination to a logic of identity.

I presume that Hegel stands for a logic of identity that subordinates difference. Does it continue the old reading of Hegel as being all about the (movement of the concept) and not a changing material reality? This is the standard reading of the empiricists, who make their simple appeal to lived experience in the sense that all knowledge that we possess is derived from the senses and the senses alone.

Hegel appears to be the arch-enemy in Difference and Repetition:--the "French Hegel" is the repressive voice of reason whose dialectic represents the most extreme development of the logic of the identical.

Deleuze, however, is an empiricist with a difference. In the Preface to 'Difference and Repetition' he writes:

"Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts nor a simple appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever." (p.xx)

What I found refreshing with Deleuze is that he does not divorce philosophy and its history from the fortunes of the wider world of civil society; Deleuze, following Nietzsche, intimately linked philosophy to civil society and the state, and to the forces at work there.

Derrida, Heidegger, Spirit #4

Heidegger's attempts to reform the university are usually dismissed out of hand or not taken seriously. The Rectorial Address is generally not taken seriously, other than to condemn it as an example for all that is wrong with philosophy connecting up with politics.

A primary reason for this rejection is that the claim that Heidegger has attempted to politicise the liberal university, and that this is not on. This is a very common response in Australia: it is held by liberals the university should be autonomous institution in civil society and not be an instrument of the state; and by conservatives that it the university should not be transformed by a movement of radical politics (as with the 1968er's).

Yet this is what has happened to Australian universities through the neo-liberal mode of governance of the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms were designed to ensure that the universities' intellectual and material resources were to be treated as standing reserve for the Australian economic machine in a global world.

The crude reading of Heidegger is that he politicised the German university by turning it over to the Nazi movement: he beheads the autonomous liberal university and turns it into an instrument of Nazi politics.

Heidegger does make the university the site for a radical transformation in culture through the process of questioning our culture. However, this history transforming questioning of our philsophical culture involves reforms to education and provides the ethico-philosophical ends of Nazi politics, and so redirect the Nazi movement into becoming a part of Heidegger's ontological revolution. Heidegger understood his role as guiding the Nazi movement as their spiritual leader!

Update
Derrida recognizes Heidegger's conception of the process of philosophy questioning a national culture. He has some sympathy for it, given his role in establishing a lefty (1968er) version of this project in the International College of Philosophy. He says this institution was set up to try

"...to teach philosophy as such, as a discipline, and to discover new themes, new problems which had had no legitimacy, which were not recognized as such in the given universities. That was not simply interdisciplinarity because interdisciplinarity implies that we have given identifiable proper identities - we had a legal theorist, we had an architect, a philosopher, a literary critic, and they joined, they worked together on a specific type of academic object - that's interdisciplinarity. When you discover a new object, an object which up to now hasn't been identified as such or has no legitimacy in terms of any academic media or academic field you have to invent a new campus, a new type of research, a new discipline. The International College of Philosophy granted a privilege to such new themes, new disciplines which were not up to then recognized or legitimated in other institutions."

Derrida says that these paragraphs have three readings, evaluations or interpretations. The author cannot exempt himself from any responsibility; the responsibility is exercised according to a strategy with an extra suprise in reserve-- spiritualizing the earth and blood of Nazism and setting apart Heidegger's commitment and breaking an affiliation; and speaking of the destiny of the west as a spiritual force.The price of the latter strategy is contamination by the racism, and biologizing of, 'blood and soil.'

start, -previous, next

Heidegger: politics of the university#4

As we have seen Heidegger connects the possibility of philosophy (questioning) with the reform of the university (unity of the disciplines). He then links this to both the historical crisis he is living, which became manifest in WW1 and to a phenomenology and hermeneutics of everyday life. The historical crisis leads to an awakening that is supposed to re-establish Germany's dignity.

Heidegger connects these different strands thus:

"The self-assertion of the German University is the orginal, common will to essence. We regard the German University as the the "high school" which from science [Wissenschaft or true knowing] and through science, educates and disciplines the leaders and guardians of the fate of the German Volk.The will to the essence of the German university is the will to science as the will to to the hisorical spiritual mission of the German Volk as a Volk that knows itself in its state. Science and German fate must come to power at the same time in the will to essence. And they will do this then and only then when we--the teachers and students--- expose science to its innermost necessity, on the one hand, and, on the other, when we stand form in the face of German fate extreme in its extreme distress [Not]."

How do we make sense of it? We have dealt with the science/philosophy relationship before. More here. The reform is to unify the disparate disciplines of the liberal university through shared commitment to ontological questioning.

Heidegger goes back to the Greeks to reconnect with a particular historical moment. He interprets this as a time when the culture of one Volk (people) rises up against the totality of what is and questions it and comprehends it as the being that it is. This is what the German people needed to do in the 1930s: to confront nihilism in general and the metaphysical assumptions that underpinned nihilism.

In many ways this connection between philosophy and politics reaches back to Fichte, who established a constellation of four concepts (crisis, nation, leadership, and order) which allowed him to mediate between philosophy and politics. I suspect that Heidegger modelled his rectorial address on Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation.

It is at this point that spirit or Geist is introduced by Heidegger:

"If we will the essence of science in the sense of the questioning, unsheltered standing firm in the midst of uncertainity of the totality of being, then this will to essence will create for our Volk as world of innermost and most extreme danger, ie., a truely spiritual world."

What then is spirit? Heidegger first says what it is not:

"...spirit is neither empty acumen nor the noncommittal play of wit nor the busy practice of never-ending rational analysis nor even world reason; rather, spirit is the determined resolve to the essence of Being, a resolve that is attuned to origins and knowing. And the spiritual world of a Volk is not its cultural superstructure, just as little as it is its aresenal of useful knowledge... and values; rather , it is power that comes from preserving at the most fundamental level the forces that are rooted in the blood and soil of a Volk, the powerto arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk's existence."

"A spiritual world alone will guarantee our Volk greatness. For it will make the constant decision between the will to greatness and the toleration of decline the law that establishes the pace for the march of history upon which our Volk has embarked on the way to its future history."

More on pornography

Gary,

This is in response to your posting of October 18. It concerns pornography. On this topic, Gombrowicz has written:

"There is ... an immaturity which culture batters us against when it submerges us and we do not manage to hoist ourselves up to its level. We are 'infantilised' by all 'higher' forms. Man, tortured by his mask, fabricates secretly, for his own usage, a sort of 'subculture': a world made out of the refuse of a higher world of culture, a domain of trash, immature myths, inadmissible passions... a secondary domain of compensation. That is where a certain shameful poetry is born, a certain compromising beauty....

"Are we not close to Pornografia?"

If there is a whole host of people out there with these inadmissible secrets that we've been able to discover because of technological advancements, is not our culture responsible? Who or what has battered these people that they have retreated into their secondary realms of compensation?

Meanwhile, the fascist hysteria continues. Did you see the so-called 'debate' on Insight on SBS on Tuesday night? There was not a single attempt to address the issue that Gombrowicz raised, simply a constant vilification. If they look at these pictures they'll go on to make contact with children, etc. What about all the people who like adult pornography - do they go out and rape? do they have to make contact? The answer is a resounding 'no'. But nobody had the guts to even raise such points.

If some poor bastards get off on child-abuse images, shouldn't we be ashamed of our social organisation? Shouldn't we be asking how we can change it to ease the torture? No. WE want to solve it through more torture. What a bunch of wankers!

tribute to Derrida

I have neglected to mention Derrida's death. This tribute by Mark Taylor will disappear from the New York Times in a week or so. So I am posting it in full, given the hostility to, and ignorance of, the texts of Derrida in Australia.

A tribute by Judith Butler can be found here.

What Derrida Really Meant

Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines. Philosophers, theologians, literary and art critics, psychologists, historians, writers, artists, legal scholars and even architects have found in his writings resources for insights that have led to an extraordinary revival of the arts and humanities during the past four decades. And no thinker has been more deeply misunderstood.

To people addicted to sound bites and overnight polls, Mr. Derrida's works seem hopelessly obscure. It is undeniable that they cannot be easily summarized or reduced to one-liners. The obscurity of his writing, however, does not conceal a code that can be cracked, but reflects the density and complexity characteristic of all great works of philosophy, literature and art. Like good French wine, his works age well. The more one lingers with them, the more they reveal about our world and ourselves.

What makes Mr. Derrida's work so significant is the way he brought insights of major philosophers, writers, artists and theologians to bear on problems of urgent contemporary interest. Most of his infamously demanding texts consist of careful interpretations of canonical writers in the Western philosophical, literary and artistic traditions - from Plato to Joyce. By reading familiar works against the grain, he disclosed concealed meanings that created new possibilities for imaginative expression.

Mr. Derrida's name is most closely associated with the often cited but rarely understood term "deconstruction." Initially formulated to define a strategy for interpreting sophisticated written and visual works, deconstruction has entered everyday language. When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading clichés often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure - be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious - that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out.

These exclusive structures can become repressive - and that repression comes with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems. As an Algerian Jew writing in France during the postwar years in the wake of totalitarianism on the right (fascism) as well as the left (Stalinism), Mr. Derrida understood all too well the danger of beliefs and ideologies that divide the world into diametrical opposites: right or left, red or blue, good or evil, for us or against us. He showed how these repressive structures, which grew directly out of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, threatened to return with devastating consequences. By struggling to find ways to overcome patterns that exclude the differences that make life worth living, he developed a vision that is consistently ethical.

And yet, supporters on the left and critics on the right have misunderstood this vision. Many of Mr. Derrida's most influential followers appropriated his analyses of marginal writers, works and cultures as well as his emphasis on the importance of preserving differences and respecting others to forge an identity politics that divides the world between the very oppositions that it was Mr. Derrida's mission to undo: black and white, men and women, gay and straight. Betraying Mr. Derrida's insights by creating a culture of political correctness, his self-styled supporters fueled the culture wars that have been raging for more than two decades and continue to frame political debate.

To his critics, Mr. Derrida appeared to be a pernicious nihilist who threatened the very foundation of Western society and culture. By insisting that truth and absolute value cannot be known with certainty, his detractors argue, he undercut the very possibility of moral judgment. To follow Mr. Derrida, they maintain, is to start down the slippery slope of skepticism and relativism that inevitably leaves us powerless to act responsibly.

This is an important criticism that requires a careful response. Like Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Mr. Derrida does argue that transparent truth and absolute values elude our grasp. This does not mean, however, that we must forsake the cognitive categories and moral principles without which we cannot live: equality and justice, generosity and friendship. Rather, it is necessary to recognize the unavoidable limitations and inherent contradictions in the ideas and norms that guide our actions, and do so in a way that keeps them open to constant questioning and continual revision. There can be no ethical action without critical reflection.

During the last decade of his life, Mr. Derrida became preoccupied with religion and it is in this area that his contribution might well be most significant for our time. He understood that religion is impossible without uncertainty. Whether conceived of as Yahweh, as the father of Jesus Christ, or as Allah, God can never be fully known or adequately represented by imperfect human beings.

And yet, we live in an age when major conflicts are shaped by people who claim to know, for certain, that God is on their side. Mr. Derrida reminded us that religion does not always give clear meaning, purpose and certainty by providing secure foundations. To the contrary, the great religious traditions are profoundly disturbing because they all call certainty and security into question. Belief not tempered by doubt poses a mortal danger.

As the process of globalization draws us ever closer in networks of communication and exchange, there is an understandable longing for simplicity, clarity and certainty. This desire is responsible, in large measure, for the rise of cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism - in this country and around the world. True believers of every stripe - Muslim, Jewish and Christian - cling to beliefs that, Mr. Derrida warns, threaten to tear apart our world.

Fortunately, he also taught us that the alternative to blind belief is not simply unbelief but a different kind of belief - one that embraces uncertainty and enables us to respect others whom we do not understand. In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so that we can keep the future open.

In the two decades I knew Mr. Derrida, we had many meetings and exchanges. In conversation, he listened carefully and responded helpfully to questions whether posed by undergraduates or colleagues. As a teacher, he gave freely of his time to several generations of students.

But small things are the measure of the man. In 1986, my family and I were in Paris and Mr. Derrida invited us to dinner at his house in the suburbs 20 miles away. He insisted on picking us up at our hotel, and when we arrived at his home he presented our children with carnival masks. At 2 a.m., he drove us back to the city. In later years, when my son and daughter were writing college papers on his work, he sent them letters and postcards of encouragement as well as signed copies of several of his books. Jacques Derrida wrote eloquently about the gift of friendship but in these quiet gestures - gestures that served to forge connections among individuals across their differences - we see deconstruction in action.

By MARK C. TAYLOR

Update
An excellent tribute to Derrida by Lisa can be found over at the wonderful CultureKitchen.

Heidegger: the politics of university reform#3

This post continues on from this one Like the previous post it works off this article by Ian Thomson, as we move towards considering the politics of university reform in Heidegger's 1933 Rectorial Address entitled, 'The Self-Assertion of the University.'

As we have seen the role of the Rector is to unify the university around the various fragmented disciplines shared commitment to ontological questioning. This questioning awakens researchers to their implicit ontological assumptions, finds ways to disclose a new understanding of the being of their presupposed entities they study and transcends the older ontology. So the focus is on the unifying mission of the university at the expense of the academic freedom of individual researchers.

Heidegger opens the 1933 Rectorial address thus:

"Assuming the rectorship means committing oneself to leading this university spiritually and intellectually. The teachers and students who constitute the rector's following will awaken and gain strength only through being truely and collectively rooted in in the essence of the German university. This essence will attain clarity, rank, and power, however, only when the leaders are, first and foremost and at all times, themselves lead by the inexorability of that spiritual mission which impresses onto the fate of the German Volk the stamp of their history."

It is generally understood in terms of self-governance says Heidegger. So what is self governance? This is what has been understood to have been taken away from Australian universities as they have been transformed into corporations by the liberal state. Heidegger says:

"Self-governance means: to set ourselves the task and to determine ourselves the way and means of realizing the task in order to be what we ourselves ought to be. But do we know who we ourselves are, this body of teachers and students at the highest school of the German Volk? Can we know that at all, without the most constant and most uncompromising and harshest self-examination?...Self governance can exist only on the basis of self-examination. Self-examination, however, can only take place on the strength of the self-assertion of the German university."

What then is the self-assertion of the German university? Heidegger says that it is the will to its essence. It educates and discplines the leaders and guardians of the fate German Volk. ' Fate' and 'destiny' indicate historicality of our being-in-the-world. Historicality refers to modernity and modern machine technology.

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