'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'
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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'
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Derrida on Bataille
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March 29, 2006
Derrida says that in its striving for homogeneity, Hegel's discourse, unjustifiedly though necessarily, reduces the accidental, heterological elements such as restlessness, eroticism, anxiety, laughter, and the mystical. Bataille insists on these experiences, since they do not constitute a dialectical moment in the Phenomenology o0f Spirit. Hence, these resist the project says Bataille in Inner Experience ( p.323). But what does resistance to the project mean?
In his On the Sources and the Structure of Derrida's Radical Notion of Experience Zeynep Direk says:
According to Derrida, [in Writing and Difference] the attempts to stabilise the limit between philosophy and non-philosophy have always taken place through the concept of experience; and it is this attempt that determines its historical "specificity" within its dispersion throughout the tradition (, p.79). What Derrida says here is clearly the leading motivation in his reading of Bataille in "From Restricted to General Economy." The radical concept of experience, the experience of trace, becomes what it is in Derrida's work not simply because he makes an attempt to include what has so far been excluded from philosophy as "non-philosophical," but mainly because Derrida wants to underline the sacrificial logic underlying the inexhaustibility of experience. He shows in fact that the discourse of philosophy is sustained by a sacrificial logic. As Derrida's essay on Bataille makes clear, "experience" is not a term bound to a discourse that can be confined to a restricted economy, but exceeds it towards a general economy. In other words, the relation (or the non-relation) of rupture between these two different orders must be thought in terms of "experience." Perhaps, the elements of "radical experience" such as repetition, chance, play, risk, fear, untranslatability, resistance, forgetting, encounter of singularity, undecidability etc., must be conceived as the in-between of these two orders neither of which can be reduced to the other.
Bataille seeks to break out of the closure of knowledge in Hegel as interpreted by Kojeve. Radical experience is a transgression (the affirmation of play as a rule, the potlatch of signs, waste of words in the gay affirmation of death, i.e., sacrifice and challenge), of Hegel's conception of 'undergoing experience '. Bataille interprets this as being within "the circulation of prohibitions" and law and opposes it with the transgression of desire towards the non-meaning or the non-philosophical. This kind of radical experience is a "passage beyond the limits" or a "transgression", though the unlimited affirmation of singularity.
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Postmods themselves do the sort of reifying and "hypostatization" that they attack: words such as fear, chance, risk, play, forgetting do not have some innate existence. They refer to events, to other thoughts, to objects. It's debatable that humans even conceive of many words in the same way. THe postmod wants to say that, wants to emphasize ambiguity and undecidability, but then a few minutes later he's speaking about "play" as if everyone agreed on its meaning.
At least with someone such as Quine, words are carefully defined, and reference instead of meaning is the semantic , eh, strategy. And a precise semantics is also more conducive to effective politics, something postmods routinely overlook.