tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2991343547887142385.post5343053866669450036..comments2024-02-24T20:29:17.083-05:00Comments on MINDFUL PLEASURES: DECONSTRUCTION AND CRITICISM by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller (the gang's all here!)BRIAN OARDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695622618831825498noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2991343547887142385.post-77196671307838241942009-01-31T11:35:00.000-05:002009-01-31T11:35:00.000-05:00Very interesting post (and much more focused than ...Very interesting post (and much more focused than my desultory thoughts). I think you've inadvertently pinpointed the reason for my own attraction to some of Derrida's work in your sentence: "Once having departed from actual reality, Derrida's whole work becomes surreal." Derrida is, I think, neither a phenomenologist nor a hermeneuticist but an artist--a deeply frustrated artist trapped inside the discourse of philosophy and desperately trying to break free of it, to free himself. His work is thus, at its best, more personal than even he probably ever realized. And more Romantic. I realize that it's among the hoariest of 'saving' strategies to take a philosopher or scientist whose work has been convincingly criticized and shift the plane of discourse by calling him an 'artist' (cf. some of the lamer Freudian apologists), but in Derrida's case I think we do see a late Surrealist trapped inside the body and language of a philosophy professor.<BR/><BR/>Also, I wonder whether Derrida is simply misunderstanding Husserl or creatively misreading him (and the entire Western philosophical tradition) a la the strategies of misreading outlined in Harold Bloom's work of the 1970s (Anxiety of Influence, etc.) Derrida does seem to be a case study in Bloomian theory.BRIAN OARDhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00695622618831825498noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2991343547887142385.post-50165747751679873482009-01-30T22:06:00.000-05:002009-01-30T22:06:00.000-05:00All the peculiarities of Derrida's work come from ...All the peculiarities of Derrida's work come from his dissociated epistemology.<BR/>Derrida gets the language for his epistemology from Husserl. Everybody agreed on the starting point, that phenomenology starts with a "principle of principles" that "primordial presence to intuition is the source of sense and evidence, the a priori of a prioris."<BR/><BR/>This means that "the certainty, itself ideal and absolute, that the universal form of all experience (Erlebnis), and therefore of all life, has always been and will always be the present. The present alone is and ever will be. Being is presence or the modification of presence. The relation with the presence of the present as the ultimate form of being and of ideality is the move by which I transgress empirical existence, factuality, contingency, worldliness, etc." [Speech and Phenomena, 53-54.]<BR/><BR/>However, Husserl's choice of the words "present" and "presence" to indicate the ground of all knowledge has some very unfortunate consequences. That choice sets up a confusion between two completely different meanings of the word "presence." <BR/><BR/>One meaning is "phenomenological presence". This refers to the immediate access to being in the original act of knowledge. It does not refer to time at all. So, phenomenological presence might be better expressed by calling it presence-to-being. That would save it from being confused with the other meaning of "presence", what we should call "temporal presence", that is, the occurrence of an event at a particular moment in time.<BR/><BR/>Derrida also mentions that this living presence is "the now". This reinforces the confusion between presence-to-being and occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time. It is also unfortunate that Derrida has to use the word "form" in the phrase "the universal form of all experience". What he wants to refer to is the "universal basis of all experience", which is not a form. It is an act. But this word-slippage is also quite telling, and one of the many clues in Derrida's work that he is confusing the order of abstract concepts and the order of actual reality.<BR/><BR/>Once having departed from actual reality, Derrida's whole work becomes surreal. One cornerstone mistake is his claim that iterability is an a priori condition of the origin of knowledge, whereas in fact iterability is an a posteriori result of the original act of knowledge. Once you get the traditional realistic assertion that insight is an act that can be repeated over and over, all of Derrida's objections collapse.<BR/><BR/>I have discussed these issues at length in my article "Dealing With Derrida", which you can find on the Radical Academy web site. http://radicalacademy.com/studentrefphilmhd1.htm<BR/><BR/>Although running down Derrida's mistakes in his text is difficult, once you get the key point that he was dissociated, the whole pattern of his out-of-body thinking makes sense. Dissociation is the result of trauma, and we find it in many corners of social thinking, presumably among people who have been traumatized. There are many sources of insight into dissociation. I recommend Trauma and the Body by Pat Ogden et al. as a start.Michael Duceyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09215968773156622398noreply@blogger.com