larvalsubjects Says: August 4, 2007 at 1:28 am I fully agree that thought is always “dialogical” or in communication with others. There is, however, quite a difference between a thought that is in communication with others (whether thinking with them as Lacan did with Freud, or antagonistically as Schopenhauer did with Hegel), and a thought that primarily provides commentary on another thinker. Compare Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power with Kiesel’s with Theodore Kisiel’s Genesis and Structure of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Butler works intimately with the work of a number of other theorists in her work, ranging from Freud, to Althusser, to Foucault, to Lacan and Nietzsche. She is deeply in dialogue with these thinkers, but the aim isn’t to provide a commentary on these thinkers, but to develop a set of concepts out of their work for theorizing subjectivity, attachment, and power.
Keisil’s work, by contrast, is designed to help us understand Heidegger, by looking very closely at Heidegger’s intellectual milieu, earlier lecture drafts leading up to Being and Time, and so on. Here we’re dealing with a commentary, that’s interested in getting Heidegger right.
I think we can thus think about dialogism in two ways. On the one hand, there’s the sort of dialogism we find in Plato and Aristotle. In the case of Aristotle, for instance, there’s always a survey of the positions of other philosophers, the merits of their positions, the problems, and so on. Aristotle uses this as a sort of propaeduetic for posing and clarifying the problems he’s addressing. Similarly, in Plato we have a series of dialogues with proper names (Parmenides, Gorgias, etc), which always name the site of a problem or a question. In the case of this dialogism, engagement with a particular figure is always mediated by a term that isn’t figural: the problem.
On the other hand, we have that form of dialogism pertaining to the history of ideas that is directed at the figure. This dialogism is interested in interpreting the figure not grappling with the problem. Now, to emphasize once again, I am not dismissing the legitimacy of commentary. I have benefited tremendously from Hallward’s work on Deleuze and Badiou, from Gasche’s work on Derrida, from Lawlor’s work on Bergson, Husserl, Derrida, and Merleau-Ponty, etc. What is at issue here is the way in which continental philosophy as practiced in the United States has created an environment where figures and texts are what are real, where commentary is institutionally demanded, and where a focus on problems and questions necessarily fall into the background or are only approached obliquely as filtered through how a particular figure poses questions. The issue is not at all one of a fantasmatic autonomy that would escape altogether from texts, figures, and influences.
I do find it interesting, however, how common responses such as your own are to these kinds of remarks. This indicates to me just how ingrained this way of operating is… So ingrained that it appears natural, obvious, and invisible.
Keisil’s work, by contrast, is designed to help us understand Heidegger, by looking very closely at Heidegger’s intellectual milieu, earlier lecture drafts leading up to Being and Time, and so on. Here we’re dealing with a commentary, that’s interested in getting Heidegger right.
I think we can thus think about dialogism in two ways. On the one hand, there’s the sort of dialogism we find in Plato and Aristotle. In the case of Aristotle, for instance, there’s always a survey of the positions of other philosophers, the merits of their positions, the problems, and so on. Aristotle uses this as a sort of propaeduetic for posing and clarifying the problems he’s addressing. Similarly, in Plato we have a series of dialogues with proper names (Parmenides, Gorgias, etc), which always name the site of a problem or a question. In the case of this dialogism, engagement with a particular figure is always mediated by a term that isn’t figural: the problem.
On the other hand, we have that form of dialogism pertaining to the history of ideas that is directed at the figure. This dialogism is interested in interpreting the figure not grappling with the problem. Now, to emphasize once again, I am not dismissing the legitimacy of commentary. I have benefited tremendously from Hallward’s work on Deleuze and Badiou, from Gasche’s work on Derrida, from Lawlor’s work on Bergson, Husserl, Derrida, and Merleau-Ponty, etc. What is at issue here is the way in which continental philosophy as practiced in the United States has created an environment where figures and texts are what are real, where commentary is institutionally demanded, and where a focus on problems and questions necessarily fall into the background or are only approached obliquely as filtered through how a particular figure poses questions. The issue is not at all one of a fantasmatic autonomy that would escape altogether from texts, figures, and influences.
I do find it interesting, however, how common responses such as your own are to these kinds of remarks. This indicates to me just how ingrained this way of operating is… So ingrained that it appears natural, obvious, and invisible.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment