To Chris and other others:
On Kampf/strife: When, in the context of his explication of the
Heraclitean polemos, Heidegger translates the latter an 'unsprungliche
Kampf' (In 1935's IM)--a primordial struggle which first gives rise to the
contenders as such (Heidegger is on the way to a-letheia)--he is in part
obliquely critiquing the cult of personality then centered around Hitler's
Mein Kampf! Of course, it is the most dangerous possible strategy of
critique, for by attempting to appropriate the language of the Nazis in
order to move 'the movement' in another direction, he risked simply
allowing his own language to be coopted by that movement in turn.
(Lacoue-Labarthe's betrayal thesis--which he borrows from Blanchot--is thus
too simple.)
On Violence: In addition to the sense of violence described in B&T
(doing violence to our ordinary conceptons in order to break-through to the
temporal structure ontologically conditioning those conceptions), there are
at least two other senses intended by those who say that Heidegger's
Auseinandersetzungen are 'violent.' These two sense correspond with the
two main brances of contemporary hermeneutics (which go back to the early
and the later Heidegger, respectively).
1. The early-Heidegger/Gadamerian sense: readings are violent
insofar as they refuse (implicitly or explicitly) to respect the
self-conception of the author. But, as Gadamer credits Heidegger with
having taught him, every interpretation is violent in this sense, for if
the interpretation did not suppose that it had discovered some meaning in
the text which the author had missed, then it would not be an
*interpretation,* but only (the acolyte's dream of) a pure exegesis (which,
were it possible, would be superfluous!). Freud's conception of the
analysand's motivated self-deception ('miscognition') and Marx's critiques
of 'false-consciousness' (being mistaken about the real sources of one's
ideology) would fit in this category.
2. The later Heidegger/ Derridean sense (which stems from
Heidegger directly and by way of Levinas): Derrida accepts and
hyperbolozes the assumptions implicit in the Gadamerian view that every
interpretation is violent, such that A). the author has no privileged
access to the meaning of her text and B). since 'no context can determine
maning to the point of exhaustiveness,' meaning necessarily excapes the
textual parameters set up by the author to contain it. If the author is
thus only the first reader in the open-ended discursive community within
which the text becomes meaningful, then 'violence' in the Gadamerian sense
is not only unavoidable but actually beneficial; it helps resist
hypostasizing the author's authority and thereby closing off the potential
meaningfulness of a text. Does this mean that for Derrida 'hermeneutic
violence' is a toothless charge? No, for JD hermeneutic violence is the
reader's failure to respect the alterity of the text. (Hence an 'ethics of
reading.') This means that an interpretation, while picking up on what the
author has forgotten, overlooked, etc., must be careful not to claim the
completeness of its own interpretation.
Here--under the influence of the later Heidegger--Derrida's
textualization of ontology is quite apparent; as Heidegger thinks Being
cannot be completely understood (or conceptually circumscribed) by any
number of metaphysical interpretations, so Derrida holds that the text
cannot be exhausted by any number of readings. [If Being is the sole
'positivity' in the later Heidegger's thinking (but a curious positivity
that lends itself to 'negative theology'), then perhaps Heidegger is the
sole positivity of Derrida's].
Iain
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
On Kampf/strife: When, in the context of his explication of the
Heraclitean polemos, Heidegger translates the latter an 'unsprungliche
Kampf' (In 1935's IM)--a primordial struggle which first gives rise to the
contenders as such (Heidegger is on the way to a-letheia)--he is in part
obliquely critiquing the cult of personality then centered around Hitler's
Mein Kampf! Of course, it is the most dangerous possible strategy of
critique, for by attempting to appropriate the language of the Nazis in
order to move 'the movement' in another direction, he risked simply
allowing his own language to be coopted by that movement in turn.
(Lacoue-Labarthe's betrayal thesis--which he borrows from Blanchot--is thus
too simple.)
On Violence: In addition to the sense of violence described in B&T
(doing violence to our ordinary conceptons in order to break-through to the
temporal structure ontologically conditioning those conceptions), there are
at least two other senses intended by those who say that Heidegger's
Auseinandersetzungen are 'violent.' These two sense correspond with the
two main brances of contemporary hermeneutics (which go back to the early
and the later Heidegger, respectively).
1. The early-Heidegger/Gadamerian sense: readings are violent
insofar as they refuse (implicitly or explicitly) to respect the
self-conception of the author. But, as Gadamer credits Heidegger with
having taught him, every interpretation is violent in this sense, for if
the interpretation did not suppose that it had discovered some meaning in
the text which the author had missed, then it would not be an
*interpretation,* but only (the acolyte's dream of) a pure exegesis (which,
were it possible, would be superfluous!). Freud's conception of the
analysand's motivated self-deception ('miscognition') and Marx's critiques
of 'false-consciousness' (being mistaken about the real sources of one's
ideology) would fit in this category.
2. The later Heidegger/ Derridean sense (which stems from
Heidegger directly and by way of Levinas): Derrida accepts and
hyperbolozes the assumptions implicit in the Gadamerian view that every
interpretation is violent, such that A). the author has no privileged
access to the meaning of her text and B). since 'no context can determine
maning to the point of exhaustiveness,' meaning necessarily excapes the
textual parameters set up by the author to contain it. If the author is
thus only the first reader in the open-ended discursive community within
which the text becomes meaningful, then 'violence' in the Gadamerian sense
is not only unavoidable but actually beneficial; it helps resist
hypostasizing the author's authority and thereby closing off the potential
meaningfulness of a text. Does this mean that for Derrida 'hermeneutic
violence' is a toothless charge? No, for JD hermeneutic violence is the
reader's failure to respect the alterity of the text. (Hence an 'ethics of
reading.') This means that an interpretation, while picking up on what the
author has forgotten, overlooked, etc., must be careful not to claim the
completeness of its own interpretation.
Here--under the influence of the later Heidegger--Derrida's
textualization of ontology is quite apparent; as Heidegger thinks Being
cannot be completely understood (or conceptually circumscribed) by any
number of metaphysical interpretations, so Derrida holds that the text
cannot be exhausted by any number of readings. [If Being is the sole
'positivity' in the later Heidegger's thinking (but a curious positivity
that lends itself to 'negative theology'), then perhaps Heidegger is the
sole positivity of Derrida's].
Iain
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---