StephenKMackSD's Blog

Below I have quoted an excerpt from Professor Gary Gutting’s book Thinking the Impossible. His very useful analysis has opened the way for me to achieve a greater understanding of Derrida’s work; which  seemed repetitive and pointless, a highly rationalized intellectual meandering. But the insights that Professor Gutting offers here makes me hopeful about coming to a new level of understanding. To  re-read Derrida with a new sense that the seemingly endless questioning has a methodological validity that had previously escaped my grasp. I had read French Philosophy of The Sixties by Ferry and Renaut, Introduction to Phenominology by Dermot Moran and Profits of Extremity by Allan Megill, all offering valuable insights and historical/philosophical analysis. Professor Gutting offers another view of the History of Philosophy, that enhances my understanding, as each one of these other books has.

‘It is not that Derrida is shy of direct criticism of other philosophers. He was quite forthright in his attack on Foucault’s treatment of Descartes in The History of Madness, and we shall see that he had no reluctance in confronting what he saw as Sartre’s philosophical failings. But Derrida distinguishes between two types of thinkers. On the one hand, there are those for whom “a certain kind of rigorous analysis could render their texts accessible and exhaustible”. These include “the great French thinkers”, who have, he says, his “profound respect”, but whom he would obviously have no hesitation in criticizing based on a thorough understanding of their views. On the other hand, there are thinkers (Greeks and Germans, it seems) of whom he says that, when he reads them, “ I feel that I am confronting an abyss, a bottomless pit in which I could lose myself”. He explicitly mentions Plato and Heidegger, but would surely have in mind Hegel (and Nietzsche). Regarding such thinkers, there is for Derrida never a question of decisive refutations; there is only an interminable process of probing deeper and deeper, suggesting new questions and new responses. To any easy dismissal (or any ultimate dismissal at all) of philosophers such as Hegel or Heidegger, his response is always, “But it’s more complicated than that”. With them, we never escape from the abyss.

However, the very act of finding interminable complications in a thinker is not only a way of elaborating and appreciating the richness of that thought. It is also a way of challenging its “mastery”’

You recall when Pretty Boy Critic (PBC) used to everywhere. I know you do, you’re just pretending to be twenty years younger than you are. Your plastic surgeon and your hairdresser both conspire to hide those two decades, but you’re looking like Joan Rivers. But back to PBC and his ubiquitous rein on all those ‘talk shows’ of the 70’s like Merv, Mike, Dick and Johnny and all of the clones of clones, that appeared and disappeared with astounding regularity: all with the same guests endlessly recycled, old faces, even some new faces resembling old faces, hawking their latest bestseller, movie or Vegas appearance or just playing the old Show Biz buddy routine. Sound familiar? Well PBC would come on in full makeup, false eyelashes, pancake and rouge, dressed like your flamboyant unmarried uncle, and dish about his latest interview with a movie star, who lit up a joint during the interview (gasp from the audience)  in that southern drawl, that almost resembled a purr. He was, in his salad days, everyone’s darling; he even did summer stock with Jacqueline Susann. Well, time has caught up with PBC, no more escorting those aging Hollywood beauties to various events, adding a much needed patina to his un-likability. He’s been reduced to reviewing movies and exclusive cabarets for a trendy New York publication, printed on salmon colored paper. Time has not been kind to the once luminous beauty that he so carefully attempted to enhance, yet he brings a style and finesse, dare I say dignity and maturity, to his writing that makes him worth reading.

Literary Hack     

‘First, Hyppolite gave up Hegel’s claim that philosophy could culminate in a “totality” that synthesized and reconciled all oppositions, and instead presented philosophy, as, Foucault says, Husserl did , as “an endless task, against the background of an infinite horizon”. Second, Hyppolite replaced the finality of absolute knowledge with the idea of “continuous recommencement”, thereby transferring “the Hegelian theme of the end of self-consciousness into to one interrogation” (recalling Kierkegaard’s category of repetition). Third, rather than absorbing all non-philosophical experience and knowledge into the absolutes final philosophical synthesis , Hyppolite , in the manner of Bergson “reestablish[ed] the contact with the non-philosophical” in a non-reductive manner. Fourth, the irreducibility of the non-philosophical led Hyppolite to look back, like Fichte rather than Hegel, to the question of how philosophy might find its beginning in the non-philosophical. Specifically, (and this is the last alteration), Hyppolite invoked the challenge of Marx, and asked , “if philosophy must begin as absolute discourse, then what of history and what is the beginning which starts out with a singular individual, within a society and a social class, and in the midst of struggle?” This invocation of the “singular individual” also refers to the fixed point of French philosophy throughout the twentieth century, the irreducibility of the free individual, which had always stood as the fundamental obstacle to a French appropriation of Hegel’s thought.'  

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/opinion/22brooks.html?_r=1&hp

Does one ever tire of the jottings of America’s premier spokesman for bourgeois heterosexual conformity, in all of its manifestations, including a penchant for the reification of the benighted tribalism known as the Abrahamic Tradition? Mr. Brooks is the apologist that propagandists could only hope for, as he frames his latest essay with the title of ‘Creed or Chaos’, an absolutely false dichotomy but a politically useful trope, in the lexicon of the professional religious apologist. Do you ever wonder why atheists become militant, obnoxious, insulting in their addressing of the dull-witted apologetics of rationalizers like Mr. Brooks? Mr. Brooks considers himself as an enlightened person, perhaps even superior to lesser beings, who do not share his religious enthusiasms: as a guide to actions in all areas of life. Now the bloody history of the Abrahamic Tradition is there for all to examine, if they will. Yet Mr. Brooks manages, like most of his fellow travelers, to focus on the very carefully chosen bits that emphasize ‘tolerance’ rather than the actuality of the authoritarian male abusing his power in the name of whatever ‘God’ is expressive of a necessary and demonstrable opportunism. In Mr. Brooks’  worldview the choices are simplistic in the extreme, almost like elementary arithmetic. Let me state my prejudice forthrightly, the American male heterosexual is utterly incapable of comprehending the notion of nuance in any of its permutations

Queer Atheist.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-sends-in-a-marine-for-education-reform/2011/04/19/AFsQaMEE_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

One thing The Great Will (TGW) cannot resist  is the heady perfume of the jackboot, it provides a frisson that suffuses his latest essay titled ‘The GOP sends in a Marine for education reform’. And the object of TGW’s latest Political Romance is Rep. John Kline, a Minnesota Republican with 25 years in the Marine Corps and on his fifth term as a congressman. But Rep. Kline is no mere means to an end, but a friendly witness, for TGW’s  attack on Public Education and Teachers Unions as the bearers of the mantle of political obstructionism, and a pernicious self-seeking, self-aggrandizing politics of civic irresponsibility: even of an unseemly display of public immorality, framed in the inimitable Political Theology of Conservatism. It is a fight between moral good, Rep. Kline, and the inherent evil of the modern Public Sector Union, teachers, in this case. TGW likes to work the most oblique angles of the latest policy questions, made fully congruent with his  ideological belief, so as to appear more deeply knowledgeable than even his political confreres.  And his rhetorical frame embraces one of consistent themes of The American Political Melodrama, David verses Goliath , albeit re-imagined as a visionary congressman  attempts to reform a sclerotic, malfeasant  bureaucracy under the  banner of ‘Education Reform.’         

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/business/20fraud.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

'Very few people have the luxury of being freely obnoxious. Most people have to watch what they say for fear of offending their bosses and colleagues. Others resist saying anything that might make them unpopular.But, in every society, there are a few rare souls who rise above subservience, insecurity and concern. Each morning they take their own abrasive urges out for parade. They are so impressed by their achievements, so often reminded of their own obvious rightness, that every stray thought and synaptic ripple comes bursting out of their mouth fortified by impregnable certitude. When they have achieved this status they have entered the realm of Upper Blowhardia.These supremely accomplished blowhards offend some but also arouse intense loyalty in others. Their followers enjoy the brassiness of it all. They live vicariously through their hero’s assertiveness. They delight in hearing those obnoxious things that others are only permitted to think.'

It is so hard to resist quoting Mr. Brooks in his tepid scolding of candidate Donald Trump. I've never met an arrogant waiter or waitress. Never met an arrogant receptionist , secretary or bus boy. Poor Mr. Brooks lives in a world where ordinary people can adopt an attitude displeasing to anyone that comes into their orbit. But to paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald, the rich are different.  Mr. Brooks soft-pedals that angle of the story, although he mentions it, in passing. It seems to me that only the rich, who answer to no one but themselves, have the opportunity to indulge themselves in cultivating their inner asshole. Mr. Trump is, of course, needy, pathetic and grasping, just like his political precursors Richard Nixon and Newt Gingrich, whose pathos mirrors the other. But Mr. Trump's pathological neediness is of such an advanced state, that even with all his success, he must make himself the center of a vulgar television entertainment , that  allows him to act out his mastery over insignificant others.And then to celebrate that mastery  over them, while they and others watch as he passes sentence on this weeks loser. Mr. Trump and Mr. Brooks have something in common, a belief in authority and authority figures: who pronounce on the lesser beings who have the misfortune to be subject to the arbitrary exercise of their will.

Almost Marx     

You have got to admire the indefatigable ambition of our self-described Little Greek Girl! She makes one respect, at the least, the scope and resilience of  that very real human aspiration. She is now an executive at AOL and has turned over the Huffington Post to a former New York Times Editor. She has time ,now , for those lunches with Barbara Walters, among others, and the leisure to reply to her former allies and fellow travelers in The Progressive Blogisphere, who have had the temerity to take legal action against her 'employment policies'. Arianna has pissed off her former progressive friends and allies, by acting not like a political altruist, but more like an a rabid Randian Capitalist, defending her acquisition by AOL as completely legitimate- if at a very inflated purchase price, to the rest of us small time players in the game of  selling ourselves in the marketplace. One must simply keep in mind that  the Huffington Post was always 'just a business', albeit with a very real ideological impetuous.
Literary Hack