• Mark Thwaite continues his superb interview series with none other than Gabriel Josipovici
• An accessible and straight-forward review/summary of Philosophy in a Time of Terror, and another more critical of Derrida here (excerpts here)
• Scott McLemee writes on "Big Love," Milton and polygamy
• Sunday Update: I don't usually link to the NYTimes, and tonight is no exception.
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6 comments:
Matt-
thanks for the words over at the blog,
i was referring chiefly to my seeming inability to keep it updated with any consistency, hard to be frustrated with a lack of exposure when one can't get the ideas on the page... but a good idea certainly, and perhaps the forthcoming tronti contribution at LS will be cross posted...
But I was wondering if you had any thoughts as to Borradori's central conceit in her book about the diagreement between H. and D. to be one of a squabbling over the legacy of the enlightenment. I always thought it was an interesting frame, but it never got much press
Hm. Well it's gotten a little press, and it may not have been a terribly new conceit. Maybe not enough press to reach a certain intended audience. But are you asking for my scholarly, or politician's opinion:)
Generally, it would seem a provocative, calculated and useful way in.
And yours?
Or make that nowhere near enough press, maybe.
Interesting from the tail of this:
"It should be noted that the majority of the book consists of Borradori’s uncritical essays relating the life’s work of the interviewees to their thoughts on September 11, which is unfortunate considering the wealth of material here ripe for criticism. And, given the timing of the interviews, the interlocutors could not discuss the extraordinary events that have occurred since the attacks which are arguably of greater global importance than the attacks themselves. Habermas has subsequently, for example, stated that “America’s normative authority lies shattered” because of the war in Iraq.[7] In addition to Habermas and Derrida’s collaborative rallying of European dissent in “After the War,” Slavoj Žižek contributed to the discussion in Lettre, describing U.S. policy as absolutely morally bankrupt,” and in Süddeutsche Zeitung Richard Rorty beseeched Europe to “save the world” from the “disastrous” Bush administration. As a result, Borradori’s interviews are already somewhat dated in these frenzied political times. Despite these shortcomings, Borradori has created an important work in which the giants of contemporary Continental philosophy take steps together toward confronting the Leviathan of the neoconservative United States."
Well, putting aside questions of whether or not it was good or bad from a political stanpoint,
I thought it acomplished an odd thing in that it seemed to take as granted that any conflcit between the two of them was immediately available for intetpretation or recasting in the (suddenly) common idiom called 'the legacy of the enlightenment.' For a book that seems altogether pro-derrida both in the space he gets and in general, the central interpretative frame seems strangely habermasian, a kind of foundational faith in the secondary source...
all of which is to say that the question of a secondary source (borradori's essays) lying side by side with primary texts of H and D rehearses the question of their division, and the content of the secondary source, a recasting in a common tongue, ends the question by siding with Habermas. Derrida is twice abandonded, first formally, and then content-wise.
another way of saying borradori's frame betrays a love of derrida via a striking lack of fidelity to his project.
does that make any sense?
I agree completely.
She was clearly baffled by "Kierkegaard...who would not necessarily have been a Christian, or not quite known that he wasn't a Christian," &c
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