'Postmodernism' as Existential Threat.

Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I'm gonna port all your undeleted posts into a training set for an LLM which I will then mercilessly interrogate about your whereabouts.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I'm gonna repeatedly prompt VersionGPT to produce dissertations about Caroline Polachek, and I will repeatedly neglect to read them.
 
dilbert1

dilbert1

Well-known member
"The deconstructionist, incapable of having an effect on even the smallest detail of his world, being literally almost no longer in the world and having made absence his permanent mode of being, tries to embrace his Bloomhood with bravado. He shuts himself up in that narrow, closed circle of realities that still affect him at all - books, texts, films, and music - because these things are as insubstantial as he is. He can no longer see anything in what he reads that might relate to life, and instead sees what he lives as a tissue of references to what he has already read. Presence and the world as a whole, insofar as Empire allows, are for him purely hypothetical. Reality and experience are for him nothing more than dubious appeals to authority."
Click to expand...
version said:
I'm not a deconstructionist, but this was a little too close to home.
Click to expand...

Almost certainly the author flogging his own guilty conscience. Of course he (as everyone) is an impotent ‘Bloom’, too, also preoccupied with the “realities that still affect him,” including copious literary references, Jewish esoterica, a narrow-minded fixation on the urgent threat posed to (whose?) “presence” in 2001 by Jacques Derrida, etc.

Immediacy, as Hegel has already explained, is the most abstract determination. And our deconstructionists know well that the future of Hegel is Empire.
Click to expand...

This is set up so that a nothing-but-the-text ironic detachment is what you’re left with when you abandon “immediacy.” That “the future of Hegel is Empire” is an incredibly obscure assertion in that regard. Empire = mediation (bad) = Hegel. The terms are basically interchangeable, though it is further unclear in what sense “Empire” has a “future” that is “Hegelian,” as opposed to a recent past and present. Perhaps this statement signals the indirect endorsement of a deeper, pre-“Empire” past that was less Hegelian, less modern, less mediated, and therefore good? There’s a lot going on. Or is there?

Of course, the authors are at great pains to let us know how little they care to be understood, the contrived affect of superiority over those who would approach what they write at an intellectual level (rather than with the immediacy of l’appel) providing a convenient excuse for poor articulation. Style over substance is a credo Tiqqun would likely admit to proudly embracing. One sometimes wonders why they dwell on commentary on philosophy at all, other than for a certain stylistic effect. Often playing fast and loose with citations (i.e., assimilating influences to their quasi-religious narrative), and with varying degrees of insight no doubt, the decision to invoke Hegel here seems rather arbitrary. If what’s intended is the further equation of Hegel with deconstruction, the caricature reaches new heights and the entire project of a “critical metaphysics” can then hardly be distinguished from a “deconstructionist” one. Tiqqun, performatively dismissing the life of the mind tout court, nevertheless have already done our densest readings for us, having immersed themselves in the elevated but no less parochial theoretical preoccupations of France’s finest academic institutions, so soberly taking this discourse for the ethico-politico-metaphysical battlefield of contemporary humanity. The most exquisite flavors of invective can then flow forth in all their italicized glory. For all the tough talk, and to a degree they could hardly recognize, Tiqqun are more of an offspring of what they decry than its “irreconcilable” opponent.
 
version

version

Well-known member
I'm settling into treating them as a curiosity and a warning, much like Land. They're fun and have their moments, but you can see the dead ends and danger all over them. Some of Intro. to Civil War is incredibly dull too.
 
dilbert1

dilbert1

Well-known member
@version that’s my own approach now as well. I got a little carried away airing out my own guilty conscience. I think in the beginning of the book they talk about aspiring to a “negative anthropology,” which has a certain Landian ring. Tiqqun grapples for a “pre-humanist” restoration while Land defers to a literally post-human horizon. Horseshoe theory of anti-humanism?
 
version

version

Well-known member
I don't see much similarity between them beyond an extreme use of D&G that lends itself to fascism and a shade of transgressive glamour.
 
version

version

Well-known member
"Critical Metaphysics is the experience that… with open eyes, celebrates more each day the excesses of the disaster."
Click to expand...

That does sound like Land. I haven't read that one yet.
 
dilbert1

dilbert1

Well-known member
Also funnily enough in that “Critical Metaphysics” essay there are also multiple references to Hegel, all in the affirmative (and characteristically elliptical, if less ambiguous), but without fundamentally altering the overall orientation shared in the later text you cited. Maybe this speaks to a different emphasis of argument in the respective pieces, or even a diversity of mind in the pages of the journal, but what’s certainly consistent in both is the strong odor of half-baked acuity, and a Heideggerianism (however proleptically disavowed via juvenile insults) so taken for granted in all French ‘postmodern’ theory.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top