Date: Sat, 13 Dec 1997 09:45:16 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: wittgenstein, lyotard, foucault




On Fri, 12 Dec 1997, jon roffe wrote:

> Yes, I've read it.  It's hard work, but sounds like it might be worth a 
> look for you.  Foucault himself described it as his most tiresome book.  
> However, I'm fairly suspicious about thinking of it as structuralism.  
> The familiar labels that Foucault's work often gets called obscure the 
> originality of what he was trying to achieve.  I guess this is an old 
> point, but I often think of it as I read Foucault.  In terms of the book 
> itself, it really works as a pair (at least I think) with The Archeology 
> of Knowledge - it may not have been a structuralist period, but it was 
> certainly a period of some kind!  If you want some good commentary on 
> it, I found Foucault's Force of Flight (James Bernauer ?)good on this 
> area of his work.

I agree about lables--Foucault seemed furious when he was called a
structuralist.  

I had an experience this semester where someone turned to me in class and
asked "So, are you a deconstructionist?"  I was very annoyed.  I sensed
that this guy had already made up his mind about the matter and if I
answered one way I would "lose", if I answered the opposite I would also
"lose".  So I said "yes and no", which bothered him even further. 

> 
> I know this is a Lyotard list, but could you give us a little taste of 
> what you're working on re Husserl?  I don't know much about his work, 
> but I do know that Schutz, a phenomenologist, has spawned a whole gang 
> of phenomenological anthropologists.
> 

I am only starting this writing and research work but I'm reading right
now Derrida's Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry and Derrida's
Speech and Phenomena, two of his very first published books (he actually
wrote the essay Genesis and Structure from Writing and Difference before
the Introduction to Origin of Geometry, but it was published later.

I've also started Husserl's Crisis in the European Sciences and
Experience and Judgement, his two last books, neither of which he really
finished.  I hadn't intended to work with the end and go backwards to his 
earlier writings, but I can't find anywhere copies of the Ideas or the
Cartesian Mediations, etc.  

Later I hope to read Adorno's Against Epistemology, reread Heidegger's
Being and Time and Gadamer's Truth and Method (at least pertinent
passages from the latter), selections from Merleau-Ponty and Sartre's
Being and Nothingness, and now Foucault (thankyou for your comments on
that work and Archaeology of Knowledge--I will try to read both).

It is Husserl's later work that most interests me, especially his use of
the term "Ruckfage" which translates as "return-question" or a
questionning back, as well as further inquiry.  This is a questioning back
to the origins of ideality, and it carries with it the sense of
reactivation or reawakening of "sense" (the translator says sense, but
Sinn, from the German, can mean quite a lot of things including, "meaning,
essence, feeling" etc) the reactivation of that which has been buried
under sendimentation of the tradition This carries one to the point of
being responsible for the sense or meaning which is reawakened, which the
Tradition has concealed (the two German terms for reawakening and
responsibility are Verantwortung and Besinnung).  You can see Derrida
finding his own project in this material. 

I understand the "crisis" to be, in part, between genesis and
structure--between the intentional Ego, the Kantian categories of
understanding of how any knowledge at all is possible--and the structural
forms that must--if they are truly to be structures and thereby always
true, without origin or end--must exist apart from the perceiving Ego,
must have a way of presenting themselves to the intentional Ego. 
Mathematics is Husserl's example of this--or in particular geometry. 
Geometry was not created by human beings, it must in some sense always
have existed structurally in order to have been discovered and
understood--it wasn't simply a matter of a perceiving Ego coming to it
with categories that permitted its reception in the mind.  Do you see my
point?

But this is a problem because how can the intentional Ego, which is
founded on genesis--is culturally and historically determined, etc--have
entrance to structures which are not generated at a specific point in
time, to structures which are always there.  How could this have
occurred?  What arbitrary act allowed it to occur?  The danger is to view 
science and mathematics, for instance, as somehow derived from
psychologism, which is something Husserl very much rejected.

He is trying to say how we can know what we can know.  The bridge between 
the two, as I understand it, comes through language.  Other than that I
haven't progressed.  If anyone can add to these comments and has read
more Husserl than I, I would be very appreciative.

I hope I have been clear--probably not, but I tried.  He is an extremely
unfriendly writer I think, very VERY difficult to get through.  And not
just because he uses a whole set of terms that are highly idealized and
abstract but because he doesn't write particularly well!  

One question I had for people who know their Heidegger--did Husserl take
his term "Ruckfrage" (there should be an umlaut over the "u") from
Heidegger after reading the latter's Being and Time, or is this a term
that appears in earlier works by Husserl?  It sounds like something he
would have derived from reading Heidegger--especially Introduction to
Metaphysis, but I don't know if that's so.

> Has anyone else read this one?  Matt, and whoever, I would be interested 
> in thoughts on it - and, incidentally, what you thought of the Derrida 
> one.

I've only read half of Of Spirit and that was a few years ago.  I am very 
found of Lyotard's writing and thinking--but I don't think it adequately
grasps the matter at stake in this discussion.  But then again, as he
points out repeatedly, what would?

He refers to Freud's ideal of repression and delayed or deferred
response, as well as Kant's theory of the sublime.  Eric, who brought up
Kant in the first place, should comment on this.  My feeling is one of
frustration because both Lyotard and Lacoue-Labarthe try to sketch a way
of philosophically talking about the Holocaust but in doing so their use
of theory falls flat.  Is this all they can do, is what I want to say at
times.  It is not enough.

But as I said before I don't know what would be "enough".
Best wishes,
Matt