> Doyle wrote:
> Certainty-filled pronoucements, hmmm. If you try to undermine when I tell
> my wife not to cross the street against traffic, I will do as Marx did which
> is destroy you as best I can because your statement would endanger the life
> of my wife whom I value over yours.
>
I do not understand your bringing your wife into this discussion. I am
talking about the notion that the certainty with which scientists,
economists, and artists make about objective reality and truth is
questionable. This has nothing to do with the certitude you have
relating to the danger facing your wife. That is a fact that can be
verified immediately. Of course, there is no question of this even
happening. Your straw man argument draws an absurd conclusion because it
does not even address what I was talking about.
> Doyle said:
> A mirror reflection is not the same thing as seeing something. Mirror
> reflection is a faulty metaphor for invariant transformation of the image
> upon the retina and confuses the idea of what it means to have the same
> properties in two cases or family resemblances even.
>
Mirror reflection, in the context I used it, has to do with a way of
speaking. Your misconstrual of my metaphor is indicative of a
literalizing rhetoric that attempts to undermine an opponent's argument
by a straw man reductio ad absurdum. I was not speaking literally. In
the context of common usage, people understand the notion of a mirror
reflection. In the context of Derrida speaking about Marx attacking
Stirner, we can certainly speak of mirror reflections, since many people
(and Marx in this instance) base self-identity on trying to be like
others (think of a teenager idolizing a rock star). Marx, according to
Derrida, saw elements of sameness between his own thought and Stirner's
and their relationship to Hegelian thought. The closeness was too
mirror-like, according to Derrida, so much so that Marx's fury in
_German Ideology_ is potentially understandable as Marx's attempt to
eradicate this mirror-likeness.
> As for destroying one's opponent, well that is really about
> the question of how social systems work, not about personally
> destroying
> someone. Marx would have been writing about why St Max fails in his
> social
> programmes. What is wrong with looking at the weakness of one's
> contemporaries?
>
Again, your reductionistic tendency to literalize misses the point
altogether. Marx was indeed ostensibly attacking Stirner for his lack of
awareness of historical constructs and their conditioning of how the ego
understands itself. That is not the question that Derrida is dealing
with, not does what derrida confuse his argument with what you are
correct in noting. But, for Derrida's argument, your statement is
_obvious_. The element in Marx's critique of Stirner that Derrida finds
interesting is the ferocity of the attack, as well as the fact that
Stirner hold positions that Marx really should, according to his own
logic, accept, but which Marx seeks to destroy by obliterating his
opponent. I think Derrida sees this as indicative of an ontological
tendency to reduce otherness to sameness when the other refuses to act
or think like me.
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