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<PRE>"Doyle Saylor" wrote:</PRE>
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<PRE>But there is nothing in Duchamp that is about
deconstruction of other painters.</PRE>
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The deconstructionist character of the ready-mades strikes as one sign
of Duchamp's alignment with Derrida/others. If you understand deconstruction
as an attempt to identify the irreducible instrumental nature of our existing,
then the ready-mades can be seen as Duchamp's attempt to get back to the
instrumental nature of art and of our being in the world. There are elements
of deconstruction to his _Big Glass_ work. The _marginal_ quality of the
art, which questions the accepted norms of conventional aesthetics also
is deconstructionist in its bringing people face-to-face with the _normativity_
of artistic taste and canons as a whole.
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<PRE>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.</PRE>
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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.
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<PRE>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.</PRE>
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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.
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE>As for destroying one's opponent, well that is really
about<BR>
the question of how social systems work, not about personally destroying<BR>
someone. Marx would have been writing about why St Max fails in his
social<BR>
programmes. What is wrong with looking at the weakness of one's<BR>
contemporaries?<BR>
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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.
<P>Chuck Miller</HTML>