I asked:
>pop quiz: who wrote -
>
>"All the second volume of _The German Ideology_ (manuscript in
>Engel's hand) aims at those who lay claim to what they call 'true
>Socialism'... writers who have adopted certain French and English
>communist ideas and 'amalgamated' them to their 'philosophico-German'
>premises, by considering the French or English texts, precisely, or
>as purely theoretical writings come from 'pure thought', as they
>imagine is the case for the German philosophical systems."
jayson wrote:
>>That is, these German writers abstract those movements from the
particular
needs and historical situation of a particular class--bien sur: the
working
class. So is your question an intervention against idealism,
abstracting
theory from historical practice.<<
me thinks jayson gets the nod for spotting the sense of the quote, if not the author.
I kind of burdened the citation with more tasks than is fair. the first, was to try and trip intuited understandings of a particular theorist. the second, was to point to an explanation for why such intuited understandings might take hold as they have done.
the author is Derrida, from _onto-theology of national humanism (prolegomena to a hypothesis)_ , olr, 14:1-2, 1992.
the essay discusses, amongst other things, why political and philosophic 'communication' cannot forget the idiomatic (the specific situation in which a theory or philosophy emerges), but is nonetheless compelled to brush up against it for the sake of this communication. what Derrida warns against is both a nationalism which either wants to purify a communication of 'other national idioms',
{{"... a war in the course of which ... you see the enemy within, the one who in France likes German philosophy too much, who in the USA is over-impressed by French philosophy, or in Britain by Continental philosophy, etc."}}
or wants to absorb them without any trace of their idioms, their differences - a move which can only be accomplished if one believes (as grun did, and as I think many in the US do now) that one's own philosophy is the pure expression of a philosophy without idiom, I.e..,
{{ " ... as they imagine is the case for the German philosophic system."}}
also:
"the United States of America have played a quite odd and revealing role in this question of philosophical nationalism since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Today it is the market or the Kampfplatz, as you wish, which is the most open to the greatest intensity of exchanges, debates, ... it would be easy to show that the USA is the major place, the obligatory passage for all philosophic circulation, with all the problems that that poses... among other things the place today of Anglo-American idiom is the socially and economically the most powerful legitimating discourse; taking into account also of the fact ... that there seems to be developing ... a sort of American nationalist renewal or reaction which claims to defend or restore, against the European invasion ... a more properly American tradition."
angela