On Fri, 1 Oct 1999 14:52:27 -0400 curtiss_leung at ibi.com wrote:
> I've never been able to understand the affinity between deconstruction
> and Adorno's ND, though. (Maybe part of the problem is what I know of
> deconstruction comes out of secondary sources, but still...)
Maybe the difference could be explained like this: deconstruction is a strategy that borders on the edge of metaphysics - a kind of negative theology. Derrida, in his debate with Gadamer, argues that Nietzsche actually goes further than Heidegger with this. Negative dialectics is emphatically compassionate deconstruction. Yeah, I know this might make some people puke. But Adorno's negative philosophy makes the expression of human suffering the condition of all truth. Heidegger talks about the care of Being.... One is surely a bit more emphatic than the other...
> In particular, deconstruction seems ahistorical in
comparison to the ND: it's a critique of concepts from the
point of view of ontology (I think).
Yeah, I'd go with that. In Negative Dialectics Adorno notes that "negative dialectics is the ontology of a wrong state of affairs" and, it could be added, this doesn't need to presuppose a "right" state of affairs....
> Now, if you take ontology and ontological arguments as
really and truly fundamental, you think this is fine -- but
if you think ontology can't and shouldn't be sundered from
history (like me)...well, you've got a problem with this
approach.
Yep. I'm quite attracted to Zizek's understanding of ontology - as radical contingency. He preserves enough of Hegel to salvage his sensitivity to the way in which history is constituted (through retroactive justifications; imposed meaning from the here and now projected backward and identified as history leading up to this point) (if it sounds like "back to the future" it is).
> One thing Adorno does in _Jargon_ to drag ontology out of its sphere as
> pure philosophy and plop it down as a mere part of a general reaction to the
> real economic and social conditions in Germany at the time of its rise.
And I'm skeptical about this... It's an interesting idea... but could the same thing be said about postmodernism today? Pomo is a general reaction to high modernism? A giving up on everything and nothing all at once? or is it a bit of both - a give of intellectual reaction to administrivia and financial trans[cendental]actions? I don't know. It sounds nice, and its a nice package to sell... but it's a bit determinist isn't it? (ah well, the truth is a lie in the form of a lie, so maybe this is a lie telling the truth).
Some Zizek:
"[Heidegger's] attempts are not only ineffectual: the true problem with them is that, on a deeper level, they incite the evil they are fighting even further..."
"Heidegger did not engage in the Nazi political project 'in spite of' his ontological philosophical apprach, but *because of* it; this engagement was not 'beneath' his philosophical level - on the contrary, if one is to understand Heidegger, the key point is to grasp the complicity (in Hegelese: 'speculative identity') between the elevation above ontic concerns and the passionate 'ontic' Nazi political engagement." (emphasis in text)
Pages 14, 15 respectively - "The Deadlock of Transcendental Imagination" in The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology
damn i miss reading zizek these days, sundered, ken