> I'm sure there are; isn't that what Kojeve's account of Hegel is? But
look > at where his thinking takes you: Western Democracies as the end of
History > and Francis Fukuyama. I don't know about you, but that's enough
to make me > start drinking before noon.<
well, not drinking -- i'd do that for more joyful moments. it does make me wretch all by itself...
> Seriously though, I don't doubt that there are ontological versions of
> historicism other than Kojeve's, and probably some of them are likely
> quite useful.
ahh, i think you might have missed the sense in which i asked the question. my fault. but i wasn't defending an ontological sense of history; rather i was suggesting that to counterpose ontology with history does not always work, especially when that might be or pose an ontology all its own. hence, the distinction doesn't seem to be quite so distinct...
> But do the insights their authors adduce come out of
> their ontological elements, or in spite of them? That may seem to be a
> flip question, but I mean it: right now a book near the top of my pile
> is _Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's Being and
> Time_ by Johannes Fritsche, who makes the point that left readings of
> Heidegger are...well, misreadings. I suppose I ought to know Heidegger
> better than I do before taking up a tome like that, but there it is.
i'm not the person to defend heidegger. forgive the self-citation, but just to be clear what i've already said on this, a bit from a Sept 6 post to lbo: "but that response [ie., derrida's], is hardly a sufficient response, for many reasons, not least because of a refusal to enter into the precise question of the sense in which being for heidegger is not contingency (as it was for husserl, for instance), but the facticity of fallen-ness that is elevated to an ontology." this is also the argument made by Nancy.
so, i'm far from disagreeing on heidegger. the problem i would have is that history can mean many things, and being sure that it is not an ontology is i think quite a difficult thing to do. and, my query was hardly innocent in the context of your argument that derrida is ahistorical. first, i'd suggest you read derrida rather than take seriously anything written here, including this post. second, i'd suggest that you read derrida keeping in mind your response to kojeve (and indeed a kojevian reading of hegel). that is, derrida is (as are most frenchies) working against the backdrop (yes, history) of an intimate connection between a kojevian hegelianism and the french communist party. if this kind of historiography has been denounced, that does not for all that mean that there is no longer a sense of history, does it? it simply means that it takes on certain kinds of emphases and disputes, and reading those in derrida's writings requires some familiarity with that context to make the particular idiom intelligible. i would'nt be able to understand half of the preoccupations on this list if i didn't make an allowance for a different history, and the other half still bewilder me, but i assume ignorance on my part rather than demand that everyone use my idiom in order for it to make sense to me.
if deconstruction were ahistorical in an absolute sense, then people like spivak would never have been doing subaltern historiography, for instance -- leaving aside whether this is an interesting or good historiography, it is historical. moreover, the claim that history is no longer being done or attended to reminds me of the claim made against althusser by e. p. thompson, who could only envisage one kind of historiographical practice, and a very destinal and ontological one at that. a surprising and rather absurd claim for me, since all the althusserians in australia in the 'seventies were all writing australian history. that's my lineage, though not generation. i do mostly historical research (on class composition in australia, specifically), and i've never considered derrida or althusser inimical to that. in fact, i read them because i think they help me think more rigorously about history and historiography, not less. i would think that a critique of the subject as history (and indeed history as subject) opens up the terrain of historiography rather than ends it, since the kind of history so often done was pretty fatalistic and fatal to any kind of interventionist historiography.
> To go back to Adorno, another quip of his seems relevant: this is not the
> time for first philosophy, but last philosophy. In this case, I take
that
> to mean _the objection_ that historicism lacks ontological grounds --
> a demand of first philosophy -- is something that itself must be
> criticized -- an act of last philosophy.
i'm not sure what you're saying here. i recall adorno being quite hostile to so-called first principle philosophy, but did he advocate the end of philosophy in quite this (kojevian) way? that's an innocent question rather than a lure.
Angela _________