This isn't a tort to any thread on Derrida. It is just a response of some sort to acknowledge some of the posts from Yoshie, Angela, Jim Heartfield, Christian Gregory, and others.
I've mention this before, but for anyone interested there is a very good and very short series of essays by Octavio Paz called, _Children of the Mire, Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde_, Harvard Uni Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1974. This collection is not really about poetry, as much as it is about the intellectual movements since the French revolution which were given expression as poetry, particularly Latin American and Spanish poetry.
Under 'The Closing of the Circle', and subheading, 'Revolution/Eros/Meta-irony', Paz writes:
"The most remarkable similarity between Romanticism and the avant-garde, the crucial point of similarity, is the attempt to unite life and art. Like Romanticism, the avant-garde was not only an aesthetic and a language, but also an erotic and a political frame of reference, a world-view, an action: a life-style. The urge to change reality appears among the Romantics just as it does in the avant-garde, and in both cases it branches off in opposite yet inseparable directions--magic and politics, religious temptation and revolutionary temptation." (103p)
It is in juxtaposition to this moment, that I would like to look at our own period and Yoshie's last two posts titled, "Logics of Failed Revolt.." and "Re: Derrida". In other words I agree that Hegel is somehow central to understanding this sweep from romanticism to the avant-garde, and more particularly the latter, in its turn into a postmodernity. But this view requires other aspects of the earlier Romantic period in order to see the relation to Hegel and some of the analogies to his historical context.
For example, I think it is important to remember that one components of the French Revolution was its announcement that the dawn of an age of science, industry, and reason had begun. This was more than just propaganda coming from the Committee for Public Security under the reign of Terror--a meta-narrative in the ironic if there ever was one. Besides the morning executions held to celebrate and herald the new day, there were concrete institutional changes made that were intended to assure the rhetoric of enlightenment, science, and industry would become facts of daily life. For example, the creation of the metric system or the SI, and the conversion of all the Royal institutes and departments into nationalized public bodies. And for the rest of the century, these institutes and departments would compete with both England and Germany in a purely nationalistic spirit in mathematics, physics, and chemistry--in consort with the dwindling French geo-political and colonial struggles.
It should be emphasized that these intellectual struggles were conducted along the lines of our own cold war period. That is achievements in the sciences were considered tantamount to military advantage, since many of these had military applications. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to say the primary reason for this emphasis and its concomitant allocation of resources was to promote and project national power.
As science and industry became the primary focus of public resources this attention effectively marginalized the arts and humanities, and insured the eclipsed of their importance. We see this movement in philosophy as a rise to dominance of positivism and empiricism and their insistent emphasis on nominalisms of all flavors. Meanwhile against this dominant foreground, the languishing arts and humanities undergo one reaction after another oscillating between absolutes of embrace and rejection in a perpetual cycle of avant-gardes. So, the lines are drawn where science and industry are considered the highest achievements of bourgeois culture, while the older, quasi-aristocratic arts and humanities undergo a profound alienation from the bourgeois realm, by turns composing its worst critics and deepest lovers.
Hegel could not have known what was to come, but he certainly understood the implications of the absolutist program implicit in natural philosophy, physical science, and their rational nominalisms. His almost incoherent ragging on about science must have been motivated by more than just a few of its modest results. In some metaphorical sense, these results were embodied in the Napoleonic armies who arrived in Jena, on the eve Hegel completed Phenomenology of Mind. The French armies were no doubt carrying Lavoisier's gunpower formula in their muskets. Indeed, the wolf was at the door.
I am fascinated by this amazing historical scene. I don't think we have ever escaped this confrontation. And, it is for this reason that I think the modernist and postmodernist avant-gardes in the arts and humanities can be associated with and partly understood as a series of embraces and rejections of Hegel's program to secularize and rescue metaphysics and re-establish its classical supremacy. In a sense the arts and humanities are metaphysical projects of their own sort and in some irrational way they identify with or look towards philosophical systems with an endearing glance as if to say whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks.
What I am reading at the moment is Horkheimer's Critical Essays, his and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and slowly slogging through Negative Dialectics. It is fascinating stuff to read in relation to both Heidegger and the French sequence--an endless cat and mouse story as they chase each other round and round the same darkened rooms.
Chuck Grimes