I really don't care if you guys read Heiddeger's later works on metaphysics and technology for the "poetry." At some point I may pick it up again myself on a lazy Saturday afternoon. You never know. But for poetry, I have been reading Yusef Komunyakaa's "Neon Vernacular." The purpose of its poetry is quite different than pronouncing on world history from a metaphysical position, and I find it more gratifying.
Honestly, my purpose was not to convince you that you are wrong to read Heidegger. It was to try to get my bearings and to try to help clarify some things for myself. That's why I read Bourdieu. In the last six months, rereading the pragmatist philosophical essays of Charles Sanders Pierce (he's not German or French or English, by the way, although that is really neither here nor there) has been helpful. I find him much more congenial as a philosophical thinker and writer than the decons.
I probably had enough of the humanties theory binge of the eighties (early eighties in my case) when I went to school at the west coast headquarters of the deconstructionist mafia. The Derrida worship was rank. Paul DeMan came round to lecture on "Errinerung" and "Gedachnis" (sorry that English ASCII doesn't have the umlaut) in Hegel to reverent faculty and grad students. "Theory" was to be the royal road to career advancement for young professors. Whole lingos were a-brewing: differance (accent on the a), rhizome, pli (Deleuze), suture, slippage, abjection (Kristeva), postmodernism, episteme (Foucault), phallogocentrism (a feminist perversion, I think), in piles of books that no one (not even the professors who purported to know) could possibly read or adequately grasp in the time allowed by the syllabi, they were so "liberated" from "ordinary language." I was much too "traditional," thinking that I should know my subject matter and use only such language as enabled me to make sense of IT, and help my reader to understand what I was getting at, not use IT to support some new language fetish that I had developed. But it became clear that that wasn't going to get anyone's attention. Other complications of life and obligations intervened, and I really couldn't adequately prepare for exams -- not that that I really CARED anymore.
It seemed to me like the most improbable interpretations of literature were granted status if they simply "used" the "latest theory." I felt proscribed from asking: "So, you're telling me that Moby Dick is about differance (with an accent over the a), and that Ralph Waldo Emerson was the American Heidegger or Derrida? You grant the chataqua orator more credit than he deserves. There's often more bogus afflatus in Emerson than there is careful thought. You want to talk about an American thinker whose cannonization gave rise to grandiose delusions of individual genius, it's Emerson. Witness his boffo heir Harold Bloom."
So chalk it up to cleaning cobwebs and letting you guys overhear. I just refuse to write like a deconstructionist or Jean Baudrillard. You can chide and chastise me all you want, but it won't happen. Why would I want to baffle myself?
The last few posts have been pretty weird. I think I'm going to have to go find a book that has NOTHING to do with "theory."
Oh, "The God of Small Things" is a wonderful novel. I have to get back to finishing it.
You guys know any good books written recently about union activity?
Peter Kosenko
============================================================= Peter Kosenko Email: mailto:kosenko at netwood.net URL: http://www.netwood.net/~kosenko ============================================================= "Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe."--Benjamin Franklin