[lbo-talk] Butler on Derrida

[Jeffrey Fisher]

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 21:10:05 -0700 (PDT), andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Well, W seemed to think that philosophy was not
> optional -- it was both inevitable and disastrous.
> Lenin (maybe) and Dietzgen (just guessing here) seem
> to have thought one might study it the way one might
> do theology, from the outside, as a matter of choice,
> to refute its errors, and from a better perspective
> than it offered. Or not study it it. W didn't think we
> have a better perspective (although there was one),
> that we had to return to it obessively, and that the
> point of doing it is toi get oneself free of the need
> to do it, to "shew [Brit spelling] the fly the way out
> of the fly bottle." However, W's is indeed a sort of
> "end of philosophy" view -- like Lenin's, Marx's,
> Engels's, Hegel's. And Heidegger's too. All in
> different ways, of course.

and in many respects, derrida's, too. i'm not at home, so i don't have
it at hand, but derrida somewhere in _the margins of philosophy_ (the
essay on différance?) says basically that philosophy (and here he
means that heideggerian thinking about being) is basically something
we can't do, but nevertheless have to do, because it's what we do. i
believe he uses one of those derridean phrases like "incessant
necessity", but while it's clear that he thinks it's important
somehow, it's also not at all clear that it can actually get us very
far. sorry i can't provide the quote, and so my "analysis" is
necessarily limited, but the bottom line is that derrida fits quite
nicely in justin's list (as would lévinas, btw).

i'm sorry i've missed so much of this discussion (damned work!),
although there are parts of it that clearly would have driven me nuts.

j