>Well, and there is the fact I just sent three long and very densely
>pack posts on Cassirer, hoping that someone out there would read them
>and go get some Cassirer, like it and learn from it. So, I am nobody
>to complain about difficult reading. Cassirer has certainly been a
>gold mine for me.
>
I read them over the weekend and last night. I'm going to see what they have from Cassirer at the library.
>For example, Cassirer's critique of the Aristotelian object moves in a
>similar direction to Butler's critique of sex and its constructions. The
>difference is Cassirer performed a much more sophisticated critique,
>raised his critique of the concept of the object to exponential
>heights, and applied it to the foundation of mathematics.
I see what you mean by the exponential heights. One thing that interested me was reading about Cassirer's connection with the Aby Warburg Institute. Someone who opened my eyes the way Cassirer opened yours was Carlo Ginzburg, who also spent time at the Warburg Institute. Ginzburg has raised the bar for the way we explore and think about history to exponential heights I think.
>In a way, I think of Butler as a sub-school of the Eraser School, that
>I call the Smear or Schmir School. They use bad erasers at the Smear
>School so you can still make out some of the text.
Like Robert Rauschenberg? http://www.tate.org.uk/images/cms/12543w_erasuregenteel_eraseddekooning.jpg
>Anyway, it's always fun to argue if we're nice about.
>
>CG
But there's something about the sniping that this topic begets. Once in an interview, Ginzburg said he didn't like Derrida because what he was doing was so cheap. That's funny and it's easy to take from Ginzburg because he doesn't throw Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and whoever else into the same bag to be dismissed and tossed away. When people do that it's difficult not to think that there's something else besides this or that quality of the work itself that's raising ire.
