shag wrote:
>
>> Maybe he contradicts this later in the book, but to me it reads: a bunch
> of lazy English lit majors who want to read philosophy without really
> reading it.
(My eyes won't let me go on reading Tilottima Rajan, & the machine I use to project text on the screen is too clumsy to use in browsing, so I'm operating here on the basis of an imperfect memory of texts I never quite mastered to begin with.)
Rajan certainly read the philosophers -- read them enough to disagree sharply with Derrida's treatment of Sartre's presentation of Heidegger; Derrida et al claimed Sartre misunderstood Heidegger; Rajan says, No, he didn't misunderstand H, he disagreed with him. Her book is in fact an attempt to trace in some detail the phenomenological roots of deconstruction -- and (I think) she is arguing that Sartre was more important than Heidegger.
Whatever. I still suspect the whole thing was a false turn, but certainly Rajan was not a "lazy English major" pretending to know philosophy.
Carrol