[lbo-talk] French Theory

Charles Brown charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu Sep 25 11:08:11 PDT 2008



>>> Carrol Cox

(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

^^^ CB: I read of Phenomenology as " the philosophy of appearances" . Makes sense -phenomena, not lumena , surfaces . The 20th Century bourgeois philosophy concern to get away from "metaphysics" and to the "concrete" , or the inferiority complex and denial of philosophical idealists , 75 years after the winding up of philosophy.

^^^^

^^^^

roots of deconstruction -- and (I think) she is arguing that Sartre was more important than Heidegger.

^^^^ CB: He certainly had better politics.

^^^

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

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