"Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."
-J Hillis Miller Yale School of Deconstruction
----- Original Message ----- From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 3:32 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] do people sill read post-structuralism
> Chris Doss: 'Just about every European philosopher post-1930 has been
> influenced by Heidegger in one way or another, because anybody trained in
> the history of philosophy can read him and see that he was fucking
> brilliant. Not being influenced by Heidegger is like being in the Solar
> System and not being affected by the gravitational pull of the sun.'
>
> We get it Chris, you have a hard-on for the Nazi in the lederhosen,
> chopping logs in the cabin in the woods. To me, it was like learning to
> speak Chinese, and never going to China. He was an influence, a negative
> one. His dismantling of the rationalist tradition was a dead-end whose
> only virtue was to create a private language so that initiates could
> recognise one another - rather like the fans of Tolkein or World of
> Warfare. Speaking Heideggerian reminded me most of Edwin Abbott's fable
> Flatland, set in a world of two dimensions. The hero, finding himself
> incapable of explaining what objects with mass are, spots a sphere passing
> through flatland, and calls to his hosts, look, a sphere! They look at him
> quizzically and explain that they just saw a small point expand into a
> large circle and then shrink down again to a point.
>
> You can argue that there is no relation between Heidegger's politics and
> his philosophy, but there is, as he himself insisted. The anti-rational
> project was coterminus with fascism. Destruction of ontology = book
> burning; Being-towards-death = Nazi death cult; authenticity = German
> romanticisim; 'The They' = the working class; their 'endless chatter' =
> democracy. The turning point in his argument is the claim that the They
> can never be anything like a collective subject - namely a refutation of
> popular democracy, which he was attacking in Georg Lukacs, his rival in
> 1923 for the man with the answer to the question of the age, 'alienation'.
> Heidegger's answer was a descent into stupidity, Lukacs' was socialism. I
> prefer the latter.
>
> Heidegger's gravitational pull was indeed great, as great as the
> gravitational pull of atavistic stupidity and violence was in the 1920s
> and 30s. Few people escaped its influence, more's the pity. It has taken
> us a long time to awaken from that nightmare, it was shameful of the
> disoriented leftists of the 1970s to revive that reactionary project.
>
> Having invested the effort of learning Heideggerian, it is understandable
> that you do not want to abandon your investment. But it isn't doing you
> any good. It is just a daft hobby, like stamp-collecting. Like the Who
> sang, 'many, many times before, Messiah's pointed to the door, but
> no-one's had the guts to leave the temple..'
>
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