[lbo-talk] Conversation with Derrida

Eubulides paraconsistent at comcast.net
Fri Nov 6 20:36:32 PST 2009


On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 5:50 PM, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:


> ``there are hints here of the wider issues raised in this thread.'' I'd
> hoped we could get there, but it doesn't look good.
>
> CG

==========================

What, the Searle-Foucault friendship and the manner in which they thought about truth and histories of "the" idea of reason?

Searle:With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes. http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/john-searle-on-derrida/

Major interpretive concessions have to be granted to develop substantial connections between Searle and Foucault, especially on the issue of truth. The result is that the reader is often left feeling that both Searle and Foucault have implausible accounts of truth and that [Donald] Davidson, who Prado returns to over and over again, has offered the best that philosophy can give on the subject. foucaultacrossthedisciplines.googlepages.com/Koopman_Paras_Review.pdf

Or are you intimating your curiosity on the Searle-Putnam collaboration with Gerald Edelman re "Neural Darwinism" which has this little gem tucked in the first few pages?

"The position I will take here is that this is just the case: the environment or niche to which an organism must adapt is not arranged according to logic, nor does it have absolute values assigned to its possible orderings...When we consider the world, there is no given semantic order: an animal must not only identify and classify things but also decide what to do in the absence of prior detailed descriptive programs[.] [GE, ND pages 24-26]

I think/guess that Searle's thought quite a bit about a biopolitics of cognition that his published work barely hints at; yet if we are to take his collaboration with Edelman, like his friendship with Foucault seriously we've barely begun to ask good questions regarding thinking about/with minds, ecologies, climates, technologies in an era of melting polar ice sheets yada yada

Just *asking*,

Ian



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