File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1999/avant-garde.9903, message 224


From: "Ann Klefstad" <klefkal-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us>
Subject: Re: Jacques Derrida?
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 19:54:00 -0800




----------
> From: Carol L. Hamshaw <CL_Hamshaw-AT-bc.sympatico.ca>
> 
> whats the difference between a theorist and a philospher? i'm not
suggesting
> they are the same but what are the differences to you as you use those
words?
> 
I guess to me, and probably to others, a philo-sopher, a lover of wisdom,
in other words, has a certain relationship to truth-seeking. Such a one
perhaps holds assumptions about  "truth" as something that stands still, a
nominative quality. This person may also assume that once a distinction is 
made, it stays made.

A theorist, in contrast, is defined purely in the performance of an action,
that is, doing theory. It's a tautological definition, and this
tautologicalness is for me theory's defining characteristic. Why I brought
up the Braided Man--he manufactures items that exist only for himself, on
his own terms. The rhetoric (in the Braided Man's case, white cardboard
boxes and descriptions) in which he houses these things, however, make them
real for the rest of the world, give them currency and utility. Now, I have
loved theory and theorists, but when I first began reading this vast
Fluttering corpus, it wasn't called "theory," but "theory of . . ." things.
In other words, the word "Theory" always took an object. Now it takes only
an abject--sorry. But since people have begun using the word "theory" w/o
an object, a sort of Theory of Everything has grown up, a "Theorie den
Als-Ob," a riskless doubled universe of consequenceless thought and
disembodied and thus painless ideation.

Kierkegaard, whur are ye when we need ya?

So I don't quite think Jacques D. is a "theorist" --rather, a philosophe,
because, in his crushing knowledge of the terrible 20th century
consequences of belief of all kinds, he writes without mentioning its name,
as one doesn't mention, cannot say, the terrible name of God. But
philosophical questions haunt his work, which takes the shape that it does
because of the unnameable around which it is wrapped.

Ann Klefstad 


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