From: "Widder,NE" <N.E.Widder-AT-lse.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: dialectics: 'Can Philosophers read Deleuze?' 
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 11:14:14 -0000


>Nathan wrote:
> I know some not very literate
>> people who have
>> no problem understanding philosophy.  Most philosophers (i.e.,
>Aristotle,
>> Epicurus, the Stoics) have spent a great deal of time teaching
>> those who can
>> only be described as "non-philosophers" or "professional-types".

>I don't think  Deleuze meant 'non-philosophers' or 'professional types'.
>Or
>teaching philosophy to 'illiterate people'.Rather that people from
>'outside'
>philosophy could connect their own autonomous dialetics with the
>problems he
>produced.

I made a mistake when I said "professional-types".  Epicurus taught slaves.
Some of the Stoics were slaves.  The point is that philosophy has
historically not been some private domain reserved for intellectual
big-shots (medieval universities might be something of an exception, but
even then there were some famous types who had nothing to do with them, and
who wrote philosophy for politicians, and generally non-philosophical types
(John of Paris, Marsilius of Padua, Christine de Pisan)).

> He did mention surfers once. Wasn't 'Anti Oedipus'a bestseller in
>France? I
>know ' What is Philosophy? is widely read. I don't personally think the
>B.W.O is a concept that can be normalised as philosophy.

Well, you are treating 'philosophy' as a normalized and normalizing realm.
That may be fine for polemical purposes, but I doubt very much it goes
beyond that.

>>  But in any event, commonality doesn't
>> implicitly make
>> Nietzsche a grand philosopher and I don't see why you would think it
>did.
>
>It would link him to the ' common sense' of a philosophical tradition he
>is
>isolated from.

Heaven forbid.

>> Why the need to cut the two off completely, as though any
>contamination of
>> Nietzsche by Hegel would destroy the former's thought?
>
>It would destroy his idiosyncracy, his work against 'common sense'.

To suggest that there can be some complete cut off or erasure is what would
destroy his idiosyncracy, and plunge him into mere performative
contradiction.  And Nietzsche does not simply cut himself off from the
things he attacks.  He recognizes his relation to the Church, for example,
as well as the philosophical tradition.

>  That's the sort of
>> transgressiveness Derrida attacks (as Michael pointed out) and which
>you
>> seemed to imply in your last post (when I said this was a pitiful
>> conception
>> of 'beyond').
>
>You assumed.

Perhaps I did assume.  I did apologize in the last post.  But you also have
not clarified your conception of 'beyond'.  Please do so.

>>
>> > Nietszche refuses the needs of reciprocity ( between slave and
>master,
>> > problem and solution etc ) that define Hegel's dialectic.
>> >
>> 	So?  This is still a Nietzschean reversal which takes place
>within
>> an Hegelian problematic.
>
>A clear demonstration of why he must stay ignorant of it. Philosophers
>now
>don't have that possibility. As you say everything philosophical  must
>take
>place within a Hegelian problematic..

Again, if true, heaven forbid!!!

>
>and as Derrida points out about the 'we' of the phenomenology: "It does
>not
>see the nonbasis of play upon which (the) history of meaning is
>launched. To
>this extent, philosophy, Hegelian speculation, absolute knowledge and
>everything that they govern, and will govern endlessly in their closure,
>remain determinations of natural, servile and vulgar consciousness."

That does not mean thinking philosophically or thinking through philosophy
is in any sense a bad thing.  As I said before, it's a generally useful --
and very powerful -- technique to be able to read a thinker and make him say
something he is trying not to say.  More powerful than some pretended
ignorance.

>Regards to you and Micheal.
>Phil.

Nathan
n.e.widder-AT-lse.ac.uk