Date: 	Tue, 8 Apr 1997 21:00:58 -0400
From: "kenneth.mackendrick" <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: Re: Derida, Habermas, and the Other



  Bayard G. Bell wrote:
> Let me go ahead and transcribe the exchange between de Man and Hertz
> that I mentioned in my previous post....

I won't repost the very interesting conversation between de Man and Hertz...
thanks for posting it though!!!!

It seems to me that what de Man is getting at is the fundamental, structural, 
impossibility of translation, and subsequently, interpretation, in total.  The point is 
that apprehension (a prosaic notion) does not lead to comprehension since 
comprehension is always just beyond, or substantially beyond, our cognitive 
capacity to understand, learn, and, know - since the historical connotations of 
language gets lost somewhere along the way.  In this sense language may be 
understood as something inhuman because it does not refer to something human 
as such - its linguisticality is distinct from that to which it actually points to.  
However - the apprehension of language, images, expressions etc. does appeal to 
something that is human - but ever elusively....  inbetween the word and the 
cognitive act of apprehension something happens....

This is how I understood the passage anyway - which I found to be a difficult 
passage to grasp in any event....

I think this reading of language is commensurate with Habermas's and Gadamer's 
analysis of language.  The living dialectic bears witness to this.  Habermas's 
notion of systematically distorted communication, Gadamer's idea of the 
fundamential incompleteability of the dialectic etc. both swim in the same current.  
Langauge is structurally limited with regards to conveying reality as it is from one 
subject to another.  However - we are linguistic beings and as Georgia Warnke 
notes "there just isn't anything else."  Language is how we communicative, 
however flawed, and there is no way around this.  Now yes, we want to take 
difference seriously - but Habermas's discourse ethic also accounts for this.  The 
process, or procedure, of moral reasoning doesn't end with a consensus (it doesn't 
even matter if language has a transcendent moment or not).  Moral conversations 
continue, on and on, and we use the tools we have to reflect on this.  Language 
cannot be used in a purely instrumental way - and this is Gadamer's insight - even 
the most diabolical intention is simultaneously an attempt to understand.  The 
critique of ideology plays a centre role here as does the notion of dialectic - since 
reality is not one-dimensional, although it seeks to be such, it is contradictory and 
unreconciled.  The intimation of freedom is given credence by our longing for 
justice, the good life, and freedom itself (our unfreedom testifies to the possibility 
of freedom).  The condition of longing indicates this - and the critique of ideology 
both illuminates it and relentlessly grapples with the contradictions in the name of 
that which could be considered human - indeed - what is human and that which is 
inhuman.
ken




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