File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9805, message 16


Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 09:50:08 -0700
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: Foucault and Lyotard


jon roffe wrote:
 
 Foucault was a trenchant critic of this
 idea of a philosopher, and if we take Lyotard's remarks
 about the failure of metanarrative, then we must move
 beyond looking for Superman, and start doing
 microphilosophy ourselves, start being specific
 intellectuals ourselves, rather than global prophets for
 emancipation and other profoundly problemmatic
 modernist notions.
 
 $~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~$~
 
 Thanks Jon,
 
 For a serious reading of the item I posted.
 
 When I compare your words (above) with mine:
 
 "I just hope that somewhere, somehow, some
 philosopher will pick up the threads of such
 speculations and explore them in the context
 of the current social disasters round the globe."
 
 It seems there is more similarity than difference in
 our respective statements.
 
 Labels are often troublesome and misleading.
 
 When I say "philosophers", I think of Foucault
 and the Archeology of Knowledge, not a bad idea.
 History is what the living say it is, constantly
 being revised and it exists only in living tissue.
 
 We are constantly digging up an conversing about
 artifacts, most of them words.
 
 In this context, I think of Rorty, Barrett, and Lyotard,
 who wrote books (not many) that went beyond name-dropping
 and explaining what a voice from the past "really meant".
 
 They became, perhaps, "specific intellectuals", interested
 in "ideas".
 
 I was looking for specific intellectual comment every
 time I tried (unsuccessfully) to find what those
 who put blips on this screen think/feel/intuit when
 they read Lyotard re: justice and the mysteries of
 language and obligation.
 
 I don't understand "microphilosophy".  Scientists immersed
 in "reductionist" theories seem to chop matter into finer and
 finer bits until it becomes indescribable - maybe just a
 prejudice.
 
 Philosophy, for me, has to do with the pursuit of wisdom, or
 how one lives a life, and perhaps assists children and others
 in living theirs.
 
 Our species-consciousness seems to be a series of
 overlapping lifetimes; chains of humans (like inchworms)
 measuring their spans, emerging from, and exiting to, the
 void of not-being.
 
 Approximately six billion.
 
 No emancipation in sight!
 
 Cheers,
 
 ~hugh~


   

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