From: colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1999 15:17:12 -0700
Subject: Dialectical dialectics


brent:
      I can only think that in refering to the 'grand narrative of
dialectics' you are thinking of the Hegelian dialectic of Becoming. And
you'd certainly be right to characterize this as a grand narrative:
Hegel, to my mind, was the last great philosopher of totalizing systems
(consequently, of course, Lyotard has major problems him). However,
there is a division within Hegel's own thinking, and I would suggest
that both my comments about oppositional politics and Lyotard's work in
general is indebted to one half of this division. The contradiction in
Hegel is between his dialectical method on the one hand - which makes
things radically relational, or, in more Saussurean terms, differential,
and thus non-identitarian - and, on the other, his all subsuming
teleology of World Spirit which aspires to a kind of cosmic, overarching
unity. Hegel's dialectical method is triadic, moving from thesis to
antithesis and finally (this is the moment Lyotard would resist)
synthesis. Lyotard, if he spoke in these terms (which generally he
doesn't), would keep dialectics at the perpetually disruptive tension
between the initial stages of thesis and antithesis. Very much like
Adorno, he would refute the synthetic moment as a necessary violence.
      The dialectic I was invoking was of this destablizing kind, not
the Hegelian totalizing kind. This is all present in Adorno's 'Negative
Dialectics'. Indeed, Lyotard seems greatly influenced by Adorno,
although where they depart is the matter of the subject, with Adorno
firmly trapped in a humanist philosophy of the subject. For an article
that I'm pretty much paraphrasing here (and which does comprare lyotard
and Adorno), see:
    'The Politics of Nonidentity: Adorno, Postmodernism-And 
     Edward Said' by Fred Dallymayr, in Political Theory, 
     Vol.25, No.1, Feb 1997, pp 35-56.
cheers,
Col