Date: Sat, 31 Aug 1996 18:08:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: Why Foucault is worth discussing



Julian tells us: 

>There are few zeros greater than Derrida [ 10 minus 33 cm] -- Baudrillard is
>a total m o r o n. 

and wonders:
        
>Why anyone deems them worth mentioning leaves me breathless.

This is puzzling.    Marxism is always concerned with important trends in
intellectual thought.    Jacques Derrida,  with whom the term
"deconstruction" is most closely associated,  has carried out a rigorous
rereading of the constitutive function of language in Western philosophy
through the sustained analysis of major texts (Plato,  Aristotle,
Descartes,  Kant,  Rousseau,  Hegel,  Freud,  Nietzsche,  Husserl,
Heidegger,  and so on) in an effort to detect,  within the texts themselves,
the ways in which the postulates of reason,  presence,  properness,
immediacy,  and identity are based on the active repression of their binary
opposites (madness,  absence, impropriety,  distance,  and difference),  and
thus are not self-evident and freestanding.    

These are important keys to understanding the scholastic mysticism of
bourgeois thought.    If the history of philosophy (including Marxism) is
the history of an effort to reach the truth in its immediacy,  and if that
history can only exist as the history of the writings in which that search
has been executed,  there is a lag,  distance or difference (*differance*)
between the object sought (truth) and the means of the search (language).
It is the promise of truth that inculcates the structure of language and is
as much its function as its endless deferral and metamorphis.    This forms
the basis of much of Marxist criticism in the modern era.    It cannot be
easily dismissed out of hand,  despite much of its finespun obliquity
(Derrida in 1993: "I am not *for* socialism;  but I am not *against* it
either.   Neither am I *neither* for or against it,  nor simply for or
against the whole opposition of 'for or 'against').    "Deconstruction",
with its provisional naming and identifying properties,  has proved a useful
tool,  despite the moral equivocation and ambiguity of its progenitor.

Jean Baudrillard is a more difficult prospect.    *Simulations*, *In the
Shadow of the Silent Majorities*,  *The Ecstasy of Communication*,  and the
*Mirror of Production* offer in their own tentative way "fatal alternatives"
to the "failure" of radical responses to postmodernity.    Topics in
Baudrillard range from modes of political representation and strategies of
refusal to aesthetic theory and commodification,  situationist theory,
seduction,  gambling and obesity,  elements of which are present in
Foucault's most important work.    At the same time,  Baudrillard is of
limited value to a wider critique of postmodernism because of his
willingness to renounce substantial elements of it.   He is nonetheless
worth reading.

I am not at all comfortable about dismissing any major postmodernist writers
out of hand.    Perhaps Julian could expand on his apparent wish to do so
with Derrida and Baudrillard.

Any thoughts,  Louis (P)?


Louis Godena



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