Date: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 23:57:24 -0500
Subject: Re: Objectivity and Ideology



>Forget M. Heidegger - he isn't talking about subjectivity - he is
>talking about Being - a certain kind of privileging of
>nonidentity - an attempt to think without concepts and then
>privilege the results. Bad stuff that.  Both metaphysical, as
>Adorno successfully demonstrates, and authoritarian (as
>Derrida demonstrates

I do think this is q bad characterization -- in that it seems to neither
reflect upon its own terms He's not talking about subjectivity, he's
talking about being.  Seemingly he counters them for very specific reasons.
My understanding of  H.is premised on the view that he propose  that being
and identity are not equivalent and can never be ( a Platonist/ Kantian
logic dominates his thinking on this point -- which is probably re-enforced
by his understanding of Husserl's phenomenology)  -- The arguement goes
something like this -- Identity (which is our perception of ourself as an
object into the world)) is a construct of language. Language is a
technology by which we put things into the world.  The non-identity of
being is existence  within its  totality, it lies outside of  conscious
though it must also  be conscious of the fact that the world outside of its
symbollic ordering  is not for us, It is fear and the drive for control --
egoticism that makes us believe it is being held in reserve for us  rather
than being aware  that we are part of it. Adorno's humanism rooted in the
Enlightenment tradition (German Idealism) of course  would have to find H.
metaphysical given the only materialism he knows are those of Marx and
Weber are themselves rooted in a romantic metaphysics of fulfilment, as for
Derrida the idea of an non metaphorical being that can not be open to
interpretation because it  consciously acknowledges the limits of the
representation of being and claims that there is something beyond that
representation in which it is grounded and that thing is not metaphysics
but being itself ( consciousness)-- must seem authoritarian because here is
a claim for a fixed meaning not rooted in language but in the notion of an
authentic  experience of the self.  I would propose that at worst H. is a
romantic given he would find our completion in the restoration of nature
and the primacy of origins, and that it was probably this that mde Nazism
seem so attractive to him given its own anti-bourgeois rhetoric and bias
against technology. More to morrow.  This lengthy precis does not mean I
buy H. view but they do come in handy in that they do necessitate that we
view any statement in terms of its interriority, exterriority, anterriority
and posterriortiy  which means atlest to me that when I have the patience
and time there is no possibility of jumping to conclusions-- no matter
whose authority is called into play.
More tomorrow, I've had a long day trying to construct Jasper Johns and
thisis all I can muster at this hour. .

 )....  Has anyone seen any good feminist
>critique's of Heidegger?  I don't know if Irigaray talks about
>him at all....