Date: Thu, 05 Mar 1998 22:31:06 +1000
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)....  Has anyone seen any good feminist 
> critique's of Heidegger?  I don't know if Irigaray talks about 
> him at all....
>
Well, Herr Heidegger does actually talk about subjectivity, if only 
to pour scorn upon it. He does want to talk about Being, but he gets 
there through the being of beings- dasein. He must, therefore, and 
does, tread along the shores of subjectivity. What he claims is that 
subjectivity is necessarily tied to objectivity; big surprise, I 
know. He claims that objectivity and subjectivity exist in a 
relationship whereby the escape into the one can only intensify the 
claims of the other. Thinking avoids this trap by thinking Being 
(Sein), a potentially revelatory experience for beings if they think 
their relationship to Being. Lots of good stuff in there for ecology.

However, as you point out, there are big problems. I think you can 
argue that it is Adorno who points out the authoritarian problems in 
Heidegger (the jargon of authenticity) and Derrida who points out the 
metaphysics, especially the metaphysics of presence which is his real 
problem with Heidegger; that is, for Derrida, Heidegger privileges 
the metaphysical presencing of Being.

Claire Colebrook has tried to trace gender difference through to 
asking if it is difference in Being, with a very tricky reading of 
Irigaray, Heidegger, Derrida, and Butler. Don't know if it has been 
published.
 
> I also wouldn't want to reduce the subject-object dialectic to 
> the will to power.  That seems a bit too arbitrary (why not 
> desire?  why not reason?  why not imagination?  why not 
> liberation?  why not the struggle for recognition?  why not 
> survival of the species?)
Because they're all power(s) says Herr N.


gilligan.