Date: Mon, 2 Oct 95 12:30 BST
From: N.E.WIDDER-AT-lse.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Interpretation vs. Life


Sam,

Clearly there are differences (even big ones) between Nietzsche, Foucault, 
Derrida and others.  My point was only that this same criticism is applied to
all of them -- usually by people who like to lump them together as though there
were no real distinctions between them.

As for whether Foucault's disciplines/ethics, Derrida's speech/writing,
Heidegger's Being/being, etc., are "binary distinctions which by way of 
negative theology can be taken as foundations" -- I'm not sure I agree with
this, although I'd like to know more about why you think this in the first
place.  Derrida's arche-writing or differerAnce, for example, precisely
functions as a hinge to deconstruct the speech/writing and identity/difference
distinctions.  It is neither a combination of those two terms in the
binary (dialectical or otherwise) nor is it subsumable into either one of them.
And it is in no way a foundation because differAnce paradoxically cannot be
'called into being' prior to what it is supposed to 'ground'.

As for these postmodernist who wax ironically in their millenarian hope for an
end to grand narratives, I'll leave that aside, since I don't precisely know
who these 'postmodernists' are in the first place (the term postmodernism 
itself, usually used to lump all these thinkers together who you already noted
were all quite different).

Later,

Nathan


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