Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 09:55:43 -0500 (CDT)
From: Erik D Lindberg <edl-AT-csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: Re: Interpretation vs. Life--or, "Do the Dew."


On Thu, 5 Oct 1995, Sam Vagenas wrote:

> 
> If everything is permitted, then why don't you just enjoy life?  Why embark
> on the quest to overcome slave morality, reified Being, disciplinary
> technology, or phono/logocentrism? Or more importantly, even if you embark
> on your quest what basis do you have to criticize those who do not join your
> journey?
> 
> Now, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and especially Derrida caution us that
> we cannot ultimately Overcome in the sense of reaching some new, absolute
> exterior state.   However, there is a vector-like sense of transcending --
> transcendence within immanence --  despite the fact that there is no ground
> to base this flight.   Even if you dismiss this trace of exteriority as
> vague, we are still left with the religious critique which provides the
> horizon for post-whatever philosphizing.    Call it destruktion,
> deconstruction, genealogy, etc. these philosophers have not been called the
> "Prophets of Extremity" for nothing (although this is not Megill's thesis).
> Meanwhile, we cannot overlook the fact that these authors walk a careful
> tightrope to avoid falling into the Truth of tradition.
> 
I think these thinkers bear comparison to a writer like Beckett, and one 
of his "characters" such as Molloy and his plotless wanderings.  I also 
think Rorty captures the dilemma here, in his essay "Deconstruction and 
Circumvention," in which he too asks the question, if we have no 
grounding, why do we need to worry so much about our relationship to 
grounding.  In one passage he makes the sort of comparison to narrative I 
was hinting at above.  He says:

"The dilemma can be summed up by saying that any new sort of writing 
which is without Archai and without a Telos will also be without 
Hypokeimenon, without a subject.  So, a fortiori, it will not tell us 
anything about philosophy.  Or else, if it does tell us about philosophy, 
it will have Archai, namely, the new metaphilosophical jargon, in terms 
of which we can describe and diagnose the text of philosophy."

This can be pushed further in the direction of narrative: without 
beginning from many of the terms and strategies that it wishes to 
deconstruct, without at least parodying a traditional plot style (thus 
walking the tight-rope)--without, in short, some system of order--it will 
not be recognizable within any genre.  When writing (or narrating, thus 
avoiding the confusion with _ecriture_), we might say, 
one must always start from some sort of "inside," even if this inside is
created, and even if the distinction between inside and outside is one of 
the targets of the new narrative.

Unless some sort of plotting is maintained, one will end up where Beckett 
does at the end of his trilogy in _The Unnamable_, where writing 
describes little more than the stub of pencil and the tattered sheets 
upon which the narrator is at that moment writing or preparing to write.  
Beckett's is a great joke, and a joke in the most serious and valuable 
sense.  The same may be for Nietzsche-->.  But it is a joke that is only 
funny once, perhaps twice.

Which also forms an answer to a question posed several weeks ago, asking 
why we stuffy academics don't write with more of the vitality and emotion 
of Nietzsche.  Me--I'll just do the Dew instead.

Erik

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> 

Erik D. Lindberg
Dept. of English and Comparative Lit.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI  53211
email: edl-AT-csd.uwm.edu



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