File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9712, message 57


Date: Wed, 03 Dec 1997 17:57:01 -0500
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Footnotes


La grande bête Paul Mathias wrote:


> Things are changing pretty quickly. It has become really trendy to be
> able to quote X, Y, and Z -- even X(a), X(b), Y(a), Y(b), etc. etc. etc.
> Look for instance at those Gallimard Pleiade editions, one of the most
> famous issue being _The Presocratics_. The Pleiade was created to allow
> people to carry literary works along their trips, for instance. Now it
> has been "historicized", it has become "serious" and wants to be a model
> to other publishers, French or foreign. With some success, I think.
> Footnotes bring respectability, especially in "our" scholarly world.


Yes, one dreams of being "Pleiadisé"!


> "scientific *and* historical" -- that's the point I think: sciences
> (especially literary ones) slowly shift towards history and less and
> less towards invention. That "spirit" you're referring to "naturally"
> mixes sciences and history. I'm not saying they should be left apart one
> another; I'm suspecting literary science is dying from historical
> terror. As if we needed to be precise, not inventive.

	A remarkable thought -- historical terror -- I like it.  But reigns of terror,
as a Frenchman knows better than most, are often conditioned by or as the 'end
of history.'  Don't terror and authority go together?  Has historical terror
been made possible by Hegel!!   Is it dying of a new 'reality principle?'




> Would you imagine Plato's dialogs larded with footnotes, or Descartes'
> Discourse, or even Nietzsche's Zarathustra, which is by the way, a
> footnote in itself -- to biblical and classical literature...? Now a
> "non-footnoted" text is not (necessarily) a mere rhetorical
> presentation.

	I only have in mind a certain type of philosophical writing that places itself
'before' authors treated or invoked.  Heidegger was a great philosopher and did
this -- what he has to say is in many respects more important than whether what
he says 'does justice' to, for example, Hegel.  There are 'lesser' philosophers
who step into the same limelight.

> I think it can be a work of humility: "here's a text given
> to you to judge not by its accuracy, but by its pertinence". Of course,
> under such circumstances, we "scholars" are bound to be out of a job
> soon. For what are we supposed to be, if not "accuracy experts"?

	Interesting that phenomenologists -- I'm thinking of Husserl here -- hardly
ever had a footnote, and his project was making of philosophy a rigorous
science.  But there, in place of footnotes, one had the repeatability of
phenomenological analysis.  Who needs footnotes when you can repeat the
deduction yourself?



> 
> Now as it may have been noticed, I'm sometimes disrespectful towards
> scholarly habits and what I happen to see as universitarian
> "enfarinement" (the word is in Montaigne).

	That's why we refer to "pasty-faced intellectuals"

> To give an example: I edited
> Nietzsche's Zarathustra a few years ago, and had to write an
> introduction to his work.

There's the connection (viz. metaphysical friend) -- Michel Haar!

> Which I did. There is not one single footnote
> in the whole introduction (you find 150/200 of them in "normal"
> introductions, generally...)
> I even have a (personal) theory for that. Writing is about creating
> something, not justifying authoritatively the adequacy of one's sources.
> Or maybe I should say: there is writing that is about creating, and
> writing that is about copying, and commenting upon, more or less
> shrewdly.

And appropriately, reading is about pleasure, until "cognative interests" arrive
on the scene.


> Don't mistake me though. I think one of my strongest fantasies is to
> write a "serious" work, to be able to footnote my way through a work of
> universitarian art! I know it's hopeless: I have neither the patience,
> neither the knowledge. Just the envy. Not even the urge to acquire the
> knowledge or to become patient. I certainly do NOT want to be patient.
> I'm just envious of "serious" scholars...
> A publisher I was working with some time ago pictured me accurately, I
> think. He told me I was launching "commando" operations into a
> speculative field, and then leaving it to an hypothetical army to come
> in and occupy the field. 

Taking recruits?

> Maybe not. But it's a sign of the way I understand my personal relation
> to philosophy. Most of the people I know see it as a (good) job, and
> specialize into making it a good job. It's a good job all right. But
> damn! it's a way of life, and I should say, a "Weltanschauung" in
> itself. And frankly, I can't see my son as a footnote to my own life!

But we're all footnotes to Plato, n'est ce pas?


Ciao,
Reg


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