Date: Tue, 06 Jan 1998 10:09:05 -0500
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: O.T. : N.T :: Freud : Lacan (Was Cultural studies)


> Well Lacan's an interesting messiah. Many such as Derrida have accused him
> of claiming to have the correct/true/real reading of Freud. Still, it was
> definitely a modified Freud for the times. While Freudian in its
> extraction, Lacan's "mirror stage" has been called the psychoanalysis of
> the "modernist ideology," whatever the latter may be. But really, in this
> matter I'm curious in the general phenomena of the derailed textual
> tradition: Old Testament to new, Freud to Lacan, Hegel to Marx, O.T./N.T.
> to Islam. It seems perhaps in all of these cases (of Islam I'm woefully
> unfamiliar) that there is a similar mechanism at work: a spectacular new
> read coupled with a thematization and justification of the inceptive
> breach. Almost performative in its logic: depending, as it were, on the
> extra-textual gauarantee of a charasmatic "new reader." Perhaps this might
> explain the pseudo-messianic cultifying of the figure of Derrida--merely
> the reactivation of a familiar logic?


	In an early and admittedly rather puerile article, I tried to summon up the
German word "Umschlag" to describe this logic (there RE Hegel and Nietzsche and
the end of metaphysics).  Though I've (fortunately) forgotten most of what I
wrote, I find this logic eerily central to my work and raking myself over coal
to come up with a vocabulary and framework of describing what I intuitively
grasp as a highly formal structure.  Any thought you have on this, the happier I
will be!

Ciao,
Reg


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