Archive for the 'quotations' Category
“Now, the disciple’s consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a discipline—this disciple’s consciousness is an unhappy consciousness.”
Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”
Yesterday I had the good fortune of [...]
A suggestion by one of my supervisors sent me back to Derrida’s little essay on cosmopolitanism (an address delivered in 1996 to the International Parliament of Writers). In it Derrida, briefly, schematically, but very lucidly, draws out his thinking on hospitality with respect to the European tradition of cosmopolitanism.
I happened to have a copy of [...]
Now, we finished the last post off with the geometrical object acquiring a “living linguistic body”, and with this being the manner in which it became there for everybody. Now we need to have a closer look at this process.
Husserl not only lists the objects of science as ideal bodies, but, interestingly, the “constructions of [...]
Hegel makes some interesting comments, distinctions and criticisms with respect to the respective domains of history and philosophy in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right:
s3. Montesquieu proclaimed the true historical view, the genuinely philosophical position, namely that legislation both in general and in its particular provisions is to be treated not as something isolated [...]
My reasons for looking at historicism should emerge clearly over the coming posts. Derrida understands historicism as an unacceptable relativism, and a critique of this is an implicit first step in his thinking. As Peter Dews notes:
Given the frequency of relativistic appropriations of Derrida, particularly in the English speaking world, it is important for an [...]
Forty years ago there were all sorts of debates about historicism. They’ve largely disappeared, or are met with stifled yawns. But, I think, it is largely an unacknowledged problem within historiography.
Frederick Beiser (Hegel 2005, p.29-30) gives a brief schematic of historicism, which is a useful place to start, as follows:
Although the term ‘historicism’ has acquired [...]
I liked this:
During a meeting of Cornell’s literature department to decide the fate of Nabokov’s tenure, one of the professors objected by saying that allowing a writer to be a part of a literature department is not unlike letting an elephant to be a zookeeper. This is to prove that established professors could still have [...]
By no longer treating the posts as a metaphor of the envoi of Being, one can account for what essentially and decisively occurs, everywhere, and including language, thought, science, and everything that conditions them, when the postal structure shifts, Satz if you will, and posits or posts itself otherwise. This is why this history of [...]
Carolyn Steedman on Derrida’s Archive Fever:
“Many English-speaking readers – this one, too – have assumed that ‘Archive Fever’ has something to do with archives (rather than with psycho-analysis, or memory, or finding things); and even when the reaction has been more philosophical, Derrida has been addressed through his archon and the arkheion. But commentators have [...]
Macquarie’s own Vice-Chancellor offered comment on Australia’s history teaching last week. A national curriculum had been proposed, setting Australian history into a world-historical context. ‘Queen of the Humanities’, Schwartz called History – a downgraded cousin of the ‘Queen of the Sciences’ vied over by Philosophy and Theology perhaps, (according to Schwartz’ post, neither are claimants [...]
