Posts Tagged ‘intellectual history’
History is a science of ghosts—just ask Michelet. Or Hegel, for that matter. But the problem with adopting the vocabulary of Derrida’s Specters of Marx (for example, like Ethan Kleinberg does) is that one feels like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, seeing ghosts all the time. Not untrue, but unsatisfying. It took very [...]
Speaking on the link between the work of Derrida and identity, Peggy Kamuf, a trusted translator of Derrida’s work, glossed his work thus:
In practically everything Derrida has written over the last thirty years, this figure of circular appropriation of the self to itself without difference [she means the concept of identity] is shown to submit [...]
Here’s something I’m currently grappling with. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
On the one hand, I am dealing with the empirical history of the reception of Derrida. This is interesting insofar as it provides a kind of anthropology of academic disciplines – the way academics respond (or not) to philosophical innovation, and the way this is [...]
Francois Cusset’s recently translated book, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, has been reviewed in the NDPR by Ethan Kleinberg.
Kleinberg is appreciative (yet with a dash of the critical) – as is expected in any good review. He’s disappointed with the lack of substantial analysis, [...]
When we talk about things – about anything in actual fact – we normally give them, whether implicitly or explicitly a kind of history. We imply the genesis of this or that, its heritage and kinship. It’s how we make sense of the world, we relate things to each other in a web [...]
Phew! That’s one beefy chapter. I finished a draft of a chapter last week – it’s the first I’d done, and although I’m pretty sure it fill morph at some future point, the bones are there. Crazily though, it weighed in at about 33,000 words. Hmmmmm.
Perhaps a touch on the weighty side for a journal [...]
