[Davor000]

Evo raznih mišljenja nekih filozofa i književnika o stanju stvari. Počet ćemo od čovjeka koji je priznao da je prevarant prije nego što su drugi priznali. Evo što C. Hitchens kaže o L. Althusseru prilikom kritike jedne knjige:

I decided to look up another author with whose work I have some acquaintance, and with whom I had actually met. Here is a typical passage from the discussion of Louis Althusser, a true son of the Ecole Normale and for many years a guru to the theoreticians:

''In fact, in a manner that is nonreductive, Althusser asserts that art, theology, literature and family life are determined according to their own relatively autonomous laws of production, which are not governed by or identical to the laws of production in the ordinary sense of goods and commodities.''

As with Butler's elaborate denial of the concept of gender as a uniform, one wonders why it should take a dialectical materialist so long to conclude that some crucial elements of the ''superstructure'' of society are not solely determined by its economic base. How much tautology, in other words, can one bear?

Respectful mention is made of Althusser's reputation-making books, ''Pour Marx'' and ''Lire le 'Capital.' '' Of the publication of these, as he wrote in his own memoir, ''The Future Lasts Forever,'' their author wrote: ''I became obsessed with the terrifying thought that these texts would expose me completely to the public at large as I really was, namely a trickster and a deceiver and nothing more, a philosopher who knew nothing about the history of philosophy or about Marx.'' By 1980, Althusser had been exposed as the utter fraud he later confessed himself to be, and furthermore confined in a mental institution for, among other things, the strangling of his wife. No mention of his memoir and no hint of his recantation appears in this ''Guide.''

Evo ništa manje zanimljivog odgovora od strane Baudrillarda, također velikana filozofije (kako da ne ):

In the Euclidean space of history, the shortest path between two points is the straight line, the line of Progress and Democracy. But this is only true of the linear space of the Enlightenment. In our non-Euclidean fin de siècle space, a baleful curvature unfailingly deflects all trajectories. This is doubtless linked to the sphericity of time (visible on the horizon of the end of the century, just as the earth's sphericity is visible on the horizon at the end of the day) or the subtle distortion of the gravitational field.



Euklidski prostor povijesti? Sada znamo kome su namijenjeni ovakvi tekstovi, a to sigurno nisu matematičari. Zapravo, pitanje je tko ovo čita i kako takvi ljudi razumiju raspravu o euklidskome prostoru? Naravno, ne razumiju, ali gdje je šteta ako se na trenutak praviš pametan samo zato što ne znaš što pričaš. Istina, troši se novac itd., ali to je samo kapitalističko sredstvo koje ništa ne znači i tlači ljude, zar ne?

Sljedeći klaun je snimio film o, naravno, sebi. Evo kratki uvod:

By Mark Goldblatt



Zeitgeist Films, distributor of the documentary Derrida, currently in limited release in select cities across the country, poses the following rhetorical question on its promotional website: What if you could watch Socrates, on film, rehearsing his Socratic dialogues? The insinuation, of course, is that Jacques Derrida, the contemporary French thinker sometimes called the "father of deconstruction" deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the ancient Greek thinker sometimes called the "father of philosophy." This is true only insofar as a firecracker and a hydrogen bomb both go pop. Otherwise, the comparison is ludicrous.

Moguće je da ovo netko shvati kao jeftini pokšaj diskvalificiranja čovjeka za kojega je Jacques Chirac (da, bivši francuski predsjednik koji poznatiji po korupciji negoli po predsjedništvu) rekao da je "najveća intelektualna figura našega vremena".

Zanimljiva je usporediti dva intervjua o terorističkom napadu na WTC 11. rujna između Habermasa i Derride:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/066649.html Zaista, nije teško otkriti tko od njih prodaje maglu.

Malo analitičke filozofije:

John Searle: I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.


When Derrida was awarded an honorary degree from Cambridge University in 1992, 20 of the world's most-prominent philosophers — including W. V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus — signed a letter of protest which is worth quoting at length:

M. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some marks of writings in that discipline. Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely outside philosophy. . . . In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor. . . . M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists. . . . Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.

Nagel: Postmodernism's specifically academic appeal comes from its being another in the sequence of all-purpose "unmasking" strategies that offer a way to criticize the intellectual efforts of others not by engaging with them on the ground, but by diagnosing them from a superior vantage point and charging them with inadequate self-awareness. Logical positivism and Marxism were used by academics in this way, and postmodernist relativism is a natural successor in the role.




Možda sam pogriješio u procjeni njihovog nepoznavanja matematike, primjerice. Evo što kaže Lacan:

This diagram [the Möbius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject. This goes much further than you may think at first, because you can search for the sort of surface able to receive such inscriptions. You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease.

Naravno majka svih prevaranata pokajnika(hmm) Althusser odgovara na ovo (?): "Lacan finally gives Freud's thinking the scientific concepts that it requires".

Na kraju, možda i Derrida ima pokajnički ton kao Althusser, jer priznaje:

“To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.”

Genijalno.