Dom:
> > To conclude this somewhat rambling response to your post, if everything
> > between _A Course in General Linguistics_ and Foucault were miraculously
> > expunged, the intellectual world would be a better and a more coherent
> > place.
>
> "Between" in what sense, I wonder? I imagine a spectrum, or range, with
the
> _Course_ somewhere in the moderate/conservative trough, and Foucault at
the
> very limit of pitch and elevation: Foucault-the-pale,
> Derrida-beyond-the-pale...
Um ... Tricky. For starters, I'd reject the idea of placing the _Course_
in a spectrum or cline or whatever -- it's the still point from which all
the ripples start, and I think there are +still+ aspects of the _Course_
which haven't been fully worked out.
(Personally, and I know this is pretty extreme, I'd rip down most of what
came since and go back to Saussure. Seems to me about all that's worthwhile
in (post)structuralism is a commentary on Saussure, and the further away
from the biblical origins [I use this metaphor advisedly], the worse. Look
at the tangent Barthes draws between _Writing Degree Zero_ and _The Elements
of Semiology_, to _Mythologies. Bleh.)
> This carping about "Derrida's elevation of the written over the spoken" is
> mistaken, tho'. The point is that the anxieties a philosophy which always
> returns to the voice as a source of authority and reassurance has about
> writing and inscription speak volumes, so to speak, about the anxieties it
> has over its own predicament.
We have been here before. Specifically (one of Derrida's thingies),
Socrates vs Plato, living speech versus the written, and the paradox enacted
+in+ the Dialogues. We're fighting an old war. Incidentally, does nobody
these days read _The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates_?
Maybe not the best thing Kierkegaard wrote, but certainly the most
intelligible.
(ASIDE: For anyone within spitting distance of the east midlands of England
[specifically Loughbrough], Derrida will be there in an authentic presence
on 10th November this year -- tickets still [just] available.)
> I would say "the author's predicament" rather than "the author['s]
> function", because I think that insofar as authoriality is made to
> correspond to an assigned function, a determined place of emission - let's
> say of authority, or authenticity - it is made the subject of regulations
> which seek to quell the very *anxiety* that is proper to authorship, to
the
> effort to bring a body and a self into discourse, into language.
For some reason, I'm irresistibly reminded of Archilochus -- "With this
spear I knead my bread". A bit after Homer but well before the Romantics.
The problematics of the authorial presence can be traced at least as far
back as the Dear Dead Greeks. Anacreon. Sappho (god bless her). ee tee
see.
> Foucault's attempt to define what "the author function" was for a
> particularly milieu is fairly convincing, but it doesn't dispose of the
> anxieties that this milieu sought to regulate by assigning such a function
> to authoriality, and it certainly doesn't abolish the *problem* of
> authorship in our own age.
This doesn't directly address your point, Dom, but what Foucault has, that
so few others in this line of filiation have, is a sense of history. It
permeates everything he writes. And so, once more, we're back to Saussure,
whose distinction of diachronic and synchronic, and focus in the _Course_ on
the synchronic, has been illicitly taken to justify an abolition of the
movement of language (and associated semiological systems) in time. As if.
Saussure cut his teeth studying the evolution of Indo-European verb forms.
There were giants on earth in those days ...
Robin
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