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>I get the feeling that what is happening here
> (using primers like Norris) has become
> something else to what is in the texts.

I was taught somewhat differently, I should say. Partly I was self-taught,
reading outside the curriculum (and also, at my university, outside of what
was at that time becoming the dominant theoretical "filiation" - to New
Historicism, which I found fairly comprehensively dissatisfying), and partly
I was lucky in being able to attend some graduate seminars, whilst still an
undergraduate, where you could hear people give papers on Levinas and
Blanchot (actually I have to admit I slept through most of the Blanchot
one). I never got much out of the primers. I don't believe there was all
that much in them in the first place.

> Screwing this some more, postmodernism now appears as some type of
> ideological line, perhaps a line of state ideology, which returns to state
> sponsored pedagogy.

You could probably get Terry Eagleton, state-sponsored pedagogue, to agree
with you about that one.

I would say that this is the kind of abrupt, abusive politicisation that
Lyotard and Derrida have both forcefully protested against in their readings
of various "affairs" (that of Heidegger, that of de Man): it might be one of
a few things they would really have agreed about. They weren't insisting on
the right to remain, or pretend to remain, apolitical, but could be seen as
refusing the overdetermination of one "affair" by another. As, vide:

>Yale University had HIV safe sex
> posters aimed at providing safe sex education to gay men taken down
claiming
> they were pornographic while deconstruction was practiced in the
literature
> department. I have here a link, a connection between deconstruction in
Yale,
> and homophobia. Yale deconstruction, as it is properly recognised, was
> complicit in continuing the spread of the HIV pandemic within populations
of
> young gay men, perhaps. Yale is a homophobe? (Sorry about the leaps,
trying
> to be brief.)

You cannot be serious. Or, to put it another way, a great many things
besides literature, a "deconstructive" approach to literature (amongst
others, no doubt, since even the "deconstructionists" may be expected to
have honoured their commitment to teach other things from time to time),
must have been being taught in Yale all the while: politics and law, for
instance - perhaps even a few classes on Chomskian linguistics. You do not
"have here" a "link" between anything and anything, besides perhaps the
legal and political situation of campus authorities during the Reagan era
and the tendency of said authorities to take fright at the appearance of
posters referring to - if I may hazard a wild guess - blowjobs and
masturbation in the public spaces they were charged with regulating.
"Radical" professors not noticeably up in arms about university management's
quotidien acts of timid repression? Hold the fricken front page...

> ps. . . I have heard postmodernist say that being anti-romantic is a
defining
> feature of their thinking. Could I say; scratch a postmodernist and you
find
> a romantic?

I seem to remember Paul de Man wanting to think of Rousseau as the flawless
prototype of deconstructive blindsight...

Dom