UPDATED: With his characteristic acerbic wit, Adam Kotsko coins the term “Academic Stockholm Syndrome” to describe what I was trying to get at. After 50 comments in response to this post– many of them lecturing me about the relationship between expression and content that anyone who studies Derrida, Lacan, Heidegger, Hegel, or Deleuze is familiar with… And many of these responses missing the irony that they’re able to explain clearly what they’re claiming can only be articulated through a particular style –this might be the one remark that actually paid attention to what I argued in the post.
Perverse Egalitarianism has an interesting post up on “difficult books”. A taste:
I have been thinking along the similar lines recently as I was revisiting the old issue of trying to use “difficult texts” in my Intro class: the rationale for me has always been that I will expose my students to a type of writing that in itself will allow me to teach them a skill. For example, even though Plato’s dialogues are quite “easy” to read, or at least I can say that most college students find the form of a conversation between several people to be quite easy to grasp, we spend a lot of time trying to explain why it is important to ask about the essences of things like “justice” or “piety” – the style of a dialogue itself is never really an issue, because the subject matter is what is most important. Is it possible, for example, to use a text by Deleuze or Derrida or Blanchot as a way of exposing a group of students to the style of philosophizing that, because it is impossible to clearly see the actual subject matter, would draw attention to itself?
Assuming that the students actually read, or try to read the difficult text, is it possible to coherently argue in favor of such an experience of confusion? Does it make sense to say:”Yes, I know some of you told me in private that you tried to read the text but you couldn’t understand anything, but that is precisely what I expected would happen. Now that we are in class we can read the same text together and see if we can figure it out, because that is the skill we are trying to acquire in addition to being introduced to a contemporary thinker.” In a sense, if students could read and understand an essay by Derrida, they wouldn’t need to be in an Intro class.
Hopefully I have enough “cred” to inveigh against “difficult books” (I am, after all, mired in the work of figures such as Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, etc., who are the worst of the worst), but I have increasingly found myself suspicious of the “difficult work”. On the one hand, I read texts in the sciences that express extremely complex ideas in very basic prose. Somehow I’m just unwilling to concede that what Hegel is trying to talk about is any more difficult or complex than what the biologist, complexity theory, economic social theorist, ecologist, or quantum physicist is attempting to articulate. This leads to my concern. I wonder if terribly dense styles such as we find in figures like Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, Derrida, etc., etc., etc., aren’t a form of intellectual terrorism. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not referring to the quality of their concepts or arguments. What I am referring to is a general writing strategy that demands so much work on the part of the reader in the art of interpretation, that by the time you’ve managed to make heads or tails of what Lacan is arguing or Hegel is seeking to articulate or Deleuze is seeking to theorize, you have so much invested that you simply cannot think critically about that figure.
Among the post-structuralists, at least, style was a way of subverting the metaphysics of presence and identity by drawing attention to the differential, the play of the signifier, our inability to pin down meaning due to the inherent polysemy of language. There’s an implicit politics here as well. The metaphysics of presence and identity is seen as being attached to centralized and totalizing social systems similar to the “Great Chain of Being”, where you have the sovereign giving decrees on high. However, isn’t there still an insidious power structure at work in these textual strategies as well?
On the one hand, post-structuralist texts (and other similarly obscure texts) take on the logic of the veil. When confronted by the veil our desire is evoked. We are led to wonder what is behind the veil. The veil suggests something hidden, something tantalizing, something just out of reach. “What is it that Derrida is saying?” “What is the secret of Hegel’s Logic?” “Is Guattari saying anything at all?” The veil in writing either produces a violent reaction of rejection or a sort of hypnotic attachment in the reader like a moth drawn to a flame. On the other hand, if the effect of hypnotic attachment is successfully produced, if we become convinced that the text hides a secret, we become locked in a power relationship with text and authorship where the author is now a master containing the truth of a secret, and the reader is perpetually inadequate, always close to the elusive truth of the secret of late Heidegger, late Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, etc., while also always falling short. Far from freeing the reader, far from liberating them, the reader instead is locked in identity as a disciple and apostle of the text, devoting, perhaps in the extreme case of the scholar, their entire life to the hermeneutics of the text that has now become sacred. In short, this textual practice stands in stark opposition to its often stated aim.
Does this mean I cease to read such figures or reject them out of hand? No. I do believe they hide secrets. However, if Badiou has contributed one thing to Continental thought, if one thing lasts in the case of Badiou, I hope it is the rejection of stylistic virtuousity. This is not an endorsement of Badiou’s ontology but of his ethics of writing. I confess that I harbor some resentment of the hours of my life penetrating a text, navigating the stylistic gymnastics of some thinker, to grasp a concept that is really rather simple and which could have been articulated far more directly. If someone can articulate string theory in a straightforward way I don’t see why they cannot do so with ereignis. I’ve spent my fair amount of time defensively defending the writing style of figures such as Lacan, Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze, etc., etc., etc. What I realize is that what I was defending was not their style but the value of their concepts and arguments despite their style. As per Lyotard’s remarks at the beginning of Differend, I would like to gain some time. We live, we work, we must integrate superhuman bodies of information. Perhaps a little consideration is in order.
April 25, 2008 at 4:28 am
If I understand you correctly, you are alleging that the style of, Derrida for example, not only adds nothing to the ‘content’ of his thought, but actually obscures it? If so, I can’t reconcile that with your point about “subverting the metaphysics of presence”. I have always read Derrida at least to completely depend on what you seem to consider as ‘mere style’ to articulate his thinking. Far from being a coincidence, isn’t it evident throughout all of these thinkers that there is a profound struggle to find words that are true to these concepts? I am quite surprised to hear you arguing otherwise–I thought this was widely accepted in continental philosophy. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since there seems to be almost no regard given for even the possibility of serious ontological force of hermeneutics.
On the other side, I am highly suspicious of contemporary physics and mathematics in their more speculative forms. Sure their ideas might be clearly stated, but to my admittedly amateur scientific sensibilities, I am confused about their material significance. That is, while coherent within a clearly defined (as opposed to differential) terminological structure, involving all sorts of fancy flights of calculative intelligence, I see no compelling connection to lived world. Although one physicist at Northwestern did curtly tell me quantum physics was “the reason why my VCR worked” when asked for a basic response to Einstein’s old objection. My touchstone for this is the Nussbaum-Butler “debate”, where, accused by the former of precisely the politically charged obscurantism you seem to be invoking here, Butler responded (paraphrasing) ‘clarity has its own things to obscure’.
April 25, 2008 at 4:31 am
Yes, I’ve made the arguments quite often myself in the past. Perhaps you missed my point about how they enact another form of power and identification?
April 25, 2008 at 4:32 am
That is, I’ve made the argument you make in your first paragraph quite often in the past.
April 25, 2008 at 4:39 am
And I confess, I do think of it is a lot of unnecessary stylistics. I’ve spent years, for instance, working on Lacan, having worked through nearly all his seminars now. Most of that work on Lacan, has been despite his style. I understand his points about what happened with Freud and the need to enact the unconscious as a sort of pedagogical device. However, despite Lacan’s heroic efforts to avoid the fate of Freud among his followers, I can’t say that anything different has happened with Lacanian communities. In some respects its been worse, generating the worse sort of hagiography in explicit contrast to his teachings. I simply don’t accept that talking well about the unconscious entails enacting the play of the unconscious. The same point would follow mutatis mutandis for a thinker like Derrida.
April 25, 2008 at 4:48 am
I’m not sure if I am reading you correctly, but are you assuming that the ‘difficult’ style is a result of intentional act of obscuring the simple? “Intellectual terrorism” implies that for example Derrida writes a first draft which is clear and simple and then in order to achieve a certain goal, he complicates it with strange style. Does complexity come from an intentional stylistic strategy or is it a result of trying to express complex thoughts?
April 25, 2008 at 4:54 am
I do think there has been an intentional development of style among certain continental thinkers that isn’t simply a function of the complexity of their thought. Here I have in mind especially Hegel, Adorno, Lacan, Heidegger, and Derrida where there was also a great meditation on style and the relationship between style and content. I would not make the claim that there was first a draft that was simple and then one that was complex, which would be absurd. However, I think it’s equally absurd to claim that somehow Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Zizek, or Simondon aren’t complex which accounts for the greater degree of accessibility in their work.
April 25, 2008 at 4:56 am
Which isn’t, of course, to say that Marx or Kant, or Merleau-Ponty are easy or clear as day. I’d certainly concede that complexity of a matter makes for difficulties in expression, but Freud seemed working out exceedingly complex material in beautiful prose.
April 25, 2008 at 7:26 am
“I confess that I harbor some resentment of the hours of my life penetrating a text, navigating the stylistic gymnastics of some thinker, to grasp a concept that is really rather simple and which could have been articulated far more directly.”
I kind of lament what you are saying here. I think that you are not considering the fact that the resentment you identify its just an evidence that you have sucesfully incorporated the knowlegde that is implicated in the text, and the sign -or the synthom if you like- that you have hopefully embodied the point of view that is registered in those “stylistic gymnastics” too. This allows u to think and not only to reproduce the implications of the concepts you are willing to clear. Remember that when you embody those concept you will never forget them, they will be part of your experienced composites.
The resentment you are reffering to is not about the time you spent reading the book, is about a confrontation you have inside and that is related to the author and the books that you have considered as a “must read”. I can understand the resentment you have in the case of the authors that u have read and that do not compose with the singularities you are, but if your idea of reading philo its not mererly academical, you have to admit that its not an obligation to read authors such like Nietzsche or Deleuze -which philosophy confronts with Kant or Hegel´s point of view- if you think that your philosophical path is rather kantian or hegelian.
Well, this is just what I sincererly think about what you have written, I must say that it took me quite a good lapse of time to express it, since I am not an english native speaker. I cannot be able to sustain a debate with you about this, althought i can try or at least read about your concerns, but i just wanted to let u know that your denying the labour that exercises thought itself, and that gives u the chance to activate the way you think. Maybe Kant, Hegel or Heidegger and Derrida wont help too much about it, because they were in fact pretty mistagoges, but Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault Spinoza gave everything they had, even with their stylistic gymanastics.
ok, please forgive my so broken english
and cheers
April 25, 2008 at 7:32 am
[…] style […]
April 25, 2008 at 8:06 am
Just a couple of questions, Sinthome, and perhaps a few rambles:
In the first instance, I’m not entirely sure that systems theory or math is any less difficult or obscure than any bit of philosophy. Although there have been great popularizers, say, of string theory, or complexity theory, their robust articulations are in no uncertain terms difficult, perhaps even verging on obsurantist.
Indeed, there’s a debate within theoretical physics, which has been going on for a few years now, about whether string theory obscures what physics is — or should be — up to; indeed, whether it’s physics at all. (there’s a popular book on the subject, but I’ve forgotten the title) Same with systems theory, although this debate ended, i think, in the ’80s when the decade old promise of a general systems theory failed to produce anything once again. And then there’s Math’s unease with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems: no one is entirely sure what they actually amount to. There is absolutely no consensus over what they mean or imply. Go ahead and ask a Mathematician — rather than a philosophy type — and see what he or she thinks. I’d wager that he or she simply shrugs, and says something to the effect that ‘it’s an elegant argument, but it doesn’t really affect any contemporary theoretical math.’ Or again, take a look at Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Theorem, which wonders through typology, etc. before making its point (the great anecdote was that when wiles was teaching his proof, no one had any idea what he was up to, or why he was combining things the way he did; no one had a clue what he was up to). In all of these cases, there doesn’t seem to be anything ‘clear.’
So I wonder: are we not mistaking the pop-culture view of science for the real thing, which would be analogous to mistaking the Introducing Philosopher X books for the philosophy itself? That is, I wonder whether there’s a tendency to mistake a simplified, intuitively — representationally — grounded presentation of an extremely complex conceptual argument for the argument itself. That would be a category mistake.
Now, if i take some of the thinkers you mentioned, like Spinoza Leibni, and Zizek, they all have a pronounced didactic — and popularizing — goals (I don’t know Simondon, but I’ve heard his prose is incredibly convoluted, and Merleau-Ponty’s later work, which it must be said has several mitigating factors, is anything but clear).
Finally, just to be a little more contrarian, Adorno did actually write a first draft, and then ‘complexify’ it in subsequent reworkings (this certainly holds true of the Kierkegaard book, and Negative Dialectics). Here, though, the thrust was for synthetic articulations, ‘pregnant thinking’ as Husserl would say, not obscuratism.
All this said, though, I agree with you on ‘unnecessary stylistics.’ but that applies to ‘ian/ist’ thinkers, who get stuck in the rut of imitating a ‘master’ rather than developing something out of it (and one can, of course end up imitating oneself; Derrida’s Economimesis essay seems to be one such example).
So, maybe we could reframe the debate this way: the problem isn’t so much obscurantism vs. clarity, nor is it the scientific ideal of presentation vs. a the philosophical one; but rather the willingness to popularize and make use of intuitive metaphorical/analogical structures to represent complex ideas, which leave some of the details behind. The problem, then, at least as i see it, is that philosophy is always in the details. And philosophy is extraordinarily suspicious of both metaphors and representations…..
April 25, 2008 at 1:31 pm
The issue isn’t one of rejecting these figures because of their style as Nussbaum did in the case of Butler, nor is it one of rejecting these thinkers at all, but rather of identifying a different sort of power at work in these texts that often is quite at odds with the explicit aims of the texts. This point seems to be getting lost in a number of the responses, no doubt because us continentalists– especially if we’re from the United States –are especially sensitive to this issue because we’ve suffered so many difficulties professionally in relation to Anglo-American philosophy having to defend the value of these thinkers. We know (or many of us think), for example, that there is something of tremendous value in Lacan’s work, yet the very first thing we encounter again and again in discussions with others about someone like Lacan, is kurt dismissals of that work based on style alone. We thus find ourselves in the position of having to do all sorts of defensive legwork defending the purpose and importance of both the text and its stylistic decisions before we can even begin to discuss the conceptual issues.
What I’m proposing is that these stylistic practices have their own dynamic of power that is often at odds with the express aim of these practices. In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari contrast root-books and rhizome-books in the introduction to the work. Root-books are centralized, “paranoid” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the word), and presided over by an author-function that works much like a sovereign. Rhizome-books, by contrast, lack any centralizations, can be read in a variety of different ways, and connected to anything we might like. The root/rhizome opposition then also functions as a contrast between texts that on the one hand subordinate their readers (the author speaks on high and the reader receives) versus another sort of book that is supposed to be freeing or liberating. Yet what is it that happens with the rhizome book in actual practice? The rhizome-book begins to function in much the same way that an icon functions in religion (under Jean-Luc Marion’s description anyway) where there’s a sense in which the reader becomes trapped in the text, seeking to find its key, or sense, thereby never getting out of the text. In other words, a new sort of subordination to centralized authority emerges that while different from the root model, is no less pervasive in its effects. In the States, at least, we see the effects of this at continentalist conferences, where all the papers are about figures. That is, the figures dictate and the continentalists set about the work of translation.
Alexei, I think there’s a distinction I’m groping for that I can’t quite articulate. I am not confusing pop-science with science. Rather, it seems to me that there are two sorts of difficulties that are being contrasted. Kant is difficult but would still fall within the model of clarity that I have in mind. Badiou is difficult, but still falls under the model of clarity I have in mind. Marx is difficult, but still falls within the model of clarity I have in mind. Goedel is difficult, but still… In other words, clarity does not mean easiness, and I would agree that the Hegelian argument about the relationship between expression and content holds. However, what is the difference between the difficulty of Marx’s Capital or Badiou’s Being and Event, and the difficulty of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition or Lacan’s 20th seminar? Is there a difference at all?
April 25, 2008 at 1:49 pm
‘The rhizome-book begins to function in much the same way that an icon functions in religion (under Jean-Luc Marion’s description anyway) where there’s a sense in which the reader becomes trapped in the text, seeking to find its key, or sense, thereby never getting out of the text.’
Surely you mean idols (under Marion’s description anyway).
April 25, 2008 at 2:03 pm
No, I mean icons. The way Marion describes the icon in ways that are similar to Kant’s sublime, as a something like a saturated phenomenon that exceeds all our intentionality and keeps us locked within its regard is close to what I’m getting at. That is, I see an ideological function at work in what Marion is describing or a fetish.
April 25, 2008 at 2:21 pm
I suppose you could argue that that is what Marion is effectively saying, but his intention is clearly the opposite. In short, icons are good and idols are bad, much as one would expect from a Christian.
April 25, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Well your point is fine, but that is not at all how I remember Marion describing the icon. The idol captures the gaze and holds it, whereas the icon alludes the gaze, pushing the one who views it past it. Both are saturated phenomenon.
This is a strange post. Difficult books are difficult books! I didn’t find the prose all that different from Being and Event to Difference and Repetition, other than the normal differences you’d expect from a magnum opus written late in life and a doctoral dissertation. I wonder if science and clarity don’t operate as a fetish here.
April 25, 2008 at 2:42 pm
I figured I was missing something (the invocation of surprise was not rhetorical), but I’m not sure I’m satisfied with your elaboration. I take this to be the crux of your point about “another form of power and identification”:
“The rhizome-book begins to function in much the same way that an icon functions in religion (under Jean-Luc Marion’s description anyway) where there’s a sense in which the reader becomes trapped in the text, seeking to find its key, or sense, thereby never getting out of the text. In other words, a new sort of subordination to centralized authority emerges that while different from the root model, is no less pervasive in its effects. ”
I doubt D&G would necessarily reject your complication to that point, lacking a clear description of these effect. The language of entrapment, seeking escape you use here implies what I would take to be a misinterpretation of Heidegger’s classic formulation of the hermeneutic circle. As soon as you’re trying to get out, you’ve missed the point, which is to get into it the right way. Are you rejecting this concept of hermeneutics in its broad sense? As I suggested in my final paragraph, I also agree with Alexei’s objection in the sphere of math/physics (Alexei, if you could remember the title of that book, I’d greatly appreciate it. I’d like to spend some free time this summer refining this point.)
I’m sorry if I am appear obstinate, here, I have read this blog long enough to know that you are well aware of all these basic points. But for whatever reason I can’t get a sense for the force of your object, weak or strong, so I’m trying to draw out new formulations.
April 25, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Sure, I agree that for Marion idols are hypnotic and icons are something more, I just happen to think everything I read in Marion’s description of icons fits phenomena such as our fascination with a very power and charismatic leader. In other words, I think that Marion fails in his intention.
April 25, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Floyd, I have no particular commitment or attachment to Heidegger, so I don’t really see how he can function as a normative authority in this case. I really don’t have anything to say one way or another about the hermeneutic circle or whether one should try to escape it or embrace it. My post wasn’t about hermeneutics. I value the products of hermeneutically oriented thinkers, though I do think they’ve taken on a somewhat detrimental hegemonic role in continentally oriented American philosophy departments.
It seems to me that you and Alexei made very different points about science. Alexei rightly pointed out that science itself is often very difficult. We find conceptual creations and acrobatics that rival, in imaginativeness and stunning novelty anything we find in the arts or philosophy. I am not sure why we should pitch this discussion as somehow being one of science versus the humanities. Your view struck me as rather different. You made claims about not seeing science as attached to “lived experience”, echoing, I presume, Heidegger’s unfortunate assertions that science and mathematics do not think and his account of technology. Again, I’m not sure why lived experience should be the final authority where philosophy is concerned, which isn’t to reject lived experience.
I’ll try to make the point I was making yet again via Lacan. The rationale behind Lacan’s style is two-fold: On the one hand, Lacan enacts the unconscious as a pedagogical device to expose his audience to the sorts of formations that appear in the clinic. His style changes markedly in the mid-60s because he opened his seminar up to the public (rather than restricting it to analysts). As a result, he found that it was necessary to somehow render the clinic present to an audience that has never practiced as analysts or been in analysis. On the other hand, there is another pedagogical philosophy Lacan develops over the course of his entire seminar. Seminar 17 is entitled The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. What is the other side of psychoanalysis? The other side of psychoanalysis is the discourse of the master. That is, psychoanalysis is not a discourse of mastery. Or it does not aim to be, at any rate. In addition to the pedagogical aim of Lacan’s language, this language, with its polysemy, irony, constant deviations and contradictions, is designed to undermine belief in the existence of the Other, a father figure, or a subject that knows. Lacan described himself late in life as an honorary woman and as a psychotic, this is what he was getting at.
My question is Hegelian here: does Lacan’s style accomplish what it aims to accomplish? To answer this question we need only look at Lacanian communities and Lacanian scholars. What we have gotten is something that, far from departing from the authority of a master, instead engages in endless textual hermeneutics like priests pouring over sacred texts, and very authoritarian psychoanalytic organizations organized around the charisma of Lacan. This has occurred because the “mystery” (Lacan’s elliptical style) is every bit as hypnotic as the sort of classical text that Lacan denounces. Mutatis mutandis in the case of many other continental figures.
April 25, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I wonder if science and clarity don’t operate as a fetish here.
I think it’s a fair question, although not really a new question – the clear and indubitable nature of mathematical demonstrations has always attracted philosophical types – I wonder if we are confusing “clear” and “simple” here? A simple idea that, as Levi points out, could be a result of a long and frustrating reading (thus the resentment), but is not necessarily assumed to have been clear from the very beginning (of reading or writing) – where is this “very beginning” anyway? I think in a way we are simplifying the issue by assuming, for example, that there’s a uniform Deleuzian or Derridian style (just two thinkers I’m more or less familiar with) – I mean there are essays by Derrida that are quite “clear” but not very “simple” in their conceptual implications, and then there are convoluted ramblings about a very “simple” idea. the example of first would be say something like “Differance” essay and of second something like “Force of Law” – “Differance” is a rather “clear” essay style-wise but is trying to deal with a very complex concept, “Force of Law” is a long-winded discussion of a rather “simple” point – there is a “between justice and law”…
I know this discussion is going in a rather different direction, but my original point of reference was not the production of difficult texts but their pedagogical value – what kind of skill, if any, is being developed while one is forced to read a “difficult text”? And just a side note, I’m not sure why Kant is included in some examples of “difficult books” – the man clearly struggled with his style but of all the philosophers he’s the one most concerned with clarity, simplicity and, even if one might say he failed, attempts to present his views to the educated public in the simplest possible way thus excusing himself from any accusations of intentional obscurity…
April 25, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I’m a bit perplexed as to why the discussion has veered off into a discussion of science versus philosophy as I was not proposing that science serve as a model for philosophy but only made the offhand observation that scientists often seem capable of expressing extremely complex ideas without falling into obscurantism. Of course, there is going to be some relativity here. What counts as obscurantism is also going to be a function of one’s background knowledge. When I pick up a book on category theory in mathematics I’m utterly lost after a few pages as I simply do not have the mathematical background to read the book.
Some of the frustration I’m expressing here is simply about bad writing. Take Difference and Repetition and A Thousand Plateaus. I think there are elements of Deleuze’s writing her that aren’t simply a function of style. References are perpetually made to other figures without clarifying exactly what is being referred to or how it is being referred to. This would be excusable, perhaps, if these were common figures in the history of philosophy, but often they are extremely obscure figures. In other cases, concepts are deployed that play a central role in the discussion, but which are based on obscure figures, yet reference isn’t given to the figure. For example, Simondon, plays a central role in Deleuze’s thought yet there are only about 8 references to him throughout the entire body of writing! Likewise, there’s a tendency to introduce terms without providing a provisional definition, and in many cases there’s no identifiable thesis organizing the claims to be made. I take it that this is simply bad writing. Now anyone who reads Larval Subject knows just how committed I am to figures like Deleuze or Lacan, so this isn’t a question of rejecting their work. But I do think these are extremely unforgiving texts and that the cryptic nature of these works does function to produce a particular form of attachment. They’re like mazes that draw you in and interpellate you in this way. It reminds me of this parable from Lacan’s 11th Seminar:
These non-authoritarian texts function according to the logic of the veil. They create the sense of hiding someone as an apparatus of capture for the desire of the reader. Power then hasn’t been eradicated, but takes on a different form, not unlike what Oedipa encounters in Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 in her search for the elusive meaning of the bugle.
April 25, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Maybe Kafka’s Trial and Castle would be better examples of what I’m trying to articulate… Especially the “Before the Law” section of the Trial:
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/beforethelaw.htm
The basic insight of “Before the Law” is that it is our fascination with the law, our belief that it holds some sort of secret, that attaches us to the law and holds us in its grip. We believe that the law has some sort of secret power and it is this very belief that ties us to the law.
This is the basic principle behind transference (and we have been talking about transference to texts, not the merits of style or reading techniques… At least that’s what I’ve been talking about). The analysand goes to the analyst, believing that the analyst has a particular esoteric knowledge of his desire. The patient supposes that the analyst knows. It is this that attaches the analysand to the analyst. Insofar as the patient believes the analyst contains the secret of his desire he tries to figure out what this secret is. Analysis concludes when the analysand discovers that the analyst is a dope like anyone else, and that it was the patient, himself, doing the work all along. At this point the shift is made from the analyst as a supposed receptacle of knowledge, to the unconscious as the only receptacle of knowledge. As a result, there is also a dissolution of the Oedipus or authoritarian power structures in the subjective space of the analysand insofar as the Other is no longer seen as containing objet a. This is one of the reasons that Lacan refers to the analyst’s work in analysis as a sort of controlled suicide… His aim is to undermine his own mastery and position of power.
Now in order to read any text whatsoever– or to learn from any text –it is necessary that there be a transference. That is, phenomenologically we must encounter the text as containing a secret, as hiding something. This sets to work the process of reading. I do think, however, that there are certain types of texts that diminish our potential to work through the transference and find our own autonomy. One type of text along these lines would be the authoritarian text written by the “perverse” master, where every question is given the appearance of being answered. Here any sort of lack has been disavowed in the text, so the reader is left no place to discover her own desire because nothing is lacking in the Other. All this is left is complete alienation in the text and total subjective identification. This effect can be discerned, perhaps, among the cult like followers of Ayn Rand.
Another type of transference would be metonymical transference. This sort of text is full of desire– it is elliptical, enigmatic, full of gaps, suggestive, cryptic. Transference here functions in a different way, but no less powerfully. Where there’s a complete fading of the subject in the first text (coupled by strong aggressiveness to others as a sort of symptomatic trace of subjective erasure), the transference at work in the metonymical text functions by suggesting, hinting, promising, that objet a is always just around the corner. Along these lines, one of the things I find fascinating when reading original manuscripts of Lacan’s seminars is their sentence structure and qualifications. Lacan’s setences are extremely complex, sometimes running on for a couple of pages. He perpetually qualifies them with statements like “what I am trying to show you” “what I am trying to get you to see” “the topology that I am trying to handle”, etc. A lot of this gets loss in Miller’s authorized editions. The sense you get is that of a sort of antipatory breathlessness, where Lacan is just about to reveal the truth, to manifest it at long last. This, of course, is the logic of objet a. If Lacan was fascinated with irrational numbers and things like Fibonacci sequences, it was because of how they perpetually repeat while always leaving a remainder. The problem is that the moment of separation called for by analysis, coupled with the traversal of the fantasy, is never accomplished by this sort of style. The listener becomes trapped in Lacan’s speech and ends up thoroughly alienating themselves in his signifiers. The healthy Lacanians, the most authentic Lacanians, are, I think, figures like Iragary, Guattari, Laplanche, Cicioux, and Leclaire… Not because they follow the letter of the Lacanian text, but precisely because they departed from Lacan, indicating that they had undergone separation and traversed the fantasy, finding their own space of desire.
April 25, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Alright, I understand what you mean. I don’t have any stake in defending Marion’s conception of the idol and the icon.
I do think there is a difference between good writing of the sort you’re talking about (i.e. clear, straight-forward, scholarly writing) and the sort that is sort of attractive about Deleuze and Derrida (I don’t know about Lacan). I personally find both Deleuze and Derrida to be very enjoyable reads. I understand what Mikhail is saying about “Force of Law” and he’s largely correct by the standards of the first kind of good writing. But how many novels are basically a simple idea that is then surrounded by rambling. Of course there are good novels and bad novels and those of us who like reading good novels can’t necessarily write them (for instance, I know that my writing reaches its limits very quickly). Now, I know they aren’t writing novels and certainly the analogy isn’t satisfying in a lot of ways. Still, it just seems that there is something that would be lost if Deleuze wrote in the way you wish he had.
Anyway, much of what I just said covers over lots of good things Mikhail and Levi have said. The difference between simple and clear, the fact that Levi isn’t saying this is grounds for rejecting the text, the desire for more accessible philosophy in general, and so on.
April 25, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Trying to respond specifically to your point about Lacan’s intent to demasterfy the text and the actual outcome in authoritarian sacralization.
According to Weber, this would be a completely ordinary ‘routinization of charisma’. All of the figures you mentioned as examples of clarity have their own priesthoods too. This possibility is there with any text. But it’s a certain ‘kind’ of reader who gets caught in a text this way, isn’t it? Maybe your focus is misplaced?
I don’t think of texts as having power over me (they’re tools for me), but some people do. Why?
April 25, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Mikhail, here you can see the perversity at work IN VIVO. Angelina Paulina comes in with some barely disguised complaint (is it icon or is it idol) designed to provoke dr. Sinthome into spanking her, and dr. Sinthome of course can’t resist the temptation. Then Angelina offers an apology which clearly isn’t honest, hoping to tempt the narcissistic cat into spanking her some more. In between Adamina makes a patronizing appearance just to make sure who’s the real boss at the Eternal Theology Students blogs. In this way Angelina’s masochistic jouissance is doubled.
April 25, 2008 at 9:34 pm
i don’t have a lot to add, but thought someone should at least sort of agree with larvalsubjects.
my appreciation of the style of deleuze and derrida is, for lack of a better term, aesthetic, and undoubtedly has something to do with this power relationship LS is talking about. their ideas can and have been made clearer by interlocutors, and i think only the aesthetic element is lost. that’s quite a lot if you’re a fan, like i am — if they’ve been responsible for shaping you intellectually — but for those who don’t have a taste for it it’s not that much.
i’m not sure how marx fits into this — his prose is just as horrendously and unnecessarily difficult as the writers on your ‘obscurantist’ list, though his subject is (arguably i suppose) of more immediate importance.
it’s interesting that i agree with your assessment of kant, spinoza, leibniz, etc. but for the most part i find their writing a chore, and i think they take me just as long to sort through as the ‘obscurantists.’ that is, i agree that their concepts are clearer (despite their difficulty), but here too i think they can be broken down in such a way that the only loss is to those who have developed a relationship with them, by laborious working through the texts. one learns a skill, perhaps, in doing this, but i don’t know that it’s qualitatively different from the ‘skill’ one learns from reading derrida, deleuze, etc. and the end result is still often a kind of tutelage to an invisible master.
this actually does seem to be a philosophy vs. science question. i think what’s at stake is something like content.
April 26, 2008 at 1:03 am
I’ve been thinking about this discussion for the past couple of days. The post hits some central issues for me, as I spend much of my time trying to unpack Marx’s style in order to make sense of the underlying argument (I agree with traxus that Marx is also needlessly – and deliberately – difficult: the composition of individual sentences and the flow of the text may seem clear enough, but the argumentative structure and textual strategy of a work like Capital is deeply obscurantist). Marx would have defended his presentational style on substantive grounds: he thought this form of presentation was necessary to express what he wanted to express. The consequence, though, was a fairly predictable and understandable set of interpretations of Capital that sit in deep tension with what I take to be Marx’s actual argument. The amount of time it has taken for me to try to make sense of the text – and then the additional time it takes to show other readers why Marx chooses to express this content in that form… it’s deeply frustrating, particularly given that the underlying argument is already complex enough to state in its own right, without having also to take the reader on long tours through the idiosyncracies of Marx’s textual strategy…
The points on transference above echo some things I have thought in relation to parts of Adorno’s work, where he adopts a particular style in order precisely to attempt to undermine a certain relationship of the reader to an authoritative author, by involving the reader in the constitution of the textual constellation: I understand what Adorno is seeking to achieve, and I enjoy his work – but my underlying reaction is that texts are read in very different conditions over time, by readers socialised in different ways – and that the impact of a style, or the attempt to cultivate a particular experience of reading in order to transform the reader, in some sense perhaps relies on the notion that style would always have the same impact over time, as everything else changes around it. There seems to me to be a sort of assumption lurking that the text can control the conditions of its reading – coupled with a notion that particular habits of perception and thought have intrinsic political implications, as though political implications would not be negotiated dynamically with a complex surrounding environment.
Of course texts can be intended as interventions into some very specific situation. But they persist. They fall into different constellations. They become, as a result, different texts. This both leads me to be sympathetic to the sorts of points made in the original post – to be a bit suspicious about whether the advantages that are meant to derive from certain stylistic presentations, really do eventuate. But also to apply this same suspicion reflexively: I sense a value, now, to texts that seek a particular sort of accessible presentation – but I am also intervening into a particular moment – a moment that will eventually transform around the texts I generate myself. This suspicion doesn’t make me less committed to how I want to write; it just reminds me of how reliant is any sort of stylistic commitment, on factors beyond the writer’s control.
All of this says nothing about Sinthome’s other points: that some of what is being discussed is simply “bad writing”, and that certain sorts of communities and attachments seem to coalesce around the reading practices demanded by particular texts. Just associating to some of the side thoughts the post provoked for me…
April 26, 2008 at 8:49 am
I’m inclined to agree with N, and I’m not sure there’s really anything more to add, save that bad writing isn’t necessarily obscurantist, or ‘difficult'(in the sense of ‘intellectually arduous’). It’s just a nuisance, which has prompted folks to sometimes offer rather Ptolemic interpretations of a thinker in order to make bad writing into a smart insight into the nature of X.
So,with this said, let me just respond to the questions directed to me:
(1) Floyd, the book I mentioned is entitled The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin. It’s a pop-science book that argues something to the effect that String Theory is the biggest detour Physics has ever taken in that if one wants to do physics, or obtain a research grant, one must do string theory even though it has no experimental or predictive facet.
(2) Sinthome, although I don’t know Lacan’s 20th Seminar (I’ve only ever flipped through his Ecrits and, to say something entirely about me, I found it to be rather unhelpful, and largely uninteresting), and it feels like decades have passed since someone has even mentioned Deleuze to me. But this said, and restricting myself to Deleuze’s work, I’m really hard put to say that there is any difference, which makes a difference, between him, Kant, and Badiou at the level of difficulty, ‘good/bad’ writing style, or accessibility.
If there is a difference among them, it’s this: Kant has been around long enough for some of the dust to settle around his work, and for us to see what he was up to. IN his own time, however, Kant was considered to be obscure and difficult (indeed, his prose is still nothing less than Teutonic — impossibly long, convoluted sentences, verging on ungrammaticality — and arguments with missing or implied premises that are only made thematic well after the arguments for which they are needed have been concluded, interlocutors who are mentioned only once (if at all) in his entire work, etc). Some have even argued (eg Blumenberg) that Kant’s work only found an appropriate audience in the 20th Century.
In any event, this picture of Kant does seem similar to the one you have painted of Deleuze. Impossible sentences, missing interlocutors and influences, etc. So I’m completely unconvinced that there’s any substantive difference between the two. We just need more time with Deleuze.
Same with Marx and Badiou: although Marx was a fine writer (and Badiou isn’t), both have moved philosophical problems from a ‘philosophical ground’ onto a ‘scientific one:’ Marx moves from ideational philosophy, to an immanent, reflexive description of social and economic phenomena, which are taken (and then shown) to be constitutive of our self-concpetion and social interaction. Badiou moves from a straightforward, transcendental understanding of what Hegel would call ‘Spirit,’ to the hypertrophied formalism of set-theory. The difficulty in reading these thinkers stems from the fact that (a) one needs to readjust one’s naturalized perspective and leave behind some baggage in order to follow them, and (b) one has to be able to follow the ‘sciency’ bits. If one can’t accommodate a and b, then their texts are difficult and obscure.
Now, since I don’t want to be completely tangential to this conversation, I take it that the difficulties, charitably read so as to excuse bad grammar etc, is necessary insofar as we can speak of something like progress. Like the distinction you are trying to express, Sinthome, there are times when the available technical resource are insufficient to their task. Hence difficulty.
But then it’s our task to continue to refine the ‘new tools’ in order to get a hold on what our predecessors were trying to fashion. But this implies that Deleuze, for instance, or Badiou don’t get it ‘right,’ don’t express what they needed to, and hence their ‘tools’ need to be refashioned. Hence the need for difficult texts.
April 26, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Alexei, I think your remarks significantly ignore the role that textual strategy plays in thinkers like Hegel, Adorno, Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze. In these cases there was a very explicit meditation on the relationship between the form of presentation and the content presented, and a conscious effort to cultivate a particular style of presentation in keeping with the content of presentation. Kant is difficult because the content of what he is attempting to express, but I can’t say that I’ve found a similar meditation or self-conscious cultivation of style in Kant. In the case of Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and Adorno, there is the self-conscious aim of developing a style that would itself be differential in character, or that would escape the primacy of identity in metaphysics through its very form of expression. This is going to have consequences where textual constructions is concerned. In short, I don’t think the “difficulty” of these works is simply a function of the ideas being “new” and therefore unfamiliar. Rather, there is something closer to the transcendental going on here. Insofar as thought necessarily tends towards the representational and identity– towards “abstraction” or “thing-thinking” in Hegel-speak –such texts will be inherently difficult due to their differential and dialectical nature, regardless of the historical setting in which they’re read (barring, of course, a massive transformation in the nature of cognition and a fundamental shift away from intentionality directed towards identical objects). Jameson does a fairly good job discussing this in Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic. I personally don’t find the same struggle in reading Badiou, who strikes me as giving a rather straightforward presentation of his claims (he’s very programmatic). Badiou explicitly speaks to developing a style that is maximally transmissible as one of his goals. While his claims may be difficult to understand as accounts of the world– if we bend to Floyd’s primacy of “lived experience” (a prison house if ever there were), then we’ll find it very difficult to think being as pure multiplicities of multiplicities without unification or one –but stylistically his specific claims aren’t difficult to pin down. This is very different than the case of a Deleuze or Lacan where it’s not at all clear what is even being claimed. I can say with confidence what Badiou is claiming or arguing even if I have difficulty understanding what it would be like to live in such a world, I cannot say with confidence what Lacan is explicitly claiming.
N.Pepperell, I think this is an interesting observation:
I agree that texts are ecological in the sense that they resonate differently depending on the surroundings in which they’re read (much like one and the same sound can produce very different affects depending on what other notes it’s related to). I wonder, however, whether it’s entirely fair to these thinkers to suggest that they’re trying to control the experience of the reader. In the case of Deleuze, for example, it seems that his works (especially the later ones with Guattari) are designed to do something rather than represent something. That is, they’re designed to function as catalysts of sorts. This would be in close keeping with your ecological discussion of texts resonating differently. A text like A Thousand Plateaus is designed to actualize itself in a variety of ways through different encounters and embeddings. It doesn’t mean or represent something, but instead interacts with the world about it and its readers producing something else. This would be very different than a root-text where authorial intention governs the meaning and sense of the text.
On the other hand, it seems to me that every text has its apparatus of capture, where it simultaneously invites a certain sort of reader and seeks to construct a certain sort of reader. I suppose that if this is the case the question becomes one of investigating the different modes of capture and construction.
April 26, 2008 at 5:00 pm
[…] April 26, 2008 I have some reservations about the recent Larval Subjects post about “difficult” books, but I think that, in part, it points toward a real phenomenon — one that I call […]
April 26, 2008 at 5:01 pm
A text like A Thousand Plateaus is designed to actualize itself in a variety of ways through different encounters and embeddings. It doesn’t mean or represent something, but instead interacts with the world about it and its readers producing something else.
Dr Sinthome I think you´re completely right. I recently started the Anti-Oedipus. I had long been put off by the book because of my impression that, following Lacan´s frequent complaint, it wasn´t aware of the way it gets bogged down in metaphors of its own making, to what extent its language was metaphorized I mean, and in this way the book´s attempt to reinterpret Oedipus seemed like a truism to me (you can´t reinterpret metaphors by inventing more metaphors). But then one day while reading the chapter on the Body Without Organs I realized that the book itself is a Body without Organs, generating numerous realities/multiplicities and that that´s the most astonishing thing about it. It seemed like a prequel of blogs and all these other hypertextual creations of the 21st century. The book seemed to me like a portal to parallel realities. That said I find the style often dry, and difficult to follow due to its insistence on a kind of a mathematical tone, for which I don´t quite have the right impression. It really takes an obsessive scholar such as yourself to have the patience and the anal rigor to make sense out of this and translate it to some kind of an understandable Texan drawl. This is why I have faith in your book´s success, even as ´´Difference and Givenness´´, in marketing terms, is a recipe for commercial failure!
April 26, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I mean can you imagine Madonna or Britney Spears singing something like ´´difference and givenness´´, and you´ll get my advertising point.
April 26, 2008 at 5:41 pm
But on the other hand if you´re pessimistically inclined, you could think that Deleuze and Guattari, whose gayness is inescapable in their sympathies for the female side of the sexuation graph, created just another language grid and in this way have been trapped by language even as they were trying to ´´burn a hole through the silk´´ as in Lynch´s Deleuzian masterpiece INLAND EMPIRE, to expose the Hole, the Light shining through all the blankness, and find creativity in it. I wonder also if this isn´t the same thing that Guy Hocqunghem tried to reach through his asshole only to realize that the obsessive compulsive neurosis didn´t disappear and that the Phallic law wasn´t broken.
April 26, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I’m not sure that I am ignoring the role of style or textual strategies, Sinthome (especially since i took myself to be agreeing with N), but your point is well taken.
Of course, now I’m a little confused. Are you now saying — contra what you’ve written in the above post — that these textual strategies, this ‘stylistic virtuousity’ are a necessary evil (say, in the case of folks like Adorno and Hegel, with whom I am more familiar), that some texts need to be difficult, and there’s no way around that? I have no qualms with agreeing with such a stance, it’s just that I took you to be championing something quite to the contrary.
And in any event, aren’t these textual strategies you mention not ideas presented through, or created by the text itself (or their author functions), even if they are not propositionally, or explicitly formulated? aren’t they as much the content of a given text as the ‘explicit content’? So what gives, at the interpretative level, credence to separating textual strategies as the form through which one delivers semantic content, when both this form and the content it conveys are both meaningful products of ‘meditations’? why not treat them as part and parcel of the same phenomena — as you say, differentially or dialectically related — but nevertheless ideas, rather than invoking a form content distinction?
April 26, 2008 at 7:39 pm
There’s some interesting assumptions about style and content, here. The notion that there is a style that divests itself of style, and that represents the object without any style – the object being an argument, a thesis, an idea – has historic roots in the ‘plain’ prose – the natural prose – which was the ideologically preferable to the cleric’s casuistry or the court language of rhetoric. And the ideology puts style on one side, and this thing that will not be style – will be good, solid argument – on the other.
That structure of assumptions is just what Derrida and, in his own way, Deleuze are targeting, so it is no surprise that you would be irritated by the way they write. The assumptions are consonant with the long attempt to create a metalanguage that would be a self evident set of functives, autonomous, universally available, and above all, impervious to style.It is as if here, finally, we will have the content without the form. This project has, I believe, collapsed, as have its corollaries – the attempt to reduce all science to a physicalist language, for instance – but it is perpetually being renewed by philosophers who somehow think there must be only one structure of appearance. And of course the desire for it is still strong – perhaps even dominant in the ‘common sense’ Anglosphere.
I don’t believe, however, that once you have “figured out” an argument (within the gradient of the easy and the difficult) or an idea or theme, that you have unwrapped it from its style – that is a little like saying translating from French to English is translating from a mere language to the way things really are.
That doesn’t mean the plain style isn’t a good choice. You can prefer it for a number of reasons. But I don’t see how you can prefer it for not being a style. At that point, you do fall prey to an ideological illusion.
Myself, I like Deleuze’s style very much. In Logique du sens in particular, it achieves a real beauty, to my mind. And it is successful by one of the keys of stylistic success as Deleuze saw it – becoming a stimulus for concept-making over an array of disciplines. I don’t think, for comparisons sake, that Rorty has ever inspired a painter or filmmaker (although, on the other hand, I know Davidson had a marked influence on the minimalists – Davidson had a relaxed, conversational style which is the best aspect of the plain style).
April 26, 2008 at 8:04 pm
ps – I should also say that Badiou, from what I’ve read of him, gravitates to a very interesting style – the list. The list appears as soon as writing systems appear, they form a couple. It is a sort of primal form of the epistemic text – the organization of a space in which the sign will match an object. Correspondence theory is more than a theory about truth, it is a way of organizing the social world. The list is the bureaucratic text par excellence, which sinks the assumption of power – the initial fiat into an unlisted sorting principle. One of the genuinely witty futurist tactics was to create list manifestos – as if the futurists had seized power. And, in the sixties, guerrilla groups – for instance, the Red Army – were always doing the same thing, although less humorously. The list of demands became a subgenre. Badiou would know about that from the old Maoist days. Jack Goody has a really good essay about lists, Literacy and classification, in The Domestication of the Savage Mind.
April 26, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Roger, while I do not disagree with the thesis that style and content interpenetrate– a point that I’ve made all along, so there’s no need to rehearse the tired post-structuralist cliches on this score –but I find myself wondering how, if what you say is the case, you are able to write such a clear post to make these points. In short, isn’t there a bit of nonsense in the thesis that one must write like Derrida or Lacan in order to express the point that there is no universals? You just made precisely these points in your post without resorting to these sorts of stylistic techniques (which is different than suggesting an absence of style). I also find myself fascinated by the massive secondary literature on these figures which seems occupied with the activity of translation. In short, I suspect that style is exaggerated in these thinkers to draw attention to a specific aspect of language. Could it not be said that brain neurons function in a way similar to signifiers. Why is it that neurologists are not compelled to construct prose that imitates the differential play of neurons when mapping the functioning of neurons? Not being a reader of Rorty myself– at least not for years –and therefore not being keyed into looking for his influence or lack thereof, I can’t say whether he’s inspired folk outside of philosophy to produce new things or not. The argument strikes me as rather specious, to tell the truth. Artists, film makers, scientists, etc., are inspired by all sorts of things.
Alexei, no I am not claiming that some texts need to adopt such a style because of their content. I am saying that Lacan, Adorno, Deleuze, Derrida, and Hegel all argued that style should be reflective of content and that content is a function of style. That is a very different claim from the claim that style dictates content. Incidentally, these textual strategies are explicitly formulated by the various authors with the possible exception of Deleuze. Here I think N.Pepperell’s observations about Marx’s textual strategies are apropos. In short, the question is whether or not Marx’s claims could have been presented in a different way. I suspect they can. We see N.Pepperell doing precisely this.
April 26, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Roger, I’m not making the claim that there’s a “style-less” form of writing, but speaking of a particular sort of style.
April 26, 2008 at 9:40 pm
it seems to me that defenses of ‘style’ on this thread are defenses of a particular ‘experience’ of reading, reading under a certain set of conditions assumed to be the most ‘authentic’ — most compatible with what’s taken to be the author’s ‘original product,’ most compatible with the local idiom of the text’s tightest fan bases (trained scholars and critics).
what i’m getting at is that style is part of a social configuration. if LS finds a certain style objectionable, it has something to do with the social configuration of the group that likes and perpetuates it. the styles of lacan, derrida, and deleuze all reject ‘accessibility’ as a norm complicit with this ideology roger describes as “ideology on one side, good non-ideological style on the other.”
i guess the idea is that these reading experiences contain ‘something more’ than can’t be adequately expressed in a different form. by definition any form that has accessibility as one of its primary goals. of course there is never one universal form of ultimate accessibility — it’s relative to audience. so the ban on accessibility reduces to any language that more people can understand. for this move to not be simply elitist, we need to insist on this union between content and expression such that the one is inextricable from the other.
so i think this idea of some untranslatable something in these texts — translation as a kind of corruption, or a concession to the ignorant/stupid/foreign — has ideological underpinnings we should really be questioning. that there is a content which can only be understood in a particular narrow way, that it is inextricable from this particular set of experiential conditions (in the case of deleuze, that it must ‘do what it says’).
what pepperell says here:
“my underlying reaction is that texts are read in very different conditions over time, by readers socialised in different ways – and that the impact of a style, or the attempt to cultivate a particular experience of reading in order to transform the reader, in some sense perhaps relies on the notion that style would always have the same impact over time, as everything else changes around it”
makes me wonder if this experience ever actually exists as a discrete thing one must learn how to access. it seems to me more that a certain type of habitus is being advocated, certain norms of reading and the institutions which support those norms. which set up the hierarchy between ‘original’ ‘difficult’ work and the ‘mass industry’ of ‘secondary literature’ that is only about translating the product of these brilliant geniuses, marking both their readers and writers as students rather than true philosophers.
April 26, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Traxis, I think you make a number of good points here. It seems that our reaction to these issues depending on what the telos or purpose of our activity of reading is. I am primarily interested in understanding the world around me. I want to know, for example, why the weather is the way it is in North Texas, or why social formations take the form they do around the 70s in the West, or why a particular person has a particular symptom. I find that answers to these questions can only be found in thinkers that have relational and process oriented approaches that are very sensitive to local conditions. However, it takes a good deal of work to pierce some of these texts… Something that I think has often been counter-productive to the social and political aims some of these thinkers have wished to promote. I confess that I find the aesthetic dimension of these texts secondary to my particular aims.
That aside, I think the question of institutional habiti(?) is an important one. It’s difficult for me to speak outside the context of philosophy departments, but my sense is that what we have in most continentally oriented philosophy departments is not philosophers but intellectual historians. That is, we have people who devote their lives to careful commentary on figures like Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel, and so on and publish and present the results of this work. If you want to do original work in a continental vein chances are you will be required to seek positions outside of philosophy departments in some sort of sociology, cultural studies, or rhetoric department. This is reflected in continental journals and conferences. It is all but impossible to get a paper accepted to, for example, SPEP unless it is on some other figure such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida, Irigaray, etc. It is unlikely, for example, that Brassier would have been able to do the sort of work he’s done here in the United States simply because he violates the commentary based orientation of continental philosophy departments and doesn’t fit the frameworks delineated in Anglo-American programs.
There has thus emerged a hierarchical system in American continental philosophy departments. On the one hand you have your revered masters (Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Derrida, etc., etc.), on the other hand you have those that do research on these figures. While this is not an absolute, what you don’t have is an institutional setting that cultivates thinkers in their own right. A dissertation is understood to be on a particular figure or set of figures, rather than on a particular problem. It is, moreover, extremely difficult to publish articles that aren’t on aspects of the thought of various figures. Most of the intellectual work done in these departments is work of translation. That is, it consists of studies of the work of various philosophers such as my Difference and Givenness.
This is in stark contrast to Anglo-American departments. While figures are not unimportant in these departments, the focus is on problems, rather than figures and on the evaluation of various solutions to problems. This is not to say, of course, that Anglo-American departments do not have their own constraints. Whereas the “revered masters” in continental philosophy set their own problems, in Anglo-American orientations the problems tend to be already set and a sort of phase space of potential solutions is explored by individual thinkers. That is, problems in Anglo-American departments have a status analogous to figures in continental orientations.
April 26, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Levi,
I know of quite a few Continental philosophers who have done this. Take DePaul, which is hardly a top tier philosophy department, where many have published on problems. Some of how they’ve done this is via a study on a thinker, but some of it has been completely original. And Brassier’s book does the exact same thing (not one chapter doesn’t go forward without some other thinker who serves as either a figure to critique or to use). There is, of course, some truth to what you are saying, but you are giving an inaccurate description of the situation by making it far too stark of an opposition.
April 26, 2008 at 11:31 pm
LS, I’m not quite sure I see why the use, by non-specialists, of Deleuze’s work is a specious argument, given that the stimulus for your argument is that a non-specialist audience can understand – or at least buys the books of – scientists. You are opening up the question of style with reference to one non-specialist audience, and I’m saying that there are at least two.
I think you have an energetic notion behind what you say about style and content – for instance, the idea that ‘every content is styled’ is a “tired” structuralist “cliche”. Some ideas, apparently, get tired. They evolve from truth to truism. How? Is it that they are repeated too often? Applied too generally? Do they fade into the background – losing energy like a popped balloon and settle down among the tired and drowsy cliches? As cliches, do they have the same truth value? After you know what Hegel means by a passage, does the passage lose its energy for you? Become rote? Is the rote passage the same as that passage when it was opaque?
I think that, in fact, the style of someone like Deleuze does respond in a romantic manner to the same energetic notion you are using – or at least shares a set of similar fears. How to create a style in which every repetition of the content is “fresh”? The “social configuration” in question, in the sixties, was that of a bureaucratized world, and all of those writers are trying to shake it up in various ways – hence, the aversion to the list as the ultimate form of text, whether it is the test – what does x mean by y – or the notion that the world is best described by a set theory that makes sure no proposition expresses an ill formed set, or the notion that what we want to instill in our governing elite is a canonical set of instructions to cover all circumstances.
So I’d say the difficulty question about style has to do with what the texts do. I think, ideally, the puzzle would not fit together the same way at every reading. There’s a phrase of Novalis’ that says, if I remember correctly, that God is a problem whose solution is a problem. This was the discovery of the romantic style – that there could be such objects – and it seems to have been one motive in the stylistic choices made by Derrida and Deleuze.
April 26, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Most of the intellectual work done in these departments is work of translation. That is, it consists of studies of the work of various philosophers such as my Difference and Givenness.
Right – translations, many of which are excellent, of that which cannot possibly be translated.
i would actually argue that the desire to be ‘original’ is itself a function of this institutional setup. rather than trying to work together on solving a problem of larger importance, we’re encouraged to desire the role of genius while working hard at the perpetuation of that myth.
if it’s true that “problems in Anglo-American departments have a status analogous to figures in continental orientations” — and from my experience that’s accurate — i would assume there’s a resistance to debunking certain problems, that institutionally accepted problems have an inertia in much the same way as the genius of Foucault.
the problem we seem to have is some way of trying to address common problems, rather than problems as defined by a set of institutional conventions. to do that, it seems to me, not even style can be held inviolable.
April 27, 2008 at 12:01 am
Roger, I think you quite miss my point. In suggesting that your remark about Rorty and Deleuze is specious, I am not denying that Deleuze has had a great influence on people in a number of fields. He has. What I am rejecting is your blanket assertion that someone like Rorty has not had such an influence. I simply don’t know one way or another whether this is the case one way or another.
I do not recognize myself in the remainder of your remarks or how I’ve argued anything remotely similar to what you’re talking about regarding freshness and perpetual novelty. I clearly outline the problem I have with post-structuralist styles of writing in the third paragraph of the original post.
Anthony, the claim I was making was a statistical claim, not an absolute claim. Clearly there are those that manage to break out. Moreover, a lot of work focusing on problems is done in a “furtive” fashion. That is, American thinkers in the continental tradition use a particular philosopher as a way of formulating a particular problem. Butler, for instance, does this in much of her work. By and large, however, I think what I say holds about continental philosophy departments in the States. Institutionally our journals and departments are set up in such a way as to strongly discourage anything but the work of intellectual historians. Some manage to break out of this, of course, but our institutions and graduate departments certainly don’t encourage it or make independent work professionally wise or a good career decision. I think the rejection of your article on Meillassoux was an example of this sort of institutional framework at work. You were making original and independent claims, developing a position of your own, and there’s little place for that in continental journals.
April 27, 2008 at 12:28 am
Traxus, I wonder if the shift towards commentary on texts in continental philosophy doesn’t have something to do with a more generalized collapse of truth posited in these traditions. That is, if truth has collapsed, if there’s no longer a world “out there” that could be an arbiter of different claims about that world, what is left but to talk about texts about the world rather than the world itself?
April 27, 2008 at 1:38 am
i would actually argue that the desire to be ‘original’ is itself a function of this institutional setup.
you don’t really have to argue this, it’s common knowledge, and it’s also common knowledge how this “desire” is produced: start with a doctoral dissertation that is – a requirement – an original contribution to the field, and go on to publications, books, etc etc. i see your beef with everything “institutional” but there isn’t much philosophy in this country done outside of the institutions…
April 27, 2008 at 1:45 am
Mikhail, presumably the question would be one of how to change those institutions and institutional practices.
April 27, 2008 at 3:32 am
Certainly, i’m just saying that there’s no need to really be so surprised about the desire to be original when it’s pretty much all one is told to want to be in an institution of higher education or at least a graduate/postgraduate and professional life (in my limited personal experience) i don’t know if it’s really a manageable task to try to change this culture of originality, especially when originality is often understood as simply a novel way of combining concepts, not achieving the level of genius, as Traxus seems to suggest…
April 27, 2008 at 10:51 am
LS: we seem to be talking past each other, and i’m not entirely sure why. But let me give this another shot, if only as something of an experiment:
I’m not claiming that style dictates content, or that content necessarily dictates style. That would be absurd — and I didn’t even want to approach intimating something like either of these two claims.
Of course, there is a give and take between style and content, and certain styles do limit or encourage certain kinds of thinking, just as certain languages facilitate and limit certain kinds of thinking (E.G. French has a rather elaborate tense system, English has a robust descriptive vocabulary). Everything that one says in french can be translated into English. But not everything that is simple to say in english is easy to say in French (think of how ‘convoluted,’ to an English speaker, the English expression, ‘don’t miss me too much’ is in French). Not everything that is easily explicated is easily thought for the first time. And so, some things are easier to express in French than in English, and vice versa. Same with ‘philosophical styles.’
SO, it stands to reason that if a thinker has a particular problem, or wants to motivate a certain perspective, or argument, some styles will help, some will hinder. Surely, this is the crux of our debate: whether ‘difficult styles’ (and not bad grammar, or sloppy indexes, or less than fastidious announcements of influence) are essential to a thinker’s project. That is, does a particular style facilitate a particular line of thought (and notice that this isn’t an a priori consideration; it can only be settled on a case by case basis)?
Now, I take it that an ‘analytical’ work (a work of translation, as you call it) can parse its object without resorting to the the latter’s style. however, such a work is possible only when the primary text has been written. Neither N Pepperell’s work on Marx, nor my own stuff on Benjamin, for instance, is possible without Marx and Benjamin.
Furthermore, I take it that hypotheses concerning whether, say, Marx could have written Capital in a different style but could still have achieved the same effects and conclusions to be an exercise of counterfactual imagination that verges on pointlessness. We have a text written in a certain way; we want to understand it, and perhaps understand why it was written in that manner; and, perhaps, we want to understand what the limits and potentials of that style are.
Simply put, Marx’s work, and his style were developed in order to think through specific problems. And that’s what needs to be figured out. Moreover simply because we can ‘translate’ well after the fact someone’s thinking into a ‘simpler’ style in no way entails that these thoughts could be initially ‘thought’ independently of that style. And there seems to be something like a revisionist, counterfactual impulse, which doesn’t really seem necessary to me, in claiming the contrary.
So, all this said, may I ask you again the same questions from my last comment?
(1) Are you now saying — contra what you’ve written in the above post — that these textual strategies, this ’stylistic virtuousity’ are a necessary evil (say, in the case of folks like Adorno and Hegel, with whom I am more familiar)? That some texts need to be difficult, and there’s no way around that?
(2)isn’t style as much the content of a given text as the ‘explicit content’? So what gives credence to separating textual strategies as the form through which one delivers semantic content, when both this form and the content it conveys are meaningful products of ‘meditations’?
April 27, 2008 at 11:10 am
Anthony, the claim I was making was a statistical claim, not an absolute claim.
But dr. Sinthome Angelina wants Absolution, one way or the other, why else would she be studying theology for so long?
especially when originality is often understood as simply a novel way of combining concepts
Mikhail I think what you’re encountering is the culture of mixage that spills over from MTV into reality, which as we long know from my hero and cyperpunk icon Shaviro’s writing now belongs to the media. Maybe this culture instead of being feared could be put to good use by encouraging kids to find ways to enter that space in between the two layers of the mixage, the old and the new, in order to create something Uncanny. Take a look at the Justin Timberlake clip with Madonna, it suggests just such a possibility.
April 27, 2008 at 1:40 pm
No Alexei, I do not think that they are a necessary evil and I believe that often stylistic virtuosity of the sort we find in Hegel’s Logic or Adorno’s Negative Dialectics does more to hinder a thinkers project than to help it. But once again, none of what you’ve outlined in your posts has to do with the topic of this post. The point I was making about style was clearly stated in the third paragraph of the original post and in a variety of subsequent posts in this thread.
April 27, 2008 at 3:18 pm
“That is, if truth has collapsed, if there’s no longer a world “out there” that could be an arbiter of different claims about that world, what is left but to talk about texts about the world rather than the world itself?”
i agree that this is a conclusion that could be drawn from reading this type of writing (and material from other humanities departments like literature that rely on the continental tradition for their conceptual/metaphysical framework), and my usual response has been the same. but lately i’ve been thinking, these people (people like us) may read the news with a high degree of suspicion, but it’s not likely to be metaphysical suspicion, i.e. “fools! talking about this fantastical ‘world out there’ again!”
that is, i think there may be something of the useful fiction to this collapse of truth theory. it’s professionally and institutionally useful because it’s not rigorously articulated or maintained, just assumed in order to do certain kinds of writing and thinking. it can be drawn on when needed.
this is why brassier’s book can cause a stir, when it’s core claims are really just the logical extension of commonsense attitudes about science (that it describes things that exist independently of human consciousness).
re: the originality/genius issue, isn’t there a kind of disavowal going on here? we’ve learned from the geniuses themselves that the genius-phallus doesn’t exist, and continue to act as if it did. i think it’s a mistake to blame the problem on institutional factors insofar as they’re conceived as purely external impositions, nothing do with our own activity. this is what blogs are good for, we really can write whatever we want.
April 27, 2008 at 3:24 pm
“really can write whatever we want”
and become accustomed to it, such that the absurdity of more institutionally accepted techniques and styles becomes impossible to ignore (or partake in).
April 27, 2008 at 3:33 pm
And should you decide to respond again, maybe you could find a way to be more condescending. “The book had to be written”? It’s not as if I picked up a book by Hegel or Deleuze yesterday and am suddenly suffering shock at what I’m encountering. I’ve studied these figures for going on twenty years now and have made exactly the arguments about style in defense of these thinkers you and others are making throughout the thread. In other words, yes, yes, yes, I’m familiar with these arguments. I also know that a number of Deleuze’s works are exceptionally clear, as are some of Hegel’s and much of Adorno. This suggests that something is going on.
Something is amiss when days, sometimes months are eaten up trying to figure out just what claim if any someone is making. Shouldn’t we minimally be entitled to know a person’s claims if they’re asking for an investment of our time, which is our life, and which is connected to our labor? I’ve been willing to make a sacrifice of my time and life and trudge through these stylistic fogs because I believe these thinkers articulate things that are extremely valuable and are therefore worth the trouble. But I do not believe that things have to be this way and I do think that a rather insidious form of power and set of interpellative devices does accompany these types of stylistics. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from all these thinkers, but I’m sorry I’m just not buying the arguments about the necessity of these styles. I would never suggest that these thinkers should be ignored or dismissed, but I do think that these sorts of stylistic practices are things best not continued, and I do think that many things that are very important and dear to me at the level of the social and political and clinical practice in psychotherapy have been set back, in part, decades because of stylistic self-indulgence. I also think it’s absurd to suggest that what Hegel or Adorno or Derrida or Deleuze or Lacan is trying to think is any more complex than what Freud or Spinoza or Darwin or Marx or Foucault or Husserl or Burke or Badiou was trying to think. In short, I think a number of these thinkers have a rather misguided idea of the relationship between a certain sort of style and the content of their philosophy. Judging by the some of the responses to this post and the quickness with which people have trotted out standard form/content arguments taught to every first year philosophy student studying Heidegger or various post-structuralist thinkers, all the while ignoring what the post argued about the transferential effects of this style, you would think I’d shot someone. I certainly must have hit a nerve or symptom, which, I suspect, is a function of the very thing I was thematizing in the original post.
April 27, 2008 at 6:01 pm
a rather misguided idea
A different idea, to be sure.
I seem to remember that Geoffrey Bennington’s book on/with Derrida explicitly raised the question of whether Bennington could rewrite Derrida in a way that neutralised the stylistic driftwork whilst preserving the concepts – with Derrida’s “Circonfession” running along the bottom margin doing its best to upset the applecart. I wouldn’t say that the gambit represented by Derrida’s “horizontal vertigo” fails exactly, but it might be useful to see it as a move in a game (against a neutralising, systematising antagonist) in which there is always a counter-move.
Recently I’ve been entertaining the conceit that some of the fuzzier notions in de Man might have been more clearly expressible in mathematical terms. There’s more than one way to seduce the reader away from the colloquial (that is, away from “folk” psychology, politics, economics, literary appreciation etc.). Badiou opts for mathematics as the ultimate seduction: the mind “subjectivating” a proof is as far as can be from the mind captivated by opinion.
I think it’s correct to see stylistic “difficulty” as having a relationship to seduction, captivation, transference and so on; but one should perhaps at the same time see this seduction as intrinsic to thinking, to the transmission of a thought. If thinking is to be opposed to opinion, to the circulation of received ideas, then the comforts of opinion must be overcome through the pleasure-pain of seduction. Textual “style” is just one of the possible strategies in the seducer’s repertoire.
On this point, permit me to quote what is already no doubt very well known, from Badiou’s “Philosophy as Biography”: “The question of love is necessarily at the heart of philosophy, because it governs the question of its power, the question of its address to its public, the question of its seductive strength”.
April 27, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Dominic, I know that in my own case I might as well not read a text at all if I am not in a state of transference or seduced by that text. It’s as if nothing will stick or provoke thought unless I already encounter the text as containing something. I forget all of the text. It seems that learning in general necessarily requires some sort of transference. The question, perhaps, is whether or not a textual strategy actively promotes the dissolution of the transference. Time will tell with Badiou, I think. Already we’ve seen a good deal of philosophical innovation from Brassier and Meillassoux, who I understand to be deeply influenced by Badiou, though independent thinkers in their own right. Is there perhaps something in Badiou’s textual strategy that encourages this? Perhaps something to do with the emphasis on the mathematical as opposed to the interpretive? I don’t know.
April 27, 2008 at 7:34 pm
I have been reading the same mathematical text now – Robert Goldblatt’s introduction to topos theory – for several months, albeit mostly for half an hour at a time on the train to and from work. The language of the text doesn’t seduce me at all; moreover, I find it very difficult to keep even the most basic constructions in my mind, and when more complex constructions are introduced I am almost always sent scurrying back to the earliest chapters of the book to refresh my memory.
Nevertheless, over time, some of it has started to sink in and I have begun to gain confidence in reasoning about categories, attempting the exercises and succeeding with some of them. As is often the way with mathematical texts, it seems that the exercises are key: one must rehearse the concepts, apply them, make use of them oneself, otherwise they will not “stick”.
So I suppose it might be the case that the mathematical emphasis in Badiou encourages a sort of “use it or lose it” approach where you have to see what you can do with Badiou’s notions for yourself. But is the relationship between Meillassoux and Badiou so much different from that between, say, DeLanda and Deleuze?
April 27, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Badiou opts for mathematics as the ultimate seduction: the mind “subjectivating” a proof is as far as can be from the mind captivated by opinion.
Dominique getting off on mathematics is so nerdy that it inevitably leads to a certain form of subjectivation more commonly known as a hand job. I think you better stick to your musical performances, darling, because they’re really great!
April 27, 2008 at 11:11 pm
[…] but I thought I would belatedly post a pointer to an energetic discussion still unfolding over at Larval Subjects on the question of the necessity of “difficult writing” in certain kinds of […]
April 28, 2008 at 7:18 am
“In the case of Deleuze, for example, it seems that his works (especially the later ones with Guattari) are designed to do something rather than represent something. That is, they’re designed to function as catalysts of sorts. This would be in close keeping with your ecological discussion of texts resonating differently. A text like A Thousand Plateaus is designed to actualize itself in a variety of ways through different encounters and embeddings. It doesn’t mean or represent something, but instead interacts with the world about it and its readers producing something else. This would be very different than a root-text where authorial intention governs the meaning and sense of the text.”
Sorry to drop in without invitation, especially seeing as I’ve not had a chance to read through all the comments, but I was struck by the passage I’ve reproduced above. Doesn’t that answer your own question? I ask this sincerely, because I find it hard to see how the initial “complaint” can be articulated consistently alongside this recognition of the performative dimension to their work, so I was wondering if you could clarify (no pun intended).
“I do not disagree with the thesis that style and content interpenetrate– a point that I’ve made all along, so there’s no need to rehearse the tired post-structuralist cliches on this score –but I find myself wondering how, if what you say is the case, you are able to write such a clear post to make these points. In short, isn’t there a bit of nonsense in the thesis that one must write like Derrida or Lacan in order to express the point that there is no universals?”
Is that what these texts are necessarily (intended to be) doing or what they necessarily should be doing? I see Derrida at least (and many of the others) as providing not an idea or set of ideas as rather a way of thinking — and a way of writing, of course. But insofar as it is a way of thinking, that little addendum about them providing also a way of writing isn’t simply supplemental. That is to say, ways of thinking are tied to any number of material or institutional conditions, including the codes of syntax. Unconventional syntax may well enable unconventional thought processes. Moreover, in this sense, the unconventional syntax isn’t simply a way of “imitat[ing] the differential play” signifiers or what have you; it is producing another possibility (see poststructuralist cliche #14: opening a space for the arrival of an other).
Now, maybe I’ve just articulated a “complex” point using “simple” syntax, so haven’t I just shown that the complex syntax is unnecessary? Well, only if you presume that the (necessary or ideal) purpose of a text is to convey an idea. What I suspect — or at least, this is how I (have come to) approach the issue — is that such style aids (also) in habituating readers to a way of thinking that affirms the other and to a way of being open to the possibility of otherness. The style is pedagogical, not in the sense of aiding (or frustrating) the “transmission” but in the sense of cultivating a particular capacity.
Sorry about all the post-structuralist cliches. I would ordinarily agonise over my prose to ensure that it presents its points in a much more subtle and much more courteous fashion (and again I stress that my intentions here are honourable rather than polemic), but I’m in a real rush. Here’s a question for you, though: to what extent are the very succinct and clear accounts of the interpenetration of content and style both “succinct” and “clear” only because you’ve become habituated to a way of thinking that allows you to recognise in the particular forms of words used by your interlocutors a point consistent with the kinds of ideas that that way of thinking may lead you to generate?
Cheers
rob
April 28, 2008 at 9:49 am
BTW (and apologies again if my comments come across as confrontational or condescending, which is not at all my intention), I appreciate your point regarding the “veil” and the question of power you’re raising. I think it’s a very legitimate point to raise and question to ask (but, unfortunately, don’t have time right now to articulate my thoughts in response).
Briefly, though: to what extent is the scenario you describe — i.e. hypnotic attachment — an effect of the style and to what extent might it be an effect of something else (e.g. author function, pedagogical and disciplinary practices, etc.)?
Cheers
April 28, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Rob, I suppose what I am proposing here is a sort of immanent critique of these claims similar to what Hegel does in the Phenomenology. That is, I’m looking at the ideal or “notion” that these thinkers set for themselves and then asking whether or not the practice that emerges around these thinkers lives up to its own notion. Of course, the issue is going to differ depending on which thinker we’re talking about. Heidegger has different motives for his style than does Derrida, for example. In the case of post-structuralist thinkers like Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida, Traxus has expressed the point with great clarity:
Again and again we see a sort of performative contradiction between what followers of a particular philosopher espouse vis a vis mastery and power and a way of treating the philosopher as a master who alone is granted the right to make pronouncements. That is, the thinker comes to be treated as a sort of primal father in express contradiction to what the philosophy claims of such structures of power.
I do think part of the issue here is pedagogical and disciplinary. In the States, at least (I try not to generalize here), Continental philosophy programs are set up to reinforce this sort of structure (not intentionally, I don’t think). We train our graduate students and set up conferences, journals, and presses to reinforce a particular sort of scholarship that encourages and emphasizes commentary over direct philosophical engagement. Part of this has simply been a function of finding ways for Continental philosophy to survive in the United States.
April 28, 2008 at 3:41 pm
@ls, responding now specifically to your update. It starts to look like one has only responded attentively if one agrees that there’s a problem where you say there’s a problem?
I don’t agree that there’s a problem, or rather, I think the problem is in a kind of reader, rather than a kind of text. The sort of reader who needs “transference” in order to learn from a text.
I loved the crack about “academic stockholm syndrome” and I’ve certainly seen my share of victims. But there’s nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in a text or its attendant intertextuality that requires this kind of abjection from any reader. It’s a freaking book. Read it, get something from it, don’t. The drama MUST be supplied by the reader.
Our motives for attending to texts are many and varied. They need not be masochistic, and they could always NOT be masochistic. They also need not be reverent (searching after a god to worship, see my comment above about routinization of charisma) and they could always NOT be reverent.
Lotsa projection going on here, is what I’m saying. Set/subset problems.
Coming back to whether texts ‘need’ to be difficult, I think the ground’s been well covered. My own view is that difficulty is in the first instance pragmatically enabled by the promise of an audience who will do this transference you mention. On these blogs we do not have that luxury, so we must be clear. It’s not an irony, it’s a situation.
Once a text has been ‘canonized’ by the disciples and advertised to a wider market the next question is whether something other than sadism is accomplished by its difficulty. If so, those of us who read for content join in.
April 28, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Carl, if what you say here is true, then you’ve undermined the entire discipline of rhetoric, along with much of media studies, sociology, and the analysis of ideology. While no rhetorical technique will invariably produce a particular effect, certainly there are linguistic structures and patterns that probabilistically tend to produce certain outcomes. I will say, however, that there must already, in part, be a transference to a particular figure in order for the text to produce these sorts of effects. It’s unlike, for example, that an arch-analytic philosopher is going to find himself caught in this sort of dialectic when reading Lacan or Deleuze because he already begins with the premise that the text is “nonsense on stilts” and that there is nothing to be found within the text.
April 28, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Sure. I think we could agree completely if you’d note what happens in the above quote if “requires” is replaced by “invites.”
Again, my point is to shift the focus from the text to the reader. The question is ultimately where the power is. I don’t give mine up to books and movies, but about those who do rhetoric, media studies, sociology and ideology analysis have much to tell us.
April 28, 2008 at 5:21 pm
What I’m describing is a sociologically verifiable fact and is an observation based on years spent with members of groups organized around particular figures like Lacan or Deleuze. The point is a point about readers in relation to certain texts and figures. So much the better for you that you don’t do this, but to suggest that certain group formations don’t emerge around figures such as Heidegger, Deleuze, and Lacan is simply to indicate in my view a lack of familiarity with these collective movements. These formations have something to do with the nature of the rhetoric involved. Is the rhetoric alone sufficient? Of course not, but this should be an obvious point given the nature of rhetoric as involving a relation between text and audience, speaker and listener.
April 28, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Maybe to be a little more clear, one of the basic theses of rhetoric and literary theory is that textual strategies strive to function particular forms of subjectivity, desire, or particular types of readers. What I am analyzing here is such a textual strategy where either dialectical writing styles predominate or whether the rhetorical trope of metonymy predominates. It has to, of course, be emphasized that this is a strategy. The Trojan Horse was a particular military strategy that sought to achieve a particular aim, but it doesn’t follow that it will always successfully produce this aim. Likewise, writing strategies where metonymy predominates will not always produce certain sorts of subjectification. For example, we see many people who throw Lacan down in discuss after reading one of his late seminars. Given that any sort of rhetoric is going to be a dialectical relation between text and receiver, these relations need to be conceived from both ends in their interaction. A textual strategy is a potential, but we have to examine the specific conditions under which a set of potentials can be actual. This requires an analysis of the dispositions of readers as well.
April 28, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Yes, thanks. Since I am suggesting that the dispositions of readers are the point of interest here, IF the relationship of text and reader is framed as a problem as it was in the original post, I think we’ve reached a good place.
April 28, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Pure thought is always changed in the expression. This is what makes literature. And the rest is critical commentary, which is after all not a crime. Go for that.
April 29, 2008 at 1:20 am
Ah, thank you. Now I get where you’re going. I appreciate the point about commentary over philosophical engagement. I think the question of how to follow X philosopher is a difficult one especially insofar as most contemporary continental philosophy affirms the possibility (if not necessity, if not virtue) of resisting/breaking with structure but in order to follow such X philosopher we have necessarily to begin with the available techniques or models for following (e.g. commentary, application of a method, mimicry), and this leaves us in a difficult, perhaps even impossible situation. To paraphrase what I once wrote in a paper on Derrida, to follow Derrida may involve being told not to follow Derrida. But to the extent that our not following is undertaken on the basis of an injunction from Derrida, we cannot but fail to not follow.
I agree, too, that “the issue is going to differ depending on which thinker we’re talking about”. However, I still think there’s problem — or a textual difference, if you like — here regarding attribution of intent: i.e. what it is each philosopher is presumed to be doing. For instance, I just don’t see Derrida as disavowing originality/genius — at least not in any simple way — and I don’t see his style as (necessarily or solely) intended as an imitation of the differential play of signifiers. And while I completely accept your scenario of hypnotic attachment as plausible, I do not see this as necessarily a function of a style of textual virtuosity, nor do I even see syntactical obscurity or its apparent corollary of hypnotic attachment as a necessarily bad thing.
Of course, in one sense that just confirms what you’re saying about discipleship, since there’s every reason to suspect that both my “defence” of Derrida and your grouping of Derrida, Deleuze and Lacan as post-structuralists who are different from Heidegger are tied in some way to our respective “loyalties” to these figures. By the same token, that critique only has force as a critique to the extent that one believes that the “power structure at work” in poststructuralist textual strategies is “insidious” as such, or indeed whether one believes that power can be “eradicated” from the textual relationship (or textuality in general) and whether one believes that any of the figures we’re talking about presume that possibility or affirm it as an ideal or take it as an objective of their writing (be it conceptually or stylistically).
So I guess my beef is with the way you’ve constructed the normative or ethical or political objectives of textual virtuosity. They don’t accord with my understanding (construction) of the implications of their style — as distinct from my speculation on what each figure is trying to do with such a style. Indeed, your account of the normative objectives of textual virtuosity doesn’t even match with my speculation on what each figure is trying to do with such a style — with the exception of Lacan, against whom I think your critique (insofar as it is a style of immanent critique) holds very well.
Sorry about the rambling, uncluttered nature of the above. I’ve now even less time than I had previously to take as much care with structure, style, etc., as I usually prefer to take.
Cheers
April 29, 2008 at 1:41 am
I like your formulation of what a discipleship to Derrida would mean. It was Traxus who situated the discussion in terms of genius. I have no beef with genius or originality, though I haven’t really thought about the issue much. Rather, what I’m getting at is the way in which the relationship between master and disciples seems to recapitulate the masculine side of the graphs of sexuation in Lacan (or, in Derridean terms, seems to be onto-theological in character, with a master at the top and “castrated disciples” down below). I wonder if the only two options are power and the absence of power. It seems rather naive to me to imagine that it’s possible for there to be forms of style that escape power and which do not construct various forms of desire.
April 29, 2008 at 1:48 am
Lots of interesting discussion here. Too much to catch up on in one reading. A couple of points that may be worth bringing up:
An interesting case in the question of rhetorical style in 20th century French philosophy is Lévinas. He’s an example of a writer who made a conscious effort to alter his style at a certain point in his career. Many commentators have pointed to Derrida’s essay on Lévinas as the proximate cause of his change of approach. If so, that’s an instance of some pretty powerful writing on Derrida’s part.
In Lévinas’s case, the stylistic change is directly connected with an effort to come up with a rhetoric that matches his radical ethics. In a culture where the metaphors by which we describe discussion and argument are unrelentingly bellicose and violent, finding a rhetoric that would jibe with Lévinasian ethics means a very unusual rhetoric indeed.
Another point has to do with the difference between the so-called “continental” approach to philosophy and the “Anglo-Saxon” school. It has often seemed to me that the most profound difference between the two schools is expressed in their respective attitudes toward reading the history of philosophy. The Anglo-Saxon school sees the history of philosophy as a history of arguments. The continental school sees the history of philosophy as a series of philosophical positions put forth by various thinkers.
This distinction goes back, of course, to the primordial Platonic distinction between philosophy and sophistry.
The analytics assume there is no such thing as philosophy, and look only at the rhetoric (arguments – logical argumentation being just one rhetorical strategy among many). From their perspective, everything prior to Frege was mere sophistry.
The “continentals” meanwhile, actually look at the philosophical positions put forth by their predecessors, but express themselves in the most florid rhetorical terms possible.
There are many ironies here . . .
April 29, 2008 at 1:54 am
I’m certainly not in this community and can’t comment on most of the specifics, but the discussion talks around a pattern I’m familiar with but doesn’t describe it directly, so I’ll comment.
In most scientific discourse statements are entirely recodable. They can be “translated” into different terms, languages or whatever with no loss of the scientific content. This is most extreme in mathematics, where the same result can often be stated in many unrecognizably different ways while retaining exactly the same formal meaning.
Conversely individual works of art are unique, defined by their “accidents” and generally at best partially translatable.
Of course most human creations fall somewhere in between.
LS seems to be trying to extract recodable aspects from the writers mentioned, with some degree of (understandable) frustration.
Closely related to this pattern in creations is a pattern in the communities that form around them. Scientific communities argue about personal contributions, especially priority in discovery, but these arguments are so intense largely because the creations themselves so quickly lose any identifying marks of personal style.
Scientific communities in fact do not give serious weight or even consideration to the actual works of previous generations. Unless the results can be recoded into the current idiom, they are simply historical curiosities. Of course these creators are honored, but their works are not read.
Obviously the situation is very different in Continental philosophy, as this discussion attests. I won’t venture an opinion as to why, but I would be interested in finding out.
April 29, 2008 at 2:05 am
Very interesting observations, Jed. There is a strain of continental thought that set itself up in direct opposition to the translatability you describe, seeing it connected to consumer capitalism and industrialism, as well as a particular metaphysics.
One of the things I find interesting about the blogosphere is the way in which it potentially orchestrates encounters between people from very different academic and sociological backgrounds, upsetting tendencies towards academic ghettoization, where communities all become trapped within the same lingo and set of shared assumptions. As frustrating as I find blog interactions at times, I do think they’re productive in that you’re forced to collaboratively forge languages together because you cannot assume that the person you’re interacting with has the same theoretical or academic background. Of course, participation in blogs and blog collectives is self-selecting, so you still do get stratification where homogenization of backgrounds take place. But blogs do still have this potential for encounters with alterity. In other words, I don’t know whether or not you belong to this community should be a relevant consideration. Such links are forged simply by jumping in!
April 29, 2008 at 2:08 am
I also wonder whether the emergence of blogs among the theory crowd doesn’t speak to a desire for another sort of writing, theorization, and collective involvement, reflecting certain constraints felt within the academic world. Blogs began as a sort of furtive environment or “secret world”, where one discussed things they couldn’t say in an article or at a conference, but would like to say. This strikes me as symptomatic of certain dissatisfactions with our current academic system and the communities that have congealed around them.
April 29, 2008 at 3:39 am
Thanks, LS, for the friendly response.
Recodability certainly is entwined with standardization (e.g. commodities, clock time, etc.) which are certainly tied to industrialization. But I think inferring causality is dubious.
For example, Euclid is entirely recodable, and Plato is not, but they are equally pre-industrial and have pretty consonant metaphysics (to the extent we can tell).
I also think that sweeping objections to recodability pretty much destroy the ground they need to achieve any broad influence, since if they are correct they can only speak to a narrow community. Of course this has been a problem to a degree with many of the writers you mention.
I also note that recodability is not a fixed property of a creation, but is relative to our means of (re)coding. For example the human voice has been a unique individual expression up to the present, but we are increasingly gaining the ability to “learn” voices (using computer analysis), so that we can transpose speech into different voices, or generate speech in a chosen voice. We can also “learn” styles of walking, interpretive dance, etc. In all cases the criterion of success is that human observers recognize the personal style, and ideally cannot distinguish it from the original.
Perhaps we could “learn” particular rhetorical styles, but this would require a model so deep it would in effect capture the mind of the writer, as far as it is expressed in the creations being modeled.
Turning this on its head, scientific / mathematical thought is recodable because we’ve found ways to cast thought into (relatively) easily modeled forms. The unmodeled remainder is not deeply interesting to scientists, but may be the most interesting aspect for others.
April 29, 2008 at 5:56 am
Adding a (hopefully welcome) ‘encounter with alterity’ … I write from the world of experimental theater/performance, arrived here via Wood S Lot, with a deep love of Levinas’ texts thrown into the mix. Yes, ‘love’ – and it is fascinating to me, that it took 71 comments to get to the beginning of the appearance of the thought of the ethical in this discussion of ‘the veil’ … if indeed ‘ethics is first philosophy’ as Levinas says then in a certain sense the encounter with ‘alterity'(the other’s text) is the encounter with our ‘being held hostage to the the other’ Levinas so often describes as subjectivity … His writing (which I know only in English translation) activates this extremity, at least in this reader … a reader whom clearly enjoys this experience – as well as the deep enjoyment of his uncanny ability to write/weave the phenomenon of’otherwise than being’ into a gorgeous lucid prose veil …
As a theater practitioner, the being-held-hostage is crucial as a metaphysic of theatrical structure itself, as well as L.’s ‘proximity without coincidence’, the veil of the 4th wall which is in a sense the screen (or page) both reader/audience & writer/performer are inscribing, verso/recto all at once – yet assymetrically … So it seems to me the veil being challenged and both honored and bewailed here is actually the sign (or symptom?) of certain texts that give, as a gift, this ethical encounter with the Other … and perhaps the (understandable marketplace) eschatological horizon of a final solution (knowing & taming) is what demands this lifting of the veil … And this is the ultimate violence, of Essence … But then again, I love not-getting shit, and am talmudic by inclination, so rhizomatic ruminating is a pleasure to me …
One other point about style however, also related to ethics/veil: a verbal or theatrical apparatus that is designed to effect an obstacle to an (imaginary) jewel at its center is often a text of trauma, and I think there is a strata of contintental thought that is of the temporal structure of trauma itself … Sorry if this is not clear (or original!) … I’m from the outside, looking in. Love the discussion.
April 29, 2008 at 6:13 am
I am new to this – and from a theological background. So I hope this doesn’t miss your point too much. Why have I spent so much of my time reading through this blog? Because I am seeking greater understanding – of both reality and how to understand.
LS, your point that resonates with me is:
“Something is amiss when days, sometimes months are eaten up trying to figure out just what claim if any someone is making. Shouldn’t we minimally be entitled to know a person’s claims if they’re asking for an investment of our time, which is our life, and which is connected to our labor? I’ve been willing to make a sacrifice of my time and life and trudge through these stylistic fogs because I believe these thinkers articulate things that are extremely valuable and are therefore worth the trouble. But I do not believe that things have to be this way and I do think that a rather insidious form of power and set of interpellative devices does accompany these types of stylistics. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from all these thinkers, but I’m sorry I’m just not buying the arguments about the necessity of these styles. I would never suggest that these thinkers should be ignored or dismissed, but I do think that these sorts of stylistic practices are things best not continued,”
and especially
“I do think that many things that are very important and dear to me at the level of the social and political and clinical practice in psychotherapy have been set back, in part, decades because of stylistic self-indulgence.”
You indicate here a purpose for your work which suggests itself as assisting with ‘individuation’ (I could be wrong here). If that is the case does it follow then that your argument is about concepts and processes that might assist with individuation but do not because of their ‘difficult style’. I have recently read an old book by Frank Kermode titled The Genesis of Secrecy. On page 123 he writes ‘The pleasures of interpretation are henceforth linked to loss and disappointment, so that most of us will find the task to hard, or simply repugnant, and then abandoning meaning we slip back into the old comfortable fictions of transparancy, the single sense, the truth’. I am not suggesting that this is you at all. Kermode would suggest that there are many interpretations and where there are the writing could be considered difficult; yet the writer may have a purpose in being deiberatly ‘difficult’. The writer of Mark’s gospel deliberately writes with such a style so that we are forced out of our comfortable notions and invited to contemplate new gestalts about our notions of God and purpopse, etc. The writer deliberately makes them obscure/difficult/possible-of-many-meanings so as to launch us into contemplating new possibilities which the writer of course does not describe nor circumscribe.
Is the difficult style of some of the writers you mention deliberate so as to achieve that end? May such a process aid for some their individuation?
April 29, 2008 at 8:51 am
As frustrating as I find blog interactions at times, I do think they’re productive
Just as long as they’re PRODUCTIVE dr Sinthome it’s alright. We can’t have anything unproductive now can we otherwise our stomach might be upset!
April 29, 2008 at 6:49 pm
[…] most extensive discussion I’ve seen has been on Larval Subjects. The focus there has been precisely on the ability of such texts to colonize the minds of their […]
April 30, 2008 at 6:10 pm
[…] a nice analysis of the mechanisms of textual identification with respect to the issues I raised on style over at Dead Voles. There Carl writes: At one level there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about […]
May 3, 2008 at 1:00 am
What can be seen here so visibly is a historically well-determined little pedagogy. A pedagogy that teaches the pupil that there is nothing outside the text….A pedagogy that gives to the master’s voice the limitless sovereignty that allows it to restate the text indefinitely.
— Michel Foucault, Essential Works, vol. 2, p. 416; originally in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire”.
May 3, 2008 at 5:13 am
This is basically off-topic at this point, but I wanted to comment on some points Alexei made way back at the beginning.
One of the big puzzles in physics is how to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics requires a flat space-time to even be formulated, while general relativity predicts that space-time is curved. String theory was a promising avenue for solving this problem, but experimental evidence has failed to cooperate in two different ways. One way, was that string theory makes predictions that fail to be observed. So string theorists went back and adjusted the theory to explain the failure. Another way was that new discoveries were made that string theory failed to predict. String theorists went back and adjusted the theory to fit the new discoveries. At some point, this is not a useful way to proceed. The controversy in physics is if string theory has reached this point. Lee Smolin has concluded that it has, and the fact that string theorists have been so slow to notice this is a failure in the internal culture of physics. This later claim is much more controversial than the claim that string theory has failed.
Goedel’s theorems show that inevitably the current axiomization of mathematics is incomplete, in that there will be statements that will not be provably true or provably false. Mathematicians respond to this with a shrug because it hasn’t seemed to matter in practice. (I don’t think this state of affairs will last forever, and I predict it will change in our lifetimes, but that is just an idiosyncratic opinion of mine.) The average mathematician probably is confused about what the theorems mean, but this is just a lack of familiarity, since most people never study it. Among people who has studied it, their meaning is pretty clear (though of course there is still some philosophical debate).
When Wiles presented his proof, he was a bit melodramatic in his presentation, and was coy with what he was up to. But the proof has been completely absorbed by the community, and has already been generalized considerably. So again to people who work on that, it’s pretty clear.
Systems theory I’m not very familiar with, but my impression was that the goals were too vague, and the field didn’t really get anywhere.
Dominic: I think Goldblatt’s book is a good book for learning topos theory, but it’s not a particularly good book for learning category theory. I can’t think of a book that would be obviously better for a non-mathematician, but I’ll give it some thought.
May 3, 2008 at 9:28 pm
sorry larval, could you delete my earlier comment, I have supplied the wrong link. thanks. here is the correct one.
[Larval Subjects wrote an interesting blog entry about style and writing, which has inspired these two aphorisms on the topic of writing…}
May 11, 2008 at 9:02 am
That ‘time is money’ is likely to be a primary concern for the American academic trying to make it in a world of theoretical fashion, keen to maximise returns on time invested. The key concern here is to minimize the time of ‘integration’ (understanding) in order to proceed quickly to application (‘putting the theory to work’). There are various arguments for the difficulties of Lacan’s style, but by far the most compelling is the need to protect psychoanalysis – first and foremost a clinical practice that deals with the suffering of subjects – from the kinds of concerns detailed above.
May 11, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Or perhaps Lacan’s style itself becomes a way of maximizing profit and is not so much concerned with the suffering of patients but, first and foremost, keeping patients in analysis. I’ve known analysands in analysis for over 20 years.
May 11, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I agree that Lacan’s style might induce transference in readers and that transference is involved in the clinical setting, but I don’t see how this means that Lacan’s style keeps an analysand in analysis. A transferential relationship with their analyst keeps an analysand in analysis. The analysis is over when this transferential relation dissolves, and, believe it or not, this happens, your friends in analysis for 20 years notwithstanding.
Psychoanalysis will always be controversial for the way it uses the transferential relation as its ‘motor’, and I suppose there is the danger of the kinds of abuses you mention. However, I don’t know why an analsyst wouldn’t just take on another analysand if money is what they’re after – there’s surely no shortage of suffering subjects!
Anyway, becoming a Lacanian analyst involves a lengthy analysis of your own, followed by the ‘passe’ and a supervised training. I really do think it’s a fantasy that someone would go through all of this for the money.
May 11, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I’ve been through a rather lengthy analysis myself, went through supervision, and practiced as an analyst for a time. Both my analyst and supervisor were extremely well respect theorists and analysts within the Lacanian community. The passe is generally a controversial ritual in Lacanian communities, with a vast amount of disagreement as to whether or not it should be practiced. I fall into the camp that believes the passe has been a monumental failure, as for those communities that practice it has come to function like medical degrees as a source of legitimation as in the case of the IPA. This is contrary to what Lacan himself taught about the authorization of the analyst. I don’t disagree about the role of transference, but have grown to be suspicious of how transference is handled based on what I’ve observed through my own involvement with the Lacanian community. There is also a case to be made about Lacan’s own use of the variable length session in increasing his patient base. In my more cynical moments I sometimes think of Lacanianism as a sort of pyramid scheme. First patients go into analysis, then they get more and more drawn in to Lacanian organizations, going through supervision, etc. While I have a great deal of admiration for Lacanian theory and much of its practice, there is also a great deal that is cultish in Lacanian organizations and no small amount of intellectual imperialism, where the fundamentals of the theory and practice come to function as defense mechanisms, allowing the Lacanian to claim mastery of anything that isn’t Lacanian and reinforcing attachment to a hierarchy of masters or gurus within the Lacanian community.
At any rate, generally analysands are kept in analysis by the way analysis is conducted. The analyst comports him or herself in such a way as to create the sense that the analysis is not complete, that there is more to be found, that the analysand is missing something or hasn’t seen something. Lacan raised this to the level of a methodological principle, arguing that, in part, the desire of the analyst should always be a desire for more analysis. It seems seems to me that you’re conflating two different issues here. First, in your defensive reference to fantasy, you’re speaking to something different from how analysis comes to function concretely in practice. The path to becoming an analyst, I think, is often governed by the desire to discover the secret of analysis, not unlike Kafka’s man before the door in the parable of the Law in The Trial. It is once you are an analyst that these issues come up. There is a conflict between the analyst’s accumulation of money through analysis and working through the transference. It is in the analyst’s interest to keep his analysand’s in analysis, while it’s in the analysand’s interest to work through the transference. This creates a situation in which it’s very easy for the resolution of transference to be presented through how the analyst comports him or herself. Do all analysts do this? No, of course not. But so long as money is involved in the equation, it is impossible to determine exactly what is going on. Your second sentence in your second paragraph is odd. You suggest that there’s no shortage of suffering subjects. This is true. But even the most well reputed and successful analysts have difficulty coming by patients because of the many different therapeutic options that are out there, a general lack of understanding as to what psychoanalysis is among the public, and the great demand of time and money made by Lacanian analysis that is seen as unpalatable to all save those who already have a high degree of transference to Lacanian theory prior to entering analysis.
May 11, 2008 at 5:30 pm
As for Americans and making money, perhaps your analysis would benefit from some supplementation from Marx. People need to eat and live. In the absence of this it is impossible to be free. None of these issues can properly be discussed without an analysis of labor in the United States and absent a discussion of American academic institutions and how they function. Without this, we end up with entirely decontextualized and moralized pronouncements, that ignore sociological and economic conditions in which work is being done and intellectuals are being produced. It is easy for Lacan, who had made a fortune off his practice as an analyst, to look down his nose at Americans and accuse them of crassness, suggesting that they are only motivated by money. Matters look quite different from the perspective of a graduate student or unaffiliated professor who is living on a pittance, is forced to teach an exorbitant number of classes to make ends meet, and who faces a job market where there is little likelihood of getting a position. The issue here is one of how these institutional contexts rebound back on thought, forming it in particular ways, and channeling it in particular directions. Likewise, we can explore the manner in which certain styles and forms of thought function to reproduce these conditions, by implicitly excluding and including certain forms of participation as a function of labor conditions. One of the problems with these discussions is that they often unfold at the level of concepts and positions alone, ignoring the social and political altogether. For example, you make a number of observations about Lacanian theory, ignoring altogether Lacanian practice and institutions and how they have historically functioned and function today.
May 17, 2008 at 11:50 am
I’d be very interested to hear what happened to your clinical practice.
May 17, 2008 at 7:53 pm
dr. sinthome, i forgot to tell you that in socialist yugoslavia, getting psychoanalysis was totally free (part of yr standard state social insurance)
June 13, 2008 at 8:09 am
[…] been mulling over an aborted exchange that almost took place between me and Sinthome over at Larval Subjects, concerning the role examples (ought to) play in philosophical writing and thinking. As one can […]