Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > And no one has the slightest fucking idea of what "postmodernism" is
> > or
> > who 'believes' in it, or if it is something one believes in or like
> > the
> > rain something that falls on one.
>
> Independent of what it's called, there is a doctrine, claiming
> derivation from Heidegger's idea (elaborated in Being and Time) of the
> "hermeneutic circle," that asserts that texts are necessarily
> "constructed" by the reader in a way makes their meanings unknowable
> things in themselves.
>
> This differs from Husserl's "phenomenology" which is, in part, a
> method for avoiding misinterpretation (of texts or any other aspect of
> reality) by questioning hitherto unquestioned frameworks of
> interpretation.
This "doctrine," however, itself means rather varied things as held or
purportedly held by different writers. You might be interested in a book
by a fellow Canadian, Tilottama Rajan, _Deconstruction and the
Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillared_.
Crudely, she argues that Derrida concealed, partly from himself, the
extent of Sartre's influence and overstated the importance of Heidegger.
She argues that those who had [accused' Sartre of misinterpreting
Heidegger were wrpmg. fpr he had disagreed with Heidegger rather than
misunderstood him. She also calls the u.s. coinage of
"post-structuralism" a useful error, and distinguishes it from
deconstruction. And, finally, describes "postmodernism" as an empty
phrase which has acquired a meaning (and subjectsd it to criticism).
{This is crude and not quite accurate. My reading was interrupted in
mid-January by a near collapse of vision, eventually identified as due
to low humidity. I'm gradually recovering it but haven't resumed much
reading yet. But before I was stopped in my rereading of her book I was
convinced that she had considerably complicated usual understandings of
the history of "postmodernism" in its various guises.)
CArrol
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