The Workgroup on Recognition is very pleased to host a special presentation on Tuesday, November 23, 2-4pm, W6A, Room 720
*“The Cataclysm of Truth from a Crisis of Falsehood: Habermas Reading Calvino * *(with Lacan)”*** Dr. Geoffrey Boucher (Deakin University) ABSTRACT As is well known, in *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity*, Habermas criticises Derrida’s strategy of philosophical deconstruction on grounds that it makes philosophical argumentation into a species of literary rhetoric, and that this leads to relativism. Less well known is that Habermas thinks that Italo Calvino’s *If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller *is a more consistent application of Derrida’s programme than Derrida’s philosophical interventions. Reading Calvino philosophically, Habermas argues that the writer’s effort to swallow the world into the book, that is, to include the world in a general text on the deconstructive model, fails. That would all be a lot more convincing if a Habermasian *literary *interpretation, which must assert that literature explores the nature of subjectivity and the means of its expression under the sign of a claim to authenticity, could establish itself as an interpretation of this novel. But doesn’t *Winter’s Night *suggest that it’s inauthenticity all the way down? Isn’t it hopelessly naïve to read literature as the Other Reader does, as a representation of human concerns caught up in the dialectic of desire, one that ultimately aims at defeating routinised inauthenticity with a moment of expressive truthfulness? Indeed, doesn’t Calvino’s novel anticipate this particular reading, just as it tries to anticipate every other possible reading strategy, by proposing that such a cataclysm of truth from a crisis of falsehood is no more plausible than the assertion that in universalised fakery resides the only truth? In this paper, with a bit of help from Lacanian psychoanalysis, an analysis of reader-response motifs in the text, and a discussion of the novel’s fairytale frame narrative, I intend to show that, in a novel where inversion always has the last laugh, naivety belongs to the belief that the parody of the Other Reader comes up trumps. Even though it endangers Habermas’s identification of the author with deconstruction, Calvino turns out to be the guy who’s saying that the desire to read can only be sustained by an authentic literary experience. That, in turn, can only mean an authentic representation of fundamental human concerns. All interested welcome! For more information and also for a written version of the presentation, contact: [email protected] A related talk on the same day, 11am-1pm, W6A Rm *107*: Geoffrey Boucher: *The Need in Art: Critical Theory and Aesthetic Rationality*** -- Dr Heikki Ikäheimo Department of Philosophy Macquarie University, W6A 735 Sydney NSW 2109 Australia Email: [email protected] Tel. 04-23131713 http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/ikaheimo.html http://mq.academia.edu/HeikkiIkaheimo/Papers
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