This still seems a bit confused. There's many bad things you can say about Jürgen Habermas -- he really is a liberal philosopher who has worked to defang the critical potential of the Frankfurt School -- but he is not a Heideggerian (and yes, he was a member of the Hitler Youth until the war ended when he was about 15). In fact, he is about the strongest enemy of French theory (and Heidegger) there is in contemporary German philosophy. There would be more to say about the relation of Derrida and Habermas, but the fact that they were interviewed for the same book is not a very strong connection between them.
At the end of the 1990s, Habermas approached Derrida at a party held at an American university where both were lecturing. They then met at Paris over dinner, and participated afterwards in many joint projects. In 2000 they held a joint seminar on problems of philosophy, right, ethics, and politics at the University of Frankfurt. In December 2000, in Paris, Habermas gave a lecture entitled "How to answer the ethical question?" at the Judeities. Questions for Jacques Derrida conference organized by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly. Following the lecture by Habermas, both thinkers engaged in a very heated debate on Heidegger and the possibility of Ethics. The conference volume was published at the Editions Galilée (Paris) in 2002, and subsequently in English at Fordham University Press (2007).
Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in a series of disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual understanding and friendship in the late 1990s that lasted until Derrida's death in 2004. They originally came in contact when Habermas invited Derrida to speak at The University of Frankfurt in 1984. The next year Habermas published "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity in which he described Derrida's method as being unable to provide a foundation for social critique. Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me". After Derrida's final rebuttal in 1989 the two philosophers did not continue, but, as Derrida described it, groups in the academy "conducted a kind of 'war', in which we ourselves never took part, either personally or directly".
Really, for philosophy this is not much of a connection.
Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in a series of disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual understanding and friendship in the late 1990s that lasted until Derrida’s death in 2004
I'm interested in your definition of "connection" if paling around with an anti-marxist who advanced the works of fascists like Hannah Arendt doesn't count as suspect
I wouldn't agree with calling Arendt a Fascist either, but racist lib certainly. (inb4 :same-picture: )
Regardless, I would be careful entirely dismissing post-war continental philosophy, it's not productive to dismiss an entire intellectual tradition that has valuable insights on post-Fordian capitalism just because the authors were a) somewhat difficult to understand and b) weren't literally full blown Marxist-Leninists within an environment hostile hostile to such views.
Hard to understand writing is almost an inevitability when it comes to continental philosophy, the fact of the matter is that it's just hard to explain some things, especially if you thought of a concept that no one else has put that much thought into or examined particularly deeply. For most writers, trying to describe their ideas is like trying to describe colour to a blind person.
"Former Hitler Youth member" isn't really as damning as you seem to think. Being indoctrinated as a child does not mean that you'll necessarily be a bad person as an adult (Peter Daou would be an example we all know). I don't know anything about this person but the fact that you call him "a former Hitler Youth member" as opposed to "a Nazi" suggests that the former is the most severe criticism you have of him, and then your criticism of Derrida is just, he knew someone who was indoctrinated as a child? Oh no, dear me! I was raised to believe all sorts of BS so I guess I should cancel anyone who's ever met me.
This really seems like you realized you were wrong and now you're grasping at straws to support the original conclusion. Just take the L.
True, personally I find Habermas celebration of Hannah Arendt far more damning, but I'll let Derrida off the hook, with his general ignorance about politics he probably didn't know what her deal was
I guess "Knew someone who liked someone who was bad" just doesn't have quite the same punch as "rehabilitated unrepentant Nazis." Like tbh in your shoes I'd just delete the post.
"Had a fifteen-year-long professional and personal friendship with an avowed anti-marxist who is famous for advancing and building upon the racist totalitarian concepts proposed by Hannah Arendt" still packs quite a punch for someone who is supposed to be a "genius of the left"
I can't take any of your criticisms seriously because you're just looking for reasons to own him. If I refute one thing you'll come up with something else, and it doesn't matter how spurious it is because you have an axe to grind. I'm not interested in playing whack-a-mole.
I'm not looking for reasons, I found two or three and I'm sticking with them, cause all your "refutions" are just naive nonsense or convenient excuses for what was obviously a famous clique of anti-marxists, whose reputations are not based on the rigor of their work but by the politically friendly conclusions of their "critiques" and "analyses"
As is well known, Derrida's first works – The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, the Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, and Speech and Phenomenon – were dedicated to Husserl's phenomenology which, together with Heidegger's analysis of existence, had been since the 1930s the major reference for most important French philosophers of this period: Lévinas, Ricœur, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Derrida found in Husserl the main themes of thought (the role of writing in science in Origin of Geometry and the conception of soliloquy and voice as self-presence in the first Logical Investigation) that constituted the basis of his project of deconstructing logocentrism and phonocentrism, as expounded in the fundamental book published in 1967 under the title Of Grammatology. But if it is clear that Derrida discovered these themes in Husserl, it is nevertheless Heidegger's thinking that constitutes not only his major reference, but the very milieu, the “element” of his philosophical enterprise. From the middle of the 1960s, with the text dedicated to Lévinas under the title “Violence and Metaphysics,” in which we find his first reading of Heidegger, until the very end of the 1990s, with “L'animal que donc je suis,” where Heidegger's conception of animality is once more analyzed, Derrida never ceased to be engaged in a critical dialogue with Heidegger's thinking. As he explained in an interview in 1967, nothing of what he attempted in this period, which was the most decisive for his entire work, “would have been possible without the opening of the Heideggerian questions,” and especially without the attention given to what Heidegger names the ontological difference, in spite of the fact that this difference seems to him to be still retained in metaphysics.
Yeah, that's not simply critique, that is incorporation, I said previously I was deconstructing Derrida, at first I was joking.....now
Also what was it another commenter said in terms of how to use Derrida properly "But undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures was not a negative operation."
Yes I'm using the word rehabilitation, maybe it was a little too strong, but because Heidegger was crucial to Derrida's works I'm sticking with it, but hey there's no "negative operation" just decomposition of a structure of analysis
God this is tiresome. I seriously do not care about any of your gotchas. And it's laughable that you're pretending to base your position on "deconstructing Derrida" when you had to have the meaning of deconstruction explained to you in this thread. Like from the moment you heard that definition, you were like, how can I either dunk on this in order to dunk on Derrida, or how can I apply this to dunk on Derrida? You didn't know what it meant and you still don't know what it means and if I showed that you're not applying it correctly you'd seamlessly transition back to "well, deconstructionism is dumb anyway."
You know Marx's ideas were inspired by Hegel, right? Even though Hegel reached entirely different political conclusions than Marx? If I showed a quote of Hegel defending slavery, should we also cancel Marx? What a load of nonsense. And that line of logic has absolutely nothing to do with deconstructionism, which, near as I can tell, you think means a sort of "one-drop rule" applied to philosophy, which is just... like, there is no possible way you could arrive at that conclusion if you've actually studied the concept in any capacity.
Why are you talking about Hegel and Marx and presenting deconstructionism as this mystical high-level concept, nah I got the concept, a method of discerning meaning from a text in a way that teases out differing interpretations usually thru contrast, just cause this perfectly coherent idea is used to generate ahistorical gibberish by theorists like Derrida does not mean I hold some hostility to the concept in general
My contention is that unlike Marx, Derrida on Heidegger is not simply engaging in a critique but taking the Nazi idealism of Heidegger at face vague while ironically commending/critiquing Heidegger for "rejecting the vulgar biologism of nazism in favor of a "spirit" nationalism, but thru this rejection revealing the same failed underpinnings of Nazism in general" this is just idealist nonsense, there's no "revealing", instead just a French doofus taking a Nazi doofus's self-mythology at face vague and in no way undermining Nazism in the process
Derrida sounds good on paper, sure as shit don't work in practice judging by that lecture
That his ideas drew inspiration from Hegel but that he was also critical of him. Perhaps that he was "engaged in a critical dialogue with Hegel’s thinking" or that some of his ideas "would not have been possible without the opening of the Hegelian questions."
It's almost like philosophers can engage with the ideas of other philosophers without accepting their political conclusions. Almost as if philosophers frequently engage with ideas that they disagree with in order to critique them.
Taking a Nazi's self-mythology at face value and claiming its construction by said Nazi somehow undermines Nazism is not critical dialogue, and you comparing that idealist drivel to the rigor Marx applied to Hegel is ridiculous
I'm not calling Derrida a nazi, I'm calling him an idealist who can't even competently critique Nazism without sinking into unsupportable assumptions about a Nazi's headspace
I’m not calling Derrida a nazi, I’m calling him an idealist who can’t even competently critique Nazism without sinking into unsupportable assumptions about a Nazi’s headspace
Lmao, now you're saying that. We started out at "rehabilitated Nazis" then progressed to "'rehabilitated' Nazis (technically, for certain definitions of rehabilitate)" and now we've arrived at "critiqued Nazis, but not well enough." If you opened with "Derrida's critique of Nazis was insufficient" then this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Before I got to his incompetent critique I had to sit thru paragraph after paragraph of this mf gushing over Heidegger's methodology and mode of analysis, you gonna pretend Heidegger wasn't one of the biggest influences on Derrida or that he didn't advise his students to read and take seriously this washed up "former" Nazi.....goddamn right I used rehabilitation, and I'll use it again
The Farías debate
Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others, all engaged in debate and disagreement about the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazi politics. These debates included the question of whether it was possible to do without Heidegger's philosophy a position which Derrida in particular rejected Forums where these debates took place include the proceedings of the first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980", Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", and the studies on Paul Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.
I mean at least be honest and admit you think Heidegger is an indispensable resource, Derrida certainly did
And if you do think he's indispensable and valuable, why? Contrary to what Derrida claims, it certainly wasn't his takes on his "former" Nazism or weirdly enough these out of nowhere takes on animals
Like I said, you just have an axe to grind and this is a waste of time. I don't "think Heidegger is an indispensable resource," because I'm not so much defending Derrida as I'm just calling out your dogshit, uninformed arguments that border on anti-intellectualism. But since your increasingly desperate attempts to find something to latch on to have now led you to start attacking me, I'm disengaging, and any further responses will be met with PPB. Tbh I should've started with that and moved on instead of wasting my time with this nonsense.
No worries I got yeah, I learned this from a lecture given by one of his students
Also I was mistaken he didn't know Heidegger, Derrida wrote a book with a former Hilter Youth member who did know Heidegger, my mistake
This still seems a bit confused. There's many bad things you can say about Jürgen Habermas -- he really is a liberal philosopher who has worked to defang the critical potential of the Frankfurt School -- but he is not a Heideggerian (and yes, he was a member of the Hitler Youth until the war ended when he was about 15). In fact, he is about the strongest enemy of French theory (and Heidegger) there is in contemporary German philosophy. There would be more to say about the relation of Derrida and Habermas, but the fact that they were interviewed for the same book is not a very strong connection between them.
Come on the connection is pretty strong
Let me also quote Wikipedia:
Really, for philosophy this is not much of a connection.
I'm interested in your definition of "connection" if paling around with an anti-marxist who advanced the works of fascists like Hannah Arendt doesn't count as suspect
What makes you think Hannah Arendt was a fascist?
I wouldn't agree with calling Arendt a Fascist either, but racist lib certainly. (inb4 :same-picture: )
Regardless, I would be careful entirely dismissing post-war continental philosophy, it's not productive to dismiss an entire intellectual tradition that has valuable insights on post-Fordian capitalism just because the authors were a) somewhat difficult to understand and b) weren't literally full blown Marxist-Leninists within an environment hostile hostile to such views. Hard to understand writing is almost an inevitability when it comes to continental philosophy, the fact of the matter is that it's just hard to explain some things, especially if you thought of a concept that no one else has put that much thought into or examined particularly deeply. For most writers, trying to describe their ideas is like trying to describe colour to a blind person.
"Former Hitler Youth member" isn't really as damning as you seem to think. Being indoctrinated as a child does not mean that you'll necessarily be a bad person as an adult (Peter Daou would be an example we all know). I don't know anything about this person but the fact that you call him "a former Hitler Youth member" as opposed to "a Nazi" suggests that the former is the most severe criticism you have of him, and then your criticism of Derrida is just, he knew someone who was indoctrinated as a child? Oh no, dear me! I was raised to believe all sorts of BS so I guess I should cancel anyone who's ever met me.
This really seems like you realized you were wrong and now you're grasping at straws to support the original conclusion. Just take the L.
True, personally I find Habermas celebration of Hannah Arendt far more damning, but I'll let Derrida off the hook, with his general ignorance about politics he probably didn't know what her deal was
I guess "Knew someone who liked someone who was bad" just doesn't have quite the same punch as "rehabilitated unrepentant Nazis." Like tbh in your shoes I'd just delete the post.
I did like the image of a life-long friendship between a Jewish boy in Algeria and a university rector in Nazi Germany. It's like an absurdist comedy.
"Had a fifteen-year-long professional and personal friendship with an avowed anti-marxist who is famous for advancing and building upon the racist totalitarian concepts proposed by Hannah Arendt" still packs quite a punch for someone who is supposed to be a "genius of the left"
Also “rehabilitated" in the sense he is the principle medium thru which Heidegger's thoughts persist in western intellectual circles, despite his long-winded supposed critique of him, I mean if you consider whatever the hell this is to be a critique
I can't take any of your criticisms seriously because you're just looking for reasons to own him. If I refute one thing you'll come up with something else, and it doesn't matter how spurious it is because you have an axe to grind. I'm not interested in playing whack-a-mole.
I'm not looking for reasons, I found two or three and I'm sticking with them, cause all your "refutions" are just naive nonsense or convenient excuses for what was obviously a famous clique of anti-marxists, whose reputations are not based on the rigor of their work but by the politically friendly conclusions of their "critiques" and "analyses"
Sure you are dude
Which of those categories does the fact that Derrida did not rehabilitate Heidegger fall under?
Yeah, that's not simply critique, that is incorporation, I said previously I was deconstructing Derrida, at first I was joking.....now
Also what was it another commenter said in terms of how to use Derrida properly "But undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures was not a negative operation."
Yes I'm using the word rehabilitation, maybe it was a little too strong, but because Heidegger was crucial to Derrida's works I'm sticking with it, but hey there's no "negative operation" just decomposition of a structure of analysis
God this is tiresome. I seriously do not care about any of your gotchas. And it's laughable that you're pretending to base your position on "deconstructing Derrida" when you had to have the meaning of deconstruction explained to you in this thread. Like from the moment you heard that definition, you were like, how can I either dunk on this in order to dunk on Derrida, or how can I apply this to dunk on Derrida? You didn't know what it meant and you still don't know what it means and if I showed that you're not applying it correctly you'd seamlessly transition back to "well, deconstructionism is dumb anyway."
You know Marx's ideas were inspired by Hegel, right? Even though Hegel reached entirely different political conclusions than Marx? If I showed a quote of Hegel defending slavery, should we also cancel Marx? What a load of nonsense. And that line of logic has absolutely nothing to do with deconstructionism, which, near as I can tell, you think means a sort of "one-drop rule" applied to philosophy, which is just... like, there is no possible way you could arrive at that conclusion if you've actually studied the concept in any capacity.
Why are you talking about Hegel and Marx and presenting deconstructionism as this mystical high-level concept, nah I got the concept, a method of discerning meaning from a text in a way that teases out differing interpretations usually thru contrast, just cause this perfectly coherent idea is used to generate ahistorical gibberish by theorists like Derrida does not mean I hold some hostility to the concept in general
My contention is that unlike Marx, Derrida on Heidegger is not simply engaging in a critique but taking the Nazi idealism of Heidegger at face vague while ironically commending/critiquing Heidegger for "rejecting the vulgar biologism of nazism in favor of a "spirit" nationalism, but thru this rejection revealing the same failed underpinnings of Nazism in general" this is just idealist nonsense, there's no "revealing", instead just a French doofus taking a Nazi doofus's self-mythology at face vague and in no way undermining Nazism in the process
Derrida sounds good on paper, sure as shit don't work in practice judging by that lecture
Can't say Marx ever took Hegel at face value
Marx literally called himself a Hegelian, I'm dying to know what you'll come up with next :data-laughing:
Ok, I don't disagree with that? But what exactly do you think Marx meant when he "stood Hegel on his head"?
That his ideas drew inspiration from Hegel but that he was also critical of him. Perhaps that he was "engaged in a critical dialogue with Hegel’s thinking" or that some of his ideas "would not have been possible without the opening of the Hegelian questions."
It's almost like philosophers can engage with the ideas of other philosophers without accepting their political conclusions. Almost as if philosophers frequently engage with ideas that they disagree with in order to critique them.
Taking a Nazi's self-mythology at face value and claiming its construction by said Nazi somehow undermines Nazism is not critical dialogue, and you comparing that idealist drivel to the rigor Marx applied to Hegel is ridiculous
I'm not calling Derrida a nazi, I'm calling him an idealist who can't even competently critique Nazism without sinking into unsupportable assumptions about a Nazi's headspace
Lmao, now you're saying that. We started out at "rehabilitated Nazis" then progressed to "'rehabilitated' Nazis (technically, for certain definitions of rehabilitate)" and now we've arrived at "critiqued Nazis, but not well enough." If you opened with "Derrida's critique of Nazis was insufficient" then this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Before I got to his incompetent critique I had to sit thru paragraph after paragraph of this mf gushing over Heidegger's methodology and mode of analysis, you gonna pretend Heidegger wasn't one of the biggest influences on Derrida or that he didn't advise his students to read and take seriously this washed up "former" Nazi.....goddamn right I used rehabilitation, and I'll use it again
I mean at least be honest and admit you think Heidegger is an indispensable resource, Derrida certainly did
And if you do think he's indispensable and valuable, why? Contrary to what Derrida claims, it certainly wasn't his takes on his "former" Nazism or weirdly enough these out of nowhere takes on animals
I literally just countered this exact point.
Like I said, you just have an axe to grind and this is a waste of time. I don't "think Heidegger is an indispensable resource," because I'm not so much defending Derrida as I'm just calling out your dogshit, uninformed arguments that border on anti-intellectualism. But since your increasingly desperate attempts to find something to latch on to have now led you to start attacking me, I'm disengaging, and any further responses will be met with PPB. Tbh I should've started with that and moved on instead of wasting my time with this nonsense.