Why the fuck are there leftists out there who recommend this bloated CIA adjacent fuck?

    • Pisha [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • CyborgMarx [any, any]
        hexagon
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        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).

        Come on the connection is pretty strong

        • Pisha [she/her, they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Let me also quote Wikipedia:

          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.

          • CyborgMarx [any, any]
            hexagon
            ·
            2 years ago

            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

              • dinklesplein [any, he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                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.

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      "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.

      • CyborgMarx [any, any]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        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

        • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          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.

          • Pisha [she/her, they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            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.

            • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Jaques Derrida once walked into an animal shelter and murdered all the puppies. Who the fuck are the leftists who like this fucker?

              Ok, well, technically, he didn't actually do that, but he did once say that he hated dogs, which is still pretty bad.

              I mean, I guess it was only really this one dog he didn't like. Anyway, my point still stands.

          • CyborgMarx [any, any]
            hexagon
            ·
            2 years ago

            "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

            • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
              ·
              2 years ago

              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.

              • CyborgMarx [any, any]
                hexagon
                ·
                2 years ago

                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"

                • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  I’m not looking for reasons, I found two or three and I’m sticking with them

                  Sure you are dude

                  cause all your “refutions” are just naive nonsense or convenient excuses

                  Which of those categories does the fact that Derrida did not rehabilitate Heidegger fall under?

                  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
                    hexagon
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    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