On #FoucaultandDerrida

“In these complaints, [Derrida] is often paired with Michel Foucault—a fusing that would have baffled two such disparate thinkers, who spent more of their lives disagreeing with each other, personally and intellectually, than they did in accord. Nevertheless, the pair are cast as absolute moral relativists for whom there is no truth whatsoever—a position which not only did they not argue, but were at pains to disavow. Those who accuse them are generally speaking from a position of wanting to defend some version of ‘normality’ from the leftists at the gate. The two are used as a bludgeon in the ‘culture wars,’ the complexity of their thinking being elided to argue that not only are the barbarians at the gate; they are also French and talk nonsense. In general, the way to stop these Twitter discussions is to simply ask the poster which section of #foucaultandderrida or #derridaandfoucault they are basing their ‘argument’ on. Having done this several times before growing bored, I have never received a useful reply. ”

“How Derrida and Foucault Became the Most Misunderstood Philosophers of Our Time,” - prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/foucault-derrida-post-truth-culture-wars-marxism. Writing on both lately, I can say one of the more fruitful points of comparison can be achieved with reference to their respective interpretation of Plato’s notion of hypomnesis, e.g. between Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” and Foucault’s “Writing the Self.” The joke in this case is that both drew attention to the materiality of writing and in ways relevant to thinking about subjectivity on the internet today.

On Quietism

“Thanks to this history [of persecution], ‘quietism’ has become a pejorative term, reserved for heretics, defeatists and navel-gazers. Nevertheless, it was embraced by a thinker who had a significant influence on Beckett’s personal outlook and literary vision: the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Although Schopenhauer was an atheist and wrote caustically about religion’s absurdities and horrors, he nevertheless had a great admiration for what he called the ‘saintly souls’ of mystical religion: the ‘pietists, quietists, pious enthusiasts’. While such saints were useless as metaphysicians, they were extremely valuable, Schopenhauer thought, as guides to the highest happiness. He could do without their dogma, but he cherished them as soteriological geniuses... And so, Vladimir, interminably waiting for Mr Godot, needn’t have weighed the odds of salvation quite so anxiously. For the quietist, salvation and damnation, heaven and hell, weal and woe, suffering and its end, are not distant poles, but perhaps two sides of the same coin. As Thomas à Kempis put it, in that phrase that Beckett confessed was made for him: ‘he that can well suffer shall find the most peace’.”

Andy Wimbush, “How Samuel Beckett Sought Salvation in the Midst of Suffering” - https://aeon.co/essays/how-samuel-beckett-sought-salvation-in-the-midst-of-suffering. An interesting reflection on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in wider context. Saw this play performed some years ago in Edinburgh with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in the lead rolls. Wimbush’s references to Schopenhauer and wider therapeutic philosophy (Stoics, Sceptics, Epicureans) provides helpful context to Buddhist and Christian thought on such matters. Beckett’s presentation of Vladimir and Estragon’s dialogue always reminds me of Derrida’s reflections in Body of Prayer: “I was hesitating between two ethics of prayer, so to speak. Two definitions of prayer. One has to do with improvisation. The prayer should be, in principle, pure improvisation. A way of inventing on the spot, the address, the addressee, the language, the code, so there shouldn’t be any book, any program, any rule to pray, on the one hand. Speaking of music, in that extent, jazz would be closer to prayer... But we know that in jazz there are rules too… So, although we know that the pure prayer should be improvisation, that is pure innovation, without any book, at the same time, we know that we need a book, the code of gestures, a language, and so on and so forth.” (p. 57-59). “Michal told us about the three possible semantic roots of words for prayer in Hebrew, and I think, of course, that the two last ones - to plea, to request, to sentence, to judge - are really secondary, let’s say. The most essential to me is the first root which means to wait, to hope, because it’s not a way of hoping for this, or looking for that, but hoping for the prayer to happen.” (p. 65). As it happens I’ll be teaching a course on comparative studies of suffering this year that will cover a similar plurality of perspectives.

On Lying

“The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that lying – no matter how noble or even life-saving a lie might seem – is always morally wrong. Kant’s view drew a distinct contrast with his utilitarian contemporaries, including the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose outlook could be boiled down to the maxim that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals’. In this lecture at Harvard University in 2009, the US professor and political philosopher Michael Sandel draws from the highly influential text Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) to explore Kant’s somewhat counterintuitive outlook on morality. In doing so, Sandel, with his talent for elucidating complex ideas, builds a deeper context for Kant’s worldview, including his thoughts on human uniqueness, dignity and agency.”

“All’s Not Well That Ends Well: Why Kant Centred Morality on Motives, not Outcomes” - https://aeon.co/videos/alls-not-well-that-ends-well-why-kant-centred-morality-on-motives-not-outcomes.

On a Glossary of Democracy

“auctoritas: (Latin) Might, power, influence, clout; the general level of prestige or reputation a person held in Roman society. Whence the En­glish authority. Also, tutelage, tutor. ‘Cum potestas in populo auctoritas in senatu sit’ (While power resides in the people, authority rests with the Senate.)—Cicero”

“heeler: A follower who works to further the interests of a politician, esp. one who is obsequious or unscrupulous; a flunky, hanger-on. (Whence ward heeler.) Alludes to folk etymology of the patriarch Jacob; from Hebrew עָקֵב ,יַעֲקֹב, heel. In Genesis 25:26 Jacob is described as clutching the heel of his twin brother Esau when leaving the womb of their mother, Rebecca. In Genesis 27:36 Esau associates his brother’s name with the connotations ‘to assail a person deceitfully, to overreach, to supplant.’”

“vulgar: Of an ordinary unartificial type; not refined or advanced; having a common and offensively mean character; coarsely commonplace; lacking in refinement or taste; uncultured, ill-bred. ‘That word means the mind of the herd, and specifically the herd in the city, the gutter, and the tavern.’—Guy Davenport, 1987”

“Glossary: Democracy,” - laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/glossary-democracy.

On Eliminative Materialism

“If you chop my head off, my career as a moral agent will come to an abrupt end. And frontal lobe injury may turn an upright citizen into a psychopath. This demonstrates only that my brain is a necessary condition of my conscience not that my conscience is identical with brain activity. To put this another way, while it is necessary to have a brain in some kind of working order to live a morally upright human life, it does not follow that living such a life is just being a brain in some kind of working order. To insist on this distinction is not to claim that conscience is ‘a theological entity thoughtfully parked in us by a divine being’ but rather to make the more modest point that people are not reducible to what can be seen by brain scanners and the like. Looking for the theatre of our lives – society – and the nature, origin and even validity, of our moral discourse by peering into the brain is like trying to hear the whispering of the woods by applying a stethoscope to an individual acorn. As social beings, we transcend our individual brains which, being material objects, are confined to their own boundaries. Eliminative materialism cannot accommodate this transcendence. Without propositional attitudes, Churchland’s brain would be able to interact causally with other brains but would hardly inhabit social spaces in the way that people do: it would be windowless.”

Raymond Tallis, “Conscience by Patricia Churchland Book Review,” the-tls.co.uk/articles/conscience-patricia-churchland-book-review/

On Social Distance

“‘Social distancing’ has actually lived several lives. It and its precursor, ‘social distance,’ had long been used in a variety of colloquial and academic contexts, both as prescriptions and descriptions, before being taken up by epidemiologists in this century. In the nineteenth century, ‘social distance’ was a polite euphemism used by the British to talk about class and by Americans to talk about race. It was then formally adopted in the 1920s by sociologists as a term to facilitate the quantitative codification that was then being introduced into the nascent study of race relations. In the second half of the twentieth century, psychiatry, anthropology, and zoology all adapted it for various purposes. And it was used in the 1990s in the United States to analyze what happened to the gay community when faced with straight fears of contagion. It was only in 2004 in a CDC publication on controlling the recent SARS outbreak that the term ‘social distance’ was finally deployed for the first time by the medical community. The history I trace here doesn’t presume that the doctors who appropriated it to control disease knew about its legacy, or that these links are relationships of causation. But there was something in the air in 2004 that encouraged the practices we now know as social distancing to be christened in this way—as if its past meanings had coalesced into a semantic atmosphere ripe for the emergence of this new use. Which is why if you think the term is weird, you’re right.”

Lily Cherlis, “Distantiated Communities: A Social History of Social Distancing,” cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/scherlis_lily_30_april_2020.php. Cherlis chose Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1560 Children’s Games for her touchstone image. It made me think of L. S. Lowry’s 1943 Going to Work in Manchester above.

On Cosmopolitanism

“Like globalist, cosmopolitan has become a freighted term, not least for its anti-Semitic undertones. On the right, it is an epithet for bleeding-heart liberals who support looser immigration policies, foreign aid, and multilateral efforts to confront climate change. On the left (and the nativist right), it is used to describe the Davos crowd and footloose capitalists. But as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum reminds us in The Cosmopolitan Tradition, cosmopolitanism has a rich history as a mode of political and ethical thought, one that ‘urges us to recognize the equal, and unconditional, worth of all human beings.’ ...But how such claims are to be determined and adjudicated remains unresolved. Nussbaum’s intent is not to argue for a world government; nor does she put much store in the modern system of foreign aid. Rather, her purpose is to determine whether cosmopolitanism can be made sufficient for a world in which it has already become necessary—that is, a world of nation-states comprising individuals on deeply unequal material footings, who are nonetheless more interconnected than ever. Nussbaum concludes that the cosmopolitan tradition ‘must be revised but need not be rejected.’ She proposes that it be replaced by her own version of the ‘Capability Approach’ to development.”

Stuart Whatley, “After Cosmopolitanism,” - hedgehogreview.com/issues/monsters/articles/after-cosmopolitanism

On Hermits

“The Thebaid is a collection of texts telling of the saints who in the first centuries of Christianity retreated to the barren lands around the Egyptian city of Thebes. In the Uffizi painting we meet a mass of isolates, each man declaring: ‘I want to be alone...’ It is harder to achieve the via contemplativa in the age of rolling news. That’s one virtue of the desert: no wifi. What one needs is a Working From Home hero. I have set Antonello da Messina’s ‘Saint Jerome in His Study’ (c.1475) as my desktop background. Jerome, one of the four fathers of the western church, the scholar who translated the Old and New Testaments into Latin, sits at his desk. Formerly a penitent in the desert, where he removed a thorn from a lion’s paw, we meet Jerome now serenely retired to a spacious cell in Bethlehem... Jerome’s colonnaded cell is a proper work-in-progress study: books propped, spines bent, ribbons marking places. Vincenzo Catena’s ‘Saint Jerome’ (c.1510), also in the National Gallery collection, is a one-tome-at-a-time man. His tidy cubbyholes hold clasped volumes, candlesticks, flasks and what looks promisingly like a biscuit tin. He seems to be nodding off. But that’s all right. ‘Read often,’ Jerome advised his followers, ‘and learn all you can. Let sleep steal upon you with a book in your hand, and let the sacred page catch your drooping head.’”

Laura Freeman, “The Art of the Hermit” - spectator.co.uk/article/the-art-of-the-hermit. Kindle owners will know that the device screensaver includes an image of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving of Saint Jerome in his Study (included here), a popular renaissance theme. For another reflection on the ebb and flow of isolated life, see also Terry Eagleton’s review of David Vincent'’s A History of Solitude here: theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/19/history-solitude-david-vincent-biography-loneliness-fay-bound-alberti-review

On Digital History

“History, as a discipline, comes out of the archive... enter the smartphone, and cheap digital photography. Instead of reading papers during an archival visit, historians can snap pictures of the documents and then look at them later. Ian Milligan, a historian at the University of Waterloo, noticed the trend among his colleagues and surveyed 250 historians, about half of them tenured or tenure-track, and half in other positions, about their work in the archives. The results quantified the new normal. While a subset of researchers (about 23 percent) took few (fewer than 200) photos, the plurality (about 40 percent) took more than 2,000 photographs for their ‘last substantive project’... the literal job of doing history has changed. It works through screens now; that much is for sure. Now we’ll have to look to the historians to document what that means.”

Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Way We Write History Has Changed” - theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/smartphone-archives-history-photography/605284/. Interesting summary of the ways in which archival work has become more accessible to a wider variety of scholars. The author’s brief description of such work sums up the experience quite well: “You put your things in a special locker, keeping only laptop, phone, pencil. You’re inspected for purity on the way into the sanctum and instructed in a series of obscure rights and responsibilities that attend to touching this very special paper.” I’ve added such work to my research process over the past few years, and in part, caught this odd little strain of archive fever, to recall Derrida’s comment.

On Divided Attention

“Price’s book about books reads like an anthology of ironies, including several that pertain directly to it. This book is self-consciously shaped by, and susceptible to, its own account of how we read now. Price takes divided attention for a virtue, and practically invites a reader to keep a device nearby to flesh out her examples. Almost every piece of data has its own story to tell. Perhaps more than any genre, nonfiction has been changed by the Internet, which turns a biography or a history book into a series of fascinating leads. Every reader brings her own curiosity to the printed text, and builds her own customized version out of adjacent or supplemental research... Though books have been mythologized as the one ‘non-database’ in a world of searchable content, readers have always ‘skipped and skimmed’ books, as Price points out, or rearranged them mentally, or composed their own tailored indexes for fast information retrieval. It is not unheard of to break a book’s binding and reorder its pages. I have a Latin lexicon from the seventeenth century, once owned by a clergyman. He essentially built his own search engine in it, affixing homemade calfskin tabs to its pages to mark the entries he consulted the most. Another copy of that book, with tabs in other spots, would be a different book. When a book sits next to the Internet, its authority as the final word on anything is automatically undermined.”

Dan Chiasson, “Reader, I Googled It,” newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/reader-i-googled-it. An interesting review of Price’s recent, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading.