Up to now this has been a closed blog, but it is not working as such. Too few people get in, and even less make comments here. So my feeling is, it does not make sense to keep it as a closed blog. Of course there are no guarantees that, if we open it up to interested people, they will come. But I don’t feel we stand to lose anything either way.

Our project started on the idea that we wanted to discuss the legacies of deconstruction in contemporary thought. After some discussions we focused on the notion of infrapolitics, which has been the object of some work over the last few years by some of us, and we decided to call this project Infrapolitical Deconstruction. It was meant to be a collective project, in the sense that we wanted to pursue writing and publication at the highest possible level of engagement. Exploring the legacies of deconstruction “infrapolitically” means that we will keep an eye on the political implications of deconstructive work, without positing deconstruction as political theory or political work in any direct way. We understand that one of the effects of deconstruction is probably the thought that no political theory holds any interest if it cannot accept and account for the idea of infrapolitical critique. And infrapolitical critique starts on the notion that there is always an underside to political thought that gets necessarily erased by all conventional understandings of the political, and yet it is most fundamental. On the basis of a reading of Jacques Derrida’s 1964 seminar on Heidegger: The Question of History and Being we may be prepared to say that the infrapolitical dimension of all political thought, and of every kind of political practice, is connected to the thematization of the so-called ontico-ontological difference in the political region. In other words, we are prepared to entertain the thought that an infrapolitical step back from politics is also necessarily a step back from the ontotheological understanding of the political we have inherited from the traditions of modernity. The question of hegemony, as the ultimate question of the ontotheological politics of modernity, necessarily leads, through infrapolitical critique, to the question of posthegemony.

This project proposes therefore an engagement with Jacques Derrida’s work and a consequent rereading of the philosophical and philosophico-political tradition with a view to a recuperation of its forgotten infrapolitical and posthegemonic dimensions. We understand, for instance, that a rigorous engagement with Hegelianism is necessary, and therefore also with Marxism.

We proposed to engage first with Derrida’s 64 seminar, which has only appeared in the French original so far, and immediately with two additional seminars that have been so far published also in English translation: The two volumes of The Beast and the Sovereign and the first volume of Death Penalty. We also have discussed the possibility of a serious reading and engagement with the work of Spanish philosopher Felipe Martinez Marzoa.

The systematic engagement with these issues should naturally lead to the production of papers and essays that should form the basis for ongoing publications. We are minimally committed to the publication of one volume of essays per year.

I think we should invite people to join in this discussion, to contribute to it, and to present their work for open debate.

Alberto

http://www.fronterad.com/?q=heidegger-fotografia

Notes on Derrida´s Heidegger: la question de l´Etre et l´histoire

Second session–Second set of notes.

Derrida calls our attention to two words in the Sein und Zeit manuscript, that is, “ontic metaphor,” two underlined words, as a comment to the end of the Introduction, where Heidegger is making a difference between the great difficulty of thinking the being of beings and “telling stories” about beings (ueber Seiendes erzahlende zu berichten).

[This is very significant in light of what will come later. Just keep it in mind.]

[We do not want postmetaphysical, postontological, postphilosophical thought to be a matter of telling ourselves, and others, stories.   We need to break away from novel writing when it comes down to thought.   It is de-narrativization, in a sense, that is called forth. The interruption of narration.] Derrida asks: “why, at the moment when historicity must finally be taken absolutely seriously, must we stop telling stories?”

 A necessary caveat: it is not, as it has classically been, a matter of stopping the story-making in order to access a superior realm of abstraction.   Being is not in the beings, it is nothing outside beings, it is not another being, it is ontically nothing outside its ontic determinations. It is nothing, therefore, outside its own history.   Which is the reason why the thought of (the truth) of being cannot be pursued outside history, and outside the history of ontology, through its destruction.

It is, rather, and this is the difficulty Heidegger proposes, a matter of stopping the story-making from within ontic fields–say, religion tells itself a story, science tells itself a story, metaphysics tells itself a story BECAUSE they have already closed off the question of being in favor of their own internal ontic regionality.

So, to stop telling ourselves stories means to start thinking from the ontico-ontological difference, that is, from the difference that keeps the question of being apart from every ontic determination.

[Simple thing: we tell ourselves stories when we turn being into a character.   Say, I want to teach a class on being and I say, “Hey, remember the joke about two Jewish rabbis . . . ” The example given is the moment in Plato’s Sophist when the Stranger calls for taking the question of Being strictly on its own terms instead of muthon tina diegesthai, telling ourselves stories. Say, being appears as movement, or being appears as force, or being appears as god, or being appears as production. . .   All of this is crucial, because “telling ourselves stories” already in Plato, as Derrida notes, is assimilated to “what men do,” that is, to the natural attitude, to what one does when one finds nothing better to do, that is, practically all the time. Which sets up the theme of the “necessity of the ontic metaphor.”]

[What Heidegger calls for, therefore, is a certain breakaway from the natural attitude, that is, from the necessity of the ontic metaphor.   This is the great difficulty. Because, how does one break away from a necessity? Is the necessity not waiting around the corner every time when one thinks one has escaped it?]  

Once again, through references to Hegel, Derrida explains how, on the one hand, Hegel understood the problem, the philosophical problem of having to break away from the natural attitude, in order to, on the other hand, close it off within metaphysics, which of course turns Hegel into the “plus grand” story teller of all, but still a story-teller.

The step beyond ontological history might resemble a step outside history altogether, but it is, on the contrary, “the condition of access to a radicalization of the thought of history as history of being itself.”   Stopping the story-telling is the condition of access to a radical notion of historicity.

Even in Heidegger it is a long process. For instance, the fifth chapter of Sein und Zeit seems to be devoted to historicity, but it is the historicity of Dasein, not of Sein.   It is still introductory, therefore, preliminary to the question. It is only part of a preliminary investigation into the modalities of historical access for the human being, and it still says nothing about history AND being.

And yet, as preliminary, the question of the historicity of Dasein is already “immense progress.”

Why, then, must the question of the historicity of being go through the question of the historicity of Dasein?

Heidegger must begin somewhere. But that somewhere must be without presuppositions, without “stories.” Derrida says Heideger gives himself at this point two “assurances” in order to proceed.

The first assurance has to do with the “always already.”   There is an a priori that takes us away from mere empiricism, and that must not be understood as a presupposition, but as an entry point.

In order for us to be able to ask the question of being, it must be because the question of being is already obscurely accessible.   The accessibility posits an “already” not as presupposition, but as entry point enabling the question.   Now, this “already” points in the direction of an originary history.   Heidegger calls the obscure accessibility a Faktum.

As such, it is a Faktum of language. Since “being” is a matter of linguistic signification.

So, those are the two “assurances:” there is the possibility of the question, and the possibility of the question is a matter of language.

It is these two assurances that, Derrida maintains, open up–just open up–the question of being as history, since “there is no language without history and no history without language.” [Derrida’s reasoning seems a little weak here, not persuasive, at least to me.  Something does not quite click here.  Is it just me?]