Demystifying literature: de Man and the singular

You all know I'm skeptical of de Man: I think that through equivocation on crucial issues he mislead theorists so much they are only now beginning to realize the extent of the damage. But this doesn't mean he wasn't also brilliant, or that his works aren't extremely useful. In other words de Man's power to mislead only came with a certain type of earned authority. It's just that his words require you to never let your guard down.

This is even more important to remember when these words are strung together in the witty remark, the teachable fragment, the slogan, the aphorism--I'm not sure what exactly to call these particular segments in de Man's corpus. These remarks--like "the resistance to theory is itself theoretical," or "scholarship has, in principle, to be eminently teachable," or "it is better to fail in teaching what should not be taught than to succeed in teaching what is not true" (all three taken only from "The Resistance to Theory")--remain influential even today: though it is important to keep in mind the limits of de Man's influence (as is only appropriate when such an uncritical notion as influence is used), which to this day has not been sufficiently mapped out, such phrases still guide our attempts to articulate what, at bottom, we're doing.

Such a delicate, yet dangerous string of words I want to look at right now:

When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it.
-"Criticism and Crisis" (1967, updated in 1970), in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 3-19, 18

As you can see, this is not only highly polemical, but is also conveniently short, pithy, repeatable. One can imagine many theorists picking it up and using it in all sorts of situations. But it would be a mistake to see it merely as a general statement just about anyone. Like most de Manian formulations, it is very precise. The task, then, is not to pull apart what is actually being said here from the sweeping, polemical force of the statement. Instead, it is to see that specificity alone gives such theoretical statements power. The trick of de Man's aphoristic formulation (and it is indeed a dirty one) is to let you think that theory must become less polemical as it gets more specific. Or (and this is oddly more likely), if it does allow you think otherwise, if it allows you to see polemic and precision's incompatability as superficial, it becomes your responsibility to assert this (which makes the trick even dirtier). But we'll try and get specific while also not taking over all the responsibility: we will remain critical of de Man insofar as he engages in a ruse that turns us all into his interpreters--or, better, his "demystifiers."

But, as we were saying, it isn't enough to see de Man's statement as just applying to anyone: we have to ask, first, who these "modern critics" that "demystify" actually are. Ironically, after all we just said, de Man isn't as specific as he should be about this: his answer is, the New Criticism and structuralism, or, rather, the New Critical tendency in American criticism (we can call it by its much misunderstood name: "practical criticism") as it is affected by structuralism coming from France. That's a lot of criticism, enough to seem like the most significant criticism in America and abroad (in other words, another trick involving sweeping generalizations). But it isn't enough to exhaust the totality of the field--not nearly enough, if we have the right view of things.

Why, then, this general practical criticism/structuralist poetics nexus, and not something else? Here de Man is most precise. Both, he says,

consist of showing that certain claims to authenticity attributed to literature are in fact expressions of a desire that, like all desires, falls prey to the duplicities of expression.
-"Criticism and Crisis," 12

This is what he calls "demystifying" literature. Let's be clear about what this process of demystification entails, according to de Man, for the above definition remains only a sliver of what he has to say about it. De Man goes on to say that the authenticity attributed to literature is in fact reducible to the notion--popular before the New Critics and before the advent of structural linguistics--that literary language was of a different nature than the system of language we normally use. (This, by the way, leads to the notion that the experience of this language is of a different order than everyday experience, or what I.A. Richards called, quite accurately, "the phantom aesthetic state:" the two notions imply each other and Richards, in the opening of his Principles of Literary Criticism, moved from this phantom state to this phantom literary language.) The process of demystification then would involve showing that a normal language system could serve as an adaquate basis for interpreting literature. One can see the task that the structuralist poeticians and practical critics, then, oddly have in common--and why de Man rightly groups them together: in the case of practical criticism, the task is to show that normal usage, or in fact everyday usage, provides us with enough meanings that we can outline possible interpretations of what the poem or prose work may be saying; in the case of structuralist poetics (which has a bit more complications I might get into below), the task is to outline how the system of signifiers that linguistics has studied can account for the work in question. Everyday language and the linguists' language both rid us of the need for any priveliged sort of literary language, which would be different in essence.

The larger meaning of de Man's statement becomes more and more obvious: both of these modes, in trying to undo the privilege accorded to literature, fall prey to its privilege. The implications are clear too: de Man is arguing for the restoration of a notion that literary language is different than the system of language we use everyday.

But before we outline what this really means, I would like to return to de Man's quote above regarding demystification. For while demystification involves a certain notion of literary language, it also proceeds in a certain manner which the quote makes clear: armed with her notion that the privelige accorded to literature can be accounted for by everyday language or the structure of language, the demystifying critic shows that the privelige is merely the expression of a desire. This shall remain even more important for us, for it means that demystification involves, prior to the critic's having any very clear notion about the proper sphere of literary language, a certain operation, a method, a "strategy" as de Man indeed calls it (13). Demystification is first and foremost the process of asserting that what is there can be the expression of something the critic, but not you, can see: a desire that is not fully apparent, that is duplicitous, and that needs the critic in order to make its full manifestation. Literature for the demystifier would then lack its "priveliged" or "authentic" status for another reason: literature could not be something impenetrable to the critic's process of making the work fully manifest, and in this respect could not be of a different nature than the critic's language. This, I claim, is the deeper reason behind de Man's notion that demystification involves dissolving literary language into everyday language: it is what in other essays he calls the critic's belief in the phenomenality of literature, the notion that it is something that can be made manifest and, moreover, can, eventually, be made fully manifest. One can also see that it involves a certain notion of the literary object requiring a consciousness that can judge it: in this respect the belief in the phenomenality of the literary work is also a belief in its fundamentally aesthetic nature--the work is there to produce judgments (Kant, of course, gave this view its most concentrated expression). We can also emphasize that it is aestheticism in a different, more perjorative sense: the critic, in this view, is the only one who can complete the artwork by mastering its duplicities, which makes her of the same nature as the artist, and their criticism, in turn, something participating in the art.

But, back to the point: if demystification involves asserting that there is more to the work, in the sense that there is something about it which is not as it seems and can eventually be made clear, when modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are demystified by it means that they are only making more explicit their inability to see that literature may perhaps not be something that manifests itself.

Now, there are two ways to justify this particular assertion. De Man's way, in the essay in question, is by stressing the fictionality of literature. What he says prior to his little aphorism makes this clear enough:

It [fiction] is demystified from the start.
-"Criticism and Crisis," 18

That is, demystifying a literary text makes nothing in it manifest. This is not because criticism is powerless when confronted by it, but rather because the text's nature qua fictional is to disturb manifestation itself. This is a point not stressed enough--we overlook it constantly in talking about characters, say--but it perhaps lays too much stress on fictionality: de Man could be challenged by bringing up testimony, for example (Derrida, for one, does not evade this: his reading of Blanchot's "The Instant of My Death" in the slim but profound Demeure precisely investigates the possible weave between these two).

I will take the other route and justify the notion that literature does not manifest itself by talking more about what the demystifier supposes literature actually does. The easiest case would be a practical critic, who tries ultimately to establish a meaning for the text. Jonathan Culler shows why this is questionable. Instead, a better case for now would be the structuralist poetician. I'll take Roland Barthes, with his powerful notion of codes in S/Z.

The five codes Barthes considers are extremely useful. They aren't ultimately very rigorous tools to use, but they are so handy and so intuitive: Barthes constructs them in such a way that to an experienced critic they fit like a glove--only allowing actual reflection on the manipulation ultimately produced. In short, in the codes Barthes makes explicit something the critic has for a long, long time engaged in, but never reflected on at such length (this is why they are not to be unreflectively used like any old tools, as Kaja Silverman does in The Subject of Semiotics). This is pointing out the saturation of the text with a certain type of non-literal language which is, unless we want to stretch the word, nevertheless not figurative. He opens up a domain in which a certain understanding of the message is brought about which nevertheless does not have to deal with meaning (that is, literal or figurative, strictly speaking). The code remains the way that parts of the text (and remember this remains pertinent only for a classic text, which is not stressed enough) try to be received in a certain way: as such it is like innuendo, except with the final meaning subtracted, as it were, or made unncessary to grasp.

The cultural codes are, in particular, the most intuitive to the critic (they are also the most boring of the codes: the proairetic and hermeneutic are much more interesting and indeed useful). One understands, in other words, a character has a certain status by the mention of what he wears. Or one understands a fragment of a sentence about abstruse academics, say, not because of the meaning but because of the cultural doxa, which states that academics have no connection to the real world.

The critic then goes through the text and points out these codes: it is what we do especially when watching TV, say, and noting how a certain type of character is stereotypically treated. What is one doing in such an instance? What de Man would say is, precisely, that one is trying to manifest something in the work. Even though the code isn't dealing with meaning, it is nevertheless there to bring something to the fore. It is, in fact doing something even more than that: it is allowing a secure transit between the work, on the one hand, and culture on the other. By pointing out doxa in literature or other, similar artforms, what we are doing is supposing an almost immediate link between the forces which construct the code and the code itself as we find it in a particular message. In pointing it out, we believe we are directly in connection with those societal forces, on some level, and transform them in the act. Why? Because we suppose that the message is not already demystified--to use the quote above--or in other words we overlook the fact that there there may be nothing to manifest in the message except the cultural forces which produce it.

To be clearer, manifestation may not be necessary because the literary work is singular. That means it does not express or represent those cultural and societal forces, but merely is a product of them--indeed, uniquely, irreducibly so (the reduction, in other words, would be to representation). Or, to put it another way, manifestation may not be necessary because the link between a the coded literature and culture is never immediate: it is always and only a set of productive relays which may indeed make manifestation possible, but never necessary for the work to be both extant and also (this is the tough part) able to be criticized.

With this made clear, we now understand how de Man proposes to restore the difference between literary language and ordinary language: it is not by giving literary language an essence, but rather by subtracting it. Literary language is singular, irreducible. And this does not mean the literary work is thereby shut off in any way from ordinary language, culture, or society, but is indeed precisely produced by them--since the connection is not presumed to be simply, unproblematically, indeed naively immediate. It is, in other words, produced in a way that cannot be reduced to the production of something destined to be manifest, and therefore demystified. I'll stop here, but it now should be somewhat clearer why modern critics are being demystified by such a singular literature in demystifying it.

"I don't believe that there is any perception"

The following--from a discussion at Johns Hopkins during the great structuralism conference in 1966 (!) that took place right after Derrida delivered his "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture--might help out some of my phenomenologist friends trying to wrap their heads around Derrida. Doubrovsky's great question at least allows you to approach the more structuralist and semiological mode of that essay's articulation:

SERGE DOUBROVSKY: You always speak of a non-center. How can you, within your own perspective, explain or at least understand what a perception is? For a perception is precisely the manner in which the world appears centered to me. And language you represent as flat or level. Now language is something else again. It is, as Merleau-Ponty said, a corporeal intentionality. And starting from this utilization of language, in as much as there is an intention of language, I inevitably find a center again. For it is not "one" who speaks, but "I." And even if you reduce the I, you are obliged to come across once again the concept of intentionality, which I believe is at the base of a whole thought, which, moreover, you do not deny. Therefore I ask how you reconcile it with your present attempts?

DERRIDA: First of all, I didn't say that there was no center, that we could get along without the center. I believe that the center is a function, not a being--a reality, but a function. And this function is absolutely indispensable. The subject is absolutely indispensable. I don't destroy the subject; I situate it. That is to say, I believe that at a certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific discourse one cannot get along without the notion of subject. It is a question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions. Therefore I keep the concept of center, which I explained was indispensable, as well as that of subject, and the whole system of concepts to which you have referred.
Since you mentioned intentionality, I simply try to see those who are founding the movement of intentionality--which cannot be conceived in the term intentionality. As to perception, I should say that once I recognized it as a necessary conservation. I was extremely conservative. Now I don't know what perception and I don't believe that anything like perception exists. Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of reference. And I believe that perception is interdependent with the concept of origin and of center and consequently whatever strikes at the metaphysics of which I have spoken strikes also at the very concept of perception. I don't believe that there is any perception.
-From The Structuralist Controversy, Discussion of "Structure, Sign, and Play," 271-2

Translating Husserl into the language of structuralism and specifically semiology was primarily the work of Merleau-Ponty (good friend of Lévi-Strauss), and if one reads certain remarks of his from the late 50's you can get a good sense of what that work of translation entails--you can piece together the puzzle that semiology poses to the phenomenologist of the non-French tradition, and begin to read, because all of a sudden you are launched into the types of conversations that were held after his classes there. Suddenly, this more formalized remark of Derrida's--no less extreme in its conclusions--from 1959 might also help, because one understands that it basically says the same thing in a less semiological language:

The question of the possibility of the transcendental reduction cannot expect an answer. It is the question of the possibility of the question, opening itself, the gap, on whose basis the transcendental I, which Husserl was tempted to call "eternal" (which in his thought, in any event, means neither infinite nor ahistorical, quite the contrary) is called upon to ask itself about everything, and particularly about the possibility of the unformed and naked factuality of the nonmeaning, in the case at hand, for example, of its own death.
-"'Genesis and Structure' in Husserl's Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference, 167-8

All this is evidence of the benefits of a historically minded approach to philosophy, which doesn't so much focus on the appropriations and misappropriations of particular philosophers (Husserl or Heidegger), but tries to reconstruct the discourse in which those appropriations are happening. It is also helpful in discussions of Kant, say (who is dealing with the British empiricists and materialists, like Priestley), and Descartes.

"What a sentence! Is it a sentence?"

It seems to me that Derrida is paranoid about tone (a writing's attitude towards its readers). His entire method of inquiry, insofar as it can be rigidified into "moves," or "rules," or (in a sightly richer formulation of the same thing) ethical demands for specific actions (see The Gift of Death for an articulation of how tough these alleged "moves" can be), could be said to be the emptying out of tone. "Emptying out" means here however, at the same time, an infinite expansion of the reliance on tone: tone is everything and nothing at once. In other words, Derrida's project can be seen as a giving of thickness to the idea of tone, and trying to overcome our reliance on it as a positive tool that forwards (or--and this is infinitely more pressing for Derrida--shuts down or dismisses the other's) discourse.
For example, the question of Derrida when reading Beyond Good and Evil is first and foremost one that problematizes or develops tone. "What a sentence!" he exclaims in The Politics of Friendship. But then he asks and adds (that is, supplements) the really crucial part: "Is it a sentence?" In other words, is this passage in Nietzsche merely a fragment and nothing more? Is it--and here the real inquiry begins if one follows Derrida carefully--merely an emphatic gesture, hot air, meant to rile up one's spirits more than communicate or remain communicable? Or is it precisely thereby communicating? In other words, is it resisting being said, being stated in a sentence--is it just remaining a fragment of tone--or is the tone precisely what makes it a sentence, brings it into the field of the possibility of representing? Here is the full passage (the, indeed amazing, Nietzsche included):

The transmutation to which Nietzsche submits the concept of virtue--sometimes, as has often been remarked, also in the Machiavellian sense of virtù--shudders in the tremor of this perhaps. This is something other than a reversal [or, as Foucault would say, a sacrifice--mj]. The famous passage on "Our virtues" (para. 214) from the same book [Jenseits--mj] turns resolutely towards us, towards ourselves, towards the "Europeans of the day after tomorrow" that we are, and, first of all, towards the "first-born of the twentieth century." It invites us, we the "last Europeans," to be done with the pigttail and the wig of "good conscience," the "belief in one's own virtue (an seine eigne Tugend glauben)." And here again, the shudder of the sentence, the shudder of an arrow of which it is still not known where and how far it will go, the vibration of a shaft of writing which, alone, promises and calls for a reading, a preponderance to come of the interpretative decision. We do not know exactly what is quivering here, but we perceive, in flight, at least a figure of the vibration. The prediction: "Alas! if only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be -- different! --" ( -- Ach! Wenn ihr wußtet, wie es bald, so bald schon -- anders kommt!).
What a sentence! is it a sentence? Do we know that -- that things will be different; and how very soon things will be different? Do we not already know that? Can that be measured by knowledge? If we knew that, things would no longer be different. We must not totally know this in order for a change to occur again. So, in order for this knowledge to be true, to know what it knows, a certain non-knowledge is necessary. But the non-knowledge of the one who says he knows that we do not know ("Ah if you only knew," a ploy or a figure which is neither a question or an affirmation, not even a hypothesis, since you are going to know very soon, starting at the end of the sentence, that which you would know if you knew, and that therefore you already know: "Ah if you only knew!") -- to wit, what the person signing the said sentence (which is not a full sentence, but only an incomplete subordinate) cannot state without attributing to himself knowledge concerning what the other does not yet know, but already knows, having learnt it in this instant -that is, instantaneously, and so soon (so bald) that it will not wait until the end of the sentence.
The acceleration in the change or the alteration which the sentence in suspension speaks (wie es bald, so bald schon --anders kommt!) is in truth only its very rapidity. An incomplete sentence rushes to its conclusion at the infinite speed of an arrow...
-The Politics of Friendship, 31

One can see (and Bernard Stiegler brings this out best) that Derrida is a thinker only of speed--the only thinker to think speed. For he is able to duplicate this speed of Nietzsche, albeit differently, in that amazing remark: "Quelle phrase! Est-ce une phrase?"
This is deconstruction in a nutshell. But what can be lost is that Derrida's sentence is really developing that space in which tone operates positively--positively, that is, as a the purest space of a difference. In other words, its own work of affirmation (but is it affirmation? and thus is it not negation?) is located here.
What the problem is, as I see it, is that this space is perhaps infinitely problematized or given its infinite thickness (as the purest space) too quickly for us: in its gauging how pure this difference is, we forget already that it is a pure difference--the pressure of its purity already deferring all our calculations as to the level of its difference. We're thus left with the task of catching up with Derrida (as he catches up to himself), constantly, rather than feeling all this as an incitement to precisely see how this space of difference (to be deferred already) is a space of tone, as we asserted. This is not actually his fault entirely: he is preparing us for moving within the rhythms of this forgetting and remembering, i.e. allowing us to exercise ourselves so we may perhaps attain the right speed. But still, Derrida allows us (and a whole generation of thinkers has been plagued by this, dealing with it in more or less productive and provocative ways) to doubt sentences and language as a whole, and yet not feel that we have an obligation to express through it. In other words, in his haste to point towards the the deferring (or the differing, it does not matter which comes first) he does not make us feel as well as he should this doubt as the very condition of (an unconditioned) ethics. No doubt he tries--strenuously, his entire life. But because in his haste to pass through that point where difference becomes deferred (already), he leaves us merely with a demand and not a field or formation of impossibilities or possibilities--except in what Americans call the "readings" of Nietzsche (and so many others) that he "produces" in this haste. One then makes the mistake of seeing what Derrida advocates as the endless production of readings (which is precisely to ignore what he calls above the "vibration of a shaft of writing which, alone, promises," my emphasis): text is everywhere, without also being (and this is the only Derridian point) nowhere. This objection is not one (like Gillian Rose's) about the difficulty or impossibility of expanding on what the demand is--indeed we're familiar since Heidegger (if not Kant) of the problems one encounters when one thinks that one can quickly and easily do this. It is rather an objection (and Rose also begins to hit on this at the same time) to Derrida's situating this demand always within the speed of his analysis--of too quickly folding it back into his text.
This means, with respect to tone, that it is vital to look closer at that point (or points) where difference defers itself and expand it in terms of how it belongs (or already belonged) or does not belong to tone. That is, (rather than emptying it out--and this would be really emptying it out--into logical "moves," which is how that explication of Nietzsche by Derrida so stupidly is begging to be read, but in fact cannot be read qua merely "moves"--it needs to be read as precisely the following)--that is, at this point there must be established a field in which the difference to be broken down (and how, we cannot determine in advance) will be constituted, in which it is articulating itself and (in fact) in which the possibility (or impossibility) that it has already deferred itself is developed (and indeed, unlike the majority of American theorists, philosophers, and critics, this is what some truly amazing souls actually do mean when they talk of Derrida's "moves"--more power to them!). One might call this, then, lending expression to the possibility or impossibility of the deferred in the different--and this, as I see it, is the task of Foucault.
If we become familiar enough with Foucault's task (and it might be that also of Deleuze--and Deleuze and Guattari--though, alas!, I am not yet authorized to say), we can begin to specify this possibility--and specify it as a determinate, quantifiable field (i.e. as a discursive formation, or as a field of "moves" taken in the good, developed sense)--with respect to tone in how it posits a space in which arguments can turn on themselves. I'll look at this more in detail later with respect to Matthew Arnold and I.A. Richards. For now, I'll just let (if I can) the necessity of becoming familiar with this task disseminate itself.

The post of structuralism

A genius colleague of mine (Sand Avidar-Walzer) has been talking with me about several aspects of the structuralism/post-structuralism distinction. His thesis, to which I most definitely subscribe, is that post-structuralism should not be conceived as a homogenous discourse opposed to structuralism (as a similarly homogenous discourse), but that post-structuralism is the precise deployment of structural tendencies and devices in a particular way.

If we take his thesis and run with it (and the running with it here is entirely my own--Sand's position with respect to the following is much more subtle and moves along different lines), what is produced is an uncannily accurate resituation of the current American reading of "Structure, Sign, and Play," considered to be the seminal text of post-structuralism, or at least that text which marks most clearly a break between the two ways of thinking, provoking the addition of "post-" to structuralism. This new reading understands extremely well the precise thrust of structuralist thinking that Derrida is trying to bring to the fore in the essay.

This, as I tried to bring out in another (unfinished) post, is essentially that the hypothesis of the bricoleur is not a mere patching-up of structuralism that Lévi-Strauss effectuates in order to cover the supposed flaws in structuralism, but the specifying of an operation that much of our thinking continuously engages in, insofar as it employs a particular conceptual apparatus that is not its own (or proper to it), that is other (composed of others' discourses), and requires the extensive organization of that apparatus. In other words, the provisionality characteristic of the use of another discourse--"I'm just using this concept now, this organization of data, these signifiers, to get at the real, underlying phenomenon; they are essentially inessential to my task, because they're not my own, or are not designed for my hermeneutical endeavor"--is a part of bricolage not because discourse needs to be provisional, not because structuralism as discourse is hypocritical with respect to its discursive

 provisionality (positing and referring to a center where it claims to empty out the center, to use the overused terms of that essay).

I once read that the character of MacGyver is a perfect example of the bricoleur: he uses what he finds around him to get out of sticky situations. On this reading, the use of the various pieces or fragments of equipment around MacGyver treats these pieces only as provisional things inessential to the real task: to create a device that will get one out of the room before it explodes, etc. But one must understand the existence of these provisional tools or fragments not as provisional in the sense that they are not owning up, somehow, to their own real nature as a totally provisional tool, as devices that exactly and only fit the task at hand, so that one can immediately just get out, without worrying about using the tools at all. In other words, one must not understand the provisionality of these tools to be a function of their failure to be totally provisional or completely inessential to the task. It should be obvious that MacGyver isn't somehow a guru primarily because he doesn't find some dedicated device that will immediately release him from the trouble he is in. However, this is in effect how one faults the bricoleur all across America in introductory classes in theory. In other words, this is the reading operative as the current situation stands. And we can see that this is a reading that reads structuralism already from the perspective of a post-structuralism. This can be seen in the absurd structure of our sentence above ("one must not understand the provisionality of these tools to be a function of their failure to be totally provisional"), which is almost unintelligible, yet duplicates this reading exactly in that it assumes provisionality is something both to be sought by a discourse that breaks with the center or origin (which would include post-structuralism), and is something not adequately formulated by structuralism. This reading, it is obvious, cannot conceive provisionality as the product of something other than provisionality (and one should note that this inconceivability is the essence of the humor in the "MacGruber" parodies of Will Forte currently on Saturday Night Live).

And this "something other," I am asserting, is exactly what causes provisionality. In the MacGyver example, this "something other" is precisely the fact that the tools he uses, in their otherness, in their just-found and yet not-appropriate essence, are set up as things external to him and his intentions, but which ultimately can be turned around to help him out. In other words, the bricoleur's discourse is provisional because it is not his, because it is set up as against his use only at the most basic level of it being able to be turned around towards his use. In other words, the bricoleur's discourse is provisional because it is conceived as neutral--as merely the site where two different intentions (McGyver's and the tool's proper use) are fought out. This is why MacGyver is a bricoleur: the tool can be turned around to his use because it is set up as against him, as not originally appropriate for him, and this makes the tool effectively--in the use itself--a "neutral" thing. We put "neutral" in quotes, because it is obvious that it isn't (and I should note that I'm not using this concept in the way Barthes formulates it). It has only the appearance of neutrality. Why? Because the tool was never sufficiently used against its ownmost, proper use, but only was used insofar as it was handy to get McGyver out of the situation. In this way new dimensions of the tool are opened up as uses (one understands how to use a hammer as a makeshift bazooka or something crazy like that), but the tool itself is not turned around completely to be used both as the tool that it is (a hammer) and the tool that it has become (bazooka), such that all hammers will thenceforth be possibly seen as bazookas and vice versa. To depart from the McGyver example (which has become more complicated perhaps than it was meant to be), think about how you think of a problem with the aid of a particular set of theoretical concepts: you pick up a thinker (Heidegger for example--let's say you are Derrida, or, to avoid confusion, another eminent thinker, like Sam Weber) and think in certain ways against him. The resulting reading of something (Sam Weber's essays on television, in Mass Mediauras for example) only uses Heidegger, you would say, provisionally: Heidegger is not essential to the thing you are trying to get at by way of the use of his outline of the stages of Seinsgeschichte or whatever (which Weber uses). Using Heidegger, therefore, does not make you (or Sam Weber, or Derrida) a Nazi--this would be absurd to say. Heidegger gets opened up to a new dimension of applicability: one understands a new way that the problematic Heidegger addresses in outlining stages of being history can be used. It is in this way that Heidegger himself uses thinkers like Kant, Descartes, Hegel, etc. to think about this very history of being (and to do so in a Nazi way--but one that is particular to this application of them): think of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which precisely thinks against Kant to show how being is making its appearance veiled within the discourse of Kant. The result is that the Kant, insofar as it was used, was effectively neutral: able to be turned around such that Kant was suddenly a thinker of being (amenable to Nazism), like Heidegger.

It is to against this neutrality that Derrida objects. And it is this objection that my reading here seeks to unlock from underneath the morass of comments on Derrida's essay that see the bricoleur as someone who wants to create a totally provisional discourse--when the bricoleur simply wants to think against someone or use a concept within a limited context until a more rigorous and valid concept can be found that can justify his primary aim better. For Kant, in Heidegger's reading, like Heidegger himself in Sam Weber's (or Derrida's) use of him, is not neutral. To repeat, this is because, in the first case, Kant has not been taken up as Kant. Kant has only been taken up as useful in the various places in which he addressed being and being-history. In the second, Heidegger has only been taken up by Weber in the places where he is not a Nazi. If Kant in the first case or Heidegger in the second were truly neutral, more of both of these thinkers would be able to be addressed. But because they are merely thought against (and Weber does more than merely this, but we're just using him as an example), they become places where provisionality gets performed or enacted rather than essentially constituted. The project of "Structure, Sign and Play" is to make this enactment more explicit. So this provisionality qua supposed neutrality is what is attacked in the post-structuralist attack of structuralism. The site of provisionality, then, is made again into the place where forces are taking place and need to be delineated or defined. It isn't--in the end--a simple point or place, or as simple as it looked to Lévi-Strauss (or McGyver).

So the project of post-structuralism, as I am suggesting, is to employ structures, even like a bricoleur, except render the sites on which they struggle to be used this way more responsibly as explicit and regulated, so they do not end up as wholly destructive loci in any discourse. It isn't to dispense with structures altogether (though Derrida might move closer to actually carrying out this project than others). "Structure, Sign, and Play" does not wish to transcend structuralism. It wishes to think with structures more rigorously, to account for the point at which their limited context (again, the goal is not that of a totally coherent provisional discourse, but one only coherent in certain conditions) in which they function becomes more permanently presupposed than it should--in short, where its limits get naturalized despite their resistance to this very naturalism as a tool. With Foucault, the goal is to make this realm of explicitness more and more supple, less rigid, and more determinable by analysis--that means particularly defining the limits in more complicated ways such that they can regulate the naturalizing tendency to a degree (this is largely Bourdieu's general task as well). With Lacan, the task is similar, yet it focuses more on the particular ways this regulation (or lack thereof) can be caused (this is what I get at in my recent post on Lacan, below).

Thus, the "post-" of post-structuralism is more fraught than we might think it would be. And, as we have seen, this is precisely because the notion of structure and its use as exemplified in the bricoleur is more complicated and more diversified than we are willing to admit. We might do well to display a quote of Foucault's as he turns towards his last, most amazing period--in short, that which we might call the most post-structuralist--and witness the ambiguity that the term structuralism has for him as he announces his the direction his teaching will take to the Collège de France:

And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this--if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them--structuralism...

-The Archaeology of Knowledge, "The Discourse on Language," 234.

If the notion of structure can, at this point (and several years after Derrida's essay) still apply somehow to what Foucault is doing; if it can do so such that Foucault could remain indifferent to the name itself; if only fools would assume that it were able to be transcended by virtue of the simple addition of a "post-," we would have to revisit the notion of structure as such and show precisely how it is amenable to post-structuralism as this field on which structures can appear and be made more rigorously analyzable. In other words, we have to revisit and relive the frame of mind in which Foucault can adopt this tone, this unbelievable nonchalance or ease with respect to structuralism, which would entail both a loosening up of the term itself and a loosening up of our current ways of understanding.

The first step in doing this would perhaps be to attempt to detach the notion of structure from semiotics. For what is evident, if we take my friend's reading and run with it, is that structuralism has something different to offer than just the notion of the sign. Or rather, much more is invested in the sign than perhaps can be exclusively analyzed by a solely linguistic semiotics (that is, even concerned with langue). It is the project of Barthes, for example, to invest the notion of the sign and traditionally linguistically analyzed semiotic structures with precisely these more complicated lines of force, such that the sign expands into areas where its operation is fundamentally less semiotic and more structural. The understanding of Barthes as a structuralist, and not passing him off as either merely a semiotician or a popularizer of Derrida (as is so often done in the American academy), would do much for an understanding of why structuralism is not reducible to semiotics and the other way around (semiotics may have unknown virtues apart from its structuralist use, too).

Kant and the feeling of life

Paul Guyer is right to note (in the excellent Kant and the Claims of Taste) that we are already introduced to sundry problems when we merely open the Critique of the Power of Judgment and see the particular moments into which the Analytic of the Beautiful is divided. Kant has employed the logical functions of judgment that we find in the Critique of Pure Reason: quality, quantity, modality, and relation. Why would he do this? In the manner of many of the dismissals of the conception of beauty within the Critique of the Power of Judgement itself (and we will see this similarity is not unimportant) we are ready to say this organization is just another instance of Kant being interested in form for its own sake—it has no intrinsic necessity or concreteness. But Guyer objects to this view—even as he too does so while bemoaning Kant’s choice to organize the analytic this way—saying that the reason “cannot be a mere obsession with the architectonic, for this itself could not dictate the particular architectonic elements to be employed.” He gives a plausible analysis for why this would be so, but does not sufficiently explain perhaps the most intriguing element about Kant’s decision, which we can see in Kant’s own hazy remark on it in a footnote to the first moment:

In seeking the moments to which this power of judgment attends in its reflection [in ihrer Reflexion Acht hat], I have been guided by the logical functions for judging… I have considered the moment of quality first, since the aesthetic judgment on the beautiful takes notice of this first [weil das äthetische Urteil über das Schöne auf dieses zuerst Rücksicht nimmt].

Quality comes before quantity, when in the Critique of Pure Reason quantity comes first.
This is not to say that Guyer does not at all address why quality comes first in the third Critique. He just does not do so with respect to how the third Critique might be employing this distinction in some similar way to the first. That is, Guyer explains 1) that Kant employs the logical functions with some connection to the first Critique in mind, and 2) that quality must come first for Kant. But no connection is made between these two points, and thus the whole discussion cannot account for the status of the text as we have it. Indeed, it seems that Guyer merely brings the priority of the moment of quality up so as only to follow the exposition of the text in his analysis, since he ultimately concludes that the quality of aesthetic judgment itself (that it is without any interest, ohne alles Interesse) is actually only an aspect of the “practice” of carrying out an aesthetic judgment in accordance with the more important requirement of the second moment (universality, Allgemeinheit)—and thus could just as well have followed the section on quantity (“in fact, I will argue, it is only in the practice of aesthetic judgment that the moment of quality comes first,” Guyer, 100). Guyer then wholly abandons the interesting similarity and discrepancy between the first and third Critiques that he himself pointed out.
We can use his indications, however, and make the connection that he apparently does not think profitable if we look deeper at the quality of pleasure that Kant thinks is involved in a judgment. Obviously, this then means we are resisting Guyer’s thinking of the qualitative aspect as merely an aspect that just happens to occur in a particular judgment—we are granting a greater importance and necessity to it already, even if it is not yet analyzed. At the same time, this will also go some ways towards resisting the dispersion of the act of judgment into three “stages” that Guyer famously has to posit to eventually make sense of the judgment at all (Guyer 110-2, 151-5). That is, Guyer fundamentally seems to think that because the universality of the judgment must be at the center of its operation, the fact that the disinterestedness of pleasure would be subordinate or less central means that it would have to have some sort of existence elsewhere than in the moment in which the universality would be operative. This is no doubt because Guyer understands the stakes involved and the incomprehensibilities in which he would involve himself if he were to take a different position (Note 1: Namely, whether the argument of the third Critique and its conception of pleasure are in any way coherent: Guyer thinks that without his distinction there would be a vicious circle in the argument (where pleasure would be merely self-referential, or pleasure in pleasure), and others, notably Hannah Ginsborg (cf. The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition. New York, Garland, 1990.) think it would still hold up, but precisely only if we think of pleasure as this self-referential feeling. We can only attempt to indicate here, perhaps in a manner a bit like Guyer, how it might be possible to thread the needle between these two theories), but it is certainly not insignificant that Guyer’s formulation has to manifest itself also on some level as a particular assertion about the structure of the book in general: namely, that it is only in the practice of aesthetic judgment that the moment of quality comes first and so there remains no real reason why Kant would reverse the moments of quantity and quality.
Kant defines pleasure in the first paragraph of the first moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful:

In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of the understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it [i.e. the representation] by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure… To grasp [zu befassen] a regular, purposive structure with one’s faculty of cognition (whether the manner of the representation be distinct or confused) is something entirely different from being conscious of this representation. Here the representation is related entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life [Lebensgefühl], under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, which grounds an entirely special faculty for discrimination and judging… (CJ §1, 89; KdU, 279).

Kant is extremely confusing here, seeming to say two things at once. First, he looks as if he is claiming that pleasure is a feeling to which we relate a representation in order to decide whether or not it is beautiful. He elaborates upon this in order to introduce the idea that the decision regarding beauty has a thoroughly subjective determining ground or is aesthetic, and does so by rephrasing things first in terms of what is objectively “designated” by the relation of a feeling to a representation and then in terms of the faculty of cognition can grasp something without being conscious of it. But then he says, in order to further restate how the decision is aesthetic, that as a feeling, pleasure is at bottom not this feeling to which we relate a representation but really a feeling of life, a Lebensgefühl. We are led to ask, then, what is this Lebensgefühl, this life-feeling or awareness of life, and how could it allow itself to subsume itself as it were under the name of another feeling, a feeling to which we relate a representation so as to decide if it is beautiful? We should note that this is not to say that we are positing (or that the text itself posits) two distinct feelings. Rather, we are trying to trace how one could, for Kant “go under a name” that would be different than “Lebensgefühl.”
Luckily, we can clarify things here if we return to Kant’s first unpublished introduction to the third Critique. There he says that,

Pleasure is the state of the mind [Zustand des Gemüts] in which a representation is in agreement with itself [eine Vorstellung mit sich selbst zusammenstimmt], as a ground, either merely for preserving this state itself [entweder diesen bloß selbst zu erhalten] (for [denn] the state of the powers of the mind reciprocally promoting each other in a representation preserves itself), or for producing its object. If it is the former, then the judgment on the given object is an aesthetic judgment of reflection; however, if it is the latter, then it is an aesthetic-pathological or of an aesthetic-practical judgment. It can be readily seen here that pleasure or displeasure, since they are not kinds of cognition, cannot be explained by themselves at all [für sich selbst gar nich können erklart werden], and are felt, not understood; hence they can be only inadequately explained [dürftig erklären kann] through the influence that a representation has on the activity of the powers of the mind by means of this feeling (CJ, 33; KdU, 237).

The language here is perhaps a little more loose or inadequate with respect what it wants to express, but through it we actually get a very precise sense of what Kant means when he says that one must merely use the name of the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. This is exactly because it is inadequate: in other words, because what Kant calls a feeling is precisely something that is not a kind of cognition, even calling it something like pleasure or displeasure will only abstract from its immediacy—that is, unless pleasure or displeasure is thought as so close to a bare type of feeling that it would almost lose all of our normal associations of pleasure or displeasure as something we can understand, make clear, or explain. (Note 2: It should be noted that Kant here gives us another possibility than this which he does not follow up on because he feels he has treated of it in the Critique of Practical Reason: that pleasure is a state of the mind in which a representation is in agreement with itself, as a ground, for producing its object or willing it into existence. That is, Kant is talking here about the case in which one gets a pleasure out of something like respect, which has to do with acting such that one creates, as it were, a particular state of things in the world.) This “bare” feeling that we are talking about inadequately, would be closer to a “state of mind” or (to be a little more literal with Zustand des Gemüts) a condition in which one is naturally disposed, such that one is all together correctly or as one should be (zusammenstimmt)—that is, (only) when this state or condition is the ground of some effort to preserve, or hold (cf. befassen in §1 above) oneself within this very state or condition. (Note 3: “State of the mind” is a really lamentable translation, since it seems to suggest that Kant is saying something like “state of the process in which mental data is computed” rather than “state of one’s particular temper or comportment”--Gemüt is nowhere near a solely mental phenomenon, especially in the way Kant is using it here. But though the resistance to psychologism here might be too insistent in Guyer's rendering, saying “one’s particular” as we do pushes things too far in the other direction. Kant is indeed getting at a more formal phenomenon than any one person’s general temperament, since (as we have just seen) the temperament is precisely only one directed towards preservation of this temperament. No doubt the translators are trying to anticipate extremely formal use of "den Zustand des Subjekts" in §10 of the Analytic of the Beautiful (but even then to think Subjekt and Gemüt are similar seems really unnatural). The point is, ultimately, that within this context, Zustand des Gemüt is just not as formal as “state of the mind.”) This effort gets clarified as a maintenance or movement of arresting (erhalten) in the Critique in §10. But the important point about all this is that Kant thinks his definition of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is not a definition that can grasp at precisely what it is to be within that state that constitutes a feeling pure and simple. This make it sound as if it were more like a cognition than what it is: namely, something more holistic, something more dispositional, something more connected to a basic movement of life as an effort to hold onto life and to be held by life (or, in the case of displeasure, to be released from or hindered in this holding). Thus, if we were to really hold close to what we mean by the terms, namely a fundamental grip on life, “pleasure or displeasure, since they are not kinds of cognition, cannot be explained by themselves at all.”
So this is why in the first paragraph of the Analytic of the Beautiful Kant is moving between describing the relationship between a feeling and a representation as pleasure and then calling this feeling itself a name for a life-feeling or feeling of life. Lebensgefühl is precisely this more holistic phenomenon of feeling that we have to use this shorthand to describe: that is, it is what we just have to call pleasure or displeasure, which are themselves normally thought of as feelings in a more mentalistic or less bare sense—as something we could indeed subsume under a concept and think or of which we could be conscious (cf. “to grasp a regular, purposive structure with one’s faculty of cognition… is something entirely different from being conscious of this representation”). In short, Kant is trying to reinstate what he sees as the originary type of feeling from which the feeling in the normal sense could be explained and with which any analytic cannot avoid engaging rigorously just as much as it cannot avoid failing in this endeavor. In short, Lebensgefühl is feeling (a feeling that we describe as pleasure or displeasure) rigorously conceived.
We can now see that it is perhaps because of the ambiguity regarding the precise signification of “feeling” that the moment of quality has to come first. Because Kant has to introduce the sense in which the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is not a feeling in the common sense of the word, because Kant has to show that this life-feeling is the most basic feeling from which any other feeling would have to arise (or in terms of which it would ultimately make sense as aesthetic, as subjective), he has to give priority to the particular logical function of judgment that would outline this most basic phenomenon. That is, if he is going talk about pleasure and pleasure in any of the moments, he must qualify somehow the way that it will be thought—namely, as a non-conscious feeling—before he actually deals with its particular functioning in the judgment itself, whether in the sphere of its disinterestedness or its universality. In short, this is why he would give the reason that “the aesthetic judgment on the beautiful takes [nimmt] notice of this [quality] first:” Kant has to deal with what (in-)taking or grasping (nehmen) is when it is done by a subject, and do so as such—that is, with respect to its most primordial phenomenon, its life—before he can explain how the grasping or holding of life itself is the particular type of pleasure that we find in the judgment of the beautiful. In short, quality comes first because Kant feels that any consideration of the aesthetic aspect of the power of judgment qua aesthetic (that is, subjective) has to deal with the ability of the subject in its constitution to be the particular subject that could indeed relate to itself aesthetically. The particular way Kant conceives of this relation is as a feeling, and so he must actually define the more basic sense in which “feeling” is working to constitute a subject before he can properly consider its modalities. Furthermore, he must do so without recourse to transcendental apperception, any consideration of consciousness, because we are not considering that at all here. Thus, he qualifies it as a grip. This preliminary qualification naturally fits in with the moment of quality the best, and so, perhaps, Kant reverses the order. No doubt this would make Kant’s decision a bit more circular—Kant has to outline how the grasping of life or the holding of the state of the subject in life is proper to a grasping subject that grasps the beautiful. But perhaps it would also show that Kant would be disturbing the logical order because he perhaps is endeavoring to bring it closer to the particular hermeneutical task that someone like Heidegger would employ (that is, jumping into the circle and determining the possibility for circularity) so as to be able to define how a subject is able to have a consciousness of himself without consciousness—that is, without (or rather also alongside) apperception.

Praise for Rorty's Heidegger

I know it isn't a popular opinion, but I think there is much to be said for Rorty's pragmatist interpretation of Heidegger. Why? Well, it makes the claims that Hubert Dreyfus' interpretation of Heidegger is pragmatist sound absolutely foolish. Dreyfus isn't a pragmatist. He is a phenomenologist. And if people are going to accuse his phenomenology of being too pragmatic, too unconcerned in the more "transcendental" issues Heidegger is bringing up, well, they should probably not call Heidegger a phenomenologist then. And if they do that, they miss precisely what Heidegger was doing with phenomenology even in the introduction to Being and Time. In other words, they should probably think of him as a Kantian, which is just as absurd as not calling him a phenomenologist.
Rorty, then, shows what a real pragmatist interpretation of Heidegger would have to be. And he does so precisely by taking Heidegger's more "transcendental" remarks seriously. If he is errs in his interpretation, it is precisely in not considering Heidegger's phenomenology in the way Dreyfus does--in short, by considering only his more "Kantian" transcendental statements (for what it is worth, he errs in the opposite direction with Derrida and Nietzsche, by not considering these claims enough). In short, Dreyfus, far from being a pragmatist, actually combats the position of Rorty continuously, in my view.
And this already is how Rorty can be extremely useful, as I said. But he is most useful in this manner when he interprets (quite rigorously, I might add) the claims Heidegger makes regarding truth, particularly in "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit" but also in Being and Time. While one may disagree with his conclusions about the correspondence theory of truth in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in considering Heidegger he has to flesh out exactly what a sort of non-correspondence theory of truth would have to be. If one can get past his statements that sound like relativism--which they are not, because they are pragmatist (Rorty I think enjoys or finds useful--like Derrida--being scandalous [I later took this word back, cf. my comment below] and always makes his pragmatist claims sound as relativist as possible, while always opposing relativism--perhaps to show, quite nobly I think, that pragmatism can oppose relativism right at the limit where the two might come together)--Rorty is exactly right in saying that a non-correspondence theory of truth in Heidegger is an attempt to get outside the power struggles that correspondence theories of truth since Plato have made us enter into. On Rorty's reading, then, one can see in a different way why Heidegger would so vigorously oppose Nietzsche. It is not because of a sort of leveling-down of all things into expressions of objectivity that Heidegger is opposing primarily but the fact that in Nietzsche truth is always a form of dominance. Eliminating or toning-down this dominance-structure in truth is Heidegger's objective--or is at least one of them. This is a hard thought for many Heideggerians to think, I think. But it is extremely rewarding, because one doesn't then have to disclaim that non-correspondence truth is just an other type of truth that, as it were, supervenes upon the truth that is correspondence, as Dreyfus tends to do in order to make Heidegger a bit more palatable there. Indeed, in the end, Dreyfus is right that Heidegger isn't calling for something totally different than the correspondence theory of truth to all of a sudden take over our dealings with truth. Correspondence has a particular role to play still. And so Rorty I think is ultimately wrong when it comes to what Heidegger is claiming, precisely because he does not see this role other than as a mere means that pragmatists' non-correspondence dealings with truth will employ. But he is extremely useful for going a little beyond Dreyfus to flesh out the possibilities that are there.
Of course, someone who thinks Dreyfus is full of it to begin with for not dealing with Division II (an inane criticism, since he is always dealing with it) and more "transcendental" statements  (again, which he always does) will not learn anything from Rorty in this respect. And thus one can see why their being closed-off to this interpretation, thinking that they are really "going beyond" the supposedly watered-down Anglo-American Heidegger, is mere self-righteousness. One should emphasize that Stiegler and Derrida (and, now that I think about it, John Sallis and Jean-Luc Nancy) are some examples of thinkers who did remain open to this Heidegger, and one can see by the amazing nature of their interpretation that it is quite profitable to do so. If they break with Heidegger on certain issues, one could make the case that they are precisely breaking with this effort of Heidegger to remove power from truth: they assert that power is still around even in Heidegger's truth, and this is why they keep calling themselves more Nietzschian than Heideggerian (Derrida goes so far as to call for the rescue of Nietzsche from a Heideggerian interpretation--cf. the opening pages of Of Grammatology).

Kant and the world

I wasn't exactly clear or even exactly right in my post below on Kant, when I said that the unity of the perspective from which the manifold is represented as connected is the real place where apperceptive synthesis is at work:

...we have to understand that, for Kant, this is really where the power of representation, the whole process of eventual synthesis and connection of representation, originates and is at work--but not yet as itself. In other words, connection as an act is really located here, in the unity: connection itself just issues forth from this act of unifying that is not yet action, not yet reducible to the power of representation as such.

This is generally in the right ballpark, and that is indeed where I was trying to get us in that post, but this problem, the unity of the manifold prior to representation in apperception, gets complicated and indeed is buttressed by the entire third Critique. 

Do we have reason to believe that this connection is unified simply by the existence of one perspective (speaking loosely, of course) upon the manifold? Or is this unity essentially issuing forth from the nature of the assumption we must make in order to do anything about the nature of the objective world itself? That is, the unity of the manifold must be assumed in an act of judgement regarding it: the unity of our perspective on it is thus dependent on this judgement itself being consistent. It is there that the Transcendental Deduction must find its completion and apperception really find itself issuing forth from a coherent point of view on the world. To support this reading, let's just refer to the famous introduction to the third critique where it specifically mentions the unity of the manifold in apperception with respect to reflecting judgement:

...There is such a manifold of forms in nature, as it were so man modifications of the universal transcendental concepts of nature that are left undetermined by those laws that the pure understanding gives a priori, since these pertain only to the possibility of nature (as object of the senses) in general, that there must nevertheless also be laws for it which, as empirical, may indeed be contingent in accordance with the insight of OUR understanding, but which, if they are to be called laws (as is also required by the concept of nature), must be regarded as necessary on a principle of the unity of the manifold, even if that principle is unknown to us.

-Critique of the Power of Judgement, Guyer and Matthews translation, 67 (5: 179-80), my italics.

The validity of the principle here is what is primarily in question. Indeed, Husserl notes this quite thoroughly in his The Crisis of the European Sciences. We should remark that it is actually quite useful to go there after the third critique, because it is really this problem that leads Husserl to posit the existence of a "life-world." He does not think that the third critique is able to answer this question sufficiently and still posits something about the world apart from any judgement. He must therefore look at the third critique to justify this, and out of it cull a pre-assumed "life world" that Kant fails to address. However, he does not do this to the extent we would wish it to be done. The question gets recasted, in a sense, but never explicitly read back into the place in which it originated, the third critique. Merleau-Ponty is a bit better about this, actually, and addresses specifically Kantian concerns often--turning to him next would be useful. But, frankly, all of phenomenology's concern with worldhood or the life world stems from this basic problem in the third critique. Indeed, Heidegger's assumption of the individuality of Dasein that gets given to me in being-to-death--its mine-ness, that brings Dasein away from a world at the same time as it involves Dasein in it authentically--could be said to stem from this problem, at least in the way it is carried out (and Heidegger indeed refers to the transcendental deduction in Being and Time, and his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is, after all is said and done, primarily concerned with the role of the third critique in this problem relating to the deduction). Anyway, all I'm trying to do here is redirect some musings earlier: I hope they were not that misleading (and I don't think they were).

Existence (and The Hermeneutics of Facticity)

Facticity and existentiality: the alternation between these terms is a constant feature of every analysis in Being and Time, and tracking their appearance and disappearance, their use and their constant reinterpretation is a great way to ensure that one reads that treatise attentively. But existentiality, despite Heidegger's efforts, can be said to remain underdeveloped there--no doubt because it is intrinsically hard to think and the later parts of the treatise that would give it a fuller and more explicit definition are missing. This of course does not mean that it is not thought in Being and Time, or that it is not developed and investigated as a structure, just that it is often less foregrounded in propositional statements and definitions than facticity. Supplementing this lack are the refinements made to it immediately afterward in Was ist Metaphysik?,  and especially with respect to Sartre's interpretation of existence in the Brief über den "Humanismus," that place heavy emphasis on interpreting existence as ek-sistence, standing-outside-of-itself. But perhaps this refinement is a bit too rigid with respect to what Heidegger is getting at in Being and Time, and therefore less helpful. What is needed is, of course, a good reading of Being and Time--in which ek-sistence as existence is indeed fully developed--but also perhaps a look at the earlier, clumsier lecture notes. In these Heidegger is less interested compared to his published texts for rigor with respect to how he speaks of being (not caring as much, that is, whether he says the obviously wrong phrase "being is"), and thus he is more likely to define it explicitly in a sort of rough and ready fashion. This brings it more into relief as a phenomenon  equiprimordial (gleichursprunglich) with facticity: because Heidegger does not have to talk about it with respect to Sartre's interpretation of it (which more and more should not be dismissed as a misinterpretation but a necessary interpretation and modification), it is seen more clearly as interconnected with facticity. All this is to say that a reading of the following sentences from the 1923 Freiburg course The Hermeneutics of Facticity could seriously help the reading proposed above:

The being of factical life is distinctive in that it is in the how of the being of its being-possible. The ownmost possibility of be-ing itself which Dasein (facticity) is, and indeed without this possibility being "there" for it, may be designated as existence.

-Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 12.

Existence leaps out of the facticity which it is or exists as (one begins to see how tough it is to talk about this stuff explicitly). This makes phenomena like historizing in Being and Time open out into its existentiality and not remain just a sort of mode of authenticity that emphasizes facticity, which is precisely the most necessary and most fruitful way to think about it. Furthermore, we see how the hermeneutical task is itself really a making-the-

phenomenon-exist for us:

It is with respect to this authentic be-ing itself that facticity is placed into our forehaving when initially engaging it and bringing it into play in our

 hermeneutical questioning. It is from out of it, on the basis of it, and with a view to it that facticity will be interpretively explicated. The conceptual explacata which grow out of this interpretation are to be designated as existentials.

-Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 12.

In short, it is helpful to drive the term "existence" back into the

 phenomenon, its co-belonging with facticity, in order to get a handle on it--and in fact this itself is the task of hermeneutics for Heidegger. Like with Kant, just collecting terms together, or even dividing them up in order to explicate them ("ek-sistence") does not release what is gotten at by the terms into any significant understanding. If Heidegger does this after Being and Time, it is perhaps because he considers this hermeneutical task preparatory to the thinking to be carried out in that treatise. But what bears upon this is the relation between the hermeneutical task and the phenomenology he carries out there--which he specifies in the introduction.

The big Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach post, part 5

I'm just continuing my Marx post from a while ago that tried to discern the transition from Hegel through Feuerbach to the early writings like The German Ideology, and perhaps even into Capital--why not get it all out, for those who are interested! In the next post, we'll get a visit from Beethoven and Steve Reich as good examples of the difference between Hegel and Feuerbach. But for now, here we go again:

...Feuerbach’s intentions thus clarified, we find ourselves puzzled and asking the following: if Feuerbach does not show us that Hegel’s God is only fully determined Spirit in order to contrast it with some “better” idea of the Absolute, does Feuerbach really show that a contradiction exists here in what Hegel is saying? That is, doesn’t the fact that the Absolute still lacks any necessary connection with fully developed Spirit simply disappear? The meaning of “Absolute” just has to be considered equivalent with fully developed Spirit—indeed, we just finished showing that Feuerbach does not say the Absolute is something different than the Hegelian developed Spirit. Altogether, then, all that has been shown is that it does not follow that because Spirit completes its development through historical action, it is therefore Absolute. In other words, all we see is that the Absolute remains the end of Spirit, and the two terms “Absolute” and “Spirit” stand opposed only terminologically and not because they are essentially different from other. They thus share some affinity that we have yet to specify, but this specification cannot disprove their identity. With only this terminological difference proven, then, we cannot help but implore again: what is the import of his pointing out the error of Hegel? What harm is there in making the Absolute just the full development of Spirit? It is not like we have or even should have any other conception of the Absolute!
This is the point at which the overthrow of Hegel really begins to commence, because (as we saw) it does not alter the truth of what Hegel asserts by contesting it directly, but alters it via revolutionizing this truth’s use. Feuerbach showed that all that exists when Spirit completes its development is a fully developed structure of historical actions. Now, if the meaningful development of meaning, the development and determination of Spirit, is to be therefore considered Absolute, if we are just going to make the full development of Spirit fall under the name of the Absolute as we just suggested, the necessity of that Spirit being Absolute must necessitate from historical action only, and not from any idea about the essence of the Absolute being in conformity with the essence or character of fully developed Spirit. It is not clear at first how revolutionary a step this is for understanding Hegel and the “contradiction in the speculative doctrine of God,” (the succinct title of one of Feuerbach’s most crucial chapters in The Essence of Christianity) as well as the fact that, indeed, despite all we have said, this contradiction exists in Hegel. So let us clarify. Though Feuerbach claims the identity of the Absolute and fully developed Spirit cannot and should not be disproved by specifying the as-yet-unnamed affinity between the two—and cannot and should not be disproved because their identity is the foundation of any true Christianity—he shows that the specification does indeed change the whole sense of this identity and how it is to be grasped and related to by beings. This is what we mean by calling Feuerbach’s God different than Hegel’s by virtue of its being “an object of religion”—religion is merely this grasping and comportment towards the identity of Spirit and the Absolute, merely how the truth of what Hegel asserts is used. The sense of God changes because Feuerbach discerns that Hegel ultimately attempts to approach the issue of reorganizing and reconstructing our conceptions of what the Absolute is—i.e. attempts to make God consistent in the sense we outlined above—by organizing Spirit around the Absolute, or ordering its development from the top down: in short, Feuerbach sees that Hegel attempts to construct a structure of the Absolute that is consistent (i.e. will not be otherworldly nor be the product of anthropophasis), and then derives the development of Spirit up to the point where it completes itself from this notion, such that the development of Spirit will complete itself in this structure, at this limit. The Absolute, then, is disseminated throughout the development of Spirit as its developmental principle, as the principle by which it (non-Absolute Spirit) in its multiplicity will eventually coalesce into identity with the structure of the Absolute. Feuerbach thinks this is a grievous error, because it does not show anything more than that we have renamed the Absolute—to reiterate once more, it lacks the necessity of proving that completed Spirit is not just completed Spirit but God, Absolute Spirit, a form of reality that is real.
Thus the essential conundrum boils down to this: God must be the principle of all meaningful action in those actions, not merely what they tend towards in their essence. The principle is still external to the meaning. How can Hegel show that what he has defined as meaningful action is all there is of meaningful action? How can he show that the principle of meaningful action is internal to meaningful action itself? Not as he does throughout his philosophy, Feuerbach claims. That is, not by reference to the Absolute, or even the Absolute supposedly within Spirit. Hegel must necessitate the relationship between the Absolute and Spirit by referring to the principles that are the precondition of Spirit. Otherwise he merely becomes teleological: developed Spirit or the totality of history is all there is (or is Absolute) because Spirit completes itself and history totalizes itself when it is all there is (or is Absolute). This tells us nothing! In fact, it makes us commit the most egregious mistake of reasoning with which Kant revolutionized philosophy before Hegel: Hegel advocates the synthetic derivation of a priori principles (the Absolute) from things experienced a posteriori (Spirit, Spiritual acts). By “synthetic” Kant of course means that there effectively is no derivation at all, for one overlooks any particular manifestation of Spirit to see what about it is in conformity of the Absolute. The answer will be nothing, because there is nothing “about it,” the a posteriori, that is in consideration—one’s eyes are only on the Absolute, arbitrarily asserted to be present in the world. The identity with the Absolute supposedly internal to meaningful action is still, even though it is now inside action, really external to it...