Collected essays of a 2d-tier postmodern paladin, demonstrating French philosophy has run itself up the political dead ends of power as determinative and nihilism. Badiou asserts 20th-century existentialism – from Sartre in the 1940s to Deleuze in the 90s, including Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan – rivals ancient Athens and 19th-century German idealists (but not Republican Florence, which says something of the political bent).
Finitude is intended to deprecate the possibility of universals. Truth is a process or labor, not the pursuit of veracity of proposition. Postmoderns confuse scientific advances and consequent revision with the impossibility (futility) of settlement, and so surrender to nihilism (the point at which ‘enjoyment and dying are indistinguishable’). That calculus advances does not compromise arithmetic. But postmoderns prefer to seek profundity in paradox, though enigmas borne of logic chopping are not signposts to wisdom.
Consciousness implies unconsciousness, which is to be considered part of the subject and its intentions; subject do not imply objects. Plato’s subject is detached from ideas; Descartes’ is not because reason (thinking) is required. If we deemphasize the humanity of the subject we should not ne surprised activities such as politics are becoming inhuman.
Badiou’s though moved from dialectical (in which the event identifies the subject) to mathematical (formalism). His primary interlocutors are Plato and Hegel; his opponent Kant. A Maoist, he seeks to make a virtue, a practical theory of irrational behavior of the mob: several essays lament the ‘failures’ of 1968, when the French failed to follow the Red Guards; the ‘actually existing’ didn’t conform to the philosophy of history. Interestingly, deconstruction was a disaster for philosophy, a preoccupation with words and etymology overlooks that French language depends on syntax.
On the basis of implications, there is ever so much to disagree with – the margins are littered. In fairness, however, this book isn’t a postmodern primer.
Postmodernism
4. Pangle, Ennobling of Democracy (2 Feb 2015)
A Straussian (i.e., Socratic) argument for resurrecting Classical republican approaches to citizenship and education in America circa 1990. Postmodernist thought is insufficient to the task of civic education because it considers itself in search of a successor to modern rationalism, and so cannot present youth with a certain basis of inquiry and evaluation. (This school of thought, a dying spasm of Marxism exemplified by Jean-Francois Leotard, is indeed likely to never emerge because it corrupts Nietzsche and Heidegger.) The book then turns to an extensive, fast-moving comparison of modern and ancient conceptions of the republic and democracy, finding the dialectic method is necessary to restore American civic mindedness and also the US university; however, Pangle is careful to underline that the dialectic is dangerous for the under-prepared.
21. Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (24 Nov 2015)
Fulminates against the American university’s abandonment of liberal arts education in favor of the postmodern left’s historicism and nihilism. The opening section blasts the contemporary student, circa 1985, and is forgettable. The meat of the book more usefully traces the passage from Weber and Nietzsche to Heidegger and thence, severely corrupted, to the postwar American faculty. The author contrasts classical understandings of the self, truth, and suchlike concepts with the studiously value-free conceptions of the moderns and postmoderns. The final section demonstrates how the Enlightenment university, established to safeguard academic freedom, has been transformed into a radically totalitarian institution. Erudite and interesting, if occasionally shrill.
Faulty postmodern pillars
Two of postmodernism’s original contributions, the unreliability of Cartesian science and the instability of language, are premised on sophomoric understandings. So writes John Ellis in ‘What Does Postmodernism Really Amount To?’.
Postmodernism’s components include skepticism, cultural relativism, the shortcomings of rationality, and neo-Marxism, all of which are unoriginal. Its attack on science and language are new.
…General skepticism about scientific knowledge [is postulated], for example, by the postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard, who advocated incredulity toward all such ‘meta narratives’. [In the 1860s Charles Sanders] Peirce put paid to that attitude in a devastating riposte. He argued that generalized doubt was impossible, because when we doubt something our doubt is grounded in specific knowledge. If you doubt a theory, it will be because you know something that causes your doubt. If you are skeptical of Darwinism and people ask you why, they’ll expect a specific reason for your doubt, and they won’t be satisfied with a theoretical rejection of all scientific narratives. Indiscriminate doubt is nothing but empty posturing.
Regarding the instability of meaning in language, French critic Jacques Derrida misread of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure said the assignment of words to meaning was ‘arbitrary’ but that the meaning made sense in its context (e.g., 20C or 70F are both accurate measurements).
Because he misunderstood what Saussure meant by this second sense of ‘arbitrary’ Derrida jumped to the conclusion that meaning becomes unreliable and indefinite. This mistake was amplified by Derrida’s stylistic habit of dramatic verbal exaggeration. And so, for him, the absence of a reference that exists independent of language (what he called the ‘transcendental signified’) extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely. Meaning becomes indefinite, limitless, indeterminate. The play of signifiers is endless. But of course Saussure’s point was exactly the opposite — that the meaning of a term is created by its place within a system of terms and is specified within that system.