[lit-ideas] Re: The Return of the Embodied Subject
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:41:36 -0800
Eric:
Isn't that a French thing? I mean, didn't Sartre start this stuff by
getting all hopped up on amphetamines and writing away without
structure or consistency ... as though the gurgling, chamfered jargon
were more real than traditional discourse?
I suspect that David Ritchie is not to blame, although he may have
aided and abetted, in his anti-Establishment days. Sartre was, even at
his silliest, reasonably coherent. He's responsible for a couple of buzz-words
('la nausée,' 'mauvais foi,') which, unlike the rebarbative coinage of
various 'studies,' can be unpacked in the terms of ordinary language.
It's actually possible to detect and respond to arguments in Sartre,
as Richard Taylor has done. I think that among the godparents of this
kind of talk were Derrida, Foucault (who, I grant, can be taken to be
saying something), Roland Barthes, and Judith Butler--to name a very
few. What explains its spread, I have no idea, but it probably has to
do with the advent of 'cultural studies,' 'postcolonial studies,' and
the like, and their infiltration into university language and
literature departments. Probably Edward Said deserves a place in the
portrait of Our Founders.
It's hard to give a clear summary of how the various sorts of studies
came to be and of how they relate to each other. As Peter Geach has
said, 'Nonsense has no gist.'
Robert Paul
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