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6AA4FD | 4 years ago

With regards to Lacan, Heidegger, and Derrida— each in their own way, they hold off philosophical decision. Lacan stylistically (he sucks, but is pretty structural and emphatic about his registers, sexual distinctions, mirror stage, etc) and Heidegger and Lacan through their interrelated development of the problematic of closure and archi-writing, right? But Heidegger doesn't consign himself to closure, he very emphatically sees a way out in death, the condition of possibility for the authenticity of being. Derrida does not take a way out, but also does not write or reason arbitrarily, his process rests on the simultaneous articulation of a straightforward and historically oriented commentary, and a counterpoint exposed through the repetition of the language of the commentary back at itself until underlying confusions are revealed. This is the basic knowledge I assume you have after 10 years. If you are not familiar, I recommend Simon Critchley's 'Black Socrates', and 'The Ethics of Deconstruction' in addition to the Seminars, Being and Time, and Violence and Metaphysics obviously.

The way it reckons with your question, is that these points of tension, even when they are not fully resolved, allow us to come to a place of improved understanding about the systematic and historical functionality of the language and culture that produced them. This is really nothing new: we do not need to come to the same conclusion about any other subject, anthropological, historical, even hard-scientific, to deploy our provisional understanding. A concrete example of this is talking about moral reasoning- considering similarly non-philosophical work by Levinas, I have come to the conclusion that many of the ethical dilemmas I struggle with in my health care work are not neatly decidable, and are frequently more a question of how much of myself am I willing to sacrifice for my clients... or how much I can hold back for myself in good conscience, rather than a logically and arithmetically guaranteed minimum or maximum fair ratio. This is why deconstruction + pragmatism is such an interesting subject for people like Brandom and Rorty, I imagine.

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