Theory

[icycalm]

http://insomnia.ac/essays/intertextuali ... s_project/

This is the second of William Plank's essays I posted just now, the first being The Athlete as Buffoon, and by far the most difficult of the two (the other is child's play by comparison). So I'd like to say something about it, to help those who have the courage to read it.

I realize very well that no one who reads this site has the necessary knowledge to understand pretty much any of it. Take comfort in the fact that even the majority of people who teach philosophy in universities are in more or less the same boat as you. However, what everyone can take away from it is this very important point:

Menard thus demonstrates the perfect deconstruction and reconstruction, the perfect text as intertext, and thus realizes what has been the project of the literary critic since Sainte-Beuve in the 19th century... namely, the analysis, explanation, assimilation, and in the case of the structural critic even, the substitution of the critic for the author as creator, the assimilation or the signifying act of the writer to the perfect comprehension of the critic -- namely the domination of the work by the critic. It is a bourgeois project to dominate the work and every project of domination has as its goal the control of production.

and

Pierre Menard is superior to Cervantes as the analytic critic is superior to the author because bourgeois analysis is better than creativity.*

The above conclusions are vitally important to... well, pretty much every genuine understanding of philosophy. There are connections with games too. I will explain everything at a... much later date. For now, I just want to make the readers of this site aware of this vitally important point. Whether anyone understands it is not important right now. What's important is that people at least become aware of it.




*Note that the sense of this sentence is sarcastic: analysis is of course not better than creativity.**

**Things are actually a bit more complicated than that, however, because creativity always presupposes some form of analysis...

[mees]

I know you will probably say "start with Nietzsche," but what else do you have to read to be able to understand this article? Where do I go from Nietzsche?

Also, I think it's sort of strange how you dismiss people like Deleuze and Lacan almost immediately (or at least that's how it seems to me) and yet a good deal of this article seems to show that Plank has thought about their work quite a bit in coming to his conclusions.

[icycalm]

I know you will probably say "start with Nietzsche," but what else do you have to read to be able to understand this article? Where do I go from Nietzsche?

You will not get anywhere with any of this if you do not first read all of Nietzsche. After Nietzsche, you must read a lot of Baudrillard. It is not important that you read all of him -- just a great deal. After that you can read Plank's book and mine. By the time you get there the present essay should be making a great deal of sense.

Also, I think it's sort of strange how you dismiss people like Deleuze and Lacan almost immediately (or at least that's how it seems to me) and yet a good deal of this article seems to show that Plank has thought about their work quite a bit in coming to his conclusions.

The main reason I dismiss people like Deleuze and Lacan is because these people do not want you to understand what they are saying (because they are saying very little, and want to hide this fact, as explained here). This, to me, is revolting, an insult to me as a reader, and I react instinctively to it with outright hatred. Deleuze wrote several dozen books, and yet I am willing to bet that their contents can be summarized -- without the slightest loss of meaning! -- in ten or twenty pages, if anyone could be arsed to slodge his way through them to put together the summary. The man does not seem to be able to write a single sentence without doing his utmost to put the reader to sleep. He spins, spins, spins, until you've forgotten what his original point was and no longer even care. Reading his books is PHYSICALLY PAINFUL. Compare that to Nietzsche, who seems incapable of writing a dull sentence, or the poetic beauty of every sentence of Baudrillard's, or the forceful, plain, but utterly lucid and crystal-clear expressions of Schopenhauer. Deleuze and Lacan and all other pseudophilosophers of their generation, are exactly the kind of people Schopenhauer raged against in his essays. They wanted to sell books and make a name for themselves plain and simple -- and philosophy, the search for truth, was a distant second in their list of priorities. And did they actually contribute anything useful somewhere within those thousands upon thousands of pages of awful prose they spent their lives constructing? Well, you can certainly find useful things "explained" in there, if you have the stomach to wade through their crap (as Plank apparently does, and I most certainly don't -- most probably because I am in my early 30's while Plank is in his 50's or 60's, and therefore has nothing better to do all day than read), but nothing that Nietzsche had not already explained much more clearly and enjoyably (or was on the verge of explaining, as his notebooks show), and nothing that one should not be able to work out for oneself by starting out from the same theoretical basis that THEY started out from -- i.e. from Nietzsche.

Because all of them started from Nietzsche -- even Lacan, who as a psychiatrist started from Freud, who started from Nietzsche.

Plank basically demonstrates all I said above. In his essays, and even more in his book, he exposes again and again the pathetic shenanigans of these half-charlatans. In this essay, for example, he exposes Deleuze who exposes Lacan:

Deleuze exposing Lacan:

Deleuze sets on this with a surrealist fury, accusing Lacan of interposing the level of representation between the auto-productive unconscious and production, an interposition which is the essence of the bourgeois project of domination.

Plank exposing Deleuze:

Had Deleuze admitted his debt sufficiently to Nietzsche's idea of the positive creation of meaning, the madman Artaud [Introduced by Deleuze. --icy] would probably have been superfluous.

These people must be taken to task for what they did. And what they did is extend the labyrinth, so that it is now even harder than before to escape from it. So they enjoyed their little professorships and positions as "intellectual leaders" in their lifetimes, and all the perks that go with them, but they will be made to pay post-humously, by the derision of all future generations.

[mees]

Wow! I see!

Thank you very much for your response!