the Concept of Irony

&& (I have to figure out how to make the paragraph sign on this computer. Anyway, I imagine that thinking of information as a commodity is itself a fairly modern phenomenon... though to further support what you were saying - the belief that I universities one can or should diminish the traditional master/ student relationship as one between a person who knows and explains to one who is ignorant and listens probably does go together with a sense of knowledge as being something cheap and easy to come by. Having sessions where students who have not yet learned to read carefully and have little frame of reference with which to analyze texts talk at length about what they felt and thought while reading the text does for me in some way fit with blogging, surfing the net, commenting on whatever and picking up factoids and opinions from various sources... when I was a student myself I remember feeling like my time was wasted when the floor was given too often to classmates, many of whom had nothing valuable to contribute. Everything has gone democratic. Why pay or work for expertise when everyone is an expert?
As for what you wrote in your last post about your professor's 'myth', I'm not so sure I understood the myth itself, which makes it difficult to say anything about your criticism of it. I'm not sure exactly where he's drawing his lines, so I can't say if they should be fuzzier, and the one thing I can say is that the way you described his position, it certainly did seem simple and of dubious value. While it doesn't feel in the least bit presumptuous to me for a philosopher to speculate about the nature of Being and perception and so forth, once philosophers get to talking about other sciences and disciplines, I get suspicious... just as you seem to do. But even then, something like Foucault talking about epistemological shifts seems okay to me - he might not be right, there's some sloppiness in the initial formulation, but it can be argued with and modified, and there was a lot of work done in archives underlying his initial claims - he did, after all, have his Ph.d. in one of the social sciences, and it was the social sciences that he began by critiquing. But just as when you began talking about how knowledge is valued in our society, I feel like I'm drifting into a region where I'm outside of what humble competence I might have.)

Anyway, on to my actual subject. I haven't been writing lately in part because the paper I'm writing is finally taking shape, and why write casually and badly about what I'm already trying to write rigorously and well elsewhere? Why do violence to my twenty-page thought (which actually ought to be longer), by cutting it down to one? I've often mentioned my own feeling of unease when I sense I'm misrepresenting the thoughts of people or books I'm chatting about, but it's kind of worse to feel I'm misrepresenting and diminishing my own thoughts. Nevertheless, I'll say a few things about what I'm writing, because that's pretty much all I'm reading and thinking about at the moment (though the weekend was spent listening to more than twenty speakers at a very long conference I helped organize, and teaching is taking a lot out of me at the moment). It shouldn't be a surprise to you that I ended up making my Sade paper revolve around a comparison between Blanchot's reading of Sade and Kierkegaard's interpretation of Socrates. Just as makes Sade synonymous with pure negation, Kierkegaard defines Socrates, or socratic irony, as pure negation. In both cases negation is defined in opposition to Hegel (though young Kierkegaard is much more Hegelian than Blanchot). Kierkegaard tries to maintain a strict distinction between Socrates and Plato (he's dismissive of Xenophon and admires Aristophanes, but, of course mostly uses Platonic dialogues, particularly the Apology, the Symposium and the Phaedo). In order to attain ideality, it is necessary first to negate the actual. In Plato, this negation is a starting point from which the Idea can be attained. For Socrates, the idea exists merely as a boundary. The destruction of the actuality is the goal of all Socratic thought. It is an infinite movement, but void of content. Negativity itself becomes absolute. It would initially seem that in Blanchot, no similar opposition can be set up (the short little description I just gave will give a sense of how much of Hegel is left in Kierkegaard - though I Socrates' own thought the negative is not just a moment in the accomplishment of work, of the negative giving birth to the positive, in world-historical terms, Socrates is seen as the negative moment that gave birth to Plato (and the cynics, etc.) as a new positivity. Still, Blanchot describes literature as a sort of constant self-erasure. Literary writing is, for him, always trying to return to the negative space of pure possibility... what the writer creates is a translation which is necessarily faithful because that which he is translating from, the dark space preceding creation, has no proper existence before being translated... it has no characteristics of its own, no set identity. It would be lost if not translated. Each writer brings to light a specific dark of night, which is, properly speaking, nothing. Nevertheless, that specific nothing, that silence, that space of possibility is what interests the writer more than what he has written (which has become something and gained characteristics, positive content). I could go on, but you probably get enough of the point. The main thing here is that, self-devouring as literature may be in Blanchot's description, and as shaky as the writers positive content may be in comparison with Plato's ideas which at times seem so clear and so close in certain dialogues, it is still aiming at a sort of ideality. Though Sade is mentioned by Blanchot as the writer par excellence at one point, Sade is unique in that the destruction of actuality, for him as for Socrates, appears as an end in itself rather than a point of departure. As with Socrates, Sade deals with the infinite/ absolute, and as with Socrates it is an infinite movement which stops short of ideality and doesn't appear to strive for positive content of any sort.
In a sense, I suppose that's my central argument. Everything else is used to add nuance, make the argument more convincing, give examples, etc. A couple of times you've brought up Derrida's 'Plato's pharmacy', which I might actually incorporate into the paper briefly to deal with the Blanchot quote about the demon of writing possessing Sade and Socrates... as it's the only place in the books I'm dealing with where the two men are brought together, I kind of have to bring it up and do something with it... I also have to talk about freedom in relation to negation since that's a constant theme in Blanchot, and just slightly less in the Kierkegaard. I have to admit I hadn't read the Derrida article when we started the blog, and I'm still not finished... I think its an amazing piece, and I hope I'll find a chance to discuss it here.
I'll be very interested to hear what your thoughts are on this post, but please don't be too brutal. Though these ideas are in a rough form here, unlike every other entry I've made, this actually has reached the phase of things I'm developing that sort of matter.