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.

Bataille 3 (Proust and Sade)

Do you actually read multiple new entries in the order in which they were added as opposed to in the order in which they appear? I suppose it would be good to create a style in which order of ideas doesn't matter... but, to continue with 'Literature and Evil', Bataille remarks that Proust is one of the least naive writers imaginable, and yet if you take the unpublished writings of his youth, some ten years before 'la recherche', you can find assertions that Bataille calls 'aggressively naive'. He includes the following quote, "it is this that moves us in 'the Phaedo'; when following Socrates' argument we suddenly have the extraordinary feeling of hearing a line of reasoning whose purity is unaltered by any personal desire, as though Truth is superior to everything else, because, in effect, we perceive that the conclusion Socrates will draw from this reasoning is that he must die." This is coming from a man whose later work will form one of the most adamant arguments ever made against the existence of a disinterested will to truth - who expounds at length on the fact that only desire can drive a search for the truth, and it is never just a desire for Truth for it's own sake (which, as I've already pointed out, is an idea that can be extracted from 'the Symposium' as well). Proust's naivete, by the way, comes as no surprise to anyone that has read any part of 'Remembrance of things past' (well, unless it was just the final volume maybe), since throughout, the narrator is constantly at great pains to show just how naive he once was, how the path to his final revelation was anything but straight, how it was built on the formation, loss and reformation of countless illusions and dead ends, how there is no direct or economical ways to learn the things he learns (as Deleuze explains, t is all a giant lesson in semiotics - things in themselves are not accessible, only signs which tell us about them. Those signs are like a language and you must go through a long grueling process in order to learn to read them). The particular sort of advocacy of falsehoods that the older Proust embraces makes no sense without the earlier aggressively naive devotion to the Truth (think in this regard of the young Nietzsche, devoted as he was to Schopenhauer).... at least this is, as I understand i, Bataille's reason for including this quote at the beginning of his Proust chapter. His entire discussion of Proust centers around a relatively minor event in 'Swann's Way'. A father is devoted to his daughter - is practically his only concern in life. The daughter is a lesbian, and had her lover living with her in her father's house. Though the father's devotion to his daughter was undiminished, sadness and worry about his daughter's position/ behavior sent him to an early grave. The father is shown in an extremely positive light - his devotion is thoroughly selfless, and we eventual discover that he is the greatest artist in the whole of Proust's work. After the father's death, the daughter and her lover profane the father's picture while making love. The explanation given is that because of the ban relating to the daughter's desires, she felt a constant guilt attached to pleasure, and it seemed that only the guilty and the wicked had access to pleasure. THough the daughter continued to love and admire her father, in order not to have guilt toward him ruin her enjoyment of the relationship she was having, it was necessary to embrace her guilt and think of Evil as itself pleasurable. She no doubt reproached herself for the act afterwards - had she not cared about her father the symbolic act of profanation would have had no interest for her... and of course, Proust himself had a mother who worshipped him and was deeply upset by the gay lover he had living at home with him or her - Proust's father being already dead at that point.
I think I've recounted all of that to you before... in a sense, that discussion doesn't relate so well to Sade, as I can't imagine him being a pure young idealist before going bad - though maybe I'm wrong. In a sense it very much does, as a genuine denial of the existence of Good and Evil, which is admittedly sometimes found in Sade, makes everything else he writes senseless. Have I said all this before in this blog? I fear I might have. I should also point out that in Sade it isn't 'Evil' so much as 'crime' that is prayed, and the existence of laws (divine, human and natural) that is generally discussed. As Bataille points out (so does Blanchot), it is extremely odd to speak of, or think of Sade's books as dangerous, since in order to be dangerous they would have to make crime seem attractive, and invite emulation, whereas in general Sade's books are calculated to awake disgust in the reader. For a person to be turned on and excited by all the mutilations killing, necrophilia and so forth that fills Sade's books, they would have to be unusually sick... (entry breaks off here, unfinished - perhaps to be finished one day?)