Saturday, March 26, 2016
critical artist as obituarial character
Geoffrey H. Hartman died March 14. Notice is pieced together promptly. Literary thinking itself is concealed by imperative of casual reading. Otherwise, as Margalit Fox quotes Denis Donoghue, late 1980, “I wonder would that be worth the labor of understanding it?” Donoghue might better have added some punctuation: “I wonder: ‘Would that be worth the labor of understanding it?’.”
I want to dwell with the textuality of the obituary. Is that unfair?
But I don’t have time now. The obituary appeared March 20. This is a revised version of the March 20 note which goes far enough to show how challenging a furthering can become.
Deconstruction is Derrida’s version of Heidegger’s de-structuration of phenomenological concealment of ontologism, the latter of which traditionally “warrants” monotheistic power. But the NYTimes reviewer doesn’t have a clue what deconstruction is.
A good question to ask: On what basis is deconstruction possible? Analogously, if ontologism is pervasively implicit for our professionalized conceptuality (constitutive of self-understanding's understanding of itself), how does one gain the position beyond-and-before that for recognizing how ontologism pervades? How does a fish come to understand—supposing that it could—what living in water is as such, i.e., as a “living in” that could possibly be otherwise? (An Archimedean Point is a 3-D fantasy about a non-Euclidean prospect.)
So: How goes it, living beyond-and-before ontologism? ("How may a real [albeit reconstructed] evo-devo genesis of ontogenic comprehensibility comprehend its own developmental evolutionarity as ongoing?")
There is always a moment in development of understanding when deconstruction may be apt—part of developing. But the developing as such isn’t represented by the deconstructing that displays deconstruction as such. Deconstructing is part of developing at the conceptually-constituative “level” of inquiry (presuming adequacy of the trope of level for now), yet development of inquiry has a generativity which is constructive—even, given the level of inquiry that deconstruction addresses, originary (one humbly hopes).
[To be continued. Also, here’s a PDF of the obituary.]
