Hart's style is by turns infuriating, self-indulgent, hilarious and transcendent. It is obviously a deliberate choice to write in this way because of some aesthetic sensibility, given the book's subject matter. However, he doesn't always pull it off, it must be said.
In this brief chapter he takes on Milbank's critique of the post-moderns and Heidegger, explaining that they themselves did not escape the metaphysics of violence. Despite the left-wing credentials of Foucault, Derrida and co, Milbank argues that the neo-Nietzcheans cannot wriggle out of the implication that nihilism's true practical expression is fascism. He sees the ethical work of these philosophers as aberrent, postmodernism's 'emptiest gesture'. The postmoderns as power-critics are blind to their own use of power. In addition, postmodernism, far from overturning metaphysics, actually confirms it.
So Heidegger, also:
The Heideggerian project is, both late and early, just another transcendental vantage on being, and one whose own metaphysical presuppositions confine philosophy within th enarrative of a more subtle but more inescapable ontological violence: a univocal account of being which makes out the ruptures in or transition among manifestations of difference to be inadjudicable and arbitrary expressions of a being hidden by what has being. p. 42
(what the...?!)
6 comments:
I think it is clearer if you move the 'e' at the start of 'enarrative' over to the 'th' that precedes it. See?
my goodness, my typing technique lets me down again. Lucky I know you - you are such a good typer!;-)
Derrida makes a similar point on Heidegger in the first half of Of Grammatology, I think, (although I don't have a copy to hand, so cannot provide quote).
Ye pthat' sme.
Drew: could you at least provide a paraphrase of what is being said here?
Okay, not having read Milbank or Hart, I'll have a go at how I understand it:
To begin with, it's difficult to simply lump Derrida with 'postmoderns' as a category. However you define it, (and that is difficult in itself), he is very much so a classical philosopher, and following in the traditions of the germans through Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. He is very sensitive to his own use of power and violence, and far from blind. His ethical work has spawned a lot of imitators, lots of 'ethical crusaders' which he himself dismisses as an empty gesture, although I know less of the ethics stuff. However, his ethical critique is latent in his first publications, and so is not some later innovation, but the outworkings of his philosophy from the beginning.
Derrida critiques the Heidegerrian project - he holds it as not having escaped the metaphysics that it claims to. However, he does argue that it is possible, perhaps, to glimpse the possibility of the closure but not enact the complete escape from western metaphysics. He does not hold that he himself has necessarily escaped it, moved beyond etc.
The Hart paragraph you have quoted seems to agree somewhat with Derrida's take on Heidegger. Heidegger determines Being, even as he seeks to escape from its grip on philosophy.
I'll post some thoughts on this soon, with some quotes, if that helps.
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