Thread: Literary topics

Deconstruction and it's discontents: Derrida, Rushdie and Gramsci and the need for a return to Freud.

Originally Posted by sycld

Speaking of discontented people of South Asian ethnic origin...

Also, how exactly does a crazy incoherent Algerian French philosopher, an Indian author with a fatwa on his head, and some guy I've never heard of... an particularly ugly-looking Italian philosopher-author apparently?... point to a need to return to the semi-wacky theories of Freud?

Actually, please don't answer that, as I'm afraid you're going to subvert me with the structure of your reply or whatever.

I'm sure that I could write all of those essays with at least a degree of success, but the titles were intended to be (at least superficially, on face-value if you will) mildly preposterous. Amis is if anything the champion of modernity, Nabokov's most famous character was the objectified sexual object, the "nymphet" Lolita, T.H. White's Arthurian legends with their sense of destiny and belonging couldn't be further from Heideggerian thrown-in-ness etc. etc.
Admittedly in those the humor was more clearly drawn from ridiculous pairings, whilst in the first you picked out it was more just a collection of incommensurable names.

Originally Posted by Think

I'm sure that I could write all of those essays with at least a degree of success, but the titles were intended to be (at least superficially, on face-value if you will) mildly preposterous. Amis is if anything the champion of modernity, Nabokov's most famous character was the objectified sexual object, the "nymphet" Lolita, T.H. White's Arthurian legends with their sense of destiny and belonging couldn't be further from Heideggerian thrown-in-ness etc. etc.
Admittedly in those the humor was more clearly drawn from ridiculous pairings, whilst in the first you picked out it was more just a collection of incommensurable names.

By which I mean the Derridean deconstruction of Indian identity begun by Rushdie in Midnight's Children and continuing into The Satanic Verses exaggerates the cultural tropes of his identity in order to find their foundational negations, however, the lack of the authentically new finally prevents him from completing his dissolution, and his exaggerations finally re-emerge as a new assertion of the identity he seeks to overcome. In his struggle for Gramscian hegemony, he converts the cultural currencies of the Islamic, Hindu and British identities into a key of fantasy and plays them against each other in order to desacrilise and demythologise their content; however, he cannot ultimately abandon them, as his method does not allow him to escape the horizon of their meaning. In order to find a new object of universality, the author argues, Rushdie should examine the role of death drive in Freudian theory, repeating the constellation of his cultural commitments until his conditions of identity are so fully internalised that they express not an impersonal historical force but a psychological economy from which the authentically new may emerge.