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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/72602
Description
Title
The Poetics of Resistance: Heidegger on the Line
Author(s)
Roth, Michael Theodore
Issue Date
1993
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Melnick, A.,
Department of Study
Philosophy
Discipline
Philosophy
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Philosophy
Abstract
This project attempts to show the philosophical links between the later Heidegger and Post-structuralism, focusing on Derrida's "deconstruction" with additional ingredients from Foucault. Not only a piece of scholarship that thoroughly traces out the extent to which the deconstructive problematic develops out of a dialogue with Heidegger, the thesis demonstrates the extent to which the thinkers supplement each other en route to creating an alternative to metaphysical approaches to ethical and political theories and practices. I also attempt to address the concerns of some critics who have pointed out the dangers of excess and the fundamentally passive and irresponsible nature any consequent practices emerging from deconstruction would have. It is my position that Heidegger and Derrida's affront to rationality, theory, and the possibility of prescribing principles for action, is not a move in the direction of some kind of totalitarianism or irrationalism; instead, I show that their claims are directed to the local regions where human practices take place and that they do not attempt to prejudge those conditions with universal claims that determine the solution to human problems before they arise or to use a theory that creates an ideal living situation ex nihilo without consideration for existing, coercive structures. The practices of deconstruction, I argue, are essentially directed toward specific "material" conditions and are aimed at showing the extent to which Metaphysics is more than mere theory, but a quality of material organization that is supported and promoted by even the most "ideally" liberating of theoretical and rational apparatuses. Heidegger and Derrida's projects, "community" action programs which articulate communities in terms of their multiplying resistances and interweaving forces rather than in terms of their strict identities, are based on their notions of "openness" and "differance" which generate a patient dedication to the disruption of coercive structures concomitantly with the displacement of life that builds new communities. The poetics of resistance suggests this capacity to both overwhelm what is wrong in metaphysically determined epochs of history and to create a new way in the process.
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