Monday, May 22, 2006
(10:19 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Very Serious Philosophical Reflection
For my Nancy directed study, which was somewhat insanely paired with an Agamben directed study as a single class, resulting in perhaps the single largest reading list of any class I will ever take, I am rounding out my reading of primary texts with The Birth to Presence. Although it is a very large book, I am finding it to be the most enjoyable so far, aside from perhaps The Muses -- something of a shallow way of assessing Very Serious Philosophy, but still important in such a long engagement.My two favorite essays so far have been "The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch" and "Menstruum Universale [Universal Solvent]," an essay on the concept of Witz [wit]. I have decided that Hegel's theory of the monarch is my favorite philosophical topic that I will never do anything with -- it's very charming in its simple-mindedness. The idea is that a "state" cannot say things (primarily performative things -- "I declare that the law is as follows," etc.), because only a person can. Thus, the monarch is reduced to being the mouth of the state and the body that immediately is the concrete unity of the abstract state. It's hereditary because that's the best way of making it sheer "luck of the draw" -- the point is not for the king to have appealling positive characteristics, but just to have a warm body there to "say Yes and dot the i's." The analogy with Bush is pretty clear -- arguably, we Americans have only attained to the ideal of the rational state within the last five years. (Zizek does a lot with the theory of the monarch in his For they know not what they do, as well, which is interesting because they are a series of lectures given during the initial "honeymoon period" of Slovenian democracy. It seems to me that the theory of the Hegelian monarch is important to understand what Zizek does with the Stalinist leader.) In any case, when I looked at the table of contents and saw the monarch essay, the entire volume was already "worth it" in my mind. And what Nancy does with it is very interesting and ties in with his general attempt to think "the body."
"Menstruum Universale" is interesting primarily for a series of ironies. He retains the German term because he claims that German Romanticism is where Witz was really thematized as such -- but he also claims that the true domain where Witz was enacted was in English literature, and that the intervention of the French term esprit (also meaning something like "wit") was necessary for the German language to figure out what it really meant by Witz. Interestingly, he finally claims that the reason Germans ended up placing so much importance on Witz was basically that they were insecure that they weren't witty -- they bought into the cultural stereotypes. Thus, it is only in its feared or presumed absence that Witz attains its true importance for thought -- which is doubly ironic to me, because of all the ways one might describe Nancy, "witty" does not leap immediately to mind. (Perhaps this last remark is unfair. I do like his jabs at what might be called Heidegger's "tackiness.")
This is a rather superficial treatment of Nancy's thought, as befits a blog.
One last note: reading Nancy and Agamben makes me think that I need to take a year off from whatever I'm doing and finally just memorize Sein und Zeit (in German, of course).
UPDATE: Looking at the Library of Congress information for The Birth to Presence, I notice that it is "translated from the French." Why "the"?
