Co-presence between texts

Intertextuality. According to Genette's rather restricted definition intertextuality is "a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts."

This includes, as Eskelinen put it, the practices of quotation, allusion and plagiarism. In principle, it is just a matter of recognition. But in these days just because you read it doesn’t mean it is there and vice versa. The invisible, hidden, and inaccessible parts of the text will deny the reader the comfort of knowing for certain what exactly is there in the text. To make matters more complicated it’s not only the dialectic between visible and invisible parts of the text that counts, but also the relations between what’s visible now and what, if anything, will be visible later. Also the threshold between what’s inside and what’s outside the text is getting blurrier, as it’s so easy to supplement and replace the original text from the outside (as certain famous software agents have already shown).

In some ways, all this may lead to the decreasing importance of intertextuality in dynamically ergodic works, or at least to more drastic ways of foregrounding intertextuality. In any case we’d be better prepared to understand the widely varying degrees of co-presence at work.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor

Adorno's conflictedness about Hegel

Hegel's ubiquity in Adorno and Adorno's conflictedness about him are evident even to beginners, but hitherto it needed hard-won expertise to discriminate Adorno's near-idolatry of Hegel from his often angry critique of him.

By contrast, History and Freedom compels Adorno to engage systematically with the major Hegelian themes: the [historicized] dialectic, universal and particular, identity and non-identity, objectivity and subjectivity, self-consciousness (both individual and collective), the World Spirit, the Absolute, conscience and law, race and nation. (Short version of the critique: Hegel too often ontologizes or absolutizes one term of a binary pair, thus reifying what he, of all people, should have kept fluid and "dialectical"; worse, Hegel's lapse into this error is always in favor of the "universal" and against the "particular," for the master and against the slave.)

When Adorno mentions (without quoting) some "famous" remark from Hegel (or whomever), Rolf Tiedemann's expert notes quote generously from the relevant sources, with invariably helpful comment--and, often, instructive pointers to dissonances with Adorno's other writings. (Adorno here also gives his most straightforward evaluation of Kant.)

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor

Hegel's Hypertext

How to Use http://www.hegel.net/ to Understand Hegel ,

Unfortunately, Lenin's famous aphorism: “It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” is more true today and more pressing in its significance than when it was written 80 years ago.

Most Marxists will tell you that Hegel invented dialectics and that he was an ‘objective idealist’, but very, very few have actually read Hegel. However, Marx and Engels wrote very little by way of explaining Hegel’s ideas (Engels’ Socialism: Utopian& Scientific, § II and § I of Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy are the best general introductions available), but we know from Marx’s 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and his 1844 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General that Marx formed his own view by way of a critique of Hegel, and the 1859 Grundrisse, Marx’s preparatory notes for Capital make it clear that the critique of Hegel was central to his thinking throughout his life.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor

Bookmark this on Delicious

Process of self-production

The dialectic is the process of self-production of subjectivity, of the absolute subject, and as such is its "necessary action".

According to the structure of subjectivity, the production process has three layers. First of all as consciousness, subjectivity is drawn immediately to its object. This immediate, therefore indeterminate, representation, Hegel names 'being', the universal, the abstract.

But the relation of the object to the subject is thereby overlooked. Only through this relating back of objects to the subject, will the object as object for the subject, and the subject for itself, that is, as relation to the object, be represented Nevertheless, as long as we only distinguish between object and subject, refection and being, and remain tied to these distinctions , the movement from object to subject has not yet produced subjectivity as this totality for itself. The object, being, is doubtless already with the subject as mediated by reflection, but this mediation itself is not yet itself the presentation of this innermost movement of the subject for itself. Only when the thesis of object and the antithesis of subject becomes discernible in its necessary synthesis , is the movement of the subjectivity of the object-subject-relation established in its trajectory.

This trajectory is departure from the thesis, progression through antithesis, transition as synthesis, and, as this totality , the return of this posited establishment to itself. This trajectory gather the totality of subjectivity in its developed unity. So assembled it grows, 'con-crescit', becomes concrete. Accordingly, dialectic is speculative. 'Speculari' means to discern, to set before, conceive, com-prehend [be-greifen]. Hegel states in the introduction of the 'Science of Logic' (ed. Lasson, Bd. I, S. 38) : Speculation consists "in conceiving the opposed in its unity".

Hegel's characterization of speculation becomes clearer when we take note that with speculation the synthesis results not only from conceptual unity, but , in the first place and always, from the conception of 'the opposed', as such. To this belongs the conception of opposites as appearing against and within one another, which as the reign of antithesis is in this manner presented in the "Logic of Essence" ( that is , the logic of reflection). From this self reflecting appearance, this mirroring, the 'speculari' ('speculum': the mirror) receives its sufficient determination.

So considered, speculation is the positive totality of what dialectic must signify here: not transcendental delimitation critically or polemically thought, but the mirroring and reuniting of opposites as the spirit's process of self production.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor


métabole
hypertexte


Bookmark this on Delicious