Time finds its meaning in death or eternity ?

According to Heidegger, we can only understand the phenomenon of time from our mortal or finite vantage point.

Contrary to the tradition of philosophy, Heidegger argues that time does not find its meaning in eternity, time finds its meaning in death. But it is not evident why Heidegger's account of time should in any way be superior to the traditional conception of time. Drawing on the criticism raised by Lévinas and Blanchot, that death — like eternity — is never at our disposal to understand the phenomenon of time, we can see that although Heidegger is aware that death is never an event in our life, he nonetheless claims that it is the awareness of our finitude that informs our understanding of time.

Yet if Heidegger does not see it as a problem that death is never at our disposal, then it becomes questionable whether Heidegger's initial critique launched against the tradition of philosophy still holds, because it is no longer evident why it matters that eternity, as a point of departure, is never at our disposal to understand the phenomenon of time.

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David Kolb and deconstruction

Sometimes when this problem of using hypertext in philosophy is discussed, there is a tendency to think that hypertext is useful when there is a sort of deconstruction of the linear form. What is your opinion about this relation about hypertext and deconstruction?

David Kolb - It is a complex issue. You could summarise by saying that in many ways hypertext shows that the things which deconstructive literary theorists and philosophers have been saying about texts are true. It is shows that texts are open, that they cannot be completely closed, that they cannot be completely dominated by the author, that meaning has a certain contingent way of arising, so that it is not totally under the control of anyone, reader or author; those things hypertext demonstrates very rapidly. But it is also true that hypertext stands somewhat opposed to some of the things that are said by deconstructive writers because, in fact, a hypertext is a network, a finite set of relationships; it is something made, it is an artefact. I think many of the authors who sing the praises of hypertext as somehow "the native language of deconstruction" are making a confusion. They are forgetting that there is no pure text, that any kind of presentation, any kind of writing, brings the sort of general textuality they are taking about down to a concrete mode of presentation. There is a dream, after all, of total freedom. There is a dream of a permanent avant-garde situation in writing, but I think the flag of hypertext seems like something that might lead you in the direction of that dream. But only in the direction: the dream is impossible by itself.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Symbol and allegory

• According to Paul de Man, symbol is a feature of an art which attempts to transcend , avoid, or deny the inescapable fact of temporality in embodied human existence


• Allegory not only does not attempt to avoid temporality, it highlights human finitude.

In symbol, subject and object are a unity: "the symbol is founded on an intimate unity between the image that rises up before the senses and the suprasensory totality that the image suggests."

In allegory, subject and object are irreconcilably different and separate: "in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category . . . . The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can . . . consist only in the repetition . . . of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority."

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/

See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts