grgr: overcoming of metaphysics

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Otto Sell wrote:



> Of course, because in the binary opposition of Science versus Superstition,
> Science claims to be the higher, the privileged pole saying that all
> astrology is hocus-pocus. We always tend to symphesize with this preterite
> pole and know today (with or without having read GR), that the promise of
> science and technology to make the world a better place "automatically" is
> at least as much hocus-pocus as astrology (if you don`t believe in the
> stars).

P-readers will differ on this. Doubt if many have come to consider
astrology on the same level as science. Not that science doesn't
have plenty of problems. I could be wrong but I hope not.

> And I`m sure it was not that Pynchon read a
> little Barthes, Todorov or Derrida and said to himself the things Michel
> assumed: "Let`s put it in to confuse them."

Michel wasn't TOTALLY wrong.  Confuse wasn't the right word. How about
tantalize, amaze, electrify, elevate? All good things for a novelist to
do. Nothing wrong with using philosophical texts for novelistic texts.

> "Cause and Effect" is the center of that what Derrida calls Logocentrism,
> which I would call the metaphysics of the Western, rationalized world. GR is
> an assault on this, but that doesn`t make it a religious text claiming the
> truth like astrology, which, btw is, in a way, logocentric too and , given
> its karmic aspects, includes even cause and effect on a higher level too. .

All thinking seems to be logocentric I'm sure Derrida would agree
including of course his own. I'm probably quibbling about words but the
idea of making an "assault" on something that's built into the language
process, built into human nature, presents the image of a dog barking at
the moon. The thing to make an assault on, if any, is the denial of this
basic flaw in human existence.

			P.