Look again before you go bashing Martin Eve on philosophy and lit

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

http://www.berfrois.com/2011/04/f-pynchon
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I'm not so sure that this was an April Fool's joke.

First of all, it's not that funny (too many notes).

And then the author makes the Pynchon/Foucault connection also in other 
texts:

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/pynchon-philosophy-ethics/

"This mode of history, the excavation of sub-surface, repressed 
counter-histories, is akin to the style of analysis formulated by the 
twentieth-century French philosopher-historian *Michel Foucault* as 
"genealogy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_%28philosophy%29>". 
Yet Foucault's philosophy seems to sit, in general, uncomfortably with 
Pynchon's work. In fact, although Foucault was the most cited post-War 
thinker in the academic humanities from 2004-2006, and possibly more 
recently, there has been relatively little work on Pynchon's 
relationship to Foucault. Furthermore, those accounts that do 
interrelate the two tend to posit a fundamental incompatibility. We are 
told that Foucault's concepts of a "discursive" and "productive" power 
sit ill-at-ease with Pynchon's model of a dominating, repressive power. 
However, it's not the details of this specific engagement that I want to 
get into here -- this will be much better covered in my forthcoming 
revisionist take on this -- but rather the fact that mentioning this 
opposition to Foucault leads us to a curious aspect of Pynchon's 
writing: it seems directly hostile to philosophical thought and 
interpretation. (...) This is, then, the way in which we should 
re-evaluate philosophical interpretation of literature. Yes, it remains 
important to work out whether a theoretical worldview seems to sit well 
with the world depicted by fiction, but it is also key to look 
/critically /at the /political /situation of a philosopher or 
philosophical concepts.  Fusing this triad of /critique/, /politics /and 
/philosophy /results in a reading style that I have dubbed, in a 
forthcoming work, "The Critical Pynchon". This method also admits the 
difference between philosophy and literature; it does not attempt a 
one-to-one mapping. Instead, it triangulates among philosophy; some 
parts of Wittgenstein are rejected, others are taken. Likewise with 
Foucault. Likewise with Adorno. Intersecting these stances and 
acknowledging their convergence and divergence allows us to deal with 
Pynchon's polyvocality -- for his works are, like Prospero's island, 
full of noises and voices -- but from a univocal perspective."

Will the real Martin Eve please stand up?


On 16.04.2013 04:55, David Morris wrote:
> April Fools jokes work precisely because they are so near reality. 
>  Fools for fools.  Does this make them Satire?
>
> On Monday, April 15, 2013, wrote:
>
>     Not at all. It was a good exercise. I'm glad he was just
>     pretending to be a windbag. And thank you John Krafft.
>
>
>     -----Original Message-----
>     From: Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
>     'markekohut at yahoo.com');>>
>     To: Krafft, John M. <krafftjm at miamioh.edu <javascript:_e({},
>     'cvml', 'krafftjm at miamioh.edu');>>
>     Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
>     'pynchon-l at waste.org');>>
>     Sent: Mon, Apr 15, 2013 4:44 pm
>     Subject: Re: Look again before you go bashing Martin Eve on
>     philosophy and lit
>
>     I apologize for sending this out. I did not check the date and I dislike April
>     Fool's jokes even on
>     April 1. ...It is hard enough to tell jokes from the real as it is..
>
>
>
>     Sent from my iPad
>
>     On Apr 15, 2013, at 1:24 PM, "Krafft, John M." <krafftjm at miamioh.edu  <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'krafftjm at miamioh.edu');>> wrote:
>
>     > Look at the date on the essay, and I don't mean the year.
>     >
>     > John
>

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