The reason for §35′s importance lies mainly in the way that it attempts to give an existential explanation of ordinary communication. Since the explosion of electronic media technologies (particularly, I would argue, first television and then the web), the kind of communication that Heidegger describes as idle talk has been given concrete form in increasingly ubiquitous structures. Not coincidentally, the couple of times I’ve taught Heidegger, I’ve found that this is perhaps the part that my students have had the easiest time understanding (is there a better example of “passing the word along” than the “Retweet” button?).

On the other hand, isn’t it the case that pointing to Twitter or Facebook or cable news (or respected newspapers, for that matter) as prime examples of forums for idle talk is also an example of idle talk? That is, Twitter is so trivial, cable news so superficial, that it practically announces its own inauthenticity. The interpretation of such media as only perpetuating idle talk is perhaps always already given along with the media themselves.

The question that arises for me, then, is this: can a deeper and more thorough critique of the ideology and structures of such media get past the level of idle talk, or does the anticipation by these media of kinds of critique that can be leveled against them preempt the efficacy of such critique? Is something other than critique required?

(He asks, on a blog…)

Related(?): thinking about this put me in mind of Paul Lansky’s More than Idle Chatter, which I haven’t heard in probably a decade. For your listening pleasure:

Among everything else taking up space on my desk right now are things that pertain to the syllabus I’m working on for next semester: Philosophy of Being. Almost the entire first half of the course will focus on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but the second half will move it around a little more – start off with a little Thomas Aquinas, move right on into Kant, and then finish up with a hearty dose of Heidegger. That’s the question I’m dealing with right now, though: exactly what Heidegger, and how much? I’m leaning toward the Intro to Being and Time, “What is Metaphysics?”, and “Time and Being”. But there’s so much other Heidegger I’d also like to do (not to mention adding on some Derrida and even Latour as a coda).

This is always my experience writing a new syllabus; I get to wishing that semesters were about one month longer. Of course, that’s not the feeling one usually has about the end of the current semester.

To say that God is what God is in himself precisely in that absolute nothingness in which God is not God himself means nothing other than to consider ecstasy as applying to the existence of God as well as of man.

“Atheism is a strategy of the besieged. One begins by admitting that the territory of immanence is just as religion describes it, then one declares that this territory is the only one that exists, and finally one invents every possible way of rendering it livable despite that fact.”

I have nothing to say about this, really, other than that I find it to be probably the single best metaphor for atheism that I’ve ever encountered.

A couple of years ago I read a book on the history of the Giffords, The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science and Religion by Larry Witham. It’s fairly interesting, if not particularly fascinating, piece of intellectual history if I remember correctly. I’d recommend it to those who follow the religion/science “debate” (or who are generally fans of Gifford-related work, of course).

But down at comment #86, which is where they are as of this moment, the spitefulness seems to be dying down, which is good.

UPDATE: This video pretty much sums it all up: if you think Derrida is an idiot who hates medium-sized objects, you need to correct your understanding before criticeezing him.

… relationality between any two entities stumbles over the incommensurability between reality and representation. The stone in its own right can never be the stone as encountered by another stone. It has nothing to do with specifically human finitude, but is a paradox built into the difference between object and relation.

So no, you don’t get to say: “Derrida doesn’t reduce the world to a text, because he cares about the other of the text.” The question is: what the hell are texts doing in a basic ontological proposition to begin with? They don’t belong there any more than cotton balls or meteors do.

First of all, while I understand (without endorsing) the argument against Derrida’s treatment of the world in terms of the text, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that he “reduces the world to a text.” (I would instead say that Derrida expands the notion of textuality beyond the sphere of human language to include the world, thus obviating the distinction between human and world).

But Harman is certainly correct in saying that the defense he cites doesn’t work. This doesn’t mean, however, that Derrida wouldn’t endorse the first part of the quotation above, viz. that “relationality between any two entities stumbles over the incommensurability between reality and representation” and that this “has nothing to do with specifically human finitude.” In Positions (p. 81-2), for instance, he discusses the concept of spacing precisely as it operates outside the linguistic field, saying that its operation is ubiquitous but that it operates differently each time so that it can’t be used as “an explicating principle of all determined spaces.” The differences in the operations of spacing (which do preclude its inclusion in any “basic ontological proposition”) are not results of human finitude but of the differences in the fields in which it operates.

Does this make Derrida an “object-oriented thinkers avant la lettre”? No. But I continue to think it does make him a potentially useful resource for object-oriented thinking.

The relationship between theology and ecological thought, however, I think can be (indeed, already is) particularly fruitful within the context of a thinking of radical finitude. While I do think that there are many resources in Derrida for pursuing this line of thought, what came to my mind on this point is a paper by Latour from a couple of years ago (and I of course continue to insist that Derrida’s and Latour’s positions have several significant commonalities). In the paper, “Will Non-Humans Be Saved?” (available on his website), Latour argues for an ecological theology that would articulate a relation not between religion (again, confining ourselves to Christianity for the moment) and the “nature” of modernity but rather between religion and the entities (objects, actants) that relate to and interconnect with one another in order to endure and persist as real (or not). The punchline of his argument is that what best allows religion to productively interweave itself among the “creativity” and “reproduction” of entities – in other words to concern itself with immanence, although thinking about immanence changes much of its resonance if we abandon transcendence in the traditional sense – turns out to be Darwinian theory! So, if we follow Latour here, we might be able to read Darwin and St. Paul (and perhaps some early Greek theology) together after all.

On the other hand, any time I come across a use of the word “secular” by, usually, some form of reactionary conservative (think Pat Robertson, or perhaps this gentleman) as a descriptor of the evil against which “everyday Americans,” “good Christians,” etc. must be vigilant, I bristle with the urge to defend the merits of a secular and secularized society. I don’t think that it’s a matter of these particular detractors using the word in a different sense than that of secularism’s more erudite critics. I also don’t think that it’s a matter of finding a middle point between the kind of ideological secularism denounced by Asad and Nandy, in which religion has no place, and the intolerant (I hesitate to use the word theocratic) aspirations of ostensibly religious reactionaries – though of course neither extreme is acceptable.

Although Nandy relies on a concept of “tolerance” as the preferable alternative to “secularism” – I find neither bit of terminology very acceptable, but Nandy does qualify and explain his use of “tolerance,” acknowledging that many will disagree with it – he puts this opposition to use together with another that I found very helpful in thinking through my different reactions to different uses of “secular”: religion-as-faith (understood not as belief but as way of life) vs. religion-as-ideology. Both of these are intrinsic to the present state of religious life as he sees it in India and across South Asia, such that one does not represent the “essence” or “truth” of religion while the other is foreign to it. In addition, the two are rarely if ever found in pure forms, instead being “two axes along which the state of contemporary religions can be plotted.” Nandy goes on to identify both contemporary secularizing politics and anti-secular reactions in terms of religion-as-ideology, the latter concept having come to increasing prominence both inside and outside of contemporary religions at the expense of religion-as-faith. It is in the latter that what he sees as the promise of (a recovery of) “religious tolerance” resides, insofar as religion-as-faith is “definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural.”

It seems to me that both the secularism defended by those Nandy or Asad criticizes and the anti-secularism of the religio-political right offer examples of religion-as-ideology – to be shunned in the first case and to be embraced in the second. But this naturally underplays the plurality and vitality of religion-as-faith that remains a possibility and in many cases an actuality for religious ways of life. So, I suppose it’s the attempt to shut out these other ways of thinking about religion and its relationship to politics and to society that irks me in both cases.