Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Alexander Garcia Duttmann on Derrida, Adorno, and budget cuts

I ran to death and death meets up
and all my pleasures are like yesterday
- John Donne

- Current budget crisis: we are facing, in the UK, the cutting of the majority of funds to non-STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects.
- This means that the university has given into a societal notion of measurability and accountability
- Individual academics give in to the cuts because they think that they may avoid being fired
- This would mean not the abolition but the privatization of the humanities and the arts, their relegation to a sphere that is economically unreachable for everyday people

On thinking in Derrida
- How do I relate to a gap? The gap which constitutes thinking...
- thinking is to forgo intelligibility, or to recognize the Geflecht (Adorno), entanglement, abandonment, spacing and logical irreconcilability which is proper to the affirmation of thought
- Being caught between two opposing moments creates a lacuna which can do justice to neither
- Adorno and Derrida share this overall gesture
- Deconstruction relies on a gesture of generalization

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