mirror theories

heksenhaus asked: do you think that dialectics has had a fundamentally negative effect on philosophy in the 20th century and beyond, and how do you feel we should fight it’s perfidious influence?

hookedonsemiotics:

Absolutely, and not just Hegelian dialectics. I think Marxian dialectics are right at the heart of that great passage where Lenin says we have to basically be mimetic of the state in order to topple the state and then transition into communism, which is all sorts of problematic to me and, really, the logic of it is entirely oppositional, representational, and dialectical. I think, though, that there is also a problem with the Lyotardian approach to “pure difference” and “the postmodern” which gives rise to a very fruitful restatement of the necessity of dialectics. I mean, Jameson’s whole career is based on his criticisms of Lyotard, and they’re fair, precisely because of how paralyzing his politics are, how defeatist. I think—and I would cite the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus to defend this—that a dialectic, site-specifically, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. All relations are relations of force and power (what Deleuze calls “combat”) and some combat is, invariably, oppositional. It’s just when you systematize something encountered immanently, when you generalize it beyond its sites of articulation, you do violence to how the world works and to your experience of it. And I think the answer to how one would fight that is precisely that one should resist, at all points, systematization that tends toward totalization. The method that Deleuze and Foucault explain so wonderfully (of immanence and of the encounter), and the examples afforded by Derrida, Barthes, and many others, show how one can avoid that. So there is a substantial body of work that DOES fight that perfidious influence, etc.

Just don’t let anyone take from me the dialectics that make, for example, Surrealism so interesting, or Benjamin, or Adorno. Negative dialectics is itself a whole different beast, and one that is very profitable and open, which is nice.

the bolded

(via deactiavtedhookedonsemiotics)