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Wednesday, February 9, 1994

I Fought Foucault and Foucault Won

Of Foucault,   says George Steiner, when we say Death of the Author, Death of Man, he               said, These are "footnotes to Heidegger" ie Foucault's footnotes (completion project?) on the after-Heidegger period from 1940's onwards. I don't write, therefore, because of any of this (although Poems and Language do appear to spontaneously arrive).
             And so I wonder, if in GH can be found (at last) a clearer explanation for MH's NS turn; if as GH writes, "The progress of Being and Time from the hammer-analysis onward is not an expansion: it is an implosion, a devouring of all possible specific problems by the unique question of the system of tools and its breakdown into recognizable parts" (emphases mine) p. 28 TSR. 
                This stems from MH's attempt to escape a Universal dualism: "ecstatic temporality is nothing other than the ever-present duel between the occult receding action of the tool and the radiant profile that emerges into view according to the position in reality of the observer" (p.28-29 TSR).
          

It's heavy going. Although the sun has broken through several times today, my actual  day consists of juggling four balls and sweating; drinking smooth juice (blended in a working blender) and listening. I cannot estimate the kilo-calories consumed, nor what is happening in my brain physiology. i do not hear any dogs, but I do hear GH's assertion that MH is offering only an endless repetition: "In sum, there is nothing in the celebrated Heideggarian theory of time except yet another version of the strife between tool and broken tool or execution and surface: between the thing in its being and the so-called "temporal" projection that deploys that thing somewhere in our awareness" (p.29 TSR)


I think this is why TM\s cascade against what remains in Romanticism as a problem (the de Quincyean quest to "access" the always outside-there-Nature) is so important; taken together with the implication that it is the "now-as-instant-" as the ultimate illusion, being where so many ecologists, drug-taking poets, and others (all of us!) have been going wrong...and given.that bloody Now, (which doesn't exist at all), is still being utilised to evoke, garner, evangelise and extrapolate people-to-causes (be those causes charity/political or temporary autonomous actions, or sleight of hand market sharing of the new product), makes me think that Gh and Tm are (along with those others who have also thought this through) really onto something.

I feel as if an owner has pulled my chain and yanked my neck up, stopping me short in my previous life (perhaps that is why I do not hear the dog); no doubt some of that feeling is their celebrated rhetoric, (re-designed as it is to assist thinking) and necessary too, I'll agree, to pull us up clearer in these times. Dog I may be, but I suspect something rather wonderful is within my being-pulled-up--if only for me---and my own good.