Monday, June 02, 2008

Scars of blogging

This book is about the emergence of rapture in thought, an inquiry into what it enables us to think.
Such is the alluring opening line of Jill Marsden's After Nietzsche published by Palgrave in 2002. A friend who knows told me it is an excellent book; mine for £55.

There's an absorbing discussion not unconnected to this unfortunate fact at Scars of Différance - a blog that enables those unable to afford such sums to think by linking to downloads of translated books by European philosophers - from Agamben to Wittgenstein via Deleuze, Heidegger and Lacoue-Labarthe - following a comment by an American translator bitterly offended by such benefaction. The blogger's evident hurt at the comment ("what a brute way of speaking to the other") and impassioned defence is well worth reading, as are the many further comments.

6 comments:

  1. A pity your e-publisher can't spell différence then. Might make his efforts a little easier to find.

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  2. Anonymous8:30 am

    Now that really is funny. Is this person aware of Derrida? But if not, why make such a bitter comment?

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  3. Anonymous2:26 pm

    Genevieve -- might be worth you have a quick read of this:

    http://tinyurl.com/3sfouw

    ReplyDelete
  4. No, I am aware. I just didn't know, that's all. And I did take the trouble to check a new Larousse French dictionary,which clearly doesn't accept Derrida's neologism.

    Sorry to be a nuisance. If someone would like to bin the comments, that's fine. I'm not ashamed of being ignorant though, nor embarrassed to be corrected. Thanks, Mark.

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  5. I am ashaimed of mi ignorants. Haz maid migh life a mizerie.

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  6. Stephen,

    Well, I'm torn. On the one hand, I am delighted by the blogger's efforts to create a library of philosophical e-texts, and I'm glad for the comment to his post by the person in the publishing industry, who explains that the profits on these sorts of books come from institutional libraries, not from private individuals reading blogs.

    At the same time, there is an overwrought, pretentious thread of affect running all the way from the entry down through the comments. Literally, at one point, somebody writes something essentially like Lear's "You see how this world goes" but uses "lifeworld" instead. It's just hard to see why, in 2008, we need to hyphenate "under-stood."

    ReplyDelete

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