The Philosophy Of Nietzsche Essay Research Paper — страница 2

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important ways. Although the polemic of “feminism” vs. “deconstruction” is too complex to be reduced to a manageable size here, one of the bones of contention (”But she has not a bone in her body, I thought”) between mainstream feminism and poststructuralism is precisely the status of the “subject” in contemporary thought. Some feminists have contended that the much-ballyhooed “death of the subject” is, in practice if not in theory, a tactical retreat by those who would seek to preserve patriarchy (or, more charitably, those whose pseudo-radical gestures serve to preserve patriarchy despite their best intentions): “Yes, Yes, we grant that women have an equal claim on the status of subject, but that status is itself a metaphysical construct and thus can be,

must be deconstructed.” Such a view of poststructuralism seems to me to take the metaphor of “death” far too literally (in a movement eerily reminiscent of some readings of Nietzsche’s previous funeral announcement) and assumes that what is “dead” is therefore of no account; in fact, the entire field of cultural studies seems all too eager to proclaim the “death of deconstruction” in just such a dismissive fashion. To suggest that we can now safely and with assurance move on to other problems (or return to old unresolved issues) is to ignore the immense recuperative powers of the “closure of metaphysics”–that which cannot be escaped, yet demands to be escaped. Jacques Derrida’s recent Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the

New International explores the “spectropoetics”–the call of the other from beyond the grave and the immeasurable indebtedness such a call occasions–in order to examine yet another recent listing in the obituary columns of intellectual history: the “death of Marxism.” This desire to be rid of vexing intellectual questions is perhaps a vestige we retain from belief in progress in the human sciences, yet such a faith itself is listed among the casualties of the fallout of Zarathustra’s explosive claim. How then write about Nietzsche without claiming to solve the problems of historicity and the re-inscription of patriarchy (problems I face with the fascination always concommitant with the insoluble)? One small way in which such a contradictory demand might be faced is

in the examination of just what a hypertextual breaking of Nietzsche’s sentence might entail. I believe that this appropriation of Woolf’s suggestion is not merely another male appropriation of the techniques and rhetoric of feminism for masculinist ends, but this is only because I see the feminist problematic as–not identical with or reducible to the poststructuralist set of problems, but–part of the larger questioning of (and culmination of) Enlightenment questions about the nature of the individual, society, and the possibility of knowledge. For this reason, I have chosen to “break” Nietzsche’s sentence at the start of this section, in order to consider the effects of hypertextual linkage upon this problematic. I make no grand claims for this experiment, for if

anything is “dead” here, it is the era of “grand claims”–programmatic proclamations of totality.