"As Derrida said at Villanova,
"We wait for something we would not like to wait for.
That is another name for death."
— Brian D. Ingraffia, "Is the Postmodern Post-Secular?,"
p. 50 in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought ,
ed. by Merold Westphal, Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 44-68
See also Derrida at Villanova in this journal.
The link to Ingraffia's remarks was suggested by
this evening's New York Times obituaries—
A weblog post from Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012—
"Today is the 120th anniversary of Cardinal Henry Edward Manning's death."
— A Reluctant Sinner (Thanks to Andrew Cusack for the link.)
If Manning is a saint, then Saturday was his feast day.
Some background— Manning in this journal.
See also Saturday's Derrida at Villanova. The link there to
previous posts on that topic leads to a post on Derrida's promotion
of his neologism différance as a version of Plato's khôra.
I prefer Manning's discussion of a closely related concept,
the scholastic philosophers' materia prima .
See Hugh R. King's 1956 paper sneering at the scholastics'
concept, and Heisenberg's much better-informed remarks
on the related concept of potentia —
For a related fictional account of a religious quest for "possibilities"
and "excluded middles" between "zeroes and ones," see
Ingraffia on The Crying of Lot 49 .
Related material– Saturday night's Derrida at Villanova and Villanueva.
"What exactly was Point Omega?"
This is Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
Wright is discussing not the novel Point Omega by Don DeLillo,
but rather a (related) concept of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
My own idiosyncratic version of a personal "point omega"—
The circular sculpture in the foreground
is called by the artist "The Omega Point."
This has been described as
"a portal that leads in or out of time and space."
For some other sorts of points, see the drawings
on the wall and Geometry Simplified—
The two points of the trivial affine space are represented by squares,
and the one point of the trivial projective space is represented by
a line segment separating the affine-space squares.
For related darkness at noon, see Derrida on différance
as a version of Plato's khôra—
The above excerpts are from a work on and by Derrida
published in 1997 by Fordham University,
a Jesuit institution— Deconstruction in a Nutshell—
For an alternative to the Villanova view of Derrida,
see Angels in the Architecture.
"Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold"
The above building is home to the Derridean leftists
of the Villanova philosophy department.
“center loosens,
forms again elsewhere”
|
"The most obvious problem with Derrida's argument in The Gift of Death is his misconception of Christianity. In his description of Christian mystery, the crucified figure of Jesus is strikingly absent, having been replaced by a mysterious 'infinite other.' In this respect, Derrida's understanding of Christianity is essentially gnostic; the humanity of Jesus is displaced by gnostic mystery. Although Derrida claims to describe historical Christianity, in fact, his argument is based on a serious distortion of Christian practice and theology. Although the title might seem an obvious reference to Christ's atoning death, Derrida's book can only be characterized as an overt and unacknowledged displacement of the Crucifixion and its central place in Christian worship."
— Peter Goldman, now at Westminster College in Salt Lake City |
See also Highway 1 Revisited (August 1, 2006).
To the leftist philosophers of Villanova
From "Make a Différance"
(Women's History Month, 2005)—
“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
– Glory Road
Quodlibet*
Compare and contrast
the diamond in the football
with the jewel in the lotus.
* "A scholastic argumentation upon a subject chosen at will, but almost always theological. These are generally the most elaborate and subtle of the works of the scholastic doctors." —Century Dictionary
Project Management at Villanova
Yesterday's noon post, "Lying Forth," linked to a passage by Walter A. Brogan, Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University.
A related Brogan remark for Harrison Ford's birthday—
"The last few pages of the text 'Différance' [an essay by Derrida] are a refutation of the nostalgia and hope involved in Heidegger's ontology, a rejection of the quest for the lost origin and final word."
Walter A. Brogan, "The Original Difference," pp. 31-40 in Derrida and Différance, ed. by David C. Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 32
See, too, "Make a Différance."
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