Postmodern Rationalism

“Throughout his writings, Foucault valorizes figures such as Hölderlin, Artaud, and others for subverting the hegemony of modern reason and its norms and he frequently empathized with the mad, criminals, aesthetes, and marginalized types of all kinds.”

http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/pomo/ch2.html

Isn’t this a new form of rationalism? How does it appeal to the ‘other’ of rationality without itself being implicated in rationality – is this the hyper-modernism in post-modernism? Could this be the work of another canon in the margins of a canon? It seems to me that a total rejection of the tradition can only do so in the tradition. The polar oppositions of the holy and the profane, the proper and improper can only perpetually reinvigorate themselves symbiotically. Derrida seemed to understand this and showed his discomfort with ‘deconstruction’ as the nuevo canon. Postmodernism must, from within the tradition, continually bring out its a-situated-ness, its inability to dwell, its ear for the strange and unsettled to hint at impoverishment. Otherwise, it certainly is another name for modernism. It must show the kairos, the supreme moment of indecision that must decide in privation (steresis), the in-between and the middle voice that cannot settle in the new-become-old. Being as suspended between rootedness and uprootedness, its arche as indeterminate, not as matter (hule) and form (morphe) that has its origin within itself OR as hule and morphe that gives itself over to an origin not within itself in techne – this is anarchy. The rootedness and the up-rootedness necessarily results in aufhebung (synthesis, lifting up) not abhebung, the thrown from within, with the emphasis on the violence of ‘thrown’; torn without relief not raised (aufhebung) as transformational, together-with, oppositions. Certainly, oppositions essentially belong together; they find their uniformity in their difference but ‘differance’ does not rest – it disturbs as radical alterity without recourse, adrift in violence without even the nothingness of anxiety – dread which cannot lose itself or cease to be. In this then the work of a new Greek beginning arouses.

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