Well Ken it's too bad Heidegger didn't have the benefit of your advice  
before he spent his life dismantling dualism with phenomenology. Or  
believing he had. All those Heidegerrians out there will be upset to  
get your news too.

Had you spoken out sooner, you could have headed off poststructuralism  
as well!

Diana

Sent from my iPod

On Jan 16, 2010, at 11:24 AM, Ken Armstrong <[log in to unmask]>  
wrote:

> Diana,
>
> If I understand what you are claiming, I disagree. Either/or is a  
> stage at which you arrive in your thinking -- it is constitutive of  
> thinking --  and around which you cannot go. There are no  
> substitutes and no alternate routes. It doesn't make any difference  
> what Derrida or Foucalt think (or what they think they think). You  
> can give up and walk away (or make a scene), but you can't surmount  
> the situation by uttering "dualism" or "binaries."
> BTW, obviously there is such a thing as progress, and painfully  
> obviously much more is wanted, but there is no progress in the arts,  
> and criticism rightly understood is the art of understanding the arts.
>
> Ken A
>
> Diana Manister wrote:
>> Dear Ken,
>>
>> Either/or, like all binaries, depend on totalizing each element.  
>> Male/Female, for instance. Derrida among others points out that  
>> essentializing distorts. Male and female are more alike than not.  
>> Derrida replaced duality with differance, which means more than the  
>> Anglo word difference.
>>
>> Post-Kantian philosophies are not dualistic. Except for Sartre who  
>> didn't get it.
>>
>> It seems clearer to use differance rather than a binary to express  
>> the multiple choices you describe.
>>
>> Diana
>>
>> Sent from my iPod
>>
>> On Jan 16, 2010, at 8:16 AM, Ken Armstrong  
>> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>> Nancy Gish wrote:
>>>> Neither works if you try to follow it to any logical conclusion.   
>>>> But then, as I said, I discuss this in the article on  
>>>> "Subjectivities," which focuses on how Anglo-American and French  
>>>> theories are set down on a template like Scottish poetry where  
>>>> they just do not explain anything--one of them being these  
>>>> notions of discourse as either totally originated by the lyric  
>>>> voice or totally constructed by language.  I never feel  
>>>> constrained by "either/or"; it is pretty much always a false  
>>>> dichotomy.
>>>>
>>>  I had a friend who insisted that the meaning of either/or (in  
>>> Kierkegaard no less) was "take your pick" or "six of one, half a  
>>> dozen of the other"! False choices are false choices, between  
>>> which one is not constrained to choose. But without arriving,  
>>> somewhat regularly, at true either/or's, what progress does  
>>> thought make?
>>>
>>> Ken A
>>>
>>
>