a few remarks

I often felt during these three past months as time received different shapes and lengths. It sometime contracted and sometime enlarged, it sometime accelerated, sometime took a slower pace. It was at a slower pace as I delved myself in the theories of Derrida or Deleuze or Barthes or Foucault that need cautious and astute interpretations. It definitely contracted when I went through marxism which I hold accountable for destroying half of Europe. Reading those texts was like pushing a pencil against a blackboard, because it sounds so illuminating in theory, but the realty behind it and what generated in praxis is a whole different story. It is the real story of millions of people deprived of all forms of liberty during the communist era. I happened to belong to one of those countries where names like Marx and Engels used to be sacred so to speak. I felt somehow safe as we dismantled freudian and lacanian concepts, or the ideas of the feminists that I happened to use in the past. However Benjamin view upon art still questions my consciousness. But anyway what I want to write in this post is about what was absent in this literary theory class. Indeed exhaustive and structured, I realize that wanting to add or expressing some sort of regret over some missing authors in this course might seem a little too much, but I still wonder why authors like Ricoeur, Eco, and yes philosophers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer were overlooked. Derrida’s theories are totally indebted to Heidegger’s philosophy and Ricoeur’s books From text to action or The Conflict of interpretations are a great tool for those who really want to understand the process of hermeneutics as a whole. Ricoeur proposes a hermeneutics based on phenomenology. He starts with Heidegger for whom the ontology of understanding passes through the realm of Being whose being means understanding, and then he goes through the hermeneutic cercle of a semantic and philosophical thinking where a reflection upon understanding and upon a historical method, upon psychoanalysis and phenomenology would give the interpreter a cohesive view on interpretation. For me it was a great journey as I am always most attracted and intrigued by what I don’t immediately understand. It is almost an oxymoron I like what I don’t get. And since deconstruction, differance, trace gramme remained interrogative for me, I decided to do a research paper on these literary terms. Hopefully it will shed some light on the broader concept of post-structuralism as well as on interpretation. Also, the systematic view on different schools of interpretation was able to put some structure in my own views regarding theory, literary theory.