Prohibited and tempting

Author: Zhang Zhiyang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: "Forbidden and Temptation" is a philosophical written twelve years ago. Regarding its form, such as reading notes, thought fragments, diaries, and letter-like styles, Derrida called the term "writing" a piece on an endless chessboard, already expressing the floating state of words. Foucault regarded "discourse" as a living archive. He argued that social history is not found in artifacts, museums, or piles of old papers, but we can discover the "body-knowledge (truth)-power" constantly shifting "strategy sets" within the genealogy of discourse "positive-negative, real-imaginary, division-union." It speaks of the historical aspect of discourse and the accidental mechanisms of social reconstruction. Lyotard transformed "writing" and "discourse" into "narrative." To prevent the ontologization of meta-narrative, one must drive utility and paradoxical sentence structures into the traditional sentence patterns of truth, beauty, and goodness as wedges to limit their arrogance of universality, restoring narrative to its vivid or, that is, restoring the honor of naming the indescribable. It speaks of the paradoxical foundation of narrative. Although the three Frenchmen all left and secured spacious room for "the Other" in the floating discourse, or in other words, the mediativity of discourse both implies the premise of "the Other" and provides the domain of "the Other," "the Other" is ultimately established within discourse. The two Germans, Habermas and Luhmann, directly bring "the Other" onto the stage as the premise for communication through interaction and the designation through observation, with the sole purpose of establishing a consensus without subjects or an evolving contingent system. Analytical language philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition has, with the rise of language behaviorism and new pragmatism, opened the realm of metaphorical uncertainty to the certainty of expression.