Dislodging

We have a record of the discussion of the second session at the 1970 colloquium at Cluny on "literature and ideology" [Littérature et idéologies. Colloque de Cluny II. 2, 3, 4 avril 1970. La nouvelle critique. spécial 39 bis]. These discussions are as interesting as the presented papers and sometimes quite revealing as to the intellectual roots of some critical concepts.

Julia Kristeva quotes the first of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach to introduce a notion of text as activity or practice.

Le défaut de tout matérialisme passé (celui de Feuerbach compris) c'est que l'objet, la réalité, la matérialité ne sont pris que sous la forme de l'objet ou de l'intuition, mais non comme activité sensible humaine comme pratique. C'est pourquoi le côté actif est développé de façon abstraite en opposition au matérialisme, par l'idéalisme — qui naturellement ne connait pas l'activité réelle, sensible, comme telle. Feuerbach veut des objets sensibles — réellement distincts des objets idéaux — mais il ne saisit pas l'activité humaine elle-même comme activité objective. Il considère donc, dans l'essence du christianisme, le rapport théorique comme étant le seul vraiment humain, tandis que la pratique n'est saisie et fixée que sous sa vulgaire et judaïque forme phénomenale. Ainsi ne comprend-il pas la signification de l'activité révolutionnaire, critico-pratique.

After citing this, Kristeva invites us to consider these remarks in the context of signifying practices:

Transposons cette réflection sur le terrain de la pratique signifiante — nous trouverons le texte

Marx's Theses on Feuerbach seeks to establish due regard to practice.

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.

Practice occurs in a zone of strife. That zone is within and beyond the reading subject. See "Textuality" entry by Manina Jones in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms (1993).

[...] subversion of the principle that any text can function as an object whose meaning is coherent and self-contained. [...] Textuality in this context describes the tendency of language to produce not a simple reference to the world "outside" language but a multiplicity of potentially contradictory signifying effects that are activated in the reading process.

Kristeva's "transposons" makes it sound so easy. And it is if one remembers the collective notion of "let us transpose".

And so for day 1214
10.04.2010