Crude thinking rethought

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes notes 1 Plato, “Theaetetus” in Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989) 845–919 (860 (155d)). 2 Edward Said, “Millennial Reflections: Heroism and Humanism,” Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line 463 (6–12 Jan. 2000): 1–4, available . Cited in Jacques Lezra, “Unrelated Passions,” Differences 14.1 (2003): 74–87 (86). 3 One also thinks of the Foucauldian notion of those “founders of discursivity,” such as Marx and Freud, who author not only their own texts but enable new and potentially endless discursive possibilities. 4 Barbara Johnson, “An Interview with Barbara Johnson, Conducted by Michael Payne and Harold Schweizer” in The Wake of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) 76–103 (100f.). 5 See, for instance, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 88. 6 Christopher Norris, “What Are the Questions that Fascinate You? What Do You Want to Know? (A Roundabout Answer to Some Straightforward Questions),” SubStance 32.1 (2003): 44–49 (49 throughout). 7 Martin Heidegger, “Was heißt Denken?” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: Neske, 2000) 123–37 (124 throughout). 8 Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation” in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10:2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997) 794–99 (798f.). 9 Friedrich Hölderlin, “In lieblicher Bläue ...” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Michael Knaupp (Munich: Hanser, 1992) 908–09 (908). 10 Bertolt Brecht, Dreigroschenroman, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 16, Prosa I, eds. Werner Hecht et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990) 173. 11 Fredric Jameson, “Criticism and History” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 – Volume I: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 119–36 (119f. throughout). 12 It is necessary as well to consider additional repressed modes of knowledge encrypted in crude thinking, such as the terms of psychoanalysis. As Kalliopi Nikolopoulou reminds me: psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge has been the stage of much of this tension between practical (crude) and theoretical thinking (speculative, most notably in the Lacanian branch of it). At the same time, Freud, and even more Lacan, seem to locate the knowledge that comes out of analytic practice as a dialectical knowledge between the plumpes Denken (itself often somatic) of the analysand (though it itself can also be dialectizable) and the more refined knowledge of the analyst. Freud himself has often outlined the very nature, questions, and principles of psychoanalysis in a “crude” style. Phrases that come to mind are the definition of psychoanalysis as the project that tries to answer the question “what do women want,” or even particular empirical descriptions of his concepts such as “his majesty the baby” for primary narcissism. 13 In these etymological remarks, I follow the Deutsches Wörterbuch, eds. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 13 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1999) 1939ff. as well as Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, ed. Wolfgang Pfeifer (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1995) 1021. 14 See Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984). 15 This emphasis on the perpetual learning of plumpes Denken rather than its mere execution from a standpoint of mastery is also encoded in Brecht's preference for calling his dramatic works Lehrstücke or “teaching pieces.” 16 Walter Benjamin, “Brechts Dreigroschenroman” in Versuche über Brecht, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971) 54–63 (60). 17 Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: State U of New York P, 1995) 138. 18 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 73. 19 According to recollections by his son Hermann Heidegger, who notes that Heidegger repeatedly made this confession to him. Cited in Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997) 352. 20 Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, Musikalische Schriften I–III, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997) 249–642 (540

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