Why the fuck are there leftists out there who recommend this bloated CIA adjacent fuck?

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3 points

No worries I got yeah, I learned this from a lecture given by one of his students

Also I was mistaken he didn’t know Heidegger, Derrida wrote a book with a former Hilter Youth member who did know Heidegger, my mistake

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11 points

This still seems a bit confused. There’s many bad things you can say about Jürgen Habermas – he really is a liberal philosopher who has worked to defang the critical potential of the Frankfurt School – but he is not a Heideggerian (and yes, he was a member of the Hitler Youth until the war ended when he was about 15). In fact, he is about the strongest enemy of French theory (and Heidegger) there is in contemporary German philosophy. There would be more to say about the relation of Derrida and Habermas, but the fact that they were interviewed for the same book is not a very strong connection between them.

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3 points
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At the end of the 1990s, Habermas approached Derrida at a party held at an American university where both were lecturing. They then met at Paris over dinner, and participated afterwards in many joint projects. In 2000 they held a joint seminar on problems of philosophy, right, ethics, and politics at the University of Frankfurt. In December 2000, in Paris, Habermas gave a lecture entitled “How to answer the ethical question?” at the Judeities. Questions for Jacques Derrida conference organized by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly. Following the lecture by Habermas, both thinkers engaged in a very heated debate on Heidegger and the possibility of Ethics. The conference volume was published at the Editions Galilée (Paris) in 2002, and subsequently in English at Fordham University Press (2007).

Come on the connection is pretty strong

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Let me also quote Wikipedia:

Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in a series of disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual understanding and friendship in the late 1990s that lasted until Derrida’s death in 2004. They originally came in contact when Habermas invited Derrida to speak at The University of Frankfurt in 1984. The next year Habermas published “Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity in which he described Derrida’s method as being unable to provide a foundation for social critique. Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, “those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric … have visibly and carefully avoided reading me”. After Derrida’s final rebuttal in 1989 the two philosophers did not continue, but, as Derrida described it, groups in the academy “conducted a kind of ‘war’, in which we ourselves never took part, either personally or directly”.

Really, for philosophy this is not much of a connection.

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9 points
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“Former Hitler Youth member” isn’t really as damning as you seem to think. Being indoctrinated as a child does not mean that you’ll necessarily be a bad person as an adult (Peter Daou would be an example we all know). I don’t know anything about this person but the fact that you call him “a former Hitler Youth member” as opposed to “a Nazi” suggests that the former is the most severe criticism you have of him, and then your criticism of Derrida is just, he knew someone who was indoctrinated as a child? Oh no, dear me! I was raised to believe all sorts of BS so I guess I should cancel anyone who’s ever met me.

This really seems like you realized you were wrong and now you’re grasping at straws to support the original conclusion. Just take the L.

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1 point

True, personally I find Habermas celebration of Hannah Arendt far more damning, but I’ll let Derrida off the hook, with his general ignorance about politics he probably didn’t know what her deal was

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10 points

I guess “Knew someone who liked someone who was bad” just doesn’t have quite the same punch as “rehabilitated unrepentant Nazis.” Like tbh in your shoes I’d just delete the post.

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