/lit/ - Literature

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-take-place-jordan-petersons-12-rules-life/

>In departing with the seemingly drastically different approaches of structuralism and phenomenology, Derrida and Foucault left behind a totalizing idealism shared by both schools of thought, which had left their adherents unable to explain the differentiated and uneven realities of both philosophy and history. It is not Derrida and Foucault who reproduce this totalizing idealism, but Peterson. Contrary to his self-professed reputation for straight talk and hard truths, Peterson’s conception of all the various phenomena of social life as expressions of a curiously interpreted intellectual episode happens to be consistent with the most speculative of philosophies: an idealism that claims ideas descend from heaven to earth.

>Drawing on his reading of western philosophy, Derrida showed that throughout its history there were varying yearnings of a “metaphysics of presence”: the notion that some pure, unadulterated truth exists independent of the derivative and distorted forms in which it is expressed. Beginning with Plato, this was dramatized in the opposition between speech and writing. In speech, said Plato, one was faced with the presence of the speaker and the possibility of directly accessing the truth of his utterance. But in writing the speaker was absent, and his words could be misinterpreted. This is all Derrida means by “logocentrism” — the presupposition that speech was primary to writing, that it was a representation of ideas that preceded its utterance. The logocentric way of thinking, long customary to the point of being a truism, is an evasion of the fact that philosophy, and therefore any quest for truth or knowledge, can only take place within the impure, in-between field of language.

>Derrida’s meditations on these questions are both more complex and more precise than some dormroom soliloquy punctuated by the bubbling of bong water. The question Peterson accuses him of answering with dangerous equivocation — whether there is such a thing as objective truth — is not one he poses. That question is so vaguely and poorly framed as to be irresolvable. The point is that we have no direct access to truth, that it cannot simply be made present. Instead, we have to pay attention to the various forms of secondariness, impurity, difference, and distortion which actually constitute our thought.

How will JBP ever recover?

If you want critiques of postmodernism rooted in material reality instead of "muh fee-fees" read the following:

The Condition of Postmodernity - David Harvey
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism - Fredric Jameson
The Illusions of Postmodernism - Terry Eagleton (accomplishes in ~90 pages what Scruton tried and miserably failed to accomplish in ~250 pages)
Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique - Alex Callinicos

If you'd like to learn about how hypocritical and fucking stupid Anglo-philistines are by virtue of the hilarious way in which they co-opt postmodern ideas without even realizing it, watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAPvgybAJQU