A TRIAL OF PHILOSOPHY
JOEL C. BEAUPRÉ
Dissertation under the direction of Professor David C. Wood
This trial of philosophy is of whether suffering, through a reading of Job, can arraign philosophy. I examine the form or law of thinking a specific loss of experience: that useless suffering cannot appear. Job is un-mournable his suffering can only attain meaningfulness in terms supplied by the purportedly divine mechanism of retributive justice. Jobs lawsuit attempts to meaningfully bind his innocence, affliction, and the divinitys violence together. Like Jobs lawsuit, I carry an exploration of sufferings recalcitrance to formation into a destructive reading of both a repression of the text and philosophys attempt at responsiveness to the articulateness of material. Although acknowledged as constitutive of philosophical reflection, Erfahrung is subject to an aspiration to a perfect system, requiring careful parsing of differences between philosophies that attempt to defer reconciliation and resolution.
Job is not experienced by way of an illusion of an immediacy of Jobs meaning consistent with types of eschatological horizon. Like Jobs challenge to law (a violent administration of the world and axiomatic presuppositions as to the meaning of suffering), I attempt to challenge lawful resolutions of indeterminacy in interpretation. In an attempt to allow the sensuousness of Job to signify in its own right, I read against synthetic efforts to heal fissures in the text. In dialectical tension with the desire for univocality, I read Job as irredeemably torn, for preserving elements in their differences is generative of plural readings. Like the allusions in the text to a weave coming undone, Job mimes the modernist artworks resistance to form. By allowing the non-systematic to suffuse the practice of criticism, criticism becomes utterly useless for the perpetuation of the fear and hope of endoxa (an attempt to foreclose significances). I employ textual juxtapositions (e.g., Job and Kafka, for both K and Job are subject to the absence of written law) to mime the contemporary spirit of montage as the gathering of things ejected by the insistence that everything be properly placed. Jobs cry wanders homelessly through nested displacements, requiring a wandering reminiscent of Benjamin.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-12032010-142226 |
| Date | 13 December 2010 |
| Creators | Beaupre, Joel C |
| Contributors | David C. Wood |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-12032010-142226/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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