things to remember

– Communication and Media Studies – amorphous and interdisciplinary – my background
– Derrida, Ponge, Bazin, Barthes, Blanchot, Kracaeur on the thing (the other). Serres combines a concern with the complexities of mediation with a concern with the real. All of this as a means of pointing to undercurrents within strains of 20th century french thought that are not totally bound to the thinking of anthropocentric correlationism (Mellissaux – spelling?). An attempt then to respond to Harman oversimplification of the earlier tradition – his tendency to misread the catch-cry ‘there is nothing outside the text’ as insistence upon the human space of language and a complete bracketing of anything else. So the first object is historical – making it clear that a realist committment (in the ethical sense) is not something totally new or totally alien to even the post-structural tradition. Serres provides a particularly good example of a theorist who draws realist and epistemological concerns together.
– related to the latter, draw up the main features of the ancient Greek god, Hermes, as a means of explicating the paradoxes of mediation. I have not read Serres’ work in this area…