Peter Erb on Augustine

So I've been sitting in on Peter Erb's last class at WLU. He's teaching Augustine's Confessions, but he's still creating the theoretical background for a postmodern interpretation of Augustine (with Erb this means treating Augustian as a rhetoritian, not as a philosopher). The class with change radically when we finally crack the text. Over the last two classes he extended an argument about western culture, claiming that our political and legal forms, along with the core or our normative values, our civil society, are all secularized forms of Christendom. He was using Schmitt's Political Theology and Karl Lowith's Meaning in History to support this view. He was calling the west "a disobedient Christian step-child". Then he moved on to sketch the rize of postmodernity in the academy, which is important for his interpretation of Augustine, as he claims pomo has given the victory to rhetoric/sophists over the philosophers (sounds like Milbank here). Today he continued to set up postmodernism through a narrative about authorial intention and the search for the author. He claimed that modernist forms, especially in Biblical studies, were obsessed with authorship. Then came Karl Barth, the New Critics, Eliot, all of who stressed textual tradition and made way for structuralist insights. According to Erb, the key players in structuralism were not Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, but rather Chomsky on Language and Frye on cultural code. He said Chomsky and Frye hit North America by storm in 1957, and the interest in the French followed after. Then Erb moved to poststructuralism (just to get Judith Butler's back up I suppose) and he began to explain Derrida's negation of Heidegger, which we all understood to be Derrida's continuation of Heideggerian questions with more radical results. Needless to say, most of the lecture on Derrida was about Heidegger. We were looking at Heidegger's concept of a "house of language", he comment that dasein lives on earth, but in the world. Erb claimed the difference between the earth and the world is that the earth sustains us physically, while the world is our cultural imaginary. It is in the world that Angels live, but only if we dwell poetically. He commented on Heidegger's critique of instrumental reason and technology, and his late pronouncement about dwelling poetically as a type of figurative play. I think he was going to extend this to Derrida next class. Anyway, I thought I would post his lectures on z share, and compile a list of links on my blog sidebar (Martini anyone?).
Jan 24 07
Erb sets up Pomo 1
Erb sets up Pomo 2
Jan 31 07
Erb on the Rise of Structuralism
Erb on Heidegger and Derrida