acts of violence performed on a dead frenchman
i'm considering undertaking some kind of ongoing criticism of big postmodern thinkers. i think there might be reason to hold them absolutely ( i just said that to piss them off) responsible for the state of the left today. from an article on derrida:
<<"I don’t understand him, he must be stupid!" It came from the back of the seminar room, from a graduate student whose self-deprecating joke summarized a world of responses to Jacques Derrida. I had assigned Derrida’s Of Grammatology, a book about the impossibility of fixed meaning in writing, to my graduate seminar on the historiography of communication.
As many obits have now pointed out, Jacques Derrida was an immensely important and influential figure in the world of left academe. Perhaps fittingly for a figure who argued for the impossibility of fixed meaning and intention, his work has been mischaracterized, wrongly interpreted, unfairly dismissed, and subject to at least one unauthorized translation. As a successful French import, Derrida also has the mixed fortune of a wave of fairly uninventive disciples: as deconstruction descends into orthodoxy, it becomes a parody of itself. Derrida is a conflicted character in comparison with his peers: he is much less clear on his political record than a contemporary like Pierre Bourdieu, his philosophical legacy is more uncertain than those of Gilles Deleuze or Michel Foucault, and to even explain the exact nature of his influence on a subsequent generation is tricky. Yet the verb "deconstruct" has come into common parlance in some circles, and Derrida’s celebration of "difference" has been distilled into a battle cry for everything from major challenges to Western philosophy to bland corporate-style multiculturalism. He was successful in ways that his contemporaries were not.
Deconstruction, the name for Derrida’s elusive method, has an elective affinity with some schools of thought in Marxist, feminist, antiracist, queer and postcolonial circles. Yet deconstruction is not responsible for these positions as they are represented in academia. They are all, to the one, intellectual responses to social movements that began outside universities. Derrida’s deconstruction, meanwhile is very much an academic invention.>>
i have the distinct advantage of not being subject to the consistent criticism leveled against those who decry derrida...i haven't read him. but you don't travel the thoughts i've been traveling for the last several years without getting some sense for what the basic project of deconstruction is. i can't be accused of misreading him or of misunderstanding him, and i like it that way. i think, perhaps, i may not read him as an act in itself. dogmatic, just to piss him off. to one-up him. you can't get anymore inner-circle than that. at this point, if i had to hear about how i had misinterpreted derrida or misread him, i might have to chew off whoever's head housed the mouth that said it.
the world is a text and fixed meaning within a text is impossible. have i oversimplified it? GOOD. this is my violence. and maybe this violence is the first step for a good leftist. maybe it's the beginning of something. or, better, the end to a paralyzing trend of thinking. in the quantum world, matter isn't fixed either. but i don't fall through floors for a reason. luckily, it doesn't matter what i think about physics--i can't make myself fall through it--quantum mechanics has no relevance to my reality, where the apple i place on a table stays there. unfortunately, in leftist "progressive" politics, more than half of the army has fallen through the floor, by virtue of collective choice. ok, choice isn't fair. it's just like religion--rather than choice, i'll say it's bedazzlement and wonder for the intelligenstia. no wonder they treated him like a saint when he died. he was a saint--and every bit as worthy of decanonizing as anyone sainted by the catholic church.
<<"I don’t understand him, he must be stupid!" It came from the back of the seminar room, from a graduate student whose self-deprecating joke summarized a world of responses to Jacques Derrida. I had assigned Derrida’s Of Grammatology, a book about the impossibility of fixed meaning in writing, to my graduate seminar on the historiography of communication.
As many obits have now pointed out, Jacques Derrida was an immensely important and influential figure in the world of left academe. Perhaps fittingly for a figure who argued for the impossibility of fixed meaning and intention, his work has been mischaracterized, wrongly interpreted, unfairly dismissed, and subject to at least one unauthorized translation. As a successful French import, Derrida also has the mixed fortune of a wave of fairly uninventive disciples: as deconstruction descends into orthodoxy, it becomes a parody of itself. Derrida is a conflicted character in comparison with his peers: he is much less clear on his political record than a contemporary like Pierre Bourdieu, his philosophical legacy is more uncertain than those of Gilles Deleuze or Michel Foucault, and to even explain the exact nature of his influence on a subsequent generation is tricky. Yet the verb "deconstruct" has come into common parlance in some circles, and Derrida’s celebration of "difference" has been distilled into a battle cry for everything from major challenges to Western philosophy to bland corporate-style multiculturalism. He was successful in ways that his contemporaries were not.
Deconstruction, the name for Derrida’s elusive method, has an elective affinity with some schools of thought in Marxist, feminist, antiracist, queer and postcolonial circles. Yet deconstruction is not responsible for these positions as they are represented in academia. They are all, to the one, intellectual responses to social movements that began outside universities. Derrida’s deconstruction, meanwhile is very much an academic invention.>>
i have the distinct advantage of not being subject to the consistent criticism leveled against those who decry derrida...i haven't read him. but you don't travel the thoughts i've been traveling for the last several years without getting some sense for what the basic project of deconstruction is. i can't be accused of misreading him or of misunderstanding him, and i like it that way. i think, perhaps, i may not read him as an act in itself. dogmatic, just to piss him off. to one-up him. you can't get anymore inner-circle than that. at this point, if i had to hear about how i had misinterpreted derrida or misread him, i might have to chew off whoever's head housed the mouth that said it.
the world is a text and fixed meaning within a text is impossible. have i oversimplified it? GOOD. this is my violence. and maybe this violence is the first step for a good leftist. maybe it's the beginning of something. or, better, the end to a paralyzing trend of thinking. in the quantum world, matter isn't fixed either. but i don't fall through floors for a reason. luckily, it doesn't matter what i think about physics--i can't make myself fall through it--quantum mechanics has no relevance to my reality, where the apple i place on a table stays there. unfortunately, in leftist "progressive" politics, more than half of the army has fallen through the floor, by virtue of collective choice. ok, choice isn't fair. it's just like religion--rather than choice, i'll say it's bedazzlement and wonder for the intelligenstia. no wonder they treated him like a saint when he died. he was a saint--and every bit as worthy of decanonizing as anyone sainted by the catholic church.