DEAD WHITE MALE: Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and critic widely credited with (or variously accused of) being the father of deconstruction and the textual method of literary analysis had his own subjective context permanently obliterated last week by pancreatic cancer. He was 74. The Times, of course, carried a tasteful and literate obituary that eschewed hyperbole and other forms of playful excess.
*ahem*
After his rise to prominence with American intellectuals in the late 1970s, tenured liberal ideologues employed Derrida’s considerable and immensely challenging body of work to devastating critical effect throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s -- primarily as a tool for driving would-be graduate students out of the academy and into marketing or other useful professions. More traditionally oriented academics, social conservatives and other witting and unwitting tools of the phallocentric Christian/capitalist patriarchy frequently adopted reactionary, hostile approaches to Derrida’s scholarship and to deconstruction generally. Such detractors offered objections in the name of intellectual principle, moral certainty and/or individual mental and general social health, but were -- from the perspective of transcendence -- merely uttering wails of childish confusion or (ironically) hysterical patriarchal indignation at the discovery that the unspoken premises of their formerly presumed privilege or hegemony had been put effectively into discursive play.
Or so I was told at the time.
Given what is often at stake, it is hard to blame serious people for responding to deconstructive critique as if it were contradiction or condemnation, and it is certainly not hard to see why those who refuse to engage Derrida on his preferred level of abstraction find him aggravating.
But what is deconstruction? Derrida didn't like to say, probably because he thought tight scholastic definitions generally over/under-determined intellectual practices (indeed, all phenomena) and thereby encouraged tendentious or sophomorically over-earnest fracturing of potentially resonant logospheres. Putting such objections firmly to one side, a useful but (necessarily) limited practical instruction in -- or indoctrination into -- the practice/trap of deconstructive criticism can be found here, at the website of Southern Oregon University. You will find that the technique they have outlined is very useful for frustrating interlocutors and isolating yourself at cocktail parties.
Some might find even the SOU materials a bit too dense for their discursive presets. They might consider renting the recent Derrida biopic instead. By some lights it was quite good. Others might insist that the SOU instructions (and this entire post) offend their intellectual honesty and are altogether too rough and compromised to pass as even impoverished representations of Derrida or the deconstructionist method. Scholars of such discipline and maturity will find a more satisfying discussion behind this link. The essay there is an emphatic but nuanced discourse with an arcane but penetrating relation to Derrida scholarship. It rewards repeated reading.
But maybe we should not measure Derrida by the tone or character of the derivative phenomena discussed briefly and inadequately as text in the text and hypertext above, but by the impact of his subjectivity on those who have been directly or derivatively subjected to him. How many parents have bitterly complained that their children earned B.A.s in Political Science without learning a thing about politics, only to find their personhood vitiated with respect to debate of Derrida-as-dyad by the fact that they did not themselves have tenure, owe any further tuition to their kids’ colleges or otherwise “count” in the calculus of higher education? How many liberal arts graduates have found themselves reflecting on the hermeneutic, metaphysical and ontological implications of whether their customers want fries with that as text, only to conclude that Derrida -- in subjective context -- is a ruefully unsatisfying phenomenon? Where would these, or indeed, all other victims of context and un-transcended subjectivity be without Derrida?
Leaving that question to your subjective determination, I’ll close with a quote from Derrida’s Archeology Of The Frivolous: Reading Condillac:
“[S]ince ‘good’ metaphysics is the science of origins and true beginnings, we might feel that ‘good’ metaphysics should also be presented as first philosophy. But that is not at all the case! The science of beginnings -- the metaphysics of the simple, of combination and generation -- the new philosophy, will be irreducibly second. Such is its condition.”
I’ve always liked that one, even if -- in context -- he is arguably speaking for Condillac rather than for himself.
Rest in peace, Professor.
No comments:
Post a Comment