Jacques Derrida

when ppl say "[x] date is when everything changed" he is saying "no, lots of things stayed the same"

I can't. What I've heard of his seminal stuff sounds wonderful, but that statement, though true, is also not very unusual; I'm sure Brbara Ellen has said much the same; and in any case the same goes for September 3 1939, May 6[?] 1979, or what have you. 'Everything changed' is journalistic shorthand, yes; there's no necessary fit beteween metaphor and 'reality', yes. I'll back back up on this bitch when I've read 'On Grammatology'. Laterz -- enjoy the nowties!

(ps i am totally allergic to heidegger, so ignore this post if yr milage varies)

Oh dear :-( Thomas McCarthy in his attack on Derrida makes a similar claim -- i.e. that all this talk about difference simply leads to a politics of cultural differences, and the rise of political particularisms. As anyone whose read Derrida's comments on nationalism knows, this is not the case. Because all identities are only in / through a wider process of differentiation, the opposition between identity / difference falls apart, and certainly can't be mapped onto equality / difference. I think Derrida does follow Hegel in the sense that the institutionalisation of certain forms of equality via the state is seen as necessary, even if it such equality will never be equal enough -- i.e if we ever managed to treat everyone equally as citizens, this would still only ever be formal / abstract equality (in Hegelian / Marxist terminology) or a failure to address each citizen as equally different (in more Levinasian / Derridean terms).

(also there's the ice-t link)

Yeah, I shd do this, but I'm trying to write about 30s stuff now. So maybe he could help if... Is there any derrida which wd help me understand sartre? But probably I need background in phenomenology etc? I'm coming from history/politix angle (this para contains huge elision)

I think this might be more Deleuzean (although I am no expert on GD): JD is all about the philosophy, GD seems to me much happier to get on with the sensing / eating / desiring etc. (thus too vitalist for me.) So for JD it might be 'treat things as texts if you good at thinking about reading' 'like fruit if you are good at thinking about fruit.' To the extent that this implies that something like deconstruction might be going on in the natural sciences, in fact anywhere that people are having to think about the categories they use to understand and order the world, I like it. I guess the problem would be that the natural sciences (from a Derrida perspective) don't treat the rest of the world like friut -- they simply assume a great deal about the nature of science, the relationship between science and reality etc., the teleological progression of knowledge -- rather than submitting these things to the kind of demystification process that takes place when you say 'this is no longer what it appears to be, an apple, but is in fact all sorts of things at once, and not as distinct from - say - a pear, when you get down to certain basic levels of analysis. So the distinction between an apple and a pear is not natural but relative to a context, and therefore subject to revision. The fact that plants or animals do occasionally get reclassified suggests that something like this process can be at work.

Not as yet, but thanx for the recommendation: what I'm assembling is about the Popular Front/Spanish War as seen through arch-quietist Henry Miller. JPS is kind of side-matter here; I suppose I'm trying to rewrite those debates through later eyes, but the thing I'm on is basically 'Barton Fink' meets 'Rogue Male', so... !. One day I will get round to JD; but I don't think I'll ever specialize.

being and time is sorta simultaneously w.la nausee? (from memory only, i might be v.wrong abt that)

Ooh that looks wicked. Probably there is no short cut and all that but fuck it, I'm using it as a short cut. when i get paid. and i finish this otter stuff.

nauesee=193? (to use bowie term, or '1938' really.

Slightly mixed feelings.

1. Relatively readable, I suppose, compared to JD on some other things.

2. The intellectual history traced in eg. 'Two Words for Joyce' does have an importance - and I am not averse to the 'personal' aspect of this stuff (ie. 'I first read JJ back in 1958', etc.)

3. He has supplied one or two new metaphors for people to work with - notably computers, telephones, postal systems.

4. But just to say that is to be too generous. Given the length of his major essay on JJ, ths lack of insight and illumination it offers (compared to eg. any much less well-advertised and less often read decent critic of the writing) is almost record-breaking.

my own take on critical theory generally speaking is that it's performative: that its central interest is not as criticism but as literature, and that as criticism is success relies on how well it works as literature. This is why I prefer Paul De Man to Blanchot, even: he's a hoot to read. Of the major post-structuralists, I think Derrida is (oddly) the one most closely alllied to 'proper' philosophy: I say "oddly" because he's almost exclusively interested in literature & in bringing literary tropes to bear on his investiagations. Since I consider all critical theory just a different kind of fiction, and am a sucker for narratives, Blanchot's and De Man's narrative-heavy strategies work best on me.

But I have not read Derrida in several years. I agree that we should have a "reading Of Grammatology" thread.

(i wd not even know if he wz good or bad or useful or timewasting eg on mallarmé)

But I'm fairly certain this would not REPAY the debt, so this book exists as a title only

(haha "debt" is JD's MUCH SUPERIOR alternative - ie clear and meaningful and useable - for the pesky i-word)

I would say that De Man is as good and better than most normal-style critics - his "arche de-bunker" schtick is simply magnificent

I have a feeling we have been down this dirt road before

PS / yes it is true that JD on lit is generally less incisive than at least early JD on eg Rousseau or Levinas -- though this is complicated irritatingly by the inclusion of his drama-king Rousseau essay on Acts of... Literature.

Because i learnt a lot from Derrida which is not stuff exclusive to his work, but common to a whole intellectual tradition / milieu (bit of both) I would probably attribute more of how I know think to his impact on me than any other thinker. But that's not necessarily to do with being Derrida, just someone I studied at a particular time, if you see what I mean.

Derrida is certainly nearer to philosophy than Foucault or Lyotard say, I'm not sure about Deleuze. The entire gamble of Derrida's work is (described one way) concerned with being super-philosophical but also being against or anti or just plain different from philosophy at the same time, and showing that it is strictly impossible to decide which. I'm not sure how fair it is to describe Derrida's work as mostly concerned with applying literary techniques to philosophy, because there is a philosophical trajectory underneath his work, which his interest in the concept of literature is put to work on. Certainly he has never claimed to be a literary critic in the sense Blanchot or de Man are (and I have yet to see even a cursory account of the influence of the latter on the former, although there are clear verbal echoes in at least one place), so I don't find it surprising that people don't find him particularly helpful in reading literature. What I find slightly interesting is why people think they should find him useful for this.

(this seems a bit unlikely - it requires wilder to understand lubitsch to understand that a. L's work should only be valued in money terms, and b. that the content of L's work at every level is an argument that all such work should only be valued in money terms)

also this is a debt which can never to arbitrated by a third party (which rules out the entire purpose of the cash nexus heh)

his daughter is still alive though

(this is bcz they are too caught up dealing - or not dealing - with the nature of their OWN debt to both prior parties)

Potlatch=like todal free-for-all? Probably involving jouissance, and lashings of derives?

Someone said upthread that philosophy = Oh Really? & So What?

Two more options:

Let's Try and Make This Simpler vs (or, and) Let's Try and Make This More Complicated.

Both impulses are comprehensible and exist in a dialectic, perhaps.

JD cannot on the whole be accused of the former. He may possibly be enlisted to the latter.

The question could then be: does he Complicate things in a useful / helpful / interesting / moving / nice / pretty / enlightening / funny [etc] way? Or does he complicate things unhelpfully and leave us not much better off at the end in any of those ways and more? Or: do the gains his complications give us outweigh the losses? Or: are they worth the effort? (Analogy with Proust here.) (Many different questions, perhaps, not all to be mixed up.)

Over years I came to feel that his brand of complicating was not doing enough of the good stuff, and was doing too much boring and unhelpful nothing-much stuff.

Mark S quotes me upthread - and it is nice of him to remember what I said. And his words suggest to me what I have sometimes thought: that maybe people (like eg. us) like or dislike (or a mix) eg. JD the way we like and dislike eg. Kafka, Beckett, or Defoe and Dickens for that matter.

I think I have taken this A-road before.

Sadly this thread has lost me in just the way Kogan has complained about a few times - I think I have the first idea about some of what Derrida has been on about, but if we are to just talk about this stuff in terms of how it relates to Mallarme and how Deleuzian it might be, I very quickly get lost. This isn't particularly a complaint, since unsurprisingly the discourse between Alex, Mark and The Pinefox is zipping around rather above my head, and asking them to take little baby steps everywhere so I can keep up would be completely unreasonable. I'm more meaning to apologise for backing away and looking for someone posting kitten pics...

False! The third party creates the debt and pays it as he/she sees fit, unless I misread Barthes! Crit theory exclamation point party hurrah!

the third party doesn't create the debt: the third party may not even be aware of the debt - not all readers end up being writers, their handling of the debt may only ever manifest in a world w/o possibility of audience (like, i dunno, someone who becomes a doctor after reading pushkin) (or chekhov, i forget which one was the doctor)

(actually for the purposes of the thought experiment it doesn't matter)

enrique the idea of debts which no amount of money can repay or address are commonplace, so THAT line won't fly

All readers are writers!

The festival of exclamation points continues!

i.e. in what way is it "real" to privilage "text" as everything, or is it just a historic "accident" of "text" (in the more traditional sense) being a place where thinking about it FIRST meant thinking about mediation? i.e. how do we distinguish "everything is textual" from "everything is everything" and what implications does that carry with it?

also how is consuming an apple like consuming a book or a sentence?

doesn't the redefinition of text simply recognise a colonial reality? that (eg) a visual examination of a painting can be converted into writing or speech, but not vice versa?

i actually really dislike that redefinition of text, bcz i think it's misleading (plus i get sick of the word being used instead of like "book' or 'article' or 'poem' when the general-technical meaning is not actually required by the context)