Jacques Derrida

A few more beatings administered with Wittgenstein's slabs here: Po-mo vs Futurism vs Modernism

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

Has Derrida written on film or literature?

Sometimes the pomo tendency to dwell upon the impossibility of meaning feels to me like an inverted objectivism -- building a "philosophy" around a bad natural tendency (nihilism, selfishness) rather than around aspirational aims. Then again, maybe I'm not typical in being naturally nihilistic, a lot of people don't seem to be.

I read a speech by Derrida wherin he explained that a lot of what 'deconstruction' did was in response to 68 and in general to French society at the time. I'm not sure I'd call it 'nihilistic' or 'selfish', they were writing in a society with a whole lot of ingrained, unquestioned truths and meanings.

to be clear I was associating nihilism with postmodernism and selfishness with Ayn Rand's "objectivism" but that seems fair.

D after not so much the "impossibility of meaning" but its inexhaustibility. been said before, but deconstruction is often (willfully) misconstrued as a critical technique of demystification. it's not something a critic does to a text, its something a text does (maybe even something a text does to a critic)--and at best a critic can trace its movements.

“I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others”

I went and read the longer paragraph. It seems to me you could just as well say in general that "I cannot do anything, without sacrificing the other others, the other others." On an absolutist idea of moral responsibility, nothing I do is going to answer more than a tiny number of the hypothetical calls that can be made on me. The fact I can't respond to any particular moral call, without sacrificing all the other calls, sounds less paradoxical and more just tragic if you regard it as one way of filling in the more general claim. I could fill it in with any kind of non-moral actions as well, which makes it seem less like an aporia for the concept of moral responsibility (the only way to respond to a moral responsibility is to sacrifice ethics), rather merely a fact about how infinitely short we invariably fall.

merely a fact about how infinitely short we invariably fall.

yeah, i agree, but this is a major theme of deconstruction. all discourses are approximate; the thing itself always escapes, etc

but the tragedy of our failure to achieve pull presence also has a positive dimension, because full presence would be stasis, death. the "opening" of... derrida often says language but martin hagglund has argued that you can just as easily say "time," so like, lived experience/existence... is the only thing that makes it possible/legible

you're reading The Gift of Death, right? that was my intro to Derrida and still probably my favorite by him. definitely in his tragic mode there--though maybe he always is.

close second, after the early foundational texts, is probably The Animal That Therefore I Am. contains a bonus and quite decisive critique of Lacan as well.

I feel like I've read a lot of Derrida but I still need to make my way through about a dozen of his books I have laying around. My only complaint is the creep of a "program," a performative contradiction, into the great amount of writing he produced--though I'm sure he'd be the first to admit his own work can only reflexively struggle against what it's so often about.

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Tuesday, January 13, 2015 9:40 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea, i got sucked into derrida big time in college and it was a shame because in retrospect i remember significantly more from the critical feminist theory and critical race theory stuff i read, and all that has had much more of an impact on how i think about the world than anything derrida wrote ever did.

gloria anzaldua, cherrie moraga, linda martin alcoff, and charles mills are all more worth the time than derrida, at least for me

good for you

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Tuesday, 13 January 2015 14:40 (1 hour ago)

sad that you are still hurting

lol.

i guess here's where i say i like deleuze more. is there good derrida to read abt ontology

i he's sort of opposed to ontology on principle.

i think, etc.

i always got the impression you had to be a big lit head with a minor in etymology to do derrida, that's my blockage. does he have anything to say about univocity / the nature of being? i guess if there's a nietzschean streak in derrida somewhere i would go there.

you'd probably want to read his stuff on Heidegger. Aporias, maybe. or: http://english.columbia.edu/files/english/content/geschlecht2.pdf

but i think you may be disappointed? if i know D at all he'd be concerned to show how univocity or the nature of being are themselves founded on deconstructable oppositions (no univocity without equivocity, etc). he doesn't go in for big master concepts like that.

To me Derrida is no more than just an overrated jerk who writes melodically dead emotionally dry books.

― Gombeen Dance Band (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 13 January 2015 12:50 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

deconstruction is often (willfully) misconstrued as a critical technique of demystification.

― ryan, Tuesday, 13 January 2015 15:11 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's some worthy intent in people who claim derrida etc is 'not that difficult' and can be taught to the average liberal arts undergraduate, it's just that it gets sold as a sort of readily deployable praxis for demystifying social relations and then they get all of these wounded solipsist responses when it fails on those terms

even if they do have the aptitude and talent for it they probably don't have the grounding in western philosophy that would be typical in france and absent that a lot of derrida becomes a bit kitsch

it's just that it gets sold as a sort of readily deployable praxis for demystifying social relations

yes this is a nice way of putting it.

that's not to say that Derrida can't be used that way, but if so you're sort of only engaging with half of his project.

✓

regarding "emotionally dry" there's a moment in Deconstruction and Pragmatism where Richard Rorty calls Derrida "sentimental" and that he "believes in happiness." or something like that. anyway in Derrida's contribution later on there's a remarkable moment where he (sort of) cops to it.

it's sort of a touching moment brought about by Rorty's own, sometimes forced, plainspokenness.

the "emotionally dry" bit is from a running "artists who are overrated" joke, initially about the Rolling Stones.

i find JD almost always a warm, human writer. i do feel that to abstract his "ideas" from his work is precisely a subtraction

i think that's certainly true. i think one of the best ways to "use" Derrida, or at least how I try to use him, is less to read him as producing a body of work than as something like an essayist in the vein of Emerson or Montaigne. So im more likely to seek out an essay or book by him because im interested in, say, Friendship or Death or whatever, than i want to produce a definitive account of "Derrida."

the first part of that which i never c&ped does sound a lot like the acutely enervated hatred that people who have given up on derrida etc tend to express

Album after album I sat through, with reactions that would range from actually enjoying a song or two to straining to keep my eyes open to looking up and praying for God to take me now. But I still don't see what everyone else does in The Rolling Stones.

i was going to say something smartarse about people who respond to an artist's reputation as a personal attack but then i remembered i started the "tell the Beatles to fuck off" thread so i'll shut up

That was funny though... and justifiable.

i think that's certainly true. i think one of the best ways to "use" Derrida, or at least how I try to use him, is less to read him as producing a body of work than as something like an essayist in the vein of Emerson or Montaigne. So im more likely to seek out an essay or book by him because im interested in, say, Friendship or Death or whatever, than i want to produce a definitive account of "Derrida."

― ryan, Tuesday, January 13, 2015 10:07 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, this is the impression i have and what i remember from the little i've read.

I reviewed @petesalmon's new Derrida biography for @tribunemagazine: "[Salmon] places Derrida within a sort of theatre of reason, as a player concerned as much with dismantling the scenery and stage machinery as with delivering lines of his own." https://t.co/sD5BuY4fdJ

— a gnarled woodland spirit (@dynamic_proxy) December 12, 2020

i was thinking about getting that book. half because i liked the cover.

Quite good stuff on theory (both the thread and in some of the replies) as it's functioning in social media via conversations and thinking stuff out together, and why that might be a good thing than a having a 'rockstar' theorist to get guidance/rely on in the public sphere.

I have various thoughts about this but one that I think is important is that social media absolutely produces a higher level of collective intellectualism on the left (whatever we think the left is) & that might be preferable to a few high profile intellectual stars. https://t.co/lkiEkJiZBl

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) April 29, 2023

Tom Gann 100% is a rockstar theorist to get guidance on/rely on tho? Obv his reach is lesser than that of someone using traditional media in the 20th century, but feels to me like to buy into what he's saying in this thread you kinda have to ignore that follower counts exist?

and likewise ofc traditional public intellectuals would also claim to have developed their thoughts in conversation with other thinkers as Gann would with mutuals - the contribution of tweets by randoms to this, is it more substantial than that of randoms in the q&a section of a lecture?

There is nothing like the reach of Graeber or Fisher to this, never mind someone like Derrida. These people (not just Gann but a few others with followers of a few thousand) have not written books (I think Gann was going to co-write something on Corbyn and the project around but 2019 was a massive defeat and the thing was let go). Nothing has been written about them. They are not name dropped.

It just doesn't function in the same way.

It's still a hierarchical system of looking towards thought leaders tho, just in a smaller room. Like come on how often do Gann tweets get posted on here? How is that not what he's talking about?

if anything you can say that it's a move from the old rockstar model to microniches of ppl who are rockstars to smaller groups, which is p much what's happening in all of culture and on the right as much as the left

I've seen him be challenged quite a bit by serious posters. I don't feel he is dropping things and people are nodding away. It feels like a shift in dynamic.

And in that sense it's quite community like. Inevitably some posters have more followers but actually what I see is a lot of posters with few followers making strong points.

Crucially there are no careers being made, not many books are being produced. Maybe the odd talk.

It all feels very fragile too, what with the disintegration of twitter.

rockstar academics of the 20th century were also challenged by their peers, all the time, I mean that's what their entire shtick revolved around

for there truly to be an end to the rockstar dynamic we would have to be in a situation where Gann getting challenged on something by some random person would hold the same weight (and attract the same eyeballs) as him getting challenged by one of his serious poster mutuals - this is impossible within social media, even if Gann were to act identically in both situations, because the algorithm is designed against it.

at any rate the smaller this becomes, the lower the follower counts, the more it will resemble discussion groups of the kind we had throughout the 20th century

NS does have a patreon I contribute to, which is not "a career" I agree but also not more than many other microniche celebs have

You are focusing way to much on Gann. Sure he has put it all together (in response to Bastani) but still the more I think about it the more it feels right.

"rockstar academics of the 20th century were also challenged by their peers, all the time, I mean that's what their entire shtick revolved around"

Not really true. They constantly lectured, wrote books, toured. Their enemies would challenge them because they have a different politics. The challenge on twitter are by people who roughly come from the same place. The observers like me come away better informed about these things. Or get things to think about, in turn. This is positive.

On twitter I see really good threads by a random from time to time. That perhaps has decreased but you see a lot of ppl that have a background in theory using it to disseminate their understanding of the world in tweets. That's a real shift from ten years ago where it felt like a thing from above with little challenge.

So a lot more engagement with different thinking via people. It just feels more organic than before.

"NS does have a patreon I contribute to, which is not "a career" I agree but also not more than many other microniche celebs have"

Lol please - their platform is a massive struggle.

I mean for Gann you can substitute any number of leftist influencers - I honestly do not see what you're describing, in terms of "really good threads by a random" being served up to me - again, due to algorithm, what I'll get is mostly the bigger names in leftist circles and then ppl who know/are mutual with these names.

I'm also puzzled that you don't think 20th century academics were challenged by other academics coming from roughly the same ideological place, I think this was a common ocurrence and in fact also a good piece of marketing.

I used to see quite a lot of threads by random people (mostly in Anarcho left circles tbh) that were coming from a politics, and explaining stuff. They didn't even have a public name. They were just as solid and interesting as anything served by Gann or Hatherley. When I came on twitter that was pretty powerful to watch.

Yeah I guess there were public debates between intellectuals but a lot of the time it would be people from different sides of the political spectrum on TV. But I'm sure that there was a lot of yes, two people from similar sides in a conversation.

FWIW "rock star" is not a very precise phrase, even as a loose analogy.

For a very few people like Jacques Derrida it makes sense. He really did have an aura, a global following, an ability to awe people by arriving on stage, as a celebrity artist would do.

But very few others were in that bracket.

If you're using a "rock" analogy then most people were playing the Camden Falcon and Bull & Gate.