Jacques Derrida

✓

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.

Derrida vs Foucault was reasonably famous beef in its era

That's France for you though.

tend to agree with Daniel, it seems disingenuous of Gann to imagine that there are no notional authorities in the Twittersphere or that the platform works against hierarchy

my wife used to complain about how the entrance exam to becoming a librarian in France had a bunch of literature and philosophy in it and almost nothing about the actual work of being a librarian

I nodded along while secretly thinking "hell yeah now there's a REAL country"

xpost

i'm not in the corner of british left theory twitter you guys are talking about but i do find twitter in general to be extremely non-hierarchical. very frequent on left policy/econ twitter for completely random accounts by citizens with no academic credentials, institutional affiliation or media background to become prominent in the discourse and engage with the big dogs. not sure it's possible (or desirable) to get less hierarchical than that imho

In politics that are ofc many randos that have a better read (or just more informative) on the politics than many journos too. More voices being platformed and then they getting to sone kind of notoriety is pretty good.

well yes Twitter has been excellent for showing up how lacking a lot of professional journalists are

i wish i could have seem jacques derrida the rock star. what was his vibe, holy fool or something?

So here is Gann being challenged (in the comments) and putting his hands up and going "ok". Someone else makes a better comment on the video he is dunking on too, i.e. that video could explain more about capital and why it operates in this way.

Does anyone really think this? Really? Yet again great, serious, non-patronising work from the legends of the British labour movement. Equally, what are you going to do about it? https://t.co/beR7IEC8aU

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) May 24, 2023

i feel we shd actually start a thread to discuss and explore uk attempts to fashion a useable uk left media (something gann for all his faults is very much working on)

(and something derrida has little to do with) (bcz dead but also anyway)

i mean maybe it's already the novara thread? except these days that's properly for dunking on bastani and mason

I like Tom but one time I disagreed with a lazy joke he made about the group menswe@r of all things and he was furious with me for "intruding on a private conversation" by which he meant "commenting on my Twitter thread when I don't know who you are" - and I went off him a bit then.

xp isn't that the novara thread?

i think we shd separate the bastani-dunking from the important thinking!

"I like Tom but one time I disagreed with a lazy joke he made about the group menswe@r of all things and he was furious with me"

I think I remember that awful joke. He is at his worst when pulling a long 90s 'theory' (I don't think it's not nothing but I don't feel it's especially interesting thing to hold onto).

At the moment Novara's grifting is kind of where left media is. Worth a thread when something emerges from the ashes of 2019.

i guess the good thread i'm suggesting would be a place to brainstorm ways *out* of the current impasse

just to return to the thread subject for a moment

Derrida and Ornette Coleman, 1997 pic.twitter.com/8voR1TXPAF

— Winter Pallaksch (@albernaj) May 24, 2023

thank you for saving the revive

That appears to be a photo taken of famous people together that I would never have expected to be together but makes me happy all the same.

i have always felt that JD was a charlatan

does JD = Jacques Derrida or Johnny Dean from Menswear

i remember being kind of amused to learn that his primary theoretical contribution was misspelling the word "difference", lol. i know lots of extremely smart people who find his work appealing, but i've never met somebody who can sufficiently convey what it's about without ending up sounding pretty ridiculous. and i have a lot of time for heady theory.

i don't know what menswear is, is it like the men's wearhouse?

Johnny Dean (born John Hutchinson Dean; 12 December 1971) is a British musician, frontman and figure of the 1990s Britpop era. He was the frontman of Menswear (stylized Menswe@r) and is currently working on a solo, synthpop project called Fxxk Explosion.

lots of british people on this board who persist in having the most arcane discussions imaginable about disputes between obscure media figures. but i'm pretty sure this is a thread about jacques derrida

i don't know what jd is about really but reading him sure is a pleasure