Jacques Derrida

do we have a Foucault thread? if not, should we start one?

My experience with Derrida via work involves his TAs asking for oodles of books to be placed on reserve. I suspect most of them are by him or about him.

But at the end of the day, he has rarely delivered. I think I mean, reading him has usually been frustrating, bringing less insight than the time / effort demanded. (There are no absolute standards here, needless to say - but I'm saying JD comes near the bottom of the heap: and there is **so much else to read**.)

Insight != Knowledge, Truth or whatever. I want whatever a writer can give me - beauty, fun, laughs, surprise, emotion - as well as / instead of what feels true. One of the above might do. JD rarely gives me any of them.

That is to explain why I don't really bother with him now. I know that others do, and they must get something: good luck to them.

Foucault: good writer; useful thinker (explicit 'toolbox' thinker, I think). Yes, I go back to him (or I should, or could) - except that for a long period of his career, you know what he's going to say. (But jeez, that shouldn't be a crime...)

But I'm sure I have said before that for a lazy aesthete like me, the key French PWWII maitre is Roland Barthes by a million miles. Plus, he gives me and Stevie T something to talk about when we're on the 3rd round of ales and have polished off Morrissey and O'Hara.

Why is this an interesting statement? It seems vacuous to me. It's equivalent to saying that a person's genealogy may never be adequately completed because to complete it you'd have to take it back earlier than the original one-celled creature from which he or she descended. The use of the word adequately here is dysfunctional. A genealogy is complete when it tells you what you want to know. It stays complete until someone gives you a good reason for wanting to know more. Are you sure that it's Derrida's idea that genealogies of concepts may never be complete - rather than, say, Paul de Man's or Barbara Johnson's or Christopher Norris's fumbling attempts to explicate Derrida? I've barely read Derrida, and maybe I went after the wrong books (Speech and Phenomena and The Gift of Death - might as well have been in Greek, for all that I got out of them). But I have read Richard Rorty and Newton Garver on the guy, and what they say doesn't square with this. Maybe what Derrida really wants to say is that the genealogy of a concept doesn't have to be complete unless you want it to be, but that's not the same is saying that it can't be complete. And why would Derrida go for such metaphysical/metalinguistic statments anyway? I thought he didn't believe in such things?

Anyway, apparently I.Penman is/was crazy about ol'Jacques. I'm still looking for a JD text that deals with Penman's obsession in re. the relation between thinking and hallucinations. Anyone here have an idea where to look?

As for the genealogy of concepts: I didn't say that it was "Derrida's idea that genealogies of concepts may never be complete". I merely remarked, in the context of a discussion about ways of using concepts, that this was one of the issues at stake in his work. It would be possible to argue that Derrida has no ideas of his own (because it is the problem of ownership itself with which he is (in part) concerned); that Derrida presents no arguments; or that Derrida would agree entirely with Pinefox, that there is so much else to read, that we will never be done with it. In which case, why read Derrida? I can only refer my honourable friends to the answer I have already given.

There is very little good secondary reading on Derrida. Rorty's account of Derrida is nearly as bad as that of Habermas. De Man's work has an extremely complex relation to that of Derrida, but in none of his texts does he set out to 'explain' Derrida. This is a problem, since Derrida's work is infuriatingly obscure in many places. (I can, however, unreservedly recommend anything written by Geoffrey Bennington.) The early work (eg. _Speech and Phenomena_) is steeped in the vocabulary and thought processes of phenomenology; much of the later work (eg. _The Gift of Death_) consists of transcribed oral presentations. All the many different types of text Derrida has produced require different types of reading. If there is one constant, it might be that they all work over other texts and ideas, sometimes alluding as if by reflex, to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and so on. Reading Derrida's texts on their own, as if that ought to tell you something in and of themselves (and it can do) may already be to miss the point, somewhat.

Where to start with Derrida? If your approach is philosophical, my personal suggestion would be to begin with his introduction to Husserl's _Origin of Geometry_. This is a fiendishly unreadable text, but once you're clear on the phenomenological refutation of historicism and Derrida's subsequent displacement of the concept of transcendental historicity, _Writing and Difference_, the most interesting early essay collection / book (it is, perhaps, both) should be easier. Much of the rest follows. I think Derrida's most important recent text is _Politics of Friendship_, but it is also a difficult one. (But no more so than many of the key texts in the history of philosophy.) Most accessible? I'm not sure I could comment on this, since each text presents its own unique combination of difficulties, and I've spent too long reading many of these books, and continually discovering new problems in them, to remember which was a good introduction.

Rorty on JD is bad, yes - but that != Rorty is bad. The weird thing is, RR doesn't (shouldn't) need JD to make his case. He should let JD play in his own garden.

Closest to fun the PF has come with JD surely = Of Grammatolgy, for its mild cliffhanger aspect. (Like I say, I like Fun in buiks.) But I have to respect what Alex T says re. his personal affinity for JD; and he's certainly not the only one to feel that way.

*If* I were to attempt to invert my position and think JD more positively, I would try to describe him sth like:

He thinks very hard and very slowly - no faster than he must; at his own pace - about things which are fundamental - structures of thinking which are endemic and hard to escape; he has no confidence that he'll escape them, but thinks it might be worth thinking around it anyway, for thought is a valiant labour (of love?); he does this thinking not by striking out into the darkness (Descartes etc) but by reading other people, and sparking off (veering off from) the smallest things they say, into comments which are small, yet whose implications might not be small (it's too early to say); and if we are serious about thinking (which is what Reason or Philosophy are supposed to be), we should give him a chance.

But I'm put off from reading Derrida because: (1) Derrida's prose is difficult (and I don't know French, hence don't get a lot of the wordplay), (2) most references pro or con to Derrida's ideas make him seem to me like a bullshitter and a mediocrity, or (3) the discussions and explications of him become obfuscatory filibusters.

And true to form this thread so far is acting like just another filibuster.

Three of Tom's questions about Derrida are: "What does he say? What do you think he says? Is he right?" I jumped on Alex's post not through any fault of Alex's but rather because, for the first time in the history of ILE/ILM, someone seemed not just to be referring to Derrida, or tossing forth an opinion on the guy, but actually to be presenting one of the man's ideas. Now Alex is saying that I misunderstood, but still, maybe at least I've got a foothold. Maybe. If this discussion doesn't do the usual ILM/ILE fadeout. And I do appreciate the reading list. But meanwhile, the filibuster continues:

It would be possible to argue that Derrida has no ideas of his own (because it is the problem of ownership itself with which he is (in part) concerned).

Well, it would be possible to argue that Bob Dylan has no songs of his own, because it is the problem of ownership itself with which he is (in part) concerned. In fact, he calls his new album Love and Theft. But it doesn't follow that Dylan has no songs. And it doesn't follow that Derrida has no ideas, either, whether they are his own, swiped, or community property. So what are they? Like, one or two of them, at least? Alex, Sterling, Pinefox, mark s? You've all talked on this board as if you'd read Derrida and had some idea what the guy was going on about. So what is the guy going on about? Or were the four of you just bluffing? (And don't say that Derrida just can't be summed up or condensed, or that one of the issues at stake in his work is whether ideas can ever be adequately summed up or condensed. If I can do Meltzer, for chrissakes, you can do Derrida. At least you can try.)

By the way, to say that Dylan has no songs of his own would be just as vacuous as saying that genealogies of concepts may never be adequately completed. You can say it, but the phrase "his own" ends up just as useless and irrelevant as "adequately completed" did (and is unrelated to any concept of "his own" that I could ever possibly care about).

I didn't say that it was 'Derrida's idea that genealogies of concepts may never be complete'. I merely remarked, in the context of a discussion about ways of using concepts, that this was one of the issues at stake in his work.

I don't see how it's any better as an issue than as an idea. The question "Are genealogies of concepts ever adequately complete?" is no less empty than the idea that they may never be adequately completed. What is being asked? What's at stake? There's no general question here that I can see, and no answer needed. Imagine if someone told me that one of the issues at stake in my work was whether "songs are ever good." I wouldn't know what the guy was saying, and unless he tried to explain himself further, I wouldn't care.

Describe the structures of thinking that Derrida believes are endemic and hard to escape. And in what sense are these fundamental?

I ask that second question because from my meager secondary reading I had the idea that whatever Derrida thought about structures of thinking, he very much did not believe that any particular structure was "fundamental" for, say, the entire species. "Endemic" would be within a particular "discourse" or tradition or activity. I'd thought.

Hard to respond here, cos it all seems so contradictory. I like what you say, I like the no-nonsense tone, I like the probing, I like the Dylan refs. Yet the level of aggression is so hyper and weird. But... I like that, too.

Attempted response...

>>> But I'm put off from reading Derrida because: (1) Derrida's prose is difficult

Not that difficult, relatively speaking - as you yourself indicate later on.

>>> (2) most references pro or con to Derrida's ideas make him seem to me like a bullshitter and a mediocrity

Well, maybe you're right. Maybe that's what he is, so... where's the problem?

>>> (3) the discussions and explications of him become obfuscatory filibusters.

I like the term filibuster for JD, but will not have it applied to me, thank you very much.

>>> And true to form this thread so far is acting like just another filibuster.

Jeez - a little overheated, this?

>>> Alex, Sterling, Pinefox, mark s? You've all talked on this board as if you'd read Derrida and had some idea what the guy was going on about.

I have read him. So have they, surely. Surely we wouldn't have said it if we didn't mean it (to adapt Lloyd).

>>> So what is the guy going on about? Or were the four of you just bluffing?

How dare you accuse me of bluffing? What I said above was mostly how I had a problem with JD!! That's no bluff!

>>> If I can do Meltzer, for chrissakes, you can do Derrida. At least you can try.)

Meltzer = ?

>>> He thinks very hard and very slowly - no faster than he must; at his own pace - about things which are fundamental - structures of thinking that are endemic and hard to escape...

Describe the structures of thinking that Derrida believes are endemic and hard to escape. And in what sense are these fundamental?

This feels like 'Ithaca' 'Catalogue these books'.

But that's OK. I like the aggression here, cos I think it bespeaks honesty and seriousness. Still, it is hardly for me to answer the question. I was trying to voice a favourable view of JD, though it's not really my own. I am now trying to work out a way of answering your question, and can't do so; presumably cos I am not a Derridean. I sympathize with your impatience - I've been there. But I'm not sure the bull-in-a-china-shop approach is the best. But I could be wrong - maybe it is the best after all.

But come now, Mark - it is such standard fare that 'JD Has Been Misinterpreted'. (Thus, I'm afraid, I find this move of yours rather over-familiar piece of rhetoric - *unlike* the rest of your post.) very book on JD says this about every other book on JD; or they say that the very idea of a book on JD is (hey! how interesting!) somewhat self-contradictory; or that it's time to take him back from the Yanks; or whatever. And if what you say is true, then it should still be possible for you to say what JD *is* about. I don't want you to, or anyone to, particularly. My life has been enough spent on the geezer already.

I've never seen Mark's body. Maybe that's the trouble.

hm.

Do you no the jurisprude from Edin., err, Christianiddis or -iopolous or something? He's good friends with out tutor, we're getting him next term I think.

I only revived this because we had our Derrida tute today and I don't think he is a good writer but am unsure with him as a thinker. Not too interesting. Foucault was much more exciting and a better writer (scaffold puns ridin all over the place).

Where is Frank?

"Le 11 Septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, 'September 11'. We will have to return later to this question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say 'September 11' you are already citing, are you not? Something fait date, I would say in French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history. “To mark a date in history” presupposes, in any case, an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are – and I want to insist on this at the outset – only suppositions and presuppositions. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. The telegram of this metonymy – a name, a number – points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about."

Anyone care to paraphrase?

"September 11 [le 11 septembre] gave us the impression of being a major event, one of the most important historical events we will witness in our lifetime, especially for those of us who never lived through a world war. Do you agree?"

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/066649.html

jd can generally take an awful long time to say stuff - but there's more to what he's saying as a whole (on that link) than my redux: he's saying it that way to get you in a mood to be attentive to what's not being said

(ie like elmer fudd: "be vewwy vewy quiet, i'm hunting wabbits)

jonathan z. i take yr point, i'm just not sure if the best way to get ppl to think for themselves abt the shadow side of eloquence and rhetorical power is by being ALWAYS snappy and zippy and grabby

(on the other hand JD is *never* any of those things, though in some ways his problem is that he is too compressed haha)

this phrase is one of both Derrida and DeMan's favorite red herrings

What he says about philosophy has not always been banal, or has not always been obvious.

(haha "like nations on a map with no names" -- WHERE the fuck did i just read that!?)

im not sure what that means but it seemed very funny.

they're like monads except they throb

is this like saying that naming something necessarily means "we do not know what we are talking about"? (and therefore means that we never know what we are talking about - we just talk about words) or does this only apply to metonyms?

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

i think it's more helpful to think of derrida and other continental philosophy "rock star" types as idea artists more than anything

différ@nce

JD's unknown pleasures

Happy to have infested the Jacques Derrida thread with discussion of Menswe@r, let's tie this all together.

I have a philosophy degree because the lead singer in Menswear said that mods were existentialists in an article in Melody Maker. Looked up Existentialism after reading that and went to a bookshop and got some Sartre. https://t.co/xDmR1AEdUy

— Marcas Ó hUiscín (@MarkHoskins) June 4, 2019

pdf of the interview/conversation w Ornette:
https://www.ubu.com/papers/Derrida-Interviews-Coleman_1997.pdf">chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.ubu.com/papers/Derrida-Interviews-Coleman_1997.pdf
You can read it w/o dl, though it's a little blurry around the edges, maybe appropriately--although I like Open Culture's take & quotes:

The interview took place in 1997, “before and during Coleman’s three concerts at La Villette, a museum and performing arts complex north of Paris that houses, among other things, the world-renowned Paris Conservatory.” As I mentioned, the two spoke in English but, as translator Timothy S. Murphy—who worked with a version published in the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles—notes, “original transcripts could not be located.” Curiously, at the heart of the conversation is a discussion about language, particularly “languages of origin.” In answer to Derrida’s first question about a program Coleman would present later that year in New York called Civilization, the saxophonist replies, “I’m trying to express a concept according to which you can translate one thing into another. I think that sound has a much more democratic relationship to information, because you don’t need the alphabet to understand music.”
As one example of this “democratic relationship,” Coleman cites the relationship between the jazz musician and the composer—or his text: “the jazz musician is probably the only person for whom the composer is not a very interesting individual, in the sense that he prefers to destroy what the composer writes or says.” Coleman goes on later in the interview to clarify his ideas about improvisation as democratic communication:

[T]he idea is that two or three people can have a conversation with sounds, without trying to dominate or lead it. What I mean is that you have to be… intelligent, I suppose that’s the word. In improvised music I think the musicians are trying to reassemble an emotional or intellectual puzzle in which the instruments give the tone. It’s primarily the piano that has served at all times as the framework in music, but it’s no longer indispensable and, in fact, the commercial aspect of music is very uncertain. Commercial music is not necessarily more accessible, but it is limited.

Translating Coleman’s technique into “a domain that I know better, that of written language,” Derrida ventures to compare improvisation to reading, since it “doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible.” For him, the existence of a framework—a written composition—even if only loosely referenced in a jazz performance, “compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation.” As Derrida and Coleman try to work through the possibility of true improvisation, the exchange becomes a fascinating deconstructive take on the relationships between jazz and writing. (For more on this aspect of their discussion, see “Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation,” an article in the open access journal Critical Studies in Improvisation.)

The interview isn’t all philosophy. It ranges all over the place, from Coleman’s early days in Texas, then New York, to the impact of technology on music, to Coleman’s completely original theory of music, which he calls “harmolodics.” They also discuss globalization and the experience of growing up as a racial minority—an experience Derrida relates to very much. At one point, Coleman observes, “being black and a descendent of slaves, I have no idea what my language of origin was.” Derrida responds in kind, referencing one of his seminal texts, Monolingualism of the Other:

JD: If we were here to talk about me, which is not the case, I would tell you that, in a different but analogous manner, it’s the same thing for me. I was born into a family of Algerian Jews who spoke French, but that was not really their language of origin [… ] I have no contact of any sort with my language of origin, or rather that of my supposed ancestors.

OC: Do you ever ask yourself if the language that you speak now interferes with your actual thoughts? Can a language of origin influence your thoughts?

JD: It is an enigma for me.

Indeed. Derrida then recalls his first visit to the United States, in 1956, where there were “‘Reserved for Whites’ signs everywhere.” “You experienced all that?” he asks Coleman, who replies:

Yes. In any case, what I like about Paris is the fact that you can’t be a snob and a racist at the same time here, because that won’t do. Paris is the only city I know where racism never exists in your presence, it’s something you hear spoken of.

“That doesn’t mean there is no racism,” says Derrida, “but one is obliged to conceal it to the extent possible.”

You really should read the whole interview. The English translation was published in the journal Genre and comes to us via Ubuweb, who host a pdf. For more excerpts, see posts at The New Yorker and The Liberator Magazine. As interesting a read as this doubly-translated interview is, the live experience itself was a painful one for Derrida. Though he had been invited by the saxophonist, Coleman’s impatient Parisian fans booed him, eventually forcing him off the stage. In a Time magazine interview, the self-conscious philosopher recalled it as “a very unhappy event.” But, he says, “it was in the paper the next day, so it was a happy ending.”

I did part of my MA with a Derrida specialist, who led six of us through some of the thornier parts of his oeuvre. It was a trip tbh and I think about it often. I think of Derrida a bit like I do Lacan: it's like a high-wire act and I experience something approaching jouissance when I'm reading it, then I look away and it's not gone as such but something like gone.

A mate, who now works at Leeds via Goldsmiths, wrote a long piece about that very Ornette interview.

God, that sounds so pompous. Anyway, I don't think I could be arsed to read Derrida today but glad I went there.

what, sound pompous on a derrida thread? impossible.

Haha. Fair point.

He taught at NYU at least one semester while I was there. I didn't try to get into his class. Probably should have.

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

― mark s, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

One day I will read something on TV from a left journal with absolutely no mention of politics.

https://jacobin.com/2023/05/succession-television-devestating-critique-ultrarich-review/

I'm a bit bemused at myself that I only posted twice on this thread over the years and in both cases tried to say something by implication rather than fully spelling it out, but honestly there's not much to tell. Anyway: so I was a grad student in English lit at UC Irvine in the early nineties, switched over to working in the library system there through 2015, and as such was in the mix of Derrida being here for his spring quarterly visits until his passing. I always heard his lectures were crowded/overbooked affairs and actually being in grad school made me realize how my eyes quickly glazed over on a lot of things in the general field, so I admit I never bothered with said appearances, but it was interesting/bemusing to sense him as presence in the air. I essentially saw him in person only a handful of times over the years, never spoke with him directly, but he seemed either affable in conversation with others or lost in thought on his own, which I chose not to disturb, tempted though I was to ask him about a certain Scritti Politti song. Ultimately my strongest memory of him was walking past him casually one morning on the footbridge connecting the campus to the mid-size open air mall across the street, and I like imagining he was going over for a burger or something. (Plus, to add another memory, per my earlier comments, TAs coming in to put lots of books for his course on reserve, and indeed a number of them were his.)

Are you able to confirm a bit of apocrypha about his time there - that over his office door was a "French Only" sign?