Jacques Derrida

how much of living as a HUMAN is specifically human?

to some people, talking about this is pointless stuff: these people shouldn't bother talking about it! for others, i.e. Derrida and people who like him, it's loads of fun

so even when you harrumph about it and reach for something untainted bcz isn't that a better version of whatever, it ain't, so better to get used to it and be cool about it

(also the biology, culture etc involved in mastering speaking, latterly reading, writing have a huge presence in society, even when we don't actually think about them or refer to them much...) (a LOT of argts on ilx cd be rephrased as judgments abt level or "quality" of readership, like it carves the world into a hidden class structure)

(and he means language in a v.wide sense there: "text" is - or was at the point he wrote that - his technical term for the generalised sphere of communication, bigger than eg just speech or writing, but DEF - explicitly - including mathematics)

i find the games side to it a bit tiresome, as in the games he seems to enjoy, but i also think he's right not to drop that down to a "mere" set-asideable level, cz it's a big and maybe wrong assumption to make to just decide that the GAMES aspect is an irrelevance and a distortion compared the serious, proper useage... cz that develops later, out of the games...)

(and it's not as if i don't opt for jokes a lot myself)

(one of the things i like abt ilx as a structure is that it allows a tremendous play between extremely difft er ahem "modes of address")

I'm not so sure! Though again may I recommend Blanchot, whom I think is saying "there is nothing without/outside language, nor is there anything at all in language"

an impenetrability that ensures my continued deification in France and elsewhere.

Point of information — Derrida’s reputation in France is not in any way comparable to its status in Britain or the US (both in terms of good and bad things said about him). This is an important point, because so much of the problems in discussing Derrida do genuinely stem from the difficulty of translation between different contexts — never impossible, but never to be taken for granted. Like the assumed demand that a ‘philosopher’ should have something - what? Useful - to say about a ‘major event’.

That language strategy could be dramatically counterproductive, though (turning off more people than it turns on, too easy to make fun of, etc.). It seems counterintuitive to deliberately make something more complex, just to stop people in their tracks. I do find the language to be a stumbling block.

This is a really interesting comment. If it is counterintuitive to make something complex, then surely all philosophy is counterintuitive? But the assumption that this is done for effect - deliberately to obfuscate or to provoke - seems odd. I mean, why ask a philosopher about something if you want the same answer a journalist, or a politician, or a bloke in a pub, might give? Putting things in ‘simple’ terms is often the easiest way to a) obscure complications which are just there, whether we admit or not and b) apply a kind of rhetorical force to the situation: e.g. asking someone whether they believe in freedom really means ‘take one of these two reductively established positions so I know whether to shoot you or not’. So a) there’s nothing wrong as such with making things complex and b) what are you afraid of? Derrida’s response is (on one level) ‘I can’t answer the question you have posed in those terms because so many of them seem to me extremely obscure, so let me show you what I think needs to be clarified before we can begin’. i.e. Derrida is seeking to CLARIFY, but that necessarily involves making things more complex.

But there’s another assumption, which is that Derrida should respond in your language, rather than his. Isn’t that a slightly strange demand? i.e. you’re asking why these damn foreigners can’t speak your language. (Even that’s a philosophical foreigner rather than a literal foreigner). [Mark makes a similar point, I discover reading the remainder of the thread] If you were to pick up one of Derrida’s essays on Husserl, or Heidegger, would you say ‘that bastard hasn’t written a beginner’s guide to Husserl, he’s written a complex text which I’d have to know a certain amount about philosophy, and about Husserl, to get something out of’? Yes, the specific genre here is that of an interview, but the context is unclear - Derrida is trying, as Foucault did, and as others have, to present his work in a non-technical context. (Although in the second extract he recalls some of Schmitt’s arguments). But this doesn’t mean not asking technical questions, or using technical language. If you want Derrida’s response to something, this is how he thinks! And yes that’s a calculated risk - not everyone is going to have the patience to take the time to explore why he’s asking these questions, and in this way (as this thread proves!). But that’s his risk. The response that ‘I can’t be bothered to read something difficult like Derrida’s work’ is at least an honest one.

mark, what about the stuff he says on war between states (or classical war) vs. civil war (or partisan war) and now international terrorism? this must be relevant to your rights-based constitutions thread. although i don't think it's a problem with the choice of political philosophy as much as the way they are used to justify actions. or maybe this is the problem derrida is talking about: terrorism has made it necessary to make explicit a philosophy for international law

What Derrida is saying is something like: 1) Schmitt distinguishes between ‘classical war between states’ and ‘partisan war which breaks those rules’; 2) this is a useful distinction and it’s the kind of technical clarification we need to try and understand and describe the world better; 3) but this is never going to be *enough* because 4) the real world already deconstructs such oppositions - Bush has declared war (as if the US was a state making war in the classical sense) but against an enemy who does not fit into traditional categories; 5) so a CRITICAL reading of Schmitt would need to accept that the real world is messier than the theoretical or abstract world view and work out how to continue the kind of project he’s interested in while taking account for those elements of messy reality which frustrate such a project. Now, as the Pinefox observes as smartly as ever, this may be banal - but most of what we can say on such a topic is banal. It’s not an attempt to develop a new theory of terrorism, or of international law, as such: in fact Derrida advances very little under his own name, describing instead what a critical reading of Schmitt *might* achieve (but might not). But again, this is an interview not a full-blown philosophical essay. If you’re interested in his reading of Schmitt, there’s plenty in Politics of Friendship, although strictly speaking that’s a series of seminar sessions, not a philosophical essay (not that it’s not philosophical). Being clear about the status of these texts, and of what Derrida says is important because it presents what he’s doing as offering starting points for your own responses, he’s not telling you what to think, but making suggestions as to how you might begin to think, if you stop expecting the world to offer you easy answers.

does Derrida believe in MONADS

I don’t know much about the term Monads - I take it to come from a Leibnizian / Spinozan (?) type philosophical discourse. Derrida has not written anything I can think of on Spinoza - most of his work is either on classical philosophy, some medieval thinkers, and on post-Kantian writings. But if you wanted me to guess, the answer would be NO, because singularity is always fractured or contaminated in his work, the One is always more or less than one, never whole and complete in itself. i.e. like many post-Hegelian thinkers, identity is always relational. (But see remarks on dates later)

It would cheer me a tad if on... "threads like this", people who like Derrida would sometimes take more sceptical positions re. him, and perhaps even vice versa.
I find the JD fandom and perhaps the JD critique brigade typecast. There is perhaps too much nervy reactive anger, if that word is not too strong, and a sense that battle must be joined. I doubt that it need be.

I kind of agree with the Pinefox here, although he probably has me down as a member of the Derrida fanclub. It tends to depend on the context - I can often disagree with Derrida, and have done in public forums, but in other cases, like here, I think sympathetic clarification is the more effective strategy. It tends to be far too easy to knock someone’s position rather than trying to see their point of view from inside. Once you do that, it tends to become harder to attack it - so it might be a good rule of thumb to do this with whatever you read, or indeed whoever you’re arguing with.

I think it's the way that binaries do work that concerns Derrida. He's not a mechanic fixing broken ones. He's showing how, although they're necessary, binaries necessarily create all sorts of ghosts which 'haunt' our thinking, semi-visible. Which makes him not so much a 'ghost buster' as a spiritualist, teasing words from his ouija board.

This is quite a neat statement of Derrida’s aims I think. But I would certainly add that he’s very interested in some of the political consequences of ignoring the ghosts and pretending they’re not there. Making the ghosts appear is part of his project, trying to act out possible attempts to reckon with the ghosts, and finding a way of thinking about the ghosts which doesn’t (because it can’t) claim to have adequately banished them or factored them in, is another.

'All sentences of the type "deconstruction is X" or "deconstruction is not X" a priori miss the point.'

This perhaps not so helpful. Is it from the letter to a Japanese friend? (Could check but books are upstairs!). If so it occurs in the context of a discussion which does try to find ways to talk about deconstruction - so Derrida is not just throwing up his hands and going ‘oh it’s all so difficult / intrinsically undefinable (which verges on a kind of mysticism). And given he has regularly produced sentences of that type, it would be a funny kind of thing to say, were it not for the fact that there is always context - so a word, a sentence, a whole book, is never complete in itself. The same might be said of any event - and we’re bordering here on what he says about 11/9. To name an event - to cite it in discussion say - is always to limit it, by setting borders and parameters around it. Obviously this is what we do all the time, and there’s nothing intrinsically *wrong* about it, but it has certain effects, not least that it means we’re always having to forget or exclude things in order to handle the concepts we use to interpret the world, just as we often forget that those concepts are only concepts (and then elevate them into abstract terms which can be used to label good and bad, right and wrong).

I don't know how much Derrida hates slogans, no matter how much he may protest - "there is nothing outside the text" is the "Just Do It" of Critical Theory

But certainly at the time of writing Derrida never knew what was going to happen to that phrase (for example its translation into other languages), and by God it’s buried in a long and dense text. He has always insisted that the word ‘deconstruction’, just for example, was never intended to introduce some kind of manifesto. If subsequent events made it convenient to use that word as a kind of shorthand, and to take positions around it so be it - but obviously the fate of a word can never be determined by one person, and in this as in other things Derrida has responded to what happens elsewhere.

Since this smacks of the apologetics Pinefox is fed up with , maybe I should add that I think Derrida has deliberately used forms of sloganeering in certain places, and a number of times I wish he hadn’t or wouldn’t. But on the one hand Derrida is being told (again this thread is typical) ‘put it in manifestos, in words of one syllable I can repeat or disagree with’ and on the other ‘don’t reduce things to buzz-words and slogans’. The guy’s only human.

his statements carry authority. Since most of what he has chosen to throw that weight behind has been things I believe in (he's spoken for nuclear disarmament and against apartheid, for instance) I am happy with this.

Martin is I think talking absolute sense here. If Derrida doesn’t have an obvious position on ‘feminism’ (although I think it’s fairly clear, depends what exactly you’d be looking for) it’s because he knows that ‘feminism’ is such a disputed and complicated term, that there are plenty of feminists he might agree with and plenty he would have little common ground with: he would almost certainly, and I think I’ve seen him do this, insist that we can only talk about ‘feminisms’ in the plural (as we can only really talk about ‘deconstructions’ in the plural). Derrida was for a long time very unhappy with the public and supposedly authoritative position he was expected to take, and so there are few interviews and only a couple of photographs of him before the mid-to-late seventies. After his involvement in debates surrounding the teaching of philosophy in France, Derrida appears to have become more open to taking public stances. Again, that was his decision, and we can say we think it was right or wrong, but we cannot a priori quibble with his right to make his own decision on that.

it seems to me it calls for an infinite regress of re-evaluation - rather than propose a standard for obtaining truth (like pragmatism for instance) it simply proposes a method for undermining all possible conclusions! its a useful tool but not something you can live by

I like to think that accepting that any decision you make is always provisional, and that you might like to look back and say well that was wrong (or right), is a possible way to live. It would mean never assuming that you were right and someone else was wrong, but would mean you were prepared to act as if you were right when you judged the situation to call for that. In fact, it’s pretty much what we do the whole time isn’t it? Since the re-evaluation would be infinite, deconstruction would never be something you could actually ‘live’: but you might be able to live more or less deconstructively (i.e. more or less taking the apparently ‘given’ or ‘natural’ for granted). This may also sound banal: but the specificity of Derrida’s project, for example, lies in the kind of questions he asks to the specific texts, ideas, events that he considers. Examined carefully, the results may not be so banal - in fact, obviously they’re not, or we wouldn’t have all this fuss to deal with. (Not sure I’ve explained that very well)

"there is nothing outside the text"

Trouble is that this isn’t really about ‘texts’ in any obvious way. In the essay it’s from ‘text’ has become something like an improved term for what Heidegger calls ‘Being’ i.e. ?the world; ?language; ?everything. Difference being that Derrida wants to insist that anything we might care to investigate will have the same characteristics as a text (ie in being resistant to final determination, being totally pinned down to an unequivocal meaning (i.e. translation into another context / discourse / language / paraphrase). The fact that ‘Being’ can be translated into ‘text’ itself acting out the inherent destabilisation of even such terms which seek to identify fundamental concepts.

So it’s not quite enough to say that Derrida’s work is about texts, or even about language. In a couple of places he describes deconstruction as being whatever happens to happen, or happens not to happen: i.e. if we could talk about (but by definition we can’t) it would be everything which is and everything which isn’t. But these aren’t the best terms to use to look at what he does. What I mean is, deconstruction is about events not language or texts. (Footnote: this is the starting point for some of my own research, in which I argue that you can understand political events, usefully, as being deconstruction in progress, if you look at them a certain way, and that this opens up issues which other ways of looking at them ignore.)

i.e. it might be easier to think of Derrida in the Kantian or phenomenological traditions, but really pushing the problem of how do we ever have access to ‘things’ to what’s out there to its limits, rather than as a ‘it’s all language games’ or discourse theory type of guy.

What I mean is, deconstruction is about events not language or texts.

i.e. it might be easier to think of Derrida in the Kantian or phenomenological traditions, but really pushing the problem of how do we ever have access to ‘things’ to what’s out there to its limits, rather than as a ‘it’s all language games’ or discourse theory type of guy.

these comments are really interesting, and i'd like to find out more about the differences. thanks for the clarification on my comments on the interview.

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)