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'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free'
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10 comments:
I wish he would explain his explanation, as Byron said of Coleridge.
Lil had a friend at college who was into Derrida. When asked if he understood the man, I gather he replied "You don't understand Derrida.
Me - well, I go all Hold The Line on the man, and can only say - what is point Derrida? How has he contributed to the sum of human happiness?
Alienation after Derrida is a feeling I know well.
Gosh, L, I'm still working over:
'the current "trans-valuation of values," as Nietzsche puts it, where the highest -- from the metaphysical standpoint -- values are debased and the lowest elevated, that is to say, where the same, the proper, and the identical cede their privileged place to the other, the alien, and the non-identical. This lopsided dialectic indicates, however, that the Nietzschean trans-valuation is far from being complete: in its second stage, at the threshold of which we find ourselves today, it will necessitate a de-hierarchization of the already inverted values, so that alterity, too, would lose its newly acquired transcendental status, just as sameness and identity did in twentieth-century thought.'
You're well ahead experiencing post-Derridian alienation.
Glad to see I am not the only one who was completely bedazzled/befuddled by all that gobbledegook - so much so that I just gave up half way through. Some people really do live in their own little universe don't they?
It's more that I feel alienated from French intellectuals, HG, after reading a passage or two of Derridaian (?)prose. I did listen to Gayatri Spivak once at the ICA but I found myself admiring her beauty rather than comprehending her theories.
The excess of surplus value is, actually, the embodiment of economic alienation (of the workers from their labor time not restituted in wages) and, therefore, the element of injustice, around which capitalism is built. There is no place either for singularity, or for justice, or for the incalculable in the machinations of the capitalist "excess of exchange," incompatible with deconstruction.
bollocks
if you'll pardon my french
... hospitality, respect, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, etc. We are urged to come to terms with that which is alien, to learn to live with foreignness, to recognize the uncanny ... ain't that the truth
(uncanny, "unheimlich", a lovely word)
Nietzsche's time is a'comin ...
"Deconstruction" seems a reasonably pointless activity (unless you are a film critic, and then you just have to know your French onions)
'Some people really do live in their own little universe don't they?'
The trouble is they're out of their box and swarming all over our universe, Nomad.
PS
I so liked this comment on the original Leiter post that I've pinched it. I hope no-one minds.
'Ephraim Kishon has a story called “Jewish Poker”. Jewish poker is played without cards so all you can do is bluff – and you have to bluff high. I think that this is the secret of Derridean post-modernism as currently practised in U.S. humanities departments: in the end, it’s all competitive hyperbole – who can be more radical?
Someone starts off with a huge unsupported generalization. For example, they write a book saying that the whole of Western thought is under the hegemony (good word) of (say) “logocentrism”, that its genealogy has to be exposed and deconstructed to reveal the Other that it “covers over and disavows”.
That’s a high bid, but you can top that. Why not write a review saying that this is to give “the Other” a “hegemonic status”, that this too needs to be deconstructed and given a genealogy? Say that the re-valuation of values hasn’t been radical enough, that “the Nietzschean trans-valuation is far from being complete: in its second stage, at the threshold of which we find ourselves today, it will necessitate a de-hierarchization of the already inverted values, so that alterity, too, would lose its newly acquired transcendental status, just as sameness and identity did in twentieth-century thought.”
Of course, tone and style matter. Although you’ve left banalities like “sameness and identity” (and hence, presumably, essence, cause and logical inference) far behind, don’t hesitate to use terms like “necessitate” for the ideas you are advocating, or (although you don’t believe in such fetishes as truth in interpretation) to describe others’ interpretations as “deeply flawed”. To think that once you've toppled the idols of objectivity you can't write as if they were still standing is a sign of hopeless logocentrism.
It’s good too to write as if your native language isn’t English, or that, at least, your English has been saturated by what you’ve absorbed in your many years on the *rive gauche*. A nice Derridean-Althusserian touch here (see Judith Butler, *passim*) is the spurious use of the term “precisely” when you make an especially vague assertion (“The promise of deconstruction lies, precisely, in its ability to inspire this post-metaphysical thrust ‘beyond the same and the other.’”) Introducing your sentences with pompous phrases like “Let us note that …” may not add anything of substance to them but it does convey the impression that you are addressing your audience from a position of authority (a podium at the École Normale?). Above all, the secret is to convince people that you are further up the mountain than everyone else and looking down on them. Writing in this condescending way won’t make you popular, no doubt, but what the hell – oderint dum metuant!
Where will it all end? Presumably, this too can be out-bid – perhaps someone else will come along and offer a genealogy of deconstruction or a deconstruction of genealogy. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many iterations the transvaluation of valuations can go through. Yet there must – surely – come a point where the whole thing vanishes up its own …
But what to do until that happy day? Certainly, it is heart-breaking for those of us who would like Continental philosophy to be taken more seriously, but how do you argue with people for whom “reason” and “argument” (like “sameness” and “identity”) are simply terms in a “hegemonic discourse” they have left behind? And, if they can shrug off the Sokal hoax and take Alain Badiou seriously, they are obviously past being laughed back into sanity by a sense of the absurd. So I think that all the rest of us can do is to keep out of their way and leave them to patronize one another to their hearts’ content.
Posted by: Michael Rosen | November 19, 2010 at 02:52 PM
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