Week 6 Reading Comments
Posted by Ananya:
The reasons behind Derrida’s idea of Europe as an interlocutor between ‘the United States and its enemy,” and the language used to explain this idea, reveal a logic that reinforces the imperialist “power arrangements” it is supposed to question.
I say this because:
- Europe, Derrida writes, would function as an interlocutor because it is the “only secular actor on the world stage…with one of the most advanced nontheological political structures” (275). He also states that doing so involves the “memory of a European promise that is yet to be fulfilled: democracy and emancipation for all…Enlightenment is not dead…” (260).
In these phrases “democracy and emancipation for all” is isolated as an “European promise,” Europe is, once again, presented as setting an example – or as ahead in development – to which all countries should aspire.
This echoes the reason behind the colonial desire to “civilize” and reflects the historicist perspective of linear progression where most of the natives have yet to reach a point (identified by the Europeans) where they can be considered for human rights and other privileges – as in this instance, states that might have experience balancing different religions (or any other relevant insights) are not considered in Derrida’s discussion because they do not measure up to his standard of “secular.”
The idea of “deconstructing boundaries,” particularly the way it has been articulated as an aspect of “development” to which others have to catch up to, also contributes to this argument. The boundaries, the nation-state, a history, and a national identity are often unavoidable products of colonization, which have been thrust upon post-colonial states by their colonizers, and are notions with which these states are constantly struggling. This notion of “deconstructing boundaries,” and de-centered identities goes against the efforts of these newer states trying to hold a disparate population within one nation. Instead of challenging this idea of “catch up development,” ‘universal” development, Derrida, through his language, articulates yet another universalist idea of development, which people must strive towards in order to be equal to some others on the globe.
February 25th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Please post under the comments for the week so that others can follow the thread of discussion. Thanks!
Sharon
February 27th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Ananya,
I agree with your comments, it seems that western subjectivity, even in its hopes of achieving an ethos of ‘de-centering’ has retained its representational lens: it must view the rest of the world and its events through its own interpretation of what is happening. this includes not only the political sphere which you point out, but also ‘post colonial’ theory itself often.
Perhaps Derrida, as well as Buck-Morss and Beaudrillard, have decided to forgo some of the political basics (such as critical examinations of modernity and enlightenment) for an involvement in the technological zeitgeist of electronic technologies (tv, new media, etc) and globalism, These are to a certain degree accepted and not problematized in ways that we have seen before, and it seems that these writers have specifically chosen to move beyond the critique mode afforded by something like post colonialism or even marxism, and into a) the technological and b) speculation about the 21st century. Are they thinking ‘future’ at the cost of these important political discourses?
And where are the aesthetics? This question is sort of a leads into me wanting to say that I was feeling after class like I perhaps glorified ‘the visual’ a little too much and its capabilities for ‘embracing dissonance.’ While I think this is an important idea and I want to explore it more, I think that the visual and the image are just as capable of encoding, inscribing ideologically, and could certainly be used in ways that aren’t ‘breaking binaries’ to use a classic altruistic turn of phrase.
I’m thinking apparatus theory and all that. I would like to read more on this…anyone have any suggestions?
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Well, in the meantime, I just came across this obituary of Derrida in The Economist. It seems to encapsulate in much better English my own paranoias about him…
***
“IN HIM France gave the world one of the major figures of the intellectual life of our times,” announced Jacques Chirac, the French president, on the day after Jacques Derrida’s death. Mr Derrida himself disagreed with pretty much everything anyone said about him; but he may have let that encomium pass. The inventor of “deconstruction”—an ill-defined habit of dismantling texts by revealing their assumptions and contradictions—was indeed, and unfortunately, one of the most cited modern scholars in the humanities.
He was also the most controversial. In 1992 a proposal to award him an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University caused such howls that the university was forced to put the matter to a ballot—the first time this had happened in 30 years. Amid charges that Mr Derrida’s work was absurd, vapid and pernicious, the degree was awarded in the end, by 336 votes to 204.
The academy is often fractious, but this was different. It is not that Mr Derrida’s views, or his arguments for them, were unusually contentious. There were no arguments, nor really any views either. He would have been the first to admit this. He not only contradicted himself, over and over again, but vehemently resisted any attempt to clarify his ideas. “A critique of what I do”, he said, “is indeed impossible.”
There has always been a market for obscurantism. Socrates railed against the followers of Heraclitus of Ephesus for much the same reasons that Mr Derrida’s critics berate his unfortunate disciples:
“If you ask one of them a question, they draw out enigmatic little expressions from their quiver, so to speak, and shoot one off; and if you try to get hold of an account of what that one meant, you’re transfixed by another novel set of metaphors. You’ll never get anywhere with any of them.”
Subjected to his weak puns (“logical phallusies” was a famous example), bombastic rhetoric and illogical ramblings, an open-minded reader might suspect Mr Derrida of charlatanism. That would be going too far, however. He was a sincere and learned man, if a confused one, who offered some academics and students just what they were looking for.
Mr Derrida’s father was a salesman of Sephardic Jewish extraction. Born in a suburb of Algiers, Jacques was expelled from his school at the age of 12 because of the Vichy government’s racial laws. With some difficulty, in 1952 he succeeded in entering the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and attended the lectures of Michel Foucault. He began to lecture at the Ecole Normale in 1964. Two years later, at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he laid the foundations of his reputation in America with a bold new way to approach literary texts and lay bare their ideological presuppositions. Three books followed in 1967, including “Of Grammatology” and “Writing and Difference”. A radical star was born.
Mr Derrida’s style of deconstruction flowered especially in American departments of comparative literature, where it became interwoven with Marxism, feminism and anti-colonialism. Although by the early 1980s French academics had largely tired of trying to make sense of him, America’s teachers of literature increasingly embraced Mr Derrida. Armed with an impenetrable new vocabulary, and without having to master any rigorous thought, they could masquerade as social, political and philosophical critics. Mr Derrida always denied any responsibility for the undisciplined nihilism of his imitators, who gave the strong impression that deconstructionism had somehow succeeded in undermining, or even in refuting, the notion of objective truth. But his work could not easily be interpreted in any other way.
A crisis came in 1987. The New York Times revealed that Paul de Man, a friend of Mr Derrida’s and one of America’s leading deconstructionists, had written anti-Semitic articles for a pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper in 1940-42. Coincidentally, also in 1987, evidence began to emerge of the hidden Nazi past of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had been a major influence on Mr Derrida. Mr Derrida’s response was disastrous. He used deconstructionist techniques to defend the two men, laying down a fog of convoluted rhetoric in a doomed attempt to exonerate them. This fed straight into the hands of his critics, who had always argued that the playful evasiveness of deconstruction masked its moral and intellectual bankruptcy. The New York Review of Books quipped that deconstruction means never having to say you’re sorry.
Mr Derrida also pursued far worthier causes. He fought for the rights of Algerian immigrants in France, opposed apartheid and campaigned for Czech dissidents. As his influence waned, his fame grew. Abandoning his earlier reticence, he submitted to interviews and photographs. He confessed to disliking Woody Allen’s comedy, “Deconstructing Harry”. The books continued to flow (80 volumes in all) as his concerns moved away from literary and philosophical texts to ethical and political subjects, but they were no easier to follow. In his final years he became increasingly concerned with religion, and some theologians started to show interest in his work. God help them.
***
Derrida gave that interview less than three years before his death, so we must keep in mind that by that point he was more of an honoured elder/venerable sage in academe than a vital living force.