Posted on 10/20/2004 11:36:47 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
A headline for an obituary in the October 10 New York Times said it all: “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74.”
There is no denying the “abstruse” part. The French philosopher’s work was not just difficult to understand; it was incomprehensible. Yet, for all of Derrida’s murky and jargon-ridden prose, his impact on the world we live in was enormous.
Derrida, you see, was the father of “deconstruction.” That is the literary theory that says that “all writing [is] full of confusion and contradiction . . . the author’s intent [can] not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself.” So, all texts, whether literary, historical, or philosophical, are devoid of “truthfulness, absolute meaning, and permanence.”
Now, Derrida may have just been having fun. I often thought that he put out these unfathomable statements just to watch the confusion. Intellectuals took him seriously and thought he was saying something so profound that their problem was that they did not understand it. So they held conferences to try to figure him out. All the while he was being entertained, however, he created huge mischief: People believed his intellectual nonsense.
While his French contemporaries dismissed him, he soon found a receptive audience in America. A generation of American scholars has championed his theories, especially at Yale, where Paul de Man, Derrida’s close friend, taught.
If Derrida’s maxim that “there is nothing outside the text” had been limited to literary theory, he might not have done much damage. However, deconstruction broke out of the literature department and was applied to almost every non-scientific discipline: history, “anthropology, political science, [and] even architecture.”
An example of this took place at Duke Law School. There, Stanley Fish, America’s leading deconstructionist, although not a lawyer, taught courses in law, admitting that he knew nothing about law. Why would we he need to? If, like Fish and Derrida, you believe that “there is nothing outside the text” except what the reader brings to it, it doesn’t matter what others have thought and written about the law.
This subjectivity, however, only gives ammunition to lawyers and jurists who want to interpret constitutions and statutes in ways never imagined by their drafters. Or, some are creative enough, they just disregard the statutes. This has created a crisis in the law: using the courts as tools for social engineering.
We will be living with the consequences for a long time. A generation of Americans has been taught to believe that there’s no such thing as objective truth, only preferences, and one person’s preference is as good as anyone else’s. If students read books at all, they care less about what the author had to say than about their own opinions and feelings.
The very day Derrida died, I was on an airplane. A couple recognized me and came over to talk. They told me the sad tale of how four years of college had turned their son from a solid Christian into a doubt-ridden skeptic. Now multiply that incident a million-fold, and you’ll understand the real legacy of Jacques Derrida, who amused himself at our great expense. Who said ideas don’t have consequences?
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Not me. The damage this idiot caused is incalculable.
He must have grown up on a diet of James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake".
Isaiah 2 2 And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.
Isaiah 11 9 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.
Revelation 11 15 And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.
John Kerry must be an ardent fan of Jacques Derrida, then! Fool all of the people all of the time; baffle them with bullsh**! Able to re-evaluate his position and consider all aspects of our oh-so-complicated problems several times within the same paragraph - nay! - sentence! A true practicioner of "creative thinking" - "I am not where you think I am, for I am not where I was a moment ago." QUANTUM LOGIC - the ability to occupy multiple states of existence at one and the same time WITHOUT contradicting yourself! A nuanced practicioner of "multiple intelligences" and "multi-dimensional thinking." The ever versatile, eminently dependable and trustworthy, multi-tasking, multiculti JOHN EFFIN' KERRY. One can only hope that MISTER Kerry offers an eloquent eulogy on the death of one of the "greatest thinkers" (BARF ALERT) of postmodern times. May Jacques Derrida, who didn't know whether he was coming or going until the definitive moment when he shucked off his mortal coil (no offense intended) rest in eternal "peaces!"
Derrida's philosophy offers definitive justification for those monks who take a vow of perpetual silence. Too bad Kerry and Edwards couldn't do the same, becoming magicians and mimes in the same act, and spare us the prospect of 4 (or even, as in the Clinton years, 8! - horror of horrors!) years of mass confusion.
I just pinged nearly this same list with a link to an article by Robert Wolf comparing the Enlightenment to multi-culturalist present-day thought:
Just as reverence for multi-culturalism has removed all judgement from human affairs, so too, has its intellectual evil twin, which I will call multi-conceptism removed judgement from the realm of ideas. Our young are taught that firmly held convictions and clear visions of the truth are worthless hallucinations of the mind and that truth and fact are judgmental. It is more important to understand process than to produce a correct answer and no particular idea is more noteworthy than any other.An uncritical view of these ideas could be our downfall. But more than that, an uncritical stance in general is now a huge threat. For example, where is the willingness to criticize embryonic stem cell research, genetically engineered crops, hyper-inflated immigration, gun control, and the push for abolishing traditional marriage? All of these things represent massive changes to our culture. No one knows the results. But we're rushing headlong to embrace them all, like so many performance artists cum scientists.
If we need to be angry, it's because nobody wants to ask "why" anymore. It's always "how soon can we start down a new path."
T.S. Eliot is one of the most forhtright and clerest of literary critics. One of the things that's not being mentioned about Derrida is that nothing he said was all that new. Language is naturally ambiguous? Greeks were saying that 2500 years ago. Authorial intent sometimes pulls the rug out from under the author...Nietzche and Freud said as much.
Amen brother.
When Derrida was asked to define deconstruction he replied that there really was no sufficient definition, that it could not be defined.
What a joke. Kind of like sKerry's position on most anything!
When your thesis is that communication through language is essentially futile I guess it's not in your best interests to be comprehensible in general !
"I thinik it's reasonable to criticize Derrida, but are ideas themselves dangerous?"
I'd say some systems of ideas contain inherent self-contradictions which, if the ideas are applied, are intrinsically destructive to the socio-cultural fabric (one might think on analogy with a computer virus); and I'd put deconstruction in that category.
Fortunately, even deconstructionism is just another text.
Derrida was the first one to admit this!
Interesting, Borges. I'm a T.S. Elliot fan. Currently, his Hollow Men poem is in my profile. I think he's reaching for what Fedora referred to in #40 on another Derrida thread as a correspondence theory of truth. Death is a reminder that in all the things we strive to acheive, in the end we will have to let go of our ambitions.
Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow...
Ideas don't kill people, people kill people. As ideas are always contained within a brain, no idea has ever been destructive to the "socio-cultural fabric." It's how people act upon ideas that causes the problems.
LOL!
I think post-structural analysis is like a tool. It actually can be applied from the right (in our political context). For example, we can deconstruct the Democrats by finding the nexus of power on a given policy, and then find their polarity. We can find a reference to our own position in that context and shred theirs without even saying what we're doing.
Furthermore, I would argue that it is the application of post-structural thought that leads to self-contradiction. I found arguments around the Internet suggesting that Derrida accepted external reality; but he went much further than supplying us with tools to rethink the world (the interior of which was more interesting to him).
I don't think he'd complain if we said he wanted to destroy the west with his ideas. And I doubt he or Foucault would be surprised to find out that we can use them to intellectually destroy his apostles today.
An excellent paraphrase of John Milton, Areopagitia, 1644.
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