I'm in a really strange position vis-à-vis Derrida. On the one hand I love Samuel Wheeler's Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, Martin Hagglund's Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, and Lee Braver's discussion of Derrida in A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. I mean, I've learned a lot from Derrida through Wheeler, Hagglund, and Braver. And have learned a lot talking about Derrida with my friend and oftimes co-writer Mark Silcox and with my colleague Francois Raffoul.
On the other hand, trying to read Derrida never, ever, ever ends well for me. One memorable evening I actually got hives. It's as bad as how Martin Amis describes the effects of the novels of Richard Tull, the protagonist of The Information. No one can finish his last modernist experiment before getting ill. At one point a case of the books almost causes a plane crash. That's exactly how Derrida's prose effects me.
And I never managed to figure out why this was the case until reading Graham Harman's blog today.
No. Graham Harman finally explains it. My revulsion is not from the stylistic affectations alone, but actually moral revulsion at what Derrida does with those affectations. Harman's post is worth quoting in full:
Derrida has his good moments, but there are too many moments like this one on pages 3-4 of Positions:
“In what you call my books, what is first of all put into question is the unity of the book and the unity ‘book’ considered as a perfect totality, with all the implications of such a concept. And you know that these implications concern the totality of our culture, directly or indirectly. At the moment when such a closure demarcates itself, dare one maintain that one is the author of books, be they one, two, or three?”
At the moment when such a closure demarcates itself, dare one maintain that Led Zeppelin has recorded albums, be they eight, nine, or ten?
There is an inherent problem with this compulsive unwillingness to stand anywhere in particular even while insisting that purported gullible dupes such as the person who was kind enough to interview Derrida are the very incarnation of naiveté for daring to use such credulous words as “book.”
You can’t place yourself forever beyond all definite statement and commitment, calling everything into question, placing everything in brackets and quotation marks, while feeding off the life-energy of those who dare to do so and hence can be the gullible foils of your supposed superior sophistication.
One of the major factors that made Žižek such a perfect post-Derrida leading actor, I believe, is the compelling force of his dogmatic assertions and his willingness to take responsibility for the thing he says.
If you ask Žižek about his books, he would never in a million years begin by saying: “In what you call my books…” And I happen to think Žižek is in the right here.
In what you call my blog…
I think one of the coolest things in contemporary continental philosophy is the extent to which people no longer engage in the p(r)ose exposed by Harman (gratuitous abuse of parentheses being part of that for a couple of decades).
I also think there is a strong connection between this and the other great development in continental philosophy, the move away from exegesis and towards analysis (in the broadest possible sense) and system building. As Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, and Nick Srnicek write in their Introduction to The Speculative Turn:
These are exciting times in our field. No dominant hero now strides along the beach, as the phase of subservient commentary on the history of philosophy seems to have ended. Genuine attempts at full-blown systematic thought are no longer rare in our circles; increasingly, they are even expected.
The sort of fey constitutive refusal to commit that Derrida turned into an artform, and that infected the prose of a lot of my friends doing continental philosophy in the 1980s when I was at the University of Texas, is part and parcel of too much ironic distance, a kind and amount of distance incompatible with system building but weirdly not incompatible with exegetical standards that sometimes bordered on hero worship.
[Notes: (1) I think insofar as "analytic" and "continental" ever denoted anything, they were inverse prototype concepts that only fairly characterized exemplars of the worst philosophy done in each category. This is inevitable because there is no royal methodological road to wisdom, good philosophy being sui generis. As a result, membership in each category could at best be determined by metaphorical distance to the nadirs. So when I discuss what seems to me to be derivative Derrideana that apes the pose Harman exposes I'm not trying to characterize even very much of what people have called continental philosophy. Foucault and Deleuze never went in for that kind of thing, and from the 60's on Americans who wrote about them didn't fall into the same kind of stylistic t(r)icks and affectations that make Marder's recent book so aggravatingly unreadable. And Braver, Wheeler, Hagglund, and many others before them such as Culler have written accessible yet deep work involving Derrida. (2) Let me again state that it is completely clear to me from Wheeler, Braver, and Hagglund's work that Derrida is an important philosopher. Harman didn't mean to suggest otherwise either. Just as a first rate philosopher like Heidegger can have morally contemptible politics, a first rate philosopher can have morally contemptible prose and conversational habits. But in both cases I think we should let go of our hero worship and be honest about the spiritual rot.]
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