Wednesday, July 14, 2004
(10:48 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Guilty, Furtive
I sometimes think that the past four years, on the political level, have been meaningless. Actively meaningless, as though the stated goal of the Bush administration was to rape language at every opportunity. Rumsfeld will resign if he no longer believes himself to be effective, but doesn't want the matter of his resignation to be a "political issue." Is that their strategy? Are they trying to hit a kind of "depression sweet spot" whereby their statements come as close as possible to "absurd on its face" while simultaneously requiring some kind of effort to dismantle? Are they trying to make their supporters feel like brilliant textual analysts by hiding some hint of a possibly extant meaning that you can parse out if you believe?Crimes against language. I'm reading Derrida's "Force of Law" in the hope of one day possibly writing a paper on it, and I'm torn. On the one hand, I think it's distressing the way that Derrida so frequently seems to turn from questions of real, physical violence to questions of language -- but then on the other hand, I'm living under the Bush administration. Is there any correspondance between our mangled national discourse and a mangled corpse in Iraq? Is it obscene to ask? Is it obscene not to ask?
The problem with the Bush administration is not that they are liars. The problem is that they have completely effaced any clean distinction between the truth and a lie. I literally don't know what it would mean for George W. Bush, or any of them, to tell the truth.
And with every fucking word I write, I can hear the right-wing talking points screaming at me -- every fucking word. I already know the objections, and I know that they don't make any sense, but they come like a torrent and suck all the reason out of me. They control everything, these talking points -- you cannot not write about them, even if you want to mock or dismiss or (good luck) disprove them. No matter what you do, they will already have won, or at least declared victory: mock, and you're hateful; dismiss, and you're elitist; disprove, and you're biased. A completely negative movement, a vicious circle of self-reproducing lies colonizing our very lifeworld -- stealing our money, gutting our schools, polluting our air, imprisoning peace-loving immigrants, taking our rights, killing our young people who were stupid enough to sign up for the army, killing tens of thousands of people in order to liberate them.
Crimes against language.
