Wednesday, October 13, 2004
(10:40 AM) | Adam R:
Adam Tyner Robinson's Blogging Condition
What can I say about Jacques Derrida? That’s the point, isn’t it, that there’s something to be said? That each of us is to share, to speak, to create a mesh over the chaos? And yet I have more love for the words in the books, in the pages between the covers; I have more love for the fact that they are there than for anything they might mean.So what can I say? I don’t pretend to understand this problem. I have an intuitive idea of what it means when Levinas said of Derrida that he “[brings] to an end ‘a naivety, an unsuspected dogmatism that slumbered in the depths of’ recent philosophy,” a quote which I found in an essay by Edith Wyschogrod. I suspect—merely suspect—that he is pointing to a fundamentally misplaced understanding of how we are able to speak of—speak in—the world. I only bring it up because so many people lately have accused Derrida of trying to make everything meaningless, which I don’t think, I think, is what he meant to happen.
But then when we got to the, you know, the discussion of the imperialism of the logos, of the ways that history is violence, of the primordial il y a and the absence of transcendence, I get muddled. I can’t think those thoughts. I can barely read the words on the pages.
But shouldn’t I say something? It’s important that we speak. It’s important that we “keep reading,” but—even in our ignorance—aren’t we supposed to speak? Aren’t our voices the sieve? Aren’t our words the keys? This is one thing I learned from my classes in philosophy: even when we are in over our heads and up to our necks in texts like wooden blocks, speaking can loosen up something, elucidate some chunk of meaning.
I ought to contrast that with my courses in English, where ninety percent of the readings were immediately meaningful—what could be said of them? It seemed silly, it made me self-conscious, to discuss the obvious books, to wring the pages of Madame Bovary for something that was always already beautiful enough on the surface. Much more enjoyable were the sessions when we tried to hash out The Sound and the Fury, when we tried to make sense of Pale Fire.
Maybe—I merely suspect—that this is what Hélène Cixous meant when she suggested that writers are outlaws, and that literature ought to be a transgression. Writing is an in-breaking. Writers break in, and it’s imperative that they get caught, that they get found out, that their confessions are heard. Because we are all criminals, but there is only one writing. This is the writing that has no market value, that is rejected at one’s death. A writer must be unreadable, her language be foreign. It is ours (our gifted possession, our responsibility) to interpret. To speak.
Of Derrida, there is so much to say.
