Saturday, February 19, 2005
(11:02 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Missing Out / Derrida-ed Out
Apparently, while grappling with the world-historical significance of Pauline exegesis, I have missed out on a few interesting theory related threads out there in Blogland. First, I of course cite Jodi Dean, part of whose process of recovering from Habermasianism is a rejection of democracy. She also uncovered this critique of Left populism, particularly the replacement of principles by cynicism, with reference to The Daily Show. Matt has some incisive remarks on the article at Pas Au-Delà:But keen observers are those who recognize a red flag (as they say) whenever the word "failure" is invoked as self-evident, beyond all doubt (as in the "failure of Theory," "failure of Communism," "failure of the 60's," etc.) Such phrases often betray an entire host of common, clichéd prejudices--in short, a worldview--whether they intend to do so or not. And the phrase "failure of the left" is not always untouched by this tendency. As the film Control Room concludes, on a Howard Zinnian note, the tragedy is in people remembering only one thing: Victory (whether "History" or disengenuous, attempted performative utterance).Matt also has several posts on Derrida, which I won't link individually, unless he wants me to artificially inflate his Technorati numbers. Mark Kaplan's continued attention to the theme of so-called "anti-Americanism" is interesting as usual, as is his Žižekian analysis of the "position of enunciation" of a blog -- a rather familiar type, which announces itself as left wing while fully embracing every arbitrary criticism from the right. Žižek may be right to say that we need less dialogue (Organs Without Bodies [Routledge, 2004]: p. 1).
Last night's Northwestern event on Derrida was something of a disappointment -- a brief symposium at which four professors, one graduate student, and one undergraduate (!) offered short reflections on the greatness of Derrida. The most interesting paper by far, in my opinion, was Penelope Deutscher's, which asked some very probing questions about Derrida's conflicted relationship with feminism -- if he professed such admiration for feminism, why did he never undertake a deconstructive reading of a feminist text, for example? She even offered an example of a text that would have been very productive for a Derridean reading,
In any case, in a completely unprecedented fashion, this academic event ended with a failed attempt at a Q&A session. Part of the problem may well be that so many of the participants had also attended Peggy Kamuf's excellent (and much more substantial) lecture earlier in the day, where the Q&A session found Samuel Weber asking if Peggy had recently looked over "the Bataille essay" (meaning the essay on Bataille and Hegel in Writing and Difference -- she hadn't) and further inquiring as to why Bataille simply "drops out" in later works, especially in Given Time, in which Bataille's economic analysis would have been clearly relevant. Michael Naas recalled a conference (in Portugal) where Derrida had gotten the same question, and it turns out to be a strategic choice to dissociate his concept of unconditionality from both sovereignty and freedom (as opposed to Jean-Luc Nancy -- and I'll admit that among this highly French-oriented crowd, I was at first confused when Sarte's La nausée seemed to be coming up so often, especially since "Jean-Luc" for me is Marion, not Nancy -- who attempts to rehabilitate freedom, and whom Derrida critiques in Rogues). I wanted to note that Bataille does play some role in the footnotes to Politics of Friendship, but I was frankly somewhat intimidated by the fact that I was in the very nerve-center of Derrideanism and didn't know if I could really make the case that my remark was relevant to the conversation at hand. All this to say: perhaps people were simply Q&A'd out and just wanted some damn wine.
I have gotten a huge helping of Derrida over the past few days, so I am looking forward to this week, when I plan on hammering out my Wesley/Badiou project. (I should probably also look into getting some damn plane tickets to Seattle -- since CTS isn't coughing up any money for me to go represent their sorry asses with my sheer brilliance, perhaps a web-based fundraiser would be in order. But in order for that to work, I suppose I would have had to make more of an effort to cultivate an audience not entirely made up of poor grad students.) With all due apologies to the Vanderbilt School, I plan on taking a materialist approach to Wesley, because -- again, with apologies to the Vanderbilt School, and to Søren Kierkegaard -- I think that materialist analysis is less incompatible with the gospel proclamation than is any other intellectual framework. At least that's my working hypothesis. Bill Brower "called" that materialist analysis of religious texts was going to be huge once this Paul thing really took root, and I think it's at least plausible. He said that the materialists would get ahold of Barth and never let go; I figure I might as well offer up Wesley as well. The guy's a total economic radical, and -- this is important -- not one of those medieval-fetishizing early socialists like Ruskin. In short, what we get in Wesley is a thoroughly non-obscurantist, though fragmentary, critique of capital.
Okay, but no more spoilers! You're just going to have to come to Seattle to hear more.
