Monday, May 09, 2005
(9:13 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Debating Derrida
It's true, I cannot resist a Derrida debate. All too often, I find myself in the awkward position of being the last commenter in a thread -- the person who straightens up the chairs and shuts off the light once everyone else has gotten bored and walked away. This is not to say that there are never boring parts of any given Derrida debate. For instance, exchanges in this genre quickly become tedious:
Derrida Cultist: "Many of Derrida's most trenchant critics don't seem to have read much of his work, or read very carefully. You can tell by comparing their arguments to the actual passages they're quoting -- here, let me show you."
anti-Derrida Cultist: "You arrogant bastard. How typical! I guess everyone who disagrees with Derrida has just failed to comprehend his transcendent genius and complexity."
DC: "Well, no, that's not what I'm..."
anti-DC: "Can't stand to have your little idol attacked, huh? You're just going to have to accept the fact that some people disagree and that it doesn't mean that they're mentally handicapped."
DC: "Of course people can disagree, it's just..."
anti-DC: "You theory people are all alike. I'm so sick of your nonsense. Ever since the Sokal hoax, your entire intellectual enterprise has been thoroughly discredited."
Right. I will venture an opinion here. It might sound anti-Derridean in spirit, but only to those who have decided to allow cliches and slurs about Derrida to stand in for the body of work itself. Any given text limits the number of reasonable objections that can be made against it. Those who are deeply acquainted with the key texts of Derrida (for example, "me") are able to identify those kinds of objections; in fact, we may very well share some of them. We are also able to identify objections that have become common cultural currency (among them, the idea that Derrida says that a text can mean any old thing an interpreter wants), but that no reasonable interpreter could arrive at based on a more or less careful reading of Derrida's actual work. These are hardly ground-breaking principles, and to the extent that they claim special knowledge for "Derrida fans," it is knowledge that is publicly available and is accessible, in principle, to anyone who cares to obtain it.
That is, if you feel like there's something seriously wrong with Derrida's intellectual project, the responsible thing to do is to go to the library, perhaps equipped with a list of what a Derrida scholar believes to be his key works, and sit down and read that stuff with the same level of attention you would give to anything about which you hope to write a serious scholarly study -- in fact, if you don't have a really strong background in philosophy or a decent acquaintance with the French language, you might even want to give it more attention, to avoid the embarrassing situation of making strong assertions based on a misunderstanding.
I suppose that if you're writing for an audience that has never read much Derrida, or at least never understood him, and is already convinced of whatever point you're mining his texts in order to prove, you could just skip all this -- but then don't cry foul if someone who actually knows a lot about Derrida comes along and points out that you're being irresponsible and intellectually dishonest. And I'd recommend being a little more careful about accusing Derrida's partisans of being afraid to face strong intellectual scrutiny, because a literary theorist is likely to know a thing or two about Carl Jung and can thus recognize that your accusation is a clear-cut example of "projection" -- that is, attributing to some other person emotions that you yourself are experiencing. As I've noted, there are plenty of people who have engaged Derrida in depth and decided that he's just not right on some key point of his project, and there are even more people who have decided that engaging with Derrida would not be the best use of their time and thus simply remain silent on Derrida. But since we're psychologizing (that is, since the anti-Derrideans started this game of psychologizing by airing their special insights into the petty insecurities of the "fake intellectuals" who would dare to believe anything Derrida says), I'd say that the person doing a hatchet job against Derrida and then refusing to listen when someone who actually knows a lot about Derrida says that the charges are not accurate or are not supported -- that's the person who is refusing to give up his or her own prejudices.
Just to give any respondants a paragraph to exclude when they're blockquoting me: I have repeatedly made clear that I am not equating all criticism of Derrida with ignorance. He's not some kind of magical author who is right about everything and is automatically convincing to everyone who reads him. There are a lot of people for whom Derrida is probably not the best use of their time -- I think they're missing out on a very engaging and brilliant thinker, but there are plenty of other engaging and brilliant thinkers I'm missing out on by reading Derrida. What I'm talking about is the "hatchet job" people, or the people who revel in their ignorance of Derrida as if it were some kind of mark of intellectual discernment (either claiming to have read a good chunk of Derrida and decided it was nonsense, or else claiming that various hatchet jobs have proven that actually reading Derrida is a waste of time). And I have a feeling that as long as I can't resist a debate on Derrida, I'm going to keep on running into those proud, willfully ignorant people -- because they clearly can't resist a debate on Derrida either.
OH DEAR: It looks as though my comments in that thread have drawn the ire of John Holbo. The Valve is fast becoming the Internet's indispensable one-stop venue for discussion of the cultural politics of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world!
