Wednesday, January 25, 2006
(10:53 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Plagiarism
Scott McLemee has a characteristically excellent column up today on plagiarism. While reading it, I was reminded (somewhat tangentially) of a thought that has crossed my mind more than once recently: what is at stake when someone claims that the ideas of a contemporary figure can all be found in some form in his predecessors? For example, someone might say that a particular idea of Derrida was already found in Kant, or whomever. Obviously, the intention of such statements is usually to dismiss Derrida (or whomever) as not worth the speaker's time -- and to declare that, as opposed to the Derrida fans, the speaker can distinguish between genuinely original thoughts and second-hand merchandise.An interesting paradox opens up here. On the one hand, fans of Derrida are often derided as fetishizers of mere novelty, all to ready to throw the tradition out the window. On the other hand, the opponents of the Derrida fans end up as the true fetishizers of novelty, arguing that Derrida can be dismissed precisely because he is not radically breaking with the tradition. The claim that a serious reckoning with the ideas of Kant might, of itself, produce something new -- indeed, might produce a "new Kant" -- is never considered. Kant is Kant. "Kant" is Kant's property, in perpetuity. All surplus valued generated by the laborer on Kant's property is to be credited to Kant's account.
"Derrida" and "Kant" are of course only examples, even if Derrida might be considered a particularly exemplary example of the phenomenon I'm describing.
