Derrida was not superman
Derrida is dead but not erased. Steve Johnson has blogged a memoir that, in a couple of paragraphs, puts Derrida in a perspective that others have spent volumes trying to get right. Snippet:
Ultimately, I came out of that period with the feeling that deconstruction was ultimately an accurate, legitimate, and surprisingly understandable critique of the way language produces meaning. (Or it least it could have been understandable, if its proponents weren’t so insistent on having their writing enact the contradictory, self-erasing property they were trying to document — which is a bit like a evolutionary biologist choosing to write a paper using strands of DNA.) But I also came to feel that the lessons of deconstruction were fundamentally small ones; extremely important to deal with if you were, say, a philosopher of language –but not all that important if you were trying to analyze a novel, or a political movement.
When Derrida was coming to prominence, I was hanging out with Heideggerians who viewed Derrida as someone who would spew irksome contradictions merely to have something to say…pretty much exactly what non-Heideggerians thought of Heidegger. I never made it over Derrida’s intelligibility hump. In fact, only now am I reading Foucault with the respect — awe — he deserves. Maybe I’ll make it to Derrida before I die…
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I studied Derrida in the late 80s, early 90s. What I realized of course was that after the master’s home was razed, there were no tools with which to build anything. It was then that I looked deeper and discovered that Derrida and Cixous were having a laugh. They were doing what intellectuals — er, what I mean to say French intellectuals — were doing, which is to say, playing. Now, Americans are pitifully earnest and we never quite saw the wink so we took what was meant to be merely a tool — in much the same way that a flame thrower or napalm bomb is a tool — and not a revolution. So, there are the French intellectuals both agast and amused at all the damage we had dome to Western Culture. Of course the French are quick to consider everything normal: c’est normale, so they merely rolled with the punches. We, on the other hand, recoiled and will never be the same again. The trust is gone. It is like the Kabala: young minds should never be exposed to such powerful magic.
Yeah, Derrida had a hell of a sense of humor, but nearly no one in the U.S. got it (the post card that never arrived at its destination). Part of what he showed us is that language is fundamentally broken, but it still works.
And people in the U.S. never got to the second part of the previous sentence–he wasn’t against language; Derrida rolled in the wonder that language worked at all. He wanted, I think, people to understand how contingent and complicated communication was so that they’d appreciate that wonder.
Deconstruction was a minor and isolated point in one way of thinking, but a tectonic shift in another, like understanding that the earth isn’t the center of the universe (Galileo) or that time and space are relative (Einstein).
Much of the damage to his reputation falls to people who aped his convoluted prose style without understanding the workings of that style; it had more in common with James Joyce than Dada (at least stylistically if not philosophically).
And–ironically–I can’t find the link to the Steve Johnson bit on Derrida in the original weblog entry above…. Am I missing something. (Undoubtedly.)
Wow, I’ve never seen a Heideggerian at all, let alone a bunch of them together. I must be hanging out in the wrong places! (Seriously!)
BTW, the memoir in question is here: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000202.html
Ack. Thanks, Len, for posting the url. I wrote that blog entry on the run in an airport. (Well, I actually was sitting down.) I got sloppy. I’ve fixed the entry.
In The Wake of Derrida
Last night, between snarky comments about the debate, David Weinberger and I were chatting about postmodern theorists (sorry to sound pretentious; if it makes us sound more down-to-earth, I could quote some of the Halley-inspired political commentary w…
Following a mysterious absence of several years, the Man of Steel comes back to Earth in the epic action-adventure Superman Returns, a soaring new
See new superman return gallerty at
http://www.opida.com/Cat/Business/SupermanReturn/default.aspx