A long note on the silliness

Hi all,

I'm probably just wasting my time, but...

There seems to be a mistaken impression around here that something in the
work of Jacques Derrida makes meaning impossible or understanding impossible or
makes judgment or position-taking impossible or renders everything relative or
nothingness or negative or some other such nonsense.

Nothing that Derrida has ever actually written has ever argued such a thing
or resulted in any such conclusions.

If anything, Derrida is in fact quite the opposite sort of thinker -- he
speaks often of preserving meaning and texts and conserving the tradition which he
"deconstructs" (a word which for him has never, in any way, meant "dismantle"
or "destroy").

At one point, in an interview, he distinguishes between the terms
"indeterminancy" and "undecidability." His distinction here is interesting, because it
emphasizes what he believes is fixed and determinate about language (and
actions, etc.) and their finite possibilities.

He says, "I do not believe I have ever spoken of 'indeterminancy,' whether in
regard to 'meaning' or anything else. Undecidability is something else
again. While referring to what I have said above and elsewhere, I want to recall
that undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities
(for example, of meaning, but also of acts). These possibilities are
themselves highly determined in strictly defined situations (for example, discursive --
syntactical or rhetorical -- but also political, ethical, etc.). The are
pragmatically determined. The analyses I have devoted to undecidability concern
just these determinations and these definitions, not at all some vague
'indeterminancy.' I say 'undecidability' rather then 'indeterminancy' because I am
more interested in relations of force, in differences of force, in everything
that allows, precisely, determinations in given situations to be stabilized
through decisions of writing (in the broad sense I give to this word, which also
included political action and experience in general). There would be no
indecision or double bind were it not between determined (semantic, ethical,
political) poles, which are upon occasion terribly necessary and always irreplaceably
singular. Which is to say that from the point of view of semantics, but also
of ethics and politics, 'deconstruction' should never lead either to
relativism or to any sort of indeterminism."

Elsewhere, as I have already mentioned, Derrida has analyzed specifically
what he sees as the evils of racism and more specifically its historical origins
in South Africa, and what precisely, in a highly determined way, allowed those
evils to exist so successfully for so long. His analysis prompted a debate
among scholars of African culture and politics in the late eighties. Derrida
participated in this debate, and was later asked about how he could claim to
have been "misread," given what the questioner believed JD thought about
language. Derrida corrected his questioner, citing from the question:

"The 'commentators' whom you evoke would, as you suggest, have totally
'mistaken' the 'implications' of my discourse in general and of what I have said of
apartheid in the particular context to which you refer. They commit the same
'mistakes' as those to whom I respond in Critical Inquiry. I consider the
context of that discussion, like that of this one, to be very stable and very
determined. It constitutes the object of agreements sufficiently confirmed so
that one might count on ties that are stable, and hence demonstrable, linking
words, concepts and things, as well as on the difference between the true and
the false. And hence one is able, in this context, to denounce errors, and even
dishonesty and confusions."

Derrida has always insisted that deconstruction means close, careful,
patient, detailed reading which respects the contexts and the shared discourses of
the text and its readers. He has always insisted on the existence of determined
and specific fields of meaning and context which are precisely what he seeks
to analyze and understand.

And he never rejects anything like logocentrism or the Western tradition or
any other such formulation. He reads. He critiques. He analyzes. But he
does not either reject or dismantle. And he says this over and over again.

When others heard the word "deconstruction" and thought it meant dismantling
or rejecting, he tried repeatedly to clarify and correct them as to what he
meant by it (and yes such a thing is very possible, and even necessary,
according to the logic of deconstruction), and then later simply stopped using the
word.

When asked whether he dismantled meaning and texts, and if that's what the
word deconstruction meant, he once said this about the history of the term:

"When others got involved in it, I tried to determine the concept in my own
manner, that is, according to what I thought was the right manner, which I did
by insisting on the fact that it was not a question of a negative operation."

(Once again, for Luke -- not a question of a negative operation)

"I love very much everything I deconstruct in my own manner; the texts I want
to read from the deconstructive point of view are texts I love, with that
impulse of identification which is indispensable for reading. They are texts
whose future, I think, will not be exhausted for a long time. For example, I
think Plato is to be read, and read constantly. Plato's signature is not yet
finished -- that's the destiny of signatures -- nor is Nietzsche's, nor is St.
Augustine's (like you, I'm altogether convinced of that), nor are the signatures
of still many others. Thus, if my relation to these texts is characterized by
loving jealousy and not at all by nihilistic fury (one can't read anything in
the latter condition), then I don't feel I'm in a position to choose
according to the terms in which you have presented the choice."

Derrida is a philosopher of the tradition. He is not a postmodernist nor a
relativist nor an atheist nor a nihilist nor any other such nonsense. And
nothing in his writing suggests he is. He is much more conservative, in many
ways, than some of his more famous colleagues, like Foucault or Lyotard or
Baudrillard. And he is always very affirmative in his reading and in his analyses.

I should mentioned found the few citations above in the very first books I
opened, on the very first pages I read. There are millions more like them,
everywhere in his work.

What you read on this list, by many, about Derrida and his work, is sadly
shallow and ill-informed and careless.

*********************************************************

And guys, I do not know who taught you the cartoon caricature of Derrida that
you present around here, but I hope they did not get paid for doing so. You
got ripped off.

**********************************************************

And now back to the silliness, I suspect,

--John

PS: (and I was right...) Luke, now you write:

"Establishing a contradiction between apartheid rhetoric and the realities of
its implementation requires reason, to distinguish the two as unlike."

And since Derrida is a philosopher who insists on reason, that is not a
problem. All you have done is agree with his anyalysis of the problem in your own
response.

PPS: Sorry, Tim.

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Received on Mon Aug 11 22:36:46 2003