Knowing J.D. -- On Derrida and Lit.
john v. omlor (omlor@packet.net)
Thu, 10 Dec 1998 14:40:44 -0500
How strange. All is this talk of Derrida and understanding and knowing and
subverting. Well, at least I can say this. I know Derrida (and if there
are to be quotation marks in that sentence, they should more properly bind
the proper name rather than the problematic verb). By this, I mean in part
that I know the work, or most of the work, or at least the work translated
and some of the work yet to be translated, signed "Jacques Derrida" -- and
it is this signature that is always already the problem, hidden (*derriere
le rideaux*, one might say of his name), before those "What is..." problems
of understanding, knowing, or subverting (the latter verb being something
JD insists at times that he is actually not engaged in -- precisely because
of its dangerously implied binarism. Dissemination /deconstruction
/grammatology/displacement/etc... none of these, nor the undecidability of
the fort/da nor the hymen nor the trace nor the remainder nor the sponge
nor the Chora nor the parerga nor the post card nor the blinds nor the gl-
effect nor any of the other aporias within which Derrida has read and
written -- none of these represent a logic of subversion. Interrogation
and disturbance and warning and careful reading perhaps and certainly a
movement towards a respect for radical heterogeneity -- but not quite
subversion even in a political sense, although Derrida has always and
everywhere been in certain terms thoroughly political -- not subversion, I
suspect, even in the early days of the reversal/displacement patterns that
characterized JD's responses to structuralism).
Also, by the way, when I write that "I know Derrida" I am fortunate also
to be able to mean that I know Jacques Derrida, the writer, the professor,
the human being. He has been kind enough to have helped me on several
occassions with my work, including a too long dissertation in large part on
his work. He has taken the time to correspond with me at various intervals
and we have spent some very enjoyable time together at a number of academic
conferences over the years. To that extent, as shaky as it is, I guess I
can also say I know him. But what this means precisely, is stuff for
novelists and poets and playwrights and filmmakers as well as philosphers.
It might interest some around here to know that he always wanted, from his
early days as a student, to be a scholar of literature and even a creative
writer (which, of course, he already is -- see the first half of *The Post
Card* for proof, for instance). In his thesis defense he tells his
committee:
"For I have to remind you, somewhat bluntly and simply, that my most
constant interest, coming even before my philosophical interest I should
say, if this is possible, has been directed towards literature, towards
that writing which is called literary." ("The Time of a Thesis" 37)
And of course the line between "that writing which is called literary" and
the writing that is called "philosohical" is one of the places that Derrida
has most frequently and most powerfully pursued his work (*in *Glas* most
explicitly --between Hegel and Genet -- about which I have written too
often, elsewhere).
In the same defense, JD goes on to ask questions that seem to me very much
at home here on the Salinger list.
"What is literature? And first of all what is it 'to write?' How
is it that the fact of writing can disturb the very the very question 'what
is?' and even 'what does it mean?' To say this in other words -- and here
is the *saying otherwise* that was of importance to me -- when and how does
an inscription become literature and what takes place when it does? To
what and whom is this due? What takes place between philosophy and
literature, science and literature, politics and literature, theology and
literature, psychoanalysis and literature? It was here, in all the
abstractness of the title that lay the most pressing question. This
question was doubtless inspired in me by a desire which was related also to
a certain uneasiness: why finally does the inscription so fascinate me,
preoccupy me, precede me? Why am I so fascinated by the literary ruse of
the inscription and the whole ungraspable paradox of a trace which manages
only to carry itself away, to erase itself in marking itself out afresh,
itself and its own idiom, which in order to take actual form must erase
itself and produce itself at the price of this self-erasure. (37-38)
It seems to me something very much like this curiously problematic act of
reading and writing the traces of meaning and the erasure of these traces
and then carefully re-reading and re-writing their own re-production
happens often when I read Salinger. This is not, by the way, technically
speaking a "deconstruction." Deconstructions (and JD now insists on the
plural for a number of important reasons) are something slightly different
which I *can* actually describe -- but in another post and only if asked --
for that may be trying too many readers' patience.
Thanks for reading. I am, as you can tell, on break.
With too much time on his hands,
--John
"If I clearly saw ahead of time where I was going, I really don't believe
that I should take another step to get there."
--Derrida, from the text cited above...