Re: Individuals arent' the people who read; they're the people who get

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Matt writes:

>Somewhere in this chain of reasoning, Barthes gives way to Foucault and
>the poststructuralists.

To me, this is an icky sentence.  There are a number of reasons why such
neo-Hegelian patterns of linear intellectual development bother me (for
one, they are much too easy and allow one to ignore significant differences
among a bunch of specific texts and arguments and for another they are much
too quick in their tracing of complex histories and relationships).
However, just to make one point, I would want to mention that if by
"poststructuralists" Matt is including Derrida, then his account of their
arguments about the construction of the author is not exactly accurate.
This is not the place for a reading of JD's many writings on this issue,
but I can claim with some confidence that nowhere in his work (and I have
over the years managed to nearly all of it that has been published and some
that hasn't), nowehere does JD ever speak of "getting rid" of anything or
of "the death" of anything and I do hope that it is understood that nothing
in that work loosely grouped under the unfortunate name "deconstruction" is
there anything about stepping over the author or the individual or "getting
beyond" such concepts.  For assurance and reassurance on that particular
topic see, among other places, Derrida's interview "Eating Well" in Eduardo
Cadava's *Who Comes After the Subject?" Where Derrida details why we
can*not* speak of "after the subject" in such an easy way.  As early as his
debate with John Searle on these issues in a series of articles Derrida was
careful to insist on these problems remaining problems which demand careful
and cautious work rather than a rhetoric of transcendence or
dissappearance.  Of course, Barthes *and* Foucault retain enough
structuralism in the works so far cited that they remain a different
critical animal than Derrida or others one could call "poststructuralist"
(although this easy word too is a problem -- see JD's "Some Truisms..."
about that).

As to the ability to remain "individuals" and read without positing a final
signified, I think it's done all the time (if, of course, we agree to a
multiplicity of possible formulations for the idea of "individual"  -- a
term which has a long and complicated textual history that needs to be
considered and which has roots in Idealism and particularly Kantian
subjectivity and which *has* clearly come to mean a whole bunch of stuff,
some of it rather alternative and decentred and even sometimes subversive
in other people's work in the past century and a half in literature,
psychology and philosophy).  As to how such indivudual readings occur --
well, one example would be Derrida's psuedo-biographical, performative
reading of Freud in *The Post Card* -- one in which the "individual" and
the "author" as they ae being discussed here are often featured players.
Another good example would be the use of the the many individuals (and
their readings) in writing and elsehwere that have gone into making the
name "Genet" and how those signatures can be written into and through the
imperial and absent author that Hegel wanted to be -- this work can be
found in a wonderful book called *Glas*.  Indeed, Derrida has written
constantly about authors and their work and their lives and insists on the
crucial nature of these relationships throughout both sides of *Glas*...

But I *really* don't want to go there.  There is much more, but I hope I
have at least made the argument that the issue for some
"poststructuralists" is not at all one of going past or beyond anything or
the death of anything at all.

I also suspect I am trying the list's patience (and I feel guilty for
leaving out the other JD -- such a strange thing to find intention
arguments on a list that is on the one hand about and structured around the
notion of a "single author" and "his" works and on the other hand about an
author who is often defined explicitly by his silence on such matters....).
I will stop now and will continue the theory discussion privately if
anyone still wishes me to go further into such things (which I cannot
imagine).

Thanks again,

--John

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