Re: Meaning, intentionality, and responsibility...

john v. omlor (omlor@packet.net)
Mon, 14 Sep 1998 07:54:17 -0500 

Just a couple of quick points, as I have relatively little problem with the
response Matt recently offered about fine tuning his comments on
"poststructuralisms" (and I put the word in quotes here more insistently
than I would the word deconstructions because although I feel I can offer a
reasonable explanation of the latter in a few screens or so, the former is
so often used to cover so many texts -- in this case apparently from the
historiographies and genealogies of Foucault all the way to the early
Derrida in Matt's post (I hope the later Derrida, even he agrees would be
something else -- surely, for instance, his work on the gift and on Europe
and its future, for instance). Also, I would argue that both words should,
whenever possible, probably be written in the plural (Derrida has taken to
insisting on this these days within discussions of deconstructions as a way
of reminding people that the word has come to stand for so many texts and
readings and writings) since we are still talking about a rather
heterogeneous collection of singular moments.

Matt writes:

>Now, when I note that Barthes eventually gives way to Foucault and the
>poststructuralists, I have in mind the Foucault who himself is very
>attentive to the problems inherent in trying to escape structure.


While I agree that in some of his work F. is at least "attentive" to this
concern (even moreso for instance in works we haven't mentioned such as his
"History of Sexuality"), this attentiveness, it seems to me, more often
collapses back into a structuralist's reliance on a fixed and readable
concept of "discourse" as historicized than it does in, JD or in, say,
Delueze and Guattari or even Lacan.  But that's not what troubles me about
all of this.  It is, actually, the "gives way" and the notion that one can
draw a line from Barthes to Foucault, when in fact, such a line would have
a number of breaks and not be a recognizable line at all considering the
differences between the two men's work.  Clearly by the time Foucault
renounces his archeological project in favor of a rewriting of Nietzchean
genealogy (in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History" and many works
thereafter) he is simply doing something altogether different from Barthes
(though not, I think, necessarily "poststructuralist" even in the limited
sense of "self-conscious" that Matt seems to be stipulating).  In any case,
the later Barthes (of say *Barthes on Barthes* -- his extremely problematic
autobiography) seems to me under this definition to be far more
"poststructralist" than anything Foucault wrote.  The point here isn't a
"who is-who isn't" one -- indeed the labels are confining, restricting, and
in the case of work like Derrida's actually counterproductive (and JD does
have a clear and powerful piece on this word and its problems entitled
"Some Statements and Truisms About Neologisms, Newisms, Positisms,
Parasitisms, and other Small Seismisms" collected in David Carroll's
*States of Theory*, where he discusses the many mostrosities that too often
accompany this word and remind us that such titles "do not respond, do not
correspons to any classifiable identity, to any corpus which can be
delimited (67).")  The point here is simply that the history implied in the
"Barthes gives way to Foucault and the poststructuralists" claim is both
too neat *and* gets its history a bit wrong besides.

Also, Matt writes:

>Without going so far as to say
>that the orignial stock of decon has been polluted, I note that the
>critique of structure, after so noble a beginning, and through no fault
>of its many honest practitioners, has slipped into a horrible
>complacency.


Well, only someplaces obviously -- and in many of those places it was
always horribly complacent.  However, in many other places, both here in
the US but even moreso right now in Europe, this is not true at all -- and
it is certainly not true, I think, in the work of people like Sam Weber and
David Farrell Krell and Judith Butler and many, many others, including JD
himself.  A quick look, by the way, at the Derrida web pages that Peter
Krapp has constructed out on the West Coast and in Germany can demonstrate
this (I can give the URL laater if anyone is interested).  On the other
hand, there is always complacency in the academy and it has had a damaging
effect on how these works are taught from the very beginning and will
continue to fill sudents with misimpressions and with the horrifying belief
that they don't have to read the specific texts.  This is precisely why
deconstructions' insistences on slow, deliberate, patient and careful
reading and a respectful double affirmation -- its warnings about going too
quickly -- are so necessary here and now.

I must go and try and teach carefully myself at the moment.  I hope this
has been OK.

Thanks again,

--John