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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Of all the comments made about Jacques Derrida of late, the most apposite was made by AS Byatt; "He wrote with immense ad hoc wit and had no interest in creating a system, but his followers did create a system and sought to deconstruct everything." Like Nietzsche, Derrida was more than capable of containing multitudes, something evidenced by his refusal to define deconstruction. His writing tended to suggest that the meaning of language could only be understood in relation to language itself, to an endless play of differance, either obfuscating the notion of a referent beyond language or making the idea of an other beyond language ever more important (making it clear to understand why Habermas called Derrida a Jewish mystic). This was not so much a matter of inconsistency (though I doubt that Derrida was ever especially concerned about criticisms of that ilk), but as a matter of refusing to deny the plurality of meanings. This also applied to his political and ethical observations, where he stressed the need for pluralism, thereby enabling him to support Habermas' declaration of European values (presumably for reasons not dissimilar to Popper's advocacy of the open society).
However, it should be recalled that Derrida wrote at a time when literature had lost its place at the apex of French culture, displaced to a large extent by the writing of figures like Derrida. Like Hietszche or Kierkegaard he was as much a writer as a philosopher. As this recent London Review of Books article put it:"Viewed comparatively, the striking feature of the human sciences and philosophy that counted in this period was the extent to which they came to be written increasingly as virtuoso exercises of style, drawing on the resources and licences of artistic rather than academic forms. Lacan's Ecrits, closer to Mallarmé than Freud in their syntax, or Derrida's Glas, with its double-columned interlacing of Genet and Hegel, represent extreme forms of this strategy. But Foucault's oracular gestures, mingling echoes of Artaud and Bossuet, Lévi-Strauss's Wagnerian constructions, Barthes's eclectic coquetries, belong to the same register."
Update: Needless to add, many of the comments on Derrida have been hostile. More often that not they tend to deal with postmodernist concepts of meta-narratives in relation to politics and ethics rather than deconstruction. As an example, Johann Hari wrote:"There are, he said, no universal truths, no progress and ultimately no sense, only "decentred", small stories that are often silenced by a search for rationality and consistency. The Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative. "
As I've written before, such arguments concerning the universality of ethical and political concepts (typically highly culturally specific ones) tend to put the cart before the philosophical horse; assuming that since such concepts are deemed necessary it follows that a philosophical justification is also necessary. Moreover, the argument concerning the Enlightenment also greatly interests me; surely one of the central characteristics of the Enlightenment is the way in which it produced and assimilated its opposites; Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and indeed Derrida. The implication persistently seems to be that Enlightenment concepts are unable to withstand the plurality that supposedly underpins them. The idea of an Enlightenment heritage is always assumed to be considerably more fragile than actually appears to be the case. Beyond that, there is the further question of what we actually mean by terms like 'the Englightenment;' such things can hardly be seen as homogenous concepts and much of Enlightenment thought was deconstructive; consider Hume's views on reason, for example. Finally, there is the question of whether the Enlightenment was quite the unalloyed good Hari takes it to be; there is an argument to be had that Enlightenment concepts formed the backbones of some of the worst totalitarian disasters of the twentieth century.Labels: Philosophy, Theory
posted by Richard 6:53 pm
