Una lettura non delle più semplici del Reb. Tre capitoli in particolare hanno lasciato il segno di questa lettura. Il che, richiede, necessariamente una possibile rilettura, ogni volta unica. Gira e rigira, finendo sempre col ringraziare. ( )

What a slog! This is a series of essays deconstructing other writers. Unless you're intimately familiar with these other writings, the allusions probably won't make much sense. Even if you have familiarity with the writers, Derrida seems more intent to prove himself clever (lots of self-stroking) than to advance any argument. Ah, but that's just it...that's right...the very notion of advancing an argument is suspect...just posits one center, one logos, in place of another. So it must be OK, all is play. Reminded me of Deleuze; the French philosophers love nonsense apparently, particularly those who were influenced by the psychoanalytic tradition. We're all fools and we shouldn't pretend otherwise, so embrace the madness already! Postmodernism is profound, of course; you must agree. Question everything but that. There were a few nice moments in descriptions of Descartes, Freud, and Levi-Strauss, but overall this work was disappointing. I've always enjoyed Nietzschean deconstruction, so I suppose at least one and perhaps both of two things must be true: 1. this book doesn't have nearly enough yes-saying for my taste (because to say yes is to assert logos, one's own) 2. I'm too devoted to a modern outlook to appreciate Derrida's "genius."

Here at the end of a fifty-year wave of change in how we think about meaning in the humanities, a lot of the lionization as well as a lot of the criticism leveled against this poster child for uncompromising poststructuralism, the kind that can't be integrated into marketing theory or wargames but slams the foundations of our ways of knowing and apparatuses for arranging that knowledge--a lot of the hullaballoo is starting to look not unwarranted, but misguided. The dismantling and cleanup of the old construction will take further decades before we even know what we're looking at, but I would submit that Derrida was not so much an epoch-making as a transitional figure, less Bob Dylan than Chuck Berry, and that like Berry, the novelty of his work will wilt--it will go from irrelevance to truism, and its game-changing nature will be obscured by just how thoroughly it changed the game.


Because there's truth to a lot of the criticism--of course he's using the tools of the old thinking to attack it, no matter how cute he tried to be about it, and no matter how ridiculous and dogmatic a "deconstruction as process or treatment" approach it opened up for certain of his acolytes. His approach is as binary as anything, and his pet binary is the opposition between "binary opposition" and opposition to binaries. And sure, there's a tower-of-skulls quality to that, where we're looking for fecundity and laterality. The great problem is that he's trying to attack the thinking of the past with the tools of the future, which don't exist yet, and certainly didn't in his time, and as such is seeing through the proverbial glass darkly with the language of Saussure--like trying to prepare spaghetti using only a magnifying glass and a backgammon set.


But what makes this moral philosophy is that he doesn't let that dissuade him from making his critique. And if there's a fundamental structuralism in his poststructuralism, a lack-that-wrongfoots to his method, a lark's-tongues-in-aspic approximate or inappropriate quality to his chain of difference-deferral that makes you crave a fuller, less language-bound, warmer and opener and more interactive model with more positive and less negative potential: well, iconoclasts can't be expected to be visionaries.


Iconoclasts aren't visionaries. And they're not, need it be said, nihilistic in their assault on prevailing ways of meaning. Derrida, in fact, is radically optimistic. He's less shouting fire in a crowded theatre than setting fire to a fallow field, and the attention that draws is like the skeptical fascination of the early agricultural humans who have seen the great lushness that grow up after the forest fire but still can't conceive doing that violence to their carefully tended terraces and granges; it's like the consternation and loyalty engendered by crotchety old Socrates, unsettling the ancient pieties and clearing the way, clearing the way, clearing the way for radical Platonic creation of critical vocabulary. And in that regard, Derrida's real children are guys who have been conceived as parallel or even antagonistic to him, like Baudrillard with his hyperreal that is hypersignification but also a veil of unknowing, or, more than anyone, the Deleuze and Guattari of 1000 Plateaus, who take over Derrida's fallow field and fill it with rhizomatic verdure--his workmanlike model with greenery covering all the hinges and cogs. ( )