fucking with Derrida

Damn, damn, damn. There's no going from Point A to Point B this evening. I just spent a few hours providing you not only with a very nice blog roundup, but with some snide commentary about Jacques Derrida's philosophy, deconstruction (which he wouldn't style a philosophy, by the way, for the same reason he refuses the label "deconstructionism"-- with thanks to Dr. doCarmo for pointing this out years ago).

My current computer at the PC-bahng had other ideas, though, and decided you didn't need to know anything I was telling you. So it displayed an error message, left me no option but to close Explorer and lose all my unsaved work, then refused to let me reopen Explorer until I hit the all-powerful "restart" button.

OK, screw the roundup this evening (sorry, fellow bloggers). What I wanted to say about Derrida is that his "deconstruction" is, to my mind, about 90% shit, and the remaining 10% is badly rehashed Eastern philo, right down to a very Buddhist critique of the "metaphysics of presence" he perceives in Western philosophy and culture-- i.e., foundationalism, reificationism, essentialism, etc. Problem is, as any good philo student knows, Greek philosophy (at which Derrida is primarily aiming) wasn't all reificationist. Heraclitus (approx. late 6th cent. BCE), for example, viewed the world in terms of flux. Even Democritus' (approx 460-370 BCE) atomism is suffused with dynamism; it's hard to label his worldview a "metaphysics of presence" in the sense Derrida intends, and Derrida is aiming primarily at Plato and Aristotle.

[above refs = The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Deconstruction (some argue it's a radicalization, not a rejection, of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic notions) isn't wrong to bring the idea of différance (deliberately misspelled) to the philosophical discussion. The contention that meaning is contextual, plastic, relational-- both differing and deferred-- isn't particularly revolutionary, nor (at least to a Buddhist) is the insight that there is no "transcendental signified"-- that metaphysical ground in which ultimate meaning is rooted. Buddhism anticipated this kind of nonessentialism centuries ago.

Derrida's most infamous catchphrase was and is "il n'y a pas de hors-texte," which some people translate as "There is nothing outside of text," suggesting that existence is radically, inescapably textual. Derrida himself has backed away from the major implications of this contention (cf. Edith Wyschogrod's Saints and Postmodernism [can't remember the page], which mentions Derrida never meant the phrase to imply all it seems to), and he'd better, because the belief that there is nothing prelinguistic or preintellectual about human existence is bullshit.

Match "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" up against "The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao," for example. The Tao Te Ching's primary contention is that ultimate (ordinary) experience lies beyond the discursive realm. My favorite way of explaining this is through a question:

Imagine you're talking to someone who's never smelled or tasted chocolate. Can you describe chocolate's taste so accurately that you evoke exactly the right gustatory impression in your listener-- i.e., such that they, too, experience the taste of chocolate?

If you get pissy with me and try to explain that it may be possible to do this through language alone (something I very much doubt), I'd say you're on thin ice. The commonsense answer is: No, you can't evoke chocolate through language alone. The taste of chocolate-- such a simple, ordinary thing-- has to be experienced. The chocolate I can talk about is not the true chocolate. Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn uses watermelon as his example (cf. The Compass of Zen). Thich Nhat Hanh uses apple juice to make the same point (cf. Living Buddha, Living Christ). To "attain" watermelon (as Seung Sahn puts it), there's nothing to do but cut a slice and bite that puppy. "BOOM! Your experience!" Seung Sahn laughs.

Zen dharma talks aim at a realm that lies completely outside of Derrida's paltry formulation, but this realm lies completely within the bounds of ordinary, everyday human experience. And this above all else is what makes me mistrust Derrida's agenda: it's a typically French attempt to inject absurdist fantasy into human existence. Where the Zennist and Taoist take pleasure in the absoluteness of the ordinary, Derrida's sense of fun makes him and his followers veer into a crazier form of dualism, in which the realm of meaning offers little more than the eternal play of different/deferred signifiers. While Derrida may have uncovered certain truths, he's done this very poorly and awkwardly, and articulated his position in language too esoteric to be meaningful to the people for whom it's supposedly relevant.

I take too dim a view of Derrida to belong to the now-burgeoning school of Eastern philo nuts who are trying to establish more and more commonalities between Derridean and Eastern thought. I'm not convinced the project is worthwhile, though I can't help thinking that deconstruction can only be improved by such interaction.

Here's that Derrida quote from Andrew Sullivan's site:

"Borridori [interviewer]: September 11 [Le 11 Septembre] gave us the impression of being a major event, one of the most important historical events we will witness in our lifetime, especially for those of us who never lived through a world war. Do you agree?

Derrida: Le 11 Septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, "September 11." We will have to return later to this question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say "September 11" you are already citing, are you not? Something fait date, I would say in French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history. "To mark a date in history" presupposes, in any case, an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are - and I want to insist on this at the outset - only suppositions and presuppositions. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. The telegram of this metonymy - a name, a number - points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about." - from "Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida," by Giovanna Borridori. Excerpted in the latest Harper's magazine.

Here's where people like yours truly come in handy. We can break this shit down into something intelligible, then JUDGE IT. Ready?

What Derrida is saying:

Presuppositions about what the date "September 11" signifies are not shared by everybody. Further, we haven't wrapped our mind around "September 11" as textual label or as historical phenomenon.

That wasn't so hard. Now let's judge this observation.

Four words: barely relevant mental farting.

Sullivan is mocking how it takes Derrida a whole paragraph to express what I just expressed in under 35 words. Sullivan may also be questioning whether Derrida has a point. I'd need to read more of the interview before I make a judgement about that.

My own point is that Derrida, when you read him, isn't purveying total bullshit, but you do have to pick through the shitpile to find those juicy bits of corn and peanuts. I can say this, having watched his 1999 keynote speech and having gotten my styrofoam cup signed by the man: he's not an evil little gnome (though he is little, and does look sort of evil). He has a great sense of humor, and (if I may venture a guess) probably doesn't take himself nearly as seriously as his self-important acolytes take him. Don't worry so much about the potential harm of Derrida the man-- worry instead, as Camille Paglia does, about Derrida the movement (and on a scatological site like mine, movement is an exquisitely redolent term for what Derrida has begotten).

Deconstruction and the wider postmodernist vogue don't strike me as all that useful for much beyond lame critique of the West's shortcomings. Deconstruction is overly political, and because it's self-deconstructing (please don't put this on a level with Nagarjuna's [c. 150-250 CE] emptiness of emptiness), it doesn't seem to lend itself very well even to literary criticism, the field that arguably sees the most Derridean prick-waving. I have yet to read a truly clear, coherent deconstructive analysis (if that word even applies to what a deconstructionist does), though this may also be my fault for not trying that hard. If a reader out there is in love with Derrida or his followers and can point me to some truly amazing deconstructive works available online, I'll make the effort to read and respond-- in many cases employing the paring "technique" I used above.

Humanities academe thrives on verbiage, bloviation, the fifty-cent word. I'm guilty of engaging in this myself, I realize, but have retained enough of my wits (despite a hermeneutics course that did much to unseat my psyche) to know when I'm doing it. What I'd like to think is that Derrida-- who isn't young, and who is probably, as we speak, immersed in a Bergmanesque game of chess with Death-- is basically playing a huge joke on us all.

That would rock. It would be the biggest fuck-you to academe in history.

If the last thing Jacques Derrida says or writes is similar to Aquinas' famous quote, "All is straw" (i.e., "Everything I wrote in my life amounts to a pile of shit"-- Thomists and neo-Thomists have been living in constant denial of this ever since), I will be first in line to throw flowers on the evil gnome's casket.

But if Derrida's actually serious about all this (and if we're realistic, we have to admit the strong possibility that he is), then I'll bring along a sledgehammer to the funeral so I can whack his corpse a good one in the balls and hope he feels the blow in Sheol.

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