Over at Object-Oriented Philosophy, Graham has a post up responding to Matthew Calarco’s remarks on Derrida (here and here). I agree with all Harman says, however I wanted to point out what a sad affair this aborted dialogue is. Calarco’s quote deployed to support his point actually taught me something new about Derrida, but because it was framed in the rhetoric of a professor condescendingly lecturing ignorant students, no discussion could take place. Moreover, I think Calarco should just acknowledge that there’s a pretty standard version of Derrida that emphasizes text and language over all else and that he’s presenting a deviant reading of Derrida that both expands his thought and does something new. Rather than hiding behind Derrida’s pants Matthew should focus on the originality of his own expansion of deconstructive thought in a realist direction. That would be interesting! Certainly Morton has softened me up towards Derrida quite a bit as a result of making precisely this move.
Some readers of this blog might have noticed that I’m responding to comments less and less. A lot of this has to do with tone. Some comments I don’t respond to just because I largely agree and have nothing to add (Joseph Goodson’s comments generally fall in this category). Other comments, however, I don’t respond to just because either a) they’re rude, or b) discussion isn’t going to go anywhere. If someone starts off by giving me a lecture about the finer points of a philosopher’s thought, then I won’t respond because such a mode of interlocution situates me in a subordinate role as a pupil to a teacher. That’s no way to begin a discussion. This recently happened with someone lecturing me about the finer points of Graham’s thought, striving to correct me. Likewise, if someone asks me to solve some massive problem I won’t respond as I’m not a dancing monkey that solves problems on demand. The same person recently addressed me in such a way, asking me to provide a philosophy of nature and science. I’ll get around to such things on my own time and won’t do them on demand. Finally, if someone sets off with guns blazing, trying to demolish my own position, I just won’t respond. First, I’ve found that such people generally are unfamiliar with OOO and are attributing all sorts of claims to us based on word connotations alone without having previously followed my blog or read the relevant texts. Second, I’m just not going to give up my own position and project based on such encounters. Consequently, I just don’t see the point of even dignifying such discussions.
Philosophical discussion needs to begin from a place of mutual respect and an interest in exploring each other’s ideas. For some reason or another many theory folks see antagonistic argumentation as the primary mode of interaction. I’m not sure what they hope to accomplish by addressing people in this way. Increasingly I’ve also received emails that say things like “I used to be interested in OOO but now I find it thoroughly uninteresting”. While these emails are few and far between, I find myself wondering what a person who writes such things is hoping to accomplish or why they would even say such a thing. Imagine saying such a thing to a good friend: “I used to find you interesting, but now I find you thoroughly uninteresting.” Is this something you would say to a good friend? What would you hope to accomplish by saying it? Would you expect such a person to respond?
The point is not that criticism is out of line. I get a lot out of my discussions with Vitale, Shaviro, and Ivikhiv, all of whom are critical of my position. However, there’s mutual respect in all of these discussions, even if they get heated at times. Nor are any of us, I think, trying to demolish the work of others. We state our points of divergence, we respond to one another, we clarify our claims, and as a consequence all of our thought grows. Likewise in my debate with Bogost over Marxism. I have no illusions that Bogost is going to become a Marxist, that Shaviro is going to give up on Whitehead and Kant, or that Ivakhiv and Vitale are going to give up on process and becoming. That’s not the point. All of us strengthen and deepen our positions through our discussions. We admire and recognize interesting aspects of each others work through these discussions, steal concepts from one another, build new concepts, and so on. It’s a productive discussion and it’s a discussion that isn’t based on the antagonistic aim of destroying each other’s positions, nor is it a condescending discussion based on correcting one another.
Larval Subjects . 
August 7, 2010 at 4:23 pm
Plus it’s getting to be a full-time job, no? It seems that a scarcity of your time comes into play.
August 7, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Yep, but mostly a lot of people just exhaust me and drain my energy, leaving me sad, depressed, and despondent.
August 7, 2010 at 4:27 pm
[…] 7, 2010 Here he is WEIGHING IN ON L’AFFAIRE CALARCO, but also making more general points with which I agree. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in […]
August 7, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Great advice all around.
I’ve always thought that there was something absolutely right about Leibniz’ claim that the secret to being a good reader is to read the book so that it contains truths. Something right about that, even though it’s false at the same time.
I think your meditations here about the most productive way to approach interlocutors with whom you disagree gets to the (true!) heart of what Leibniz meant.
August 7, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Couldn’t agree with you more Levi. Thanks for the post and in advance for future dialogues.
August 8, 2010 at 12:15 am
Hi Levi (and Graham–you don’t allow comments on your blog, so I’ll drop them here):
First off, for Levi, I’m glad that you learned something new about Derrida. That’s all my remarks were intended to do in your case and in the case of other readers–set the record straight on a simple interpretive matter. On the tone and dialogue issues you raise, you and I have very different ideas about what philosophy is and how it proceeds. So we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. But thanks for posting my remark–you’re a good sport.
Second, for Graham, I read both of your comments and found them terribly silly, to be perfectly frank. You didn’t challenge the substance of anything I wrote. Instead, (like Levi) you challenge the tone I wrote my remarks in? And then you ask why Derrideans don’t join you? OK . . .
1. In regard to your remarks on my tone and rhetorical effectiveness, meta-debates like these put me to sleep. Sorry–I can’t bother with them. They are, however, a lovely way of distracting people from the issue at hand and fueling the marketing machine . . .
2. As for why Derrideans don’t come to your defense, this too distracts from the issue at hand. But let me answer anyway, since you continually make such an issue out of it. There are probably many reasons they aren’t allying themselves with you: perhaps they are not interested in Derrida’s proto-ontology; perhaps they don’t stay up with discussions in OOO; perhaps they don’t know your work; perhaps they are crappy readers of Derrida’s work and don’t understand what he’s up to in this area. Shall I go on?
Ultimately, though: why do you care what Derrideans are up to anyway? We’re talking about Derrida’s work not Derrideans; and he has important things to offer in discussions of non-anthropocentric ontology. Whether Derrideans ever catch on to this or promote it is a different (and pretty boring) conversation–and one that I’ll have to pass on. I’m not a Derridean and don’t much care what Derrideans think.
So, that leaves us with the actual point at hand, Graham. You read that passage. Could it have been any clearer to you what he was saying there? Was it not painfully obvious that you and Levi are badly misreading him? How come you didn’t engage the passage I cited?
Finally, I don’t think it’s to Derrida’s *credit* that he arrived on the scene 40+ years before you with the idea of extending relations of alterity and withdrawal to nonhuman beings. To be frank, once again, I think this is where the chief *mistake* of his project lies. He charts a very remarkable path out of metaphysical humanism, and does a fine job of identifying the anthropocentric blind spots of modern anti-humanism. But as soon as he generalizes his (non)phenomenological findings to the proto-ontological level the way he does, he reintroduces a subtle but very stubborn anthropocentrism that he simply is unable to see, even at the very end of his career.
Just a thought: your version of OOO might, just might, be engaging in the very same kind of Derridean gesture without knowing it.
But no that can’t be right. I’m probably just projecting things onto Derrida’s work and badly misreading your version of OOO. I mean, you state emphatically that your ontology is non-anthropocentric; and Derrida never talks about anything but books!
August 8, 2010 at 12:28 am
Eventually, everyone will realize that AUFS has the only workable comment policy. Glad to have you on board, Levi.
August 8, 2010 at 3:31 am
Matthew- You can’t burst into a room acting like that and then complain that people ignored the “substance” of your remarks. Especially not when you’re nearly as bad in the follow-up.
And incidentally, the “substance” of your remarks was one passage from Derrida, without context and without even a page number,
surrounded by lots of bluster and insult and inflated claims.
I’m finished with you already; if you put something in print I may have to respond to it.
August 8, 2010 at 3:43 am
Still evading, Graham?
There was plenty of substance to what I wrote and you know it. That’s why you won’t respond directly to what I wrote and will only talk about the way I wrote it.
For the quotation, you have a computer, no? Check Google books. I’m sure it’s there.
I never stated that everyone knows these things about Derrida; I stated that they are basic to Derrida’s project (101 stuff) and that you won’t be able to read him well without understanding these basic matters.
This isn’t a “debate,” and I never said it was. A debate can’t take place until willful misreadings are set aside.
I put my name on my comments. Does it look like I’m not taking responsibility for them? And if you want to put this topic into print, be my guest. I’d suggest for your article title: “Derrida Writes only on BOOKS!” You get that into print, I promise I’ll write a rejoinder and submit it to the same journal. It’ll be a hoot.
August 8, 2010 at 4:20 am
Matthew:
I think that you will find both Levi and Graham open to ideas from strange or unexpected sources — right in the middle of Levi’s deeply realist work you find inspiration from Lacan, for instance. But I really have to agree with them about the tone and mien of your posts which is, I find, insufferable. First, you seem to only appear to “correct” people about Derrida, but not really to offer much in the way of constructive or positive criticism. Second, you are obviously deeply familiar with Derrida, and I can’t help but think you have completely undermined your own desire here. You immediately situate yourself outside both Derrida and OOO, only barely hinting at your own thoughts about it. When you do refer to OOO, the subtext is dismissive — Derrida did this first. Which may very well be true! I am only familiar with a fraction of Derrida as you are, and I find myself interested now in a Derrida-OOO link in spite of the tone of your remarks. But I really think that you will receive like for like here: if the tone and attitude is one of genuine concern for the philosophical concepts at hand, and it is not done sarcastically or dismissively, then you will receive a fair hearing. I find one of Graham’s strategies to be very effective — one might say, “here is what I think, I don’t expect you to agree with me immediately, but here is how I came to this conclusion, and if you follow this path you may see the same thing I did. Take your time to think about it, as it is worth it.” But to come in as you have and just say, look, this is ridiculous, here is a quote and a passage to prove it, change your mind as you’re obviously wrong — when would that convince anyone about anything? I mean, not only in philosophy is it difficult enough, but with the work of someone as complex as Derrida, when has the quoting of one or two lines really “proved” anything? Not sure that would work with Plato or Hegel, either.
In any case, it seems to be too late, the missives have been sent and impressions have been made, but, as someone who is now interested in the Derrida-OOO connection, this could have happened very differently and with much more salutary effect.
August 8, 2010 at 4:36 am
Matthew,
I’m afraid I don’t see how you said anything of substance here. You cited a passage from Derrida about how x extends well beyond the human. This doesn’t mean a whole lot in a French post-structuralist context where the human was treated as a linguistic and historical construction. Now you might very well have your own project here that expands and resituates Derrida’s. I’d be very interested in hearing about it. However I really don’t see how you can suggest, with a straight face, that the thinker who spent his life commenting on the texts of others was a staunch defender of extra-textual realities. All that aside, what do you hope to accomplish in this discussion?
August 8, 2010 at 5:32 am
To be fair, twenty or so years ago (this was even before Derrida’s “ethics turn”) Jonathon Culler was arguing over and over again that Derrida didn’t really mean that stuff about their being nothing outside the text.
But Graham’s post didn’t dispute that (even though Culler’s view was never embraced by mainstream SPEPers as far as I can tell). What he claimed is that the overwhelming majority of Derrida scholars have read Derrida as either a radical anti-realist (please see Braver’s brilliant book) or at best a “realism of the remainder” (that can’t even individuate objects, much less develop a workable ontology) of the type he (Harman) very ably critiques in several publications.
And you do need to be humble about this Mathew. I mean, one of the biggest recent books in Derrideana is Marder’s “Event of the Thing” ( http://www.amazon.com/Event-Thing-Derridas-Post-Deconstructive-Realism/dp/0802098924 ) which interprets Derrida IN EXACTLY THE WAY HARMAN is talking about.
So it is not only rude to go on about “Derrida 101,” it’s really just profoundly mistaken as a claim about how Derrida is typically interpreted. I mean Marder was hired with tenure at one of the top SPEP schools; so some people with institutional power smile on that interpretation (actually it’s probably more complicated, with his stale version of neo-Kantian realism of the remainder seen as hip or new in contrast to the traditional anti-realist).
This being said, I should note that to me Morton’s Derridean writing about the ecological thought is in part so exciting to me because it is salvaging a lot of the kind of Schopenhaurian/Buddhist aspect of realism of the remainder type realism, hopefully ultimately in a way consistent with many of Harman and Bryant’s deep insights.
Finally, come on. You can’t seriously dispute what Levi is claiming about how text-centric the overwhelming majority of Derrida’s writings are.
August 8, 2010 at 6:52 am
Joseph,
You seem like a very straightforward, well-meaning person. I’d be happy to discuss any of these issues at length with you by email. Just drop me a note. I talk with half the people here by email on a regular basis.
Levi,
Well, it *was* a blog comment and not a proper essay! That said, I made the claim that Derrida makes room for nonhuman-nonhuman relations of alterity, provided a quotation for it, explained it, and so on. How much more could anyone want on that issue?
As for the quotation not meaning a whole lot, well, I don’t know what to say to that other than to read the interview with Nancy and see if you don’t change your mind. Derrida is, in essence, clarifying that his major “infrastructures” are meant to apply to relations everywhere, that is, well beyond humanity. Those infrastructures lay out, in various contexts and under numerous rubrics, the very relations of alterity, withdrawal, affect, and so on that are under discussion here. The claim that Graham made (with zero evidence) was that Derrida doesn’t do this. I claim the contrary and provide some basic evidence. If you want more evidence, read my Derrida chapter in Zoographies. But why bother? Why not just read Derrida for that info?
As for my own project, I am not offering an original reading of Derrida that I need to defend or expand upon. This stuff is extraordinarily basic and can be found across multiple books. All I’m doing here is clarifying something basic. And in my published work on Derrida and others, all I do is a offer a careful reading of their work so that I can show where my own line of thought differs. I’ll readily admit there are dozens of sloppy commentators on Derrida out there, but who cares? Are you reading them or reading Derrida? Who/what are we talking about here?
You write: “However I really don’t see how you can suggest, with a straight face, that the thinker who spent his life commenting on the texts of others was a staunch defender of extra-textual realities.”
And you and Graham rant about my tone! And you talk about “dialogue”! I tried already to explain this at length. And I did so on *your blog*! I honestly thought you were kidding when you said this same statement a while back.
Derrida only writes on texts? (Or Graham’s version, “Derrida only writes on books”). So, let me glance at the bookshelf. I see Jacques Derrida and the Humanities. I open it to Derrida’s essay, “The Future of the Profession . . . “. Guess what, it’s about the profession of teaching in the Humanities! I see The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. It’s about . . . Europe! I see a book entitled On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. It’s about . . . you guessed it. Shall I continue?
Now, does Derrida write about other books in these books/essays? Sure–what philosopher doesn’t? But can *you* suggest with a straight face that these and literally hundreds of other pieces he’s written are simply comments on other peoples books? Read anyone of those three and get back to me. Hell, carefully re-read *anything* written by Derrida and come back and make that claim.
Now, *strictly speaking,* it’s true that Derrida only writes on the texts of others. According to him, that’s all anyone has access to–just texts, traces that elude full presence. But that sure as hell doesn’t mean he just writes on books. It means that all possible relations with referents–books, mugs, trees, whatever–are shot through with the effects of differance (does OOO claim anything different?). He couldn’t be more explicit about the point that “text” does not mean simply “book written by a philosopher.”
As for what I hoped to accomplish in this discussion, just check my first comment. I said everything right there.
Thanks for posting my comments. I’m off to bed.
August 8, 2010 at 2:18 pm
If Derrida had just written the texts you talk about *nobody* would read him. These are occasional pieces from the late period where he tried to reinvent himself as European-man-of-letters with all the great and terrible baggage that entails.
Seriously, just imagine him not having written Grammatology or the essays in Writing and Difference and the Margins of Philosophy and then writing the political stuff. Nobody would read it.
This is a minor point, the real point again is that Marder’s “realism of the remainder” (for an explanation, read the very good Notre Dame Philosophy Review of his book) interpretation of Derrida has been interpreted as fresh and new. Which disconfirms what you are saying in two important respects. (1) That Derrida-the-realist is just a standard part of Derrida 101, and (2) that, contra Graham, the resulting realism is one that passes a variety of Meillassoux smell tests (Marder’s new radical reading of Derrida certainly does not, just read the NDPR piece). None of your comments above or in your blog discuss this latter point, which was the substance of Graham’s post!
And I should also note that nobody is saying that Marder (whose book I must admit I hate because of it’s tired generic “continental” prose affectations) needs to be taught Derrida 101. No, his realism-or-the-remainder interpretation of Derrida has been treated by the entire profession as radical and new.
And again, to be fair Jonathon Culler was making exactly your claims during the glory days of Grammatology/Writing and Difference/Margins of Philosophy Derrida. But it wasn’t very plausible then. And more to the point, the negative reception of his work by mainstream SPEPers (hopefully with Marder’s book, people will go back and read Culler, who writes very well), as well as the abject failure of the work’s ability to pass the Meillassoux (arche fossil) and Harmanian (individuation) smell tests, just underlines Graham’s point.
So, any way you cut it, you really should be jumping on board and thanking Graham and Levi for the space they’ve opened up in these debates. But instead you’re just instantiating the William James thing he posted.
August 8, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Jon, thanks for the pointer to the Marder book review in NDPR. However, and perhaps ironically, both the NPDR websites and the Google cache of the review fail to load for me. I wonder if I’m not meant to read the review, or perhaps the book ;).
As a one-time Derridean who studied with Culler and others, I find that my interest in this problem of origins is troubled. On the one hand, I’d like to read the interview from which that passage is cited to learn more, but unfortunately it appears in a book that’s almost impossible to find. It’s frequently cited in animal studies, but only as an excerpt. I suppose I could grouse and suggest that a single passage in an interview in a book that cannot be found shouldn’t qualify as “Derrida 101,” but I’ll refrain from belaboring that point.
On the other hand (and more importantly), one of the things that turned me off to Derrida (or really, to Derrideans, or maybe to poststructuralism more generally) is the rhetoric of “anticipation.” There are lots of examples of this; one I remember off the top of my head is from George Landow’s old book Hypertext, in which Landow claims that figures like Bakhtin and Derrida and others “anticipate” hypertext. The problem with such observations aren’t that they are right or wrong, but that they’re so strangely framed, meant to celebrate the particular genius of a favorite figure in order to continue the practice of figure-worship that’s so dominated continental philosophy in America for the past decades. (I suppose that’s my first conclusion about this passage, as I look at the way it’s cited in animal studies… as a sort of “See, Derrida said this already” trump card.) This concept, of course, was important to Heidegger and then Derrida (and Blanchot and others), in the notions of Dasein and the “always already,” so I suppose it’s no surprise that it gets toted out in the context of discussions on Derrida. But after a while–and indeed a long while it has been–it just feels boring, old, tired, like a bad magic trick an old uncle has shown a child umpteen times.
I think we’d do well to remember the old Whitehead aphorism about philosophies not being disproven but abandoned. In my case, my disinterest in Derrida is as much one of weariness and overconsumption as it is in disbelief, perhaps more so. It’s the same feeling one gets after gorging on oysters for a week at the seashore. Who can stand even to look at another oyster? Some will claim such a perspective lacks “rigor” (one of my least favorite defenses), but I’m afraid I just don’t care. A different kind of engagement with philosophy, I think, describes one of the differences between SR/OOO and previous continental trends. For me, that’s one of the reasons I was inspired to get back into philosophy, and since I have the luxury to do so, I’ll happily refuse the invitation to the table of “business as usual” accusationalism.
August 8, 2010 at 4:49 pm
“If Derrida had just written the texts you talk about *nobody* would read him. These are occasional pieces from the late period where he tried to reinvent himself as European-man-of-letters with all the great and terrible baggage that entails.
Seriously, just imagine him not having written Grammatology or the essays in Writing and Difference and the Margins of Philosophy and then writing the political stuff. Nobody would read it.”
These claims are highly speculative, Jon, and no one can really answer them, but a couple of points here: 1) Even if the only books Derrida published were the ones you mention, it would still be very problematic to say that he “only wrote about books” in any way that is different from anyone else writing about books. (Look through the titles of essay/chapters in any of those books, they are not about books, they are about a number of concepts spanning a large number of topics). But Derrida’s writing career spans over 40 years (think about it, four years!), so to say that his early books are his real philosophy and his later books are just his ways of repositioning himself as a public intellectual is not only unfair, but also simply untrue. 2) I find your example of books on Derrida by X, Y, Z to be distractive of Calacro’s point – it’s not important what Derrideans say about Derrida (there are way too many books on Derrida), but what Derrida himself says. Take the example of Harman’s reading of Heidegger that you can complimented on many occasions – its premise is Harman’s argument that, despite all the literature on Heidegger and all the Heideggerians saying all sorts of things, Heidegger’s philosophy is to be read through his tool analysis. Now, as Harman himself readily admits, it’s not an acceptable position among the Heideggerian establishment (and he’s really proud of his heretical status), but that does not in any way affect his argument, does it? Argument here either stands or falls – if we were to argue for correct or incorrect interpretations based on someone writing a book arguing X and then getting hired, we would not be doing philosophy but some disgusting form of academic gossiping. And all this business of “well, if you are correct, Calarco, then how come other people who read Derrida did not already come up with this interpretation?” is rather childish (see Harman’s reading of Heidegger that can be countered with the same question), I think and I don’t understand why you are defending it.
August 8, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Mikhail,
the point is that the thesis that Derrida is a defender of extra-textual access is tenuous to say the least. This is belied by both his practice and explicit claims. No one is disputing that he’s made a number of significant and interesting contributions. I do, however, believe that continenental philosophy needs to broaden and become less fixated on commentary.
August 8, 2010 at 5:15 pm
“Eating Well” is collected in Points…Interviews, 1974-1994
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=2569
Most of the interview, including the passage Matthew cites (274), can be read at Google Books.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ydnInqiO_UcC&pg=PA255&dq=eating+well+derrida&hl=en&ei=JONeTL6HG4n2tgOd3empCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=eating%20well%20derrida&f=false
August 8, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Levi, we certainly don’t disagree on those points. But I would suggest that your insistence that we go beyond simple commentary is at odds with your insistence that we take Derrida at his word (“explicit claims”) and therefore someone like Calarco cannot go against those explicit claims and propose a reading of Derrida that is innovative and counter-intuitive.
I’ve heard you often say that you think philosophy should go beyond commentary, and I support this sentiment whole-heartedly. What I don’t always get is what you mean by “commentary” – some time ago you were writing about how most of the philosophers today need a master-thinker to which they can attach themselves and on the basis of which they can build their philosophical careers. I had mixed feelings about it because on the one side I agree with you, but on the other hand I don’t see how it’s possible to overcome this way of doing philosophy – you have your Deleuze as a starting point, Harman has his Heidegger, I have my Kant and so on. We all begin by “writing about books” and most of us continue to do so (you mention a list of thinkers you discuss in your upcoming book, Harman wrote a book on Latour and is writing one on Meillassoux). Now I see your point here as being less of a “let’s stop commentary” and more as “let’s stop slavish commentary of the text of the master” and I agree with it. Derrida’s did not write about books, it’s pretty clear to anyone who has read Derrida – even early on his point was not about books – the reason I still find Of Grammatology to be a great resource is because it is not about “there is nothing outside the text” kind of misreading of Derrida. Again, I protest against “Derrida only writes about books” because it’s not clear how we ever do anything else as philosophers.
August 8, 2010 at 5:38 pm
“On the other hand (and more importantly), one of the things that turned me off to Derrida (or really, to Derrideans, or maybe to poststructuralism more generally) is the rhetoric of “anticipation.”… But after a while–and indeed a long while it has been–it just feels boring, old, tired, like a bad magic trick an old uncle has shown a child umpteen times.”
Ian, I used to love Iron Maiden back in high school, and I mean I loved me some Iron Maiden – their double guitar solos were innovative and their bass lines were unreally complex (for hair metal). Then I stopped liking them because I discovered other types of music. Now I can launch into a pontificating speech about how Iron Maiden was repetitive and uncreative as they went on and on into, well, still playing music in 20 years and that I’ve lost interest in them. And then I can also imply that my subjective loss of interest in them corresponds to some objective loss of quality. But let’s face it, just because I stopped liking them does not mean they stopped being an awesome band, i.e. just because I found them to be shallow and tired and boring does not mean they actually are such. Surely, your personal experience with Derrida is indicative of something, but it cannot really be indicative of the quality of Derrida’s work, can it? Otherwise we are left with philosophical “like and dislikes” not philosophical arguments which also applies to your Whitehead quote – just because Whitehead said so, does not make it so. You agree with Whitehead quote because you liked Derrida and then didn’t like him (“abandoned him”) and the quote provides a nice explanation as to why, but that doesn’t mean that Whitehead was correct in his assertion.
August 8, 2010 at 5:43 pm
And speaking of Of Grammatology, I believe what Matthew and Mikhail are suggesting is that these are not simply stray remarks scattered throughout Derrida’s work but are, in fact, a critical element present from the beginning as evidenced by this passage from page 9(!) of OG:
Now we tend to say “writing” for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself. And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing.” One might also speak of athletic writing, and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today. All this to describe not only the system of notation sec¬ondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves. It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, 3 it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. Even before being determined as human (with all the distinctive characteristics that have always been attributed to man and the entire system of significations that they imply) or nonhuman, the grammè—or the grapheme—would thus name the element. An element without sim¬plicity. An element, whether it is understood as the medium or as the irreducible atom, of the arche-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within the system of oppositions of metaphysics, of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say the origin of meaning in general.
August 8, 2010 at 5:45 pm
Mikhail,
I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t engage with other philosophers nor that we shouldn’t accurately represent their positions. I am contesting the culture of commentary that pervades continental thought. Harvey relates an amusing anecdote about this in a course on Capital he gave one year. That year he had a bunch of derridean scholars in his class. They spent the entire semester on the first chapter of Capital. I’ve experienced something similar in numerous reading groups with derrideans and gadamerians. There’s nothing outside the text with them and it’s scadalous to argue with the text.
August 8, 2010 at 5:52 pm
marc,
Thanks, for some reason I was confused and thought it was in some other, esoteric collection. Maybe it’s there too? Anyway.
August 8, 2010 at 6:05 pm
I believe you are misremembering Harvey’s anecdote. It actually demonstrated how amazing it was to read Capital in a variety of contexts, that is to say, he loved reading it with Derrideans (even if it drove him crazy at points) because they provided such a different take on the text. You might want to revisit that anecdote, he refers to Johns Hopkins comparative lit students and I don’t believe he ever said that for Derrideans “there was nothing outside the text and that it’s scandalous to argue with the text”… In fact, his message is that because he never heard of Derrida at the time, he thought he was an idiot because of such attention to the text, but the anecdote concludes with Harvey’s statement that he actually learned a lot from such a reading, especially when it came to Marx’s language. And he says that he is very grateful to that group of Derrideans now and so on…
Again, just because Heideggerians are a rather annoying group does not prevent Harman from proposing innovative and anti-establishment readings of Heidegger. Just because you find Derrideans to be annoying (and so do I, trust me) does not mean Derrida’s work is worthless. I think we agree on that, do we not?
August 8, 2010 at 6:05 pm
For what it is worth:
http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com/2010/08/derrida-question-or-question-of-derrida.html
August 8, 2010 at 6:06 pm
I posted a comment yesterday and it didn’t come through so I’ll post the gist.
John Caputo, Christopher Norris, Martin Hagglund, Patrick O’Connor Henry Staten, David Schalkwyk and Arkady Plotnitsky all suggest that Derrida is some sort of ‘realist’, or at the very least is someone who does not reduce the world to text – Norris uses Derrida against the anti-realists. Derrida himself claimed that he had been understood on this point – see Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. 136-137 and elsewhere. And, to add to this illustrious list – me. Many maintain the opposite, in particular, one should note, Derrida’s detractors.
It seems rather than a being “tenuous to say the least” it is a legitimate conflict of interpretation as with many philosophers. Perhaps it is not then at all obvious and we should all step back and consider if there is a real core to the problem rather than surface issues of rhetorical style.
August 8, 2010 at 6:10 pm
And speaking of Of Grammatology, I believe what Matthew and Mikhail are suggesting is that these are not simply stray remarks scattered throughout Derrida’s work but are, in fact, a critical element present from the beginning as evidenced by this passage from page 9(!) of OG:
Now we tend to say “writing” for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself. And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing.” One might also speak of athletic writing, and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today. All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves. It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. Even before being determined as human (with all the distinctive characteristics that have always been attributed to man and the entire system of significations that they imply) or nonhuman, the grammè—or the grapheme—would thus name the element. An element without simplicity. An element, whether it is understood as the medium or as the irreducible atom, of the arche-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within the system of oppositions of metaphysics, of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say the origin of meaning in general.
August 8, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Marc,
I just don’t find this sort of argument compelling. First, there is, as I’ve said, Derrida’s actual textual practice. If he spent substantial time discussing cells, DNA, cybernetics, etc., this would be another matter. However, he doesn’t. Second, one of the most basic claims of French inflected semiology was that of the primacy of language. Consider, for example, Barthes’ argument for privileging language in discussions of the semiology of fashion in The Fashion System. Derrida is very much within that semiological tradition. Consequently, I just don’t find references to DNA compelling in this context.
August 8, 2010 at 6:43 pm
Mikhail,
I am not misremembering Harvey’s anecdote. I referenced it as an example of the sort of thing common among these kinds of textual approaches. Harvey indeed said that he learned a lot that semester, but I don’t think he thought this practice advisable as the norm or as a regular textual practice. Again, my point is that I think these sorts of practices should be discouraged within Continental philosophy. Right now I believe they are dominant.
August 8, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Mikhail,
Surely, your personal experience with Derrida is indicative of something, but it cannot really be indicative of the quality of Derrida’s work, can it?
No, it cannot. But I never claimed it was, nor would I.
As for the Whitehead quote, I find it helpful not for any love or hate of Derrida (believe me, my feelings about Derrida are neither of those) but because it opens the door to other ways of engaging with thinkers and thought beyond formal logic and text-mining.
August 8, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Marc,
Expanding on my point, citing stray examples where he mentions something like cells just does not make the case you want to make. The question is very simple: does he regularly make non-textual and non-human phenomena a sustained object of analysis in his work? No, he does not. We find stray mentions here and there but they are not at all dominant elements in his thought. I’m surprised that a Derridean would deny this. After all, Derrida is the master of arguing that metaphysics is dominated by binary oppositions in which one term based on privilege always has the dominant function. Text– in the very literal sense –has the dominant function throughout Derrida’s work. Moreover, the very logic of Derrida’s arguments forbid any sort of realism. Derrida, after all, argues that there are no originary terms, that there is no transcendental signified, that there is no sign that stands for itself alone. This is the gist of his reading of Saussure and inversion of the speech/writing binary. As a consequence, he semiotizes the world.
August 8, 2010 at 6:57 pm
For anyone who is interested in comparing my memory of the anecdote with that of Levi, it’s found in the first lecture on Marx’s Capital in the first 10 or 15 minutes. You can see it for yourself here:
http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/marxs-capital-class-01/
Harvey says nothing about inadvisability of such a technic at all. In fact, he laughs at himself and concludes that it was indeed a very fruitful approach, as were many other approaches which is the point of his illustration to begin with.
If the choice is between close and slow reading of texts and lack of it, I’d go for a close reading anytime, especially if it will prevent me from misinterpreting the author in question. Surely, at some point it’s great to leave texts behind and philosophize without them, but I don’t see anyone doing it, including the authors of OOO.
August 8, 2010 at 6:58 pm
I don’t know how many hard-core Derrideans will agree with me (or how many detractors of Derrida, for that matter), but even the most hyper-commentarious of Derrida’s works (say, Glas) only matters if underneath all of the stuff about can-we-read-Hegel-like-this, or-how’s-about-like-this!, we stipulate that it matters how we read Hegel. Which means, that what Hegel is talking about (e.g. the Trinity, or Absolute Knowing, or the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, or etc. etc.), also (1) “exist” in some sense and (2) matter. Is this existence “outside the text?” Yes and no. But certainly YES, in the sense that if it was just a matter of blathering on and saying more words about words about words, we’d get bored in a big hurry. (And of course, many of us did get bored–some in a bigger hurry than others.)
August 8, 2010 at 6:59 pm
“No, it cannot. But I never claimed it was, nor would I.”
I’m glad this is clear.
August 8, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Marc,
I won’t speak for Levi or Graham, but I for one would welcome an object-oriented interpretation of Derrida. I don’t particularly want to do this myself, and I think it would require considerable effort, and I think it would subsequently amount to something quite different from deconstruction even if it were influenced by deconstruction.
But that’s not what got this whole moil going, right? It was the old familiar move of “my favorite thinker already thought of what you said, here look at this one sentence, neener-neener-QED.”
What’s so tragic about this move is that Derrida himself was so open-minded and curious, but yet his thought has bred such close-mindedness and clubbishness.
And what I find so curious about this sort of debate is that it seems much more productive to argue for a new and unfamiliar reading of Derrida (or whomever) than to claim that X is “always already” there in Y text.
Boggle!
August 8, 2010 at 7:12 pm
“Does he regularly make non-textual and non-human phenomena a sustained object of analysis in his work? No, he does not.”
So you’re basically asking if Derrida is an object-oriented ontologist like yourself? Of course he is not, because you pose the question this way, you’re bound to get an answer you want. Is this fair? Derrida, of course, regularly makes non-textual phenomena an object of analysis (differance being a good example – how is it textual? explain). In fact, to turn the tables, can you give any example or evidence of Derrida’s analysis that claims that “Text – in the very literal sense – has the dominant function throughout Derrida’s work”?
Like so many commenters here, I’m beginning to feel a strange feeling of déjà vu – I really thought we got over these misreadings of Derrida in the 90s when the Derrida critics finally decided that it’s not worth their time to press with this ludicrous misreading (“there is nothing outside the text” means that text is everything etc etc), but I guess we’re still there, again, despite 40 years of Derrida’s writings in front of us.
August 8, 2010 at 7:18 pm
“If he spent substantial time discussing cells, DNA, cybernetics, etc., this would be another matter. However, he doesn’t.”
Animals, auto-immune disease, architecture (at least as non-human as cybernetics), photography, smoke. I really don’t understand what it is exactly you’re saying… What counts as substantial time? Who exactly are we to take as our models for doing this kind of philosophy that doesn’t do commentary and engages with non-human things for a substantial time?
August 8, 2010 at 7:19 pm
[…] in his comments, gets it right. Ian writes: As for the Whitehead quote, I find it helpful not for any love or hate of Derrida (believe me, my […]
August 8, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Levi,
I apologize for the double post. I hoped at least one would escape your Spam filter and the second gave me an opportunity to correct some minor transcription errors.
Although, on the face of it, Derrida’s range of objects of interest was quite broad, I don’t agree that “Derrida’s actual textual practice” (or that of the Derrideans) ought to matter much or at all in evaluating what he actually says in his texts. Even Matthew suggests he didn’t make of these openings what he could have, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.
August 8, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Anthony,
Substantial time would be something like what Protevi does in his work or DeLanda does in his. Passing reference does not a philosophical focus make.
August 8, 2010 at 7:22 pm
Mikhail,
Derrida makes reference to text and signifiers all over the place in his differance essay. And yes, I desire a broader philosophy than the one Derrida proposes, and therefore do want him to be more of an object-oriented ontologist. This is why I admire thinkers like Whitehead, Latour, Stengers, Haraway, and so on and don’t get particularly excited about thinkers like late Wittgenstein or Derrida.
August 8, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Mikhail,
I guess we just disagree here:
I am deeply opposed to the idea of devoting an entire semester to the reading of a single chapter or a single article (as many of the hermeneutically driven reading groups I’ve participated in have done). I believe this is a form of intellectual imprisonment.
August 8, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Marc,
You don’t believe that it’s philosophically significant that Derrida devoted 90% of his philosophical work to commentaries on other texts? I believe that speaks volumes.
August 8, 2010 at 7:31 pm
So you admire some thinkers and don’t get excited about others? That’s absolutely fair. But what does it have to do with Derrida’s work?! You don’t find it interesting? Great! I don’t see anyone pushing Derrida down anyone’s throat these days, do they?
Differance essay (not the only place he talks about it, of course) is full of references to texts and signifiers therefore it is about text (in the literal sense) and signifiers? Are you seriously proposing this interpretation or am I missing something?
This is turning into a ridiculous “yes, he does” – “no, he doesn’t” – Derrida talks about a great number of subject matter, many already mentioned a great number that cannot qualify as a “passing reference” – the opening seciton of Of Grammatology (cited above) is not a passing remark but a conceptual groundwork for the whole book. How many examples do you really need to be persuaded, especially since you apparently don’t care about thinkers like Derrida at all?
August 8, 2010 at 7:32 pm
So a whole book devoted to animals or photography or a whole chapter devoted to smoke doesn’t count?
August 8, 2010 at 7:39 pm
“I am deeply opposed to the idea of devoting an entire semester to the reading of a single chapter or a single article (as many of the hermeneutically driven reading groups I’ve participated in have done). I believe this is a form of intellectual imprisonment.”
Great. It’s absolutely your right and no one is taking it away from you. But a) don’t put it in the mouth of David Harvey, and b) dismiss other thinkers that did the same, ex. Heidegger whose students famously complained about his slow reading of Aristotle or Harvey who is dedicating a whole semester to one book.
Just because you don’t find such close reading of text to be interesting, does not mean that it is not. You find it to be constricting, others find it to be exhilarating, is it not condescending and dismissive of you to assume that your reaction to Derrida’s reading technic is the correct one and the reaction of others is the incorrect one? Students in Harvey’s class chose to do a closer reading against his own instinct as a teacher and he learned a great deal from it – I’m sure everyone benefited greatly from the experience. All you say is that you wouldn’t have liked it – great, you’ve proven that some people like close readings and prefer Derrida and some don’t and prefer some other philosopher.
August 8, 2010 at 7:49 pm
I do believe it’s not philosophically significant. It may be significant biographically or historically, that is psychologically or sociologically, but philosophically, no. I don’t know enough to comment on the accuracy of the 90% figure but what percentage would change this philosophical significance to insignificance: 50%, 25%? Is Derrida then guilty of philosophical hypocrisy by not practicing, at least in theory, what he preaches?
August 8, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Mikhail,
you don’t see the irony in telling me not to express my views on such matters while Derrideans do? These aren’t issues of personal taste or liking but of how institutions are organized. I outline all this in my most recent post.
August 8, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Marc,
he’s practicing what he preaches. His focus on text reflects what he believes to be real. The suggestion that form and content can be separated in this way is an extremely odd claim for a defender of Derrida to make.
August 8, 2010 at 8:18 pm
But Levi, I don’t believe I’m separating form and content in suggesting that Derrida didn’t pursue ever area of inquiry he could have. In all likelihood, give the general framework he sets up, he would have pursued them in similar ways. That’s what I think can be inferred from the passage I cite from OG and why I don’t believe the disjunction between the earlier Derrida and the later Derrida that Jon suggests holds.
And considering what you claim according to your terms alone, wouldn’t that figure need to be 100% to be philosphically significant? If not what’s Derrida doing the other 10% of the time?
August 8, 2010 at 8:30 pm
Marc,
You’re ignoring my argument about the primacy of the linguistic in the French semiological context. I suppose we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
August 8, 2010 at 8:38 pm
You’re right, Levi. I’d been thinking about how to approach that aspect of your argument but I’m ready to wrap up too. Thanks for engaging.
August 8, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Not to mention those who books devoted to religion, justice, Marxism or money.
The point of Derrida it seems to me, was actually to escape the semitoicism of structuralism and show how it was not a valid way of approaching reality precisely because of the slippage of language due to the slippage of all things. This is not an argument that we should reduce the world to a text, but that such approaches are invalid. The same is true of late Wittgenstein, who like Marx, wishes to return all metaphysical abstractions to human practice – “in the beginning was the deed” – not to reduce the world to a linguistic idealism (indeed idealism itself is a species of the kind of problem with philosophy tout court Wittgenstein is attempt to oppose).
I’m with Mikhail – these debates were had ad infinitum in the 80s with people who had studied the work of Derrida saying he wasn’t a textual idealist lining up against either a) poor literary theory readings or b) his detractors priming him for dismissal.
And I say all this as someone who hates Derridians for the most part, their eternal waffling, evocation and stupidity plus their political impotence.
August 8, 2010 at 10:01 pm
“You don’t see the irony in telling me not to express my views on such matters while Derrideans do? These aren’t issues of personal taste or liking but of how institutions are organized. I outline all this in my most recent post.”
And I didn’t tell you not to express your view on such matters, if you read my comments, it would be ironic indeed if I did so. All I asked was that you not confuse your negative experience of the institutional oppression by Derrideans with the experience of others. Saying that you suffered or that you think reading a chapter a semester is horribly constricting does not mean that others had the same experience and that those who do like close readings are in the wrong. That’s all I said.
August 8, 2010 at 10:11 pm
“But that’s not what got this whole moil going, right? It was the old familiar move of “my favorite thinker already thought of what you said, here look at this one sentence, neener-neener-QED.”
Actually you’re wrong, Ian. The old familiar move did not take place in Calarco’s original comment that provoked this discussion (reread the comment), it was Harman‘s interpretation of Calarco’s comment (In his Calarco Loses His Cool post). All Calarco said was that Derrida could be understood as doing a proto-ontology and that he talks about non-human to non-human interaction, this point was contested here and I suppose it depends on one’s reading. It was Harman who suggested that Calarco was basically saying that “Derrida already said what you are saying” which he didn’t. But then again Harman added that Calarco’s just angry that Derrida’s stock was falling and therefore his move (or what he interpreted his move to be) is to steal his (Harman’s) original idea and pretend that Derrida already said so. This says more about Harman’s view of his own philosophical project than it says anything about Calarco’s or Derrida’s philosophy. Again, big difference.
August 8, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Mikhail,
The old familiar move did not take place in Calarco’s original comment that provoked this discussion…
You’re not serious right? Here’s an excerpt:
There’s more (I did reread the comment; did you?) but the sentiment was continued here too, long after Calarco.
August 8, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Jon,
So, you’re not a fan of the later texts and think Derrida reinvented himself there (how you arrive at that conclusion is beyond me, but I’ll move on). OK. So, it must be that the early Derrida only writes about books?
Well, how about a classic like “Differance”? Do you think that piece is about books? How about Of Grammatology? That stuff on the trace, supplement, speech/writing, and so on? You think that is about books? You can’t be serious. Would you really want to have the same conversation for Writing and Difference, Margins, and so on?
I have no interest in talking about Marder’s stuff on these issues. It’s totally unnecessary. I’m not talking about whether Graham and Levi are Derrida’s long lost ontological twins, and I’m not offering a novel reading of Derrida. I’m suggesting very simply, contra Graham and Levi, that Derrida allows for nonhuman-nonhuman relationships of alterity without human beings being present. This does not require a long trip through the secondary literature. It is basic stuff. That is what 101 means. It means the prerequisites for going further into the material. Chemistry 101, for instance, is not common knowledge and not everyone knows it. But you’d better know it if you’re going to make sense of more advanced chemistry. The same is true of Derrida. If you start off with a straw man anti-realist, correlationist, trapped-in-books-and-human-language-style interpretation of his work, then you’ll miss everything.
To make the same point another way, you, Levi, and Graham are trying to convince us that Derrida only writes on books. Should I marshal some secondary literature against you on that issue too? Or should I just point out the painfully obvious once again? The conversation we’re having is at an extraordinarily low level. And that’s the whole point. We need to move beyond it to have a decent discussion about Derrida’s contribution to a non-anthropocentric ontology, its merits, limits, and so on.
Also, you attribute to Culler the idea that Derrida doesn’t really mean “there is nothing outside the text” as evidence that Derrida is a realist. Culler never says this in print, to my knowledge, and it would be ridiculous if he did. Derrida is perfectly sincere in saying there is nothing outside the text. Look at the statement in the context of that discussion and in the context of that book (it’s in OG). That statement gels precisely with what I mentioned to Levi earlier. If being means full presence in the context of metaphysics, then every time there is a claim to full presence and an attempt at reference, there is a “text” (and text does not mean just book, as Derrida explains as clearly as possible). In short, wherever there is presence there is also nonpresence on the scene, differance, etc. In short, all relationships and attempts at reference are “text”ual, differan-tial, shot through with the effects of differance. There is no abandonment of reference in Derrida, just a complication of any naively empirical or naively realist account of presence.
That point, too, is extraordinarily basic.
Finally, as for thanking Graham and Levi for opening up the space for these debates, why would I do that? (Although I have thanked Levi for being a good sport and hosting the discussion, and I’m happy to do so again.) I’m suggesting that it is *Derrida* who opened the space here and that they are unwittingly walking in his footsteps. I’m also suggesting that they are unwittingly repeating, with Derrida, what I consider to be a serious mistake in the development of a non-anthropocentric ontology. I already explained both of these things in my comment to Graham. But he’s taken his ball and gone home to his comment-free safety zone, so I won’t go any further down that road for now.
I’m staying with a friend at the moment and have crappy internet access, so I’m offline for the next few days. I have emails from several of you and will drop you a note soon. My apologies for the delay!
August 9, 2010 at 12:04 am
Many of the comments here–especially those aimed at Matthew–speak to the need for slow reading and understanding of a position. I find the psychological fragility displayed by Levi and Graham somewhat perplexing: the suggestion that Derrida might have made some comments worthy of consideration for those who seek to think non-anthropocentrically become interpreted as the most vile attacks on someone’s identity? Please. Graduate school is traumatic for everyone–the stupid and the intelligent alike–get over yourselves!
I quote from Calarco’s book (page 13):
“One of the points I hope to make convincingly in this book is that this kind of implicit anthropocentrism is one the chief blind spots of much contemporary Continental philosophy [I trust the OOO people agree with this–cm.], and that works of thinkers like Derrida and Gilles Deleuze can be used [note: used–cm.] to expose these blind spots and aid [the answers are clearly not in these texts, hence they are not ‘master thinkers’–cm.] in the process of challenging and moving beyond them. […] The central issue concerning the critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity concerns more than the consequences of a certain legacy of Cartesian subjectivity in modernity and postmodernity; if this critique is understood in a rigorous manner, it leads us to see more fully the inner connection between metaphysical humanism and metaphysical anthropocentrism [a criticism I gather OOO shares with Calarco–cm.]. To allow this anthropocentrism to go unchallenged renders thoroughly unradical and conservative much of what today goes by the name of radical politics and theory. It is essential that the signposts toward a nonanthropocentric or critically anthropocentric thought that Derrida, Deleuze, and related thinkers have opened not be shut down in the name of a hasty retrieval of anthropocentric subjectivity toward supposedly radical political ends.”
The passage ends with a footnote, which reads:
“Although I do not touch on their work here, I should note that the thoroughgoing critique of anthropocentrism in the writings of Graham Harman and Ray Brassier accomplishes at an ontological level what I am trying to affect at the ethical and political levels. I hope to engage with their work more carefully elsewhere.”
My apologies for having recourse to the tyranny of the text.
August 9, 2010 at 12:12 am
Ian, I’m not kidding, anticipating OOO is not the same as “Derrida already said it all” twist you were mocking. If you read enough Harman, then Heidegger already anticipates OOP, if taken in the right direction. There’s nothing illegitimate in claiming someone is anticipating someone else, it’s not the same as questioning originality of anyone’s insights – I seriously doubt you can consistently argue for any real ‘out of the blue’ novelty. But I won’t speak for Calarco, I’m sure he can do a much better job of explaining what he tried to say, sans Harman’s (and yours) mocking.
August 9, 2010 at 12:13 am
Craig,
In many respects, I think you articulate precisely the problem I have: close reading. I am all for careful reading of texts, but I do object vehemently to the tyranny in textualism that would trap us in the endless close analysis of texts. I see this as a theft of life and thought.
August 9, 2010 at 12:48 am
Craig: That’s an interesting passage, since it says exactly the opposite of what Calarco’s post did! He was saying that this reading of Derrida is already Derrida 101, in which case his book would be wholly redundant, and a waste of time for him to have written (unless his book is intended as a Derrida/Deleuze 101 textbook?). But in the passage you quote, he says quite the opposite: that he’s breaking novel ground in using Derrida towards these ends, not merely summarizing the content of a Derrida 101 course he took.
August 9, 2010 at 12:59 am
Mark N.,
I don’t believe that’s right at all. As Matthew explains above, Derrida 101 is the starting point not the finish line.
August 9, 2010 at 1:12 am
Mark N.,
Likewise with Marder’s book. The book is certainly not presented as Derrida 101, but Calarco has clearly committed himself to it being little more than “Derrida for Dummies.”
Mathew,
You are reading something I said de dicto in a de re manner. If I’d meant to actually quote Culler verbatim I would have used quotation marks. I don’t know if you are being deliberately obtuse. If so, I apologize for belaboring this, but. . . Culler tried to disabuse people of taking Derrida to be an linguistic idealist, in part by encouraging a certain take on problem passages such as the one you quote. That’s all I meant to say.
I didn’t mean to quote anything from his books. It’s been a long time since I read them (though I’ve read some of his really nice recent stuff on the necessary impossible he’s been working on the last few years; I don’t know if Culler’s published any of that yet though).
But please tell us all, is Marder “Derrida for Dummies” like your post to Graham is supposed to be?
Again though. I’m just really astonished by some of this. You can read anything by Derrida at random versus for example Latour, and there is a huge difference with the former being what KPunk rightly calls methodological textualism and the latter clearly not. Please read his excellent post at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011650.html . I can’t really say any of this any better, so I won’t try.
Jon
August 9, 2010 at 2:07 am
[…] There’s been a whole lot of discussion at the various OOP related blogs the past few days on Derrida. Most of it appears to be tied to some discussions over at Levi’s blog. Graham talks about it here and then some additional comments here. Levi then chimes in as well. […]
August 9, 2010 at 2:16 am
Jon,
Saying something is “_______101” is not quite the same as calling something “_______for Dummies”.
I think Matthew’s point is that what is important here is what is already in Derrida and that neither turning to his sharpest interpreters (whether one prefers Culler, Braver, Marder, or Hägglund) let alone the Derrideans (who neither supporters nor detractors seem to have many good words for), is necessary for this conversation to take place.
August 9, 2010 at 2:53 am
[…] Uncategorized Leave a Comment In response to one of Cogburn’s comments, Marc Goodman writes: I think Matthew’s point is that what is important here is what is already in Derrida and that […]
August 9, 2010 at 8:27 am
[…] because it’s not something I’m especially concerned with. (You can get a flavour of it here, here and here.) But there are some wider issues that have been raised that might be worth […]
August 9, 2010 at 1:03 pm
Marc,
The galling and completely ironic thing is that we HAVE read big chunks of the Marder book (before it’s preposterously affected style caused all of us to put it down at various points), and that’s part of the reason we think Derrida doesn’t get you anything interesting beyond typical realism of the remainder type realism.
This was the substance of Graham’s initial three posts. Please read the the NDPR article on Marder’s book http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18867 ! Everything Graham, Levi, Ian, or me has written above is predicated on familiarity with the kind of argument Marder is making (and in my case some personal interaction and exposure to unpublished works of Culler).
The fact is, lots of people here assume if you don’t hold Derrida in the same esteem as them then you must be cognitively deficient in some manner. It’s a very weird inference to make. I never feel that way about my friends who don’t like Dummett, Brandom, Heidegger, or Graham or Levi for that matter.
But we’re not cognitively deficient. We don’t need Derrida 101. We’ve all read scads of his stuff years ago, studied with many of his principle interpreters, and for various reasons ended up finding Derrida less than helpful in our own work, and we find it somewhat pernicious in the works of others. Though Morton and Braver and Scu have disabused us of this latter part.
Jon
August 9, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Jon,
Marder’s book actually sounds pretty good, or to share a number of affinities to object-oriented ontology. Does he generalize his withdrawal thesis to relations between nonhuman objects, or is withdrawal restricted to how humans relate to objects?
August 9, 2010 at 3:05 pm
But Jon, ultimately we are talking about interpretations here. And, of course, we are also implicitly talking about definitions of realism. In my 15-second scan (I do intend to go back to it!) of the review of the Marder book, I landed on this sentence, “In particular, Marder is not entirely explicit as to what he takes traditional realism to entail.” I don’t doubt anyone’s bona fides here and certainly not anyone’s cognitive proficiency. I go back with Levi even before he started blogging (Yahoo Groups!) and read all of your blogs regularly and with interest. I’m on record in a comment somewhere claiming that reading the work of the Derrideans put me off the real thing for years. No one’s disputing anyone’s preference for pursuing whatever line of inquiry drives them forward – to, through, around, or past certain thinkers. These things do seem to move dialectically. (Stocks go up, stocks go down. Backlashes begin, backlashes against backlashes follow. Have we really even begun to understand this thinker?) It’s clear this whole discussion has been very affectively charged. The suffocating atmospheres and humiliation experienced during one’s training, the perceived insults to one’s very intelligence – I get all that. But at the end of the day, what started this was Matthew’s strong reaction to what he clearly believes is a gross mischaracterization of what Derrida is up to. And given the supportive comments throughout this thread, he’s not alone in that belief. I’m no scholar, but over time I too have been persuaded by this line of reasoning. That’s really it. I appreciate your taking the time to responding to my comment.
August 9, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Marc,
Let’s recall that this post wasn’t even about Derrida. I really have no strong feelings about Derrida one way or another. This post was about tone. I think Matthew could have made his point much more effectively. I said as much in the post itself and expressed interest in the point he was trying to make. Matthew continued to insist on insulting the rest of us for reasons that just baffle me. Meanwhile, over at Mormon Metaphysics, I read the following comment addressed to me:
First, this comment confirms the version of Derrida that the object-oriented ontologists are objecting to, yet beats us up for criticizing the very thing we’re targeting (i.e., the relationism). What a catch-22! We’re told we haven’t read Derrida when we target this relationism, only to have this relationism endorsed in the next sentence! But the even greater jaw-dropping moment occurs when we’re accused of naivete for endorsing the existence of independent objects that are static and reified. We’re supposed to be close readers of Derrida, yet with this simple remark the commenter reveals that he’s read nothing of object-oriented ontology as there’s nothing static or reified in our account of objects! Talk about double standards! Close reading only applies when it’s a big daddy like Derrida. This is the sort of authoritarian subtext that is all too often behind these debates.
August 9, 2010 at 5:21 pm
I can’t speak for Michael, and I think it was perhaps unwise of him to launch a critique of OOP being less versed in it. That said I think he was making two separate claims. One that Derrida is being misread. The second that on a point where Derrida is read correctly he favors Derrida over the OOP. So I think you’re perhaps conflating two separate issues.
A quick question for a beginning student of OOP though. Would you say that for all versions of OOP the lack of relations with a substantial core is key? I ask because it seems like there is a wide range of views under the OOP rubric and I’m wondering if the substantial complete object view is a key one.
August 9, 2010 at 5:21 pm
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2010/08/lets-talk-about-text-baby.html
August 9, 2010 at 6:13 pm
Jon,
I managed to make it to a coffee shop but have only 10 minutes of wifi left, so I’ll have to keep this a bit brief.
Of course I was being obtuse. As you were with your comments about Culler, Derrida’s reinvention, and now with asking about whether Marder is Derrida for Dummies and whether have I read K-Punk’s “excellent” post (yet another meta-debate? you consider that excellent?). Let’s stop the dance, shall we?
Go back to the first comment. Look at the passage. Read the interview. It’s all online. See if you can come back and tell me with a straight face that you have doubts that Derrida allows for relations of alterity among nonhuman beings. *That* is what was being contested. A very simple point that is basic to Derrida’s work that not one person from the OOO crowd will directly address in several threads that have reached massive proportions.
Now, once you get past that hurdle, we can discuss some other, very important and very interesting things.
Here is Derrida, someone who seeks to demonstrate (along with Heidegger, Levinas, and others) the limits of a phenomenology of presence. He does this in the context of a contestation of both humanism and anthropocentrism. He also tries to build a bridge between his critical analysis of phenomenology and more general proto-ontological statements about human and nonhuman beings and their relations. He is trying to do all of this in a non-anthropocentric manner. Does that seem like a waste of time for people interested in OOO? Does that look like a linguistic idealist and correlationist to you? Moreover, doesn’t all of this seem oddly familiar to you? Doesn’t it seem like you’ve seen the same basic moves elsewhere recently?
Probe one step further, and consider these issues: how does one move from (a) phenomenological findings about the limits of presence and the withdrawal and alterity of other beings to (b) *general ontological* statements about relations among nonhuman beings themselves and as such? What does this bridge look like? How was it built? How does one traverse this terrain? Moreover, how does one occupy this ontological space without subtly re-importing the very anthropocentrism one is seeking to leave behind? Phrased otherwise, what if this kind of neo-phenomenological ontology were actually and unwittingly anthropocentrism’s last and most desperate gesture?
There are dozens of hard and important issues that lurk on this terrain (which was cleared by Derrida and is now being occupied by OOO and Graham in particular), but you and I and the other OOO theorists will never have a discussion about them because we’re back in la la land talking about Graham’s uninformed comments on Derrida, Culler’s chats with his students, whether Marder’s book is for dummies, and whether I have checked out K-Punk’s recent and excellent meta-debate post.
Some philosophical “dialogue,” eh?
August 9, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Hi Clark,
Responding from the beach, so this’ll be short. OOO does not reject relations, but argues that relations are external to objects. Objects pass out of relations and enter into new relations. This is only possible if objects are independent of their relations. Clearly the relations an object enters into play a significant role in the form an object takes. If I’m shot into outer space without a space suit ibecome many objects or a very hard object. What OOO rejects is the thesis that objects ARE their relations. Were this the case, were it true that objects have no autonomy, this shifting of relations would not be possible. It’s a very simple point, I think. There are other arguments as well, but this is enough for now.
August 9, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Matthew,
you make philosophical dialogue extremely difficult because of your snide, condescending tone. The thing is that we don’t need Derrida to make these claims, so you diminish alliance with him through your rhetoric. That said, youvee piqued my interest so maybe I’ll take another look eventually.
August 9, 2010 at 6:22 pm
[…] 73 Comments and Still no Hitler Reference… H/T Morton: I sometimes miss these comments threads through my RSS feed, but there’s a lively back-and-forth on Derrida and realism here. […]
August 9, 2010 at 6:36 pm
ANd, of course, Derrida carries a lot of baggage that sr is attempting to move beyond. You have piqued my interest though.
August 9, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Holy crap why am I still participating in this conversation?
Matthew Calarco sez:
Go back to the first comment. Look at the passage. Read the interview. It’s all online. See if you can come back and tell me with a straight face that you have doubts that Derrida allows for relations of alterity among nonhuman beings. *That* is what was being contested. A very simple point that is basic to Derrida’s work that not one person from the OOO crowd will directly address in several threads that have reached massive proportions.
I’ll address it, because I am a fool who is still participating in this conversation. I read the interview yesterday. There’s the kernel of something interesting about non-human beings in that interview, but it would have to be heavily interpreted for me to feel that its a theory of relations among non-human beings. Rather, i read it as another set of observations about responsibility between humans and non-human objects, primarily non-inanimate ones.
I’m still not sure why it’s “simple” or “basic to Derrida’s work” though, nor why you’d want it to be (given that there would then be little philosophical benefit in advancing the position). The other issue–the main issue for me–is that I’m not convinced why I ought to care that one could read Derrida in this way. And I say that as someone who has in the past devoted a great deal of time to Derrida’s work.
Perhaps your book addresses this feature in more detail. I’d like to want to read it, but as Levi says, your demeanor doesn’t endear me to your work in any way. Part of the idea of building a philosophical community (or any community) is to choose the people you’d like to have around you as colleagues.
Matthew, maybe you’re a decent and reasonable man who is very busy or distracted. Maybe you just come across differently to others than you think you do. Or maybe you’re just yet another asshole academic like so many among us. I don’t know. But I’m a decent person and I’m willing to try again if ever you choose to do so. And perhaps in a while, after this whole mess is less fresh in my mind, I’ll read and enjoy your book. But for now, what a bitter, bitter taste. Can you understand why that might be?
I think you may be overlooking an important feature of the community you’ve dropped in on, and that’s that we’re unlikely to pledge fealty to Your Favorite Thinker on the basis of claims of origin or anticipation. Maybe you can mount an OOO reading of Derrida. As I said above, great, I’d enjoy reading that. But I’m just not particularly convinced by your claims that the entire project we’re advancing owes some foundational debt to Derrida. That’s a rhetorical disagreement, not a philosophical one.
(PS – On the topic of anthropocentrism, Jane Bennett has a good take on this, a similar one to that which I take up in my forthcoming book. You can read Bennett’s book, you know, if you feel like it.)
August 9, 2010 at 7:46 pm
I’d be really interested in what you (Levi) make of the Marder book. I was really excited about it after reading the NDPR piece, but was so put off by the writing style I put it down short of being half way through it. It was *acutely* painful to me, literally (I’m not being facetious or exaggerating) sickening. I blogged about it the fateful evening of Marder induced nausea at http://drjon.typepad.com/jon_cogburns_blog/2010/03/sick-of-derrideans.html .
Backstory. As an undergraduate I focuses on Critical Theory with Douglas Kellner (almost entirely on Frankfurt School stuff) and Marxism with Harry Cleaver. I also studied Derrida from Louis Mackey (of Slackers and Waking Life fame) and Robert Solomon. But while I love Mackey and Solomon (God bless both), when (twenty years ago!) my friends started writing like Marder does now ( massive and lazy overuse of chiasmus, the unwillingness to make a clear assertion that K-Punk argues is consitutive of stylistic Derrideanism, syntacticly driven ambiguities, etc. see the link above for examples from Marder’s book) it struck me as nothing short of tragic, a waste of their talents, and finally had the end result of driving me away from doing graduate work in Continental Philosophy.
I did read the Culler stuff at the time, but found that Derrida as reported by him wasn’t nearly as substantial a philosopher as the reading of Derrida he was going against. If you are versed in analytic philosophy of language (and I’ve always been interested in both traditions) as well as the British idealist tradition, there’s really nothing in Culler’s early Derrida that isn’t already argued for by someone else in a much, much, much, much clearer (and just as deep) manner.
Levi- our conversation over beer with Eric the Viking fourteen or so years ago was in the detritus of that. Which makes it somewhat ironic that your blog is such a big part of what got me interested in Continental Philosophy again (weirdly I seem to be moving towards Schopenhauer and OOO).
I think the best recent Derrida stuff is the stuff on autoimmunity, but it’s hard for me to get into that that much after reading through Faye’s account of what Schmidt was really up to with his account of the state during the Nazi era. And, again, I think Derrida’s aporetic political theory actually ends up exactly there (unlike with Quine and the British idealists, this is considerably more troubling ethically). I should note that very good student of mine did his MA thesis on this topic, and he would disagree with my judgment here. Also that Protevi has a great discussion of Derridean autoimmunity in one of his books that is not Schmiddtean (though, again I think only because of Protevi’s other commitments).
I do find what Culler is now doing with the necessary impossible to be really fascinating (actually much more fascinating in light of Levi’s various meditations on Christianity!), and Hagglund’s book is dynamite, as is Timothy Morton’s work. So anybody should admit that at the very worst Derrida is a really good Rorschach blot for some incredibly astute philosophers. I feel the same way about late Wittgenstein sometimes.
But jeez, read the Marder book and tell me that K-Punk isn’t exactly correct about the horrible, horrible effect that Derrida’s texts can have on otherwise smart people (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011650.html). Maybe I’m completely wrong about this. I hope I am, but like I said, trying to read it was deja vu back to some really sad times.
To anyone reading this, I’m sorry if anything I wrote above has been intemperate. As we all know perceived sleights of tone tend to get exacerbated on the internet. The “Derrida 101” quip continues to strike me as the very definition of a dick move, as does condescending in this manner to Harman, who I regard as one of the most important living philosophers. Of course I realize, like all such judgments, many smart people of good will are going to disagree. So I’m not saying that because of my possibly idiosyncratic estimation of Harman’s philosophical importance, Calarco had a special obligation not to be a dick to him, just that (again, to me) it was extra-ludicrous when he did so.
August 9, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Jon it’s interesting in that I was so excited about that book of Marder’s and decided not to buy it almost entirely based upon your review. I’m so sick of Derrideans aping Derrida’s middle style. It’s not necessary, rarely adds anything, and is immensely distracting to some topics. It’s not necessary and there are some great books that don’t do it. (Lawler has some that are great, although I understand his latest which I’ve not read does the pseudo-Derridese unfortunately)
Levi thanks for answering that bit about the “core” of objects and whether it’s the typical OOP position. I kind of suspected this after Prince of Networks but wasn’t sure. I think this the temporal assumptons behind this might be where I part company with OOP. However questions of time are so tricky I promise not to say anything on the subject until I understand OOP better. I tend to see time as emergent rather than a proper background to objects.
August 9, 2010 at 9:45 pm
I’m so sick of Derrideans aping Derrida’s middle style. It’s not necessary, rarely adds anything, and is immensely distracting to some topics.
For what it’s worth, Derrida himself actively discouraged this. I never had the chance to take a seminar with him during his UCI days (I attended the lectures), but those I know who did often report on his brutal criticisms of their writing and rhetoric.
August 10, 2010 at 3:28 am
Ian (and Clark),
That’s really great to hear about Derrida discouraging that kind of thing. A lot of people got down on Derrida when he said deconstruction is not a methodology, viewing those claims as just more aporetic posturing, but I think he was being spot on (in part because any talk of methodology in philosophy is always somewhat ludicrous, but also for reasons more particular to Derrida’s work).
For what it’s worth, even though I think of the overly performative middle year works as a kind of wilderness period for Derrida (and the Limited Incorporated and DeMan/Heidegger flaps as moral wildernesses too), I still see those works (Truth in Painting/Glas/Postcard etc) as clear evidence of a sui generis genius. And I think the disciplinary writing norms that Jameson and K-Punk (and me in my review of Marder) rebel against are pretty monstrously disrespectful to that genius. I mean, somewhere Eddie Van Halen said that it’s just false to claim that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If you want to flatter someone, really dig their work, burn the midnight oil figuring out what they are up to, and then go do your own thing. Only if your non-imitative work has benefited from their tutelage, is it true you are really flattering them.
It occurs to me that the sad thing is that there was really no way Derrida could win here. If he does discourage the clones he runs the risk of coming across as saying that only he can write that way because he’s better than everybody else. If he does not discourage it, then he gets held responsible for the SPEP-at-its-worst (which I shouldn’t have to say but I will is no worse that APA-at-its-worst, but for different reasons) kind of writing culture of endless deferrals and “playfulness” that is really just bad writing and power politics. I mean, Derrida could not win.
I think the only way you could even come close to responding to that kind of problem is to be cagey in totally public pronouncements (e.g. “Deconstruction is not a method”) and then much more strongly discourage it in private in the way Ian reports he did. But you still kind of lose either way.
I guess the traditional weird genius never had to face that kind of problem because the really dysfunctional Baby Boomer culture of fame never hit them the way it bowled over Derrida. Though of course I’d rather suffer Derrida’s problem than die in the street like Kierkegaard or spend a decade staring into space as my sister brought up sinister prot-Nazis to worship me as did poor Nietzsche. . .
August 10, 2010 at 8:10 am
Hi Ian,
I hope this comment makes it through–I’m on a weak one bar signal at my friend’s place and wanted to respond briefly to your comment.
Thanks for reading the passage. That’s fair enough that you read it somewhat differently from how I do. How about this passage from a couple pages later on as a follow-up and for further clarification? I think it helps to underscore the point I was trying to make (viz., that Derrida is claiming that the relations of alterity described by his “infrastructures” extend well beyond the human).
“The idea according to which man is the only speaking being, in its traditional form or in its Heideggerian form, seems to me at once undisplaceable and highly problematic. Of course, if one defines language in such a way that it is reserved for what we call man, what is there to say? But if one reinscribes language in a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the inside, then everything changes. I am thinking in particular of the mark in general, of the trace, of iterability, of differance. These possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language, *are themselves not only human* (italics in the original).”
If these infrastructures are not only human and are at work beyond the human, then you know as a former Derridean what that means: relations of alterity, withdrawal, differance, etc., are at work beyond the human. And I’m sure you don’t think he believes these relations only began once homo sapiens started watching or arrived on the scene. After all, the nonhuman world is already on the scene “watching” *us* according to Derrida’s analysis, so we’d never arrive on the scene in time anyway.
I hope you find the above remarks useful and written in an appropriate tone. I wrote to you the way I did because you took the time to read the passage and because I read your blog frequently. I know who you are and how you interact with people. I would never dream of taking a confrontational tone with you.
I wrote to Graham the way I did for glaringly obvious reasons. Everyone except Jon and Levi seems to understand why. That’s fine. (But I must say that I seriously admire you Levi–hell, you’re still posting my comments after all this! And Jon, no hard feelings. You’re a loyal friend to and defender of Graham. I admire those traits as well. But I will insist that that was no dick move. If anything, I was being *too polite*.)
****
So, Ian, as for why the Derrida/OOO link is important to underscore, you can check my follow-up comments to Graham and Jon. There is a specific sense in which the transition from (a) the critical delimitation of the phenomenology of presence to (b) a general ontology brings with it a lingering, stubborn, and very problematic anthropocentrism. I would suggest that it’s important to see how this plays out specifically in neo-/post-phenomenological contexts (Derrida, Graham’s version of OOO, Levinas, and others) because: the problem that keeps being repeated here has important and very serious consequences in terms of (a) rethinking our practices with both human and nonhuman beings and (b) the way we think about the possible relationships between ontology and practice. I’ve laid out some of this above but am too tired to write anymore. Let’s just kill this thread for now.
But I’m sure we’ll talk more soon.
August 10, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Matthew,
Thanks for your follow-up. I read the whole interview but I had to do so on Google Books because I don’t have Points available (actually, it’s probably in a box right now, moving between offices on campus). I don’t read this sort of prose easily on the web, so I’m not sure I’ve really given it a fair go yet.
That proviso intact, looking at the passage you quote above (and only briefly for now; I’m on my way out the door), I have something of the same reaction as before, namely that these seem like interesting moves to me and ones worthy of exploitation by someone so inclined to interpret trace and difference as concepts in metaphysics rather than concepts in language. I still think there’s much work to do here, but sure, there’s a kernel of something that could be exploited.
I’ll admit that it’s been a long time since I’ve reread the Derrida canon (and I really mean “reread” … I know sometimes we academics have a tendency to use “reread” as an aphorism for “read for the first time”), and I haven’t read every word he ever wrote, but I’m still having mighty difficult trouble seeing non-human objects as playing a large role in Derrida’s thinking. “Eating Well” is an interesting piece, I suppose, but it’s an interview in a book full of interviews; it’s hard to take it as a sustained and detailed account of the trace as an operation of things.
Like I said above, that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in a Derridean OOO. Just that I’m not yet seeing it, and that it’s not plain as day to me (as I think it is to you?) that Derrida himself got there… I think there’s much more work to be done to reinterpret him in this way.
Forgive me for not engaging the anthropocentrism point you raise again here; I do have an answer, and I’m writing about it at some length in my new book, but I have to run right now. Thanks for making the effort to comment again despite your connectivity/travel situation.
August 10, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Derrida’s contribution to non-anthropocentric metaphysics is very specific if largely methodological. It conforms to a kind of reduction and realization procedure familiar from model theory. The recipe is as follows: bake some traditional philosophical structure – like Husserlian temporal awareness – until it can be interpreted in a purely formal or topic-neutral manner (e.g. via the logic of difference or trace). Re-heat by showing that some favoured doctrine of interpretation for this structure (e.g. phenomenology) can’t uniquely fix its interpretation. Low and behold: this allows us to preserve certain traditional philosophical schemes – again such as the jargon of transcendental constitution – while displacing them outside the language or subject-centred domain. So we get Paul Cilliers using the logic of iterability and trace to talk about recurrent neural networks of Elisabeth Wilson’s use of Derridean concepts to discuss the imbrication of meaning and flesh in the phenomenon of dermographism. For this methodology to qualify as correlationist it would require some meta-framework (language, transcendental subjectivity, etc.) which yields privileged interpretations of these schemas that allowed something along the lines of an empirical/transcendental divide to be established. However, if we can always show how any transcendental claim can be treated as part of some speculative empirical hypothesis this move can always be circumvented. This is why Derrida is better antidote correlationist thinking than Meillassoux, who simply presupposes the legitimacy of the language of transcendental constitution from the outset.
August 10, 2010 at 5:16 pm
David,
perhaps you could say a bit as to why you’re evoking Meillassoix in this context. Is your premise that M is foundational for all sr thinkers? Also, what do you see Derrida contributing to discussions abot neurology that isn’t already there in neurology? Why is it necessary to pass through Derrida to diss these things rather than just doing something like what Malabou, Metzinger, and the Churchlands do? Isn’t this an unnecessary detour that just clouds the issue?
August 10, 2010 at 5:52 pm
[…] a bad weekend to be out of town – or maybe a good one, depending on one’s reaction to all of this. (I can tell you that I was following along somewhat, and doing a lot of huffing and fidgeting.) […]
August 10, 2010 at 6:05 pm
I should also add that while I enjoyed Cillier’s book tremendously, it also struck me as rather analogical in its argumentation: “Look! Complexity theory is a lot like Derrida and postmodernism!”. I’m just not sure what this sort of detour accomplishes. I think one of the most problematic aspects of anglo-American thought is our inability to speak in our own name and our need to everywhere find a master figure and make him say what we would like to say.
August 10, 2010 at 10:13 pm
Levi – Most of the stuff I’m writing at the moment has no essential relationship to continental philosophers whose names begin with ‘D’ or ‘H’ – or ‘M’ for that matter and I’m entirely with you about the tediously exegetical character of much continental theory. No problems there. My piece in the recent Review of Philosophy and Psychology anthology on Objects and Sound Perception is straight constructive metaphysics thank you very much! Likewise my forthcoming in Mind and Machines on instrumental eliminativism. No sublime recapitulation of the same for me.
I’m merely responding a Derrida discussion thread that began, I think, with one of Harman’s posts seemed to be playing out here at some length (or did I misread?). The calumnies against Derrida’s purported ‘textual idealism’ are annoying and seem to written in ignorance of other appropriations or readings. It’s not what’s important to me right now.
David
August 10, 2010 at 10:18 pm
David,
send me the offprints when you get a chance. I’m excited to read it.
August 11, 2010 at 8:50 am
I have. Thanks for the interest!
August 11, 2010 at 9:26 am
“should also add that while I enjoyed Cillier’s book tremendously, it also struck me as rather analogical in its argumentation: “Look! Complexity theory is a lot like Derrida and postmodernism!”.”
I agree, and in a way its quite paradoxical as you bring the two together yet respect the structures of each which kind of leaves it as a non-encounter and you are left with the impression of so what?
I’m started to get interested in Catherine Malabou as from what limited contact I’ve had with her it seems more traversal.
Will.