This debate about Derrida is truly not a debate I wish to have. I think all of us have more or less said our piece and there’s really not much more to be said. Moreover, I just don’t see how this debate is conducive to my own work or what it contributes to that work. I think Scu, in his post over at Critical Animal, and Ian, in a couple of his posts here, hit the mark. Scu writes:
In both Levi’s and Harman’s cases, I think this Derrida was suffocating for them. Both of them have talked about the sort of push back to doing work that wasn’t commentaries from their pro-Derrida grad programs. In one of these posts Harman even talks about how derridians didn’t exactly support his book Tool-Being.
This describes my position exactly. First, I, contrary to what Scu implies in his post, I have gotten a lot out of Derrida. My Master’s thesis, paradoxically written after my dissertation, was on Derrida. I learned a lot from him and have been deeply influenced by his thought. However, second, Scu is absolutely right in observing that I have found a certain institutional atmosphere in Continental philosophy to be literally suffocating. I cut my teeth in a graduate program focused on the history of philosophy that was filled with Derrideans and Gadamerians. What I found suffocating is that philosophical discussion became debates about texts rather than issues. Hours would be spent analyzing texts, debating what philosophers meant, tracing out etymological resonances, tracing historical lineages etc., without ever evaluating the claims and arguments of these philosophical texts.
Two things followed from such an orientation. First, any criticism of a philosopher’s claims was immediately transformed into the claim that the philosopher had been misinterpreted. While misinterpretation does indeed take place and it is important to get one’s interpretations right, a) the tendency within Continental circles is to infinitely prolong the labor of interpretation such that philosophical work and argumentation is never reached, and b) I’ve simply never seen a Continental philosopher in this tradition ever concede that the interpretation was valid and that a criticism is not a matter of misinterpretation. In other words, the possibility of counter-argument against, say, Hume is always deferred. We give it lip service without ever actually practicing it. Or, at least, this is the rule.
Second, philosophy is transformed into the analysis of philosophical texts by these orientations. What the contemporary Continental philosopher is supposed to do, within this framework, is analyze texts. This tendency is so pronounced that those who do original work even come to be called “analytic philosophers” by Continentalists. I’ve often heard Manuel DeLanda, for example, referred to as an analytic philosopher because of the nature of his work and the fact that it doesn’t primarily grapple with texts or the history of philosophy. In my darker moments I sometimes wonder if humanities shouldn’t be restructured so that the people who wish to engage in the work of commentary are placed in history departments and philosophy departments are dominated primarily by themes and questions. I say “in my darker moments” because I, of course, still engage heavily in the analysis of texts as a way of thinking. What I object to is an institutional climate that normalizes textual engagement as the dominant and primary way of doing philosophy. In my view, any glance at the SPEP schedule reveals what a crisis American Continental thought is in. 90% of the papers are commentaries on other thinkers and they are selected for precisely this reason. This, I believe, is both decadent and ridiculous and something we should work to change.
Ian, 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 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.
Earlier on he writes:
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.
This, I think, is what it’s all about. On the one hand, it’s a question of fostering institutional settings that are more conducive to other sorts and styles of intellectual work. In my view, one of the reasons there’s been so much flight out of Philosophy departments into Literature, Media Studies, Political Theory, Rhetoric, Gender Studies, etc., is precisely that Continental philosophy departments are rather stiffling in the sort of work that they encourage. This is about power and how power is wielded by institutions. It ranges across the entire sphere of Continental philosophy departments. Whether we’re talking about what graduate directors encourage students to write their dissertations on, what sort of support they give their students, how course assignments are structured, what types of papers Continental philosophy conferences encourage, and what sort of articles Continental philosophy journals encourage, there is just a tremendous focus on commentary. There will always be exceptions who escape these hegemonies, but just as we don’t talk about the realities of poverty by appealing to Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, who built an empire without a highschool degree, we shouldn’t measure the state of Continental programs by those few exceptions that manage to escape the commentary industry.
Additionally, I just think we’ve reached a point where it’s time to begin rethinking the canon. Derrida has made a number of important contributions, but it’s time to begin looking at other thinkers and emphasizing other thinkers besides Derrida, Gadamer, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Kant, Hegel, Deleuze, etc., etc., etc. Such encounters disrupt worn and rote patterns of thinking and allow for the development of new forms of thinking. Suppose that someone does indeed demonstrate that Derrida is really a hardcore realist. Fine. But perhaps this still isn’t reason enough to grant Derrida such an important place in the humanities. Perhaps it’s time to move on for a while and explore other thinkers so as to head off what have become rote patterns of thought.
August 8, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Sorry if I got some of it wrong with you and Derrida’s relationship. (And if it is an interesting story, I would be curious how a master’s thesis was written after a dissertation. Though, I was awarded my master’s the same year I became abd, and it is only interesting if you like horror stories about bureaucracy).
Anyway. My relationship to the institution of Derrida is just so completely different than yours. I had a similar relationship with Heidegger at my undergrad as you did with Derrida at grad school. And then when I think of that feeling at graduate school…
August 8, 2010 at 7:44 pm
I suppose philosophies are somewhat iterative coming in an out of fashion, and sometimes the iterations seem little more than matters of fashion and sometimes they are most substantive (and we always hope for the latter). To me, thinking rhetorically, as I often do, it’s a matter of purpose and audience. I came to Derrida through the work of Gregory Ulmer, a rhetorician who took up his work in an experimental and productive way, as opposed to the literary-deconstruction machine familiar to English departments. But while Derrida has been productive for me, I agree that I might not find much reason to engage with his work in my own research right now.
On the other hand, do I think our doctoral students need to read Derrida, along with Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, etc? Probably. I’m not assigning those texts, but if we’re going to read DeLanda’s _New Philosophy_, some understanding of Deleuze would be helpful. At this point, one couldn’t understand the last 30-40 years of English Studies without this context.
That said, I certainly sympathize with the desire to stop talking about _______.
August 9, 2010 at 8:27 am
[…] 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 reflecting […]
August 10, 2010 at 10:39 am
For some obscure and possibly pathological reason this debate recalls to my mind a cliché often found in car adverts:
“It’s all the car you’ll ever need…”
Is deconstruction “all the [philosophy] you’ll ever need”? Can anyone make that claim of any philosophical position or any one thinker? If so that pretty much precludes the claim to be a philosopher. Yet a great many people (and I am not necessarily including anyone in this debate in this generalisation) seem to think that deconstruction is ‘all the car you’ll ever need’ and that we should pretty much just stop looking for anything else. The only legitimate task ahead is to iron out the creases in the theory and get on with ‘destroying in slow motion’, as Latour likes to say. (For anyone who thinks this is an invalid generalisation I know a notable professor of political theory who has said pretty much exactly this to me in the past; I have no reason to believe that it is an isolated belief — in fact I expect the contrary.)
It is an odd sort of ‘end of history’ movement and it cropped up around the same time that Francis Fukuyama revived that tired old Hegelian trope (and for probably very similar reasons). Fukuyama declared the end of history for geopolitics; Derrida, if you believe the hype, declared it for philosophy and literary and social theory alike. Strident rightists and confused leftists have this in common. I think this says a lot.
I have nothing against Derrida, only against Derrideans. He was a first rate philosopher but a limited one. If he can be said to be a great philosopher that greatness surely comes from an unsurpassed and probably unsurpassable attention to detail and a close concentration on a handful of very particular problems. For this he should be celebrated.
He is not, however, all the car I will ever need; nor is his work all that useful for what I am interested in right now. The problem is that his work has achieved such a hegemony that I have to prove that he is not relevant to my work than the other way around. The burden of proof with regard to his ir/relevance is on me, as far as far as past supervisors and many of my peers are concerned. This too says a lot, I think.
September 4, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Fascinating! A great blog all-round.
Let me know what you think of mine . . .
http://apieceofcoffee.wordpress.com/
Keep on posting!
November 25, 2012 at 4:48 am
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