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 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.
I think what Marc says here is a good deal of what’s being objected to. This is not so much a point about Derrida as about certain common practices (and debate practices) in Continental philosophy. The problem is that we’re never done with the text, we get imprisoned in the text… And this for reasons that Derrida himself outlines: because there is no transcendental signified, no final interpretent, no final signified. I don’t disagree with this thesis.
What I’m pointing to is what follows from this in terms of institutional practices. The thing we commonly see with advocates of deconstruction and hermeneutics is, whenever faced with any criticism, is to call for a return to the careful reading of the text. But this is a trap. Whether intentional or not, it is a trap designed to insure that we never move out of the history of philosophy, an established canon, and the text. It is, as Mark Fisher and Harman have both said, a form of upsmanship. On the one hand, the person making this call will always be able to find some obscure or passing quote in any text, some out of the way, marginal essay, etc., to support their point. On the other hand, given that Derrida defends the indeterminancy of meaning (Mark’s about about the prohibition against positive enunciation or statement) and the manner in which everything explodes its context, the Derridean will always have infinite resources for defending his position and insuring that you remain locked in the text.
As a consequence, the work of interpretation becomes endless and infinite, and those trapped within it become like Sisyphus, doomed to endlessly roll their boulder of interpretation, etymology, rhetorical analysis, etc., up the mountain of this history. The paradox is that deconstruction thereby becomes the most conservative of ideologies precisely because we are perpetually trapped in the text and prohibited from making any positive claims. I think Gratton admirably identifies the return of the repressed, the symptom, that emerges out of this: Insofar as we are prohibited from making positive claims on our own behalf, we do all sorts of acrobatics to make philosophers in the history of philosophy claim what we want to say. And in my view, this is just a profound time drain. Rather than simply making and defending the claim ourselves, we instead engage in all sorts of textual contortions to make, for example, Descartes say what we’d like to say.
A while back I coined the term “minotaur” to describe this sort of conceptual personae. The minotaur is that conceptual personae or figure of philosophy whose first reaction is 1) to say “you’ve misinterpreted x”, 2) to always call for a return to the text, and 3) to prohibit any positive philosophical claim or evaluation of another philosopher’s position without first reading the entirety of that philosophers work. Although the analogy to mythology isn’t perfect, the idea is that the minotaur turns any philosophical discussion into an impossible to escape labyrinth that he fiercely guards with the axe of calls for close readings.
Some have called me a hypocrite for denouncing the figure of the minotaur for simultaneously denouncing this sort of practice while accusing others of misinterpreting my positions. This is a superficial strawman to say the least. The point of the figure of the minotaur is that he is essentially a scholar that guards philosophy carefully by restricting it to the history of philosophy and fiercely denouncing any criticism of figures in the history of philosophy. The point is not that the minotaur points out misinterpretations– misinterpretations genuinely exist –but that the minotaur reduces every criticism to misinterpretation. It is perfectly legitimate for a philosopher to point out when others have misinterpreted his or her claims. The mark of the minotaur, by contrast, is the restriction of philosophy to the history of philosophy, the call for endless interpretation, and the reduction of all criticism to misinterpretation.
One might conclude that I am making a call for sloppy reading. But I’m not. Interpretation has its place and is a healthy and necessary activity. However, as Mark notes, certain interpretative practices are pathological. In psychoanalytic terms, washing your hands is a perfectly ordinary and healthy activity, but washing your hands three hundred times a day when you’re not a doctor is an obsessive symptom. And this is how it is today with a lot of Continental philosophy.
Additionally, it’s my view that a number of Continental texts are designed as labyrinths such that they are rhetorically put together in precisely such a way as to trap the reader and provide no means of moving on. A good deal of Hegel is like this. Derrida is certainly like this. Lacan is like this. Much of Luhmann is like this. Deleuze is like this. (Note that I’ve cited four thinkers here who are huge influences in my own thought). These texts are put together in vague, elliptical, allusive, and polysemous ways so as to prevent the reader from pinning them down. In the case of Hume, Kant, Descartes, and Spinoza, I can readily pin down the claims they’re making and their arguments for these claims. In the case of the above listed thinkers, by contrast, I become a slave to the text, forced into an infinite labor of interpretation that never ends. Shouldn’t there be a point where we can move on?
August 9, 2010 at 3:28 am
Levi,
I think many of your points here are well taken, but I don’t believe that is what has happened in the current instance. Matthew objected to characterizations of Derrida that he understands at a very basic level to be untrue. (You’ll forgive me if I bracket any epistemological questions regarding truth and interpretation for the purposes of this comment.) Matthew is, on record, here and elsewhere, as not being a Derridean or a Levinasian or a Deleuzian. As the passage that Craig cites from Matthew’s book makes clear, he takes a “toolbox” approach and draws “useful” aspects from these thinkers and many more. I’m guessing he wouldn’t disagree that misreadings can be productive. But he is no more trapped in any one text or any one thinker than anyone else who has been part of this conversation. And he is no less interested in moving the discussion along. His objection was to the “straw man anti-realist, correlationist, trapped-in-books-and-human-language-style interpretation of [Derrida’s] work” and he suggested that Derrida, properly understood, is a resource for OOO than an stumbling block.
August 9, 2010 at 3:47 am
Marc,
I think you’re getting things backwards here. I wasn’t saying that Matthew is trapped in the text, I was saying that certain types of defenders adopt the strategy of the Minotaur. This, in effect, is what I think Matthew has done. He’s pointed us to rather marginal texts and remarks that are subject to a variety of different readings and made a call for us to go back and read the Derrida library. That’s the rhetoric of a minotaur. I can come up with four quotes for every one of Matthew’s quotes to support my reading of Derrida. This, no doubt, is why Matthew has to resort to condescension in his rejoinders. He knows that he has to situate others in the position of ignorant students to enforce his reading. But again, I really have no dog in this fight. I have no particular hostility towards Derrida. He’s not someone who’s really even on my radar. This is why I find it odd that a post that wasn’t even about Derrida has spawned this whole discussion.
August 9, 2010 at 4:07 am
While I may have too hastily conflated some of the points you were making, I would insist that Matthew is not simply pointing to “rather marginal texts and remarks” to support his reading of Derrida. His whole argument is that these are not at all marginal and that “il n’ya pas de hors-texte” is being misunderstood here as elsewhere. And your speculation regarding his motives I know to be just as inaccurate as if someone had attributed similar such motives to you. That’s just not what you guys are up to here.
August 9, 2010 at 8:27 am
[…] of reading thinkers, and issues concerning their work. There is the discussion of Minotaurs, here. What I’m pointing to is what follows from this in terms of institutional practices. The thing we […]
August 9, 2010 at 10:42 am
I really don’t want to get drawn into a discussion about the ontology of Minotaurs, grey vampires or trolls, but I just want to point out that, as I understand these categories, they are not about motives as much as they are about practices. I think it’s important to distinguish the two. A person might be perfectly reasonable, have honorable motivations, but on the net, in comment sections or in blogs, practice the art of the troll or the Minotaur. Calling someone out on this is not a question of motives but of their practice — their concrete rhetoric and method and even the character of their responses. This is perfectly legitimate, I think. A person may not think or intend to be a troll at all, yet their behavior, etiquette and practice on the blog might be just that. You don’t need to speculate to identify the troll — it’s right there in the style of the responses, I think. This might be a kind of internet-specific phenomenon, too, much the same way Goofy turns from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde when he gets behind the wheel of a car in the classic Disney cartoon “Motor Mania” (1950).
August 10, 2010 at 10:02 am
August 10, 2010 at 10:03 am
Okay so I rather messed up the tags on that last comment!
August 12, 2010 at 7:20 pm
[…] don’t get me wrong, of the bestiary that is proposed by OOO– gray vampires, trolls, minotaurs, moles, and voles –I believe […]