Or this is what seems to be the case these days. After years of anti-realism being the status quo in American Continental circles, it now seems that everyone is stumbling over themselves to show that their favorite thinker is really a realist. Such appears to be the case with Adam Kotsko, in a rather snide and lecturing post responding to what I believed to be a rather generous post on Hägglund and Derrida in light of the Derrida debate that came out of nowhere on my blog last week (I repeat again that the post that generated that debate wasn’t even about Derrida). Quoting me, Kotsko goes on to write in his, to put it mildly, colorful fashion,
A recent post by Levi is illustrative of the attitude at work:
Currently I am reading Hägglund’s Radical Atheism with great excitement and a strange sense of affinity. Throughout, Hägglund explores Derrida’s conception of time and its implications. Hägglund’s book is marked, at the outset, with three virtues. First, the clarity of his prose and his argumentation is to be highly commended and is something to be emulated. Second, this is not a slavish book devoted to a pious repetition of Derrida, but develops arguments and lines of thought in its own right. Third, Hägglund develops a realist version of Derrida that doesn’t restrict these claims to the human, texts, or language, but extends it to all life (here I’m left wondering why he restricts these ontological claims to life, rather than going all the way and extending them to all beings).
The third point is what I’d like to address: that’s not a version of Derrida, it’s just Derrida. Yes, Derrida’s method almost always involves the analysis of some particularly representative or symptomatic text. Yet those texts are about something. He’s not just analyzing them to be clever, he’s analyzing them because he believes them to be particularly illustrative of the difficulties of analyzing whatever phenomenon he’s analyzing. So, for instance, Of Grammatology is not primarily about the texts of Rousseau, it’s a book about human language in general. The Animal I Therefore Am is about animals. Rogues is about politics. On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy is about touching. I could go on and on, as could anyone with access to the backs of these various books. This is the simplest possible point: Derrida talks about a lot of things.
As is his general modus operandi, Adam reduces my position to a mere straw man (“Derrida is just trying to be clever” and this reading of Derrida is just “common sense”) and then proceeds to argue that something like Hägglund’s reading of Derrida is “just plain obvious”. No, it is not at all obvious that this “just is” Derrida. Derrida’s textual engagements are indeed about something, but that doesn’t entail that they are about a world independent of humans and language. It is perfectly legitimate to read Derrida as carefully demonstrating that due to the play of language any presence (i.e., one variant of realism) is impossible. Under this reading, Derrida would be carefully demonstrating the ruin of presence due to the play of language patiently in each text. In his post, Kotsko mentions Derrida as an “internal critic of phenomenology” citing texts like Speech and Phenomena and implying that I’m unfamiliar with this work. What Kotsko fails to mention is that Derrida’s critique of Husserl revolves around showing the play of signification in his thought (er Adam, did you miss that first chapter on sign and signs and the distinction between expression and indication?) and that Derrida’s critique of Husserl revolves around showing that representation always and necessarily precedes presentation, thereby spelling the ruin of Husserl’s principle of all principles.
In order for a realist version of Derrida to get off the ground what is needed is an account of representation that has nothing to do with the human or language. In other words, it would have to be shown that this primacy of representation or the trace, this trace that was never present, would be something operative in all beings even if humans and language did not exist. I am not suggesting that such an account of trace is impossible– this is precisely what I find interesting in Hägglund’s work and was what I was suggesting could be done in my onticology –but it is not self-evident that it’s there already in Derrida. Why else would we have readings of Derrida as an anti-realist by talented scholars like Lee Braver in A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism? However, such a reading requires, I believe, sifting through a lot of gravel and text that suggest the anti-realist reading to get there.
All this aside, I find it very interesting that everyone is suddenly stumbling to be a realist. In his little essay on Mao, Zizek remarks that ideological battles are won when your opponents begin using your vocabulary to articulate their own positions. It seems that something like this is beginning to take place.
Larval Subjects . 
August 16, 2010 at 3:12 pm
In other words, it would have to be shown that this primacy of representation or the trace, this trace that was never present, would be something operative in all beings even if humans and language did not exist.
Derrida directly says as such in Of Grammatology — maybe he doesn’t adequately demonstrate it for your purposes, but that’s one of his claims.
August 16, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Adam,
I just don’t find that line of argument or rejoinder convincing. First, it’s not at all clear that he’s saying that such a primacy of representation is possible independent of language. Second, his arguments undermining the primacy of the human occur in a French structural linguistic context where the human was replaced by the play of the signifier over and above the intentionality of a centered subject. This is pretty basic stuff in understanding what was going on in French philosophy during this period, so I’m surprised to hear you advance this line of argument. Language is still a human phenomenon ergo I don’t really see him as reaching a realist position with respect to these issues. That said, I find Hagglund’s appropriative reading of Derrida very interesting and a promising move beyond the residual humanism of French anti-humanism.
August 16, 2010 at 3:44 pm
I’m saying that Derrida directly claims what you say he should claim. If you’re objecting that he doesn’t actually make that claim, then say so more clearly. As things stand, I know that structuralism existed and Derrida was responding to it.
August 16, 2010 at 3:53 pm
But isn’t this exactly what Derrida’s appropriation of Peirce does? Representation for Peirce is much, much broader than human representation. And semiotics isn’t merely (ala Saussure) about human sign systems but a general logic for the universe itself. (See for example Peirce’s notion of quasi-mind.
Now it’s fair to ask how much of this Derrida actually adopted. I, for instance, don’t see much evidence Derrida was acquainted with Peirce’s writings from his mature phase – more just the writings typical in most semiotic readers that deal with Peirce.
I’d also note that in his discussion of Peirce in On Grammatology that Derrida notes,
“The so-called “thing itself” is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence.”
Also note Derrida’s critique of Saussure’s semiotics in preference to Peirce’s.
“It will liberate the semiological project itself from what, in spite of its greater theoretical extension, remained governed by linguistics, organised as if linguistics were at once its center and its telos. Even though semiology was in fact more general and more comprehensive than linguistics, it continued to be regulated as if it were one of the areas of linguistics.”
It think it clear (especially if one is familiar with Peircean semiotics) that Derrida is very much doing what you say he ought do. Could he have been more explicit about this general semiotic? Probably. Did he focus on the object – object relation rather than inverting Heidegger and in effect looking at Heidegger from the perspective of the object? Yeah, I think so. Do I wish he’d focused on objects more rather than humans? It certainly would have been more interesting.
August 16, 2010 at 3:53 pm
And I’m claiming that you’re misinterpreting Derrida and don’t understand French antihumanism. French antihumanism, in Derrida, was the thesis that social structures are the true agents, not individuals. The social, however, is still human. Moreover words like “world” and “real” cannot be taken at face value in these contexts as phenomenology had already treated them as the given for us.
August 16, 2010 at 3:54 pm
[…] 16, 2010 Levi has a FUNNY POST ON REALISM up […]
August 16, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Clark,
I think that’s reading a lot in Derrida’s very brief remarks about Peirce (which I made a lot out of my thesis). I find no evidence that Derrida extends signs beyond the human as Peirce sometimes seems to do. This would just be semiotic correlationism.
August 16, 2010 at 4:07 pm
So Derrida’s intellectual context outweighs his explicit statement? You’re saying Derrida is just by definition a French anti-humanist, and any attempt to complicate or go beyond that must be, at best, an “appropriative” reading? I don’t understand the method at work here.
August 16, 2010 at 4:11 pm
To re-iterate a point I have made elsewhere: that Derrida is or is not a realist is a separate question from whether Derrida is a textualist, a textual idealist, obsessed with texts, believe there is nothing outside the text where the text means language etc etc etc. This you seem to agree with, or don’t you?
The latter is what I object to, the former we can argue at another time.
August 16, 2010 at 4:11 pm
You don’t find that comment about the thing itself pretty compelling?
August 16, 2010 at 4:17 pm
He does not say this, but he does make it clear that “language” is much more inclusive than words coming out of a human mouth. This broader notion of language, and the trace, does apply to all beings according to Derrida. Not that I want to set him up as beyond critique, but surely Derrida would reject the debate over whether he is a realist or anti-realist by pointing out that neither is irreducible. Moreover, wouldn’t he say that language cannot be separated from the world making him, I suppose, technically an anti-realist in this debate? But really, why does it matter if he’s a realist or not? He wouldn’t describe himself that way so why should anyone else want to unless to prove a point that is at odds with Derrida’s own work? Not that one can’t read Derrida against himself, but that isn’t what looks to be happening a lot over the course of these Derrida debates.
Beyond this point, aren’t all of these debates things that have been going on for years in philosophy circles? Richard Rorty certainly spent a great deal of time trying to bridge these differences and trying to josh scholars out of such debates (however successful or unsuccessful he may have been at it). I personally find the whole “I’m a realist-you’re an anti-realist” thing, and the last paragraph of Levi’s post, to be a bit silly if not frequently condescending.
I bring up Rorty because one of the things I keep getting as I read the various blogs and comments on these issues is that, whether stated or not, there is the assumption that some philosophers are doing real or proper philosophical work while others are not.
It seems to me, like him or not, as many have pointed out, there is a great deal of useful material in Derrida as regards the human-animal distinction that can be used for realist positions just as there is a great deal of realist stuff that can be reconciled with Derrida to enlarge what he was doing.
In other words, as some commenters have been doing specifically, and as comes out in an overall sense, why attempt to prove primacy or superiority of one group or another? Indeed it looks to me that Levi is often suggesting such an agenda is indeed unproductive which made some of the paragraphs in this post all the more regrettable (“stumbling over themselves to become realists”).
Not being in a philosophy department maybe I’m off here or things just look different to me but I just can’t stop feeling as I read some of this that the overall framing, if not some of the details as discussed by people, sound a bit silly. I mean this good-naturedly and not as an insult to anybody but sometimes I begin to feel as if we’re all living in a fifth land Gulliver didn’t choose to write about in his travels.
August 16, 2010 at 4:19 pm
I should add one quick thing – where does Adam claim Derrida is a realist? I don’t see him making this claim anywhere – I don’t think Adam has a dog in realism/anti-realism debates at all.
August 16, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Adam,
it’s not merely an argument from context. I believe this reading follows directly from his Ends of Man essay in Margins and the argument in Of Grammatology.
August 16, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Clark,
that claim about things is why I believe he’s a semiotic correlationist.
August 16, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Okay, so here’s where I’m confused. I think Clark and I are in basic agreement. You say that if Clark is right, then Derrida’s a “semiotic correlationist” — and then say that Derrida is in fact a “semiotic correlationist.”
This indicates to me that you agree, as I’ve said repeatedly, that Derrida’s semiotic theory applies to more than just human language. You find it problematic that his explanation of non-human things is modelled on the human phenomenon of language, and I understand that objection — but you seem to have basically accepted a reading in the ballpark of Hagglund’s, mine, and Clark’s as an accurate portrayal of Derrida in the course of this conversation. Am I correct that you’re shifting positions here?
August 16, 2010 at 4:37 pm
No Adam, of course signs and language apply to more than just the human, but in Derrida they originate in the human nonetheless.
Cute Alex, he says the realist reading just is Derrida in the paragraph I cite.
August 16, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Fair enough, maybe you could respond to my more important point?
August 16, 2010 at 4:43 pm
To add, there definitely is a debate even among Peirceans about how closely Derrida follows Peirce. This is the point of say Barnouw’s critique. “in fact, however, Derrida follows Husserl in his conception of phenomenology, rather than Peirce, just as he follows Saussure rather than Peirce in his conception of the sign.” I think that false in terms of both charges but clearly he sticks with the language of Husserl and Saussure.
Anyway, not to go down the Peircean hole here. And you are right that one can’t produce a “guilt by association.” As I’ve tried to make clear this key point isn’t something made so clear by Derrida that he can’t be read in other ways.
August 16, 2010 at 4:46 pm
I already responded to your strawman about what Graham and I are claiming about text over at AUFS. You’re attributing a claim to us that we’ve never made.
August 16, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Levi, I don’t see how that makes him a semiotic correlationist. But as you have said yourself OOP proponents use “correlation” very, very broadly. It seems to me that if everything is signs independent of humans (i.e. ala Peirce) that the correlationist charge doesn’t work. But maybe I’m just not sure how you are using correlation. It seems hard to fit to Derrida since the issue isn’t a correlation between two things but merely the selection by greater forces.
August 16, 2010 at 4:49 pm
You seem to be moving the goalposts a bit here, Levi. Do you see how the quotes collected by Alex on AUFS would lead us to think that you and Harman believe that Derrida is an analyst only of linguistic phenomena (in the straightforward sense)?
I can see saying that you don’t think semiotics is the right tool to use for analysis of the non-human, but it seems clear that Derrida straightforwardly intends to be putting forth a theory that extends beyond the human and the (common-sense idea of) the linguistic — i.e., that you don’t need to “extend” his theory or “appropriate” it in order to get to this level, but that it was always already there. And now it seems like you’re saying that. So were we misunderstanding you before, or have you changed your mind?
August 16, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Also, I’m saying that Hagglund’s reading just is Derrida — you’re the one who characterized it as realist, a term that I have no investment in whatsoever.
August 16, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Clark,
my thesis was on the Peirce, Husserl, Derrida connection. Remember, in OG Derrida talks about Peirce in the context of manifestation, I.e., the mechanism by which things are given. As I see it, D is arguing that signs rather than sense-bestowing intuition do this. That’s still a correlationism in my book, even is it’s not cogito centered. I see no trace of anything like zoosemiotics in d, yet that would still be a correlationism of the animal even if it were there.
August 16, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Finally, you say: “No Adam, of course signs and language apply to more than just the human, but in Derrida they originate in the human nonetheless.”
You’re really going to use “originate” in this way in describing Derrida. If he thinks that the world is structured semiotically, then why would he thinks it originates in humanity, which obviously didn’t always exist? I mean, we learned about certain aspects of heredity from fruit flies, but that doesn’t make heredity an irreducibly fruit-fly-based phenomenon.
August 16, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Another favorite Adam move: “you’re moving the goalposts!”
A simple question: would signs exist without humans or animals? Another question: if Derrida believes they would why does he never analyze the dynamics of sign systems that don’t pertain to the human?
Finally, if you’d followed the Derrida debate it was all about whether or not Derrida as a realist. That’s what started it off with calarco. I was praising hagglund for giving a realist reading of Derrida. You intervened and said that just is Derrida. I’m now confused as to what you’re trying to argue. I also think you have a very muddled understanding of d.
August 16, 2010 at 5:12 pm
No, I have a muddled understanding of you. I’m saying it appears that you’re moving the goalposts. Have you changed your position or not? Now you seem much more open to the idea that Hagglund is being accurate rather than appropriative. The three possibilities here seem to be either that you’ve changed your mind, that I was misreading your previous remarks, or that I’m misunderstanding your position now. Which is it?
August 16, 2010 at 5:16 pm
I believe hagglund is doing something different than what you or Derrida are talking about.
August 16, 2010 at 5:18 pm
For the sake of utter clarity. Two claims are being made here.
1. Derrida is a textualist, a textual idealist, reduces the world to language. Shown by:
a) his method
b) his claims
2. Derrida is an anti-realist or correlationist. Shown by:
a) his method
b) his claims
You seem to be claiming 1 and hence 2. I think you’ve said 1 enough “Derrida just writes about books” being Graham’s lucid presentation. What I’m saying is 1 is false. I don’t care about 2 right now.
August 16, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Just a quick, tangential note regarding Hagglund’s reading which might clarify his (and Derrida’s? that is the issue) position regarding the non-living: in his ‘Response’ to the commenters in the book symposyum in ‘The New Centennial Review’ he explicitly states
‘…the structure of the trace cannot be re-
stricted to the structure of lived experience but is an “ultratranscendental” condition for everything that is temporal. Although there may be good reasons for focusing on the question of life…the trace structure cannot be limited to the living but pertains to succession in general. Everything that is subjected to succession is subjected to the trace, whether it is alive or not’
I guess that ‘ultratranscendental’ here indicates a sphere well beyond that which is manifested to just human/animal/living experience.
August 16, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Okay. Thanks for clarifying.
August 16, 2010 at 5:39 pm
[…] Derrida Wars II: The Search for Mock… Invariably, in every comments section on this, the “you suck” stage is reached. We’re getting close… […]
August 16, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Alex,
I’ll post here what I wrote over at AUFS:
If you wish to have a discussion then you must, as you yourself have argued, accurately represent the claims of others. I haven’t claimed anything remotely like what you’re attributing to me. It is very difficult for me to see you entering into discussion in good faith when you repeat this nonsense after I’ve already shown how that is not the argument that is being made. As for the difference between signs or signifiers, semiotics or semiology, I just don’t see that it makes much of a difference in this discussion. Both strategies amount to the same thing.
Adam, I notice that over at AUFS you cite the differance essay as a counter-example. This is silly. That essay is filled with discussions of the signifier and explicitly treats differance in terms of the signifier.
Fabio, this is exactly what I find interesting in Hagglund’s reading. What you get there is a reading that disentangles Derrida from all this focus on signs and the signifier. In my view this is an aberrant reading (which means I’m more interested in Hagglund than Derrida) but, as Peter points out, something that necessarily needed to be said. What I object to is that somehow the characterization of Derrida as a semiotic or linguistic idealist is some blatant misreading. There’s as much textual support for this reading, if not more, than for the realist reading that’s being proposed. At any rate, you might be interested to know that Hagglund’s essay for The Speculative Turn argues that the logic of the trace applies to non-living things as well.
At any rate, I’m not very interested in continuing this discussion as I’m just not all that interested in endless debates as to which is the true version of a philosopher and who gets to own that philosopher, and because the AUFS crowd tends to come at me like a pack of rabid dogs whenever I enter into discussions with you. You behave like a bunch of goose stepping fascists that see it as your duty to correct everyone. I still have no idea what Adam is advocating, why he cares one way or another, nor why he is commenting on my blog or linking to it. I thought we’d parted ways a long time ago, yet once again I find the shrill Adam Kotsko scrawling all over my blog, linking to posts by Mikhail of all people, snidely correcting me, and then wondering why I get a bit huffy with him (soon there will be remarks about how I should look in the mirror or about the ugliness of my own rhetoric, as is always the case). Perhaps one of these days Adam & Co. will learn to do something other than playing the disciplinary school teacher correcting the student and will do some philosophy. Of course, then how would they get their sense of superiority. Just use Derrida rather than turning him into a big pappy that needs to be defended and protected. Y’all will get a lot further that way, rather than trying to force people to be Derrideans (or whoever your favorite philosopher is).
To Gratton… I think this post is the “you suck” you were alluding to.
August 16, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Levi,
I know you know these things if you have read Of Grammatology, but let’s lay these things out because they might help clear this up:
1. Derrida uses “text” to talk about things other than texts not because he thinks “world=text” or “my access to the world=language,” but because the predicates usually attributed to “text” actually the way things work more generally in the world. The way real, solid things in the world work. Like animals, cars, basketballs, etc.
2. Derrida approaches these predicates through Saussure’s text, which is of course a text about language, but Derrida isn’t really all that concerned with language, just like Derrida doesn’t ultimately care about texts. He is more concerned with the radical possibilities that are presented by Saussure’s assertion that a signifier’s value is purely negative; there are “only differences with no positive terms.” This is something Derrida takes to be applicable in general, to everything in the world. Not just signifiers. Things in the world function in a way that is somewhat analogous to Saussure’s concept of the signifier.
3. You may disagree with Derrida’s argument, but the upshot of his argument has little to do with words, linguistics, or even signifiers. He is talking about the way the world is put together. He claims it functions by means of iterability, which is to say “the trace structure,” which is what Hagglund is simply explaining.
August 16, 2010 at 6:02 pm
BB,
Yes, thank you for educating me BB. I think Hagglund does what Derrida ought to do but fails to do in his own practice or theoretical edifice.
August 16, 2010 at 6:08 pm
Especially egregious is being lectured by Adam in a self-righteous fashion when he apparently missed the basic lines of argument in texts like speech and phenomena or ends of man. Sheesh.
August 16, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Levi,
sorry man, I am honestly not trying to be a jerk. I think I can tell this is grating on your nerves. I am trying to learn, too. I have really enjoyed reading your blog in the past couple of months and it has helped me a lot.
But I think the important thing from my comment is this: Derrida cares about the predicates of “text” that help him re-think the presence of actual, real objects. Predicates such as “deferral,” “referral” and “citability.” These things sound a lot like “withdrawal” to me. It’s a small point, but I think an important one if you want to avoid stirring up the pot with derrideans. Maybe you like it, though?
August 16, 2010 at 6:25 pm
OK, fair enough Levi (23). I’d probably disagree but I fully agree that is a cogent reading of On Grammatology.
That said I think the argument there for Derrida being a correlationist is at best an argument from silence. But then I’m coming to think the correlationist charge gets raised anytime a human being is mentioned.
August 16, 2010 at 6:30 pm
I feel I need to object to the way Levi is characterizing me, my friends, and the way this conversation has gone — but there’s no need to elaborate, probably. We can just agree to disagree on whether I’m a fascist.
August 16, 2010 at 6:49 pm
“The real debate is not with whether text is a technical term that goes beyond books, but with whether what Derrida calls text is restricted to language or whether it’s a basic ontological feature of being as such, regardless of whether humans or language exist.”
Okay, I get that, but a lot of what you’ve said seems to suggest that rather than talking about the first you’ve tended to say “Derrida is all about texts as in the things in books!” thus removing the technicality – including numerous bits from comments I’ve posted at AUFS. By making these statements, it opened up the door to misreading, shared by others.
But, life’s too short. I’m not rabid. I’m calm as a cucumber! We are just discussing philosophy on the internet!
THE INTERNET = SERIOUS BUSINESS
August 16, 2010 at 7:48 pm
“The real debate is not with whether text is a technical term that goes beyond books, but with whether what Derrida calls text is restricted to language or whether it’s a basic ontological feature of being as such, regardless of whether humans or language exist.”
I get this point as well. But I always read Derrida as saying about what BB says here:
“3. You may disagree with Derrida’s argument, but the upshot of his argument has little to do with words, linguistics, or even signifiers. He is talking about the way the world is put together. He claims it functions by means of iterability, which is to say “the trace structure,” which is what Hagglund is simply explaining.”
Derrida may spend a lot of time wading around in the semiotic weeds but he does so because it always him to move on to his larger points. Could he have done it otherwise? Sure but I think, as Levi has mentioned, the philosophical schools at the time were oriented toward such things and Derrida, like everyone else of the time, entered into that debate.
OOO, on the other hand, wants to reorient philosophical thinking yet again. So it makes sense to want to leave Derrida, or what is perceived to be his methodology, behind.
I will say, though, that in his later work Derrida is quite explicit that his project applies to non-humans, all life, and even beyond life. I know some people on here have commented before on reading Cary Wolfe. I always thought he did a pretty good job reiterating this aspect of Derrida. Maybe not?
August 16, 2010 at 7:56 pm
I think the really interesting point was put by Levi nicely in the initial post:
“In order for a realist version of Derrida to get off the ground what is needed is an account of representation that has nothing to do with the human or language. In other words, it would have to be shown that this primacy of representation or the trace, this trace that was never present, would be something operative in all beings even if humans and language did not exist. ”
This is probably a bit idiosyncratic, but the larger part of the interest for me in Division One of Being and Time is that it gives you some building blocks for developing a theory that succeeds along these lines. But the appropriation of Heidegger by the Parisians of 68 precluded that (I defer to Braver’s book as well as the (in the U.S., not France) controversial Ferry/Renault here)).
Heidegger gives us reference relations between two objects (e.g. the “in order to” relation). These are of course still part of Dasein’s “world” for Heidegger and so still implicitly correlationist, but as Harman and others have shown, a tremendous amount of his insights can be preserved without this correlationism. Externalists like Gary Williams also read Heidegger in this manner (though the focus of them is more on mind issues than on discerning an OOO philosophy of language).
In this regard, picking up from Saussure is entirely retrograde. We need to start with theorizing inter-object reference relations and then build up a model of assertions as events in their own right. But Derrida does just the opposite of this. The entire debate over whether or not he can get back to the real world after doing so is thus orthogonal to what Graham and Levi have been trying to explain.
And we (the more I read Harman and Bryant the less adverse I am to flying the OOO freak flag) completely reject the post-structuralist order of explanation. For us the theoretical building blocks are objects and the way they relate to one another. From that you build up a theory of how feeling bodies interact as objects with each other and other non-feeling objects.
That is not to say that there isn’t anything to learn from structuralism. Of course the *context of discovery* might coincide with the structuralists. We might learn new things about objects by specialized study of human objects (e.g. Husserl’s critique of bundle theory which Graham generalizes outside of the phenomenological context). But the *context of justification* starts with a characterization of objects. I think one of Harman’s major philosophical breakthroughs is viewing so much of the correlationist tradition as being salvageable in terms of viewing their correlationist presuppositions as belonging to the context of discovery, and then examining whether the claims themselves can be justified from an object oriented standpoint. In addition to the other manifest literary and philosophical virtues of his work, Hagglund is radical and new in part because what he’s doing passes the anti-correlationist smell test in just these regards.
August 16, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Jon, as I noted to Levi, Peirce provides this as well. One can debate how much Peirce Derrida actually adopted. But certainly Peirce offers a way in the concepts that Derrida appropriated to have representation without humans or language. Indeed for Peirce the universe itself is a sign system working out its final representation.
August 16, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Captain,
Maybe a way of putting it would be to say that there’s a certain tendency at work in Derrida’s thought (I’m thinking of something like Bergsonian tendencies that are virtual without yet being actualized). What I call an aberrant reading would then be one that emphasizes these tendencies and renders them explicit, de-suturing differance and trace from concepts like text, sign, and writing, thereby allowing them to be situated in a much broader ontological domain that wouldn’t be so fixed on the analysis of books (in the way the “methodology” has been put to work).
August 16, 2010 at 8:54 pm
I get a real sense that some people in these kinds of debates are either not honest about their intentions – i.e.that they care about ideas and are not merely stirring the pot – or they have a poor sense of when to call a spade a spade and end the conversation in friendly disagreement.
For my money, there is more to be gained from intelligent discussion that leaves open the possibility of further intelligent discussions, even if that means leaving certain issues without full agreement. Call me old fashioned like that.
August 16, 2010 at 9:01 pm
Levi, I think you are conflating Derrida’s methodology, terms and conclusions. His method is reading other texts quite closely, yes. These are also at times texts about language (Of Grammatology, Ltd. Inc in particular). His terms are drawn from these readings, and so they often “belong” to the domain of linguistics (i.e. signifier, etc.) But Derrida’s conclusions – not my conclusions, or Hagglund’s, but really, truly, Derrida’s conclusions – are that “every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace.” (Ltd Inc, 148). That’s Derrida’s big conclusion.
Again, he may be worthless for your work, that’s fine. But it’s not wrong to say that Derrida’s conclusions are about the world itself. That’s not what every Derridean says, ok, but it’s what lots of them say, and more importantly it’s what Derrida says himself.
August 16, 2010 at 10:46 pm
“I get a real sense that some people in these kinds of debates are either not honest about their intentions – i.e.that they care about ideas and are not merely stirring the pot – or they have a poor sense of when to call a spade a spade and end the conversation in friendly disagreement.”
As one of those likely included here, my intentions are pretty pure – I quite literally only care about the ideas. Personally I think the move to intentions is itself an underhand move.
August 16, 2010 at 11:01 pm
BB,
As I’ve already remarked, however, I’m not persuaded by this sort of argument:
Let’s draw an analogy to Kant. You could easily say that for Kant “every referent, all reality, has the structure of categories and intuitions in space and time.” However, it would also be true that this is only the case for phenomena or for-us (referents-for-us, reality-for-us) precisely because mind imposes these forms of intuition and categories on mind. Derrida is coming from a phenomenological/structuralist tradition where it’s already understood that claims about the referent and reality are always necessarily restricted to this “for-us”. As a consequence, it is not at all clear whether he’s making an ontological claim that would hold regardless of whether any humans, language, signs, or animals exist, or whether this claim is restricted only to a world where language and signs exist. In my view, Derrida’s methodology is highly symptomatic of where he really comes down on these issues. In the other Derrida thread someone cited a passage from Of Grammatology where Derrida refers to genes as a writing system. Okay, so why don’t we ever see Derrida analyze genes as a writing system rather than analyzing Levi-Strauss? Why don’t we ever see him directly analyzing “text” that are outside the book? I think the fact that he doesn’t suggests that this is because he believes we have no access to a world apart from discourse, speech, books, etc.
Now let’s say I’m wrong on this. Maybe I am and maybe I’ve gotten D. all wrong as you guys are suggesting. I think there is still a strong case to be made for marginalizing Derrida in our current intellectual context as a way of moving on to other things. Here the argument I’ve made in the past is that the Enlightenment thinkers had to marginalize the scholastics to do their project. Now, we all know that the Enlightenment thinkers were unfair to the scholastics, that they continued to draw heavily from the scholastics without referencing them, and that the scholastics had the resources to answer to a number of their arguments. That’s not really the point though. Scholastic thought had become a quicksand that had to be marginalized for things to move on and for new forms of discourse and new sorts of questions could emerge. So long as the scholastic thinkers hegemonized the field, this really wasn’t possible. A case could be made that something similar is needed with thinkers like Derrida.
August 17, 2010 at 4:48 am
For your consideration, here are two quotes from both Derrida (Archive Fever p. 16 and 17) and Ian Bogost:
“One can dream or speculate about the geo-techno-logical shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, Freud, his contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had access to MCI or AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail.”
“This means that, in the past, psychoanalysis would not have been what it was (any more than so many other things) if E-mail, for example, had existed. And in the future it will no longer be what Freud and so many psychoanalysts have anticipated, from the moment E-mail, for example, became possible.”
In other words, the medium is message.
Here is what Ian Bogost said at a recent Richard Rorty conference:
“Consider, for example, the future archives being built today “in the cloud” on services like Gmail and Twitter. These are not documents, but entanglements of database records, air conditioners, end-user license agreements, electricity grids, backup tape automators, venture capital, password reminder security questions, browser standards, and much more. When we call things digital, just as when we call things linguistic, we are always only partly right. Instead of file systems, we ought seek other metaphors. Perhaps future archives will be more like bestiaries or like Wal-Marts than they are like libraries.”
In this heated debate, I think there are connections that could be made that are being missed. If a buggery of Derrida is possible, then why not?
August 17, 2010 at 6:33 am
Zizek mentions deconstruction and Judith Butler. I thought is was funny…only two minutes.
August 17, 2010 at 8:47 am
I’ve been following this debate with some bemusement in that everybody seems to be skirting the main point – Surely from the OOP posse’s point of view, Derrida’s philosophical heritage means that he is necessarily bound within the correlationist circle and therefore cannot be a realist. This absolutely follows from Meillassoux’s argument in After Finitude. Doesn’t OOP agree with Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism?
What this means is that the most that OOP will admit to is that a philosopher such as Derrida (and just about anybody else) has certain resources which could be employed in an OOP style. This is what Levi now seems to be claiming for Derrida and is certainly what Harman does with Heidegger.
Consequently, it is simply a waste of time trying to ‘prove’ Derrida’s realism to Levi because realism is defined in such a way that it is impossible for Derrida to fit the bill. This is a perfectly fair (I hesitate to use the ‘reasonable’)move for OOP to make.
Philosophically, the interesting thing to do is attack OOP’s claims about realism and, in particular, correlationism – If correlationism exists as it is depicted (quite possibly), does it produce the problems OOP claims (I don’t think so) and is it possible to think outside it (I doubt it)?. Do that, and you can have your realist Derrida if that’s what you want.
Personally, I think that whatever there is in Derrida that is interesting and/or useful
is not dependent upon his commitment, or lack thereof, to realism.
August 17, 2010 at 9:01 am
If Derrida is truly a realist (and I think that this argument is very interesting) then 99.5% of the scholarship on his work for the past thirty years has completely misinterpreted him.
Certainly I was not taught this particular version of J.D. in grad school. To quote (verbatim) the professor who taught discourse analysis: “language relates only to language”. (Pretty unambiguous!) Perhaps I was misinformed by an oaf who knew nothing? Or perhaps, and I find this rather more plausible, I was taught the overwhelming, mainstream view present in every textbook and seminar syllabus I’ve ever seen. Perhaps this is why whenever anyone in the class was so naive as to suggest that human perception is impacted by non-human objects in fashions irreducible to individual or collective discursive representations of those objects they were swatted down with disdain?
So, why is it only now that the ‘real’ (i.e. ‘realist’) Derrida is there for all to see, so obvious and self-evident? For all those who consider Derrida to be a realist: great! But the first thing you have to do is to explain why almost everybody who has ever read Derrida has gotten the opposite impression.
Secondly: Does language relate to more than language? If there is no REFERENCE between words and worlds (nobody here is arguing that) then is there RELATION between words and worlds and, more importantly, are there worlds even without words?
August 17, 2010 at 11:00 am
Levi, thanks for your reply. I do in fact think that Derrida strongly critiques this sense of restricting reality to the status of “for-us” and pushes very hard against the idea that a human mind needs to be present for the trace structure to function. I would quote texts to that effect, but your second point makes me think that doesn’t matter very much, since you’ve decided to rhetorically position Derrida a certain way. It reminds me of Gadamer completely misinterpreting Dilthey for the purpose of, in his words, “silhouetting my work more boldly.” Ok, sure. But is Derrida really the guy you want to put in this position? Perhaps it’s a winning move. But from where I sit, the guy has enough people misconstruing him already. One more is just white noise, not a bold silhouette. Now Deleuze’s re-reading of Hume, that was a barn burner. Why not reread (or reposition) Wittgenstein this way instead?
August 17, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Levi, the article I reference below (G. Bennington’s “The Limits of My Language”) is a good overview of my position, and a piece of mainstream Derrida scholarship that I think makes a good case for this. If you like Hagglund’s book, this might contribute to that discussion.
@CSquares:
“Does language relate to more than language?”
Derrida in fact claims that even human thought is not necessarily linguistic. Moreover, one of his basic points is that the image of a chasm between language and world is false, because language is a part of the world. It’s a thing like other things. If you want a really good overview of this, check out G. Bennington’s article “The Limits of My Language” in his book “Not Half No End,” it’s on Google Books. It addresses this very question.
“99.5% of the scholarship on his work for the past thirty years has completely misinterpreted him.”
Maybe that’s true (I don’t think so, at least not the people I read and like, but whatever). But in the spirit of OOP, why not talk about the object (i.e. Derrida) and not your linguistic mediation of the object (i.e. the “tradition”?)
August 17, 2010 at 1:27 pm
BB,
Wittgenstein already has been repositioned this way by analytic philosophers. We help ourselves to Kripke’s interpretation of the rule-following paradox, and see him as an ancestor to contemporary inferentialists like Brandom and Dummett (and perhaps less anodynely McDowellian “quietism”), but that’s about it. Almost nobody sees philosophical methodology in anything like Wittgenstein’s original disciples. And (much more sadly) almost nobody reads any of his original disciples (Anscombe to some extent excepted).
Which is to some extent sad. Phillips is a vastly underrated philosopher of religion (I’m hoping to write a paper defending him some time this year), and he is Wittgensteinian to the core.
But it really is all to the good that Wittgenstein inspired approaches to “grammar” are nowhere near the core of analytic philosophy. It would be just way too constraining to philosophy if Wittgensteinism had the same role vis a vis analytic philosophy as Derrida does with SPEPy continental philosophy.
August 17, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Jon,
Ok, thanks for the info, but I think you missed my point. I don’t really care about Wittgenstein.
Let me try again: why try to stake out a bold rhetorical position by saying that Derrida cares only about language? If you are saying something Sokal said, then it’s probably not going to turn any heads. Surely there are more striking rhetorical positions to take.
August 17, 2010 at 2:42 pm
@ Jon C.:
Let’s have some Wittgenstein wars now! (It’d be more interesting.)
I am glad to see folks pushing for a different take on Derrida than the one that everyone seemed to be mouthing back in the late ’80’s/early ’90s. To my mind it is largely uninteresting, and certainly not able to be finally established, whether Derrida “really meant” to be a realist. I deeply doubt it, because I deeply doubt he thought reality was “realistic.” By which I mean, my reading on him is that he saw that any matter continually evaded our formulations– whether those were linguistic or otherwise. What is more interesting (to me) is whether Derrida can be read this way. And surprise! the man who championed the idea that there is no single reading of anything, (nor any single anything whatever), can in fact be read this way. In this sense, Derrida is a natural ally for OOP (if they want him), whether or no this is on the surface of the majority of his texts. I would almost say that OOP is the deconstruction that the glass would use on the lemonade, and vice-versa, if either could think.
August 17, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Hey, thank for putting up with me, guys. I really appreciate the dialogue. I’ll butt out now.
August 17, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Well I’m not queuing up to be considered a realist if that’s any consolation! :) I still detect a whiff of “back to Plato” in most moves intended to overturn Kant, and this isn’t something I’m keen on.
In fact, a recent philosophy book proposal of mine was rejected by a publisher (much to my chagrin) on the grounds that what I was suggesting was anti-realist and that (in effect) there was nobody left supporting that kind of view in academia. This did not please me! X(
What annoyed me in this regard was that I didn’t think of my position in terms of anti-realism (in the sense of denying an objective world) – I’ve never denied a “real world”, only the knowledge claims that pre-suppose secure conditions of access to it, and in this non-foundationalist position what I am against is not reality but epistemology. Isn’t this merely opposition to the “naive realism” that pretty much everyone in philosophy now discredits anyway? :-/
It can’t really be the case that I am the only person left following the arguments of Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty et al in opposition to secure construals of knowledge. Surely not… The debate may be more sophisticated and have uncovered fresh seams of enquiry, but nothing floating around seems to have invalidated this line of thinking as far as I can ascertain.
But then again, here you are saying “everyone’s a realist now”, backing up the grounds by which my proposal was rejected. So what’s the deal here?
I still haven’t had the option to investigate speculative realism in detail (i.e. beyond reading a few blog posts here and there), but it seems to me that it can’t possibly be pursuing a foundationalist stance or it wouldn’t need the “speculative” qualifier… So why am I all of a sudden a pariah?
If you can shed any light on my baffling predicament I would love to be illuminated!
Best wishes,
Chris.
August 17, 2010 at 4:15 pm
johneffay, I think you’re right. Levi definitely has moved on to contextual arguments regarding Derrida’s meaning. Given that he was writing in that context and doesn’t make a sufficiently explicit comment on object-object relations for the OOP crowd they’ll never accept him. So it probably is a pointless discussion. The very context entails a certain reading for most OOP proponents. I suspect the defenders of a realist reading of Derrida just wish to point out that Derrida can coherently be read in a much more open fashion. But I really can’t fault Levi for the sort of reading he engages in. I think it very cogent and common. I just don’t think it the only reading nor the most interesting reading.
I can but say I’ve always read Derrida as a realist. Indeed as somewhat of a scholastic realist (with the usual caveats of his not being the typical realist due to non-presence).
Even if most readers read Derrida as an anti-realist (which as I said I find difficult to establish) so what? To make a Heideggarian point why remain caught up in Das Man? Engage in an authentic encounter with the things themselves. In this case Derrida. I think once you allow an openness to this reading that it’ll really jump out to you when you reread Derrida.
August 17, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Chris, I think you’ve established that philosophy is dominated by fads. Right now realism is the latest fad. This probably means a whole lot of horrible readings done by people weak in philosophy. Are Graham and Levi about to be transformed the way Derrida was in the 80’s and 90’s by the establishment? (Grin) Maybe they’ll make comments in interviews about not rejecting some key point but since they were writing in a particular context and because the majority don’t interpret them in that way no one will believe they actually believed that point. (LOL)
More seriously though it seems odd you’d get that comment. It seems to me that anti-realism, especially as tied to deflation (which I take as anti-realism) is still amazingly popular in analytic philosophy.
August 17, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Chris,
Don’t conclude very much from one one journal reviewer said. Many reviewers are unkind and uncharitable.
The average acceptance rate of most philosophy journals is between 5 and 10%, so even if you are at the median you have to submit between ten and 20 times between acceptances. The whole system is very much a test of how many times you can get back up after being punched in the face.
Unfortunately when the reviewers have to justify non-acceptance and sometimes they go overboard in their attempted justifications.
A good review will say what is good about the paper and then make concrete suggestions for improving what is not. You can do this and still counsel rejection just because the paper would in effect be a new paper or because the revised paper would still be better at another journal. But often reviewers don’t do this.
So just revise it and send the thing back out there!
This being said, even unhelpful comments can be helpful. You can usually revise the paper so that the next unhelfpul, uncharitable reviewer can’t make the same mistakes. And the paper is usually better for having done such revisions.
August 17, 2010 at 9:33 pm
I take Levi’s ” I think there is still a strong case to be made for marginalizing Derrida in our current intellectual context as a way of moving on to other things.” as a self conscious joke since for D, the margins are central. However, I think D remains a good figure for questioning the axioms of OO since these were already so central to research. However, I think it would be unfair to locate D within a straight phenomenology since his project, in Genesis and in Origin, begins with exactly the problematic relationship between a science which claims to know things and the problems of that association. One does not obviate that problem by referring to an accepted “thing” — like the study of genes — and so overcome exactly the problems of genesis and difference in regard to the assertion. One can, like the enlightenment very much, assert certain rules for discussion but these do not answer any more than Kant did Hamann.
August 18, 2010 at 1:52 am
James,
Sure, but it’s also important to remember that Derrida is currently among the establishment thinkers that preside over the framework of contemporary thought. Attend to Deleuze’s “buggaries”. Deleuze selected thinkers such as Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, and so on. At the time French thought was dominated by the shadow of Hegel and phenomenology. This choice of thinkers was an attempt to redirect that. Derrida, I believe, needs to sit for a few decades before what you’re talking about can be done. Absent that it will just be a continuation of business as usual.
August 18, 2010 at 3:51 am
I myself think Derrida does really need to be reread and new things done with. I’m not sure this is possible at the moment either. I’ve attempted to in a few papers but, in reference to the commenters above on journals, have only received baffled responses from reviewers about what I’ve written. Like a lot of people interested in the non-human I’ve been thinking and writing about Derrida’s comment on vegetarianism trying very much to figure out what Derrida offers along these terms beyond what his comments on the matter imply.
To Levi a friend who read my recent paper said it was interesting as I was using derrida to think about ontology and to make him and ontological thinker. Just thinking about your above comments along these lines.
August 18, 2010 at 7:16 am
Clark: no doubt you’re right about fads… this one just took me by surprise since (as per Levi’s post) I can’t believe everyone turned realist overnight! :)
Jon: this was a book proposal submitted to a publisher, not a paper proposal submitted to a journal, and was rejected on the basis of two reviews. But, as you say, I just got back on the horse revised and resubmitted. I’m now on the third proposal in this sequence – and the current proposal references your work, actually, both positively and critically. :)
What surprised me about the rejection was the accusation that I was an anti-realist, and the suggestion that everyone in academic philosophy had turned realist – hence my posting of my rather grumpy point-of-view in this post.
Anyway, on with the show, as they say. :)
August 18, 2010 at 12:25 pm
@ BB (post 53)
Thanks for the reading suggestion (G. Bennington “Not Half No End”), I’ll check it out.
“[I]n the spirit of OOP, why not talk about the object (i.e. Derrida) and not your linguistic mediation of the object (i.e. the “tradition”?)”
Is Derrida more of an ‘object’ than ‘the tradition’? Of course there is Derrida and then there is “Derrida” (just as in Latour’s Pasteurization of France there is Pasteur (the man) and “Pasteur” (the myth, the legend, the ‘genius’)).
It is difficult to disentangle these two things but certainly both were objects or collections of objects. Derrida is dead so he’s not much of an object anymore!
As for his texts, they remain objects but very much in the plural, translated into many different languages and printed thousands of times. Never mind the fact that they are intertextually related and cannot be understood qua philosophy texts outside of that relationality.
But aside from that, if you mean that I should just talk about the real Derrida rather than what I was taught about him (perhaps erroneously) then I must say that my impression upon reading him was that while he was ambiguously realist in his interviews, in his other texts he was straightforwardly anti-realist.
Derrida was extremely lucid in his interviews and rather difficult everywhere else and I suspect many of the citations arguing for his ‘realism’ came from the interviews rather than his other texts as there he let himself use declarative sentences.
But I must be clear: I am no Derrida expert — not even close, so I am not claiming any interpretative authority whatsoever. My point is more that if Levi and others take Derrida to be an anti-realist they are, in this respect, fully in agreement with the vast majority of the secondary literature on J.D.. Where they differ is that Levi and others think anti-realism is a bad thing and most Derrideans don’t.
This jars with the Derridean side of this ‘debate’ which broadly takes the line: ‘how can you think he is anti-realist? he obviously is a realist, just look at A, B, C, D…’. Well, it isn’t at all that obvious; if it was then fewer people would have made this mistake (if that is what it is).
My question therefore is: if Derrida was a realist why have so many people come to the opposite conclusion? Everybody is perfectly entitled to argue that he is a realist but I would like to hear why it is that so many intelligent people have made the mistake of thinking he isn’t (if it is a mistake).
It may well be that he has said anti-realist things and realist things at different times and in different texts. This seems most plausible. In this case we should ask if there is enough realism in Derrida for him to be usefully taken as a realist philosopher. That would seem to be the more pertinent debate.
August 18, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Chris,
Ooh man, Yeah I HATE book proposal rejections. In my experience they tend to be less fair and helpful, and a lot more difficult emotionally to deal with- because I have so much more invested in it than a paper.
Good to see that you’re back up and punching again though.
Jon
August 18, 2010 at 2:58 pm
[…] Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized Leave a Comment In light of the Derrida discussions I’ve been left feeling paranoid, wondering whether I’ve gotten everything entirely […]
August 18, 2010 at 7:24 pm
Hi Levi,
I’ve followed your blog for ages, and it’s been really exciting to watch your thought progress.
I suppose I have a nagging fear, which might be based on a misunderstanding, so forgive me if this is so. The fear is to do with having done enough. I’ve thought for a long time about the kind of research that your thought suggests, and I worry that it could suggest a process of never-ending failure. Any particular research by necessity privileges a particular area, insofar as it is impossible to investigate the object in all of its manifestations. At the moment I suppose, giving attention to objects that have previously been neglected draws attention to prior hegemonies, and perhaps to hegemony as such, but in the future, what’s to stop it turning into a bureacratic exercise of covering your back?
I realise this is slightly off topic…
Cheers Levi.
Ghost
August 18, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Hi Ghost,
I was talking about this very thing with a friend the other day. I’m pretty much of the mind that the best we can hope for is never ending failure. There’s never going to be a methodological approach that does a fully adequate job in taking into account all the different things that contribute to a milieu and how all those elements interact with one another in producing phenomena. For me, however, it’s important to develop a theoretical practice that is squarely aware of this and open to taking these other actants into account when our models suggest that missing masses are at work. I think I’m pretty humble when it comes to the issue of what we can know. I arrive at this honestly through my Lacanian background that emphasized the impossibility of totality and that there’s always a remainder. I think Dany Nobus, in his recent co-authored book, is especially good on these points.
August 18, 2010 at 10:46 pm
Yes, I agree with you about totalities. I wonder whether sometimes there are areas to research that are more important than others, but I think this is something you’ve addressed before, not least in these Derrida debates.
I very much look forward to reading the book.
Ghost
August 18, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Excellent question. I suspect context had a lot to do with it, as Levi’s arguments demonstrate.
As you said in the interviews he was much more straightforward. My own view is that people try to fit Derrida into the traditional categories. And in that sense he’s closer to the anti-realist camp than the scientific realist camp or Kantian camp. So it’s understandable. As I mentioned the same thing happened to the pragmatists a century or so ago.