December 01, 2012
eagleton reads the derrida bio
I suspect that one reason Derrida enjoyed travelling the world so much was because it allowed him some respite from the bitchy, sectarian, backstabbing, backscratching climate of Parisian intellectual life, which this superb biography faithfully records. What the book fails to underline quite as heavily is how waspish the maitre himself could be. Two dramatic moments stand out in Derrida's subsequent career. Traveling to communist Prague in 1981 to address a secretly organised philosophy seminar, he was arrested and charged with drug smuggling. It seems the authorities saw the dismantling of binary oppositions as a threat to the state. The police officer who had planted the drugs in Derrida's suitcase was himself later arrested for drug trafficking.more from Terry Eagleton at The Guardian here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:49 AM | Permalink
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As recreation while preparing for a graduate program at a certain business school, I was reading a bit of Derrida. I was not impressed.
I, for one, continue to be underwhelmed by virtually all of Derrida's 'theories'. It is unclear to me that his contributions to modern thought, and that of the deconstructionists, amounts to anything more than the following single sentence. "A line of text can be amibiguous in meaning."
Other than that totally trivial observation, it beats me what Derride has really said or contributed to the world of intellectual thought. Indeed, I would term Derrida's work philosophizing for the lazy intellectual. 'Lazy' because a good analysis based on mathematics and statistics would resolve these 'binary oppositions' that Derrida talks about. If there were "binary opposition"s and they were a construction of the "West", then how could the same sort of analytical tools that are used in the "West" are also effective in the "East" - e.g. in countries like India and China?
Here is an example. For a multi-racial person like Obama, a statement like "blacks in America are poor while the whites are rich" would be understandable. But a comment like "Ninja please" would be doubly hard to cognitively process because he has taken a lot of pains to get out of the very stereotypes about blacks that people often label them with. But then again, at the end of the day, they may attribute his success to his being not entirely black and therefore "accceptable" to everyone. But there is nothing special going on -cognitively- in the mind of Obama. There is no specific hard-to-resolve "binary opposition". It is simply the case that statements like "blacks in America are poor while whites are rich" are statistical observations. Also, there is a lot of not-very-nice people in the world. That is about the only conclusions one can draw from these comments. There is no reason to believe that there are "binary oppositions" out there waiting to be pounced upon by the cruel, unfeeling world.
And so Eagleton shouldn't just say that he "likes" Derrida. He should address the fundamental problems that exist with deconstructionist analysis. Essentially, any time you decide that you want to preternd to be discussing ideas without actually getting into the depths of the issues, deconstructionism will work for you. Instead of actually trying to understand the best solutions to various policy issues, it is easier to simply analyze and re-analyze the 'binary oppositiion"'s which takes less time to write a paper about than actually collecting empirical data. It is also almost impossible to disprove.The rise of deconstrutionism is an organizational phenemenon and must be seen, I believe, as such. Professors have to meet certain requirements to get tenure and
"deconstructionist" analyses helps them get there without them having to takethe
effort of actually publishing anything novel.
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Posted by: Anand Manikutty | Dec 2, 2012 10:38:44 AM
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