I really dislike this kind of post and wish that there was more interest in philosophy and literature on Hexbear. Something like this is quite sad to see.
Are you sure you're talking about the right person? Derrida hardly ever wrote about consumer culture, his "anti-communism" consists of a few scattered remarks critical of certain parts of the Soviet Union, he was very much against Western chauvinism, he never even met Heidegger and certainly wasn't friends with him.
Derrida is still part of a wave of broad anti-Marxist reaction within the bourgeois academy.
Like if you read Spectres of Marx, there isn't much there that seems to actually contribute anything to Marxism. I don't really understand how he felt justified in dedicating that book to Chris Hani, of all people.
Derrida was still a massive liberal. I can't find it now but check out lectures he did in South Africa after the end of Apartheid. He is intellectually masturbating in front of a bunch of radical young black south africans who've just lived through apartheid and basically justifying the liberal (so, concretely, neoliberal) development of South Africa. Obvs not saying don't read him or that there's literally nothing there, but I think Marxists should definitely treat his thought as reactionary overall, methodologically and how it's diverted and poisoned alot of intellects that could have been radicalised as Marxists. He was important in delegitimizing Marxism within academia.
Out of interest, as I'm happy to be wrong on this point: do you personally think there are elements of his thought which are of value for Marxism today? Examples I see referenced are writings on animality (so perhaps of relevance to animal rights and veganism) but I haven't had the time or inclination to check em out, and they strike me as, at best, idealistic analyses which we could just avoid by doing dialectical materialist analyses of animality in the first place.
His concrete political positions certainly aren't always convincing. I know that Christopher Wise has some good criticism of his ambiguous statements about Israel, for instance. But I don't see how this vitiates his entire body of work. His primary concern is the history of Western philosophy and I always felt that there was more than a hint of Marx in the way he criticizes texts immanently with a focus on binary opposites. Now, you might say that it is no longer necessary to read philosophy at all because the science of dialectical materialism has made it obsolete, but that is not the position of Marx, Lenin or Mao. All of them take elements of their thought from Hegel because they have read him critically. Why should we not do the same? And in a way, basically everything Derrida wrote concerns the problem of reading. As far as I know, there is no dialectical materialist method of reading, so it's not like there's an obvious substitute for his work.
Regarding his effect on the intellectual esteem of Marxism in his time, I find it difficult to make a judgement. It seems to me that after 1968, there was no longer any possibility of worthwhile Marxist praxis in the West (for the time being at least). So I'd say there's a lot of blame to go around for the weakness of the Marxist left in Europe in the past decades, and I do not think that French intellectuals are a major factor here. If anything, the whole intellectual environment of "continental philosophy" seems more amenable to Marxist thought than Anglo analytic philosophy, which is the only alternative in Western universities. Maybe Specters of Marx didn't do anything for the Communist movement, but it did help a bit to make Marx seem intellectually respectable again after the decades of the Cold War.
In any case, Derrida's thinking about text and reading seems irreplaceable to me. Literature has always been a difficult topic for Marxism (the great names have almost nothing to say about it), so I think a kind of literary theory that is actually aware of the problems and history of philosophy instead of shunting that off to another discipline seems worthwhile, and I don't see how you get that without Derrida or thinkers like him.
There's a good case that deconstruction and Derrida's method of differance is just applying Marxist dialectics to reading. Derrida was obsessed with finding the "sediment" of words and thoughts, the underlying and historicised meaning behind texts left unsaid. That's a very materialist and Marxist thing to do!
Yes, that's pretty much what I think. If looking at how the matter of writing always resists its reduction to meaning, resulting in a history of conflict between matter and ideas, isn't at least inspired by Marx, I don't know what is.
deconstruction has never been Marxist, no more than it has ever been non-Marxist, although it has remained faithful to a certain spirit of Marxism, to at least one of its spirits.
Welcome to Derrida bud, there's no "meaning," we're just signifiers trapped in a world of signifiers where nothing can be signified. This is partially why Derrida is stupid even though I love him.
Hmm. That definitely interesting as a suggestion.
Personally I didn't get that impression of any materialist project reading, for instance, Writing and Difference or Grammatology.
Just to reference his first book on Husserl and geometry (not actually about geometry, but which I once found, hilariously, in the maths section of my uni library), he emphasized the lack of any actual immediate relation, that the voice we speak or hear, or for that matter consciousness, it never in an absolute, ideal immediacy with itself. It is always mediated. Sure. But this point can also be found in analytic philosophy (Sellars, who read Hegel and had started as a Marxist) and is literally the first section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (On Sense Certainty).
TBH my main issue is not even with Derrida, but with derrideans. Similar shit with Foucault and Deleuze. The work has some good ideas, points, analyses, insights. But in the hands of their self-described disciples in modern bourgeois academia is has really, mostly become scholastic masturbation, bar some exceptional cases like Spivak (but who I try to translate into more materialist, dialectical language).
It appeared to me like deconstruction ends up becoming basically just a directionless, interminably system of signification signifying further signifiers. A similar thing happens in Lacan (a whole other kettle of fish). The insights they arrive at sometime strike me as to have been arrived at equally in spite of the methodology as because of it. Hence why I'm still convinced its idealist.
I mean on the whole you're definitely right, the decontructionist legacy Derrida left has mostly been used by brain dead academics to keep their jobs and doing close readings of nothing. I think Derrida does some interesting things and I enjoy reading him.
Some of his political takes are good, many are bad. I don't disagree with you there.
I'm not saying we should stop doing philosophy. Not that we should take his word as gospel, but when Marx speaks about philosophers only understanding the world, rather than changing it, he is not saying we should stop doing philosophy to engage in the general projects of understanding and determining out most general theories.
I also agree that we should keep reading philosophy, including non-Marxist philosophy. It arrogant otherwise and it often shows. But unless you're specifically something like a historian of ideas and are studying the history of 'western' philosophy, I'm personally don't see the reason to keep spending time reading these dudes like Derrida which we could spend reading far more grounded works of philosophy and political thought.
On the topic of 'continental' vs 'analytic' philosophy, I think it depends. Most analytic philosophers are equally useless, intellectually masturbating navel-gazers as continental philosophers. But tbh, if what you're interested in is mathematics, or the philosophy of the natural sciences, the 'continental' thinkers who tend to talk about these topics often display profound ignorance of them, imo. So do many analytic thinkers, but I still think the gold standard in the west for reflection on those topics, because analytic philosophy was founded by actual mathematicians who are important in the development of modern mathematics.
For the record, there are analytic philosophers who are/were genuine leftists. Putnam at some point was a Maoist, before becoming a soc-dem. Neurath was a Marxist. Carnap tried to join the communist party. That being said, none of their important philosophical work has anything to do or really to offer to political, social or economic philosophy, imo, and the work in the tradition has become more and more of a performative scholastic arena for academic credentials since the mid-century.
I honestly can't think of any really good analytic political or social philosophy. But I also think most of the 'continential' work is a waste of time. There's a world of Marxist theory outside of this done by people, above all in the Global South, which is of far greater value to political, social or economic thought.
I think part of Derrida's value lies in problematizing notions that seem fundamental to us. For example, one might feel that politics on one hand and the history of (Western) philosophy on the other are disparate fields where one is concrete, useful and practical while the other is minor and abstract. Is that a valid distinction we should make or do we get into trouble if we investigate it too closely? I feel like that's an issue worth thinking about and on which old Hegel may have something useful to say.
In any case, Derrida is mostly a critic of philosophy. His point is not that we need to recapture valuable insights from old wise men, but that we are still operating with their ideas and concepts, whether we like it or not, and if we want to do something about that, we need to investigate them. I think that's another point in which he is close to Marx.
Totally agree that they are not separate issues. There is no such thing as an absolute separation of the abstract-theoretical and the practical-concrete (we can obviously spell out what that last statements means in alot of different, valid directions).
Yh that a good role of his thought. But I don't think you need to read Derrida (which, lets be honest, for most people is hell) to know that.
Marxism on the left was certainly weaker, certainly, after the late 60s, but I think this is an excessively academic point of view.
This was also the period of Maoist revolutionary violence in Europe, and the Years of Lead in Italy, ineffective as they ultimately have been, also leading to the further development of ultra-leftist and eurocommunist reformism and opportunism in light of their exhaustion and failure.
There were also multipler people's wars and revolutionary struggles being waged globally, which many (including western) Marxists dealt with. Alot of very important Marxist work was done in the 70s. There is a slowdown by the early 80s, i.e. the full onset of neoliberalism, imo.
I totally agree we should still read them critically. But their dominance within the post-new-left critical theory traditions has definitely occupied a space which excludes Marxism, as most of it is premissed on an explicit rejection of Marxist notions and methods, and when modern rad-lib critical theorists attack Marxism as outdated, reductionist, or totalizing (which often leads on in practice to them arguing that Marxism is totalitarian), they frequently do it using derridean and co. Tbh the bottom line for me is not that he problematizes concepts we often essentialize, but that he attack on them is not productive. I don't see it as dialectical. A concept should be maintained in its development to the extent that it continues to aim with theoretical understanding and praxis.
I've read Hegel and yh, I read him as a Marxist so the idealism is the standout issue. Like I have beef with Zizek because he's more of a hegelian than a marxist, and this shows in his liberal, reactionary views and practices. I don't think you need to real Hegel to understand Marx, but the main value of reading him, for me at least, is the epistemological and methodological importance of dialectics, although for ontology there is also importance insofar as he seems to have an process-based ontology, which Marxism also does.
When it comes to Derrida, the difference is that I'm not really convinced on the substantial ontological, epistemological or methodological importance of deconstruction. At the end of the day the proof for me is in the pudding, and there are no militant derrideans.
I actually completely agree with you when it comes to literature. I'd say something similar about how many marxists have engaged with ethical thought (see: https://alt.politics.communism.narkive.com/Sb205tXJ/ho-chi-minh-on-revolutionary-morality). Marxists in general have been weaker in their analyses of literature and the arts. A good deal of this comes from mistaking describing the external material conditions of something's historical context for exhaustively describing everything that can be said about it in material terms. I don't see any reason why materialist analysis of art, literature, music, film etc. can't still make or musn't make reference to the forms of the arts and the types of experiences these forms tend to produce in the audience who experience them, if those things are understood materialistically and properly placed in their historical context.
In other words its often vulgar materialism dressed up as Marxism and applied to culture.
If anyone finds Derrida helpful for their understanding of something important to them like literature, then yh no hate from me, bless up. I personally think there are more productive sources to appropriate, even for literary analysis, but I'm happy to be convinced that I'm wrong. I also like getting stoned and reading Joyce.
What's the utility of an Derridan analysis of text if one of his own students accuses him of intentionally misrepresenting text he was supposed to be analyzing
Why should we trust that guy more than Derrida himself? And anyway, shouldn't we check it out ourselves instead of trusting someone else's interpretation?
This still seems a bit confused. There's many bad things you can say about Jürgen Habermas -- he really is a liberal philosopher who has worked to defang the critical potential of the Frankfurt School -- but he is not a Heideggerian (and yes, he was a member of the Hitler Youth until the war ended when he was about 15). In fact, he is about the strongest enemy of French theory (and Heidegger) there is in contemporary German philosophy. There would be more to say about the relation of Derrida and Habermas, but the fact that they were interviewed for the same book is not a very strong connection between them.
At the end of the 1990s, Habermas approached Derrida at a party held at an American university where both were lecturing. They then met at Paris over dinner, and participated afterwards in many joint projects. In 2000 they held a joint seminar on problems of philosophy, right, ethics, and politics at the University of Frankfurt. In December 2000, in Paris, Habermas gave a lecture entitled "How to answer the ethical question?" at the Judeities. Questions for Jacques Derrida conference organized by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly. Following the lecture by Habermas, both thinkers engaged in a very heated debate on Heidegger and the possibility of Ethics. The conference volume was published at the Editions Galilée (Paris) in 2002, and subsequently in English at Fordham University Press (2007).
Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in a series of disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual understanding and friendship in the late 1990s that lasted until Derrida's death in 2004. They originally came in contact when Habermas invited Derrida to speak at The University of Frankfurt in 1984. The next year Habermas published "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity in which he described Derrida's method as being unable to provide a foundation for social critique. Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me". After Derrida's final rebuttal in 1989 the two philosophers did not continue, but, as Derrida described it, groups in the academy "conducted a kind of 'war', in which we ourselves never took part, either personally or directly".
Really, for philosophy this is not much of a connection.
Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in a series of disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual understanding and friendship in the late 1990s that lasted until Derrida’s death in 2004
I'm interested in your definition of "connection" if paling around with an anti-marxist who advanced the works of fascists like Hannah Arendt doesn't count as suspect
I wouldn't agree with calling Arendt a Fascist either, but racist lib certainly. (inb4 :same-picture: )
Regardless, I would be careful entirely dismissing post-war continental philosophy, it's not productive to dismiss an entire intellectual tradition that has valuable insights on post-Fordian capitalism just because the authors were a) somewhat difficult to understand and b) weren't literally full blown Marxist-Leninists within an environment hostile hostile to such views.
Hard to understand writing is almost an inevitability when it comes to continental philosophy, the fact of the matter is that it's just hard to explain some things, especially if you thought of a concept that no one else has put that much thought into or examined particularly deeply. For most writers, trying to describe their ideas is like trying to describe colour to a blind person.
"Former Hitler Youth member" isn't really as damning as you seem to think. Being indoctrinated as a child does not mean that you'll necessarily be a bad person as an adult (Peter Daou would be an example we all know). I don't know anything about this person but the fact that you call him "a former Hitler Youth member" as opposed to "a Nazi" suggests that the former is the most severe criticism you have of him, and then your criticism of Derrida is just, he knew someone who was indoctrinated as a child? Oh no, dear me! I was raised to believe all sorts of BS so I guess I should cancel anyone who's ever met me.
This really seems like you realized you were wrong and now you're grasping at straws to support the original conclusion. Just take the L.
True, personally I find Habermas celebration of Hannah Arendt far more damning, but I'll let Derrida off the hook, with his general ignorance about politics he probably didn't know what her deal was
I guess "Knew someone who liked someone who was bad" just doesn't have quite the same punch as "rehabilitated unrepentant Nazis." Like tbh in your shoes I'd just delete the post.
"Had a fifteen-year-long professional and personal friendship with an avowed anti-marxist who is famous for advancing and building upon the racist totalitarian concepts proposed by Hannah Arendt" still packs quite a punch for someone who is supposed to be a "genius of the left"
I can't take any of your criticisms seriously because you're just looking for reasons to own him. If I refute one thing you'll come up with something else, and it doesn't matter how spurious it is because you have an axe to grind. I'm not interested in playing whack-a-mole.
I'm not looking for reasons, I found two or three and I'm sticking with them, cause all your "refutions" are just naive nonsense or convenient excuses for what was obviously a famous clique of anti-marxists, whose reputations are not based on the rigor of their work but by the politically friendly conclusions of their "critiques" and "analyses"
As is well known, Derrida's first works – The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, the Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, and Speech and Phenomenon – were dedicated to Husserl's phenomenology which, together with Heidegger's analysis of existence, had been since the 1930s the major reference for most important French philosophers of this period: Lévinas, Ricœur, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Derrida found in Husserl the main themes of thought (the role of writing in science in Origin of Geometry and the conception of soliloquy and voice as self-presence in the first Logical Investigation) that constituted the basis of his project of deconstructing logocentrism and phonocentrism, as expounded in the fundamental book published in 1967 under the title Of Grammatology. But if it is clear that Derrida discovered these themes in Husserl, it is nevertheless Heidegger's thinking that constitutes not only his major reference, but the very milieu, the “element” of his philosophical enterprise. From the middle of the 1960s, with the text dedicated to Lévinas under the title “Violence and Metaphysics,” in which we find his first reading of Heidegger, until the very end of the 1990s, with “L'animal que donc je suis,” where Heidegger's conception of animality is once more analyzed, Derrida never ceased to be engaged in a critical dialogue with Heidegger's thinking. As he explained in an interview in 1967, nothing of what he attempted in this period, which was the most decisive for his entire work, “would have been possible without the opening of the Heideggerian questions,” and especially without the attention given to what Heidegger names the ontological difference, in spite of the fact that this difference seems to him to be still retained in metaphysics.
Yeah, that's not simply critique, that is incorporation, I said previously I was deconstructing Derrida, at first I was joking.....now
Also what was it another commenter said in terms of how to use Derrida properly "But undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures was not a negative operation."
Yes I'm using the word rehabilitation, maybe it was a little too strong, but because Heidegger was crucial to Derrida's works I'm sticking with it, but hey there's no "negative operation" just decomposition of a structure of analysis
God this is tiresome. I seriously do not care about any of your gotchas. And it's laughable that you're pretending to base your position on "deconstructing Derrida" when you had to have the meaning of deconstruction explained to you in this thread. Like from the moment you heard that definition, you were like, how can I either dunk on this in order to dunk on Derrida, or how can I apply this to dunk on Derrida? You didn't know what it meant and you still don't know what it means and if I showed that you're not applying it correctly you'd seamlessly transition back to "well, deconstructionism is dumb anyway."
You know Marx's ideas were inspired by Hegel, right? Even though Hegel reached entirely different political conclusions than Marx? If I showed a quote of Hegel defending slavery, should we also cancel Marx? What a load of nonsense. And that line of logic has absolutely nothing to do with deconstructionism, which, near as I can tell, you think means a sort of "one-drop rule" applied to philosophy, which is just... like, there is no possible way you could arrive at that conclusion if you've actually studied the concept in any capacity.
Why are you talking about Hegel and Marx and presenting deconstructionism as this mystical high-level concept, nah I got the concept, a method of discerning meaning from a text in a way that teases out differing interpretations usually thru contrast, just cause this perfectly coherent idea is used to generate ahistorical gibberish by theorists like Derrida does not mean I hold some hostility to the concept in general
My contention is that unlike Marx, Derrida on Heidegger is not simply engaging in a critique but taking the Nazi idealism of Heidegger at face vague while ironically commending/critiquing Heidegger for "rejecting the vulgar biologism of nazism in favor of a "spirit" nationalism, but thru this rejection revealing the same failed underpinnings of Nazism in general" this is just idealist nonsense, there's no "revealing", instead just a French doofus taking a Nazi doofus's self-mythology at face vague and in no way undermining Nazism in the process
Derrida sounds good on paper, sure as shit don't work in practice judging by that lecture
That his ideas drew inspiration from Hegel but that he was also critical of him. Perhaps that he was "engaged in a critical dialogue with Hegel’s thinking" or that some of his ideas "would not have been possible without the opening of the Hegelian questions."
It's almost like philosophers can engage with the ideas of other philosophers without accepting their political conclusions. Almost as if philosophers frequently engage with ideas that they disagree with in order to critique them.
Taking a Nazi's self-mythology at face value and claiming its construction by said Nazi somehow undermines Nazism is not critical dialogue, and you comparing that idealist drivel to the rigor Marx applied to Hegel is ridiculous
I'm not calling Derrida a nazi, I'm calling him an idealist who can't even competently critique Nazism without sinking into unsupportable assumptions about a Nazi's headspace
I’m not calling Derrida a nazi, I’m calling him an idealist who can’t even competently critique Nazism without sinking into unsupportable assumptions about a Nazi’s headspace
Lmao, now you're saying that. We started out at "rehabilitated Nazis" then progressed to "'rehabilitated' Nazis (technically, for certain definitions of rehabilitate)" and now we've arrived at "critiqued Nazis, but not well enough." If you opened with "Derrida's critique of Nazis was insufficient" then this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Before I got to his incompetent critique I had to sit thru paragraph after paragraph of this mf gushing over Heidegger's methodology and mode of analysis, you gonna pretend Heidegger wasn't one of the biggest influences on Derrida or that he didn't advise his students to read and take seriously this washed up "former" Nazi.....goddamn right I used rehabilitation, and I'll use it again
The Farías debate
Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others, all engaged in debate and disagreement about the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazi politics. These debates included the question of whether it was possible to do without Heidegger's philosophy a position which Derrida in particular rejected Forums where these debates took place include the proceedings of the first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980", Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", and the studies on Paul Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.
I mean at least be honest and admit you think Heidegger is an indispensable resource, Derrida certainly did
And if you do think he's indispensable and valuable, why? Contrary to what Derrida claims, it certainly wasn't his takes on his "former" Nazism or weirdly enough these out of nowhere takes on animals
Like I said, you just have an axe to grind and this is a waste of time. I don't "think Heidegger is an indispensable resource," because I'm not so much defending Derrida as I'm just calling out your dogshit, uninformed arguments that border on anti-intellectualism. But since your increasingly desperate attempts to find something to latch on to have now led you to start attacking me, I'm disengaging, and any further responses will be met with PPB. Tbh I should've started with that and moved on instead of wasting my time with this nonsense.
Literally sat through a three hour lecture by this french dork to formulate a critique of his supposed "critique" of Heidegger just to get called a goddamn anti-intellectual by a chatGPT, unbelievable
Critiquing a French philosopher and not simply taking his received wisdom at face value is not anti-intellectualism, my problem isn't with deconstructivism, it's with Derrida's use of it, now folks got mad at my use of the word "rehabilitation" which is ironic since per the Farias debate (which I noticed none of the Derrida scholars here brought up), would most likely have Derrida agreeing with my use of the term, I guess rehabilitation apparently only means moral and not rehabilitation of ideas, methodology and concepts which is a pretty weird way to look at it, since he if was engaging in moral rehabilitation I would've just called him a fascist and not a liberal know-nothing
Ok there's this pushback which I am seriously reflecting on, and then theres all this Derrida stuff I've been reading all morning, including a three hour derrida lecture on Heidegger and it is not 1:1 and it's making me go :jesse-wtf: to everything in this thread
Granted I know im not communicating my ideas well, cause this stuff is a chore to read and I want to know what version of derrida you guys are reading cause I'm not finding him
Meh, there are better philosophical works to engage with than Derrida. Besides not crossing the Quran/Veda/Analects line, the cost/benefit ratio of being able to understand his text is too high. And even among Western non-Marxist text, there are still better candidates towards investing your time to study.
I would say most Western text on how to wage war like Clausewitz's On War or Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice is more deserving of your time. There are also military manuals that people, especially people who face off against the pigs, can find extremely useful.
The work of pop intellectuals (Chomsky's, Fisher's, and Graeber's more popular works) is also more deserving because if nothing else, at least they're easier to read, which means not only are you able to get through the text faster, but you're also more likely bump into other people who've actually read the text. No one's fucking reading Derrida in their free time.
And finally, explicitly fascist text like Carl Schmitt's works or The Turner Diaries or even Mein Kampf is more deserving of examination in a "know thy enemy" capacity. Fascist paramilitaries in the US constantly try to reenact scenes from The Turner Diaries, so shouldn't people at least be aware of what the text is about? And as we saw with the Bolsanaristas, the US is the number one exporter of fascism and fascist thought. The fact that The Turner Diaries is written within a US context won't save non-USians from their domestic fascists copying or taking inspiration from that book.
I really dislike this kind of post and wish that there was more interest in philosophy and literature on Hexbear. Something like this is quite sad to see.
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Incomprehensible gibberish about consumer culture underlined by rapid anti-communism and western chauvinism is not my idea of good philosophy
But no plz I'd like to see a defense of Derridas life long friendship with nazis like Heidegger
Are you sure you're talking about the right person? Derrida hardly ever wrote about consumer culture, his "anti-communism" consists of a few scattered remarks critical of certain parts of the Soviet Union, he was very much against Western chauvinism, he never even met Heidegger and certainly wasn't friends with him.
Derrida is still part of a wave of broad anti-Marxist reaction within the bourgeois academy. Like if you read Spectres of Marx, there isn't much there that seems to actually contribute anything to Marxism. I don't really understand how he felt justified in dedicating that book to Chris Hani, of all people.
Derrida was still a massive liberal. I can't find it now but check out lectures he did in South Africa after the end of Apartheid. He is intellectually masturbating in front of a bunch of radical young black south africans who've just lived through apartheid and basically justifying the liberal (so, concretely, neoliberal) development of South Africa. Obvs not saying don't read him or that there's literally nothing there, but I think Marxists should definitely treat his thought as reactionary overall, methodologically and how it's diverted and poisoned alot of intellects that could have been radicalised as Marxists. He was important in delegitimizing Marxism within academia.
Out of interest, as I'm happy to be wrong on this point: do you personally think there are elements of his thought which are of value for Marxism today? Examples I see referenced are writings on animality (so perhaps of relevance to animal rights and veganism) but I haven't had the time or inclination to check em out, and they strike me as, at best, idealistic analyses which we could just avoid by doing dialectical materialist analyses of animality in the first place.
His concrete political positions certainly aren't always convincing. I know that Christopher Wise has some good criticism of his ambiguous statements about Israel, for instance. But I don't see how this vitiates his entire body of work. His primary concern is the history of Western philosophy and I always felt that there was more than a hint of Marx in the way he criticizes texts immanently with a focus on binary opposites. Now, you might say that it is no longer necessary to read philosophy at all because the science of dialectical materialism has made it obsolete, but that is not the position of Marx, Lenin or Mao. All of them take elements of their thought from Hegel because they have read him critically. Why should we not do the same? And in a way, basically everything Derrida wrote concerns the problem of reading. As far as I know, there is no dialectical materialist method of reading, so it's not like there's an obvious substitute for his work.
Regarding his effect on the intellectual esteem of Marxism in his time, I find it difficult to make a judgement. It seems to me that after 1968, there was no longer any possibility of worthwhile Marxist praxis in the West (for the time being at least). So I'd say there's a lot of blame to go around for the weakness of the Marxist left in Europe in the past decades, and I do not think that French intellectuals are a major factor here. If anything, the whole intellectual environment of "continental philosophy" seems more amenable to Marxist thought than Anglo analytic philosophy, which is the only alternative in Western universities. Maybe Specters of Marx didn't do anything for the Communist movement, but it did help a bit to make Marx seem intellectually respectable again after the decades of the Cold War.
In any case, Derrida's thinking about text and reading seems irreplaceable to me. Literature has always been a difficult topic for Marxism (the great names have almost nothing to say about it), so I think a kind of literary theory that is actually aware of the problems and history of philosophy instead of shunting that off to another discipline seems worthwhile, and I don't see how you get that without Derrida or thinkers like him.
There's a good case that deconstruction and Derrida's method of differance is just applying Marxist dialectics to reading. Derrida was obsessed with finding the "sediment" of words and thoughts, the underlying and historicised meaning behind texts left unsaid. That's a very materialist and Marxist thing to do!
Yes, that's pretty much what I think. If looking at how the matter of writing always resists its reduction to meaning, resulting in a history of conflict between matter and ideas, isn't at least inspired by Marx, I don't know what is.
As Derrida himself wrote:
Yh I'm going to need some help spelling out what that means (lol)
Welcome to Derrida bud, there's no "meaning," we're just signifiers trapped in a world of signifiers where nothing can be signified. This is partially why Derrida is stupid even though I love him.
damn it I knew it
Hmm. That definitely interesting as a suggestion. Personally I didn't get that impression of any materialist project reading, for instance, Writing and Difference or Grammatology.
Just to reference his first book on Husserl and geometry (not actually about geometry, but which I once found, hilariously, in the maths section of my uni library), he emphasized the lack of any actual immediate relation, that the voice we speak or hear, or for that matter consciousness, it never in an absolute, ideal immediacy with itself. It is always mediated. Sure. But this point can also be found in analytic philosophy (Sellars, who read Hegel and had started as a Marxist) and is literally the first section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (On Sense Certainty).
TBH my main issue is not even with Derrida, but with derrideans. Similar shit with Foucault and Deleuze. The work has some good ideas, points, analyses, insights. But in the hands of their self-described disciples in modern bourgeois academia is has really, mostly become scholastic masturbation, bar some exceptional cases like Spivak (but who I try to translate into more materialist, dialectical language).
It appeared to me like deconstruction ends up becoming basically just a directionless, interminably system of signification signifying further signifiers. A similar thing happens in Lacan (a whole other kettle of fish). The insights they arrive at sometime strike me as to have been arrived at equally in spite of the methodology as because of it. Hence why I'm still convinced its idealist.
I mean on the whole you're definitely right, the decontructionist legacy Derrida left has mostly been used by brain dead academics to keep their jobs and doing close readings of nothing. I think Derrida does some interesting things and I enjoy reading him.
Some of his political takes are good, many are bad. I don't disagree with you there.
I'm not saying we should stop doing philosophy. Not that we should take his word as gospel, but when Marx speaks about philosophers only understanding the world, rather than changing it, he is not saying we should stop doing philosophy to engage in the general projects of understanding and determining out most general theories. I also agree that we should keep reading philosophy, including non-Marxist philosophy. It arrogant otherwise and it often shows. But unless you're specifically something like a historian of ideas and are studying the history of 'western' philosophy, I'm personally don't see the reason to keep spending time reading these dudes like Derrida which we could spend reading far more grounded works of philosophy and political thought.
On the topic of 'continental' vs 'analytic' philosophy, I think it depends. Most analytic philosophers are equally useless, intellectually masturbating navel-gazers as continental philosophers. But tbh, if what you're interested in is mathematics, or the philosophy of the natural sciences, the 'continental' thinkers who tend to talk about these topics often display profound ignorance of them, imo. So do many analytic thinkers, but I still think the gold standard in the west for reflection on those topics, because analytic philosophy was founded by actual mathematicians who are important in the development of modern mathematics.
For the record, there are analytic philosophers who are/were genuine leftists. Putnam at some point was a Maoist, before becoming a soc-dem. Neurath was a Marxist. Carnap tried to join the communist party. That being said, none of their important philosophical work has anything to do or really to offer to political, social or economic philosophy, imo, and the work in the tradition has become more and more of a performative scholastic arena for academic credentials since the mid-century. I honestly can't think of any really good analytic political or social philosophy. But I also think most of the 'continential' work is a waste of time. There's a world of Marxist theory outside of this done by people, above all in the Global South, which is of far greater value to political, social or economic thought.
I think part of Derrida's value lies in problematizing notions that seem fundamental to us. For example, one might feel that politics on one hand and the history of (Western) philosophy on the other are disparate fields where one is concrete, useful and practical while the other is minor and abstract. Is that a valid distinction we should make or do we get into trouble if we investigate it too closely? I feel like that's an issue worth thinking about and on which old Hegel may have something useful to say.
In any case, Derrida is mostly a critic of philosophy. His point is not that we need to recapture valuable insights from old wise men, but that we are still operating with their ideas and concepts, whether we like it or not, and if we want to do something about that, we need to investigate them. I think that's another point in which he is close to Marx.
Totally agree that they are not separate issues. There is no such thing as an absolute separation of the abstract-theoretical and the practical-concrete (we can obviously spell out what that last statements means in alot of different, valid directions).
Yh that a good role of his thought. But I don't think you need to read Derrida (which, lets be honest, for most people is hell) to know that.
Marxism on the left was certainly weaker, certainly, after the late 60s, but I think this is an excessively academic point of view. This was also the period of Maoist revolutionary violence in Europe, and the Years of Lead in Italy, ineffective as they ultimately have been, also leading to the further development of ultra-leftist and eurocommunist reformism and opportunism in light of their exhaustion and failure. There were also multipler people's wars and revolutionary struggles being waged globally, which many (including western) Marxists dealt with. Alot of very important Marxist work was done in the 70s. There is a slowdown by the early 80s, i.e. the full onset of neoliberalism, imo.
I totally agree we should still read them critically. But their dominance within the post-new-left critical theory traditions has definitely occupied a space which excludes Marxism, as most of it is premissed on an explicit rejection of Marxist notions and methods, and when modern rad-lib critical theorists attack Marxism as outdated, reductionist, or totalizing (which often leads on in practice to them arguing that Marxism is totalitarian), they frequently do it using derridean and co. Tbh the bottom line for me is not that he problematizes concepts we often essentialize, but that he attack on them is not productive. I don't see it as dialectical. A concept should be maintained in its development to the extent that it continues to aim with theoretical understanding and praxis.
I've read Hegel and yh, I read him as a Marxist so the idealism is the standout issue. Like I have beef with Zizek because he's more of a hegelian than a marxist, and this shows in his liberal, reactionary views and practices. I don't think you need to real Hegel to understand Marx, but the main value of reading him, for me at least, is the epistemological and methodological importance of dialectics, although for ontology there is also importance insofar as he seems to have an process-based ontology, which Marxism also does. When it comes to Derrida, the difference is that I'm not really convinced on the substantial ontological, epistemological or methodological importance of deconstruction. At the end of the day the proof for me is in the pudding, and there are no militant derrideans.
I actually completely agree with you when it comes to literature. I'd say something similar about how many marxists have engaged with ethical thought (see: https://alt.politics.communism.narkive.com/Sb205tXJ/ho-chi-minh-on-revolutionary-morality). Marxists in general have been weaker in their analyses of literature and the arts. A good deal of this comes from mistaking describing the external material conditions of something's historical context for exhaustively describing everything that can be said about it in material terms. I don't see any reason why materialist analysis of art, literature, music, film etc. can't still make or musn't make reference to the forms of the arts and the types of experiences these forms tend to produce in the audience who experience them, if those things are understood materialistically and properly placed in their historical context. In other words its often vulgar materialism dressed up as Marxism and applied to culture.
If anyone finds Derrida helpful for their understanding of something important to them like literature, then yh no hate from me, bless up. I personally think there are more productive sources to appropriate, even for literary analysis, but I'm happy to be convinced that I'm wrong. I also like getting stoned and reading Joyce.
What's the utility of an Derridan analysis of text if one of his own students accuses him of intentionally misrepresenting text he was supposed to be analyzing
Seems like a vehicle for academic grift
Why should we trust that guy more than Derrida himself? And anyway, shouldn't we check it out ourselves instead of trusting someone else's interpretation?
I mean for one he acknowledges the existence of class
A concept Derrida seems to struggle with
No worries I got yeah, I learned this from a lecture given by one of his students
Also I was mistaken he didn't know Heidegger, Derrida wrote a book with a former Hilter Youth member who did know Heidegger, my mistake
This still seems a bit confused. There's many bad things you can say about Jürgen Habermas -- he really is a liberal philosopher who has worked to defang the critical potential of the Frankfurt School -- but he is not a Heideggerian (and yes, he was a member of the Hitler Youth until the war ended when he was about 15). In fact, he is about the strongest enemy of French theory (and Heidegger) there is in contemporary German philosophy. There would be more to say about the relation of Derrida and Habermas, but the fact that they were interviewed for the same book is not a very strong connection between them.
Come on the connection is pretty strong
Let me also quote Wikipedia:
Really, for philosophy this is not much of a connection.
I'm interested in your definition of "connection" if paling around with an anti-marxist who advanced the works of fascists like Hannah Arendt doesn't count as suspect
What makes you think Hannah Arendt was a fascist?
I wouldn't agree with calling Arendt a Fascist either, but racist lib certainly. (inb4 :same-picture: )
Regardless, I would be careful entirely dismissing post-war continental philosophy, it's not productive to dismiss an entire intellectual tradition that has valuable insights on post-Fordian capitalism just because the authors were a) somewhat difficult to understand and b) weren't literally full blown Marxist-Leninists within an environment hostile hostile to such views. Hard to understand writing is almost an inevitability when it comes to continental philosophy, the fact of the matter is that it's just hard to explain some things, especially if you thought of a concept that no one else has put that much thought into or examined particularly deeply. For most writers, trying to describe their ideas is like trying to describe colour to a blind person.
"Former Hitler Youth member" isn't really as damning as you seem to think. Being indoctrinated as a child does not mean that you'll necessarily be a bad person as an adult (Peter Daou would be an example we all know). I don't know anything about this person but the fact that you call him "a former Hitler Youth member" as opposed to "a Nazi" suggests that the former is the most severe criticism you have of him, and then your criticism of Derrida is just, he knew someone who was indoctrinated as a child? Oh no, dear me! I was raised to believe all sorts of BS so I guess I should cancel anyone who's ever met me.
This really seems like you realized you were wrong and now you're grasping at straws to support the original conclusion. Just take the L.
True, personally I find Habermas celebration of Hannah Arendt far more damning, but I'll let Derrida off the hook, with his general ignorance about politics he probably didn't know what her deal was
I guess "Knew someone who liked someone who was bad" just doesn't have quite the same punch as "rehabilitated unrepentant Nazis." Like tbh in your shoes I'd just delete the post.
I did like the image of a life-long friendship between a Jewish boy in Algeria and a university rector in Nazi Germany. It's like an absurdist comedy.
"Had a fifteen-year-long professional and personal friendship with an avowed anti-marxist who is famous for advancing and building upon the racist totalitarian concepts proposed by Hannah Arendt" still packs quite a punch for someone who is supposed to be a "genius of the left"
Also “rehabilitated" in the sense he is the principle medium thru which Heidegger's thoughts persist in western intellectual circles, despite his long-winded supposed critique of him, I mean if you consider whatever the hell this is to be a critique
I can't take any of your criticisms seriously because you're just looking for reasons to own him. If I refute one thing you'll come up with something else, and it doesn't matter how spurious it is because you have an axe to grind. I'm not interested in playing whack-a-mole.
I'm not looking for reasons, I found two or three and I'm sticking with them, cause all your "refutions" are just naive nonsense or convenient excuses for what was obviously a famous clique of anti-marxists, whose reputations are not based on the rigor of their work but by the politically friendly conclusions of their "critiques" and "analyses"
Sure you are dude
Which of those categories does the fact that Derrida did not rehabilitate Heidegger fall under?
Yeah, that's not simply critique, that is incorporation, I said previously I was deconstructing Derrida, at first I was joking.....now
Also what was it another commenter said in terms of how to use Derrida properly "But undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures was not a negative operation."
Yes I'm using the word rehabilitation, maybe it was a little too strong, but because Heidegger was crucial to Derrida's works I'm sticking with it, but hey there's no "negative operation" just decomposition of a structure of analysis
God this is tiresome. I seriously do not care about any of your gotchas. And it's laughable that you're pretending to base your position on "deconstructing Derrida" when you had to have the meaning of deconstruction explained to you in this thread. Like from the moment you heard that definition, you were like, how can I either dunk on this in order to dunk on Derrida, or how can I apply this to dunk on Derrida? You didn't know what it meant and you still don't know what it means and if I showed that you're not applying it correctly you'd seamlessly transition back to "well, deconstructionism is dumb anyway."
You know Marx's ideas were inspired by Hegel, right? Even though Hegel reached entirely different political conclusions than Marx? If I showed a quote of Hegel defending slavery, should we also cancel Marx? What a load of nonsense. And that line of logic has absolutely nothing to do with deconstructionism, which, near as I can tell, you think means a sort of "one-drop rule" applied to philosophy, which is just... like, there is no possible way you could arrive at that conclusion if you've actually studied the concept in any capacity.
Why are you talking about Hegel and Marx and presenting deconstructionism as this mystical high-level concept, nah I got the concept, a method of discerning meaning from a text in a way that teases out differing interpretations usually thru contrast, just cause this perfectly coherent idea is used to generate ahistorical gibberish by theorists like Derrida does not mean I hold some hostility to the concept in general
My contention is that unlike Marx, Derrida on Heidegger is not simply engaging in a critique but taking the Nazi idealism of Heidegger at face vague while ironically commending/critiquing Heidegger for "rejecting the vulgar biologism of nazism in favor of a "spirit" nationalism, but thru this rejection revealing the same failed underpinnings of Nazism in general" this is just idealist nonsense, there's no "revealing", instead just a French doofus taking a Nazi doofus's self-mythology at face vague and in no way undermining Nazism in the process
Derrida sounds good on paper, sure as shit don't work in practice judging by that lecture
Can't say Marx ever took Hegel at face value
Marx literally called himself a Hegelian, I'm dying to know what you'll come up with next :data-laughing:
Ok, I don't disagree with that? But what exactly do you think Marx meant when he "stood Hegel on his head"?
That his ideas drew inspiration from Hegel but that he was also critical of him. Perhaps that he was "engaged in a critical dialogue with Hegel’s thinking" or that some of his ideas "would not have been possible without the opening of the Hegelian questions."
It's almost like philosophers can engage with the ideas of other philosophers without accepting their political conclusions. Almost as if philosophers frequently engage with ideas that they disagree with in order to critique them.
Taking a Nazi's self-mythology at face value and claiming its construction by said Nazi somehow undermines Nazism is not critical dialogue, and you comparing that idealist drivel to the rigor Marx applied to Hegel is ridiculous
I'm not calling Derrida a nazi, I'm calling him an idealist who can't even competently critique Nazism without sinking into unsupportable assumptions about a Nazi's headspace
Lmao, now you're saying that. We started out at "rehabilitated Nazis" then progressed to "'rehabilitated' Nazis (technically, for certain definitions of rehabilitate)" and now we've arrived at "critiqued Nazis, but not well enough." If you opened with "Derrida's critique of Nazis was insufficient" then this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Before I got to his incompetent critique I had to sit thru paragraph after paragraph of this mf gushing over Heidegger's methodology and mode of analysis, you gonna pretend Heidegger wasn't one of the biggest influences on Derrida or that he didn't advise his students to read and take seriously this washed up "former" Nazi.....goddamn right I used rehabilitation, and I'll use it again
I mean at least be honest and admit you think Heidegger is an indispensable resource, Derrida certainly did
And if you do think he's indispensable and valuable, why? Contrary to what Derrida claims, it certainly wasn't his takes on his "former" Nazism or weirdly enough these out of nowhere takes on animals
I literally just countered this exact point.
Like I said, you just have an axe to grind and this is a waste of time. I don't "think Heidegger is an indispensable resource," because I'm not so much defending Derrida as I'm just calling out your dogshit, uninformed arguments that border on anti-intellectualism. But since your increasingly desperate attempts to find something to latch on to have now led you to start attacking me, I'm disengaging, and any further responses will be met with PPB. Tbh I should've started with that and moved on instead of wasting my time with this nonsense.
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Literally sat through a three hour lecture by this french dork to formulate a critique of his supposed "critique" of Heidegger just to get called a goddamn anti-intellectual by a chatGPT, unbelievable
Sacred french cows
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Critiquing a French philosopher and not simply taking his received wisdom at face value is not anti-intellectualism, my problem isn't with deconstructivism, it's with Derrida's use of it, now folks got mad at my use of the word "rehabilitation" which is ironic since per the Farias debate (which I noticed none of the Derrida scholars here brought up), would most likely have Derrida agreeing with my use of the term, I guess rehabilitation apparently only means moral and not rehabilitation of ideas, methodology and concepts which is a pretty weird way to look at it, since he if was engaging in moral rehabilitation I would've just called him a fascist and not a liberal know-nothing
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Ok there's this pushback which I am seriously reflecting on, and then theres all this Derrida stuff I've been reading all morning, including a three hour derrida lecture on Heidegger and it is not 1:1 and it's making me go :jesse-wtf: to everything in this thread
Granted I know im not communicating my ideas well, cause this stuff is a chore to read and I want to know what version of derrida you guys are reading cause I'm not finding him
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Meh, there are better philosophical works to engage with than Derrida. Besides not crossing the Quran/Veda/Analects line, the cost/benefit ratio of being able to understand his text is too high. And even among Western non-Marxist text, there are still better candidates towards investing your time to study.
I would say most Western text on how to wage war like Clausewitz's On War or Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice is more deserving of your time. There are also military manuals that people, especially people who face off against the pigs, can find extremely useful.
The work of pop intellectuals (Chomsky's, Fisher's, and Graeber's more popular works) is also more deserving because if nothing else, at least they're easier to read, which means not only are you able to get through the text faster, but you're also more likely bump into other people who've actually read the text. No one's fucking reading Derrida in their free time.
And finally, explicitly fascist text like Carl Schmitt's works or The Turner Diaries or even Mein Kampf is more deserving of examination in a "know thy enemy" capacity. Fascist paramilitaries in the US constantly try to reenact scenes from The Turner Diaries, so shouldn't people at least be aware of what the text is about? And as we saw with the Bolsanaristas, the US is the number one exporter of fascism and fascist thought. The fact that The Turner Diaries is written within a US context won't save non-USians from their domestic fascists copying or taking inspiration from that book.
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