Why the fuck are there leftists out there who recommend this bloated CIA adjacent fuck?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
Come on the connection is pretty strong
Let me also quote Wikipedia:
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
"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
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
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'm literally doing deconstruction but too Derrida, I'm following his lead dammit! :meow-tableflip:
The de- of deconstruction signifies not the demolition of what is constructing itself, but rather what remains to be thought beyond the constructionist or destructionist schema.
Put another way by Derrida:
But undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures was not a negative operation.
Doesn't sound like you're doing any deconstruction to me!
but rather what remains to be thought beyond the constructionist or destructionist schema.
Yeah, what "remains to be thought beyond" is called the Information Operations Center of the CIA
But undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures was not a negative operation.
Mf that's geology not philosophy, "negative operation" what kind of happy-go-lucky magical nonsense is this
Deconstruction is indeed a kind of magical geology, a dark necromancy that elevates the precense in a way many consider unnatural, a kind of infinite becoming, always to arrive, attempting to halt this movement of "time" and examine the structures inside the object or idea. :barthes-shining:
For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.
Derrida wrote this in 1993. Sure he wasn't a communist and mostly focused on literary theory and writing books about his mom dying of dementia or how he got circumcised and had a secret name or why writing is not just glyphs, but he was not CIA adjacent (I hate this trend of just declaring people are CIA plants because you don't like them?), had the audacity to declare communism an undefeatable specter that will haunt the capitalist world until it dies in the wake of the Soviet Union's demise, and his theory of deconstruction made tremendous contributions to feminist and postcolonial studies.
Yeh I'll admit these are pretty much straight barz he's spitting. But they're points we should all already agree on.
The issue in for me is why is deconstruction necessary? What is insufficient in the analytical tools we already have, like materialist dialectics, or what they contain themselves implicitly for analysing critically essentialized ideas?
Like there alot of clear value in Spivak but my gawd its not necessary to write like that. I struggled reading through everything I've read to her.The dope shit in her writings I can imagine being arrived at without reference to Derrida or deconstruction.
If I'm wrong regarding above points please point in right direction :)
Also, not that its directly relevant to the validity of her theoretical work I've also heard from people who studied under her that she treats her research assistants like garbage and makes them clean her driveway and shit. Might of been bullshit but lmao.
Also don't forget how Derrida writes about cats. Peak case of critical support.
I mean, if you'd like another example where I think Derrida is helpful, there's always gender. As far as I know, there are very few dialectical materialist accounts of gender that recognize the existence of trans and non-binary genders and those that there are usually seem like a mixture of empirical and historical facts to me. I'm trying to say that I usually find them theoretically inadequate. In contrast, when Derrida writes about Hegel or about Heidegger and their conceptions of sex/gender, it obviously doesn't have a direct application to reality but for exactly that reason, I find it much more interesting and insightful. Now, I could of course be wrong and maybe it's a question of what you want of out of theory, but that's my view.
Yeh I'm agree you're correct on his relevance in gender studies. Not to say that this doesn't have something to do with certain merits of his method or at least how it has or could be applied to gender, but I think this shows more an extrinsic, contingent weakness of dialectical materialists, rather than dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialists had far too slow. Part of this has to do with genuine class reductionism (thinking here of both certain Trotskyist groups) and also, tbh, the fact that most of the mainstream Marxist-Leninists aligned with the USSR or the PRC adopted these places views on these topics, which were unfortunately regressive. The broader and deeper historical reasons for why we've been so slow it definitely someting I need to educate myself more on though.
I don't know to what extent this kind of stuff if being done in anglolands, as I haven't encountered it, but in Europe, more specifically in France, there's currently a new wave of materialist feminism and materialist trans gender theory which is being pretty actively developed right now and a lot of it is very impressive. This work, in my opinion, is superior to the post-Butler, post-structuralist, e.g. derrideans critiques of the concept, for example deconstructionist ones, because it more explicitly analyzes gender and trans identity in materialist terms.
Yh I think alot of it has to do with what you want out of theory, which is why if someone finds themself getting something valuable out of Derrida for literary analysis then, yh, no worries, God bless.
Edit: If everyone proves me wrong by doing a Spivak and applying deconstruction within materialist analysis then that'd be dope.
What worries me is how his thought is really presented as essential to engaging in modern philosophy at all in many areas. It's moreso the overemphasis I think its been given and how most uses of deconstruction, biopolitics, genealogy or schizo-analysis has been garbage once it left the hands of its pioneers. Edit: I struck me that has something to do with the nature of deconstruction itself.
Why are liberals happy to deal with Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault and let their research students write theses on them? They are not really doing to the same extent with Gramsci or other forgotten Marxist thinkers like Tran Duc Thao [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tran_Duc_Thao], or, just to stick with French thinkers, the members of the French Historical Epistemology movement (Cavaillès, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Vuillemin, Poincaré)?
While on the topic of taking whats good and rejecting the bad from different traditions, purely for the normally indulgent purpose of doing philosophy, I think there are syntheses to be done where good work in Analytic philosophy of science, French Historical Epistemology and contemporary critical theory would be integrated into Historical Materialism.
Do you know if any of this materialist trans theory has made its way to English translation? If so please hit me up, sounds very interesting. Or I guess I really should just learn French...
If you check out this page below (in French), there is a bibliography at the bottom with several English texts. I’m not sure to what extent the French material has been translated:
I didn't claim he was directly CIA, I claimed he was CIA adjacent, which is true, no American would know who he was without the translations and publications thru The University of Chicago Press
Ah yes, I forgot that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who describes herself as a "practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist" and translated Derrida's Of Grammatology into English (which is his chief work and a major source of his fame in the Anglosphere), was a well known CIA asset amongst her checks notes stringent criticisms of imperialism and colonialism and her group breaking work on subaltern studies, using the texts of Gramsci and Derrida to examine how Western liberal thought doesn't even view non-Westerners as full people.
EDIT: Also your University of Chicago Press comment is just untrue; they didn't publish any work of Derrida until 1978, at least two decades after he achieved fame in the Anglosphere. See here: https://press.uchicago.edu/books/derrida/derridatitles.html
Ah yes, I forgot that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who describes herself as a “practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist”
Ok well I never called her a CIA asset, I'm calling the French clique post-1968 CIA assets or CIA adjacent, which they were, am I using the word "adjacent" wrong, I'm not saying the mf was conscious of the platforming he was given
at least two decades after he achieved fame in the Anglosphere
Give me a break the earliest example of "fame" among anglos you can ascribe him is the Searle–Derrida debate 1972, and to be honest he didn't come out lookin too good on that occasion
Don't try and tell me he was famous in anglo-land in 1964 when he was a random philosophy professor in the University of Paris
Bruv this is straight from his Wikipedia page:
With "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, his work began to gain international prominence.
After this conference he gave many lectures of various American universities like NYU and Berkley. By 1975 the dude was a professor at Yale from Christ's sake! This is all before the University of Chicago Press had published literally any work by him. I will say I did the math wrong though lol, should be one decade not two.
literally doesn't mention Derrida once lmao and only points to two dudes, Bernard-Henri Levi and Andre Glucksmann. It does say "The New Philosophers more than compensated for their often abstruse prose by becoming exciting media personalities, defending their points of view in the long, intellectualized television and radio programs that the French relish" well by their own admission OP you are also engaging in CIA adjacent behavior :shocked-pikachu:
Ok heres another, you want to tell me Derrida didn't hang in any of these circles, well goddamn he must've been the only frog who slipped thru the cracks, I guess his friendship with Habermas was just a weird ass anomaly
Because he was an influential post-modernist thinker whose ideas were like corrosive acid to the fabric of the West.
Why do people have to be 100% pure? Can't they have some good ideas and some bad ideas, and you cherry-pick the good ones?
I don't think we should confuse the fact that conservatives take every idea that they associate with fromage-eaters as 'corrosive acid to the fabric of the west' as evidence that they actually are. Derrida's ideas are very much in the 'radical liberal' tradition of Western thought which are dangerous, from a materialistic perspective, at the very least because they give the impression that Marxists have nothing to contribute to these discussions. A non-materialist discourse of these topics was always going to be appropriated by liberals to the detriment and exclusion of marxists.
Modern liberals have appropriated pro-LGBT, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-western-chauvinist, racial and gender liberation discourses, but they never understand or use them in a materialist or dialectical way, and so they do not understand these struggles concretely., or know how to apply them in praxis. There are no militant derrideans.
For most of these rad-liberals, these are language games where they can angle for radical credentials in academia or liberal social movements based not on uniting these other essential struggles with materialist analysis, class analysis, or class struggle, but on liberal identity politics. These struggles also ofc requires groups, orgs and struggles which emphasize them and their particular social, political and economic circumstances without having to worry about white marxist men lecturing them on their lack of class analysis or engaging in actual class reductionism, but that doesn't really affect the point that most of the identity-based discourse in the West around these issues is liberal, not radical. These liberal discourses have been very influenced by all of these supposedly radical thinkers like Derrida. A simply question I always ask myself: if this thinker has been so influential in areas of obvious political importance, where is the actual evidence that their thought has, or could have, played a real role in revolutionary struggle.
Honestly I'm always both fascinated and saddened when I see self-described Marxists trying to square the circle of identifying with an explicitly scientific project of Marxism while also embracing currents of modern rad-lib thought which explicitly calling the foundations of Marxism into question as a materialist philosophy and scientific project, and which themselves don't have much to contribute to any such project.
I don't disagree with your second point, but I think it doesn't take into account what reading, understanding and agreeing some points in Derrida actually normally means concretelt. I agree there are some good ideas, but the effort required to get to them is something you can only do if you have the time to, normally as a a bougie, petit-bougie, or if you're lucky enough in the West as a member of the labouring classes to get access to higher education, which is especially difficult in the US. It's really not justified imo and the goods ideas can be expressed without the idealist baggage and intellectual masturbation.
I couldn't and would never try to 'explain' (whatever that means here) Derrida to my friends at my local bar. But Ho Chi Minh could explain Das Kapital to revolutionary peasant soldiers in the jungle. They are not the same. One is materialist, dialectical, and scientific. The other is not.
One of the issues in the most influential modern Western leftist thinkers, and also Western Marxism as a tradition, resulting from the fact that unlike every other Marxist movement around the world it was uniquely detached from actual class struggle or the working class full stop, hence any real vantage point over concrete material conditions, is that it overspecialised in superstructural analysis. That produced alot of good analyses from certain Marxists (I'd still defend alot in Badiou, Luckacs, Lefebvre, Balibar or even Althusser; all the Frankfurt school can go fuck themselves), but also created an intellectual climate where methodological and ontological idealism really flourished. Like its difficult to explain otherwise how a Maoist like Badiou managed to arrive at a kind of of weird, peudo-materialist platonism. Its not a coincidence that perhaps the best thinker often placed in this tradition (Gramsci), who produced the most impressive superstructural analysis was a leader of the Italian Communist Party.
I mean yeah sure cherry pick to your hearts content, but let's not pretend his bad ideas weren't really bad, he was funded and sponsored by the CIA, which is the only reason anyone in the English speaking world knows his name
Derrida and the people he inspired, paraphrased:
Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of 'subjectivity vs. objectivity' as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth - 'the Truth' - is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain.
This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples. For the past several decades, people like Derrida have called reason into question, especially the sort of rationalist worldview that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is a direct path from the so-called Enlightenment to Auschwitz, and Donald Trump too.
White supremacy has historically venerated a culturally bounded pan-Europeanism designed as a class collaborationist mechanism to organize the seizure of native land and enslavement of African people for the goal of capital accumulation
A mechanism that still had to deal with the underlying ethnic and religious differences of the pan European project thru a tactical embrace of a subjective civic nationalism in North America, which stabilized the white supremacist project
Derrida is what happens when no material analysis
I'm not sure whether you're paraphrasing in agreement or not. I'll assume for this comment the latter:
Respectfully, I'd like to push back on some takes here, which is basically Adorno and Horkheimer pseudo-Marxist Dialectics of Enlightenment (coincidentally they are hegelians, thus idealists, not materialists).
The idea that other cultures have not had ideas of truth, reason or objectivity which correponds to what westerner culture might sometimes refer to as realism, or the belief in a real, objective universe which has certain properties whether or not human minds are there to perceive them, or as determined by the mind, is simply wrong. The immense tradition of Indian philosophy is a great example here. Even if you just take the Buddhist tradition, which is most famous for its later iterations post Vasubandhu and Nagarjuna where the very idea of absolute truth is definitely brought into question and problematized (in Nagarjuna, this is done dialectically), this is not always true for earlier or latter Buddhist thinkers. You can find descriptions in the Mahayana tradition to Nirvana or Buddha Nature as something like what we would translate as the ultimate truth/reality, etc. The Hindu traditions of philosophy also makes similar references to truth, absolute reality. There are most certainly ideas of absolute reality or truth in Islamic traditions. Namely Allah.
Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mesoamerica and other peoples developed scientific knowledge and they would not have done so if they didn't have somelike like the idea or assumption of truth or objective reality. Also, ideas of truth, reality or objectivity existenced well before anything like the modern concept of race, therefore whiteness or white supremacy, ever existenced.
I sometimes find like similar relativizing historicist interpretations very problematic, and ironically very reductionist, because they often feed into an impression that properties or capacities like reason, observation, experiment, systematic investigation of a world which we take to exist independently of us could not have belonged to non-white, non-european or non-western peoples, because they are ideas invented by some vague entity called 'The West'.
The fact that white-supremacists claim to venerate objectivity doesn't mean that they do, nor does it mean that the word 'objectivity' refers to (or appears to) a meaningless concept which couldn't be translated into the language of other cultures.
The fact that absolute objectivity is not something that any individual or collective can possess with finite space, time and resources does not mean that there is not, say, something like objectivity in much scientific work does in mathematics or natural sciences,a s opposed to, say, modern neoclassical economics, which is straight-up pseudo-science compared to Marxist economics. I think it's is impossible to properly explain the distinction here unless we make reference to the fact that Marxist political economy was the genuine epistemologiical break which produced a scientific approach to the questions in that field, as opposed to the apparent neoclassical break in the marginalist revolution.
I've often had debates with social scientists, such as sociologists, who are trained in a post-Bourdieu and post-structuralism environment where their understanding of what makes some practice a science is very narrowly sociological, based on certain superficial social practices, organisations and institutions. They would argue that neoclassical economics is just as much a science as physics, or mathematics, or biology, due to its social and organisation practices. You can only make such a ridiculous argument if you reject the idea that one produces knowledge, and the other does not, and that this difference is based in how they relate to the reality of the thing they are studying.
I definitely don't think a rejection of such ideas has a place in Marxism. For example, you can't seriously claim to be doing Marxist economic analysis of modern capitalism, if one doesn't recognise that capitalism is characterised by a contradiction between (i) its hyperrationality (in particular, instrumental reason) insofar as it is concerned with exploitation and production of surplus-value, and (ii) the obvious irrationality from the broader point of view of society and the vast majority of the people in it, namely the labouring classes.
White supremacists claim to venerate alot of things, like reason, evidence, virtue, courage, and so on. But they don't. We know that they don't. And we know that they don't, not by deconstructing the ideas they claim to venerate and then saying: 'see, they can't venerate these because they we've deconstructed them and so we can see that they don't have stable definitions/essences/natures etc. and therefore they couldn't have been venerating anything real behind these fictions in the first place'; we refute them easily by showing how they had none of those virtues, and their behaviour was not guided by them, but by material factors (in particular, their class and racial position) and in particular those which shaped their ideology.
It's also not clear to me how people are going to make claims that certain things are true, namely that it's a fact that white supremacists have used these concepts in these ways, which assumes a certain amount of evidence for, thus reference to independent reality to correspond to, what you're claiming, while also claim in the very same process of doing so that ideas of truth and reality are complete fictions with no actual content. To me this is clearly idealism.
To say that "white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America " is due to an idea - which you call 'a constructed myth' - of objectivity or absolute truth, is some hardcore idealism. It was certainly mobilised consistently by the ruling classes to justify the supposed objective truth of white supremacy, and the supposed objective moral validity and rationality of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism. But these are wrong. They are fucked up, wack, incorrect, regressive politically and ethically evil by anymost any sensible understanding of them. You can explain how and why they were upheld in terms of historical materialism. The ideas did not produce all of those themselves, and to the extent that they played a role, well, people use alot of valid ideas for reactionary and evil purposes.
It's ironic because people are claiming (and I agree) in this thread that Derrida and co. should be read critically, and that we should take the good ideas and reject the bad, and noting in particular his rejection or problematizing of western concepts. So l while we're at it we could give the example of linear history. This concept comes up in the above comment, and so ironically in Adorno, when they claim that history can see a linear ideological progression from the Enlightenment to Auschwitz, when reality is far more complicated.
Marxism is also a child of the Enlightment and the Scientific Revolution. There were radical, progressive and genuinely scientific developments as part of these processes, just as there were regressive, reactionary and pseudo-scientific parts. They were not homogeneous. The embrace of ideas such as these from Derrida has been an essential tool through which the rad-lib, postmodern bullshit that mascarades as serious thought has attempted to delegitimize Marxism by painting it as part of the 'road to Auschwitz'. So it's again ironic, because inconsistent, to make the critique that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water and keep Derrida's good ideas, and then use some of his critical ideas to basically absolutely tarnish anything progressive or scientific which could have been produced in the european enlightenmend and scientific revolution.
If we're going to reject everything we can possibly associate with the extremely complex and contradictory set of social, economic, political and ideological/theoretical processes and transformations which we call the European Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, then it's not really clear where to go from there. Newtonian mechanics was a produce of this. But the relative truth of many of its statements is not compromised by the fact that Newton was personally, by all accounts, a piece of shit.
Wait until yall see what I got to say about Foucault tomorrow :che-smile:
Any famous academic should be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. To succeed as an intellectual under capitalism is already quite suspicious.
Yeh Derrida honestly deserved alot of the contempt he can get. Yes he was smart. Yeah there are a couple interesting ideas in his writings. But all in all his work is useless. There is no real systematic method or content to his philosophy. It is not materialist, but methodologically idealist (see Perry Anderson's book, Considerations of Western Marxism; there's a chapter where he attacks that generation of French thinkers, in particular Derrida, Lacan, but also Foucault and Deleuze).
I personally have no idea whether or not he was CIA lol. I think it suffices that we know that the Western intelligence officers who were forced to read this generation of French thinkers (incl. Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, etc.) were glad at least that this broad post-structural school was displacing Marxism which was dominant on the left before that. Honestly Guattari is just bad. Every solo book of his I read the reasoning and methodology are just really poor imo. With Deleuze, who I think is a far more impressive philosopher (and its clearest in his more historical books on other thinkers, but there takes massive historical and interpretive liberties), I understand anarchists digging it, but I don't really understand why Marxists are still trying to identify with his thought when anything slightly Marxist which he says can simply be reformulated in a more systematic, rigorous dialectical materialism.
In all honestly it appealed to a post-68 generation in France and the US (hence the birth of the very yank field of 'French Theory') of largely petit-bourgeois wannabe intellectuals who, in the throes of protagonist and imposter syndrome, and in the context of the failure of the broad left in this period, notably due to reformism and opportunism (in 68, the PCF - French Communist Party - in particular really failed to push for a general strike and since have simply become a reactionary reformist and opportunist party) wanted to appear like they were still doing something radical. No praxis obvs. Instead we're going to intellectually masturbate and 'deconstruct' everything (the term has seemed to mean very different things to different thinkers, which it fitting for deconconstruction as a 'school'). There were still many genuinely radical communists, but you're unlikely to find them in academia. Luckily the University of Nanterre is basically just commies hehe.
Like I'm willing to admit that there's something a bit dialectical in some moments of deconstruction but overall its a mess and the actual ideas or content within his writings really do not justify the labyrinth of actually trying to understand them. I get that he thinks it is necessary to get you into the habit of thinking of deconstruction which requires a rejection of any absolute distinction between the form of the writing and its content, but yh without going into detail I think its bullshit and was a waste of my time reading it.
For a good, but summary takedown of this whole current of thought there's a book by Perry Anderson (a trot, btw; I also have criticisms of this book), Considerations on Western Marxism Ah yes Heidegger. It's very difficult to find anyone in that generation of French philosophy who wasn't influenced by Heidegger, including many on the left. There were French Marxists who today are almost unknown who rejected him, but the most influential French Marxists thinkers (Badiou, Lefebvre, Balibar, Althusser) still engage with his work.
Heidegger's main idea is the difference between Being an * beings* saying that 'the ** Being** of beings is not itself a being). Beings are what are studied in what Heidegger called 'ontic sciences', which is most people's ideas of sciences or fields of knowledge, or the broader German idea of Wissenschaft. You can think of them as entities in general. But Being, which is studied in ontology, and so is part of philosophy proper, not the empirical sciences, although Heidegger thinks that it must be studied phenomenologically (read: his weird version of phenomenology), rather than through observation, experiment or rational reflection. Its in his belief that the way Being appears to us is through our Dasein (our essential structure of being-there which he thinks define human nature) that his nationalism and Nazism gets its philosophical source. Obvs materialistically there are other reasons, like his class position. I can understand Heidegger's influence in academic at least because this is the type of question that academic philosophers love. Is it useful for class struggle? No (sorry Badiou). It is useful for philosophy more broadly, even just intellectually? Probably not, imo.
I sometimes compare him to Carl Schmitt, another example of unrependent Nazi slime, because Schmitt's idea's are actually more interesting to me as a Marxist because he was actually a liberal who supported Nazism (i.e. a liberal Nazi), and so is interesting as proof of the idea that if you 'scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds', and because his concept of politics as essentially mediated by the friend-enemy distinction and his ideas on sovereignty are genuinely interesting and capture something about politics imo, which could be interpreted materialistically. Schmitt understood his writings as an internal critique of the liberal tradition, where he thought most liberals had lost sight of the real nature of politics, of the essential distinction friend-enemy. There's a reason many Marxists have also been interested in him.
Political theology as a concept is far more interesting and relevant for our culture than deconstruction. Schmitt may have been evil, but the argument he makes re: power and sovereignty is one we should grapple with, especially as materialists.
I think Derrida has a few great ideas, phallogocentrism probs the most compelling but it's been taken up and done better by other philosophers since so :edgeworth-shrug:
Yeh it's true I should have given more of a shout-out to both those ideas. Political theology is definitely really interesting.
Honestly when I read Schmitt I find it really disturbing and disconcerting because there are several moments where I get the insight he's getting at.
As fascism is the radical response of capitalism to Leninism which has been the only real challenge to capitalism in revolutionary situations it's not surprising to me that fascists philosophers sometimes say shit more out-loud than other conservatives or liberals. As Trotsky said: revolution tears the veil of mystery from the true face of the social structure, just because it brings the classes into conflict in the broad political arena .
The closest experience I got to that was when I watched Coup d'état by Yoshihige Yoshida (far left dude, some kind of anacho-communist), which is an art film about the Japanese fascist philosopher, Ikki Kita. Yoshida has him philosophize at several points at length in the movie and there's the same chilling feeling of seeing a flash of philosophical insight from a fascist mind, which I don't think you really get with the more liberal thinkers anymore.
Post-Lenin "left" writers are a minefield. Tons of liberals and anticommunists mixed in.
Thomas W. Braden, the former supervisor of cultural activities at the CIA, explained the power of the Agency’s cultural assault in a frank insider’s account published in 1967: “I remember the enormous joy I got when the Boston Symphony Orchestra [which was supported by the CIA] won more acclaim for the U.S. in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have bought with a hundred speeches.” This was by no means a small or liminal operation. In fact, as Wilford has aptly argued, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was headquartered in Paris and later discovered to be a CIA front organization during the cultural Cold War, was among the most important patrons in world history, supporting an incredible range of artistic and intellectual activities. It had offices in 35 countries, published dozens of prestige magazines, was involved in the book industry, organized high-profile international conferences and art exhibits, coordinated performances and concerts, and contributed ample funding to various cultural awards and fellowships, as well as to front organizations like the Farfield Foundation.
I mean it literally fuckin is, what is this amateur hour? Do I need to pull certain episodes of Trueanon up before this shit reboots in your heads
So what I'm getting from your quote here, is the CIA pumped a whole lot of money into all sorts of cultural spheres to fight a "cultural Cold War", which somehow makes everyone receiving any of that money (most likely without them knowing it was CIA money) a CIA, did I get that right?
No you did not get that right, I have repeatedly said I don't think Derrida or most of the French philosophers were conscious of it, but that doesn't mean there isn't a filter created by the CIA intervention in academia, and the people who get thru that filter are people who say and teach ideas compatible with the status quo, ideas which not surprisedly tend to be highly critical of Marxism and revolutionary politics
Well, "academia in general is highly critical of Marxism and revolutionary politics because of CIA intervention creating an environment where that flourished" is a statement that is both more insightful and less needlessly hostile towards a specific philosopher, so why didn't you just say that from the start? And how is Derrida of all people somehow the example you chose to pick for this, I don't get it. Like, if you don't wanna read him, just don't read him, what are these "DAE this one thinker is entirely dismissable without reading" posts cropping up here every so often
lmao I should have gone with Focault, he was way louder about his anti-communism
