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
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
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.
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.