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 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.