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
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
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:
https://triangle.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?article8472
:stalin-heart: Thanks!!
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
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
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:
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.
Well, well, more of the usual suspects
Fair play on this one, can't argue with you there.
you're being very cringe. 🤢
lmao mfs think I'm joking
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