There's a good case that deconstruction and Derrida's method of differance is just applying Marxist dialectics to reading. Derrida was obsessed with finding the "sediment" of words and thoughts, the underlying and historicised meaning behind texts left unsaid. That's a very materialist and Marxist thing to do!
Yes, that's pretty much what I think. If looking at how the matter of writing always resists its reduction to meaning, resulting in a history of conflict between matter and ideas, isn't at least inspired by Marx, I don't know what is.
deconstruction has never been Marxist, no more than it has ever been non-Marxist, although it has remained faithful to a certain spirit of Marxism, to at least one of its spirits.
Welcome to Derrida bud, there's no "meaning," we're just signifiers trapped in a world of signifiers where nothing can be signified. This is partially why Derrida is stupid even though I love him.
Hmm. That definitely interesting as a suggestion.
Personally I didn't get that impression of any materialist project reading, for instance, Writing and Difference or Grammatology.
Just to reference his first book on Husserl and geometry (not actually about geometry, but which I once found, hilariously, in the maths section of my uni library), he emphasized the lack of any actual immediate relation, that the voice we speak or hear, or for that matter consciousness, it never in an absolute, ideal immediacy with itself. It is always mediated. Sure. But this point can also be found in analytic philosophy (Sellars, who read Hegel and had started as a Marxist) and is literally the first section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (On Sense Certainty).
TBH my main issue is not even with Derrida, but with derrideans. Similar shit with Foucault and Deleuze. The work has some good ideas, points, analyses, insights. But in the hands of their self-described disciples in modern bourgeois academia is has really, mostly become scholastic masturbation, bar some exceptional cases like Spivak (but who I try to translate into more materialist, dialectical language).
It appeared to me like deconstruction ends up becoming basically just a directionless, interminably system of signification signifying further signifiers. A similar thing happens in Lacan (a whole other kettle of fish). The insights they arrive at sometime strike me as to have been arrived at equally in spite of the methodology as because of it. Hence why I'm still convinced its idealist.
I mean on the whole you're definitely right, the decontructionist legacy Derrida left has mostly been used by brain dead academics to keep their jobs and doing close readings of nothing. I think Derrida does some interesting things and I enjoy reading him.
There's a good case that deconstruction and Derrida's method of differance is just applying Marxist dialectics to reading. Derrida was obsessed with finding the "sediment" of words and thoughts, the underlying and historicised meaning behind texts left unsaid. That's a very materialist and Marxist thing to do!
Yes, that's pretty much what I think. If looking at how the matter of writing always resists its reduction to meaning, resulting in a history of conflict between matter and ideas, isn't at least inspired by Marx, I don't know what is.
As Derrida himself wrote:
Yh I'm going to need some help spelling out what that means (lol)
Welcome to Derrida bud, there's no "meaning," we're just signifiers trapped in a world of signifiers where nothing can be signified. This is partially why Derrida is stupid even though I love him.
damn it I knew it
Hmm. That definitely interesting as a suggestion. Personally I didn't get that impression of any materialist project reading, for instance, Writing and Difference or Grammatology.
Just to reference his first book on Husserl and geometry (not actually about geometry, but which I once found, hilariously, in the maths section of my uni library), he emphasized the lack of any actual immediate relation, that the voice we speak or hear, or for that matter consciousness, it never in an absolute, ideal immediacy with itself. It is always mediated. Sure. But this point can also be found in analytic philosophy (Sellars, who read Hegel and had started as a Marxist) and is literally the first section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (On Sense Certainty).
TBH my main issue is not even with Derrida, but with derrideans. Similar shit with Foucault and Deleuze. The work has some good ideas, points, analyses, insights. But in the hands of their self-described disciples in modern bourgeois academia is has really, mostly become scholastic masturbation, bar some exceptional cases like Spivak (but who I try to translate into more materialist, dialectical language).
It appeared to me like deconstruction ends up becoming basically just a directionless, interminably system of signification signifying further signifiers. A similar thing happens in Lacan (a whole other kettle of fish). The insights they arrive at sometime strike me as to have been arrived at equally in spite of the methodology as because of it. Hence why I'm still convinced its idealist.
I mean on the whole you're definitely right, the decontructionist legacy Derrida left has mostly been used by brain dead academics to keep their jobs and doing close readings of nothing. I think Derrida does some interesting things and I enjoy reading him.