Sunday 7 March 2021

Post-Modernism










'Giving bullshit a bad name' 

But Foucault also had a disciple: Jacques Derrida , who took his course at the ENS: "I was struck, like many others , by his speaking ability . His eloquence, authority , and brilliance were impressive ," said Derrida later of his mentor. Derrida was taken by Foucault to the psychiatric hospital of St. Anne to hear patients examined (Michel Foucault by Didier Eribon, p. 50). 

Derrida has been less of a political exhibitionist than Foucault. Derrida was arrested by the communist authorities in Prague in 1 981 on charges of drug trafficking; he said that he had come to meet dissidents and was released after protests . In the mid-1980s , Derrida authored a characteristically garbled essay!in praise of Nelson Mandela.


In general , Derrida claims always to have been a leftist . Foucault and his pupil Oerrida quarreled during the 1970s , and Foucault has provi􀄘ed some trenchant summations of Derrida' s work, which he rightly called "terrorist obscurantism . " Obscurantism because Derrida deliberately writes in an incomprehensible 􀄙ay . If one ventures to criticize Derrida, the latter says: "You misunderstood me you are an idiot" (LimitedI nc. , p. 158). roucault also said of Derrida: "He's the kind of philosopher w 0 gives bullshit a bad name" (Illiberal Education by Dinesh D'Souza, p. 190). The main exception seems to be when Derrida has to argue for funding for his activities; in these cases he seems to be able to speak quite clearly (see Tenured Radicals) . The destruction of language Those who try to read Derrida find a smokescreen of infuriating jargon, thoroughly pedantic but in a modish way. What is Derrida up to behind the smokescreen? One thinks of Moliere's pedant Vadius in Les Femmes Savantes . His task at one level is simply to destroy the literate languages of western Europe and their developed capacity to transmit advanced scientific, artistic, and epistemological conceptions.

Derrida wants to wreck everything that has been accomplished since De Vulgari Eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular) by Dante, Petrarch, and their heirs in many countries. Derrida also knows that in order to destroy the efficacy of these languages, he must also destroy the heritage of Plato. Derrida wants to show that all written and spoken discourse is umeadable, undecipherable, incapable of meaning anything. Reading a written text, above all, is for Derrida always a misreading. 

For this operation Derrida proceeds in the spirit of an ultra-Aristotelian radical nominalism which abolishes any relation between language on the one hand, and concepts and reality on the other. Such an outlook is always closely linked with paranoid schizophrenic mental pathologies. The operation is far from new, but has been attempted many times during the centuries, in recent times especially by the AngloVenetian or continental oligarchical schools of philosophy. Derrida is like David Hume, who began with the usual "Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu" ("Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses") of Paolo Sarpi's disciples among the British empiricists, and soon ended up denying the possible existence of truth, the world, causality, knowledge, and the self.

Derrida uses "texts" as the primary sense impressions and arrives at the same kind of radical skepticism. Signs without reality Much of modem philosophy is an attempt to dissolve epistemology into language and then to cripple epistemology by dissolving language. This is typical of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who has had immense influence in the AngloAmerican world. Ernst Cassirer wrote in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms about language becoming the principal weapon of skepticism rather than the vehicle for philosophical knowledge. Stuart Chase and the semanticists tried to show that most important political and historical concepts were meaningless verbiage.

The modem hermeneutic school is not far behind. Derrida's late comrade in arms, Paul de Man, the leading "boa deconstructor" at Yale University until his death in 1984 , talked about the predicament of modem thought as being linguistic rather than ontological or hermeneutic- meaning once again that language is a self-contained world of signs without links to reality. Concepts about the real world are degraded to rhetorical figures and tropes. Derrida's trick is to veil his extreflle subjectivist denial of reality with an apparent negation of both subject and object: " ... not only [does] meaning ... 􀅠ot essentially imply the intuition of the object but ... it essJntially excludes it .. .. The total absence of the subject and) object of a statementthe death of the writer and/or the dis ppearance of the object he was able to describe--does not prevent a text from 'mean- I ing' something. On the contrary, this possibility gives birth to meaning as such, gives it out to be eard and read" (Speech and Phenomena , pp. 92-93). Derrida's irrationalism has more flair than that of his plodding factional adversaries in thi older Anglo-American linguistic analysis schools.



When Derrida was a young boy, he was locked by his sister in a cedar chest in the family home and kept there by her for what seemed to him to be an eternity. During this time the child Derrida thought that he had died and gone to another world. After he had been rescued from the cedar chest, he somehow conceived the idea that he had been castrated. He came to see himself as the Egyptian pagan god Osiris, who had died and been dismembered, but then reassembled and brought back from the dead (minus his male organ) by Isis. 

Derrida told his Paris students of the early 1970s that this decisive experience in his life had led him to write the book Dissemination (Paris, 1972), which includes much elaboration of the theme of seed that is scattered, etc. 

Derrida felt compelled to narrate the Isis-Osiris-Horus myth in detail in the chapter of Dissemination entitled"Plato's Pharmacy," which is otherwise a document of his hatred for both Socrates and Plato. The Kabbala and mysticism Derrida is the bearer of another form of irrationalism of a specifically Venetian stamp: He has been pervasively influenced by the mystical writings of the Kabbala, a school cultivated over centuries by the Luzzato patrician family of the Venetian ghetto. 

Derrida cites a certain "Rabbi Eliezer": "If all the seas were of ink, and all ponds planted with reeds, if the sky and the earth were parchments and if all human beings practiced the art of writing, they would not exhaust the Torah I have learned, just as the Torah itself would not be diminished any more than is the sea by the water removed by a paint brush dipped in it."

Can this be Eleazar Ben Judah of Worms, the Hasidic Kabbalist who lived from 1160 to 1238? An ancient text with rach single word surrounded by . en . dless pages of exegetica􀁑 comm􀅘nt􀅙, with each note pomtmg to a another, older text-this IS one of Derrida's d.ominating visions. 􀁐 errida's lessay . on the Livre des Questions (B ook of QuestIOns) and reBatls Ma Demeure (I Build My House) by the contemporary French author Edmond Jabes yields a singular quotation on "the difficulty of being a Jew, which coincides with the difficulty of writing: for Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same depletion." "The art of the writer consists in little by little making words interest themselves in his books" I (Writing and Difef rence, p. 65􀅚. Derrida sometimes assumes the persona of a Kabbalist and signs his essays as "Reb Rida" or "Reb Derissa." I Derrida was much influen􀅛ed by the French writer Emmanuel Levinas, who populahzed the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the pro-Nazi existentialism of Martin Heidegger in France. Husserl and Heidegger had appeared as co-thinkers until Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, when Heidegger came out openly asia raving Nazi, while Husserl declined to do so. At this point, Levinas gravitated to Heidegger's, that is to say, to the oPfn Nazi side. Levinas helped to direct Derrida' s attention 0 Heidegger, who was also profoundly influencing Frenc􀅜 thought via Sartre, who was also a convinced Heideggerian. Just as Heidegger is a commentator of the protofascist 􀅝ietzsche, so Derrida can be seen as a commentator of the Nazi Heidegger. Derrida's endorsement of Heidegger is iqdeed very strong: "I maintain . . . that Heidegger's text is 0t extreme importance, that it constitutes an unprecedented, lirreversible advance and that we are still very far from haying exploited all its critical resources" (Positions, pp. 70, 3). Deconstruction is destruction A typical theme of the irr􀀚tionalists of the Weimar Republic was Destruktion . Karl ¥annheim wrote in his Ideology and Utopia (1929) about thd need to promote the Destruktion of self-deceiving ideologi s. For the Heidegger of Being and Time , Destruktion meant something similar, approximately the clearing away of what deconstructionists call "western metaphysics" from life and the institutions of thought. Heidegger wrote afteI the war in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (p. 211) of the need for a "destructive retrospect of the history 0 I ontology" whose task would be to "lay bare the internal character or development" of its objects of study. This would i􀅞volve a "loosening up" of the "hardened tradition" of "ontology" by a "positive destruction." The Nazi Heidegger's noti n of Destruktion is the immediate starting point for Derrid􀅟 and his entire school. In the first published edition of De La GrammatoLogie (Of Gramma- I tology) published in Paris in 19f67 , Derrida does not talk about "deconstruction" but rather abfut "destruction" throughout. Derrida says that in deconstruetion, "the task is . . . to dis-mantle [deconstruire] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures which are at work . . . not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way" (Margins of Philosophy). Derrida is nervous to the point of paranoia lest this connection become too obvious: He deliberately lies that "deconstruction has nothing to do with destruction. I believe in the necessity of scientific work in the classical sense. I believe in the necessity of everything which is being done . "



The destruction of reason With deconstruction thus revealed as a slyly disguised form of destruction , the next question is to determine what is to be destroyed. Derrida wants the destruction of reason, the deconstruction of the Logos, which he identifies as the central point of the Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition. That tradition is what the deconstructionists are attacking when they rail against "western metaphysics." Derrida is anti-western because he regards the line of development from Socrates and Plato through Gottfried Leibniz as "ethnocentric" and racist. When he attacks "metaphysics," he means human reason itself.


Derrida writes: "The 'rationality' -but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence-which governs a writing is thus enlarged and radicalized , no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos . Particularly the signification of truth. All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God ' s infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense" (OfGrammatology, pp . 1 0- 1 1 ) .

And again: "This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology: The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God" (OfGrammatology, p. 13). How then can reason and the logos be destroyed?


Heidegger had already given the example of attempt this by mystifying the concepts having to do with language: ''Thinking collects language into simple speaking . Language is therefore the language of being , just as the clouds are the clouds of the heavens . In speaking , thinking plows simple furrows into language . These furrows are even simpler than those plowed with slow steps by the farmer. " 'The death of civilization of the book' For Derrida, using a terminology that is borrowed from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , language is at first the realm of "sign" and "signified . " "The difference between sign and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain . . . the scientific truth . . . without also bringing with it all its metaphysico-theological roots" (Of Grammatology, p. 13).

In other words, Platonic Christianity is the basis for modem science, and that is the enemy Derrida seeks to liquidate by destroying language. The scientific tradition "begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics . " (Here Derrida is probably targeting Georg Cantor and the transfinite numbers.) Derrida is fully conscious that the exhaustion of language will bring with it nothing less than the "death of speech" and the "death of the civilization of the book" (Of Grammatology, p . 8).




Again following his Nazi guru Heidegger, Derrida focuses his destructive attention on the "metaphysics of presence" as this relates to language . The "presence" amounts to a solid grounding for certain knowledge, for the certitude that something exists . Derrida is at pains to point out that "presence" of this kind is required as a pre-condition for the conceptual apparatus of western philosophy from the time of the Greeks on down: "It could be shown that all names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence-eidos [action], arche [principle or first cause], telos [purpose], energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, [truth] transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth" ("Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," pp. 279-280). In language, "the metaphysics of presence" is equated with a "transcendental signified" or "ultimate referent," which would function as the ultimate guarantee of meaning.

We see that for Derrida, all western languages are "metaphysical," since their key words and concepts are permeated by Christian Platonism. They are also metaphysical, he thinks, because the only way to be sure of the meaning of "Send over a pizza," presupposes the Christian Platonic foundations of the whole civilization. Derrida therefore sets out to destroy Platonism by destroying language, while hoping to destroy the civilization along with both. 

Reason and speech Derrida asserts that the western languages are "logocentric," that they are based on reason in this way. Logos can mean reason, but also lawfulness or ordering principle, but also word, discourse, argument, and speech. "With this logos," says Derrida, "the original and essential link to the phone [sound] has never been broken." In other words, human reason and human speech are inextricably bound up together. The connection of speech and reason is the organizing principle of Plato's dialogues and of all the literature based on them, through St. Augustine to the Italian Renaissance. The theater of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Schiller represents a continuation of this tradition in a slightly different form. We must also recall that the classical poetry of Homer, Dante, and Chaucer was meant to be spoken or sung aloud.

If "the scar on the paper," were to replace all this, colossal cultural damage would of course be the result. Western language is therefore not only logocentric, but also phonocentric: that is to say, western language recognizes the primacy of the spoken language over the written language.

"The system of language associated with phoneticalphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced" (OfGrammatology, p. 43).

Derrida obviously cannot deny that spoken language "came first." He also cannot escape the fact that while the spoken word (parole) is a sign, the written word (mot) is the sign of a sign. He tries to go back to a mythical form of writing in general that might have existed before Socrates and Plato came on the scene, calling this arche-ecriture , (arch-writing) but this is plainly nothing but a crude deus ex machina hauled in to substantiate a thesis that has nothing going for it.

In the Book of Genesis, Adam creates language under the direct tutelage of God by giving names to animals and other objects. But Derrida is hell-bent on reducing everything to writing and texts as the only sense data the individual gets from the world. Black marks on white paper In order to attack the logos and reason through the spoken word, Derrida sets against them his notion of writing: l' ecriture . Derrida explains that what he means by writing is "a text already! written, black on white" (Dissemination , p. 203). That means a text already written, black on white. Black marks on white paper, plus excruciating attention to spaces, numbers, margins, paragraphs, typefaces, colophons, copyright notices, plus patterns, groups, repetitions of all of the above and so on in endless fetishism. Since it is probably clear by now that Derrida, posing as the destroyer of western metaphysics, is only spinning out very bad metaphysics in the process, we can feel free to say that Derrida attempts to establish the ontological priority of writing over language and speech. Nothing in the way of proof is offered in favor of this absurd idea: The argument proceeds through a "we say" and ends by lamely hinting that the computer revolution will also help reduce all spoken words to black marks on the page:

"The entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing" (Of Grammatology, p. 9).

This is Derrida's new pseudo-science called "grammatology," which studies the marks (grammata) on the paper. Each gramme or grapheme can be endlessly commented upon. The word comes from a nineteenth-century French dictionary by Littre and has been more recently used by 1.J. Gelb in the title of his book A Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology.! For Derrida, the black marks on the white paper are the only reality, as he very radicallylasserts in Of Grammatology: "The axial proposition of this essay is that there is nothing I outside the text." Since the notion of the "text" has already been expanded to include all language, and since real events are reduced by Derrida to "discdurse" about those events, the deconstructors argue that this islnot as fanatical as it sounds. But the fact remains that for Derrida, the sense data we have are the texts. There is no other perception. Better yet, as he says, "I don't believe that anything like perception exists" I ("Structure, Sign and Play in tpe Discourse of the Human Sciences" in The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of I Man (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 27 ff., "Discussion").

Deconstructing Plato 
Derrida exalts writing over speech, but logocentric-phonocentric western thinking refuses to go along with him. Derrida directs his rage against Plato by "deconstructing" the dialogue Phaedrus . 

The result is the essay "Plato's Pharmacy" which appears in Dissemination . This is classical Derridean obfuscation, playing on the multiple meanings of the Greek word pharmakon, which can mean variously poison,remedy, magic potion, or medicine. 

But the fields of meaning are even more complicated: Socrates, at the beginning of the dialogue, recounts the story of the nymph Orithyia who was playing with the nymph Pharmakeia when Orithyia was blown over a cliff by Boreas, the north wind. 

Pharmakeia was herself associated with a healing fountain. 

Phaedrus has brought some written texts for Socrates to read, and these are compared to a drug (pharmakon) which has lured Socratesto 

Are these texts a healing drug or poison? 

Socrates narrates the fable of the Egyptian god Tlileuth, a Hermes-Mercury figure who had invented counting, geometry, astronomy, dice, and letters (grammata) for writing. Theuth wants to share all these arts with the people of Egypt, so he goes to Amon Ra (Thamus) and offers the l to him. Amon Ra rejects the letters, explaining that these will weaken memory and make available only the appearance and presumption of knowledge, but not true knowledge. Derrida explodes with rage against Socrates and Plato: ('One begins by repeating without knowing-through a myth-the definition of writing: repeating without knowing .. 1 .. Once the myth has dealt the first blows, the logos of socr􀀋es will crush the accused." (Dissemination. p. 84)


He the proceeds to an obsessive recounting of the Isis-Osiris story. Derrida also makes much of the fact that although Plato includes reference to Socrates as pharmakeus (poisoner, medicine man , sorcerer), he does not free-associate from pharmakon/pharmakeus to pharmakos, meaning scapegoat. The idea is that Socrates really became a scapegoat at his trial, while Plato is making a scapegoat of "writing ." The conclusion is that "the pharmakon is neither the cure nor the poison, neither good nor evil , neither the inside nor the outside , neither speech nor writing" (Positions, p. 59). Through a hidden pattern of ambiguities , the text, in addition to saying what Plato might have meant, also says what Plato cannot have meant. 

The dialogue thus deconstructed is hopelessly contradictory and impossible to interpret or construe. 

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