My son Raphael Simon’s essay on studying at UC Irvine with recently-deceased Godfather of Deconstruction Jacques Derrida appears in today’s Los Angeles Times.
For those not registered at the LAT site (not difficult, btw), here is an excerpt:
For Derrida’s followers, “deconstruction” was like a code word in reverse. Only his critics spoke it aloud. I was at Irvine in the early ’90s, when, as his recent obituaries have taken pains to point out, Derrida’s influence was on the wane. Poststructuralism no longer in vogue, university literature departments were in thrall to more overtly political movements like Cultural Studies and the New Historicism. Not long before, it was revealed that Derrida’s late friend and advocate, Paul de Man, had written for a collaborationist publication during World War II – a fact upon which Derrida’s adversaries seized to make a tenuous but widely embraced connection between deconstruction and fascism. Irvine was deconstruction’s last stand. The proud but beleaguered Derrida was like an aging Napoleon in exile; he seemed to be biding time in Irvine, plotting his return to power with his faithful but shrinking retinue.
Nonetheless, the California sunshine suited the Algerian-born Jew. Tan, white-haired and well dressed, Derrida was known at UCI for being fond of the beach – and of beautiful women. His reputation may have diminished during his tenure at Irvine, but he became increasingly famous until he achieved the ultimate California dream and became, literally, a movie star. Instead of his countless books, it was the documentary “Derrida” that would serve for many as an introduction to the man who had spent so much of his career defending the priority of text over image. That is, the theoretical priority.
Hi Roger– Is there any way you could post an excerpt or two from Raphael’s essay, for those of us not registered with the LA Times?
You must be quite proud of him, BTW.
ìAfter watching the video, Derrida looked uncomfortable and strangely introspective. Finally, he told me he couldn’t give me credit for it. In order to pass his class, I would have to write a conventional paper.î
In other words, Derridaís silliness does not work in the real world. At the end of the day, even he would determine the value of the studentís written words. I hold the late philosophical dilettante in utter contempt. Derrida did an enormous amount of damage. He essentially argued that human beings could not adequately communicate with each other. This opens the door to totalitarian impulses because if this is so—ultimately the toughest dude must interpret our words. That is why I remain an adversary who “seized to make a tenuous but widely embraced connection between deconstruction and fascism.” However, I adamantly argue that there is nothing “tenuous” about the connection.
[Derrida] essentially argued that human beings could not adequately communicate with each other.
He must have known my ex-wife.
David,
You’re right, of course, about Deconstruction. Derrida was learned, facile, sometimes a clever writer, more often obtuse and silly.
His project, put simply, was the deconstruction of the monuments of western philosophy and culture parading as a critique. His tools were really very simple, a fashion of epistemological nihilism, but those stubborn “traces” refused to go away, and the canon survived, much maligned. Plato and Shakespeare won handily. In fact, the pomos never laid a glove on them.
The academy, though, was ruined in the process. Imagine giving an academic a wrecking ball that would allow him to earn tenure without knowing anything. That’s what happened. Empty drivel became scholarship because it could.
The logical political result of postmodernism is, as you point out, a naked power grab. Well now the nuts are runninig the asylum at universities across the land. It will take generations to repair.
Parents of college age children, be very careful how and where you spend your hard earned money. If your kids aren’t tackling the great books as part of the curriculum, find out why. Don’t allow them to replace Shakespeare with some multi culti lesbian third world drivel.
Old Dad–
It looks as if the pomos may have gotten to the Bard after all, at least if a recent piece in the Guardian (after the Ohio letter-writing campaign and the op-ed about the desirability of W’s assassination, there ought to be a three-strikes rule for newspapers) is to be believed:
“Sufi or not Sufi? That is the question
Islam week at the Globe Theatre will link Shakespeare with a mystic Muslim sect.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1334860,00.html
One of the posters at LGF interpreted the Guardian op-ed as typical pomo stuff:
I can’t help but believe that there people out there who are deliberately pulling a shell game with us, trying to get us to agree that Sufism is kind of nice, and Sufism is Islam, and Islam is what the Wahhabists believe in, therefore let’s be nice to the enemy.
And here’s the deal — it doesn’t HAVE to make sense. You know and I know it doesn’t make sense. The syllogism is faulty. But post-modernism doesn’t work by syllogisms. You can holler all you want about how it doesn’t make sense, but post-modernism just sits there glaring at you and accusing of foisting your own patriarchal, destructive reality on others.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=13276_Guardian_Lunacy_in_Full_Flower
Congratulations Raphael (and dad Roger!).
See also the following on relativism’s empty premise: If relativists attempt to defend their position by claiming that it is not culturally conditioned but actually true, then they cannot consistently maintain their central claim that the truth does not exist. It must exist if they have found it.
The Western canon has survived because it resonates. As for me, having slogged through a couple of Derrida texts, deconstructionism is just mental smoke and mirrors (to use a polite term), no resonance there.
Charlie(Colorado) ó That’s what you get for marrying a human being. Try marrying a woman next time.
Ducks
Yank,
Oh, they’ll keep trying. A Muslim was he? Well some say the dark lady was, shall we say, moorish. But the old gent’s bones remain buried in that tidy Anglican church in Stratford. A closet papist, perhaps, but a muslim? Well, give it another 100 years and they’ll all be muslim.
This may not be the place for this, but I think Derrida has had an indiretcly positve effect on the right. The idea that communication is at best problematic when filtered through the biases of reporters has been profitable for the right, and as obvious as it is, I do not think it would have been as easily accepted without the work of Derrida and his disciples. We have been able to flip the script on the Legacy Media types and make a huge dent in their credibility thanks to this idea. POMO has come back and bitten the left on the right cheek so to speak. Thanks, Jacques! Brent Bozell thanks you, too.
Congratulations, Roger. I know you are proud. I read his piece in the dead tree version of the LAT this morning but wouldn’t have made the connection.
Charlie(Colorado) ó That’s what you get for marrying a human being. Try marrying a woman next time.
Actually, the more women I meet, the better I like cats.
I went to a somewhat conservative Catholic university, and thanks to AP credits, only had to take one English course. My professor was an old guy with no haor but big puffy sideburns who as a young man used to hang around with Dylan Thomas in the Village. Class but him and us reading poems from Norton’s anthology. No decontructing Shakespeare for him.
The first time I saw something about deconstructivism, I thought it was a satire or a joke.