The first time I saw something about deconstructivism, I thought it was a satire or a joke.

Actually, the more women I meet, the better I like cats.

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.

Ducks

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.

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

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.

He must have known my ex-wife.