so, doubling down on that missiles thing, eh?

Paglia is one of those people one loves to quote, and reads for the payoff lines. You’ve read more of her than I, from the sound of things.

Reckon I’ll have to launch in with some cultural appreciation or other, here, eh?

Cheers,
PGE

oh, what’s up with the spacing? Did you change anything recently?

I notice the margins are off around smilies, for example, and your last post has random indentations. . . .

PG-

“so, doubling down on that missiles thing, eh?”

Heh. I’m not sure that citing a psychotic lesbian writing on gay men building civilization is -quite- the best way to shore up my masculine street cred, but you never know.

As for the random spacing thing, -I- haven’t done anything different. I noticed some wonky things appear lately once I picked up a couple of co-bloggers. . . Seriously though, no idea why it’s gone weird.

And yeah, I’ve read pretty much everything I can from Camille Paglia. I -loved- Sexual Personae. I think she’s mad.

yes, I have a rather significant cast of characters in my “he’s brilliant. he’s the devil, but he’s brilliant” list. Nietzsche & Derrida lead the list. Heidegger and Marx don’t quite make that one, but they’re close. It’s possible Paglia would make it upon more reading, but . . . I find psychosexual cultural criticism tiresome. If Derrida hadn’t so consummately gutted Freud in an address to the APA, I’d suffer his, er, effusions less.

And I’m vastly entertained by your riposte. Nicely done. Though, frankly, in some circles…

Cheers,
PGE

PG-

See, I don’t get the appeal of Derrida. Well, that isn’t true. The personage of Derrida is engaging — I saw an interview where he completely played the interviewer in a way that makes Colbert seem amateurish. And I like his enthusiasm for puns — French is great for punning.

But it could just be my concrete historian’s mind, but his thought seems so trivial to me. Foucault is my home boy. I get the point of Foucault. His thinking seems to have real-world application. Derrida just seems so onanistic to me.

Am I just missing something?

Foucault? Derrida ate Foucault’s lunch. And Nietzsche stole his lunch money, split it with Schopenhauer, then got caught by Heidegger acting like a Buddhist.

Actually, most of that did make sense. Just not much sense.

I think Derrida does Foucault’s “madness” hypothesis in pretty thoroughly in “The Cogito and the History of Madness” early in his career (Writing and Difference). I think if you approach Derrida through Heidegger with reference to Levinas, thinking of him as posing a serious challenge to the totalitarian political consequences of the totalizing strain of Western thought, particularly as expressed by Rousseau through Hegel, then you find a probing (and fructifying) ethical challenge to the history of metaphysics. At the same time, you have to never lose track of his commitments, which are no better than Sartre’s (in his “What is Existentialism?”) or Heidegger’s (like whom he is an acknowledged atheist). (Mis)treated (as he as often invites as he properly disclaims) as a speaker on substantive political, religious, and cultural matters, he is playful, politically and religiously toxic, and inconsistent at an irritating pitch and frequency.

Foucault . . . meh. He’s the “postmodernism” that gets picked up and played with, like Lacan, in ways that frustrate me and my hermeneutics-focussed ilk.

But you’re probably right, there’s a difference between those who live in metadiscursive analytics and those who live in content, even when we try to do each other’s work. Notice the way I riff off my quotations, in blogging, for example; not often engaging directly in push-pull argument, but more often critiquing the assumptions and tendencies of arguments.

Cheers,
PGE

PG-

“Foucault . . . meh. He’s the “postmodernism” that gets picked up and played with, like Lacan, in ways that frustrate me and my hermeneutics-focussed ilk.”

See, I think we historians have more claim to Foucault than Lit Crit sorts. Before anything else, he was an historian, so I don’t think we pick him up and play with him. He’s one of us. And some -great- histories have been written using his insights (though, admittedly, a lot of disappointing imitative works have also been done.) Which is why I don’t resent his presence in historical theory nearly so much as Derrida. To me, Derrida is a trendy interloper.

I’m far from anti-intellectual, but I must admit that I have little patience for Theory with a big T. While I recognize the power latent in Theory (mostly destructive power) my general attitude can be summed up with — If I wanted to play frikkin’ word games, I’d play Word Twist over at Facebook.

You called Derrida toxic. What separates his philosophy from simple nihilism? In my cursory instruction on Derrida in school (we consider him unimportant next to Foucault) his thought seemed to lead only to negation.

PG-

“Foucault? Derrida ate Foucault’s lunch. And Nietzsche stole his lunch money, split it with Schopenhauer, then got caught by Heidegger acting like a Buddhist”

This reminds me of that Monty Python philosophy drinking song!

“Theory with a big T” is exclusive property of Marxists like Terry Eagleton. Lentriccia and other key radicals are actually huge critics of Derrida and de Man, who they view (with consummate irony, where political stances are concerned) as ‘apostate’ radicals.

Above all, when dealing with deconstruction & grammatology &c, it is key to remember that this is all a critique of the language of philosophy and ’social science’ at their interface. The uses to which related thinkers like Heidegger and Gadamer put poetry, etc. warrants the cultural critic’s careful attempt to make related observations, but not so much the ham-handed stuff that critics who try to use Derrida the same way they use Marx (”it’s all really about class struggle, alienation, and ideology”) or Freud/Lacan (”it’s all really about desire/aversion for returning to the womb”) or the various reductions of those schools into “power struggle in terms of race, class, gender” slop that gets taught as “postmodernism” in college classrooms daily.

Now, Derrida’s views on religion are toxic in the sense that actually getting into the Capri dialogues or parts of Acts of Religion, one risks not noticing the heavily artificial game of definition that’s going on, here. Messianism is a set of rhetorical strategies, but where is the atheist’s play of Religion and messianism (and never forget laicite is present, here, if only tacitly much of the time) to interface with Christ’s proclamation “you search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life, but they testify of me”? We risk getting lost in the moves, dangling on a spiderweb which could belong to Edwards or to Siddartha (there are remarkable parallels, oddly, between images of the spider and pit) over hell. Derrida interacts with “negative theology,” but it is vital to be able to differentiate between the apophatic movement within the believer’s faithful journey and the interface between via negativa, atheology, and the technically atheistic god-talk of Heideggerian thought (or of Buddhism).

As for Derrida and nihilism, the short version of my reply would be “Yeah, that’s what everyone thinks the first time. Including me. That’s not what he was doing, though.”

If I have time, I’ll try to cook up a post on the positive and negative uses we may make of Derrida’s work.

Cheers,
PGE