Derrida Marxist?

Charles Miller bautiste at uswest.net
Fri Dec 18 17:32:33 PST 1998



> "Doyle Saylor" wrote:
>
> But there is nothing in Duchamp that is about
> deconstruction of other painters.
>
The deconstructionist character of the ready-mades strikes as one sign of Duchamp's alignment with Derrida/others. If you understand deconstruction as an attempt to identify the irreducible instrumental nature of our existing, then the ready-mades can be seen as Duchamp's attempt to get back to the instrumental nature of art and of our being in the world. There are elements of deconstruction to his _Big Glass_ work. The _marginal_ quality of the art, which questions the accepted norms of conventional aesthetics also is deconstructionist in its bringing people face-to-face with the _normativity_ of artistic taste and canons as a whole.


> Doyle wrote:
> Certainty-filled pronoucements, hmmm. If you try to undermine when I tell
> my wife not to cross the street against traffic, I will do as Marx did which
> is destroy you as best I can because your statement would endanger the life
> of my wife whom I value over yours.
>
I do not understand your bringing your wife into this discussion. I am talking about the notion that the certainty with which scientists, economists, and artists make about objective reality and truth is questionable. This has nothing to do with the certitude you have relating to the danger facing your wife. That is a fact that can be verified immediately. Of course, there is no question of this even happening. Your straw man argument draws an absurd conclusion because it does not even address what I was talking about.


> Doyle said:
> A mirror reflection is not the same thing as seeing something. Mirror
> reflection is a faulty metaphor for invariant transformation of the image
> upon the retina and confuses the idea of what it means to have the same
> properties in two cases or family resemblances even.
>
Mirror reflection, in the context I used it, has to do with a way of speaking. Your misconstrual of my metaphor is indicative of a literalizing rhetoric that attempts to undermine an opponent's argument by a straw man reductio ad absurdum. I was not speaking literally. In the context of common usage, people understand the notion of a mirror reflection. In the context of Derrida speaking about Marx attacking Stirner, we can certainly speak of mirror reflections, since many people (and Marx in this instance) base self-identity on trying to be like others (think of a teenager idolizing a rock star). Marx, according to Derrida, saw elements of sameness between his own thought and Stirner's and their relationship to Hegelian thought. The closeness was too mirror-like, according to Derrida, so much so that Marx's fury in _German Ideology_ is potentially understandable as Marx's attempt to eradicate this mirror-likeness.


> As for destroying one's opponent, well that is really about
> the question of how social systems work, not about personally
> destroying
> someone. Marx would have been writing about why St Max fails in his
> social
> programmes. What is wrong with looking at the weakness of one's
> contemporaries?
>
Again, your reductionistic tendency to literalize misses the point altogether. Marx was indeed ostensibly attacking Stirner for his lack of awareness of historical constructs and their conditioning of how the ego understands itself. That is not the question that Derrida is dealing with, not does what derrida confuse his argument with what you are correct in noting. But, for Derrida's argument, your statement is _obvious_. The element in Marx's critique of Stirner that Derrida finds interesting is the ferocity of the attack, as well as the fact that Stirner hold positions that Marx really should, according to his own logic, accept, but which Marx seeks to destroy by obliterating his opponent. I think Derrida sees this as indicative of an ontological tendency to reduce otherness to sameness when the other refuses to act or think like me.

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