>
> Oh, I think quite a great deal of harm, if reason is something to be
> valued. Most pointedly, his defence of the Heidegger against the charge
> of Nazism is a pretty serious abuse of Derrida's authority. More
> generally, Derrida's elevation of marginalia, word-play and other
> aspects of the frivolous have had a desultory influence upon
> scholarship.
First, Derrida didn't defend Heidegger against the charge of Nazism. How could he? Everyone knew Heidegger was in the party, and that he accepted the Rector's position (at Heidelberg). The Farias book was tabloid research at its finest--it made its way on the fact that no one in the United States knew the first thing about Heidegger (or the holocaust really), and so it could make banal "scholarship" look groundbreaking.
The more problematic question is what (if anything) Heidegger's Rectorate has to do with his "philosophical" corpus. You may disagree with Derrida's conclusions, but you've gotta at least look at the work to make a judgement. No one would give a damn about Heidegger's Nazism if his work hadn't already informed a generation and a half of continental philosophers, Sartre among them.
As for Derrida elevation of the frivolous: this aspect of his work has also theoretically informed most (if not all) of the work directed to re-framing our literary and cultural canons. The notion of the "supplement" and "margin" have been indispensible to reinspiring debates about what counts as literature (or culture etc.), how, and why. Even though I don't always agree with what his students conclude on this score, that effort has been very worthwhile.
>
> It seems a shame that those on the left who hear the likes of Roger
> Scruton defending reason draw the absurd conclusion that reason is right
> wing, and obscurantism and irrationalism is left wing. After all, it is
> the left that has most to lose in the degradation of rational
> investigation.
>
> As a philosopher Derrida presents an interesting paradox (as do other
> skilful philosophers). Seen in the round, his work is part of a tendency
> towards stupidity. But his specific technical steps of argumentation are
> intelligently crafted. I think it should, after Hegel, be called 'the
> cunning of unreason' that it advances its cause through well-woven
> disputation.
I don't know whether you intend the stupidity remark as an insult, but I doubt Derrida would take it as one. Derrida is interested in the kind of built-in stupidity that our best models of reason are committed to. He doesn't want to destroy them (as some people suggest), but wants to rebuild them to make them usable. Most lefties get infuriated because his kind of interrogation isn't object specific--ie. it works as well on left pieties and stupidities as ones from the right.
Christian