>>*Mein Kampf* had this effect, too (and that's the only criterion of
>>comparison I intend, I assure you).
>
>then why choose it -- seems a ridiculous comparison, and i do not at all see
>that your justification holds up. exactly how did _Mein Kampf_ enable people
>to test and uncover important assumptions and question significant
>naturalisations?
Hitler had been a paid-up Bolshie for some short while not long after WW1. There he'd obviously learned that much seems natural when it is in fact transient - the product of the balances of struggle. Struggle got it here, and struggle can remove it. He gives no reasons why his own outrageous metaphysical sweeps are an exception, but he does clearly and compellingly make the point before going on to his own ahistorical essentialist transcendentalist racialist inconsistencies.
He is interesting on clothes, too. If memory serves, he hates fashion - not only as a divisive consumerism promoted in the interests of the few (we differ rather fundamentally as to the identity of the few, of course), but also as tyranny over the human body's potential for its imminent fulfilment (Umberto Eco once wrote a nice essay about how one is obliged to wear jeans. Even a portly middle-aged man can not wear them [ie. walk, stand, be unselfconscious etc] as he would a pair of slacks). I realise some of his most disgusting hate-mongering comes out with respect to this bit, but I'm entirely with him as far as I take it here.
Anyway, that's the sort of stuff I had in mind - I'm obliged to be general as I've not read it in 22 years (in a comparative political thought course that convinced me Italian fascism was much less incoherent than Nazism, btw).
>i think citing this text as a comparison is kneejerk defensiveness.
My own stance is far too vague and inconsistent to be defended (I don't even know where all my trenches are, for a start) - what I was trying to do was attack *Of Grammatology*. One way of self-identification is by opposition, I suppose. If I can't satisfactorily tell even myself what I think, it's no bad idea trying to put in reasoned words a case for the feeling of pronounced disagreement one gets when one reads things one detests. All the more so in a forum where others might be in a position to tell you what's wrong with your case. Your contribution has been that it inspired people whom you have found to be useful. I either never met those folks, or I disagree with you a lot.
>what harm? precisely what *harm* has Derrida done? or, ok, even loosely,
>what *harm*?
Well, I disagree with his basic points pretty dramatically, yet still discern his presence (as oft-unremarked a priori assumptions) in many a mid-term presentation by many a student I'd obviously think better engaged elsewhere. I also think there's a quietism and needless fragmentation implicit in that signifier-to-the-nth-power stuff. So he's not just wrong for me, but counter-productively so. Mebbe I just can't get a grip on what's left when you 'deconstruct' what seems to me the whole notion of reason.
>that's a ridiculous shortcut, collapsing the range of writers i gather you
>are addressing here as French Nietzscheans. and yes a very _Quadrant_ take
>on 'the postmodern threat'. reminds me of all the 'pomo panic' drivel
>published there in/after the 'Demidenko affair'. if the best way you can
>criticise something is by dismissive generalisations then yes i figure
>you're not making much of a criticism at all.
This isn't an article in Quadrant, Catherine - it's a couple of e-mails on a subject of marginal interest to me. I don't care what we call 'em, or whether they should be done the 'discursive violence' of being classed so homogenously. And I did not find the Demidenko 'affair' at all interesting - especially not Manne's panicked verbiage on it. I did read a few pages once, though, and I do agree with a few righties that it's not at all inspiring prose.
>of course i am not saying you don't have the right to disagree with derrida,
>and yes you even have the *right* to dismiss him. but that doesn't mean what
>you're doing is justice to derrida. or very useful.
I didn't understand Derrida on that always-in-the-unattainable-future justice stuff - I might if I read it now, but ya can't read everything, and I've my preferences. An e-mail probably doesn't do anyone justice. And sometimes an apparently useless post (at which I admit I excel) exites a useful thread. Perhaps this ain't one of those times, eh?
Cheers, Rob.