>>>*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.
you found hitler compelling and clear on this and derrida an unacceptable overturning of reason? i guess we just are not going to find much common ground here then. but derrida is not only going to say some effects of a struggle appear natural and are in fact transient, but that the struggle itself has naturalised foundations in the ideas of self, society and so on that underpin it.
>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.
i'm not sure how this follows in the discussion -- are you saying fashion is naturalised, or that derrida approves of it, or what?
>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.
for example -- as an undergraduate i found luce irigaray very important in coming to think differently about gender and sexual difference and identities and philosophies dependent on them, and particularly as a way of seeing and critiquing the explanatory power of psychoanalysis within twentieth-century western culture and within my life. the shape her early work took was certainly strongly influenced by derrida and was a very important discovery for me. it's true that i wouldn't extol it now in the same way, but i do make it available to my students and still suprisingly often find they are changed and effected and compelled by it.
>>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.
is 'reason' in the sense you/we use the term a natural thing and the same in every culture and at all times? if not, then why shouldn't it be pulled apart to ask how it works.
again, i don't necessarily find the way derrida does this useful to me, but definitely his work brings many people to ask questions about how things are explained and received as obvious. if a student of mine falls for derrida in a big way i will suggest criticisms of derrida and alternative approaches as futher reading, but students learn in different ways and excel by different paths, and getting them to think is the first and most important thing, and utterly dwarfs the question of whether or not they think along the same lines i do.
>>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.
yes. it's hideous. and not well written. not that that justifies or for the most part is even relevant to what manne wrote about it.
>>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?
no an email doesn't do any influential thinker justice, that's true. but you can always write with the prior and present recognition of that.
catherine