Derrida down under

Catherine Driscoll catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au
Mon Sep 6 00:03:41 PDT 1999


At 10:46 5/09/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Catherine:
>>it is so frustrating that it seems impossible to discuss
>>post-structuralism or even recent cultural theory in any form with
>>Americans without having to talk about some all too vague and loose
>>version of 'postmodernism' meaning.<
>
>I'm not American, nor are Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, Peter Dews, Roy
>Bhaskar, etc. (And no postmodernist has published a decent intellectual
>reply to them, I may add.)

Meaning who? You see that's the point. I am not a 'postmodernist' and in fact many people identified as such do not expound their social/cultural theories as 'postmodern'. So it's an impossible circle: you identify people as postmodernist who are not writing as postmodernists and of course they are not replying to criticisms of 'postmodernism' which they may even critique themselves. So Deleuze might be called 'postmodern' by someone who thus would not use his work as what seems eminently possible to me -- say a critique of Baudrillard -- and would say Deleuze never responded to critiques of postmodernism. It shortcircuits so much that is useful and interesting by settling for 'oh french, ins ome senses post-structuralist, post 68 = therefore 'postmodern' and I don't need to bother beyond that.


>There are differences between, say, Methodists and Anglicans, but they are
>both Christians nonetheless.

Huh. There are huge differences between say Catholics and Quakers, and though both could be seen as Christians their actions in and relations to the world are very damned different. But a better summary of the position might be 'Methodists and Buddhists are both religious, so there'.


>One may put Derrida, Foucault, Lacan,
>Lyotard, etc. in the same school of thought, while also recognizing
>differences.

Well I think if one did that one would miss one hell of a lot of what one might get out of one's reading of these writers.


>Whether you call that school postmodern or post-structuralist
>doesn't make much difference when the object of critique is the common
>traits among them.

The desire to collect and emphasise points of similarity between, say, Derrida and Foucault, seems to me to be a very inattentive way to read either of them. Their differences are certainly just as clear and, I would argue, far more significant. The desire to do this in spite of it predetermining that you will seek to find ways of identifying them with something you already reject seems often a product of people not wanting to hear things being said by one or more of these writers in their specific work rather than as part of an imaginary and even spurious collectivity.

Catherine



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