you asked about a prior post on derrida's _spectres of marx_. a trip down memory lane then. here's the post of mine, actually from both pen-l and lbo, and as i read the threads now not much new has been added to this debate in almost a year, and there's nothing particularly startling in these old posts. given the debate here now, it seems to me that the issues of proyect's 'lessons of history' (and in whom or what they are regarded as embodied in -- the working class, intellectuals, the petty-bourgeoisie, the state, louis proyect's head) takes on more significance, as does the issue of the reception of derrida's work across the atlantic. the only thing i'd change, is the extent to which i'd underestimated the shift in deconstruction to the left, and that partly as a result of the lag in translations and my own plodding reading. i also underestimated the extent to which any criticism of 'postmodernism' was for some on the list not the occasion to actually begin a discussion and exploration, but to end it.
as i recall, christian had a slightly different take on derrida's absenting of the issue of surplus value, that derrida was no political economist. that's true. but for me it remains a problem for _spectres of marx_. i also think i was agreeing with christian's insistence that derrida is worth reading, as against those who continued to insist that nothing could be gained there. below this one, another post in from the same thread, on foucault and marx, and below that one, a post on rorty -- all just in case they come up, as they invariably do, when the fearful fantasm of 'postmodernism' gets a workout. but another plug for the excellent essay by rebecca comay "Geopolitics of Translation: Deconstruction in America" Stanford French Review 15 (1991), which more than anything might suggest a way for many on the list to enter a discussion about derrida and the US.
cheers, Angela _________
From: rc&am <rcollins at netlink.com.au Thu 4:34 Subject: [PEN-L:1414] Re: Re: Enlightenment insight
To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Sunday, 13 December 1998 12:59
hi christian,
i happen to agree. here's a fragment from a discussion on pen-l. i hope louis doesn't mind it being reproduced here. {i like lacoue-labarthe too, but i think nancy has done some more interesting work)
cheers, angela
>Louis Proyect wrote:
> Derrida was a reaction against the notion that
> there were any kind of intrinsic "structures" in history or society.
well, i think derrida was a very good student of kant's and hegel', in the sense that he showed, time and again, how kant and hegel could not escape the dialectic or the antinomies. he merely applies this to various other theorists, like levi-straus, etc. of course, derrida himself fails miserably, because he cannot think beyond the inter-relations of the categories to history, which is different from History in his version of the world. about a decade ago, i made a bet with a derridean friend that derrida would never confront marx head on, despite (or i think perhaps because of) the fact that derrida's fan club across the atlantic thought he was an instrument against marxism, which, he most likely was. (i lost the bet, but i think i won the money - more on this below)
a case in point: i think the US version of deconstruction, which subsequently contracted into the outgrowth known as anti-foundationalism (or pragmatism) is perhaps one of the most conservative things about, and deserves as much scorn as can be heaped upon it. notwithstanding this, there is a distinctly marxist turn in french deconstruction (eg. jean-luc nancy) which occurred before derrida's recentish book on marx, and should not be easily dismissed, even if it contains many problems.
> The > postmodernists simply extend this analysis and take it in a
direction that > people like Derrida were uncomfortable with. Hence, his
"Spectres of Marx". What made him uncomfortable obviously was the sort
of idiocy that Baudrillard indulged in.<
baudrillard is supposed to make people uncomfortable, though i agree he is an idiot. (but then, i could never really understand why many french professors thought jerry lewis and walt disney were geniuses - this may explain the drivel of 'america')
> The basic problem with both the post-structuralists and the
postmodernists > is that they reject the fundamental premises of
historical materialism. > There are no "lessons" in history, they argue.
This belief makes > revolutionary action impossible, because Marxism is
predicated on the > belief that there is a continuing pattern in
history, namely the class > struggle.<
well, i don't happen to think there are any 'lessons from history' either, in the sense of unmediated deliveries from some transcendental plane; but maybe you are not talking in these terms.
in any case, i would have thought that the problem with 'spectres of marx' is quite of a different order: namely, in an entire book on ghosts and haunting (which is interesting in only the most banal of ways), not once does derrida confront or think through marx's central critical concept: surplus value. at least spivak had a go. but derrida can't even begin to think through this stuff because he wants to avoid the materiality of marx's use of things like 'spectre' and haunting and reification and objectification, etc as related concepts. so, he does marx a big disservice whilst pretending that he has in fact dealt with marx. i also thought his stuff on deconstruction being the equivalent to perestroika was one of the stoopidest and arrogant things i had read for a long time. derrida is not an idiot, so i can only think he is determined to avoid a discussion of surplus value because it would make his naff read of ghosts look silly and it would also jeopardize his fan club in the US.
----- Original Message ----- From: rc&am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> To: <marxism at lists.panix.com>; lbo <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Cc: <pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu> Sent: Sunday, 13 December 1998 4:42 Subject: Re:Enlightenment insight
can someone please explain to me the attraction of humanism? rob? never could see it myself. maybe it's because it sounds all warm and cosy, but i think it is nothing of the sort. the so-called anti-anti- humanists tend to postion anti-humanism as something beyond the pale, an expression of some kind of obliterating desire. what after all could be more dangerous than to be anti-humanist, where this is understood as being akin to being anti-human! what is neatly elided here of course is the difference between the word 'human' as we use the term, and humanism as an anthropology, as a view of what being human is and, by implication, is not.. but, from where i sit, me thinks that humnaism - by definition - closes off possibilities for transformation, and limits our horizons according to a version of what it measn to be human that can always be shown to be historically specific. a critique of humanism on the other hand opens the terrain of possibilities.
> Doug Henwood
> writes:
>
> >I'm not sure where I stand on this, but I > >think one reason MF is
so compelling is that he forces us (or should > force > >us) to think
about all those lazy assumptions of a timeless human
> essence > >from which capitalism estranges us.
i thought that marx kind of compelled us to rethink the notion of a timeless human essence before foucault. i guess they have a - at times - vastly different analysis of how certain attributes come to be deemd as what it means to be essentially human. but then, i also think that in the history of marxism, there has been a consistent attempt to make marxism into another form of essentialism, which is why foucault may seem apposite.
> alex writes:
>
> Ummm...but aren't those "lazy assumptions" the cornerstone of Marxism
> itself?
no.
> Doesn't historical materialism rest upon Marx tweaking Hegel's >
notion of "the spirit" estranged from itself? isn't this feuerbach
rather than marx?
doug quoted foucault: "Michel Foucault: When I speak of the "death of man," I mean that it's a matter of fixing a rule of production, an essential term, to this "production of man by man." seems to me that this parallels the exact problem that marx has with feuerbach, though with less emphasis on the epochal shift to the death of god/man that foucault wishes to emphasise, and more attention to the already-divided notion of Man: ie, as a determined and obfuscatory abstraction from the class divisions and the historical division between 'production' and 'ownership' in capitalist social relations. i think there are ore parallels between foucault and marx: the insistence on epochal shifts as discontinuous, as revolutions rather than evolution, on the creation of distinct understandings of what it means to be human as founded in particular historical moments. there is a big difference between the two also: foucault, of course, often isolates discursive formations as discrete entities, and renders the organisation of power as something ineffable - as simply a will to power. this is also an assertion about human nature i would think.
> Wasn't it Marx's > contention that man is essentially a producer,
homo faber is i think properly hegel's ground, whose direct descendant in socialist politics is lassalle, not marx. (see marx's 'critique of the gotha program' and his insistence that labour is not the source of all value) in any case, if we are to use producer in a less phenomenological sense, and more in an abstract way, then you are asserting little more than that people are capable of changing the environment around them. a banality me thinks, and one that if pursued very far would get you into all sorts of trouble. like: are hunter-gather economies not then expressions of what it means to be human? is it our fate to be workers?
> who under capitalism is > alienated from the fruits of his own labor,
an alienation that can only
> be overcome by revolution?<
indeed, under capitalism! but this is hardly an exemplary case for establishing what the human essence is. if it is, then we are truly doomed. this to me would be to junk the possibility of revolution.
----- Original Message ----- From: rc&am To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Sent: Tuesday, 15 December 1998 12:40 Subject: rorty - "continuing the conversation of the west"
Jim heartfield wrote about rorty:
> I also thought he scored some points against left cultural criticism
in his most recent book, though again, I didn't agree with his overall
patriotic outlook.<
jim, i would think that rorty's criticisms of culure crit is indistinguishable from his patriotism. it all comes down to the great exemplar of free society, the pinnacle of acheivement (guess which country) as the model for how the conversation over literature should take place, as an exchange of ideas which mimics the exchange of things in a supposedly orderly and polite fashion, without ever asking the upsetting question about how those rules of conversation get established. rorty's liberalism has apparently dispensed with the need for foundations or transcendental reason BECAUSE the US provides the illustration of the best that liberalism can offer. The US is plato's republic, and it provides the evidence for a certain politcs and the only permissible kind of lit crit. Rorty's "we" is always him writ large as subject and the only available subject of theory and writing: "we liberal intellectuals"; "we the people who have read and pondered"; "we rich north americans". he's like the worst of habermas (the ideal speech situation) expanded as political, cultural philosophy without any embarassment and an excesive professional self-importance. even progressive liberalism looks good by comparison: at least here there was a sense of negativity, notions of the lack of fit between liberal concepts like rights and justice and the real world, which are, in rorty, fended off by the refusal of such concepts in the name of an anti-foundationalism, which looks more a more like the inoculation of historical presumptions form critique. rorty is liberalism as purified accomodation. {ask me some other time why it is that i think a left 'anti-foundationalism' is qualitatively different to rorty's... - if that interests you}