"...Perhaps the most interesting feature of Derrida's approach to Heidegger is the way he 'combines the incompatible' - here Derrida is postmodern in the best sense of the term. As Fredric Jameson pointed out, one of the key features of the 'postmodern sensitivity' consists in bringing face to face entities which, although contemporary, belong to different historical epochs.
One of the mythical figures of the old American South is the pirate Jean Lafitte: his name is associated with his and General Andrew Jackson's defence of New Orleans, with the buccaneer romantic, and so on - what is less well known is that in his old age, when he retired to England, Lafitte made friends with Marx and Engels, and even financed the first English translation of the *Communist Manifesto*. This image of Lafitte and Marx walking together in Soho, a nonsensical short circuit of two entirely different universes, is eminently postmodern. What Derrida does to Heidegger is, in a way, quite similar: he often brings Heidegger face to face with the 'vulgar', 'ontic' problematic - he links the Heideggerian gift of *es gibt* with the 'economic' problematic' of the gift in Marcel Mauss..."
Beyond obvious: all analogies are suspect and some more so than others, isn't above spurious use of Jameson (or does no such use exist anymore when nothing is genuine)? Where is 'postmodern sensitivity' found in J? As Zizek describes it, this condition appears to be the pastiche of film like *Body Heat* with its 1930s/1980s motif. If, for sake of discussion, that is accurate association, how is it applicable to Lafitte-Marx anecdote? Moreover, is anecdote - admittedly interesting - true (or should that not be concern anymore when nothing is true)?
I was in New Orleans recently where the specter of Jean Lafitte is everywhere - parks, businesses, restaurants, a town, etc. are named after him. Seems he died in 1820s (there is some debate as to whether this was in 1826 or 1829) in Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. In other words, he never retired to England, he never befriended M&E, he never financed *CM*.
Now, perhaps, we have encountered what Greg Ulmer calls 'mystory', collection of set of elements gathered together temporarily in order to represent nexus of history, politics, language, thought, etc. (_Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video_). And maybe anecdote is akin to Michael Ryan's fictional artist Fiona Burns in his essay *Neo-Political Art After Post-Modernism* (_Politics and Culture: Working Hypotheses for a Post-Revolutionary Society_) that explores boundary between materiality and culture. Or maybe readers have taken something that Zizek made up to be historically accurate. After all, he doesn't present anecdote as fictional truth (or should that be truthful fiction?) nor does he cite source. Perhaps reason that few people know about Lafitte-Marx relationship is that one never existed and only Soho stroll two made together was in Z's head. Michael Hoover