A few years ago I read Michael Ryan's *Marxism and Deconstructionism.* I don't remember the specific arguments any more but I remember being quite impressed when I read it. Ryan made an argument for the relevance of deconstructionism for a detotalized Marxist politics. Any thought?
Manjur Karim
----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Kosenko" <kosenko at netwood.net> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2001 11:42 PM Subject: Re: "Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida"
> Here's an interesting product of a certain
> literary theory mindset: "Death Reckoning in the
> Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida" (
> you can read it on line at
> http://www.english.upenn.edu/~ov/jnschust/death.html
> ). If the title doesn't make it clear, the order
> of discussion is intended to lead you to the
> Derridean deconstructionist conclusion.
>
> The author's subject: "So, too, I think, death
> remains the imperative horizon today, the
> background limit against which we project a
> certain understanding of our own society."
> Portentious lingo there, no? And in English, not
> German or French.
>
> I'll spare you the journey. What does the
> philosophical meditation on death get us?
>
> "While we are a long way away from any workable
> everyday ethics here [no shit, my marinalia],
> there is nonetheless a real interest in opening up
> the possibility of locating a common space for
> what we all share in our separations from which we
> are further separated, our ownmost possibility of
> otherness."
>
> Okay, so I have left out the bridge. It is this:
> because we cannot experience our own deaths, only
> the effect of the deaths of others, the idea of
> death becomes a location of our idea of
> "otherness" (in ourselves), and ethics depends on
> our ability to acknowledge the other. (Actually,
> for the writer of the essay, death becomes THE
> priviledged location of recognizing "otherness.")
> Now that is all perfectly vacuous and pretty
> platitudinous (unless you want to use it to hammer
> on religious fundamentalists, who seem to be
> immune to the reality of death). Reduce it to
> this: If we all acknowledged the mortality of
> others, we would be moved to "dialogue" and create
> better societies. But do YOU really believe that
> it's that simple to get people to stop killing
> each other or one class or economy from trying to
> dominate another? Should we call a
> deconstructionist consciousness raising session
> about death at the U.N.?
>
> Here is the Derrida that sets the writer off on
> his concluding flight:
>
> "For if death is indeed the possibility of the
> impossibility and therefore the possibility of
> appearing as such of the impossibility of
> appearing as such either, then man, or man as
> Dasein [i.e., limited, finite historical being],
> never has a relation to death as such, but only to
> perishing, to demising, and to the death of the
> other, who is not the other. The death of the
> other thus becomes again 'first,' always first . .
> . [the deconstructionist flip-flop] The death of
> the other, this death of the other in "me," is
> fundamentally the only death that is named in the
> syntagm 'my death.'"
>
> Voila, the great pseudo-philosopher has once more
> deconstructed the putative "autonomy of the
> subject" (which you yourself never believed in
> anyway) by pointing out how we are connected to
> others through the experience of death. But do I
> really need the vacuous circumlocutions of the
> deconstructionist to understand that? I can think
> it quite a bit more clearly in terms of my own
> experience of the death of my mother, or the death
> of the homeless and family-less photographer
> friend who got cancer and whom I visited in the
> hospital for three months before he died. A good
> poem might bring it home to me as an experience.
> So let's all hear it for not hiding the experience
> of death from ourselves.
>
> But I have no clue what Derrida's lingo gets us or
> how the writer of the essay thinks that he has got
> some priviledged insight into ethics from it. In
> my honest opinion, there is a lot more to
> understanding others than just their deaths as the
> abstract index of their "otherness." Perhaps it
> might be good to imagine their LIVES (but that is
> more complex, no?). And how the hell did this
> insight about death become the privilege of
> "philosophers" or literary theorists? Because
> they can wrap it up in cirumlocution? To the
> Derrida above I am tempted to give Dennis
> Redmond's response to the review of Badiou:
> "zzzzzzz...." Maybe Foucault was right when he
> said of Derrida (this may be aprocryphal) that "he
> is the kind of philosopher who gives bullshit a
> bad name."
>
> As for the writer of the essay, he talks of
> "opening spaces" (that he will leave empty) and
> "possibility" (which will forever remain
> indefinite -- i.e., we need take no action, since
> action connotes "ends," and ends suggest purpose,
> which is totalizing because "teleological," and
> all purpose is subject to error, so our job as
> deconstructionists is only to awaken people to the
> vague and empty possibility of the multiplicity of
> many open-ended ends). But if you think that
> social change requires political action, I dare
> you to find any analysis on which to base a
> program -- even a tentative one. So let's scratch
> the bullshit about "the background limit against
> which we project a certain understanding of our
> own society." The social analysis isn't going to
> be forthcoming because the writer isn't interested
> in it.
>
> zzzzzzzz...
>
> Peter Kosenko
>
> =============================================================
> Peter Kosenko
> Email: mailto:kosenko at netwood.net
> URL: http://www.netwood.net/~kosenko
> =============================================================
> "Man is a rational animal. He can think up a
> reason for anything he wants to
> believe."--Benjamin Franklin
>