[lbo-talk] Derrida dead

Catherine Driscoll catherine.driscoll at arts.usyd.edu.au
Tue Oct 12 04:00:47 PDT 2004


"Charles Brown" <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:


>What's the difference between "to deconstruct" and "to analyze " ?

I saw this yesterday, but there was a backlog, and I thought hey other people will answer this as well as I ever could. But now I've moved through the "Derrida dead" thread, I'd have to say that while some people have said really very productive things I don't know that anyone gave a direct response to this that helps. I get why, it's so tiresome to combat the same old same old rhetorics on blah-textual-indeterminism-blah means death-of-all-things-good-etc-blah. But, yeah, I thought I'd have a go. Not because I'm a fan of Derrida because I am not now and I never have been, but it's ridiculous the uses to which his name his put, now and in the past.

(I grant you, I'm not sure Derrida isn't as guilty of misusing his own name as anyone else but, well, that's a different set of questions.)

I'm assuming this is a genuine question, for what that's worth.

Analysis can be many things, employing many different methods to understand how something works or is organised.

Deconstruction is a particular form of analysis, which seeks to discover what might be the unrecognisable/inarticulable foundations of a binary opposition. In that sense it's quite specific. According to Derrida, speech/writing as a binary opposition attempts to conceal the way in which speech depends, in fact, on writing. Self/Other occludes the interdependence of self and other and thus the impossibility of the opposition. Or, there may be an excluded but necessary third term, such as, to use a feminist extrapolation, father-mother-daughter (rather than son).

Not everything Derrida did was labelled or even conformed to deconstruction. It's a moment in a very specifically formalist moment in "theory". It's useful for the very particular projects in which it might be employed, and I've seen interesting things done with Derrida.

It should not be ignored that Derrida became a TheoryStar in the States, rather than anywhere else. He is important in France, but in a far more limited sense, and it was the Yale School that *made* Derrida. I think this can be traced to the death of New Criticism and the investment of the Yale School in having something to replace that with. Another interesting element for me is that, unlike New Criticism, by it's own premises (and because of the moment in which it emerged), deconstruction was not as easily confined to the top schools in an Anglophone hierarchy.

I don't like Derrida any more dead than I did alive, although his earlier work does have real importance and should continue to be taught as documents in several histories, but the snide jibes and banal dismissals are also no more intelligent now he's dead than when he was alive.

Catherine

--------- Dr Catherine Driscoll Lecturer School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry University of Sydney Phone: (61-2) 9036 9503 Fax: (61-2) 9351 5336 ---------



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list