> Yes, Cussett's book is very good (but in the end, wrong, I think:
> anti-Marxist, and apologetic for pomo wank). I lent on it in this review
> of a collection on Derrida
>
> http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/ghostly_demarcations2/
-------- Haven't got a good handle on the apologia for pomo wank yet, but I'm not sure if I agree -- at least so far, particularly given what I'm reading about Derrida in the chapter, 'Deconstruction Sites' in which he repeatedly uses terms like "initiate" which seem to me to be derrogatory. This passage, too, seems rather dismissive. He's writing about how 'deconstruction' gets taken up, zeroed in on, in spite of a lack of such focus in Derrida's work. As Cusset writes:
"In her preface, Gayatri Spivak gives a special place tot he concept of deconstruction, to which her long prefatory remarks lead as though to a reward, whereas this concept is not the key to Derrida's book."
You are never given 'proof', as it were, that this isn't the key to Derrida's book, just asked to go along with the claim. I'm not disputing him, so much as pointing out that it is not Cusset's intention to dive into a debate over what the texts really mean and then compare/contrast with the way USers ended up using those text - or rather authors in a US context used them. He refers to this as the black box of the text, IIRC.
And yet, at the same time, Cusset does go on to imply that people were getting it "wrong" -- without ever really going to the text, explaining it, and then showing how the uses to which Derrida was put were wrong. None of this, "This is what Derrida really said; and this is what this bonehead or that one said. Silly wabbits."
The way he does it is subtle. Below, he basically characterizes the people turned on by Derrida as people who could only be so b/c they'd never read Husserl, etc. He goes on to point out what he's already been elaborating: the argument that all of this worked at the service of positiong and branding English departments and literary studies departments as something akin totherole of "Queen of the Sciences" -- which we fight about (mockingly) in the sciences. IOW, he has been arguing that part of the the rise of French theory has to do with the very mundane politicking done by all departments.
Derrida, he says below, was taken up in a way that was part of a legitimation project that all disciplines find themselves -- I'm adding that bit. And I'm adding that bit because it was something I found fascinating about studying my own discpline and others -- the political wars that went on for legitimacy.
The quote, which I think is not very, oh i don't know, not very flattering. Maybe he contradicts this later in the book, but to me it reads: a bunch of lazy people who want to read philosophy without really reading it, plus it worked really great as a way to establish for lit stud it's own special object, its own turf, to be protected from the encroachments of others disciplines.
<quote> "Beginning in 1976, what was as yet only a theoretical program wlll find itself read, studied, and soon set towork in certain graduate literature courses, espeically at Yale and Cornell. One began gradually to apply deconstruction, to draw from it the modalities of a new "close reading" of the literary classics, and to find in the latter, as though through a magnifying glass, the mechanisms by which the referent is dissipated, the content ceaselessly differed/deferred by writing itself.
...
Such ambitions were inspired by the atmosphere of solemnity and the initiate's enthusiasm that enveloped the first years of deconstruction, as well as the fervor of a discovery that distinguishes its pioneers from the run of the mill of literary history -- namely, the discovery of the authors and the major concepts of Continental philosophy, which were unknown to the latter. For someone who has never heard anyone speak about Nietzsche or Husserl, the symbolic gain derived from such an approach is immeasurable, even if the question of its *cognitive* gain remains unresolved; One evokes, one detours, one deconstructs the philosphers, but on does not *study* them properly speaking. In the midst of a conflict of the faculties, deconstruction and its concept of writing are a godsend. The approach of the early Derrida, which consists in dismaltling the "phonocentric" prejudice at work in the subordination of writing to speech, amounts to a conferring of a brand-new role -- limnary, maieutic, and major -- on this notion of *writing*. And, after removing writing from the power of speech, to associate it with 'supplementarity' as its origin, and to a primary excess of the signifier, then liberates it at the same time from the empire of reason. Whereas the kind of writing considered to be phonocentric, referential, or rationally decomposable always pointed toward history, philoophsy, or the social sciences, writing as *differance*, finally detched from its exogenic orders, is the sole privilege of the literary field."
(French Theory, pp 111-112)
"one does not study (the philosphers) properly speaking"
Maybe he contradicts this later in the book, but to me it reads: a bunch of lazy English lit majors who want to read philosophy without really reading it.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)