From: Anders Ekeland (anders.ekeland@ONLINE.NO)
Date: Mon Oct 18 2004 - 01:08:36 EDT
No not before just now - but also I would defend Derrida against an vulgar attack. That does not change my judgement that Derridas style was not something that we should praise. I am probably more critical than Eagelton, but I am not deriding Derrida, I am just not praising him. Regards Anders At 06:10 18.10.2004, you wrote: >Anders, did you see this? >rb > >Don't deride Derrida > >Academics are wrong to rubbish the philosopher > >Terry Eagleton >Friday October 15, 2004 >The Guardian > >English philistinism continues to flourish, not least when the words >"French philosopher" are uttered. This week in the Guardian our >home-grown intelligentsia gave a set of bemused, bone-headed >responses to the death of Jacques Derrida. Either they hadn't read >him, or they believed his work was to do with words not meaning what >you think they do. Or it was just a pile of garbage. > >In line with this judicious assessment, Derrida - one of the most >eminent postwar French thinkers - was turned down for an honorary >degree at Cambridge University. The man was regarded by the stuffed >shirts as a subversive nihilist who believed that words could mean >anything you liked, that truth was a fiction, and that there was >nothing in the world but writing. In their eyes, he was a dangerous >mixture of anarchist, poet and jester. > >But the dons who voted him down were the kind of scrupulous academics >who had almost certainly not read his books. They knew he was >radical, enigmatic, French, photogenic and wildly popular with >students. The university had the good sense to reverse its decision >later; but many academics regard him as a man out to destroy >philosophy, thus depriving some of them of a living. > >In fact, Derrida rejoiced in the pantheon of philosophy from Plato to >Heidegger. Deconstruction, the philosophical method he promoted, >means not destroying ideas, but pushing them to the point where they >begin to come apart and expose their latent contradictions. It meant >reading against the grain of supposedly self-evident truths, rather >than taking them for granted. English senior common rooms are full of >self-righteous blather about thinkers like Derrida being more >interested in abstract theories than in close reading. In fact, he >read works of art and philosophy with a stunning originality and >intricacy beyond that of most of his critics. > >This was never for Derrida a purely academic pursuit. His first great >works appeared in Paris on the eve of the political explosion of May >1968, at a time when he was close to, but critical of, the French >Communist party. Since the party had cravenly supported the French >repression of Algeria, and since Derrida was an Algerian Jewish >colonial, his oblique relations to official Marxism were >understandable. > >But he remained a staunch member of the political left. He aimed to >prise open classical leftist ideas such as Marxism to the marginal, >the aberrant; in this sense his project had affinities with the work >of Raymond Williams, EP Thompson, Stuart Hall and the 1970s feminists >in Britain. A vital part of the heritage of May '68 has been >extinguished. > >Derrida once remarked that he wanted to "write like a woman". He was >one of a lineage of anti-philosophers, from Kierkegaard to >Wittgenstein, who invented a new style of philosophical writing. He >understood that official thought turns on rigorously exclusive >oppositions: inside/outside, man/woman, good/evil. He loosened up >such paranoid antitheses by the flair and brio of his writing, and in >doing so spoke up for the voiceless, from whose ranks he had emerged. > >· Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University >
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