“Right now, I don’t need Derrida. Thanks anyway for providing a thought-provoking article. I hope others will continue the discussion…
Over to you d63:” Majoram Blues: forum.philosophynow.org/viewtopi … 3&start=30
First of all, brother: that’s a lot of pressure, especially given the caliber of intellect and training I’m dealing with here. But I will do my best.
That said, I think you bring up an important issue when you say:
“Right now, I don’t need Derrida.”
:in that you suggest the import of use over interpretation (a point brought up in Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope. If I read you right, what you are basically saying is that, at this point, you are not seeing anything you can use in Derrida, therefore, you choose to move on to other things. And you should since the process we are engaged in is more about what we can use in any writer than it is exact interpretation of that writer. And this, I believe, is because no matter how well we come to know another writer, the process is always our own. Like a mechanic reading a repair manual, the act of reading other great writers can, at best, be supplementary to that process.
To give a personal and anecdotal example, I find that, as an American, I tend to turn more to the French propensity towards poetics and abstraction when there is a Democrat in the Whitehouse. This is because, being a committed progressive, having that allows me a kind of bourgeoisie complacency that having a Republican in the house doesn’t. In that situation, I find myself drawn to more concrete things like the social criticism of a Naomi Klein in order to undermine the popular dogma and hegemony at work in popular culture.
But even in times when I’m allowed that complacency, I still sometimes find myself wondering if I’m not a little too immersed in abstraction. I find myself wanting to get back to something a little more concrete and direct. This is why, for instance, this week’s experiment is committed to Ha Joon-Chang’s Economics: A User’s Guide. At the same time, to give you a sense of what it is about French abstraction and etherspeak that draws me and Yoni in, I do so with the same unease I would feel going back from the subtlety of a poet like Phillip Levine to the accessibility of Ginsberg’s Howl. This may seem strange, but the experience is always haunted by the feeling of it being given to me too easily and directly. I always liked Umberto Eco’s take on it (and I am paraphrasing here: the analytic approach works by a concrete step by step process based on its tradition while the continental works through saying the same old things in such a novel way that it seems like they’re saying something totally new. At the same time, I stand with Yoni when he says:
“First thing never give up and never surrender. If Derrida teaches anything is to not care and just insist of doing philosophy even if people don’t really understand what you asking of them.”
This is because doing what we do is dependent on focusing on our process and letting what results result and not letting it interfere in that. But by the same token, you would be equally justified in walking away from it. You simply cannot use what you cannot use. And it is your process and yours alone.
For myself, it’s as I said: I’m drawn to French concepts while being equally drawn to the Anglo-American style of exposition. It is my hope that this will define my style of intellectual pursuit and process. I want to see the hybrids that form between the two gravitations. For instance, I see an overlap in Deleuze’s doctrine of the faculties (based on Kant (and Dennett’s multiple drafts model of consciousness.
It’s all fuel for the fire. And there is a lot of it: way more than any individual can capture in a lifetime or process. What else can we do but lay out our own path through it?