Inside the Mind…

It’s a cold, dark place.

That said, I guess I can take a minute to say what I found exciting about Derrida’s work when I was an undergraduate, and still find now and again years later. First, let me say that hearing Derrideans (other than a few choice favorites) usually kills my enthusiasm for Derrida, I guess in the same way people who work in the porn industry end up hating women. (Does that analogy work? Eh…)

Second, I was at SUNY Stony Brook when I first studied him, so this again might make a difference from Graham: I was surrounded (more or less) with phenomenologists, not Derrideans. Also, my bag then was political philosophy (mostly), so this I think might tune the difference. And so when I first approached Derrida, it was through Of Grammatology and later texts such as “Before the Law.” If you work in political theory, you know how awful mainstream political theory as you learn it is, and how often presumptions are built-in that no one questions, but just get repeated in new and more fantastic ways. Now read Of Grammatology (still and always my favorite Derrida text). First, it says that politics doesn’t just happen out there but in the production of texts. Second, it’s an inventive re-reading of Heidegger’s insights about the metaphysics of presence in terms of what I always took to be a ridiculously closed “structuralist” theories. Third, he loves Rousseau, and I love Rousseau. Fourth, there’s a real jouissance to the text: he’s genuinely funny in places, and he’s a damn insightful reader. (Limited, Inc., which is wonderfully aimed at the puffy John Searle combines these two elements.) We can disagree with him on Aristotle or any of this other readings, but he has a way, to borrow a Zizekian term, of looking at a text awry to see it fresh. Time and again, I’ll read Derrida on a favorite figure of mine and he’ll point out something I hadn’t noticed before.

He was also often just full or air (hot or otherwise). But over forty years of writing, I’m hoping that I’ll produce a lot such that someone can say “well, that didn’t work at all, but this is good, and that was good…” In other words, I can’t bear Glas, Of Spirit, anything on Joyce, all but a few passages of Postcards, and anything on Paul DeMan. And, in fact, I’m suspicious of readings that begin with any of this. (And I say this having great respect for Michael Naas, who often goes back to Glas.) It’s a one-trick pony: two sides of the page, like two sides of dialectic, but we’ll unwork the dialectic and thus contest the “two sides” of the page—or something.

Graham and I will disagree (probably) about this, but it’s also the case that Derrida genuinely seemed to love the texts he was writing about. Most Derrideans often spend their time chastising something called “the metaphysics of presence” and thus a whole swath of the philosophical tradition without knowing what this means; Derrida was never so irresponsible. The “Comp Lit” Derrida is unbearable. The “Levinasian” Derrida is a moralistic schmuck. But Derrida read Kant closely, he read Hegel’s entire oeuvre closely, he read Plato with a real feel for his cadences, sided early and often with Husserl over Heidegger, and on and on. And his attunement to European ethnocentrism as central to his overall project—it’s right there in Of Grammatology—is something I also appreciate. I don’t often read him anymore, given my time constraints, but when I do, I’ll just pick up an essay, make sure to put down the pen, and just enjoy reading. One can’t separate, as much as we like, the aesthetics of reading—the readerly jouissance—from the philosophical positions we will take given whom we read. Sure, there’s a lot of essays where you wait for him to circle around to a point that never really comes, but he was also a sensitive and beautiful writer on such topics as mourning: he never had the fetish for the Other that readers of his later work sometimes attribute to him, and he continues to be a helpful interlocutor when I approach a range of topics.

But that doesn’t make me a Derridean. Because how could I follow someone who told me not to follow him, and thus I’m following him when I don’t follow him, and therefore I’m not following what I think I’m following…..szzzzz.….