Re: [microsound] [ot] Derrida Article in N.Y.T.

[Phil Thomson <philthom@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> That's one of the smartest obits I've seen. For one thing, it doesn't use the 
> ridiculous term "deconstructionism" (a term which cries out to be 
> deconstructed!), or posit Derrida as the "father" of that "movement".

But now that I've read the whole article, I take it back. He has a more 
nuanced reading if deconstruction than most mainstream news outlets seem 
to, but ironically I think his writing on deconstruction needs to be 
deconstructed, since he's still saying that what matters is "what 
Derrida really meant", i.e., the author's intention, and that, for 
example, "identity politics" that appropriate his work are a 
"misunderstanding" of it. I doubt he's read much of the theory of this 
"identity politics"; the last thing that Homi Bhabha or Gaytri Spivak or 
Judith Butler are trying to do is re-establish the security of 
difference in a simplistic way. If anything there work shows how fragile 
and how embattled this construction called "identity" really is, how 
constantly under negotiation and erasure. They remind us that we do well 
to mobilize identity in a way which is contingent and negotiable, as in 
Spivak's well-known but also frequently "misunderstood" formulation 
"strategic essentialism". At the same time, they demonstrate that we can't 
do without identity, as it confers a kind of social legibility on us as 
subjects; thus for Spivak "deconstruction is the relentless critique of 
that which you cannot not want"; it's a "necessary impossibility" or a 
horizon, at which one never fully arrives no matter how much one tries. 
It's a naming which exists in the hope of the disappearance or radical 
undoing of what it names. Maybe that's not what "Derrida really meant", 
but any reading of Derrida that tries to control the uses of his text 
which exceed its original meaning reeks of the same spirit of closure 
which Derrida worked so hard to unravel.

P


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: Phil Thomson
: home: http://www.sfu.ca/~pthomson
: label: http://centibel.org/
: group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/databenders/
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