[microsound] Derrida's media death

[tasty radish <tastyradish@xxxxxxxxx>]

"It's not worth cataloguing the writings of morons on
death of Derrida
who themselves have yet to master a single page of his
text.  "

no, it's not. 

it struck me that this response to his death (the
Times Obit, etc. etc.) -- providing a platform for the
mainstream spleen-bags to whip up some venomous
(cliche) slams of Deconstruction (and really of
non-white, non-male players in the fields of what I'll
call knowledge production, if you ask me), ironically
brings to mind one of the very key aspects of
Derrida's work.  (On a side note, this scene of
violence -- and it is violence to so profoundly attack
a public person on the occassion of their death -- may
actually be better analyzed thru Zizek's work on how
people enjoy the 'freedom' of their dominance and
their violence,  from a certain vantage ...?...). 

What is remarkable in this parade of journalistic
stupidity, is how ironically it ends up revealing just
how on-target Derrida's work on logocentric fallacies
is now, today. It is almost uncanny really.  

What these disrespectul, totally inappropriate pieces
are all steeped in is exactly this penchant to nail
things down into certain hard 'truths'.   Rather then
to priveledge the idea of finding ways to open up
understandings, resonances, etc.  The Times obit piece
is a prime example.  

This scene of the press tells us quite a lot, about
just how limited the press is, and how much the press
is engaged in the very things that Derrida and others
have worked to reveal as  limited, obscuring, and
further, engaged in a certain violence.  

In the end, there is a difference.  Derrida's death in
the media became a production for a mass blindspot,
and hence, by neccesity, the occassion for a kind of
work of bringing to light truth.  

Isn't this in many ways what he has taught us,
provoked us, helped us to understand, with pleasure
and pain and work? -- 

Anyhow, back to another grain of what he taught us --
the importance of being engaged in the time of our
world -- Here is an interview with him done a few
months ago, where he speaks well to the
alter-globalization movement, and the problematics of
mounting a critique singly targeted at Bush-Blair in
the current 'euro-US world system' of war.
http://www.indymedia.be/print.php?id=83123


-andrew




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