Some 20 years ago Judith Butler wrote as follows of Derrida in the LRB.
‘How do you finally respond to your life and your name?’
Dogs may respond to their names as may little children or servants or prisoners or people living in institutional environments where there is roll-call. Mature people don't respond to their names. Nor is their life something apart from them. True, such people may beat or chase away those who try to treat them like dogs or servants. Also, criminals or people who have done bad things, may try to defend their reputation.
Derrida raised this question in his final interview with Le Monde, published on 18 August this year. If he could apprehend his life, he remarked, he would also be obliged to apprehend his death as singular and absolute, without resurrection and without redemption.
Sadly, his superior obligation was to always and everywhere think and talk bollocks. If we believe in resurrection or an after-life, how we apprehend our life would be different. But this is also the case if we think we made an important discovery which future generations would consider invaluable. In no case would death be 'singular' or 'without redemption'. People make provisions in their Wills for their posterity and the atheist considers even his crimes redeemed by some great benefit he confers upon future generations.
At this revealing moment,
Derrida's stupidity and egotism was revealed at every moment of his utterly useless life.
it is interesting that Derrida the philosopher should find in Socrates his proper precursor:
Just as I find in Shakespeare my proper precursor.
that he should turn to Socrates to understand that, at the age of 74, he still did not quite know how best to live.
At 74 how best to live concerns doing stuff which keeps you alive and healthy at 84.
One cannot, he remarks, come to terms with one’s life without trying to apprehend one’s death,
Firefighters and Soldiers and Police officers risk their lives as a matter of professional duty. During a War, soldiers, in particular, apprehend their death on a daily basis. There are different ways in which they come to terms with it which are of possible interest because we too may have to fight the enemy. If Derrida were smart or had a good literary style, his reflections, in old age, on the imminence of death might be worth reading. But it isn't. He was stupid and wrote shite.
asking, in effect, how a human learns to live and to die.
They get a PhD in useless shite and then teach useless shite and then, with any luck, they die without ever having lived.
Much of Derrida’s later work is dedicated to mourning, and he offers his acts of public mourning as posthumous gifts.
These were actually slightly more welcome than chocolate boxes full of shit.
In The Work of Mourning (2001), he
makes the claim that when a friend dies, a part of our selfhood dies. But this could be said of any type of relationship. A part of your selfhood dies when you retire or are made redundant. But the closing down of your local pub or club or cafe has the same effect. Worse is the death of a parent, a spouse, a child. Perhaps, bereavement counsellors can help in such cases. The trouble about gassing on about mourning, as Butler did, was that you couldn't help looking forward to mourning her. Indeed, there is much satisfaction in mourning everybody you don't like while they are still alive.
tries to come to terms with the
brain
deaths of other writers and thinkers
in his line of work which is mourning your own collective brain-death.
through reckoning his debt to their words, indeed, their texts; his own writing constitutes an act of mourning, one that he is perhaps, avant la lettre, recommending to us as a way to begin to mourn this thinker, who not only taught us how to read,
which everybody else learns by the age of about five.
but gave the act of reading a new significance and a new promise. In that book, he openly mourns Roland Barthes, who died in 1980, Paul de Man, who died in 1983, Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, and a host of others, including Edmund Jabès (1991), Louis Marin (1992), Sarah Kofman (1994), Emmanuel Levinas (1995) and Jean-François Lyotard (1998).
Sadly, he didn't mourn Butler or Spivak. We do. Why the fuck are they still alive?
In the last of these essays, for Lyotard, it is not his own death that preoccupies him, but rather his ‘debts’. These are authors that he could not do without, ones with and through whom he thinks.
They were his excuse for not thinking. That's how academic availability cascades work. One guy says 'let us eat our own shit so as to defy Capitalist agriculture.' The other guy says 'eating our own shit in a manner deconstructive of Capitalism involves affirming that everybody else is totes Fascist.' Then a third dude says 'we aren't eating enough of our own shit because of a defective theory of deconstruction'. This means that lots of imbeciles can get PhDs in useless shite.
He writes only because he reads, and he reads only because there are these authors to read time and again. He ‘owes’ them something or, perhaps, everything, if only because he could not write without them: their writing exists as the precondition of his own; their writing constitutes the means through which his own writing voice is animated and secured, a voice that emerges, importantly, as an address.
Did these guys do any good? No. At one time there was the notion that if more people get PhDs- even in useless shite- then financial markets would think the economy would become dynamic. Sadly, PhDs are generally a waste of time. It's fine if they come as part and parcel of useful research sponsored by a Corporation or if they are in pure Math or Science.
In October 1993, when I shared a stage with Derrida at New York University, I had a brief, private conversation with him that touched on these issues. I could see in him a certain urgency to acknowledge those many people who had translated him, those who had read him, those who had defended him in public debate, and those who had made good use of his thinking and his words.
I suppose Madoff was similarly solicitous to his shills.
I leaned over and asked whether he felt that he had many debts to pay. I was hoping to suggest to him that he need not feel so indebted, thinking as I did in a perhaps naively Nietzschean way that the debt was a form of enslavement: did he not see that what others offered him, they offered freely? He seemed not to be able to hear me in English. And so when I said ‘your debts’, he said: ‘My death?’
Was the American threatening to stab him? Perhaps. Americans are a violent people.
‘No,’ I reiterated, ‘your debts!’ and he said: ‘My death!?’ At this point I could see that there was a link between the two, one that my efforts at clear pronunciation could not quite pierce, but it was not until I read his later work that I came to understand how important that link really was.
Debts are stuff you are supposed to pay off before you pop your clogs. Chores, on the other hand, can be safely postponed till your ghost can get round to doing them.
‘There come moments,’ he writes, ‘when, as mourning demands [deuil oblige], one feels obligated to declare one’s debts.
Very true. When Margaret Thatcher died, I expressed my great debt to her. Because of the numerous rapes she inflicted on me whenever she came on TV back when I was 15, I became superbly accomplished in bringing super-models to orgasm. Sadly, I've never had the opportunity to do so.
We feel it our duty to say what we owe to friends.’ He cautions against ‘saying’ the debt and imagining that one might then be done with it. He acknowledges instead the ‘incalculable debt’ that one does not want to pay:
in which case, there is no debt. There is a sense of obligation. Saying you are under an obligation sends the signal that you are a stand up dude who will return any favor done to him.
‘I am conscious of this and want it thus.’ He ends his essay on Lyotard with a direct address: ‘There it is, Jean-François, this is what, I tell myself, I today would have wanted to try and tell you.’ There is in that attempt, that essai, a longing that cannot reach the one to whom it is addressed, but does not for that reason forfeit itself as longing.
Like all longing- including longing for a beejay from Margaret Thatcher.
The act of mourning thus becomes a continued way of ‘speaking to’ the other
just like the act of getting drunk and talking to Margaret Thatcher's ghost.
who is gone, even though the other is gone, in spite of the fact that the other is gone, precisely because that other is gone.
Butler is trying to get her head around the fact that when a person leaves, they are gone. That's what the word 'gone' means.
We now must say ‘Jacques’ to name the one we have lost, and in that sense ‘Jacques Derrida’ becomes the name of our loss.
only in the sense that 'Judith Butler' becomes the name of stupidity.
Yet we must continue to say his name, not only to mark his passing, but because he is the one we continue to address in what we write; because it is, for many of us, impossible to write without relying on him, without thinking with and through him. ‘Jacques Derrida’, then, as the name for the future of what we write.
which, sadly, is imbecilic shite.
It is surely uncontroversial to say that Jacques Derrida was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century;
Philosophy rose in public esteem because of Einstein and Quantum Mechanics. People thought maybe Popper & Kuhn & Lakatos might help Scientific research. But, by the time Rockefeller University shut down its Philosophy Department in the mid-Seventies, it had become clear that the subject was useless and stupid. That's why it didn't matter if people studied Derrida or Foucault. So long as they didn't eat their own shit in public, the University could take their money and laugh all the way to the Bank.
his international reputation
amongst imbeciles. It must be said, Derrida and his ilk had some salience while the French Communist party was still a powerful political force. The hope was that budding Commissars would read those nutters and end up eating their own shit.
far exceeds that of any other French intellectual of his generation. More than that, his work fundamentally changed the way in which we think about language, philosophy, aesthetics, painting, literature, communication, ethics and politics.
People who were incapable of thinking remained incapable of thinking after reading that shite.
His early work criticised the structuralist presumption that language could be described as a static set of rules,
Anything can be described any which way. The question is whether it is useful to do so. The answer is 'yes'. Training in grammar enables you to learn foreign languages more quickly. Indeed, observing grammatical rules helps you to sound smarter and more professional even in your mother tongue.
and he showed how those rules admitted of contingency and were dependent on a temporality that could undermine their efficacy.
Why bother? The thing is obvious. All rules concerning any human activity have this quality. That's why we say 'the exception proves the rule'.
He wrote against philosophical positions that uncritically subscribed to ‘totality’ or ‘systematicity’ as values,
thus, during the Cold War, the Americans encouraged him. Indeed, Maoism was a great way to split Communist parties or to cause a backlash against them.
without first considering the alternatives that were ruled out by that pre-emptive valorisation. He insisted that the act of reading extends from literary texts to films, to works of art, to popular culture, to political scenarios, and to philosophy itself.
Nothing means anything. Thus if you have to write a PhD thesis on 'Hamlet', you can just gas on about how its totes unfair that you have to sit down to pee. Why did Shakespear not highlight this? Was it because it he had a penis- a White penis? Guess who else had a penis? Plato! Fuck you Plato! Fuck you very much!
This notion of ‘reading’ insists that our ability to understand relies on our capacity to interpret signs.
Also the notion of 'breathing' insists on our ability to expand and contract our lungs.
It also presupposes that signs come to signify in ways that no particular author or speaker can constrain in advance through intention.
We discover this by about the age of three. One reason we have to learn to talk is because even Mummy doesn't always understand our gestures. You point at the toy you want but she picks up a different one. You scream your head off. She thinks you shat yourself. You did, but that was not the point you were making. Also, it is deeply unfair if she suggests you should move out and get a fucking job you worthless pile of shite.
This does not mean that language always confounds our intentions, but only that our intentions do not fully govern everything we end up meaning by what we say and write.
Again, this is something everybody discovers by the age of 5.
Derrida’s work moved from a criticism of philosophical presumptions in groundbreaking books such as Of Grammatology (1967),
By then there were artificial, programming languages which were becoming more and more useful. Nobody believed they were derived from speech. Indeed, the US gave up its automatic translation program at around that time. At one time, it had been hoped that guys like Chomsky would discover a way to automatically translate Russian into English so that American fighter pilots could eavesdrop on their adversaries thanks to some nifty piece of tech built into their headsets.
Linguistics once enjoyed a certain prestige. Then, quite suddenly, everybody saw it was useless shite. Computing was useful and became more and more so.
Writing and Difference (1967), Dissemination (1972), Spurs (1978) and The Post Card (1980), to the question of how to theorise the problem of ‘difference’. This term he wrote as ‘différance’, not only to mark the way that signification works – one term referring to another, always relying on a deferral of meaning between signifier and signified – but also to characterise an ethical relation, the relation of sexual difference, and the relation to the Other.
Everybody else understood that if you do useful work you will have money and influence and thus 'the Other' will be nice to you and agree to engage in mutually beneficial activities. Philosophers were shunned because they were useless. Even the Sociologists and Anthropologists gave them a wide berth.
If some readers thought that Derrida was a linguistic constructivist,
they were stupid. Deconstruction is not constructive.
they missed the fact that the name we have for something, for ourselves, for an other, is precisely what fails to capture the referent (as opposed to making or constructing it).
This is also true of our farts. They don't capture anybody which is why bounty hunters have to chase after absconders and handcuff them.
He drew critically on the work of Emmanuel Levinas in order to insist on the Other as one to whom an incalculable responsibility is owed,
Sadly, all the supermodels to whom I feel owe lots and lots of my jizz show evince no desire to collect on the debt.
one who could never fully be ‘captured’ through social categories or designative names, one to whom a certain response is owed.
nobody is owed a response from imbeciles. Philosophers may think that starving people in Gaza are hoping for an Email or DM from them. This is not the case. They want food. Also it would be nice if all the Jews and other kaffirs could just fuck off and die.
This conception became the basis of his strenuous critique of apartheid in South Africa,
of which South Africans were wholly unaware. Reagan was able to get the Cubans out of Angola. That's what paved the way for majority rule.
his vigilant opposition to totalitarian regimes
Saddam ordered a hit on Derrida- thinks nobody at all.
and forms of intellectual censorship, his theorisation of the nation-state beyond the hold of territoriality,
not to mention reality.
his opposition to European racism,
he was cool with Arab racism- right? No. Algerian Jews ran the fuck away from the new regime.
and his criticism of the discourse of ‘terror’ as it worked to increase governmental powers that undermine basic human rights.
French philosophers criticized Hitler. He cried and cried and pulled out his Army. Why are the Americans and the Brits pretending their troops liberated France?
This political ethic can be seen at work in his defence of animal rights,
Animals should be allowed to eat us.
in his opposition to the death penalty,
Mitterand abolished it in 1981. It must be said, he got on with Derrida whom he tasked with creating an international college of Philosophy in Paris. He also intervened to get Derrida released after he was arrested by the Czechs. As I said, Derrida & his ilk had some marginal significance back when the Commies were keeping Mitt in power.
and even in his queries about ‘being’ Jewish
A subject on which learned Rabbis have written a great deal.
and what it means to offer hospitality to those of differing origins and language.
It means the same thing as offering hospitality to people like yourself. Apparently, this involves not farting in their faces. Sadly, I wasn't taught this at the LSE. I blame Amartya Sen for my bed & breakfast operation going bust.
Derrida made clear in his short book on Walter Benjamin, The Force of Law (1994), that justice was a concept that was yet to come.
Justice is a service industry just like Dry-Cleaning. Those who are good at it make good money. I suppose there are new concepts in jurisprudence and in the technology of getting stains out of tuxedos. What both lack is 'mystical' foundations. 'Authority' is a legal concept. Actions undertaken under its rubric are justiciable to some degree or another. Stupid people like Benjamin & Derrida didn't get this.
This does not mean that we cannot expect instances of justice in this life,
sure we can- at least in certain jurisdictions. That's why we sign contracts.
and it does not mean that justice will arrive for us only in another life.
It may for all we know.
He was clear that there was no other life. It means only that, as an ideal, it is that towards which we strive, without end.
Fuck off! He and Butler don't strive towards justice. They strive to say stupid shite.
Not to strive for justice because it cannot be fully realised would be as mistaken as believing that one has already arrived at justice and that the only task is to arm oneself adequately to fortify its regime.
To strive to be a fucking nuisance only creates a fucking nuisance.
The first is a form of nihilism (which he opposed)
It is common sense. Don't strive for perfect justice. Justice is Utility- nothing more, nothing less.
and the second is dogmatism (which he opposed).
It is pragmatism. If an institution is working well, ensure it will continue to do so. This involves not listening to shitheads like Butler.
Derrida kept us alive to the practice of criticism, understanding that social and political transformation was an incessant project, one that could not be relinquished, one that was coextensive with the becoming of life and the encounter with the Other, one that required a reading of the rules by means of which a polity constitutes itself through exclusion or effacement.
Polities constitute themselves by including useful people and giving them greater 'face'. It has to exclude useless nutters who teach worthless shite.
How is justice done?
Ask a lawyer not a Professor worthless shite.
What justice do we owe others?
See above. Apparently, I am supposed to pay off my credit card. Who knew?
And what does it mean to act in the name of justice?
Nothing, if you teach useless shite.
These were questions that had to be asked regardless of the consequences,
Any nutter can ask any questions whatsoever.
and this meant that they were often questions asked when established authorities wished that they were not.
e.g. who just farted? My headmaster threatened to expel me if I kept asking this question in Chemistry class.
If his critics worried that, with Derrida, there are no foundations on which one could rely, they doubtless were mistaken. Derrida relies perhaps most assiduously on Socrates,
as opposed to somebody who understood politics.
on a mode of philosophical inquiry that took the question as the most honest and arduous form of thought. ‘How do you finally respond to your life and to your name?’
Arduous thought is required to find a cure for cancer or to prove the Reimann hypothesis. Even a dog can respond to its name.
This question is posed by him to himself, and yet he is, in this interview, a ‘tu’ for himself, as if he were a proximate friend, but not quite a ‘moi’.
because he was too lazy to jerk himself off. Sad.
He has taken himself as the other,
and is trying to jam his dick up his own rectum
modelling a form of reflexivity, asking whether an account can be given of this life, and of this death.
Lots of people have written autobiographies. The thing really isn't rocket-science.
Is there justice to be done to a life?
Yes. It is perfectly true and just to say Derrida & Co were useless tossers.
That he asks the question is exemplary, perhaps even foundational, since it keeps the final meaning of that life and that name open.
Not for the rest of us. Derrida was a useless tosser.
It prescribes a ceaseless task of honouring what cannot be possessed through knowledge, what in a life exceeds our grasp.
Who will take that prescription? The task of ceaselessly honoring your own farts- precisely because they exceed our grasp- is preferable. At any rate, it is what I have devoted my life to.
Indeed, now that Derrida, the person, has died, his writing makes a demand on us.
It is the demand that we fart. Even the Pope farts because of this demand of Derrida's writings.
We must address him as he addressed himself, asking what it means to know and approach another, to apprehend a life and a death, to give an account of its meaning, to acknowledge its binding ties with others, and to do that justly.
Study philosophy and all you will be able to do is keep asking stupid questions.
In this way, Derrida has always been offering us a way to interrogate the meaning of our lives,
by tying them up and hitting them with a rubber hose.
singly and plurally, returning to the question as the beginning of philosophy, but surely also, in his own way, and with several unpayable debts, beginning philosophy again and anew.
And once again going nowhere.
Consider the following gems from Derrida-
To pretend, I actually do the thing:
No. We pretend to listen to a boring cunt. We don't actually do so.
I have therefore only pretended to pretend".
Only if he actually did the thing. Pretending to eat your own shit is smart. Eating your own shit as part of that pretense is not smart. It is a job for Continental Philosophers.
"What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written".
Everything that can be written in natural language can also be spoken. There's an app on your smartphone which can read out this text to you.
"Monsters cannot be announced.
Sure they can. 'Here comes the 50 foot giant!'
One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets".
Nonsense. We can show the monsters whom we have caught and incarcerated. They don't turn into pets which is why we make sure they are manacled.
"The sign represents its presence in its absence.
No it doesn't. That's why you can be prosecuted for removing a 'no parking' sign.
it takes the place of the present.
No. Either a sign is present or it isn't. Sadly, if you yourself remove a 'no parking' sign so as to park, you could be prosecuted.
When we cannot grasp or show the thing, [...]
we can still talk about it. This can be useful.
when the present cannot be presented,
the present is presented in the present.
we signify, we go through the detour of the sign [...] The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence".
Nope. It merely conveys information. Information is not presence. Information Theory got off the ground when Derrida was young. It turned out to be very useful. His shite was utterly useless.
"I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned".
What was his political role? I suppose he was seen as a liberal critic of Stalinism, Althusser, Maoists etc. Maybe he was some sort of Eurocommunist. But what was Eurocommunism? Then the Berlin Wall fell and nobody cared to discover the answer.
"As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene".
No. That's when specificity is on the scene. Baby bawls. This conveys its general discomfort. Once it can speak a little its can utter particular words or sounds. 'Ma Ma' means it wants Mummy not Daddy. 'Ba ba' means it has dropped its comforter. Similarly, screaming and shitting yourself conveys the notion that you are terrified of something. Saying 'Help! Snake!' specified what has caused your terror.
"The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages".
Like the problem of eating your own shit when you are suffering from constipation. Why do 'dominant political languages' not discuss this issue? Also, how come the BBC refused to cover the Farting Competition I organized during the London Olympics? Is it because I iz bleck?
"There is nothing outside the text".
There is the asshole who shat it out.
"Learning to live ought to mean learning to die
No! It ought to mean grasping your own farts and using them to sign-post your own absence from the company which is asking who is responsible for the bad smell.
- to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality
is fine if you believe in God
- without positive outcome, or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else".
You can't stop other people gaining positive outcomes from God. This is what really pisses off atheists.
"The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived".
The apocalypse is part of the mythology of particular religions. To our best knowledge, it is not a particularly long lived myth in the history of Humanity. Sadly, the end has so far avoided approaching Butler & Spivak. This is why many of us mourn for the Academy.
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