Deconstruction just means disassembling something to understand it better or else to rebuild it to suit some better purpose. It can be political as when a political party re-examines its manifesto and makes changes to it- e.g. the British Labor party getting rid of 'Clause 4' which called for common ownership of the means of production. In Jurisprudence, lawyers and judges frequently pull apart a particular constitutional or legal doctrine and reassemble it to serve a different purpose.
Sadly, Spivak never understood this-
DECONSTRUCTION CANNOT FOUND A POLITICAL PROGRAM OF ANY KIND.
It is part and parcel of any political program which changes as the times change.
YET IN ITS SUGGESTION THAT MASTERWORDS LIKE "THE WORKER" OR "THE WOMAN" HAVE NO LITERAL REFERENTS, DECONSTRUCTION IS A POLITICAL SAFEGUARD.
No. It would be useless if that were the case. What happens is that words like 'worker' or 'woman' are given a new interpretation- e.g. white collar workers came to be seen as similar to blue-collar workers. They could be unionized and persuaded to vote for Socialist parties. 'Woman' stopped meaning 'house-wife'. There were plenty of women who were workers and they had special needs- e.g. maternity leave and pay- which should be catered to.
This passage, paraphrased from an interview in The Post-Colonial Critic (p. 104), exemplifies in its simplicity the practical and political Spivak, whose theorizing is always ultimately directed at intervention, at attempting to change the world.
She just said that Deconstruction- which is what she had specialized in- was useless for such a purpose.
Yet how can one help to bring about change without repeating the mistakes of previous political movements that have sought liberation yet ended in repression and fundamentalism?
Which successful 'political movement' in UK or the US resulted in 'repression and fundamentalism'? None at all. It is easy enough to see that concentrating power in the hands of guys who like killing is a bad idea.
We can make a start, Spivak suggests, by keeping in mind the two meanings of "representation," which would have been clear to Marx, writing in German, but which English usage elides: "Treading in your shoes, wearing your shoes, that's Vertretung.
Nope. Vertretung is when somebody else- e.g. your agent or lawyer- represents you. They appear 'wearing your shoes' so to speak.
Representation in that sense: political representation. Darstellung
which means depicting something. In English, we say 'such and such a person is a substitute or representative of such and such a person. That person may be authorized to depict events which occurred to the person they are representing.
—Dar, 'there', same cognate. Stellen, is 'to place', so 'placing there.' Representing: 'proxy' and 'portrait'.... Now, the thing to remember is that in the act of representing politically, you actually represent yourself and your constituency in the portrait sense, as well" (The Post-Colonial Critic, p. 108).
No you don't. You are the representative of a particular bunch of people and you depict that which they want to make known.
As we have observed elsewhere, the danger lies in collapsing the two meanings, mistaking the aesthetic or theatrical sense of representation—as re-staging or portraiture—for an actual beingin-the-other's-shoes.
Nobody makes this mistake. My lawyer argues my case for me. But the Judge does not send him to jail for my crimes. Spivak is mentioning a wholly imaginary danger.
This collapsing leads to the fundamentalist mistake: assuming that always imagined and negotiated constituencies based on unstable identifications have literal referents: "the workers," "the women," "the word."
They are stable enough. However, the representative may be lying. Others are welcome to point out his error. If I say 'women don't want jobs. They like staying at home, cooking and cleaning', you are welcome to point out that my mother and my sister and my wife all have jobs. They may do some cooking and cleaning for me- but that is because they consider me a helpless imbecile.
But there is no Vertretung without Darstellung,
Yes there is. My MP may be lazy and refuse to depict the horrendous psychic rape I endure at the hands of my neighbor's cat.
without dissimulation; the two terms are locked into complicity with one another.
No. They are separate things. Your lawyer may say nothing in court to prove your innocence. He just shows that the matter is not justiciable or the court lacks jurisdiction.
Deconstruction perpetually reminds us of this complicity, which fundamentalism would pretend to do without.
If so, it is wholly useless. We don't need to be reminded that our lawyer is not actually himself a flasher. It is sufficient if he can get us acquitted of a charge of indecent exposure.
PERSISTENTLY TO CRITIQUE A STRUCTURE THAT ONE CANNOT NOT (WISH TO) INHABIT IS THE DECONSTRUCTIVE STANCE.
We can criticize the state of jails in our country without wishing to ourselves reside in a jail cell. This has nothing to do with deconstruction.
These are nearly the last words of Outside in the Teaching Machine (p. 284), Spivak's most recent collection of essays, but they echo her most persistent take on deconstruction, repeated from the "Translator's Preface" to Of Grammatology until the present day.
She has been talking nonsense for decades.
If one sets out to do a critique of metaphysics,
Which is what Ernest Nagel did in 'Logic without Metaphysics'.
there is no escape from the metaphysical enclosure.
Yes there is. By positing analytic equivalencies (or "bridge laws") between the terms of different sciences, one can eliminate all ontological commitments except those required by the most basic science.
You cannot simply assert, "I will be anti-essentialist" and make that stick, for you cannot not be an essentialist to some degree.
Sure you can. Just say, there is a possible world where I don't exist. In that case you don't have an essence- i.e. something is true about you in all possible worlds.
The critique of essentialism is predicated upon essentialism.
Nope. It is predicated on the notion of compossibility. If a thing might not exist, it has no essence.
This is why it is especially important to choose as an object of critique something which we love, or which we cannot not desire, cannot not wish to inhabit, however much we wish also to change it.
Why critique Mummy? Why not give her kisses instead? Also, don't try to change Mummy. She may be very sweet but she can still slap the black off you.
Spivak translates Derrida in Of Grammatology as follows: "Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say, without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work."
If it can't isolate 'elements and atoms', then it can't deconstruct shit. I have a computer which does not work. I should disassemble it and remove and replace the faulty part. Sadly, I don't know how to do so. Thus I say sarky things about so as to subvert its hegemony. But, at the end of the day, I have wasted my time.
This deconstructive liability, this self-confessed fallibility of deconstruction, is in some sense its greatest gift, according to Spivak.
Uselessness is the greatest gift of a useless thing. Sadly, nobody wants that gift.
Her own intellectual production is as subject to its exigency as any other
She gets invited to talk about some stupid shite and thus does talk stupid shite so as to get paid.
Deconstruction does not say there is no subject, there is no truth, there is no history. It simply questions the privileging of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth.
Which is a useless thing to do if someone really does have it. Suppose the police have captured a terrorist who knows where a bomb is planted. They need to get the guy to spill the beans. It would be pointless for someone to argue that one should not 'privilege identity' by talking to the terrorist. Why not talk to some nice trees or bushes instead?
It is not the exposure of error.
Exposing error is useful. What Gayatri does is useless.
It is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced. That's why deconstruction doesn't say logocentrism is a pathology,
It is. There is no such thing as i-language. Derrida didn't understand why because he was stooooopid.
or metaphysical enclosures are something you can escape.
You can escape anything which doesn't fucking exist.
Deconstruction, if one wants a formula, is, among other things, a persistent critique of what one cannot not want.
Baby is constantly critiquing the nipple.
And in that sense, yes, it's right there at the beginning.
No it isn't. Baby is perfectly happy with Mummy's breast. It makes cooing noises and smiles at Mummy.
Spivak says
"I have two faces.
She will now show that she has only one face- viz. that of an Indian academic teaching in America.
I am not in exile. I am not a migrant. I am a green card-carrying critic of neocolonialism in the United States.
Her mother and brother were citizens.
It's a difficult position to negotiate,
Why? Plenty of people do it- e.g. Amartya Sen.
because I will not marginalize myself in the United States in order to get sympathy from people who are genuinely marginalized
Because it pays better to get sympathy from genuinely rich and powerful people. Having hobos feel sorry for you is so not worth it.
In Seoul, South Korea, in March 1982, 237 women workers in a factory owned by Control Data, a Minnesota-based multinational corporation, struck over a demand for a wage raise. Six union leaders were dismissed and imprisoned. In July, the women took hostage two visiting U.S. vicepresidents, demanding reinstatement of the union leaders. Control Data's main office was willing to release the women; the Korean government was reluctant. On July 16, the Korean male workers at the factory beat up the female workers and ended the dispute. Many of the women were injured; two suffered miscarriages. To grasp this narrative's overdeterminations (the many telescoped lines—sometimes noncoherent, often contradictory, perhaps discontinuous—that allow us to determine the reference point of a single "event" or cluster of "events") would require a complicated analysis.
Actually an American Church group composed of women went to Seoul to investigate the matter. What happened was clear enough. The Company wanted to close the plant- which they did in fact do a few months later- and the women had got wind of this plan. The violence against them appears to have been orchestrated though the American HQ denied this. The historical background was the struggle of the Korean Unions, supported by students, farmers and others, to gain legal rights and push for democratization. The June uprising of 1987 was quite successful in this.
Here, too, I will give no more than a checklist of the determinants.
Spivak can do no such thing. She is ignorant of the legal and political position of the workers and how and why the country transitioned from ‘authoritarian exceptionalism’ (1972–87) to‘democratic paternalism’ (1987-2001)
In the earlier stages of industrial capitalism, the colonies provided the raw materials so that the colonizing countries could develop their manufacturing industrial base.
Korea was a Japanese colony. But the Japanese did create industries there.
Indigenous production was thus crippled or destroyed.
Not in Korea. It became the second most industrialized country in Asia under 35 years of quite harsh Japanese rule.
To minimize circulation time, industrial capitalism needed to establish due process,
No. Industrial capitalism would prefer it if Unions were banned or otherwise denied due process of law.
and such civilizing instruments as railways, postal services, and a uniformly graded system of education.
The Koreans wanted such things. They are a smart, hardworking, people with a great literary culture.
This, together with the labor movements in the First World and the mechanisms of the welfare state, slowly made it imperative that manufacturing itself be carried out on the soil of the Third World, where labor can make many fewer demands, and the governments are mortgaged.
Japan was once pretty backward. It wanted to rise by its own efforts and did so. India could have followed suit but India had stupid leaders.
In the case of the telecommunications industry, which makes old machinery obsolete at a more rapid pace than it takes to absorb its value in the commodity,
meaningless gibberish. Obsolete machinery can be sold for scrap. So what if inefficient firms go bankrupt? Others take their place.
this is particularly practical. The incident that I recounted above, not at all uncommon in the multinational arena, complicates our assumptions about women's entry into the age of computers and the modernization of "women in development," especially in terms of our daily theorizing and practice.
Nope. There was nothing complicated about what happened. Control Data wanted to shut down an inefficient plant. That's exactly what they did. They said they paid twice as much as the law mandated in terms of redundancy pay but others questioned whether this was actually the case.
It should make us confront the discontinuities and contradictions in our assumptions about women's freedom to work outside the house, and the sustaining virtues of the working-class family.
Why? What happened was clear enough. The American Christian women who brought the incident to wider attention understood that some women go to work in factories. They protest if they hear their factory would be shut down. True, Korean unions faced much harsher treatment than American unions. But, in the end, they prevailed.
The fact that these workers were women was not merely because, like those Belgian lacemakers, oriental women have small and supple fingers.
No one suggested any such thing. Plenty of American women with big hands worked in factories.
It is also because they are the true army of surplus labor.
Nope. The unemployed are the Marxian 'reserve army'.
No one, including their men, will agitate for an adequate wage.
Every worker in Korea who belonged to a union 'agitated for adequate wages' and democratic reform. Some non-unionized men beat up some women. But America too had such 'strike-breakers' at an earlier period. During the War, Lucky Luciano, of the Mafia, was given control of the dockyards so as to ensure there would be no strikes.
In a two-job family, the man saves face if the woman makes less, even for a comparable job.
But men would rather their wives got paid more because they the family could go on holiday to somewhere nice.
Does this make Third World men more sexist than David Rockefeller?
Some may be.
The nativist argument that says "do not question Third World mores" is of course unexamined imperialism.
Nope. It is nativism. You have to conquer and rule foreign territory to be an Imperialist.
There is something like an answer to this vexed question, which makes problematic the ground upon which we base our own intellectual and political activities.
There is no 'vexed question'. The American Christian women who visited Seoul did a good job in exposing a Corporate crime.
No one can deny the dynamism and civilizing power of socialized capital.
Socialized capital is a nationalized industry. Everybody with eyes in their head can deny that such entities are dynamic or even 'civilized'.
The irreducible search for greater production of surplus-value (dissimulated as, simply, "productivity")
can be reduced to zero if a company goes bankrupt. Indeed, an entire industry in one part of the world may disappear. Productivity matters. It isn't 'dissimulated' at all. CEOs and CFOs are always banging on about how they are more productive and have a higher Gross Profit margin than their competitors.
through technological advancement; the corresponding necessity to train a consumer
there is no need to 'train' consumers. They see other peeps using nice shiny things and decide to buy those nice shiny things.
who will need what is produced and thus help realize surplus-value as profit; the tax breaks associated with supporting humanist ideology through "corporate philanthropy"—all conspire to "civilize."
Civilization is very evil. Did you know that many men are 'civilized'? Yet they have dicks. Dicks are nasty. Ban them immediately. Kali Marx was against dicks.
These motives do not exist on a large scale in a comprador economy like that of South Korea,
It isn't a 'comprador' economy. It pursued a strategy to build up indigenous conglomerates like Samsung and LG.
which is neither the necessary recipient nor the agent of socialized capital.
The South Koreans did channel government money into its conglomerates in various hidden ways. I think their first dictator got corrupt people to put their 'black money' into these new conglomerates. Essentially, you could get rich if you invested in your own country rather than accumulating a fortune in a Swiss Bank account.
The surplus-value is realized elsewhere.
No. Korean conglomerates ploughed back their profits into investment and R&D.
The nuclear family does not have a transcendent ennobling power.
Sure it does. I like my Mummy and Daddy. They ensured I didn't end up eating my own shit. Indeed, there was a time when I was almost presentable.
The fact that ideology and the ideology of marriage have developed in the West since the English revolution of the seventeenth century
is not a fact. Marriage existed even in prehistoric times.
has something like a relationship to the rise of meritocratic individualism.
Moses was a meritorious individual. So was Sargon.
These possibilities overdetermine
Spivak means Althusserian overdetermination
any generalization about universal parenting based on American, Western European, or laundered anthropological speculation.
No. Such generalizations would be underdetermined- i.e. would not have a unique model.
Socialized capital kills by remote control.
No. Drones kill by remote control. A nationalized industry may make drones or other remote controlled devices but somebody has to operate them for killing to occur.
In this case, too, the American managers watched while the South Korean men decimated their women.
They beat them. 'Decimated' means killing one tenth of a particular group of people.
The managers denied charges.
Why did they not say 'we killed and raped one trillion women?'
One remark made by a member of Control Data management, as reported in Multinational Monitor, seemed symptomatic in its self-protective cruelty: "Although 'it's true' Chae lost her baby, 'this is not the first miscarriage she's had. She's had two before this.'"
If a court accepted this argument, damages payable may have been reduced.
However active in the production of civilization as a byproduct, socialized capital has not moved far from the presuppositions of a slavery mode of production.
Yes it has. Slaves could be sold to foreign buyers.
"In Roman theory, the agricultural slave was designated an instrumentum vocale, the speaking tool, one grade away from the livestock that constituted an instrumentum semi-vocale, and two from the implement which was an instrumentum mutum."
Actually, Varro used the phrase genus vocale instrumenti to refer to both slaves and free workers within a farm.
One of Control Data's radio commercials speaks of how its computers open the door to knowledge, at home or in the workplace, for men and women alike.
This was true enough. Kids who got familiar with
The acronym of the computer system in this ad is PLATO.'Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations' was developed by the University of Illinois, using Government funds, in 1960. It was licensed for commercial use to Control Data which built the hardware on which it ran.
One might speculate that this noble name helps to dissimulate a quantitative and formula-permutational vision of knowledge
Plato wanted kids to study math. That's about 'formulas' and is 'permutational'.
as an instrument of efficiency and exploitation by surrounding it with an aura of the unique and subject-expressive wisdom at the very root of "democracy."
Plato was against democracy.
The undoubted historical-symbolic value of the acronym PLATO shares in the effacement of class history that is the project of "civilization" as such:
it also effaces the history of the fart considered as a tool of algebraic geometry. I pointed this out to Prof. Binmore but he still ejected me from his class.
"the slave mode of production which underlay Athenian civilization necessarily found its most pristine ideological expression in the privileged social stratum of the city, whose intellectual heights its surplus labour in the silent depths below the polis made possible."
But lots of other cities had plenty of slaves but produced no philosophy or mathematics worth a damn.
Why is it, I asked above, that when Derrida writes under the sign of woman his work becomes solipsistic and marginal?
He did not write 'under the sign of woman'. True, I used to think that Honeytits Cumbucket was a nom de plume he used. This wasn't the case. As everybody now knows, it was Arvind Kejriwal.
His discovery of the figure of woman is in terms of a critique of propriation—proper-ing, as in the proper name (patronymic) or property.
Other people discover the figure of women by buying X-ray specs. These things were advertised in the American comics I used to read. That's one reason I didn't want to get a Green Card. American women might use X-ray specs and discover I had a tiny todger.
Suffice it to say here that, in thus differentiating himself from the phallocentric tradition under the aegis of a(n idealized) woman who is the "sign" of the indeterminate, of that which has impropriety as its property,
because it keeps fisting itself while on the subway
Derrida cannot think that the sign "woman" is indeterminate by virtue of its access to the tyranny of the text of the proper.
Derrida can't think. That's true enough. As for 'the tyranny of the text of the proper'- nobody has access to it because it doesn't fucking exist.
It is this tyranny of the "proper"— in the sense of that which produces both property and proper names of the patronymic—that I have called the suppression of the clitoris, and that the news item about Control Data illustrates.
Striking women were suppressed through beating. Then they were made redundant. It was not the case that they were fired because they kept rubbing their clitorises in the faces of American business executives.
Derrida has written a magically orchestrated book—La carte postale— on philosophy as telecommunication (Control Data's business)
Nope. He thought that maybe sperm could be sent by postcard. He wasn't talking about faxes or what we would now call Email. Control Data wasn't in 'telecommunications'. It made mainframes and supercomputers.
using an absent, unnamed, and sexually indeterminate woman (Control Data's victim)
Nope. She was an actual woman. Her gender was established. Control Data employed women. It may have colluded in the assault of some of those women. But it may have been innocent.
as a vehicle for the reinterpretation of the relationship between Socrates and Plato (Control Data's acronym) taking it through Freud and beyond.
Derrida had seen a picture by Matthew Paris of Socrates taking dictation from Plato. This was used as the front-piece of a thirteenth century fortune-telling tract 'The prognostics of Socrates'. Plato, at that time, was considered a mystical mage and thus is shown as Socrates's superior. Socially speaking, this was true enough.
The determination of that book is a parable of my argument.
It is nonsense.
Here deconstruction becomes complicit with an essentialist bourgeois feminism.
It can't do so because Derrida wasn't a 'bourgeois feminist'.
The following paragraph appeared recently in Ms.: "Control Data is among those enlightened corporations that offer social-service leaves.... Kit Ketchum, former treasurer of Minnesota NOW,
This is the National Organization for Women
applied for and got a full year with pay to work at NOW's national office in Washington, D.C. She writes: 'I commend Control Data for their commitment to employing and promoting women....' Why not suggest this to your employer?"
Nothing wrong in that at all. Companies want to recruit the brightest young people- some of whom are bound to be women. Showing that you have no 'glass ceiling' is good for your bottom line.
Bourgeois feminism, because of a blindness to the multinational theater,
But American Christian women had gone to Seoul to highlight a corporate crime precisely because they were not 'blind' to what happened overseas.
dissimulated by "clean" national practice and fostered by the dominant ideology, can participate in the tyranny of the proper and see in Control Data an extender of the Platonic mandate to women in general.
Control Data had to abide by American law. It couldn't get thugs to beat up employees. There was no reason a 'bourgeois feminist' should not invest in or work for a successful company. Indeed, she could aspire to become its CEO.
The dissimulation of political economy is in and by ideology.
There is no dissimulation. CEOs boast about high productivity and profit margins and the closure of inefficient plants in far away countries.
What is at work and can be used in that operation is at least the ideology of nation states, nationalism, national liberation, ethnicity, and religion.
None were at work here. On the other hand some Christian American women did turn up in Seoul to draw attention to what they believed to be a Corporate crime.
Feminism lives in the master text as well as in the pores.
No. Feminism is about doing stuff which makes the lives of women better. Sadly, men too benefit from this.
It is not the determinant of the last instance.
It is all that matters. Spivak hasn't made the lives of women better. Nor has Derrida. Both are useless and babble nonsense incessantly.
I think less easily of "changing the world" than I did in the past.
Though the world has become easier to change for women like Mamta Bannerjee or Indira Nooyi or Kamala Harris.
I teach a small number of the holders of the can(n)on, male or female, feminist or masculist, how to read their own texts, as best I can
No. You teach illiterate cretins who don't hold anything save their own tiny todgers or twats.
Derrida's oeuvre is based on an 'intensional fallacy' which systematically confuses 'type' and 'token'- the difference between a class (type) of objects and the individual instances (tokens) of that class. This lead to a farcical debate between him and John Searle of which Spivak gives the following account.
A. The Ethico-Political Implications of Austin's Strategic Exclusions.
There are none. Searle merely said that Austin's work was restricted in scope.
The concept of ordinary language in Austin is marked by an exclusion.
No. Austin believed in the general rule that we must not expect to find simple labels for complicated cases…however well-equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction. In other words, ordinary language has to stretch itself to accommodate reality. It can't exclude things just because it lacks a sufficiently complex vocabulary.
Austin thought that parasitic discourse ("said by an actor on the stage, or...introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy") is part of ordinary language (Searle thinks Derrida is unaware of this), but only as a parasite, an extrinsic "part" that lives off of the whole.
One may say that quotations are a type of ornamentation which need not be taken seriously. They may be 'mere puffery' or they may invoke or set a mood but they do not affect what is conveyed.
"The concept of the 'ordinary,' thus [since the parasite is not normally a part of normal ordinary language] of ordinary language to which he has recourse is clearly marked by this exclusion."
Ornamentation is different from the functional utility of a thing. It could be stripped away without affecting its usefulness.
It is this implicit definition of the norm that "reproduce^] in a discourse said to be theoretical the founding categories of all ethico-political statements".
There is no definition, implicit or explicit of any 'norm'. True, one could read such norms in. For example, I have recently discovered that Joe Biden has a dick. This means he has raped trillions of Benjamin Netan-yahoos. The good people in Gaza, under the leadership of Hamas, are protesting against this violation of Islamic norms.
Although these exclusions "present them- selves as...strategic or methodological suspension...they are fraught with metaphysical presuppositions"
e.g. that Joe Biden is ontologically raping trillions of Benjamin Nehan-Yahoos and forcing innocent Palestinians to watch.
These metaphysical presuppositions inhere in the totalization and idealization of the norm (the appropriate context) for a performative.
Biden's dick is inhering in the asshole of trillions of Benjamin Nethan-Yahoos.
They also inhere in (a) describing "the relation of the positive [or standard] values to those which are opposed to them...as one of logical dependence"
Logically, Benjamin Nethan-Yahoos are dependent on Biden's dick for the purposes of anal violation.
and (b) not realizing that "even if this were the case, nothing proves that it would be this relation of irreversible anteriority or of simple consequence" .
Nothing proves Biden is raping Nehan-Yahoos. So just take my word for it already.
"Distinguishing] clearly between possibility [that performatives can always be cited]
e.g. Biden buggering Israel's Prime Minister
and eventuality [that such possible events—citations, 'unhappinesses'—do indeed happen],
Nehtan-Yahoos are weeping bitter tears due to their bottoms are sore.
Derrida suggests that the protection and definition of a standard or norm which is obligatory to all ethico-political institutions is carried out by Austin's creation of a "theoretical fiction"—the logically prior norm or standard—"that excludes this eventuality in order to purify his analysis" .
Also, Searle is a time traveler who holds down Nethan-Yahoos so Biden can have his wicked way with them. UN should take action.
This does not mean, as Searle suggests, that "Signature Event Context" [Sec for short in 'Limited Inc.') "suggested beginning with theatrical or literary [romanesque] fiction." But, Derrida continues, "I do believe that one neither should nor can begin by excluding the possibility of these eventualities: first of all, because this possibility is part of the structure called 'standard'".
Only in the sense that the 'structure called standard' involves Biden raping trillions of Israeli Premiers.
B. The Difference Between Speech and Writing. The necessary possibility of these eventualities Derrida collectively and structurally calls "writing."
Biden's dick is writing rude things inside the rectums of trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
Part of this argument in Sec is that speech act theory excludes Writing.
Nope. In English a written statement can be said to have been 'uttered'.
In order to advance his argument he lists in that essay "the essential predicates in a minimal determination of the classical concept of writing."
Which is that the thing can be read back in a predictable manner.
Invoking the Husserl of Logical Investigations and The Origin of Geometry, he suggests that a certain Husserl articulated the suspicion that spoken utterances also shared these essential predicates of writing, and then went on to garner a place where Speech would shine forth alone.
Which is what happens when we talk.
A detailed analysis of Husserl's itinerary is to be found in Derrida's introduction to The Origin of Geometry and in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs.
Husserl discovered nothing. He wasted his time.
Here Derrida focuses on the supposition that writing imitates speech but cannot share in the immediate link between speech and its context of production:
unless it can. Gandhi had 'days of silence' when he responded to interlocutors by writing on his notepad.
"Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable."
This is also true of farts. So what?
Husserl takes care of this crisis through the general principle of phenomenological reduction;
which does not exist save in the sense that it enables you to see that Biden is buggering trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
Austin through a programmatic, initial, and initiating exclusion.
Austin refused to see that Churchill was sodomizing trillions of Stalins. This showed he was an 'exclusionist'.
The rest of the argument I have summarized under A. In "Limited Inc.," Derrida points out that Searle resolutely refuses to see that
Churchill sodomized trillions of Stalins. Don't tell me that randy fellow isn't still at it.
the former is attempting to rewrite the opposition Speech-Writing through what I shall call an ideology critique (although Derrida would object to that phrase and call his critique ethico-political) of the interest of such an opposition.
Did you know that Churchill banned writing because he wanted to keep his sodomization of trillions of starving Stalins a secret? The irony is that he got a Nobel prize for Literature!
Among other things, Searle sees writing as transcription of speech,
if that is what it is. But it may not be. There were people who wrote good enough Greek or Latin or Sanskrit but who could not speak those languages in an intelligible manner. Dumb people may be very good writers.
and sees text and (oral) context as distinct and different, whereas Derrida demonstrates that the principle of an undecidable and/or alterable (to the point of rupture) context is the condition of possibility of every mark, written or spoken.
But that possibility extends to the sodomizing of trillions of starving Stalins or nervous Nethan-Yahoos.
Searle, then, refutes Derrida's views on speech and writing by "a too quick retranslation" of them into "a standard and trivial idiom".
He points out that Derrida is talking nonsense.
Now, right from the start, Derrida's project has been paleonymic, urging a rereading of old words such as "writing."
We can extend this to old words like 'sodomy' to prove that Joe Biden is sodomizing trillions of nervous Nethan-Yahoos.
More recently and by way of the work of Nicolas Abraham, a name for the sustained need for a re-reading of every production of language that would take into account the permanent parabasis that Paul de Man calls "allegory" has been found: "anasemia."
Parabasis occurs where the author addresses the reader directly. It has nothing to do with 'allegory'. Abraham died before the American Psychiatric Association concluded that Freud was a fraud. There was no such thing as 'neurosis'. Charlatans were cheating healthy people by pretending to treat them for an imaginary disease. On the other hand, for just $9.99 you can buy a nice rock from me which will keep you safe from sodomization at the hands of Sleepy Joe.
The common problem with readings of Derrida's work is a disciplinary refusal even to entertain the possibility of undertaking such a rereading;
because he wrote shit.
Searle is not free of this. But what we are speaking of here is an ignoring of even such obvious demands for scrupulousness as "a neologism in italics" (pp. 23, 188). Thus, "the remains [restance, in French a neologism] of a grapheme in general" is retranslated into "permanence or survival or a 'written language' in the standard sense"
It could just as easily be retranslated into a fart emitted by trillions of sodomized Nethan-Yahoos.
. As far back as of Grammatology, Derrida made it quite clear that,
he was writing nonsense
if one insisted that the being of writing was in the technique of making a system of tangible marks on tangible material, the grounds of difference between speech and writing could be quite legitimately sustained .
Also, if you insisted that eating involved putting food into your mouth and shitting involved expelling turds from your anus then the difference between food and shit could be, quite legitimately, sustained.
The pertinent question is, is this difference ground-ly [grundlich], irreducible?
Yes. Food is different from shit. Writing is different from speaking.
If this question is pushed, then a different answer seems to disclose itself: that there is a mark-ability (graphematicity) in speech and writing; and that it is by means of that mark-ability that something—never tangibly self-identical—is carried over in acts of speech and writing.
This 'graphematicity' is also carried over in acts of farting while gazing ruminatively at a bowl of pomegranates.
That something, that minimal rather than total idealization that is different from itself in every case, is "the remains of a grapheme in general" and not "the permanence or survival of a 'written language' in the standard sense," where the context remains irretrievably oral.
No context- save fellatio- remains irretrievably oral.
"Once he had begun to neglect totally the necessity of passing from writing (in the standard sense) to the grapheme in general, an essential movement of Sec, Searle could only go from one confusion to another" (pp. 24, 189).
There is no necessity to pass from 'writing' to 'the grapheme in general'. Plenty of written languages omit the graphemes for vowels.
Searle's argument is that, although writing and speech are quite different in their relationship to context (indeed the latter might be considered the necessary context of the former), "intentionality plays exactly the same role in written as in spoken communication".
One may intend to speak or write nonsense.
This is a rough restatement of the Husserlian position,
i.e. there are 'natural objects'. This is common ground with Austin.
with which Derrida has never fully disagreed. But the status of intention is so large a part of Derrida's concerns in this essay that I shall give it a separate rubric in my summary. C. The Situation of Intention. The OED defines the term "intention" as used in logic as follows: "the direction or application of the mind to an object." And here is a definition of Intentionality offered by Searle in a piece written well after the Derrida-Searle exchange: "Intentionality-witha-t is that property of the mind by which it is able to represent other things." These are good places to begin in order to understand how, for the sake of emphasizing the similarity between speech and writing, Searle can write: "Writing makes it possible to communicate with an absent receiver, but it is not necessary for the receiver to be absent. Written communication can exist in the presence of the receiver, as for example when I compose a shopping list for myself or pass notes to my companion during a concert or lecture."
Intentionality also enables us to see that Joe Biden is sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos- if that's what best pleases us.
One response to this is contained in the answer that I summarize above: a possibility/eventuality is a necessary component of the structural definition of language.
There is no 'structural definition of language' as opposed to a particular language. Farts may be a language.
But Derrida also argues that the problem with classical concepts of intentionality is that they seek to actualize and totalize it into self-presence and self-possession.
Nonsense! Nobody thought that thinking about a cat meant turning into a cat.
It is this telos of the concept of intentionality that he is calling into question.
It has a function not a 'telos' or end-in-itself.
In this context, it is not so much the ever-necessary possibility of the writer/reader's absence to the context,
a possibility isn't 'ever-necessary' because there are states of the world where it is absent.
but the claim of the writer-reader's presence to himself in certain privileged contexts,
like being awake and not off your head on drugs
that Derrida deconstructs, arriving back at the position that the necessary possibility of the absence of sender and receiver is the positive condition of possibility of "communication."
If neither sender nor receiver exist communication is impossible. Spivak has written nonsense.
We shall come back to this suggestion later. Here a gist of the point at issue will suffice: To affirm...that the receiver is present at the moment when / write a shopping list for myself\ and, moreover, to turn this into an argument against the essential possibility of the receiver's absence from every mark, is to settle for the shortest, most facile analysis.
Whereas it not facile to say 'when I write a shopping list I do not exist save as a ruminative fart issuing from Uranus- not the one in our Solar System but one in a distant galaxy which never existed.'
If both sender and receiver were entirely present when the mark was inscribed, and if they were thus present to themselves—since, by hypothesis, being present and being present-tooneself are here the same—how could they even be distinguished from one another?
Suppose I pass you a note in class. How do I know I am me and not you? The answer is I can look and see if I have a tiny todger. That reassures me that I am indeed myself.
How could the message of the shopping list circulate among them?
I can give you the shopping list after verifying that I have a tiny todger and thus am me, not you.
And the same holds force, a fortiori, for the other example, in which sender and receiver are hypothetically considered to be neighbors, it is true, but still as two separate persons occupying two different places, or seats.... But these notes are only writable or legible to the extent that...these two possible absences construct the possibility of the message at the very instant of my writing or his reading.
A possibility which does not come to pass can't construct anything. For a message to pass between two people, they both must actually exist.
(This theme, that self-presence is irreducibly differentiated, is also to be found most extensively elaborated in Speech and Phenomena [especially in "The Voice That Keeps Silence"],
But my todger remains tiny. It isn't irreducibly differentiated over time. Also it does not suddenly turn into a vagina.
a text that is closely related to Derrida's discussion of speech act theory. That relationship can be put simply as follows: two theories so seemingly disparate as Husserlian phenomenology and speech act theory share metaphysical presuppositions that make the latter's claim to pragmatic practicality somewhat dubious.)
How so? Both think there actually are things and people 'out there'. Also my tiny todger won't suddenly turn into a vagina. Surely, that's 'practical enough'?
Such a critique of intentionality
there is no 'critique'. Intention is a Tarskian primitive.
does not, however, mean that intentionality must be "effaced or denied...as Sarl claims. On the contrary, Sec insists on the fact that 'the category of intention will not disappear, it will have its place'".
Thus, even if Biden has no intention of sodomizing trillions of Nethan-Yahoos nevertheless we can insist he does so.
Events, objects, acts, meanings—as "intended" by ego—as well as intentions themselves might well be the effects of a desire precisely to have a self-identical intention that can produce interpretations.
e.g. Biden sodomizing trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
This is a limit that no concept of simple intention can cross, for such a desire cannot be thought in terms of a fully intending subject.
like Joe Biden who isn't actually interested in fucking Israelis in the ass.
It remains irreducibly structural.
The very structure of Executive authority means POTUS sodomizes trillions of Nethan-Yahoos. Personally, I blame Neo-Liberalism.
Yet, even as intention is situated within such limits, Derrida insists that it is these very limits, demarcating intention, that produce it, and allow it to function as such.
Jill Biden often says 'Joe, your sodomization of Nethan-Yahoos has exceeded all limits of decency. Kindly give it a rest.' He replies, 'it your 'demarcating intention' that produces my incessant sodomization of Nethan-Yahoos. You yourself are to blame for the behavior you complain off.'
If this point is missed, then Derrida is seen as an absurd nihilist. "What is valid for intention, always differing, deferring [differante] and without plenitude, is also valid, correlatively, for the object (signified or referent) thus aimed at. However, this limit, I repeat ('without' plenitude), is also the ('positive') condition of possibility of what is thus limited" .
Just as the fact that Biden isn't sodomizing anybody causes the possibility of his doing so to construct his incessant sodomization of Nethan-Yahoos.
If one is prepared to stand the Hegelian system on its head to displace the deconstructive cipher, one might compare this limiting possibility to the status of determination at the very beginning of The Science of Logic.
Such that everything which does not exist proves by virtue of the construction of its absence that Biden is sodomizing trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
Whereas in Hegel, by demarcating (limiting and making possible) Dasein out of Sein,
existence and being- but this is Heidegger
determination also makes possible the production of the rigorous terminology of the self-critical language of philosophy; in Derrida the originary self-division of intention "limits what it makes possible while rendering its rigor or purity impossible"/
Intention has no such magical power. I may have the intention of picturing Joe Biden to myself. Sadly, he starts sodomizing trillions of Nethan-Yahoos. I wish the rigor and purity of those acts of buggery were impossible but, sadly, they aren't. Try it for yourself.
One of the marks of Derrida's programmatic lack of rigor in "Limited Inc." is his elaborate and uneasy-making jokes.
Perhaps he was off his head on drugs or strong drink.
I shall speak at greater length about this strategy later. Here I will comment on the title of the piece and Derrida's use of the question of the copyright. A footnote to the title of Searle's "A Reply to Derrida" discloses that the matter of Searle's essay is also a product of discussions among himself, H. Dreyfus, and D. Searle. The text thus has a plurality of authorships which can be conveniently copyrighted under one signature or proper name. To keep this possibility even in our minds, Derrida refers to the author of "A Reply to Derrida" as "Sarl" (S. a. r. I.—Societeaux responsabilites limites— limited liability in English, incorporated in American) and entitled his own piece "Limited Inc."
Limited companies are Capitalist. Searle was a Capitalist! Many of those Americans are. We like their dollars but hate their guts.
The recuperating of a plural, divided, heterogeneous, different, differing intentionality under the rubric of a single self-present sovereign and generative intention has something in common with these (in Derrida's case ironic) procedures: "That Searle's Seal should become, at once and without waiting for me, Sarl's seal, is not an accident. A little like the multiplicity of stockholders and managers in a company or corporation with limited liability, or in a limited, incorporated system; or, like that limit which is supposed to distinguish stockholders from managers"
This is also true of unlimited partnerships- e.g. being a 'name' on Lloyds of London. The fact is, Searle was an academic working with like-minded colleagues. However, whatever they published was of 'unlimited liability'. In other words, if they were guilty of plagiarism- or writing nonsense- they would all have suffered a great fall in esteem or other professional penalties.
. Exactly the opposite of what happens to the "'subject' in the scene of writing"—the I who, putatively, writes, and, having left her mark, leaves the scene. The classical concept of writing would say that, having removed her selfhood and her proper identity from the written page, the "I" of the writer (not merely of the "literary text") allows a multiplicity of anonymous readers to invest it with their selfhoods.
In the same manner that I am welcome to picture Joe Biden sodomizing trillions of Nethan-Yahoos to the great disgust of Hamas.
* Derrida is suggesting that this subject in the scene of writing is also the subject in the very house of its own proper intention.
But that house was knocked down by Joe Biden's cock desperately seeking for more Nethan-Yahoos to sodomize
D. The Structural Unconscious. The picture of an irreducibly pluralized and heterogeneous subject can find its place in structuralist and poststructuralist interpretations of Freud.
As can the 'Joe Biden complex' which replaces the 'Oedipus complex' and results in the sodomization of trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
Such interpretations must see the conscious ego as an effect of the work of the "psyche" (whose outlines are, by that very token, more like an entangling network, structured by traces and postponements, than a neat geographical boundary), rather than as fully identical with the self as a whole.
Which is why, though Biden has never sodomized anybody we can be sure that the possibility of the absence of the deconstruction of his doing so has been raping trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
In speech act theory, however, "the identity of the 'speaker' or the 'hearer' [is] visibly identified with the conscious ego...[and] the identity of an intention (desire or non-desire, love or hate, pleasure or suffering) or of an effect (pleasure or non-pleasure, advantage or disadvantage, etc.)" can be located in terms of "the conscious ego" .
Normally, that would be the case. Still, a person may be mad or under the influence of some psychotomimetic drug.
Derrida's work is deeply marked by Freud:
who was a fraud
"in as much as it touches the originary constitution of objectivity and of the value of the object...psychoanalysis is not a simple regional science" (OG, 88).
It is nonsense.
Indeed, the debate with speech act theory relates precisely to the fact that, whereas Husserl, seeing the irreducible crisis of the instituted trace inscribed in the sign, had carefully written psychology out of phenomenology;
leaving it empty and useless
speech act theory, seemingly introducing issues such as situationality and the human mind into the question of meaning, uses an interpretably oversimple model of both situation and mind—"a psychology of language (mechanistic, associationist, substantialist, expressivist, representationalist, pre-Saussurian, prephenomenological, etc.), more exactly a pre-critical psychologism" .
Which was fine so long as it was being done by smart people. Sadly, anal-tickle philosophy became adversely selective of cretins like Amia Srinivasan or Jason Stanley.
Derrida is rightly careful that his interest in psychoanalysis should not be confused with the therapeutic model of psychoanalytic practice— psychoanalysis as a regional science.
It claimed to be an actual science. At one time there was some notion that Freud's 'scientific project' could be elaborated on by neurology. Sadly, the thing was charlatanism from start to finish.
Yet, since all of Derrida's work has been largely devoted to a critique of philosophy's need to adumbrate a fully conscious and self-conscious self-presence, it is curious that Searle seems to think that, according to Derrida, "intentions must all be conscious."
For his theory- sure. The same would be the case for judicial or diplomatic discourse. When Vice President Bush claimed to have had sexual relations with President Reagan, people understood that he had mis-spoke. He did not consciously mean to say Reagan had been bending him over the Oval Office desk.
In response, Derrida carefully points out that "Seare's enterprise is in its principle designed to demonstrate such 'a structural unconscious' which seems alien, if not incompatible with speech act theory, given its current axiomatics" .
But those 'axiomatics' were subject to 'restricted comprehension'. Russell had put Anal-tickle philosophy on that path long ago.
"Unconsciousness" in such an enterprise does not mean, as it does when Searle invokes unconscious intentions, "an implicit or potential reserve of consciousness, a kind of lateral virtuality of consciousness." It is the best available name ("for example and for the moment" for radical alterity.
Which can't exist unless radical ipseity exists- which is what Derrida denies.
We have already discussed what it might mean to say that intentionality is irreducibly graphematic,
Speech may be so. Intentionality isn't.
that it is always already plural, an effect, heterogeneous, divided, and that that is precisely what allows it to work.
It would not work at all if it were plural or heterogeneous. Joe Biden wouldn't be getting much work done if he were incessantly sodomizing Nethan-Yahoos.
Otherwise, identical with itself, "eyes closed tight, nostrils pinched shut, ears stopped up" it would be the "pure" body without organs, Undivided Mind.
I still have organs if I close my eyes and stop up my nose and ears.
In order to work with such a graphematic intentionality,
i.e. one which can be fully expressed in speech
one needs a name for something that is at every moment divisively other yet indispensable to the production of the same,
there is no such thing. Human beings of different genders can make a baby together. Rocks or plants can't join in to produce the same.
We don't need names for useless things.
an "it" that resolutely leaves its track at every intended origin or goal.
That 'it' is like Joe Biden's cock which knocks down the possibility of the absence of the deconstruction of the catachresis of the ipseity of the alterity of the trillions of raped Nethan-Yahoos which are trying to get tenure.
This "it" is not a transcendental unity,
it is the fart of the impossibility of the absence of its own constitutive deconstruction of the catachresis of the neighbor's cat which is critiquing Biden's sodomization of trillions of Nethan-Yahoos who are all seeking tenure.
because with every heterogeneous move of receiver, sender, and the world of meanings, it changes its shape and fills the (no)place that marks a contingent limit.
Also it emigrates to Australia and starts up a menage a trois with a kangaroo and a wallaby.
It is not a conscious motor of things in general; therefore it had better be called the Unconscious. (The irreducible structure of this radical alterity that is also the condition of possibility of ipseity is, as I have already remarked, sometimes called Writing by Derrida.
We may also call it the univocal fart emanating from sodomized Nethan-Yahoos in protest against Joe Biden's refusal to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
Of late there has been considerable interest in the confusion and distinctions between Derrida's position and that of Paul de Man.
Derrida had a proper sheepskin. Paul de Man hadn't been to collidge.
It seems relevant to note that de Man's term for the irreducible oscillation of undecidability that is his last word is Reading, not Writing.
He wrote nonsense. Still, he did enjoy reading some books- especially if they had dirty pictures in them.
Whereas writing in Derrida is both the trace structure in general and empirical forms of writing in the narrow sense, even as it annuls that very opposition (OG, 74), in de Man "the word 'reading'...is...deprived of any referential meaning whatsoever."
Which meant he could teach Literature without having to read any of the shite high brow authors produce.
For Derrida, what one discovers in the Unconscious is not "the whole structure of language."
There was a notion that the Unconscious was 'structured' like a language. This was cool if you were cheating people by pretending to listen to them gas on about how Mummy didn't love them enough.
On the one hand, conviction of that discovery might itself be a symptomatic effect;
that you are as stupid as shit.
on the other, the structural unconscious is also that which stands in the way of any exhaustive concept of structure of language.
We want useful, not exhaustive, concepts. Machine translations are now good enough for a lot of purposes.
What one discovers in the unconscious is also not a reading effect.
One can discover anything at all in an imaginary place.
If one examines the essential predicates of the classical concept of Reading
which involves being able to read a particular written language
—halfway between Speech and Writing—
no. It is all the way to writing. If you can read, you can write.
notions of control and privilege are not far to seek;
they are entirely absent unless you actually have some control or privilege.
even in reading "the flight of meaning" or an "allegory of unreadability," the putative agent restores that context which the classical concept of writing, by its essential predication, loses as it preserves that in Speech which it can slavishly imitate.
The classical concept of writing does not lose 'context' nor does it 'slavishly imitate' actual e-language.
More specifically, such a structural unconscious also undermines the pigeonholing of meanings and speech acts.
No it doesn't. Craziness may do so but most people aren't crazy.
It can mark and undermine the conscious ego's decision to situate intended meaning in itself and for another conscious ego.
Only in the sense that it can cause Joe Biden to sodomize trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
"The specific law of...the displacement [Entstellung]
distortion or disfigurement
of the signifier" that constitutes the production of a self-identical intentionality
e.g ordering and getting a burger because you want to eat a burger.
"governs those psychoanalytic effect that are decisive for the subject: such as foreclosure [Verwerfung], repression [Verdrdngung], denial [Verneinung] itself."
A charlatan may say that when you order a burger what you really want is to kill your daddy and fuck your mummy. Tell the quack he owes you a thousand quid and keep beating him till he pays up.
The ego's speech act in this reading might very well be a rubric indicating what it cannot say.
That's how gaslighting works. You say you don't want to suck me off. But this proves you do want to suck me off!
If the unconscious is a place of possibilities of signification, the itinerary of the ego's self-constitutive need to manufacture its sovereignty
which is like the itinerary of the fart's self-constitutive need to manufacture the sovereignty of its own defining catachresis in a factory in Seoul where the women employees are beaten regularly.
activates different clusters of signification with an irregular periodicity.
just like my farts- some of which are really smelly.
In this sense, too, the radically other makes possible as its limits the ego's intention.
If alterity is radical enough, it has no fucking limits. It could take over our ego. Super advanced aliens from another galaxy may have this power.
Because speech act theory cannot recognize these limits
It recognizes that saying 'I'm a potted plant' won't actually turn you into a potted plant.
it "excludes all other ultimate criteria than the distinct, determining, and determinable consciousness of the intention, desires, or needs involved."
This also means that you can't interpret a speech by Joe Biden as a declaration that he has sodomized trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
The rigorous distinction between promise and warning or threat, for instance, is established only by this expedient.
It is established by being sensible and not talking bollocks.
Yet what would happen if in promising to be critical I should then provide everything that Sarl's Unconscious desires, for reasons which remain to be analyzed, and that it does its best to provoke? Would my "promise" be a promise, or a threat/warning?
It would be nonsense. I can say Searle sodomized Stalin incessantly but it isn't true.
Searle might respond that it would constitute a threat to Sarl's consciousness, and a promise for the unconscious.
No. He'd just say you were talking impertinent nonsense.
There would thus be two speech acts in a single utterance.
It may be that what threatens 'consciousness'- e.g. being drugged- opens the door for the 'unconscious'.
How is this possible?
Through the structural causal model I just gave.
And what if the desire was to be threatened? And what if everything that is given to please or in response to a desire, as well as everything that one promises to give, were structurally ambivalent?
Then it would be the alterity of the ipseity of the catachresis of the fart that manufactured its own self-constitutive catachresis in a factory in Seoul whose female employees are regularly beaten.
It is within this framework that Derrida criticizes Austin's strategic exclusions: For in the last analysis, seriously, who ever said that a dependent (logically dependent) element, a secondary element, a logical or even chronological consequence, could be qualified...as "parasitical," "abnormal," "infelicitous," "void," etc.?.
Ornamentation is not 'logically dependent'. It can be stripped away. So are ugly excrescences, slips of the tongue, or distracted utterances.
.. The common denominator [of all these attributes] is evidently a pejorative value judgment...more or less a mere logical derivation.
No. This is descriptive analysis and has nothing to do with logic.
This axiological "more or less" cannot be denied.
Sure it can. Axiology is about values. We can deny that other people's values apply in a particular case.
Or at least not without constituting, as far as Searle is concerned, the object of what is known [psychoanalytically] as a denial [denegation]
If Derrida denied eating his own shit it was because that is all he in fact ate.
It is also in terms of the vocabulary of the structural unconscious that Derrida chides Searle for suggesting that he, Derrida, assimilates writing and fiction:
Plenty of writers write fiction. What's wrong with suggesting that Derrida was aware of this fact?
"It is imprudent to assimilate too quickly, more quickly than one can, what is not easily assimilable.
Derrida was imprudent to write about shite he didn't understand.
Otherwise, what is produced is what certain psychoanalysts call incorporation without introjection: a sort of indigestion more or less desired by the unconscious and provoked by a parasite which remains unassimilable."
What Derrida produced was shit.
When Derrida makes a critique of the discipline of philosophy, the structural unconscious is seen as oedipalized.
But there was no such thing as an Oedipus complex. Freud was a fraud.
This is, I think, because the history of disciplines in the West is the history of oedipalization as such.
The history of disciplines is the story about how they killed their Daddies and fucked their Mummies- thinks nobody at all.
In Glas, Derrida's disciplinary critique is in terms of the official denial of the son's desire for the mother and the thematics of fetishism. Here it is in terms of the homoeroticism of the (patriarchal) disciplines, the jealously guarded relay of truth passing from father to son. If we regard the following examples as "merely a joke in poor taste," we overlook the insertion, in Derrida's works, of psychoanalysis into the exclusivist discipline of philosophy.
Just like Joe Biden's insertion of his dick into the exclusivist rectum of trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
It is an interdisciplinary endeavor that would put the properties of the disciplinary subdivision of labor into question.
No it wouldn't. The math guys will do the math stuff while the History guys do the history stuff.
Searle scolds Derrida for hassling Austin over his exclusions; for Searle has himself now established a general speech act theory of fiction. The complaint about exclusions no longer applies. Derrida points out that the relevant Searle essay appeared well after Sec and that it ends in the following inconclusive way: "...there is as yet no general theory of the mechanisms by which such serious illocutionary intentions are conveyed by pretended illocutions"
So what? You start with a 'special theory' and wait till the math can generate a general theory which in turn will turn out to be a special case of something more abstract yet.
Derrida's critique of programmatic exclusions might still stand. It is, however, upon the way in which Searle announces himself as carrying on Austin's work that Derrida comments: As to the "general theory," Sari would like Austin both to have had one...
He could have had the intuition of a general theory but lacked access to a formal language to set it down. We know Einstein wanted a 'grand unified' theory. Perhaps, such a thing will be found and grounds may be given for why it corresponds to his intuition. So far, however, it does not appear that this is likely.
and also, having died too young, not to have really had...one, so that the copyright of the "general theory" in the proper, literal sense...could be the rightful property only of the more or less anonymous company of his sons....
There is no intellectual property in philosophical concepts. Derrida couldn't stop me writing my own theory of Grammatology featuring him farting incessantly.
This is why...the paragraph beginning with "Once one has a general theory of speech acts..." is...a masterpiece of metaphysical-oedipal rhetoric.
Searle didn't want to kill Austin or to fuck his elderly widow.
Imagine the scene: Austin's will is about to be unsealed.
Austin left a will. His family inherited his property.
Although the envelope has not yet been entirely opened, the lawyer of one of the sons begins to speak: "Once one has a general theory of speech acts..."
This would be like saying 'Daddy could have become a millionaire by buying shares in Apple and Google. Let us divide up those imaginary millions of his.'
Once? We still don't know if Austin had one or was going to have one.
We are welcome to say he probably had an intuition of something which would only be formalized much later on.
I sincerely regret that "Austin did not live long enough."... But through my tears I still smile at the argument of a "development" (a word sufficiently ambiguous to mean both produce, formulate, as well as continue, in order to reach "detailed" answers), that a longer life might have led to a successful conclusion .
We are welcome to say 'if Daddy had lived longer, I bet he would have been very good with computers. He was so smart. Also I liked hugging him.'
The disciplines, and they are inescapably patriarchal, would present themselves as disinterested if not metaphysical. A patriarchy, however, works according to the love-hate rules of the oedipal scene which it has spent its energy proclaiming to be the correct structural explanation of all human relationships.
No it doesn't. Derrida hadn't actually killed his Daddy and fucked his Mummy. Jews tend not to go in for such shenanigans.
There is both the "patricide"—Austin could not have done it without me—and the dynastic pride—I am carrying on Austin's work.
Searle wasn't related to Austin.
In allowing the psychoanalytic argument to sweep from the irreducible structural unconscious in intentionality as such to the oedipal functioning of the disciplinary tradition, Derrida performs a critique of the disinterest that is supposed to inform all academic discussion as well as the history of ideas.
He thinks Einstein killed Newton and fucked his non-existent wife. Come to think of it, Newton had a dog named diamond. Thus Einstein must have fucked that bow wow.
E. Iterabilty (Citationality, Parasitism). Over the years, even as he has been practicing paleonymy,
just like my redefinition of fart such that the true proposition 'Joe Biden farts' is turned into the proposition that his farts sodomize trillions of Nethan-Yahoos.
Derrida has been deploying an alternate denomination for the method of metaphysics, disclosed or undisclosed, that inhabits the language of the human sciences.
The 'method of metaphysics' does not inhabit physics or any other 'human sciences' including the study of languages.
There are many names on this list. The most recognizable might be: the graphic of the trace rather than the logic of the simple origin;
which enables us to see that Joe Biden is raping trillions of Nethan-Yahoos precisely because he does no such thing.
the graphic of difference rather than the logic of identity;
which enables us to see that the fact than no Biden sodomizes Nethan-Yahoos proves that trillions of such Nethan-Yahoos are in fact being sodomized by Joe Biden. Some people are trying to make out that it was Kamala Harris who did the dirty deed. Iyer girls aren't like that. Mind it kindly.
the graphic of supplementarity rather than the logic of non-contradiction. Sec and "Limited Inc." add another: the graphic of iterability rather than the logic of repetition.
Iterability just means repetition in different contexts. It is not a 'graphic' or a picture of a particular context.
The substitution of graphic for logic is also an example of this alternate denomination.
Nope. It is the substitution of an 'intension' whose 'extension' may not be known, for a term used with unrestricted comprehension.
Derrida's method is not centered on the putative selfenclosed self-presence of the logos as the identity of voice-consciousness in the act of speech;
though such speech acts exist and are important in deciding court cases or issuing orders of various types.
it shares rather the structure of irreducible self-alterity carried by the backward and forward and many-planed tracing of intentions in writing. I
If there really was such a thing as 'irreducible self-alterity' then a person with that trait could be divided into two viable beings. One may say, a pregnant woman has this feature. When she gives birth, a new being comes into the world.
In other words, it seeks to be graphematic
i.e. it seeks to be written down
rather than logocentric.
i.e. spoken. But this is true of any academic 'paper' which is published.
Hence its name is graphic rather than logic.
What is written down may be a series of Hilbertian or Gentzen type logical formulae.
One of the corollaries of the structure of alterity,
which can only be discovered by examining the thing in question
which is the revised version of the structure of identity,
Nope. We can discover nothing about our alterity on some distant planet by revising the anatomical structure of our own species.
is that every repetition is an alteration.
Not if it is a perfect repetition or at least good enough to be seen as such. Otherwise, there is only alteration and no repetition.
This would put into question both a transcendental idealism that claims that the idea is infinitely repeatable as the same
It makes no such claim. Kant did not think that two physicists seeking to describe Time and Space would arrive at the same conclusion. He knew Liebniz had gone in one direction, Newton in another.
and a speech act theory that bases its conclusions on intentions and contexts that can be defined and transferred within firm outlines.
Firm enough. Law courts exist as do a variety of administrative and commercial transactions because there is a good enough method to parse or interpret 'ordinary language'.
Iterability is the name of this corollary: every repetition is an alteration (iteration).
Nope. It is a repetition in a different context. My saying 'Fuck off!' means something different when I say it to an enemy rather than to a friend.
But repetition is the basis of identification.
No. Identification is about verification. Even if I endlessly described myself as Beyonce, you would not accept my claim because you can verify that I'm an ugly, elderly, man- not a beautiful and talented lady.
Thus, if repetition alters, it has to be faced that alteration identifies and identity is always impure.
Nonsense! Beyonce really is Beyonce. I really am not. The fact that Beyonce is often called upon to repeat her performance of her hit songs doesn't mean that she becomes someone else or that her virginity is sullied (what? I'm sure I will discover Beyonce has an intact hymen on our honeymoon night) by Joe Biden's rampant cock.
Thus iterability—like the trace structure—is the positive condition of possibility of identification, the very thing whose absolute rigor it renders impossible.
The positive condition of possibility is 'compossibility'- i.e. being consistent with the laws of physics etc. Identification is possible if there is a 'unique model' satisfying certain conditions. Thus we can verify that I am not Beyonce by examining my DNA, finger-prints etc. True, Beyonce may have an identical twin or clone. Some other test may be required to affirm her identity.
It is in terms of iterable (rather than repeatable) identities that communication and consensus are established:
Anything iterable is also repeatable.
"What is this consensus? What convention will have insured up to now the contract of a minimal agreement? Iterability"
A consensus arises where it is useful for it to exist because it solves a coordination or discoordination problem. Pragmatists should embrace Schelling focal point theory. Anal-tickle philosophy was a bit of a wank.
. Searle (Sari) seems in agreement with Derrida on this very last issue. He is not, however, ready to grant the radicality of Derrida's position: "Iterability is [not] necessarily tied to convention, and...is [not] limited by it"
Because a word can be used in a novel context.
Since every identification is an iteration,
Nope. Identification involves verification.
the "natural," "spontaneous," "intended" utterance is as iterable as the conventional.
A spontaneous utterance may still be conventional or, indeed, it may become so.
"Iterability is precisely that which—once its consequences have been unfolded—can no longer be dominated by the opposition nature/convention"
The consequences of iterability can never be 'unfolded' till time comes to an end and all contexts are known.
Thus the exchange in the "normal" speech act cannot, strictly speaking, be structurally differentiated from one where both intention and context are artificial or infelicitous.
Sure it can. Courts of law do so all the time. I am charged with claiming to be Beyonce for the purpose of defrauding a Hotel. I say in my defense that I was clearly drunk off my head and nobody in their right mind would think I was actually seeking to pass myself off as Beyonce. Anyway, the security guards at the hotel threw me out quickly enough. Why make a mountain out of a molehill?
They are two cases of the alteration in repetition: iteration. "Rather than oppose...iteration to the non-iteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration....In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear, it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance."
But that 'typology' would be highly mischievous. It would enable me to conclude that when Joe Biden said 'Hello Mr. Netanyahu' what he actually meant was 'I am now going to sodomize trillions of you Nethan-Yahoos as has been my custom for the last fifty years of my life'.
Such a necessarily nonexhaustive typology would include all the "non-serious" uses of the performative mentioned by Austin—such as citation and the literary or theatrical parasitic use. Acknowledging "the structural iterability of the mark"—the grapheme, the unit of writing rather than that of speech—one must take into account that "language can always 'normally' become 'abnormally' its own object".
With the result that trillions of Nethan-Yahoos are sodomized. So what, if as a result of this theory gaining ground, all legal and commercial and administrative proceedings come to a grinding halt? So what if language becomes wholly useless? The important thing to note is that if our species becomes extinct because it will no longer be able to communicate, then Neo-Liberalism too will disappear. That's a good outcome for a Professor of useless shite.
The possibility of citing or theatricalizing is structurally inherent in every "intended" speech act.
No. It could only be structurally inherent in citing or theatricalizing. When I mutter to myself while all alone, there is no such possibility. It may be that a theater director of genius may be able to find something worth reproducing in my muttering, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yet this does not mean to privilege fictional and theatrical uses of speech acts as commonly understood.
Why not? It would be a privilege for me if some great actor or writer reproduced some speech of mine.
Just as there is no homogeneous and totalizable intention generating the utterance,
Yes there is. A law court is able to find such intentions. That is, speaking generally, a very useful function they perform. Was Clinton lying about Lewinsky. He said it depended on what is meant by the word 'is'. A court decided he was wrong. Is means is not whatever gets you off the hook.
so also can it not be advanced that the utterance is simply autotelic as such.
It may be. I may speak to myself to 'self-soothe' or just to release pent up anger or irritation.
It is rather that, among the many heterogeneous elements that constitute the speech act with traces leading back and forth,
invented traces- e.g. Derrida thinking Searle wanted to kill Austin and fuck his wife whom he considered his own Mummy.
the iterable non-self-identical intention
If it is 'iterable' then it is self-identical though the context has changed.
and context as well as the "parasitic" use are structural moments.
No. They are predicates applied by an outside observer. I may say Biden's saying 'hello, Mr. Netanyahu' is parasitic of what he is actually saying which is that he will continue to sodomize trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
The "theater" does not win out over "real life."
It may do. A theatrical performance may change how we view a real life person.
The two are seen as indistinguishable and structurally implicated.
No. They are distinguishable. Tina Fey may have been an uncannily good Sarah Palin impersonator but there was no 'structural' implication such that they became indistinguishable.
"As though literature, theater, deceit, infidelity, hypocrisy, infelicity, parasitism, and the simulation of real life were not part of real life!"
They are not part of real life. Even if I use A.I to create a 'deep fake' video of Biden sodomizing Nethan-Yahoos, it would not be part of real life.
Iterability "blurs the simplicity of the line dividing inside [real life or fiction] from outside [fiction or real life], the order of succession or of dependence between the terms [privileging real life or literature], prohibits (prevents and renders illegitimate) the procedure of exclusion"
It has no such magical power. It simply isn't the case that my saying nasty stuff about Joe Biden actually causes him to do nasty stuff.
This is the point at which this reviewer's summaries began. Iterability "itself" cannot be privileged as a "transcendental condition of possibility" for fiction, theater, parasite, citation, and the like.
Sure it can. Anything at all can be privileged by some nutter for some stupid purpose.
Whereas repetition presupposes a full idealization (repeatability as such),
No it doesn't. We may repeat ourselves in absence of mind.
iterability entails no more than a minimal idealization which would guarantee the possibility of the re-mark.
It entails nothing at all. Who is to say that contexts actually change? Everything may be part and parcel of one univocal context and every utterance may mean 'I want to kill Daddy and fuck Mummy'- at least to some quack or charlatan.
But since "the iterability of the mark does not leave any of the philosophical oppositions which govern the idealizing abstraction intact (for instance, serious/non-serious, literal/ metaphorical or ironic, normal/parasitical, strict/non-strict, etc.'"
It leaves everything in tact save by the stipulation of a nutter who may also believe that iterability caused the neighbor's cat to graduate summa cum laude from Harvard University- but not the one you are thinking of. This is a different Harvard University on a planet far far away.
, this is an impure idealization, a contradiction in terms, which cannot be caught within the either-or logic of noncontradiction.
Sure it can. The thing is called 'ex falso quodlibet'. From nonsense, any nonsense can be logically deduced.
"No process or project of idealization without iterability, and yet no possible idealization of iterability"
Iterative methods are used in computational mathematics. They can be idealized or treated at a high level of abstraction easily enough.
. In order to work with a non-transcendental, non-logical (non)-concept (or graphic) such as iterability, one must think a great change of mindset.
Or one must be as stupid as shit.
Of course a mere change of mindset, however great, will not bring about revolutions. Yet, without this revolutionary change of mind, revolutionary "programs" will fall into the same metaphysical bind of idealized and repeatable intention and context that Derrida plots in speech act theory.
But 'the structure of Scientific revolutions' shows that there are no 'metaphysical binds'. There is only stuff which is useful as opposed to stuff which is stupid shit.
Derrida hints as follows at the practical possibilities of the graphic of iterability: "it constantly disturbs, subverts, and displaces the limit [between nature and convention]. It has an essential rapport with the force (theoretical and practical, 'effective,' 'historical,' 'psychic,' 'political,' etc.) of the deconstruction of these oppositional limits
The same could be said of my farts. If the outcome of your lucubrations is a statement which can equally apply to a fart, then you have wasted your time.
Our own arena of practice is the production of theoretical discourse.
Of startling stupidity.
This practice would be significantly altered if it recognized that theoretical discourse were irreducibly iterable
it is an algorithmic method of producing nonsense from nonsense. But that's just 'ex falso quodlibet'.
(and it is a mark of the necessary "impurity" of a graphic that such recognition must come through that very conscious intention that the graphic calls into question)
No graphic calls anything into question save in a manner of speaking. But that manner of speaking applies equally to farts.
: What must be included in the description, in what is described, but also in the practical discourse and in the writing of that describing [decrivante—dewriting—undermining graphematicity by its attempt at unitary idealization] description, is not merely the factual reality of corruption and of alteration [de I'ecart], but corruiptability (to which it would be better henceforth to give this name, which implies generally a pathological disfunction, adegeneration or an ethico-political defect) and dissociability, all the characteristics tied to iterability which Sec proposed to account for. That can only be done if the "-bility" is recognized from the inception [des Ventame] as broached and breached [entamee] in its "origin" by iterability .
In other words, stupid shit can only be done if some other stupid shit is recognized from the inception of the deception of the perception of the conception of the catachresis of the constipated cat's self-scotomized alterity in the ipseity of its own self-constitutive mise en abyme of some stupid shite I just pulled out of my arse.
A case of such altered practice is a section title in Sec: "Parasites. Iter, Of Writing: That It Perhaps Does not Exist." The page and a half where Derrida explicates himself are spectacular.
They are shite.
Briefly, the lines of argument are as follows: Derrida's subtitle grafts itself on a Cartesian "original," De essentia rerum materialum; et iterum de Deo, quod existat (On the Essence of Material Things: And Likewise of God, That He Exists).
This is the ontological argument revived by Godel.
This is not just an "example" of invoking a "presence" through a deliberate citation. Descartes himself is also iterating; for this is a "repetition" (iteration) of an earlier Cartesian argument for the proof of God's existence.
No. His first argument was that nothing can come of nothing. If we exist, we must have a Creator. His second argument is more similar to St. Anselm's. However, the Church decided long ago that Faith is founded upon a mystery, not on some bogus psilosophy.
But it is not even merely a case of iteration, for the word "iter" is also mentioned.
Spivak did not study Latin. Thus she does not know that 'iterum' means repetition. 'Iter' means a journey. They are etymologically unrelated.
In that sense it is also "literally" an "iter"-ation.
No. Descartes knew 'iterum' meant 'again' or 'repetition'. However the word 'iter' meaning 'path' or 'journey' had a special meaning for him because he had a dream in which he read Ausonius's line- Quod vitae sectabor iter" (What path shall I take in life?). As a result of that dream, he devoted himself to a type of theistic philosophy.
Thus the text mimes a deconstruction of the oppositions between literal and figural, use and mention. "Iter" is not only "simulacrum"—likewise—as the English translation of the subtitle suggests. It is also "alter" or other.
There is no 'iter'. There is 'iterum' which is etymologically unrelated. Spivak is making a fool of herself. The fact is, a 'Europeanist' needs to know some basic Latin and ancient Greek. At least, they should look up relevant words in an etymological dictionary
A corroboration of Derrida's insistence that the suppression of othering
which would be a good thing
or iteration
suppression of alterity, not iteration
carries an ethico-political charge is borne out by the fact that, in the usage of the modern languages of Northern India, "itara"—other—not only means "inferior," but is also the name of the untouchable castes.)
It is a Sanskrit word which can mean 'low', 'ignoble' etc. But it is also used to mean 'ordinary' people. It is not the name of any caste though 'Tiyar' may be related. However, the problem is that the caste system is sustained by alterity which we would rather see suppressed.
Derrida is questioning the "allegorical" and "literal" in terms of his own reading of Descartes, as well as in reading "as such":
Why bother? Descartes himself told us about his dreams and the effect they produced on him. He had taken a path in life which he believed would prove, using reason alone, that God necessarily exists. He was wrong, but we don't question his faith in a Straussian manner.
The iterability of the proof (of God's existence) produces writing,
It may do or it may not. Godel seems to have suppressed his own ontological proof.
makes one write [fait ecriture—italics Derrida's] and draws the name of God (of the infinite Being) into a graphematic drift [derive] [a double take by Descartes, in this case, on an earlier text of his own] that forbids (for instance) any decision as to whether the "name of God" refers to God or to the name of God, whether God is more than the name of God, whether it signifies "normally" or "cites," etc., God being here, like/as [comme] writing, what at the same time renders possible and impossible, probable and improbable the purity of the opposition between the "normal" and, for example, the citational or the parasitical, the serious and the non-serious, the strict and the non-strict or less strict .
Descartes was aware of the debate between Thomists and the followers of Duns Scotus re. 'univocity'. It may be that he was influenced by the latter's Opus oxoniense
So Derrida chooses to memoralize this subtitle in his own because it launches the name of God into the double take of writing.
Where, so far as we know, it has always been.
Derrida puts writing in the place of God: "Iter, Of Writing." But writing is not in opposition to God.
It may be.
In order to let the opposition play, God as Logos "certainly should exist."
Because the Bible tells us so.
Only of writing as graph can it be said "that it perhaps does not exist."
Nope. Writing as graph definitely does exist even if- like the script of the Indus Valley- we can't read it.
It does not certainly have being as defined by the either-or structure of ontological discourse (the language of the logic of being).
Ontological discourse can be dialethic or involve fuzzy logic or have a complicated type theory.
It should perhaps be remarked here that, if a reading such as this were to be translated to the social text, it would require an extremely sharp eye for "history."
Which Spivak lacks. But it doesn't stop her does it? 'Social text' was the magazine which fell for Sokal's spoof.
Clear-cut oppositions between so-called material and ideological formations would be challenged as persistently as those between literal and allegorical uses of language.
Did you know Descartes was White? Worse yet, he had a penis. This means he was continually raping Black slaves. That's totes triggering for me.
The sedimentation and investment of history as political, economic, sexual "construction" would be seen as irreducible.
Because Descartes had a White penis.
Material objects, and seemingly non-textual events and phenomena would have to be seen not as self-identical, but as the space of dispersion of such "constructions," as the condition or effect of interminable iterations.
White peeps with dicks cause other White peeps with dicks to be born. The upshot is Joe Biden sodomizing trillions of trembling Netan-Yahoos.
Yet, since iterability fractures intention as well,
Like how when you say repeatedly 'no. I won't suck you off.' you end up sucking off all and sundry even though this was not your intention.
a simple stockpiling of "authoritative analyses from this point of view" without intervention in enabling and disabling auto- and disciplinary critiques would be beside the point.
The point being to rail at White peeps more particularly if they have dicks. Did you know Capitalism was invented by a White dude who had a dick? Why has Capitalism not been banned? Is it because billionaires are bribing whoever it is who is in charge of banning evil shit?
"The matter we are discussing here concerns the value, possibility, and system of what is called logic in general.
Not if Derrida is doing the discussing because he was too fucking stupid to understand logic.
The laws and the effects with which we have been dealing, those of iterability for example, govern the possibility of every logical proposition.... No constituted logic or any rule of logical order can, therefore, provide a decision or impose its norms upon these prelogical possibilities of logic"
The prelogical possibilities of logic are still only the possibilities of logic. Equally, the pre-internal combustion world's possibility of inventing an internal combustion engine was simply the possibility of it being invented.
This seems an iteration of Heidegger's placing of "assertion" [Aussage]—the logical language of philosophical prediction—
Aussage means statement. I suppose she means 'predication'
as "aris[ing] from circumspective interpretation."
If it is done by a circumspect dude rather than a crazy nutter.
"The basic stock of 'categories of signification,' which passed over into the subsequent science of language, and which in principle is still the standard, is oriented towards discourse as assertion. But if on the contrary we take this phenomenon in the fundamental principle of primordiality and breadth of an existentiale, then there emerges the necessity of settling the science of language on foundations which are ontologically more primordial" (BT, 209).
like farting. The science of language must return to the primordial fart.
Given his own comments on the "metaphysical-oedipal rhetoric," it is interesting that Derrida has recently disclaimed continuous filiation with Heidegger in his Reply to Ricoeur:
Because Ricoeur was the better scholar
Ricoeur inscribes his entire reading of "White Mythology" in dependence on his reading of Heidegger..., as if I had attempted no more than an extension or a continuous radicalization of the Heideggerian movement.... Everything takes place as if I had only generalized what Ricoeur calls Heidegger's "limited criticism" and as if I had stretched it inordinately, beyond all bounds.
Whereas the truth was that Derrida was writing nonsense for crazy people.
A little further on, in the same gesture of assimilation,... Ricoeur resorts to the figure of a "theoretical core common to Heidegger and to Derrida."...This continuist assimilation or setting into filiation surprised me.... I see myself the object, after being assimilated to Heidegger, of an objection whose principle I had myself formulated previously.
Also Ricoeur smells bad and his Mummy doesn't love him.
What follows makes no pretense at figuring out the relationship between Heidegger and Derrida.
There was none. Heidi was a spoiled Catholic who, like the Centrum party, it was worth NATO's while to rehabilitate. Derrida was Jewish. No doubt, the sly fellow was making good money by cheating credulous Yanks.
It is simply yet another summary or checklist of certain moments in Heidegger that bring "Limited Inc." to mind, followed by a few suggestions as to how Derrida might be different.
Derrida would have needed to know Hebrew and to have read the Talmud if he wanted to be taken seriously by his own people.
To interpret the possibility of a metaphysical-oedipal disclaimer would call for a different strategy.
Derrida killed Heidegger and raped his widow who was also his own Mummy.
My reading of Heidegger is somewhat anthropologistic. I have been guided by Derrida's insight: "We see, then, that Dasein, if it is not man, is not, however, other than man."
Because it is just a word some silly men use.
Although I am attempting to show that a Derridian practice would question "the name of man as Dasein" my reading of Derrida might also seem anthropologistic.
as opposed to the gushing of a school-girl of startling stupidity.
I think I must insist that a deconstructivist position cannot reduce out anthropologism fully.
Why insist? Nothing can do so.
Like the paradox of minimal idealization, the trace of anthropologism obstinately clings as restance to the practice of deconstruction.
Not to mention the practice of shitting oneself.
Heidegger shows that philosophical assertion, the ideal of scientific rigor, and common sense share a certain exclusivism or restriction.
No he doesn't. He wrote nonsense.
Of philosophical assertion, Heidegger writes: "Determining [or predicating] does not first discover the seen...as such;
No one suggested otherwise. First we see a thing and then we apply predicates to it- e.g. 'pretty' or 'ugly'.
it rather restricts the seen as a mode of showing,
It is not a 'mode of showing'. If you sneak into my bathroom while I am showering, it is not the case that I am showing you my tiny todger.
in the first instance, to that which shows itself...
It may be trying desperately to hide itself
as such so that by this expressive [ausdmcklich]
express
restriction of our view, the manifest may be made expressively manifest in its determinateness [Bestimmtheit]"
certitude.
What this rigamarole is supposed to mean is that there are things which want to unveil their being to you because that 'epiphany' will get you thinking along the stupid lines of a spoiled Catholic who turned Nazi when that seemed like a career move.
1 invoke Hegel's notion of determination on p. 81. The title of this second chapter in Hegel's Science of Logic is "Dasein"—generally translated as "Determinate Being."
'Determinate Being as such (Dasein)'. This is fine if you believe ' Logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth unveiled, truth as it is in and for itself. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite sprit.' On the other hand, if you believe in Darwin, not Deuteronomy, Logic is merely a system of making correct deductions on the basis of some set of axioms. It may be a Hibert or a Gentzen calculus (the latter features conditional tautologies). However, verification is still necessary. Your deduction may be logically impeccable but it may also be completely wrong.
Heideggerian Dasein would not take the philosophical mode of assertion as its privileged determination.
Because of Darwin and geology and cosmology and so forth.
In looking for a pre-predicative place of Dasein's operation, Heidegger looks forward to the Derridian project.
Nope. He was a spoiled Catholic following in Brentano's footsteps. Derrida started off studying Husserl but, like most Frogs, didn't cotton to his transcendental ego. After that, he just putzed around writing nonsense. Still, at least he wasn't a Marxist and didn't end up killing his wife.
Indeed, Derrida's critique of speech act theory can be put this way: speech act theory attempts to go beyond the privileged philosophical mode of predication, which Austin calls the constative.
Saying 'x is the case' is 'constative but not 'philosophical'.
Yet, in assigning a totalizable and homogeneous intention and context to the performative, it falls prey to the same metaphysical presuppositions that the constative shares.
But anything at all falls prey to nonsensical presuppositions- e.g. it is just an excuse to prevent people from realizing that Biden is sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
Of scientific rigor and common sense, Heidegger writes as follows: "Because understanding, in accordance with its existential meaning, is Dasein's own being-capacity [Seinkonnen], the ontological presuppositions of historiological [historisch] knowledge in principle go beyond [iibersteigen] the idea of rigor held in the most exact sciences.
They go beyond sanity but turn back when threatened with sodomy by Biden's cock which is larger than the universe.
Mathematics is not more rigorous than historiology [Historie], but only narrower, because the existential foundations relevant for it lie within a narrower range" (BT, 195).
Math requires a high IQ. Any cretin can do 'historiology' more particularly if it is of the 'Grievance Studies' variety.
Derrida's suggestion about the language (theory and practice) of the human sciences is that the condition of the possibility of its being (its ontological presuppositions)—iterability—is what denies it rigor.
But the language of the natural sciences is mathematics including the constructive mathematics of iteration. It has quite sufficient rigor to be used to build rocket ships which can land on far away planets.
In that Heidegger relates these ontological presuppositions to the impossibility of a fundamental ontology,
Physicists may find a fundamental ontology. Philosophers won't because they are too stupid.
he remains recuperable to a Derridian idiom.
or to an Iyerian idiom which suggests that Biden is sodomizing him on the astral plane.
In that he describes this relationship as a principled transcendence he seems to sketch a privileging of which Derrida would be as critical as he is of the metaphysical underpinnings of speech act theory.
In which case we can be critical of Derrida privileging his own rectum by refusing to let everybody sodomize him.
Comparably, of assertion as communication, Heidegger writes: "As something communicated [als Mitgeteilte], the asserted [das Ausgesagte] can be 'shared' ['geteilf] by others with the person making the assertion, without his having to have the entity which he has pointed out and determined within graspable and visible proximity [ohne dass sie selbst das ausgezeigte und bestimmte Seiende in greif—und sichtbarer Nahe haben\:
Who doesn't know this? I can tell you I have a tiny todger. You don't have to see it to believe me. Why would I lie about a thing like that?
The asserted can be passed along in 'further retelling.' ...But at the same time, what has been pointed out may become veiled again in this further retelling"
You may say 'that dude told me about the size of his penis. All I asked him for was directions to the gents lavatory.'
One could find the itinerary of iterability here.
No one couldn't. Your telling somebody else about my telling you about my dick will not enable anybody to get the itinerary of such discussions- e.g. the fact that in the year 2028, X will mention this to Y while on an bus in Kathmandu.
But only the labor of interpretation can establish that the Heideggerian terms "entity," "pointing out," "grasping and seeing," "becoming veiled" are untotalizable,
unless one stipulates that they are totally shite.
and that Heidegger is contrasting the definiteness of determination to something irreducibly indefinite.
Why stop there? Why not contrast food and shit?
Derrida confronts "communication" head on in Sec, and suggests that determinations are themselves indeterminate:
only in the sense that they are relatives of Jan Masaryk who died in 1948 and didn't leave them any money in his will.
"If communication possessed several meanings and if this plurality should prove to be irreducible, it would not be justifiable to define communication a priori as the transmission of a [determinate] meaning, even supposing that we could agree on what each of these words (transmission, meaning, etc.) involved."
It would be justifiable if the matter was justiciable and a Court decided that the intention of the communicator was reducible to one and only one reasonable interpretation. Speech act theory doesn't have to fit every possible statement. It is enough if, for a large class of useful statements, it meets ordinary standards of truth, accuracy, etc.
Yet when Derrida writes, "However, even to articulate and to propose this question I have had to anticipate the meaning of the word communication: I have been constrained to predetermine communication as a vehicle,"
Only because he was stupid. He could just have said 'communication' is a Tarskian primitive.
we cannot but sense the strong Heideggerian theme on the pre-, the inevitable forestructure of interpretation and the as-structure of understanding.
Neither of which are relevant. We may use a term without knowing what it means but gradually, based on other people's reactions, divine what that meaning might be. When I was a kid in Delhi, I didn't know that the word 'Abbe choothia' means 'Oi! Cunt!) . I was under the impression that it was a friendly form of address. Being slapped by my Hindi teacher set me right.
The Heideggerian Dasein, structurally in between this pre- and the following post-, is the scene of non-self-identity:
which is like the scene of the railway station which is actually a relative of Jan Masaryk except it isn't because it is the fart of its own fart. Writing nonsense is easy.
"Dasein is always 'beyond itself [iiber sich hinaus],
except when it is its own behind as the fart of its own fart except when it is a relative of Jan Masaryk who was actually a railway station.
not as a way of behaving towards other entities which it is not, but as Being towards the being-capacity which it is itself. This being-structure of the essential 'is an issue,' we shall denote as Dasein's 'Being-ahead-of-itself'"
We shall connote by that denotation that not only did being-ahead-of-itself became its own behind so as to give itself head, but that various relatives of Jan Masaryk, all of whom were railway stations, looked on laughing maniacally.
. Such a principle of an irreducible non-self-identity is indeed Derrida's theme as well.
Or that of Sartre. Why couldn't the French just accept Husserl's transcendental ego?
Yet the relationship between the two philosophers is not one of continuous radicalization.
They weren't radical. Heidi was right wing but useless. Derrida was supposed to be a Lefty but he may simply have been stupid.
It is rather the prying open of the Heideggerian text (and is thus discontinuous with it) by turning the principle of non-self-identity into iterability,
i.e. repeating what can't be repeated
which will grant neither a totalizable horizon nor homogeneity.
unless we threaten it with a beating.
It is here that the structural unconscious plays its role.
That of Julia Roberts in 'Pretty Woman'- right?
Lacking such a category, the closest Heidegger comes in Sein und Zeit to a practical recognition of alterity is: "The laying-bare of Dasein's originary being must rather be wrested from Dasein as a counter-move [im Gegunzug] to the falling ontico-ontological tendency of interpretation" .
NO! Dasein must be sodomized by Dasein's own originary fart before its own annunciation (himmelfart) of zugzwang iterability is barely laid (kaum gefickt) by its own hermeneutic of self-scotomization. I have proved all this in my next book.
It is in this matter of practical imperatives that Heidegger again looks forward to Derrida.
They were supposed to meet. Apparently Heidi tried to find a German equivalent for ' différance'. Then he died- which, I suppose, was the only proper way to translate Derrida's shite.
Understandably, Heidegger does not see his own practice as "express[ing] a priority of the 'practical' attitude over the theoretical" (BT, 238). Yet in suggesting that "care [Sorge]...always caring [Besorgen] and caring-for [Fursorge], even if only privately...as an originary structural totality, lies 'before' [vor] every factical 'attitude' and 'situation' of Dasein," he is introducing the category of what might be called 'affect in general' into ontology—a category that would conventionally find no place there, and that is still resisted by disciplinary cognitive interpretations of "care."
Nazis are very caring. Thankfully, they too die.
Here too the structural unconscious displaces the reserves of Heidegger's thought. For Derrida, a category such as care cannot be neatly distinguished from other desiring affects such as "willing, wishing, urge, addiction" (BT, 238-39).
Setting up a concentration camp. Writing worthless shite.
Care can no longer be "ontologically 'earlier' within the full 'ontological horizon"' for the thought of a full horizon would itself be contained within a philosophical affect.
Only if 'philosophical affects' were similar to premature ejaculations.
Following this pattern of a deconstructive insight recuperated by an idealist blindness which Derrida has noticed in Heidegger since "Structure, Sign, and Play," the Heideggerian imperative for the authentic ontology of Dasein is: "Our efforts must rather aim at leaping into this 'circle,' originarily and wholly, so that we ensure a full view of Dasein's circular Being, even as a Dasein analysis is broached"
Why not do something useful instead?
The circle in question is the impossibility of ever producing an interpretation and an understanding that are free of the existentially (though not empirically) motivated structures of as- and for- and beyond.
But they are also free of any type of utility. Why enter a vicious circle if all you do is waste your time?
"Historiology must then come to terms with [abfinden] less rigorous possibilities of knowing [than scientific knowledge], for "according to the most elementary rules of logic, this circle is a circulus vitiosus"
Meanwhile, research in STEM subjects had created a very virtuous circle indeed. Oddly, a Nazi- Gentzen (Logic's lost genius)- had done useful work on natural deduction systems during the Thirties.
Science and common sense attempt to ignore this vicious circle.
Nope. They find methods of verification which distinguish virtuous from vicious circles.
But "what is decisive is not to get out of the circle but come into it the right way" (BT, 195).
by writing portentous nonsense? But anybody could write reams of that sort of shite.
It is in search of this right way that the Heidegger of Being and Time recognizes the ontological priority of care and proposes the leap.
Sadly, the Soviet Army didn't get a chance to leap at him with both feet nor to care for him in a nice Gulag.
But here too a certain complication must, at least, be set down; "the ontologically elemental totality of the care- structure cannot be traced back to some ontical 'arch-element'" (BT, 241).
Sure it can. The arch-element is the originary arc of its own being towards becoming of the backwardization of its own self-scotomized gestalt as the suppository of the catachresis of the transcendental anus of it own fart of a himmelfart. Either that or the other way around.
To engage in analytical and interpretative activity with a full awareness of the circularity of determinate Being is then the articulation of authentic Dasein.
Or the Dasein of its own self-scotomization as the himmelfart of its own fart.
In its broad outlines, this might seem sympathetic to the deconstructive project.
It might also seem apathetic to the catachresis of its own hermeneutic circle as the fart of its own himmelfart.
In its detail, a certain rewriting becomes necessary. Iterability, as I have indicated, takes away the possibility of a full awareness.
Because you fell asleep.
It rewrites the enclosure of the circle as, at best, an ellipse that stands in for the impossibility of pure or geometric figuration.
An ellipse is a pure or geometric figuration of a closed conic section.
The end of the project—the articulation of authentic Dasein—becomes impossible because authenticity—Eigentlichkeit (ownness, properness, literalness, trueness)— is at the limit a denial of the lack of self-identity which Heidegger himself posits and which in Derrida becomes irreducible.
Nope. There may be some complicated type theory which 'reduces' the intension to some unique extension. The fact that Derrida commits the intensional fallacy doesn't mean that someone else can't remove it from his shitty oeuvre. But, why bother?
In place of the leap into the circle comes the need to "get used to the idea that, knowingly or not, willingly or not, [we] deal fictively with things which are marked in advance by the possibility of fiction, either as the iterability of acts or as the system of conventionality.
Possibilities don't mark stuff in advance. We may think certain possibilities exist but we may be wrong.
[We] cannot therefore de-limit the object-fiction or the object-parasite, except by a counter-fiction"
Nope. We can delimit any fiction of our own in any way we like. JK Rowling can make Dumbeldore homosexual and thus severely limit his ability to get girls preggers. No 'counter fiction' is required to prevent Dumbeldore doing the dirty deed with Minerva McGonagall.
(If this were an extended discussion of the trace structure as condition of possibility and denial of rigor, one would direct one's attention to Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art," one of Derrida's texts in "The Retrait of Metaphor." In these pages I have followed my surmise that, if one wished to plot the dynamics between Heidegger and Derrida in terms of a theory of (the) practice (of theory and so on), one could do worse than to examine the trace—here iterability—in terms of the Heideggerian onticontological difference; a possibility suggested by Derrida himself in "Differance."
The problem here is that Heidegger is theological or mystical whereas Derrida is supposed to be political. Simply saying 'language is complicated. Things mean different things at different times to different people' doesn't 'plot dynamics'. The other problem is that Derrida is post-war. The Humanities had shrunk and grown wan in the shadow of technocratic STEM subjects. Marxism was a complex mathematical theory. Freud was consigned to the dustbin of history because his shite could not be given a mathematical representation. Hegel's logic might have a representation in Lawvere's category theory. Husserl had been a dead end while Heidi might be 'literary' and have to do with Holderlin or Zen satori or something of that sort. What of Derrida? Could anything mathsy be done with his shite? No. Even Chomsky was found to be useless. A statistical approach to E-language could make great strides in voice recognition, machine translation etc. We now have large language models and A.Is which might take over many of our jobs. But Derrida has contributed nothing to it. 'Differance' is just deferring the inevitable total eclipse of belles-lettristic psilosophy. True, you could get in some Bengali she-monkey to make out the thing was about 'Grievance Studies' and Neo-Liberalism glaring failure to ban Whiteness or dicks or White dicks. But you really are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Sooner or later some Dalit will point out that the Bengali she-monkey is high caste. Her great-grandfather was a cook and thus had food to eat. How this bloody bitch can say she is subaltern?! Did she hang herself while on the rag when she was 15? NO! This proves there is Brahmin conspiracy to suppress the Bahishkrit who are not having any food to eat for trillions of years due to Aryan invasion.
It should by now be clear that Derrida's invocation of "fictions" does not mean indenturing the discipline of philosophy to the discipline of literature.
Nor does it have anything to do with discipline though maybe it is a Foucaldian punishment meted out by Neo-Liberalism to bahishkrit peepuls wot is doing MPhil at JNU due to Brahmin oppression.
One might think of it perhaps as deconstructing the Hegelian opposition and ranking between the ethical and the aesthetic.
So that what is pretty becomes what is good or pretty good- right?
That particular undertaking can be located in the analysis of Sittlichkeit in the left-hand column of Glas.Spivak says- "As the father's phallus works in the mother's hymen, between two legs, so Glas works at origins, between two columns, between Hegel and Genet.'
It is well known that Heidegger must rewrite nearly every word in the vocabulary of philosophy because he has seen through the rigor of philosophical language.
No. He had replaced Brentano & Husserl's notion of intentionality with something more elusive or mystical.
It is possible to situate Derrida's increasing experimentation with language in a comparable impulse.
An impulse to shit higher than his arsehole. The difference is that Derrida was post-War and of the Space Age. Philosophy had been told it was useless and stupid and should shut the fuck up. Karl Popper was considered the greatest philosopher in the world. As for Heidi, Bertrand Russell- still very prominent in the Sixties because of CND- he had been dismissed as a verbose Nazi nutjob.
As I remark above, he seems to be bent upon coining a multiplicity of terms for more or less the same thing: trace, supplement, differance, parergon, retrait, iterability—and many more.
Nothing wrong in that. Physicists keep discovering more and more elementary particles which do different things.
He also twists and pluralizes style and typography to account for the fact that a unitary message about a unitary object from a unitary author to a unitary reader is what his writing calls into question.
Because Anglo-America had already decided that Hegel and Heidegger wrote nonsense. Husserl had had the honesty to admit that his type of philosophy simply wasn't possible.
Where Derrida is strikingly different from Heidegger is in his entertainment of the "non-serious."
Apparently the French think Jerry Lewis was a comic genius.
(Here one might speculate upon his relationship to Nietzsche.) Since "Limited Inc." is an especial critique of pure seriousness as ethico-political centralization,
which is what obtains in Democracies under the Rule of Law
the non-serious element is most pertinent here. The mingling of serious and non-serious in a critique of seriousness is well exemplified in the following passage: [Iterability] carries an internal and impure limit that prevents it from being identified, gathered to itself, or in its presence [en soi ou aupres de soi], from being reappropriated, just as it forbids the reappropriation of that whose iteration it nonetheless broaches and breaches [entame]. But under such conditions, one will reply, no scientific or philosophical theory of speech acts in the rigorous, serious, and pure sense would be possible. That is, indeed, the question.... A theoretical discourse of this (classical, traditional) type must indeed tend, in accordance with its proper ethics and teleology, to produce speech acts that are in principle serious, literal, strict, etc. The only way that speech act theory might escape this traditional definition would be for it to assert (theoretically and practically) the right of its own speech acts not to be serious, etc., or rather not simply serious, strict, literal. Has it done this up to now? Might it have escaped me? In all seriousness, I cannot exclude this possibility. But am I serious here?... The drama of this family of theoreticians: the more they seek to produce serious utterances, the less they can be taken seriously. It is up to them to seize this opportunity or to transform this infelicity into delight [jouissance]
Speech act theory isn't particularly profound but Per Martin Lof and Carlo Dalla Pozza did take it up and it is used in human-computer interaction. In other words, it is 'serious' enough in the sense that it might pay for itself. Derrida's shite lacked this quality. Was he entertaining? Not really. Still, I suppose we could say he was the Zizek of his time. The big mistake made by the French was to retain Philosophy as an exam subject at High School.
"But am I serious here?" Within the disciplines of philosophy and literary criticism, that is the question that many readers of Derrida have not been able to answer.
I suppose Derrida had in mind the French usage by which the word means someone diligently doing something intrinsically worth while.
Yes, Derrida is "making fun of" Searle; and "one does not write philosophy like that."
Derrida is ignoring the fact that Searle's stuff might have a useful application. He mentions 'intellectual property' but not the fact that Austin's legacy might have 'cash value'. The fact that a Spivak might inherit from Derrida shows that he wasn't a serious player. He has no legacy except the ghost of the ghost of fart that is its own himmelfart.
But also, to repeat, the charge is precisely against that seemingly impenetrable but ultimately perhaps even stupid seriousness of the academic intellectual; that is the "condition or effect— take your pick" of ethico-political repression.
What ethico-political repression did Spivak face? As for academic intellectuals- some are Professors of STEM subjects and make discoveries or create inventions which can make everybody's life better.
And one should give Derrida the benefit of the doubt that, when he asks such a question it does not only mean "you can't tell, can you?" but that, "given the implications of my critique, I can't tell either; yet I will take my stand and make the critique nonetheless."
Why not just shit yourself and then grin and put your hands down the seat of your pants and pull out some nice 'chocolate cake' which you invite everybody to share?
It is a critique of the vanguardism of the theoretician.
What was Derrida in the vanguard of? Nothing at all. French Communism would have disappeared by itself. Althusser wasn't exactly a formidable opponent. He was as crazy as a bed-bug.
"It is right also that philosophy should be called knowledge of the truth.
It isn't. It is called love of knowledge (or Wisdom, to be more accurate).
For the end of theoretical knowledge is truth,
No. It is a useful 'Structural Causal Model'.
while that of practical knowledge is action (for even if they consider how things are, practical men do not study the eternal, but what is relative and in the present)."
No. It may be advise or a prediction or a recipe of some sort. Those with the means may outsource 'practical knowledge' and act upon it.
It is all the more poignant that since he is himself caught up in an international academic lifestyle, Derrida can behave as a nonserious marginal (given that his model is the criminal or defendant rather than the revolutionary) in limited ways.
Arthur Koestler's 'the call-girls' (i.e. celebrity academics or 'intellectuals' who fly around the world to attend seminars and conferences) came out in 1972. Plenty of people were satirizing these jokers who had nothing to say but who liked saying it anyway.
1 should insist that, to undermine the plausibility of one's arguments, to give the reader the ingredients for "situating" one's own "intention," remains a considerable risk.
Not if you have tenure.
(Indeed, such an undermining makes many devoted readers wonder why Derrida has turned "autobiographical," why he does not rigorously "deconstruct texts" anymore.)
Why read when you can just shit out books?
It is a sign of the dynamism and power of the ideology that Derrida questions that this undermining can be recuperated into varieties of esoteric game-playing.
No. It is a sign that Derrida was shit at questioning. Also, if you don't have tenure you feel 'esoteric game-playing' is a small reward for having wasted your life.
So much said, let me once again tabulate. I have spoken already of the significance of the thematics of the copyright,
No you haven't. You need to know a lot about intellectual property law to discuss the thematics of copyright.
and the argument—if that is indeed what it is—about the oedipal metaphysics of the discipline of philosophy.
'Anxiety of influence' a la Harold Bloom, maybe.
Apart from these, one of the most noticeable items of nonseriousness in "Limited Inc." is that its sections are alphabetized. Its subtitle is "abc," which is pronounced abaisse—laid low. The implications are obvious. "ABC" might also mean a primer, as in the following passage: "One of [See's] conventions which, like all others, cannot be rigorously justified,
Sure it can. Pick the right protocols, and away you go- if you are smart. Decisions made by law courts are 'rigorously justified' in terms of case and statute law. I suppose human-computer interaction based on speech act theory is getting more rigorous even if only in stochastic, i.e. Bayesian, terms.
supposed the knowledge of certain abes of classical philosophy...".
Nope. It supposed the knowledge of post-Fregean analytic philosophy and mathematical logic.
In which case what we read might he intended as a primer of how to bring down the incorporation of the copyrighted liability organization that is the philosophical establishment.
Derrida was part of the French philosophical establishment. It didn't have any liability whatsoever but his copyright in his works was protected by law.
Further, the masquerading of the authority of the alphabet,
At Derrida's primary school, the alphabet would often pretend to be the Head-master and beat him black and blue.
the representative of phonographic writing in the narrow sense, might be to polarize the absurdity of accepting the authority of the "representative" of speech as the generative moment of voice-consciousness, as the explanatory speech-act convention, or yet as the determining sovereign intention.
Yet this is what courts of law do. Nixon faced impeachment because of stuff he said which was recorded in his office. Through out history, there have been actual sovereigns whose word, quite literally, was law. Determining 'sovereign intention' is still an important function of the Law Courts.
We are caught up short when, at the end of the next to the last section, Derrida writes: "And, for the second time, I am going to conclude a bit abruptly, since I see that all I have left is the letter z" . I should add, of course, that I cannot guarantee Derridian authorization for any of these meanings. After abc, d occupies itself with the critique of the legal copyright to one's own words and mimes citationality by testing the seriousness of "Copyright © by John D. Searle" as it is plausibly placed between more and more quotation marks. Derrida also tests the status of the signature as a man's mark by examining its every implication and reproducing "his own" in various ways. Now these are, of course, "serious" demonstrations of Derrida's argument. But they are also, and unmistakably, high-class tomfoolery.
As opposed to the sort of stuff which lets me talk to my smart phone or TV remote.
And, in that at least ambivalent tone, Derrida begins f: "Let's be serious"; since it is only the "serious" tone of the performative that Austin will consider
if the performance is a joke, Austin will happily look at the joke while filtering out stuff which was not germane, like the greeting to the audience or an apology for not having been able to perform on an earlier occassion.
—and non-serious, parasitic, marginal uses (like mischief in a philosophical essay, even if it might have its point)—will be excluded.
Sadly, this would leave nothing to Derrida's oeuvre except the iteration of ignorant nonsense.
Readers will by now be prepared to read the following passage as more than a rhetorical flourish: "Faced with this speech act ('let's be serious'), readers may perhaps feel authorized in believing that the presumed signatory of this text is only now beginning to be serious, only now committing himself to a philosophical discussion worthy of the name, thus admitting that he had not done so yet." Derrida does not decide if such a feeling would be correct or not but goes on to say, in the next paragraph: "But let's be serious. Why am I having such difficulty in keeping my seriousness in this debate, to which I, in turn, have been invited? Why did I take such pleasure in accepting this invitation? Nothing compelled me to accept, and I could have—the temptation could have been strong—suggested to interested readers that they simply read 'Signature Event Context'".
The answer is that Derrida seriously thought he was smart and would be able to show up the stupid Anglos who thought he had shit for brains. But then Bergson had debated Einstein without realizing that Einstein was way smarter. Also, his theory was useful. Bergson's was belles-lettristic.
Here the possibility that the structural unconscious might waylay every so-called conscious intention is directed at Derrida himself. It cannot, of course, be more than a question, because the unconscious is another name for the it that is inaccessible to, yet broaches and breaches the I.
just like Biden's dick which is currently sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
Another theme that runs throughout "Limited Inc." is touched upon here: that Searle unwittingly demonstrates many of the arguments of Sec and that his "Reply to Derrida" is thus a case of citationality.
All replies to a critic, cite that critic's criticism. This is also true of 'cease and desist' letters asking me to stop calling the White House demanding 'Sleepy Joe get his cock out of trillions of Netan-Yahoos.'
To the question—but are we to look for such serious implications in such undisciplined language?—the answer is yes.
What serious implication? That a guy responding to a criticism cites the critic?
To introduce the nonserious, to welcome the margins of the production of philosophic discourse—that is the intent of this disciplinary critique.
Why not also welcome its shitting in your mouth?
These are the practical implications of passages such as the following: "What these 'fronts' [continental as opposed to Austinian philosophy—Searle's distinction; Derrida uses the word also in the sense of 'clandestine masks'] represent, what weighs upon them both, beyond this curious chiasmus,
Searle was an Oxford man. Them dudes may do sexual harassment but are innocent of chiasmus.
are non-philosophical forces. They must indeed be analyzed".
Unless they would prefer to have sex with Jean Genet while Hegel looks on disapprovingly.
And, "it is because of this that I agree with Sari that the 'confrontation' here is not between two prominent philosophical traditions' but between the tradition and its other, an other that is not even 'its' other any longer. But this does not imply that all 'theorization' is impossible. It merely delimits a theorization that would seek to incorporate [both in the psychoanalytic and the economic senses] its object totally but can accomplish this only to a limited degree:"
Theory does not seek to incorporate its object totally. Einstein's theory of Space-Time does not want to itself become the Universe. Steven Hawking's work does not aim to itself have a black hole inside it. Even Hannibal Lecteur did not eat the totality of his patients. He just cut out their livers or fried up a portion of their brain.
Thus it is (not) merely impertinent to acknowledge what generally remains tacit: that the academic game is played according to rules that might not pertain altogether to the disinterested intellect.
It might be played by useless nutters.
I have attempted to give a sober account of the structural unconscious in the first part of this essay. I remarked there that it seemed unusual that Searle should accuse Derrida, whose work is profoundly complicit with the general morphology of psychoanalysis,
i.e. fraud
of not acknowledging the unconscious.
Which can't be deconstructed and thus can endow illocutionary force to a proposition in a manner that Derrida can't gainsay.
Derrida comments upon it in the following way: "What a fake-out, leaving me flat-footed in the camp of those insufficiently aware of the unconscious!... For [my translator's] benefit let me specify that, ever since my adolescence, I have understood the word above all as a soccer term: an active ruse designed to surprise one's opponent occupied in another direction".
But, the unconscious is no such thing. It may cause a 'Freudian slip' e.g. your saying to a pretty woman- 'I want to fuck you' instead of 'I want to shit myself'. I'm not saying that's what happened to me. Anyway, it's the sort of thing which could happen to anybody.
That Derrida "knows" that Searle is probably not deliberately faking him out lends the irony a double edge while at the same time risking putting the entire essay beyond the pale of academic courtesy.
Derrida knew that the Anglos thought the French were terribly cerebral and Cartesian and thus didn't get the 'id' or the unconscious which they thought off in strategic terms. By contrast, for the Humean, the unconscious might be, even if isn't structured as a language, that which endows utterances with illocutionary force. We, unconsciously, intuit what other people really want. A pretty woman understand that they guy trying to talk to her at the bar isn't really interested in her views on football or politics. He wants to have sex with her. So, she casually mentions her husband and the grandson for whose wedding they both have travelled to this city. The gentleman expresses admiration for her youthful appearance and takes his leave without feeling too despondent.
Derrida makes a rather belabored and elaborate joke almost at the end of "Limited Inc." Here, through the encroachment of the nonserious, Derrida makes what would normally be considered an entirely serious point: that there is something in common between the restrictive purity of theoretical discourse and the institutional restrictions imposed upon us in its "other" (not fully its other), the "real world."
There is no such commonality. A theoretical discourse may be utterly shit in which case nobody cares what its Professors say. If it isn't, the 'real world' may take punitive action against a theoretician who makes bogus claims- e.g. having found the cure to cancer or invented 'cold fusion'.
Yet once again, although Derrida does not like the notion of the ideological production of material institutions and vice versa in case it should smell too much of binary oppositions
e.g that between food and shit. Neo-liberalism tries to convince you not to eat your own shit because it is in the pay of Big Food.
and isomorphism,
In Group theory, you don't need to distinguish between isomorphic groups.
the argument is welcome to ideology critics who would like precisely to call into question those classical constraints upon their practice.
Nobody gives a shit about crazy 'ideology critics'.
"At one moment or another [Searle] will notice that between the notion of responsibility manipulated by the psychiatric expert (the representative of law and politico-linguistic conventions, in the service of the State and of its police)
a psychiatrist may find that a person is not responsible for her actions. Such Doctors are not 'the representative of the law'. Rather they are independent witnesses whose testimony may save a defendant from prison.
and the exclusion of parasitism, there is something like a relation" .
Searle would only notice this if he were mad and lived in fear that some Police psychiatrist would get him locked up in a lunatic asylum because he had dared to criticize President Ford for sodomizing trillions of Brezhnevs thus endangering the SALT talks.
The conclusion itself is a collection of questions about seriousness, promises, and confrontations. Most serious disciplinarians
at least try to do something useful rather than pretend that Police Psychiatrists are plotting to send them to a lunatic asylum because they are 'dissidents' who argue that people should be afforded every facility to eat their own shit rather than remain in thrall to Big Food.
find these gestures offputting in published work. Why make such a thing of these marginal issues? It is because the delimiting and microstructural exigencies of practice must be acknowledged constantly, persistently.
Just as the lunatic must continually devour his own shit so as to delimit the microstructural exigencies of disciplinarity as envisioned by Big Food. Did you know that Mummies are bribed by the IMF to potty train kids? I tried to expose this conspiracy on Fox TV but it turned out that the fox in question was just a fox and didn't have a TV camera. Why does stuff like this keep happening to me?
"I have said only half in jest that women...understand a kind of work which does not...lead to one's name in a bibliography or a totemized object like a book or one's proper name...lingering in the pages of history.... That sort of activity which simply repeats itself again and again and again, like keeping the house clean, is a sustaining political activity."
One way to keep the house clean is to eat all of your own shit. That way you wont have to clean the toilet every day.
Without such interminable, inconclusive, and sustaining repetitions, theory forgets that it is also a practice,
of coprophagy
that it is at all times normed by that which it excludes; and begins to freeze, or to rot. As for example, this very binary opposition between theory and practice.
Which does not exist in genuine disciplines but does exist in paranoid ideation.
The final (non)serious item that I shall record is that Derrida manages to quote the entire "Signature Event Context" in "Limited Inc."
Like I said, the guy ate his own shit in order to shit it out again. Thrifty.
As I have said before, one of Derrida's pervasive arguments is that Searle unwittingly proves Derrida's points while seemingly opposing him.
This is also the pervasive argument of the paranoid nutjob. The fact that nobody else can see the invisible cat proves they are under the control of its mind rays.
In that sense, "Reply to Derrida" is also a species of iteration/citation of Sec. In its legending, then, "Limited Inc." is a parodistic double session of iterability.
Like shitting out the shit you just ate.
A practically fractured yet persistent critique of the hidden agenda of ethico-political exclusion; a sustained though necessarily fragmented stand against the vanguardism of theory;
Marxism may have had a theory of the vanguard. I forget whether it was the students or the drug addicts or the pedo scumbags who were supposed to be that vanguard back when I was in Collidge.
and, most importantly, a call to attend to the ever-askew "other" of the traditional disciplines,
not to mention, shit which is the 'other' of food.
the need persistently to analyze that "confrontation," to figure out and act upon that "something like a relationship" between "ideology" and "social production" which, ever non-self-identical, will not keep us locked in varieties of isomorphism.
in which case we are indistinguishable. It really doesn't matter if you are an Eco-Lesbian-Marxist nutter rather than a Lesbian-Eco-Marxist nutter. What we can agree on is dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
These are enabling principles for more than a constant cleaning-up (or messing-up) of the language of philosophy, although the importance of this latter is not to be underestimated.
It turned out that 'speech act theory' could find computational and hence commercial applications and thus may have 'paid its way'. Derrida's shite couldn't pay its way. Still it helped a Bengali monkey advance her career. Good for her.
If the "other that is not quite the other" were to be conceived of as political practice, pedagogy, or feminism—simply to mention my regional commitments—one might indeed look for "'revolutions' that as yet have no model" .
Spivak may get her wish when the Caliphate takes over West Bengal.
The full sentence in fact runs: "...'literatures' or 'revolutions' that as yet have no model." The inclusion of literature seems consonant with the sustained justification of the avant-garde that often seems to be the task of the best in European criticism.
It has had so many shitty avant-gardes that Parisians stopped paying attention and went to Disneyland instead.
Yet Derrida's usefulness for practice is not neutralized by such an association.
He was useful to equally useless nutters.
I shall explain myself by way of a European critic who wrote powerfully in support of the avant-garde and drew a careful distinction. Following Bertolt Brecht's own theories, Walter Benjamin described the former's theatrical experiments as a calling into question of the identity of the so-called Aristotelian stage,
Which Shakespeare had demolished long ago
a stage that was politically and economically, as well as culturally, a restrictive norm upon twentieth-century European theater.
No it wasn't. The French farce wasn't Aristotelian. But then neither was Aristophanes.
The identity in question is not merely "the purging of the emotions through
pity and terror
identification with the destiny which rules the hero's life." It is also the representational identification of the stage with reality,
There was no such 'identification' though audiences might hiss and boo a villain
actor with role, and finally the identification of the proper and intrinsic space of dramaturgy by the strategic exclusion of its politico-economic-ideological "other," which underwrites its being.
Nonsense! Plenty of plays took current political events as their theme. Surely, this lady has heard of Ibsen and Shaw and Strindberg and Jean Paul Sartre?
Within the rich field of Brecht's theatrical imagination, the item whose pedagogic power Benjamin singles out reminds us of citationality or iterability.
Nope. Estrangement, for Benjamin, made Brecht's 'epic' format a door to a 'Platonic' drama. He was a deeply silly man. Brecht was shit.
Just as Derrida insists that no speech act is, even originarily, tied to its appropriate context;
because no turd is connected to the asshole which originally expelled it- which is why we should eat our own shit
and that thus iterability disrupts the so-called unity of voice and intention even as it remains the condition of possibility of form; so also Benjamin writes: "Interruption is one of the fundamental methods of all form-giving.
No it isn't. It's annoying is what it is.
It reaches far beyond the domain of art. It is, to mention just one of its aspects, the origin of the quotation. Quoting a text implies interrupting its context.... '
No it doesn't. It implies there is a similarity, or even continuity, between two different contexts.
Making gestures quotable' is one of the essential elements of epic theatre.
It is an element of theater of all kinds. A catch-phrase or gimmick- e.g. a silly walk- catches on and draws crowds.
The actor must be able to space his gestures as the compositor produces spaced type."
No. The actor has much more leeway.
An extended consideration of Derrida's graphic of iterability and its undermining of self-identity on the one hand, and Brecht's iteration of gestures and its undermining of self-identity on the other, would involve at least a consideration of Derrida's early essay on Artaud, and his many comments on "spacing" as a critique of presence.
or critique as the presence of a spacing which is the fart of its own himmelfart such that it constructs itself in the catachresis of its own posterior alterity as the self-scotomization of the ipseity of the trace of its losing itself as lack in the imaginary railway station that was also, sinisterly enough, a relative of Jan Masaryk.
("Spacing [notice that this word speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space] is always the unperceived, the nonpresent, and the non-conscious....
except when it always isn't because its eternity is the recurrence of its own fart as self-scotomizing himmelfart.
Archewriting as spacing cannot occur as such within the phenomenological experience of a presence" |OG, 68].
Nor can it not not occur save as the pacing of the spacing of the critique of the catachresis of its own ipseity as self-scotomization.
Here, however, I am more interested in the contrast that Benjamin exposes between Brecht's practice, which can be pedagogic,
Marx was smart. Fuck you, Capitalism! Fuck you, very much!
and Romantic Irony,
which pursues its object in a manner precisely calculated to frustrate its own ends
which it superficially resembles.
because of the self-scotomization of its fart as himmelfart.
It seems to me that Derrida's position is to grasp iterability as the condition of possibility of the positive
Derrida grasps iterability in the same way everybody does. It is the possibility of repetition in a different context- e.g. saying yes to a marriage proposal as opposed to saying yes to the question as to whether you are likely to die a lonely virgin.
which will, however asymmetrically and unrigorously, result in the remains of a consensus;
e.g. the consensus that you will die a lonely virgin.
it therefore behooves us to forge theories (practices) of practice (theory), to whatever degree both are "normed" by the minutest detail of their structuring.
Why? If they are already 'normed' you don't have to forge shit.
In this, I place him with Brecht in Benjamin's discussion. American deconstruction, however, resembles what Benjamin writes of Romantic Irony; I choose one passage among many: "[The actor] must be free, at the right moment, to act himself thinking (about his part). It would be a mistake, at such moments, to draw a parallel with Romantic irony.... This has no didactic purpose; in the final analysis, all it demonstrates is the philosophical sophistication of the author, who, while writing his plays, always has at the back of his mind the notion that the world may, after all, be just a stage."
Benji truly was as stupid as shit. Europeans watched Shakespeare's Hamlet. They knew that actors need to look like they are thinking deep thoughts.
Indeed, the genius of American deconstructivism finds in Romanticism its privileged mode: "One may well wonder what kind of historiography could do justice to the phenomenon of Romanticism,
Romantic historiography. D'uh!
since Romanticism (itself a period concept) would then be the movement that challenges the genetic principle which necessarily underlies all historical narrative.
There is no such 'genetic principle'.
The ultimate test or 'proof' of the fact that Romanticism puts the genetic pattern of history in question would then be the impossibility of writing a history of Romanticism."
There were and are plenty of such histories.
The self-transcendent trope is, indeed, Romantic Irony, as extended by the proper heir: "In a slight extension of Friedrich Schlegels formulation, it becomes the permanent parabasis of an allegory (of figure), that is to say, irony.
No it doesn't. The permanent parabasis of an allegory would be boring shite. Ironically, this wouldn't be ironic at all. Imagine a guy who represents the plight of the proletariat under Capitalism. He starts talking to the audience about how his boss extracts 'surplus value' from him by sodomizing him incessantly. Moreover, he confiscates all of his shit so he has nothing to eat. After a couple of hours of this, the audience top themselves. Ironically, this was the cunning plan of the Capitalists!
Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding.
By repeatedly smashing your head against a brick wall.
As such, far from closing off the tropological system, irony enforces the repetition of its aberration."
Ironically, the audience which is forced to watch the prole complain that all his turds have been expropriated by the Boss class, reinforces the repetition of the aberration of the catachresis of the self-scotomization of the surd subaltern in a manner which constitutes their own posterior alterity up their own backside as the himmelfart of its own rigorous fart.
Rather than forging an irreducibly fragmented, untotalizable, yet "positive" or "affirmative" (words often used by Derrida) practice, such formulations as the above, as I have tried to show in my discussion of the structural unconscious and Reading, would remind us of nothing more than the inevitability of a repetition automatism, the repetition, in fact, of an aberration.
Which is why suicide starts looking a better and better option.
The scenario is dramatized in the words I have italicized: after the lesson of deconstruction (the substitution-consciousness of "that is to say," "in other words,") comes the "irony" of the iron fist ("as such," "enforces").
up your twat. Ironically, iron fisted fisting is not the queef of its own ipseity's self-scotomization as the himmelfart of a more rigorous fart. Rather it is the reverse. Searle should have understood this.
Because critics from the left and the right tend to see in deconstruction nothing but this itinerary of skepticism,
It is coprophagy.
any attempt, on the part of deconstruction, to disturb the status quo of theory is dismissed as "a certain Byronic chic... Deconstruction...is cogent enough to induce an occasionally felt scruple, but not a determination to change one's ways."
By chopping off one's dick and becoming 'non-binary'.
For a more specifically political (if not in every detail) deconstructive practice of theory, one should perhaps turn to the "life" and "work" of Antonio Negri.
An actual revolutionary, not just a talker.
I should like to end with the account of a humble pedagogic benefit that I receive from Derrida's generalized analogy.
She learned to write like shit from Derrida.
Graduates and undergraduates alike seem caught in a doctrine of individual uniqueness.
Whereas they are in fact interchangeable.
In a dehistoricized academy, they find no difficulty in claiming their opinions' center as their own self-possession. This is matched by the ease with which collectivities in the person are assigned centralized unitary descriptions: the fifties, the sixties, the seventies; Romanticism, Structuralism, Phenomenology.
Men. Women. Useless tossers. Smart peeps wot do STEM subjects.
In the meantime, even in the most superficial and minimal analysis, one of the most striking characteristics of any version of advanced capitalism is the fragmentation and decentralization of the individual's putative political and economic control over her own life.
Unless she is smart and made lots of money.
One of the peculiar and paradoxical byproducts of this system is to generate a conviction of individual centrality among most members of the intellectual, bourgeois, as well as managerial classes—
also, a lot of working class peeps earn good money as plumbers. Those fuckers express their individuality by buying nice cars and boats and McMansions and such.
"the internal regulation of the capitalist system which must limit concentration and decision-making power in order to protect itself against its own 'crisis'"
Fuck that. Crises are good. They permit short sharp 'shakeouts' after which there is a long bull-run.
, accompanied by either a dispirited anguish against "their" power,
Whites?|
or a spirited faith in "our" proliferation,
Darkies? Demographic replacement?
with assorted permutations and combinations, of course.
Like actually joining a political party.
The official philosophy of this group is an individualism more or less disguised as pluralism.
Why would an American need to disguise their rugged individualism? Oh. Americans who don't have dicks may have to be 'plural' or non-binary or some such thing.
The generalizable result: lack of any conceivable interest in a collective practice toward social justice,
Voting is just such a collective practice.
or in recognizing the ethico-politically repressive construction of what presents itself as theoretical, legal, benign, free, or natural.
In other words, saying 'Dead White Males are oppressing me. Why did they have to be so goddam smart?'
The "deconstructive" lesson, as articulated in "Limited Inc.," can teach student and teacher alike a method of analysis that would fix its glance upon the itinerary of the ethico-political in authoritarian fictions;
like Spivak's or Derrida's
call into question the complacent apathy of selfcentralization;
or call into question this mindless calling into question
undermine the bigoted elitism (theoretical or practical)
of bigoted elitists like Derrida or Spivak who thought they were smart even though they taught stupid shite.
conversely possible in collective practice; while disclosing in such gestures the condition of possibility of the positive.
Why use gestures? Why not speak in plain terms? If you want 'Social Justice' study Law & Econ and, like Obama, go in for 'pattern and practice investigation' followed by 'consent decree' based reform. Don't study Literature or Philosophy because they are useless and saying stupid things like 'Kant was Racist. Jane Austen was White which is totes triggering to me.'
My point here, I suppose, is that the range and risks of such a morphology (whose examples cannot match its discourse) can go rather further than a new school of literary-philosophical criticism, or even a mere transformation of consciousness.
Fuck off! Doing a morphology of imaginary grievances won't achieve shit. What is puzzling is Spivak's belief that University students and teachers are a sort of 'tabula rasa' with no previous 'oikeiosis' or natural belonging to a class or ethnic group. Spivak thinks these are empty vessels who will mindlessly accept any type of programming. They won't be able to understand that when Kant said black peeps were stupid, it was because he was an ignorant racist not because black peeps are actually stupid. Thus, their teachers have to keep gesturing to them to indicate that Kant smelled bad because he was full of shit.
As for 'transformation of consciousness'- either you can study useful stuff at Uni and get smarter and smarter and thus better able to change the world for the better or you can take drugs and destroy your mind. If you can't afford drugs, you could study Spivak-type shite so as achieve a like result.
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