Derrida Lampshades and the Men Who Wear Them At Parties

Music: David Bowie: Reality I thought I should blog more as a distraction from ebay. So I’m blogging, but the only thing I want to blog about is work-—that is, stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about as my job requires of me. So, there are these delightfully wicked pink lampshades that I envision hanging in my office.

And then there’s Jacques Derrida.

Yes, Derrida is back in my head, probably because there was some discussion on an e-list that compared Sontag's recent obituary to Derrida's.

Despite interests in similar ideas (the pain of others), Sontag’s prose is "challenging" while that of Derrida is “obscuritanist”; clearly the former is more favorably mourned than the latter. And poor Q.V. Quine’s 2000 passing almost went un-remarked (despite having at least as much influence state-side as Sontag or Derrida, albeit among the analytics—a contentious bunch if there ever was). But let me return to the dueling deaths: why does Derrida’s dying haunt me more than Sontag's? And why are Sontag’s eulogies more graceful and forgiving than Derrida's?

Well, there is Derrida’s father/son issues, I suppose; the ghosts that haunt theory (take Marx or Freud, for example) are obsessed with their progeny—their sons, as was Derrida. In his beautifully moving obituary, James K.A. Smith points readers to this lovely passage on passing:

when I am not dreaming of making love, or being a resistance fighter in the last war blowing up bridges or trains, I want one thing only, and that is to lose myself in the orchestra I would form with my sons, heal, bless and seduce the whole world by playing divinely with my sons, produce with them the world's ecstasy, their creation. I will accept dying if dying is to sink slowly, yes, into the bottom of this beloved music.

It is a lovely passage to me; I would be so moved if my own father said such a thing, such an anti-Oedipal thing. My father is not likely to say such a thing; and what if I were not a son, but a daughter? If I were Anna Freud, what difference would it make?

Derrida’s death haunts me, and the academy, for many reasons. In part his death haunts because his critique of the Western philosophical tradition is so compelling. In part his death haunts because his genius is so daunting. In part his death haunts because stories of his kindness and generosity of spirit—qualities that are not always associated with scholarly genius—are widespread. In part his death haunts because understanding his thought requires the kind of mental labor and patience that fewer and fewer intellectuals are willing to expend.

Indeed, I confess that only recently, now that I have come—in my own way—to the problems that Derrida dedicated his career to, am I truly cognizant that I have been mourning him all along. I have always had trouble reading him directly, though many of his books remain on the shelf. Appropriately, I have only made sense of Derrida’s work in spurts and sudden starts, reading some primary text against some secondary exegesis. He is a scholarly father figure more than many, if not most, and consequently, as a man, I have been mourning in trying to understand. Such a sentiment is classically cliché, but really, for someone like me there are three places to plop: dismiss his insights as so-much hocus pocus; claim to understand his work and condemn the attacks wholesale; or admit to their value but to confess ignorance. I choose the latter, of course, which I think is probably most in keeping with his stance—at least as I can tell biographically.

But there is the woman-thing, which haunts me too.

The public melee between smug journalists denouncing Derrida’s postructuralist prose at the event of his passing, and outraged academics defending his intellectual legacy and humane character, seems to me to reenact the Freudian allegory of primary horde: the exiled sons, desiring equality and resentful of the father’s control over “all” the women (in light of Spurs, this would be knowledge), conspire to band together, kill the father, and eat him. “As soon as they kill and devour the detested father,” explains Lawrence Rickels in his marvelous masturbatory text, The Vampire Lectures, “they double over with indigestion . . . and thus they find that they must also mourn him, that they are already mourning him.” In other words, the occasion of Derrida’s death and the debate over its significance not only underscores the continued importance and power of his work—especially when it is not read or misunderstood, but also the way in which the figure of Derrida haunts the academy—how it haunted it even before the anti-intellectual “feeding frenzy” on the obituary page. Derrida’s ghost forces a continual and impossible reconciliation of the thinker’s ideas and established ways of thinking—even among those contemporary intellectual progeny who refuse to engage it.

So he haunts as a figure as much as a concrete human being. I really enjoyed the documentary, Derrida, which was canned by so many snotty-film heads for being too pretentious. I found the film quite humane. It achieved the job of portraying Derrida as a human being, not so much as a figure—although the latter is, in the end, inevitable. Nevertheless, the film captured mundane origins of complicated thought (“where are my keys?”) . . . in a thoroughly masculine way.

Perhaps someone has written about this extensively—hell, I’m sure of it, but am too lazy to look. But there does seem to be a relation between Derrida-hatred and the patriarchal themes orbiting his work. As someone who does not thoroughly understand this work, I regret I cannot make the case. Even so, this masculinist thing, this association with men haunting men, seems to provide a partial . . . something.

I think I’m spent for today.