Derrida's Dying

Music: Coheed and Cambria: In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3 Derrida’s passing has become, unfortunately, much more than many would have hoped. The recent obituary in the NYT has been denounced by a number of academics as “mean-spirited” and thoroughly inappropriate, not only because the measure of a person is not simply his or her recorded thought, but his or her discrete existence--as a human being worthy of hospitality. As Judith Butler has pointed out, at issue in the many strange obituaries written presumably to “honor” Derrida is a tacit anti-intellectualism that is particularly conspicuous in the past few years (witnessing the last three presidential debates—whereby stuttering and either/or thinking passes for resolve and character—seems evidence enough).

UC Irvine (who houses the U.S. Derrida archive) has established a “memorial” online that testifies to a kind of “archive fever” that is unavoidably political, the supporting signatures of protest a veritable “who's-who” among academic super-stars:

http://www.humanities.uci.edu/remembering_jd/bois.htm

Derrida’s death has issued a cry: is it one to battle, or a whimper?

In the current battle of the “culture wars” the same anti-intellectual charges are appearing yet again: academics deliberately deploy jargon for the purpose of obfuscation, which is either (a) fashionable; (b) designed to create insiders and outsiders; or (c) deployed to create an inflated sense of expertise serving some sort of wish to establish a cult following. Certainly Derrida represents the/a Father for many, but those who have seriously struggled with his work—especially his recent work on justice and responsibility—would be quick to deny any kinship to P.T. Barnum or Gongora.

Typically, academics have defended the use of strange and difficult prose in three ways: (1) challenging language unsettles or “defamiliarizes” readers, thereby leading to new ways of thinking, and perhaps, new ways of contending with problems; (2) difficult language some how better captures the fullness of human experience, which will always forever elude representation regardless; and (3) jargon is shorthand for longer arguments too tedious to recount in this or that context of discussion.

I worry, but then, I guess that's what I'm paid to do in a sense. Is Derrida’s death coming to symbolize a more widespread dying? I personally am guarded against any apocalyptic death knells for the humanities (and tire of hearing them among rhetoricians). But since 1996 (the Sokal Hoax, followed by Nussbaum’s nasty attack of Butler in The New Republic), this charge of the academy producing “mere rhetoric” has intensified and participates in the increasing tendency to devalue intellectual labor in favor of more commodifiable/captial friendly academic objects (e.g., grants, cures for disease, MBA drones). In other words, the dismissal of Derrida as a spellbinding magus is in a very real sense a dismissal of what I—and many others—do for a living too. In this sense, it is almost tragic that Derrida’s death is not is own; “we” take it personally. And the problem with this kind of taking is that it appears "fashionable"--if not totemic.