I could swear you can read my thoughts. I was reading through this thread wondering, “Who the hell is Derrida et al?” and although I’m aware of Nietzsche I’m not familiar with his writing. This thought popped into my head, “Am I just fecking uneducated or why are folks always babbling on about people like these without me having any idea what they’re on about?” Right as rain, next post was SAF. [/quote]
It’s kind of like me when it comes to rugby. I know next to nothing about the game, so I tend not to post in rugby threads. But like you, I do wonder in spite of my ignorance why people babble on about the game. All I can conclude is that some people really like it.[/quote]
I hope you realise you just made a grown man cry. Really.
SAF - Yeah, not coming back to this thread. Makes feel “doff” (stupid) and there’s no mention of any political philosophers (that I can see anyway). So I’ll just slink back to the “Who’s hot” thread…
The rest of you, you’re a credit to the laowai, they certainly can’t say we’re dumb. Anyone who says that will be packed off to this thread and forced to write a legible precis on it. Failing that they’ll be kicked in the gonads.
And so I can’t be accussed of being a complete thread hijacker:
Derrida would no doubt agree – he said flat out that language mediates our experience of the world. He also argued that it’s bound up with ideology, which often means privileging a term over its purported opposite and sweeping the middle to either side. It’s kind of a power move, and next thing you know, you end up with simplistic oppositions like rational/emotional and such.
Ooh I like. I have a sneaking suspicion the same might be true of writers:
Pandora’s Box, perhaps? I wouldn’t at all be surprised if affect did play a role, though. As for “best nonfiction books,” that largely depends on what you and Ms. Plath mean by “best.” Are you referring to an objective best, best as determined by consensus among critics (ala the halcyon herd days of the literary canon), or best as in “bestseller”?
He gets on my bad side for very different reasons. I never saw malice in the play of signifiers, though, at least no more than I saw in Huineng (and those Zen Buddhists love to fuck with meaning), but I am aware that Derrida was French. I’ve also been told that Spivak’s translation of Grammatology is downright awful. Ironically, a lot of the criticism of poststructuralism is grounded in the very binaries it interrogates. People assume that if you highlight the instability of meaning and the slipperiness of language, you necessarily flip the hierarchy and proclaim that there is no meaning and that language is pointless. Far from it: nihilism and deconstruction are worlds apart – in fact, the latter can just as easily be used to break apart the former. Interestingly, though, the same objections were made about existentialism. Van Cleve Morris on the subject:
Haha, talk about slipperiness. Incidentally, I did end up having one more.
Jesus I hope not. And if so I apologize profusely. I swear I was not trying to be rude, but rather just express different strokes. A casual glance at Forumosa shows expertise across an amazing range of subjects – many are fascinating, many daunting, many a bit of both. And I really know zip about rugby and am way out of my depth when friends discuss the game.
My problem with Derrida and his ilk is that ruined literature, or at least the study of it. Poetry is not laying pipe (to paraphrase Dead Poets Society) and literature is not about “signifiers” and all that post-structuralist crap…this is from the perspective of someone who spent his college years in a writers’ colony amongst real writers. People who actually know, feel, and breathe literature despise those quasi-philosophers like Derrida - quasi because they aren’t genuine intellectuals in a rigorous, scientific sense, but totally psuedo. They are phony intellectuals. You can’t scientifically quantify literature or art in the way that you can quantum physics, which is the entire problem with people like Derrida. They aren’t scientific enough to succeed in science – too sloppy in their terminology and too unrigorous in their research (Foucalt made all kinds of mistakes that professional historians would be horrified at) – and at the same time don’t have the heart enough to genuinely feel art. So they try to objectively, scientifically dissect art, and um, it just doesn’t work. You just cannot scientifically dissect Shakespeare like he’s some sort of lab frog. It’s like trying to place Love on a table and dissect it like a cardio surgeon…who knows the workings of the human heart? Art is all about feeling. And people like Derrida tend to forget what the entire point of literature is all about.
Genuine writers who actually know what is to try and create genuine artistic writing, don’t take any of these clowns seriously. Derrida never wrote a coherent sentence in his entire life, much less a coherent paragraph, much less a good short story, much less a great novel. If you can’t even write decent prose yourself, then what arrogance it is to criticize people who are 100x better writers of prose than you are? Bad writers have no right to set themselves as literary critics. No one takes them seriously. If John Updike has something to say about good writing, I will take him seriously. Derrida…I mean, look at how incoherent half of his nonsense is. It’s like a college kid on LSD (or an old Frenchman brain-damaged half his life on Pernot).
Spoken like a true writer, and I mean that in a good way. One of the great ironies is that in MFA programs they teach the opposite of what they teach in theory programs in the humanities: the latter is all about rejecting formalism while the former shows you how to make use of formal conventions; latter denies aesthetics while the former champions it. Which raises a great question - should writers or artists or musicians or film producers give consideration to audience?
Yes indeed Derrida’s prose is dreadful (at least Spivak’s translation is – I can’t speak for how he reads in French). And there is the not so trivial matter of Sokal’s Hoax in Social Text a few years back. I wholeheartedly agree that the inability of critical theory to make space for the aesthetic and affective is its ultimate undoing, or at the very least its biggest handicap. But then there’s anti-intellectualism, and that’s a different matter entirely. Much in criticism comes down to Wordsworth’s oft-quoted “we murder to dissect” – the notion that we ruin the experience of art when we analyze it. But that condemns us to mere gasping or wretching, since we begin to quantify the aesthetic the moment we start to comment. I’m intrigued by your idea that only artists are qualified to evaluate art, though. But wouldn’t that also mean that no one is qualified to comment on philosophy without having first produced a substantial body of philosophy themselves? And am I also to understand that you dismiss Derrida’s entire corpus outright and believe that the only true intellectuals are scientists or writers?
There’s nothing special about a good writer. He’s a good craftsman. Same as a good guitar picker or a good carpenter. In a certain sense. Telling a good story is what he’s all about. The short story writer I admire the most was Chekov and he was no great intellectual or philosopher. But he understood people. Very well. Good craftsmanship is very underrated.
Sure, if literature is supposed to be about truth, then there’s going to be a confrontation with the deconstructionists, particularly the existentialists and nihilists who want to deny truth.
All I can think of right now is the Joan Jett song “I hate myself for loving you.” These schmoes must be a sight when they find themselves enjoying something they read, and then try and wring the remaining humanity out of themselves.
Literature is not about truth, nor about beauty. Keats was wrong - “truth is beauty, beauty is truth”
Literature is the contradictary attempt to attemp truth through dishonesty (fiction). That doesn’t make any sense, but…if you want to understand how real people lived in Dublin in 1912, who are you going to read? James Joyce’s Dubliners, which a lot of it is unrealistic and uncharacteristic and perhaps a bit wrong or…some academic writing in accurate detail about the per capita beef consumption in Dublin in 1912?
I really respect historians. My father was something of a historian…well, he taught it in highschool. But there’s only so much of a “truth” historians can reach with dry facts…it’s up to writers like James Michener to present those facts withing a frame that average people can understand.
Like one of my teachers said…nobody reads dry academic history of how French people lived in the 1852. If you want to know how your average person in France lived in 1852, you don’t read academic critics or historians. You read Madame Bovary. Other than that, it’s universal of a theme…all, or at least most, women in marriages, are tempted to cheat. Any human being can read that book and get the main point.
And there you go…that’s one thing that I have against these guys like Derrida. Literature is like music. It’s about communication. Great literature should be understood by everybody. There should be nothing inscrutable or obscure about it. IF you can’t understand it, it’s not your fault…it’s just bad writing. Good writing should be understandable. Writing is about communication, isn’t it? So bad writers are those who can’t communicate. To put complex thoughts within a simple frame…that is the essence of good writing. To put complex thoughts in simple language. Phonies put simple thoughts in complex language. Derrida is a perfect example of that, and that is why so many genuine philosophers and writers don’t like him.
Well, I suppose this is why literature should be written in a bubble, to insulate the writer from outside interference.
I wasn’t speaking of any universal truth btw, but personal truth, and honesty in the author. I prefer fiction to be a created world, not a world that is entirely possible. Haruki Murakami is a great example. His characters are true, but his world is fantasy. He allows for the suspension of disbelief.
I just read The Kite Runner. The first half of the book reads like nonfiction biography and is wonderful, but the second half is contrived normalcy and it falls flat. It is all things that could POSSIBLY happen, but you know they didn’t…or at least they didn’t happen to the same “person” at the same time, like a patchwork of stories.
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Great literature should be understood by everybody[/quote]
Hmm, I dunno about this. It may be too early for me to think clearly about this, but it occurs to me that great THEMES are easily understood by everyone. People need to be able to read and have an intuitive sense of why they enjoy (or dislike) a book, and they also should be able to communicate that enjoyment clearly to anyone asking. This doesn’t alsways happen as the “book” usually is smarter than the person reading it. If a great book is understood by everyone, is the book underacheiving? I would hate to think that Jonathon Livingston Seagull was written with the author saying, “Now HERE’S a story those morons won’t be able to miss!”
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Phonies put simple thoughts in complex language. Derrida is a perfect example of that, and that is why so many genuine philosophers and writers don’t like him.[/quote]
I agree. I mentioned to STG that my feeling is that Derrida is malicious. What is the purpose of destroying all meaning because we all don’t agree on what meaning is? Seems childish. To me it doesn’t mean there is a great universal truth, but that truth is fluid, changing, and one would hope, evolving.
Well, what I mean is that on the simplest level, great art should entertain. That’s not too much to ask. But great art is more than simple entertainment. It is multi-level. If you look at it on the surface, it’s just a great story. But you dig a little deeper, and there’s more there. Great art appeals to the lower, middle, and highbrow classes all the same time. That’s one reason why Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer of all time - he appealed to all classes and intellects, from the lowest to the highest, at the same time.
The split between the high and low brow in art in the past 100 years is unfortunate. People should not make a distinction between either. Academics like Derrida go way too far in the “highbrow” direction where their art is alienated from the average person beyond understanding. (and yes, Derrida was primarily an artist, as is any critic of art; he was certainly no scientist or academic - merely a more pretentious Roger Ebert)
[quote=“jdsmith”]Well, I suppose this is why literature should be written in a bubble, to insulate the writer from outside interference.
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Who are you referring to here? Certainly not me. I don’t believe that literature should be obsessed with the political, as that corrupts objectivity, but I certainly don’t believe that writers should ignore the real world. To do so is absurd.
The “New Critics” (aka the Southern Agrarians) really did believe that sort of nonsense, out of a warped sense of Southern gentility and apolitical shame of defeat, and since the South was (and still to a large extent is) the center of American culture/literature, they had an influence greater than they warranted. But that was 70 years ago. Apoliticism, at least in that particular case, was just an evasion of genuine political choices. Unfortunately, like I said, the New Criticism had a huge influence upon American literary criticism in the next 50 years after 1920 and poisoned the well with its relentless apoliticism. This was, as I pointed out, the result of a group of Southern writers and literary critics too cowardly to face up to the genuine political conflict going on within their own society at the time (the racial problems, obviously). So they pretended that art was “apolitical” which as anyone can see just isn’t true, ever in any society.
[quote][quote=“Quentin”][quote=“jdsmith”]Well, I suppose this is why literature should be written in a bubble, to insulate the writer from outside interference.
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Who are you referring to here? Certainly not me. I don’t believe that literature should be obsessed with the political, as that corrupts objectivity, but I certainly don’t believe that writers should ignore the real world. To do so is absurd.
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I was referring more to Derrida and other critics. A writer of literature should not be thinking about how his or her book will be received. Just write the thing.
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The split between the high and low brow in art in the past 100 years is unfortunate. People should not make a distinction between either. Academics like Derrida go way too far in the “highbrow” direction where their art is alienated from the average person beyond understanding. (and yes, Derrida was primarily an artist, as is any critic of art; he was certainly no scientist or academic - merely a more pretentious Roger Ebert)[/quote][/quote]
Is it that the "Gut Feeling"of “I know art when I see it” has been replaced by “I know art when I can explain it?”
Just to follow up on my amazement at the response to the name ‘Derrida’: I guess I’m amazed at the intensity of the responses even now, after his death, and after his reputation has declined (although all his books are still in print).
Anyways, it happened to him throughout his career, going back to the Searle debate. Just as a knee jerk guess: It must be that something in his writing is deeply threatening, as if he (his thought) was about to rob us of something extremely precious, and that can only be spoken about in one particular way.
I can’t help but have a Lacanian reaction: Derrida has stolen our jouissance; now, it’s broken; now we can’t enjoy–language, ourselves, each other, art, literature–anymore. Because of Derrida I can’t just “get off” on literature or whatever anymore Again, this is based on the intensity of the dislike Derrida has inspired.
Getting back to the intial post: The Marretti book wiill take you to the first ‘undecideable’ Derrida saw and allow you to decide just how much of a fuss to make about it. In my opinion, of course.
Not me. I still enjoy like what I like and that’s fine by me. Derrida might have been hung up on this “Since we’re all going to die, life isn’t worth living” thang, but I happen to think that life is quite a trip, and despite the nihilistic view (parts of which I happen to share actually), the nothingness that is beyond comprehension doesn’t phase me in the least. Life is lived first, understood second, and written down a distant thrid. Writing in particular has gotten really good lately and the number of well written new books published is enormous, not to mention graphic novels, TV, cartoons, movies and I would hope, theatre. There is literally something for everyone. I’d say it has been language and communication that has broken Derrida’s back.
That every single person on Earth can have something written that they can relate to is so far out cool that it just makes me smile.
And if writing is better, then life must be much better. We’d rather believe what we see and read than what we experience it seems.
If Lacan wants to get sucked into this black woe hole, TFB.
I had to read more than my share of Derrida et al. back in my student days. His work struck me as more nonsensical than most – and I don’t mean that in a good way. The much maligned Baudrillard, on the other hand, is well worth reading, I think.
About twenty years ago I spent some time with Gayatri Spivak, who translated Of Grammatology. (No, Derrida isn’t lucid in French either.) Although she didn’t convince me of the worth of Derrida, she’s a smart and interesting person. We spoke about all sorts of things, especially dictionaries and Elvis (separately, that is).
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