Why the fuck are there leftists out there who recommend this bloated CIA adjacent fuck?
Are you sure you’re talking about the right person? Derrida hardly ever wrote about consumer culture, his “anti-communism” consists of a few scattered remarks critical of certain parts of the Soviet Union, he was very much against Western chauvinism, he never even met Heidegger and certainly wasn’t friends with him.
Derrida is still part of a wave of broad anti-Marxist reaction within the bourgeois academy. Like if you read Spectres of Marx, there isn’t much there that seems to actually contribute anything to Marxism. I don’t really understand how he felt justified in dedicating that book to Chris Hani, of all people.
Derrida was still a massive liberal. I can’t find it now but check out lectures he did in South Africa after the end of Apartheid. He is intellectually masturbating in front of a bunch of radical young black south africans who’ve just lived through apartheid and basically justifying the liberal (so, concretely, neoliberal) development of South Africa. Obvs not saying don’t read him or that there’s literally nothing there, but I think Marxists should definitely treat his thought as reactionary overall, methodologically and how it’s diverted and poisoned alot of intellects that could have been radicalised as Marxists. He was important in delegitimizing Marxism within academia.
Out of interest, as I’m happy to be wrong on this point: do you personally think there are elements of his thought which are of value for Marxism today? Examples I see referenced are writings on animality (so perhaps of relevance to animal rights and veganism) but I haven’t had the time or inclination to check em out, and they strike me as, at best, idealistic analyses which we could just avoid by doing dialectical materialist analyses of animality in the first place.
His concrete political positions certainly aren’t always convincing. I know that Christopher Wise has some good criticism of his ambiguous statements about Israel, for instance. But I don’t see how this vitiates his entire body of work. His primary concern is the history of Western philosophy and I always felt that there was more than a hint of Marx in the way he criticizes texts immanently with a focus on binary opposites. Now, you might say that it is no longer necessary to read philosophy at all because the science of dialectical materialism has made it obsolete, but that is not the position of Marx, Lenin or Mao. All of them take elements of their thought from Hegel because they have read him critically. Why should we not do the same? And in a way, basically everything Derrida wrote concerns the problem of reading. As far as I know, there is no dialectical materialist method of reading, so it’s not like there’s an obvious substitute for his work.
Regarding his effect on the intellectual esteem of Marxism in his time, I find it difficult to make a judgement. It seems to me that after 1968, there was no longer any possibility of worthwhile Marxist praxis in the West (for the time being at least). So I’d say there’s a lot of blame to go around for the weakness of the Marxist left in Europe in the past decades, and I do not think that French intellectuals are a major factor here. If anything, the whole intellectual environment of “continental philosophy” seems more amenable to Marxist thought than Anglo analytic philosophy, which is the only alternative in Western universities. Maybe Specters of Marx didn’t do anything for the Communist movement, but it did help a bit to make Marx seem intellectually respectable again after the decades of the Cold War.
In any case, Derrida’s thinking about text and reading seems irreplaceable to me. Literature has always been a difficult topic for Marxism (the great names have almost nothing to say about it), so I think a kind of literary theory that is actually aware of the problems and history of philosophy instead of shunting that off to another discipline seems worthwhile, and I don’t see how you get that without Derrida or thinkers like him.
Marxism on the left was certainly weaker, certainly, after the late 60s, but I think this is an excessively academic point of view. This was also the period of Maoist revolutionary violence in Europe, and the Years of Lead in Italy, ineffective as they ultimately have been, also leading to the further development of ultra-leftist and eurocommunist reformism and opportunism in light of their exhaustion and failure. There were also multipler people’s wars and revolutionary struggles being waged globally, which many (including western) Marxists dealt with. Alot of very important Marxist work was done in the 70s. There is a slowdown by the early 80s, i.e. the full onset of neoliberalism, imo.
I totally agree we should still read them critically. But their dominance within the post-new-left critical theory traditions has definitely occupied a space which excludes Marxism, as most of it is premissed on an explicit rejection of Marxist notions and methods, and when modern rad-lib critical theorists attack Marxism as outdated, reductionist, or totalizing (which often leads on in practice to them arguing that Marxism is totalitarian), they frequently do it using derridean and co. Tbh the bottom line for me is not that he problematizes concepts we often essentialize, but that he attack on them is not productive. I don’t see it as dialectical. A concept should be maintained in its development to the extent that it continues to aim with theoretical understanding and praxis.
I’ve read Hegel and yh, I read him as a Marxist so the idealism is the standout issue. Like I have beef with Zizek because he’s more of a hegelian than a marxist, and this shows in his liberal, reactionary views and practices. I don’t think you need to real Hegel to understand Marx, but the main value of reading him, for me at least, is the epistemological and methodological importance of dialectics, although for ontology there is also importance insofar as he seems to have an process-based ontology, which Marxism also does. When it comes to Derrida, the difference is that I’m not really convinced on the substantial ontological, epistemological or methodological importance of deconstruction. At the end of the day the proof for me is in the pudding, and there are no militant derrideans.
I actually completely agree with you when it comes to literature. I’d say something similar about how many marxists have engaged with ethical thought (see: https://alt.politics.communism.narkive.com/Sb205tXJ/ho-chi-minh-on-revolutionary-morality). Marxists in general have been weaker in their analyses of literature and the arts. A good deal of this comes from mistaking describing the external material conditions of something’s historical context for exhaustively describing everything that can be said about it in material terms. I don’t see any reason why materialist analysis of art, literature, music, film etc. can’t still make or musn’t make reference to the forms of the arts and the types of experiences these forms tend to produce in the audience who experience them, if those things are understood materialistically and properly placed in their historical context. In other words its often vulgar materialism dressed up as Marxism and applied to culture.
If anyone finds Derrida helpful for their understanding of something important to them like literature, then yh no hate from me, bless up. I personally think there are more productive sources to appropriate, even for literary analysis, but I’m happy to be convinced that I’m wrong. I also like getting stoned and reading Joyce.
There’s a good case that deconstruction and Derrida’s method of differance is just applying Marxist dialectics to reading. Derrida was obsessed with finding the “sediment” of words and thoughts, the underlying and historicised meaning behind texts left unsaid. That’s a very materialist and Marxist thing to do!
Some of his political takes are good, many are bad. I don’t disagree with you there.
I’m not saying we should stop doing philosophy. Not that we should take his word as gospel, but when Marx speaks about philosophers only understanding the world, rather than changing it, he is not saying we should stop doing philosophy to engage in the general projects of understanding and determining out most general theories. I also agree that we should keep reading philosophy, including non-Marxist philosophy. It arrogant otherwise and it often shows. But unless you’re specifically something like a historian of ideas and are studying the history of ‘western’ philosophy, I’m personally don’t see the reason to keep spending time reading these dudes like Derrida which we could spend reading far more grounded works of philosophy and political thought.
On the topic of ‘continental’ vs ‘analytic’ philosophy, I think it depends. Most analytic philosophers are equally useless, intellectually masturbating navel-gazers as continental philosophers. But tbh, if what you’re interested in is mathematics, or the philosophy of the natural sciences, the ‘continental’ thinkers who tend to talk about these topics often display profound ignorance of them, imo. So do many analytic thinkers, but I still think the gold standard in the west for reflection on those topics, because analytic philosophy was founded by actual mathematicians who are important in the development of modern mathematics.
For the record, there are analytic philosophers who are/were genuine leftists. Putnam at some point was a Maoist, before becoming a soc-dem. Neurath was a Marxist. Carnap tried to join the communist party. That being said, none of their important philosophical work has anything to do or really to offer to political, social or economic philosophy, imo, and the work in the tradition has become more and more of a performative scholastic arena for academic credentials since the mid-century. I honestly can’t think of any really good analytic political or social philosophy. But I also think most of the ‘continential’ work is a waste of time. There’s a world of Marxist theory outside of this done by people, above all in the Global South, which is of far greater value to political, social or economic thought.
What’s the utility of an Derridan analysis of text if one of his own students accuses him of intentionally misrepresenting text he was supposed to be analyzing
Seems like a vehicle for academic grift
No worries I got yeah, I learned this from a lecture given by one of his students
Also I was mistaken he didn’t know Heidegger, Derrida wrote a book with a former Hilter Youth member who did know Heidegger, my mistake
“Former Hitler Youth member” isn’t really as damning as you seem to think. Being indoctrinated as a child does not mean that you’ll necessarily be a bad person as an adult (Peter Daou would be an example we all know). I don’t know anything about this person but the fact that you call him “a former Hitler Youth member” as opposed to “a Nazi” suggests that the former is the most severe criticism you have of him, and then your criticism of Derrida is just, he knew someone who was indoctrinated as a child? Oh no, dear me! I was raised to believe all sorts of BS so I guess I should cancel anyone who’s ever met me.
This really seems like you realized you were wrong and now you’re grasping at straws to support the original conclusion. Just take the L.
True, personally I find Habermas celebration of Hannah Arendt far more damning, but I’ll let Derrida off the hook, with his general ignorance about politics he probably didn’t know what her deal was
This still seems a bit confused. There’s many bad things you can say about Jürgen Habermas – he really is a liberal philosopher who has worked to defang the critical potential of the Frankfurt School – but he is not a Heideggerian (and yes, he was a member of the Hitler Youth until the war ended when he was about 15). In fact, he is about the strongest enemy of French theory (and Heidegger) there is in contemporary German philosophy. There would be more to say about the relation of Derrida and Habermas, but the fact that they were interviewed for the same book is not a very strong connection between them.
At the end of the 1990s, Habermas approached Derrida at a party held at an American university where both were lecturing. They then met at Paris over dinner, and participated afterwards in many joint projects. In 2000 they held a joint seminar on problems of philosophy, right, ethics, and politics at the University of Frankfurt. In December 2000, in Paris, Habermas gave a lecture entitled “How to answer the ethical question?” at the Judeities. Questions for Jacques Derrida conference organized by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly. Following the lecture by Habermas, both thinkers engaged in a very heated debate on Heidegger and the possibility of Ethics. The conference volume was published at the Editions Galilée (Paris) in 2002, and subsequently in English at Fordham University Press (2007).
Come on the connection is pretty strong
