Why the fuck are there leftists out there who recommend this bloated CIA adjacent fuck?
Post-Lenin “left” writers are a minefield. Tons of liberals and anticommunists mixed in.
:france-cool:
I always thought Derrida was an elaborate prank
I really dislike this kind of post and wish that there was more interest in philosophy and literature on Hexbear. Something like this is quite sad to see.
Incomprehensible gibberish about consumer culture underlined by rapid anti-communism and western chauvinism is not my idea of good philosophy
But no plz I’d like to see a defense of Derridas life long friendship with nazis like Heidegger
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.
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
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.
Literally sat through a three hour lecture by this french dork to formulate a critique of his supposed “critique” of Heidegger just to get called a goddamn anti-intellectual by a chatGPT, unbelievable
Sacred french cows
Meh, there are better philosophical works to engage with than Derrida. Besides not crossing the Quran/Veda/Analects line, the cost/benefit ratio of being able to understand his text is too high. And even among Western non-Marxist text, there are still better candidates towards investing your time to study.
I would say most Western text on how to wage war like Clausewitz’s On War or Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice is more deserving of your time. There are also military manuals that people, especially people who face off against the pigs, can find extremely useful.
The work of pop intellectuals (Chomsky’s, Fisher’s, and Graeber’s more popular works) is also more deserving because if nothing else, at least they’re easier to read, which means not only are you able to get through the text faster, but you’re also more likely bump into other people who’ve actually read the text. No one’s fucking reading Derrida in their free time.
And finally, explicitly fascist text like Carl Schmitt’s works or The Turner Diaries or even Mein Kampf is more deserving of examination in a “know thy enemy” capacity. Fascist paramilitaries in the US constantly try to reenact scenes from The Turner Diaries, so shouldn’t people at least be aware of what the text is about? And as we saw with the Bolsanaristas, the US is the number one exporter of fascism and fascist thought. The fact that The Turner Diaries is written within a US context won’t save non-USians from their domestic fascists copying or taking inspiration from that book.
