Remora

Depth charges

We received, over the weekend, a heartening email from M. She responded to the criticism that LI is shallow and vapid -- the criticism we'd conveyed in a previous post, transmitted to us by the friend of a friend -- with the beautiful phrase, "you exceed the average depth by a very large measure."

That's a difficult compliment to live up to. Limited Inc has the distinct feeling, lately, that we are crawling on our belly. That we are approaching some terrible financial and social abyss in this prone and stupid position. That verbal facility is a death curse. That our desperation, stupidity, and a forked tongue are doing us in. That it is no accident that, reading Baudelaire's Journals, we keep getting that Ecce Homo feeling -- except that the man who is ecce is the man writing this sentence, a man who's shot his wad, the spent cracker, the layed off fool.

But trying to keep up our end, trying frankly to feel deep again, we searched for topics: And then we came across this interview with Rodolphe Gasch� in Eurozine, and we thought we'd begin the week with some tribute to Derrida -- after all, he's the step father of this misbegotten site -- he's named us.

When Limited Inc. was a mere snakelet of a graduate student in Philosophy, deconstruction was just building to its peak. This was back in the late eighties. The school was popular enough that, to our dismay, its terms began to take on alchemical overtones. Any resentful attack on politically correct targets became a deconstruction of them. Usually, the attack turned out to be some crude mixture of formalism and the most vulgar kind of Marxist reduction.

Well, at the time we thought there was a certain recognizable irony at work here. This happened with Leibnitz -- followed by the ever tedious Christian Wolf. This happened to Kant -- he was followed by the ever more mystical Schelling and Co. To propose a system is to be systematically misunderstood. And to propose an anti-system is to be immediately systematized. The clown follows the hero.

Begin with a philosophical technique that explained identity as the strategic disposition of forces within the text, and that futher extends to the term, text, a meaning which encompasses both the game of sense and the continual immersion of language in its material embodiment, and its eternal denial (ecriture begins with pronunciation, don't you know, and philosophy begins with a systematic recoil from that fact ). Then throw in a whole other thematic -- the politics of identity that is pointed to by the word phallogocentrism. And then sieve this through an academic class that is deeply conscious of its own economic and social displacement in the world, as universities become mere addenda to business schools. Mix, and you get the awful deconstructive "readings" that flourished in the eighties and nineties.

Gasche, who wrote a good book about Derrida, Tain of the Mirror, makes several moves in this interview that fill us with dismay for our side. First, he disses analytic philosophy. In response to the question of philosophy's existence in departments of literature (as in, what's a discipline like you doing in a place like this?) he responds:

"Undoubtedly, some departments of comparative literature, but certainly not all, have increasingly turned philosophical, with some including straightforward instruction in the discipline "philosophy." But I think it is safe to say that with some exceptions, of course, such instruction remains framed by the requirements and expectations specific to students whose main concerns are literary. I should add, however, that with the inclusion of a number of subspecialties in the literary curriculum such as gender studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and so forth, the spectrum of the issues that philosophy can and must address in comparative literature has expanded dramatically. With this, new opportunities have arisen for anchoring philosophy in comparative literature departments. Evidently, if the philosophy taught in these departments is 'continental' it is for good reasons. The students are literary students, and analytical philosophy has nothing to offer them."

Now, if we were feeling our deconstructive oats, we would make much of the exchange between analytic philosophy and these literary students. It is a null exchange -- "analytic philosophy has nothing to offer them." And it is an exchange based, apparently, on offers -- philosophy is offering a thing. The thing it is offering, it turns out, is absolute -- it is the thing itself. If continental philosophy can offer something to these students, it is also absolute -- it also offers all it has.

Limited inc believes the offer of the absolute is obviously a con. Ah, we could go on and on about the con of continental philosophy. Instead, we will go into normal speak, and protest, like the merchant of theory that we once aspired to be. Far from offering nothing, analytic philosophy can 'offer" the event -- the event thematized, the event as the moment in which analytic philosophy both breaks down and advances. Deconstruction joins analytic philosophy in that moment, joins as a disenchanted party. Deconstruction will no longer con the student - that is its promise.

But time marches on, and we realize that we have reached a point in this post where we have totally lost our audience. Nothing does it quicker than writing about philosophy. Sorry. One other long quote, however, from the Gasche article for the one person left who might actually be reading this sentence:

"The deconstructive literary criticism that I targeted in "Deconstruction and Criticism," and which critique also frames my exposition of Derrida's thought in The Tain of the Mirror, rests, or rather rested, on the assumption that the literary text is constituted by an integral, and flawless, mirror play on all levels of the text ranging from the thematic to the one of the signifier. The critical operation of bringing the text's self-reflection to light, this is what this criticism understood by deconstruction. No doubt the Yale School and its disciples were the prime representative of this conception of literariness. However, and ironically, de Man, many of whose students adopted the deconstructive literary theory, does not easily - rather, does not fit at all - into this scheme, as I have argued in my last book. But the Yale School was not the only spokesman for this approach to the literary text. Deconstructive literary criticism was a much broader phenomenon, it diffused easily, whether as the result of a progressive dilution of the tenets of the Yale School, or as the specific form in which New Criticism became capable of survival. From my criticism of deconstructive literary criticism it is clear that I do not buy its conception of the text, nor its understanding of the task of criticism. It is a reductive approach to textuality. But in order to demonstrate that any literary text worth the name, achieves full, all inclusive specularity, this kind of criticism had to draw on aspects of language - established by linguistics, semiotics, and pragmatics - neglected by the traditional thematic, humanist, historical criticisms, but also formalist poetics. Its objections against the traditional modes of criticisms are well founded, and need to be recognised as such. In many ways, deconstructive literary criticism had a sobering effect on literary studies. I would add, however, that deconstruction in literary studies based itself on a conception of the text that is as narrow, and as questionable as the ones at the foundation of the more traditional conceptions of criticism. Let me explain myself. Since what counts in deconstructive literary criticism is the demonstration that in a text everything mirrors everything, and, hence, that no single position, statement, theme, or truth, can prevail, its criticism of other positions is limited to the accusation of disregarding certain aspects of the text which when brought into play, would debunk the claims made by singling out one of its items, or levels. Its conception of the text is speculative in essence even though the absolute speculation that animates it, serves to demonstrate that there is no absolute knowledge."

Ah, with what feelings of luxury I once plunged into this kind of argument! The delirium of all the brave young grad students! and their subsequent detoxification, drying out in every college and junior college and land grant U. from here to Bakersfield, California! And how the world goes on!