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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

The Attack on Theory

Back in the 1980s, when conservatives such as William Bennett began attacking what they termed “the politicization of the humanities,” they made a basic error. They blamed theorists for reducing texts to vested interests, for planting identity politics on campus, for subsuming aesthetic criteria beneath ideological criteria, and for disrespecting the noble inheritance of Western literature and philosophy. The accusations struck humanities professors as hare-brained and panicky and altogether political, but I observed a number of professional occasions to which they applied all-too-well, even though I despised all things Republican at the time.

But in one respect the critics were mistaken from the start: they included deconstruction among the prime targets. Deconstruction made everything meaningless, they said, removing classroom discussion from a grounding in tradition and truth, and allowing wayward professors to steer the learning any which way. Deconstruction was a canon-buster, too, irreverent and roguish. It set the critic alongside the novelist—remember Hillis Miller gushing about the creative side of criticism? No wonder it appealed to graduate students and junior faculty, who were only too eager to espouse something that licensed them to drop their humility in the face of the past.

In truth, however, deconstruction was an entirely traditional brand of philosophical criticism. The radicalism that Derrida announced in his greatest work, the essay “Differance,” bore upon the concept of being, not on politics. Derrida might put the entirety of Western thought under erasure, but deconstruction remained a parasitical activity, and the hosts continued to be canonical—Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud.

And the radicalism that de Man announced was about knowledge and interpretation, not literary values and canon formation. De Man’s theory of figurative language did nothing to displace Wordsworth and Proust from their place on the syllabus, and de Man was always respectful of the previous generation of critics and theorists.

Second-generation deconstructionists in the 1980s understood this well, and so did political critics such as Frank Lentricchia and Terry Eagleton. But neither side could make the distinction and correct the record. For deconstructionists to say, “Look, Chairman Bennett, we believe in aesthetics as much as you do, and we think that the humanities are, indeed, to an extent independent of politics,” well, that would be to align with the powers that be and to relinquish the gadfly identity that deconstructionists at the time cultivated. And for political critics to say, “No, Chairman Bennett, the problem isn’t that deconstruction is political—it’s that deconstruction isn’t nearly political enough, and is in fact downright mandarin,” well, that would be to join the powers that be in attacking deconstruction, if on different grounds.

The result was that the professors didn’t engage the critics fully, and Bennett et al won public opinion over to their side. Meanwhile, the divided import of deconstruction (radical in one sense, traditional in another) was lost, at least outside of humanities departments. Bennett is an important public presence, and if humanities professors had offered back then to debate him on the meaning of theory I think he would have accepted. In fact, in recent years Bennett has visited college campuses and debated academics on their own turf, though outnumbered and despised there. Academics would have been wise to engage conservative critics as much 20 years ago, and been willing to agree with them now and then.

Posted at 08:26:01 PM on July 16, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. While it’s true that deconstruction does depend on canonical texts (and Derrida in particular insisted on careful and respectful readings far more than most people realize), it doesn’t follow that deconstruction’s reasons for turning to these texts in any way jibes with the reasons of conservatives like Bennett. As you point out deconstruction, again particularly in Derrida’s early work, proposed to interrogate the question of being radically, and in doing so found a common (but ambiguous- — at once overdetermined and underdetermined) ground for a good deal of radicalism and conservatism. So while this sets deconstruction against many brands of leftist politics, it does not set it against leftist politics as such. Nor does it mean it might not entail a leftist politics, as Derrida’s later texts show. A good essay on this, I think, is Nancy Fraser’s contribution to the collection “Working through Deconstruction.”

    — Ammon Allred · Jul 17, 10:00 AM · #

  2. Defending deconstruction against (or making it appeal to) conservative criticism is something of a red herring.

    The most damning criticisms of deconstruction come from liberals inside the university— from mainstream philosophy departments— and for the most part are ignored by deconstructionists, who seem happier to debate with a clearly muddleheaded conservative than to take on a philosopher who presents a well-considered criticism of their work and project.

    It is telling that you portray deconstruction as “ an entirely traditional brand of philosophical criticism,” while philosophy departments in the US are almost uniform in their complete and utter rejection of deconstruction (and most other “theory”) as a viable philosophical approach.

    There seems to have been little effort made in the past 20 years to reconcile the almost complete divide between the type of philosophy that is being done in english departments and the philosophy done in philosophy departments. Addressing that divid seems more pressing to me than dissecting the right-wing attack on deconstruction for the 1000th time.

    — crazy horse · Jul 17, 10:49 AM · #

  3. Bravo Crazy Horse. Philosophy departments are skeptical re: deconstruction and ‘theory’; Psychology departments are far less enamored of Lacan than English departments; Linguistics departments moved on from Saussure generations ago, while English departments are still enraptured with him and fearful of the implications of Chomsky’s linguistic thought, which is widely accepted by linguists. This is a classic example of academic compartmentalization and a concomitant fear, in effect, of the opinions of real experts.

    Bennett is a red herring in this discussion. Consider the fact that a vast number of first-rate intellects, some of them towering experts on literary criticism/theory, had severe reservations re: theory. One thinks of Rene Wellek, Alfred Kazin, Helen Gardner, Frederick Crews, W. Jackson Bate, etc. etc. Chomsky himself, whose politics are, to say the least, different from Bennett’s, sees ‘theory’ as, ultimately an assault on the scientific method, an unsuccessful assault, since ‘theory’ puts nothing positive in place of it and, clearly, the scientific method has soldiered on, curing disease, solving problems, and enjoying massive support from both the general public and the federal government. IMHO, ‘theory’ offered some interesting perspectives and insights, but was so overblown that it ultimately did significant damage to humanistic study, damage that we are, fortunately, beginning to outlive. Ultimately it was not a new paradigm but a temporary fad.

    — BeenThereDoneThat · Jul 17, 01:48 PM · #

  4. Bravo, indeed, to Crazy Horse. Mainstream philosophy departments are precisely where the fiercest opponents are always to be found of the pseudo-theorizing fads — such as deconstruction — absorbed by the lower reaches of the humanities. So it’s scarcely surprising to hear from an English professor such nonsense as “deconstruction was an entirely traditional brand of philosophical criticism.”

    — Anonymous · Jul 17, 05:10 PM · #

  5. As though departments aren’t at least as much a product of the sociology of disciplines as they are of the pursuit of truth! As though philosophy’s disciplinary boundaries aren’t policed by passionate bluster and uncomprehending rhetoric! One need only look at the kerfuffle at Cambridge in the early 90s over an honorary doctorate for Derrida—many of the eminent protesters admitted to not understanding (or even reading) him.

    As for Saussure, as Patrice Maniglier has shown in “The Enigmatic Life of Signs” (in French), the founder of structuralism was more subtle than even his supporters presented him, few of whom recognized how radically nuanced was his theory of signs as multiply based on difference. Saussure always emphasized that the kind of being that signs have is not at all like that of the quite different, and quite positive, being of what the natural sciences study. (It’s not possible to summarize Maniglier in the twenty-five-words-or-less format, so I’ll leave it at that.)

    By the way, BeenThereDoneThat, there are plenty of people who think the Cambridge, MA research program is in decline, so as much as I respect Chomsky I have to say that a lot of his support is based merely on the sociology of departments and of linguistics training, rather than on the truth of things. Plus ça change….

    — dionysos · Jul 18, 06:08 AM · #

  6. A few years ago a neighbor of mine, a surgeon, mentioned in casual conversation to another neighbor, a stockbroker (at that time), that he’d gotten an interesting stock tip from a fellow doctor and he was thinking about putting some money into this. The stockbroker came back with the remark that he’d heard some interesting medical insights from a fellow at his office who was really good at picking stocks, and . . .

    I simply do not understand why on earth English professors would expect philosophy professors, linguistics professors, or professors of any of the “hard” sciences to take their views on philosophy, linguistics, or physics, etc. seriously. I doubt that most English professors in fact believe that their Ph.D. grants them specialized expertise outside their field.

    It would be facile to claim that

    theory:(philosophy/linguistics/[fill in blank])::creationism:science

    But any defense of deconstructionism does seem to me to need to explain a lot, including de Man’s awkward youthful politics, not to mention the pseudo-scientific gibberish produced by Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, et al.

    Just an outsider’s opinion, so have a good time with it.

    — Dan · Jul 18, 08:00 AM · #

  7. The majority of the attacks on French philosophy coming from Analytic philosophy departments are launched by individuals who show no indication of ever having cracked a work of “theory.” Does Chomsky, or Brian Leiter (talk about making your reputation on something other than the quality of your work), every say anything about Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc. that indicates that he has actually read any of these theorists? All I encounter is dismissals and repeated gestures to theory’s “opacity.”

    Where, exactly, would one find the real, philosophical critiques of theory presented by first rate academics? Could someone provide a bibliography?

    — Rob · Jul 18, 10:01 AM · #

  8. Start with Daphne Patai and Wilfrido Corral’s collection, Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent and go on from there.

    — BeenThereDoneThat · Jul 18, 10:38 AM · #

  9. I very much appreciate this discussion, not being especially well informed about deconstruction. The very term often incites howls of laughter from various of my academic colleagues—laughter that I don’t really understand. One of these days I’ll want to check out Derrida again; it interests me that he putatatively recommends close reading of the texts about to be macerated.

    Thanks to BTDT for the other reading recommendations, also.

    — humble enough to not know everything · Jul 18, 10:54 AM · #

  10. I’ve read Theory’s Empire — it doesn’t include much in the way of philosophical critique. For the most part, it reprints older attacks on Theory (generally from aged literature professors, e.g., Bates, Abrams, Wellek, etc.) and provides them with some sociological context. In their very few (and very brief) appearances (Nagel, Searle), the analytic philosophers don’t actually engage with the texts of those terrible postmodernists…

    The closest I’ve seen to a real critique of Derrida from an analytic philosopher has (famously) come from Searle, and at least here Searle’s arguments seem pretty thin. I’ve found some analytic works on Nietzsche where critics take issue with Deleuze’s reading, but nothing substantial. The philosophy professors who would be in the best position to deal with Derrida on Hegel or Lyotard on Kant (e.g., McDowell, Brandom, Pippin, Friedman, Rorty, Longuenesse, etc.) don’t seem to think that Theory is all that terrible.

    To read some of the posts, you’d think that a number of the best analytic philosophers had written devastating attacks on Theory. They haven’t. Many, however, have whined as loudly as Bennett. That’s it. Hardly very philosophical.

    — Rob · Jul 18, 11:07 AM · #

  11. Well, there’s Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, for a start. Richard Dawkins has memorably observed of one of Lacan’s goofier excursions into mathematics that someone “who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don’t know anything about.” [“don’t” italicized for emphasis in original]

    These guys may not have the best manners in the world, but how polite need one be in announcing that the emperor has no clothes?

    — Dan · Jul 18, 11:32 AM · #

  12. Well, the emperor’s clothes (or lack thereof) are what’s at issue. I’m not challenging Dawkins et alia on their mannners; I’m challenging them to engage with the material, to demonstrate the emperor’s nudity rather than just saying “well, it’s obvious…” At least Dawkins admits that he knows nothing about Lacan (meaning not just the philosophical context of Lacan’s work, but the clinical context as well). Others aren’t so forthcoming.

    As far as Sokal and Bricmont: They attack a very limited number of thinkers (a list which doesn’t include Derrida or Foucault, who are the first names mentioned by most “critics” of Theory). For the most part, they single out metaphorical uses of scientific terms and then insist that they’re “incoherent.” Indeed, their entire critique of Deleuze is essentially just pointing at the language and saying that “no one could understand this stuff” (which is a strange strategy when your argument is ostensibly that intellectual tourists should stay away from specialized disciplines, disciplines in which they lack training). Regardless, I’m hoping that Jerry Fodor’s attack on “Darwinists” makes it into the second edition.

    Derrida (or Badiou or Deleuze or Lyotard) is above all a very close reader of the classics of philosophy (in Derrida’s case, of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger). If you want to refute him, you need to show that he’s gotten these figures wrong, that his arguments don’t hold water. Bemoaning his prose style doesn’t cut it. Of course you’ll actually have to read the texts (Derrida, as well as the Germans). Or would that be unthinkable?

    — Rob · Jul 18, 12:02 PM · #

  13. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes the square root of minus one is more than just the square root of minus one . . .

    I don’t intend to defend Lacan here (whose work I am no fan of), but the flippancy of Dawkin’s quote does point to the most serious problem which folks in the science criticizing post-modern texts (which come from more than just the world of (unjustly vilified) English deparments, unless one happens to share the ethnocentric jingoism of our good friend Bennett and assume that only American philosophy programs count as echte philosophy programs (please give Bennett and all the other ethnocentrists who have already posted on this blog my apologies for resorting to German, but I’ll have to assume that any bluster over its illegibility is meer Schadenfreude.)

    The serious problem that these folks run into is that they in fact entirely miss the meaning of what the text is trying to say. One thing that I always impress on my freshman students, but that is apparently lost on my colleagues, is that if one thinks that any argument which has been persuasive to a lot of people is manifestly ridiculous, one has probably misunderstood the argument. It might turn out to be ridiculous on closer reflection, but such reflectiveness is precisely what flippant critics miss.

    The other point which should be obvious, but which seems to be being overlooked, is that it is entirely possible to rely on elements of the work of the past without endorsing it wholeheartedly. “The in-crowd at M.I.T. is getting old-fashioned,” “Saussure is passe” . . .so what? Structuralisms early insistence on the arbitrary relation b/w signifier and signified is mainstream dogma in linguistics now, even if many other elements of structuralism have been discredited. Ditto for the importance of cognitive parsing, even if the exact mechanics of “deep grammar” are questionable.

    The problem that faces so-called “theory” is that its politicization within the academy (to say nothing of outside of it) has kept this sort of natural appropriation, assimilation and rejection from running its course. “One must either be with Derrida or against him. . .” “Lacan was either a mathematics expert or a psychoanalytic fraud”

    Forgive me if I find such absolutist exercises in false dichotomies a little tiresome.

    — Ammon Allred · Jul 18, 12:28 PM · #

  14. A few points:

    Regarding Leiter: I am not a huge fan of Leiter or his life’s work (I think the PGR is both methodologically flawed and generally unhelpful) but it is not accurate to accuse him of never having read the work he criticizes. True, his offhand dismissals of Derrida as a charlatan are unsubstantiated, but Leiter has done serious, measured, and perhaps one might even say sympathetic (although still critical) scholarly work in assessing Foucault’s legacy regarding morality here: (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=952771). Also, just last week (although we’re drifting into slightly different territory here) Leiter commemorated the death of Max Horkheimer on his blog and referred to teaching H’s “brilliant but strange” Philosophical Investigations in a graduate seminar.

    Second: Rob points out regarding Derrida: “If you want to refute him, you need to show that he’s gotten these figures wrong, that his arguments don’t hold water. Bemoaning his prose style doesn’t cut it.” One of the charges leveled against deconstructionists by Searle, Chomsky, and others, (for example, see Searle in the NYRB article) is that it is not even possible to prove that their arguments don’t hold water, because the arguments are not structured in such a way that one could prove or disprove them. Searle calls it “systematic evasiveness.” To point out that an opponent never reaches the level of making outright philosophical claims—and in doing so avoids having to defend what half-claims he does make— is not “bemoaning his prose style,” it is objecting to a lack of rigor in argumentation that prevents one from even attempting to engage in a counter-argument.

    In any event, the issue as I see it is not whether philosophy departments and mainstream philosophers are right to deride deconstructionists and Theorists. The issue is why faculty at English departments in this country will not address the lack of interest or respect paid to their work by actual philosophers, but will still take the time to dissect the argument as it stood between the academy and some confused conservatives 15 years ago. Surely an astronomer should be more concerned with the fact that there is a fundamental divide between her work and the work of her colleagues down the hall at the math department, than she is with the fact that her work is called into question by an astrologer with an axe to grind. This seems to me to be exactly the case between English and philosophy today, where you have English professors saying things about the nature of truth claims that are diametrically opposed to what you’ll hear from most philosophy professors on the subject.

    Even if we grant that many critics of Theory and deconstruction (both inside and outside the academy) speak from positions of relative ignorance, it is also true that many proponents of deconstruction and Theory are unwilling or unable to defend their work to philosophers (this, while their work addresses issues traditionally held to be in the domain of philosophy, like epistemology or the philosophy of science). This signifies either a lack of confidence in the value of their own work, or a lack of interest in the work and opinions of professional philosophers; either option is disconcerting if you think, as I do, that there actually are some important questions to be raised in a dialogue between philosophy and literary criticism.

    Oh, also: “if one thinks that any argument which has been persuasive to a lot of people is manifestly ridiculous, one has probably misunderstood the argument.”

    I must have been living in a different country than you have these past 8 years.

    — crazy horse · Jul 18, 01:12 PM · #

  15. Crazy Horse,

    I’ll be happy to discuss what country we are writing from when you defend your utterly unjustifiable narrowing of the definition of what counts as main-stream philosophy to what counts as main-stream philosophy in America.

    Your patent ethnocentrism on that point suggests a probing understanding of the issue, and I am thrilled to hear it.

    — Ammon Allred · Jul 18, 01:42 PM · #

  16. Now, on to your point about “systematic evasiveness.” This is one of the more hackneyed, but admittedly substantive critique of postmodernism. However, it fails to say anything useful for two reasons. 1) Often times, the so-called systematic evasiveness is simply the result of a rather obvious mis-reading. This is certainly true of Searle, who was trying to distract his readers from the fact that Derrida had called him to the carpet on an overly rigid and dogmatic reading of Austin. (Readers who, in the words of Lavar Burton, don’t want to take my word for it —- or who want to look a crazy gift horse in the frothing mouth can consult the debate in Limited, Inc. and in Working Through Deconstruction. 2) The criticism is simply too broadly painted, in two ways. A) It might be true of some texts, but to claim it as a blanket assertion is simply to foreclose the possibility of any legitimate inquiry being done into the merits of the many claims made by a whole class of philosophers and literary critics. B) It relies on a laughably simplistic understanding as to what counts as empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. Now it’s certainly true that a lot of continental (and analytic) philosophy doesn’t lend itself either to simply constructed arguments that have easily testable premises or to claims that can be disconfirmed through the scientific method, but these are hardly the only forms of empirical inquiry available. In fact, there are plenty of experiences that would speak for or against a certain theory in a broadly inductive way. In fact, I have always (naively apparently) thought that this was one of the reasons why we have subdivisions within the academy: to allow us to engage in specialized work with the understanding that our work might fit into a broader project that spans traditional disciplinary divides. So, for example, an English professor or an anthropologist might propose a reading of a text or analysis of signification within a certain group that speaks for or against the value of a certain theory. If that doesn’t count as empirical inquiry, I suggest you rethink the meaning of the liberal arts for us.

    Finally, to compare any serious academic work to astrology suggests a profound contempt for the intellectual life that we are all ostensibly engaged in. I don’t know if this contempt, or the indifference to real suffering suggested by the suggestion that the sins of our current governments last 8 years are primarily intellectual in nature that is more wrong-header.

    — Ammon Allred · Jul 18, 01:53 PM · #

  17. You’re going to call me ethnocentric for using “mainstream philosophy” as shorthand for “the sort of philosophy done in all major research universities in the english speaking world.” I figured it was a given that I wasn’t talking about mainstream philosophy in Nepal or Zimbabew, since we’re writing on blog written in english that almost exclusively discusses higher education in the english speaking world. Whatever.

    I’m going to skip all that stuff in the middle where you argue with John Searle, because I never wrote that I agreed with him regarding Derrida (I don’t).

    Finally: “to compare any serious academic work to astrology suggests a profound contempt for the intellectual life that we are all ostensibly engaged in.”

    Of course, I wasn’t comparing serious academic work to astrology, so your outrage is entirely misplaced; I was comparing hacky right-wing criticisms of deconstruction to astrology. I didn’t anticipate having to spell it out for anyone, but in that analogy:

    English professors who teach deconstruction: right wing culture critics::astronomers:astrologists.

    The point is that Bauerlein is wasting his time doing a postmortem of the rightwingvsTheory culture wards debates when he could be trying to diagnose the problem of why the hundreds of philosophy professors at all the major research universities in the English world are not in agreement with even the basic tenets of the deconstruction/theory approach to literary criticism/philosophy.

    Whatever, though. If you want to start dragging out the ad hominem attacks (“wrong-headed”,“frothing” etc) just ‘cause I made a joke about your sacred teaching method of telling your students to entertain absurd arguments on the basis of their popularity, be my guest.

    — crazy horse · Jul 18, 02:27 PM · #

  18. Fair enough; and I apologize for the joke about frothing. But in fact, it is wrong-headed to think that the main problem with the last 8 years is the absurdity of the arguments (and in fact, if I were to assign my students to discuss those arguments, I would tell them that simply calling them absurd wouldn’t cut it.)

    I don’t know anything about the work being done in Nepal or Zimbabwe, so I won’t dismiss it out of hand, but anyone who thinks that they can divorce philosophy in America from philosophy in Europe is in fact being ethnocentric. Nor do you need to leave the English speaking world to find a pluralistic philosophy department at a major research unviersity: just go north to Toronto (or SUNY Stony Brook or Emory).

    And since we’re calling attention to fallacies, and I’m willing to admit a little bit of an ad hominem, I hope you’ll notice what a straw-man you’ve made of my position. It would be absurd to ask someone to evaluate an argument based on popularity; to be willing to construct a strong interpretation of an argument on the prima facie assumption that there may be something in it if a lot of folks think there is is humility.

    — Ammon Allred · Jul 18, 02:50 PM · #

  19. Well, I’m sure out of my depth. I could barely tell who was on which side of what in #12-18. And I’m so pedestrian I’d get hung up on silly things like spelling, punctuation, grammar, clarity, and other outmoded stuff.

    Hermann Hesses Roman “Das Glasperlenspiel” hat vor etwa siebzig Jahren diesen ganzen akademischen Sturm im Wasserglas vorausgesehen. Auch der Titel des Romans beschreibt das Postmodernismus recht genau.

    Schoenes Wochenende. . . .

    — Dan · Jul 18, 03:44 PM · #

  20. Rob clearly hasn’t read anything by Leiter, and will be chastened if he ever does so for his patently ignorant remarks about him.

    As for a short bibliography indicating why philosophers look down upon the pseudo-theorizing he evidently prizes, try — besides, of course, Leiter’s work — Thomas Nagel’s THE LAST WORD (Oxford, 1997), Paul Boghossian’s FEAR OF KNOWLEDGE (Oxford, 2006), and Colin McGinn’s MINDFUCKING (Acumen, 2008).

    — Anon · Jul 18, 06:41 PM · #

  21. Allred on Dawkins on Lacan on Freud, or Allred on Leiter on Derrida on …, etc. The moons of Pluto here. Doesn’t anybody aspire to be Da Man anymore? (No pun.)

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 19, 08:50 AM · #

  22. I’d suggest a dose of John Searle as an aid to toxic elements of the decons. In any case, despite all the pretenses of these “radicals,” working and hiring conditions in the humanities continue to deteriorate, and I don’t hear the decons protesting or doing much about it.

    As for the mention of JH Miller: I recall the predecon MIller’s lucid and approachable commentaries on Wallace Stevens. Then I bought a psost-decon book he wrote on Intro to Literature: impenetrable rubbish.

    — George K · Jul 19, 05:42 PM · #

  23. Leiter’s latest excoriation of The Chronicle nicely applies to both this blog post and many of the comments defending what George K aptly characterizes as “impenetrable rubbish”:

    “An Open Letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education: Please, Oh Please, Could You Publish Something about Philosophy by Someone Who Knows Something (even a little!) about the Subject?”

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/an-open-letter.html

    — Anon. · Jul 20, 01:08 PM · #

  24. Re:20
    In response to my ignorance about Leiter. As I mentioned, I have read him on Nietzsche. His work’s fine — certainly nothing to get him a post at UChicago. The latter is pretty obviously a result of his blogosphere celebrity. Oh well… people have made careers from far less. I’m aware of his work on Foucault (and I have a friend who attended a class he taught that dealt with Foucault). My remarks are limited to his hysterical non-engagement with Derrida.

    Nagel doesn’t mention Foucault or Lacan in the text you cite. He mentions Derrida once, in a list that includes Kuhn and … Nagel himself (and Nagel says there that he agrees with him). The other two works you mentioned are silly pieces of cultural criticism. Neither makes reference to any specific texts/arguments by any of the avatars of high theory. Do you even understand what this discussion is about?

    Re.14: Crazy Horse wrote:
    “The issue is why faculty at English departments in this country will not address the lack of interest or respect paid to their work by actual philosophers, but will still take the time to dissect the argument as it stood between the academy and some confused conservatives 15 years ago.”

    My problem here is the use of the term “actual philosophers.” If you’ve already decided that no one teaching in a philosophy department in France is an actual philosopher, it’s going to be difficult to have a conversation. If Derrida and the rest are more likely to appeal to literature professors, perhaps it’s in part because Derrida (like Deleuze, Blanchot, Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Ranciere, Macherey, etc.) had a lot of interesting things to say about literature. Aesthetic philosophy certainly exists in Anglo-American philosophy departments, but it’s much more marginal (and tends to be limited to painting and, less typically, music).

    Once again: my point was/is that there have not been substantive critiques of French philosophy coming from American analytic philosophers. What exactly are those misguided English professors supposed to say in response to the dismissive non-engagements coming from Leiter et al. If I were to call Fodor, Chalmers, Churchland, and Dennett imposters, frauds, liars, or morons, would the issue be that “faculty at [Philosophy] departments in this country will not address the lack of interest or respect paid to their work by actual [critics]?”

    — Rob · Jul 20, 10:30 PM · #

  25. Your Fodor/Chalmers/Churchland/Dennett analogy doesn’t work, obviously enough, because they, unlike your pomo heroes, advance arguments and express views which lend themselves to rational assessment. One reason analytic philosophers don’t address themselves to the level of detail you would like to the pomo avatars is that they are in the business of abstracting from them patterns of argumentation (to the extent that they can be extracted), and the usually shoddy quality of those patterns reasonably fosters an attitude of skeptical disdain for the substantive positions they hold (to the extent that they can be extracted).

    The growing interest on the part of analytic philosophes in Nietzsche is a case in point: simply compare the work on Nietzsche coming from anglo analytic quarters to the obscurantism that has issued for decades from lit departments and pomo philo departments, in the US and abroad. The contrast in rigor and advance in understanding is stark.

    — Anon. · Jul 21, 07:54 AM · #

  26. re.25: You aren’t providing arguments. You’re repeating the same tired line about “pomo obscurantism” (and can you find a place where Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault ever use the term “postmodern?”). The analogy to Fodor, etc. works insofar as I can make it without reading them. I can say, “that fraud Paul Churchland thinks that he can prove that minds aren’t real by using something that he calls a ‘neurocomputational model of consciousness.’ What jargony rubbish!” I can also throw in remarks about him having no arguments (and I can assume that dilettantes will listen to me, since they don’t really want to bother working through complicated texts anyway).

    If you don’t understand Derrida’s arguments, that’s fine. They’re difficult and they assume a lot of prior knowledge. I can certainly suggest some secondary works that could help you.

    As to your last comment: I’ve looked at analytic readings of Nietzsche. Some of them are great (I like Nehamas and Richardson a lot); many of them are not. This is true of the continental tradition as well. Again, the trick is to actually read the stuff.

    — Rob · Jul 21, 10:06 AM · #

  27. “Postmodernism” in the pejorative sense doesn’t cover merely writers who use the term or explicitly endorse it in the sense critiqued. It denotes a climate of opinion or a constellation of views whose bearers don’t necessarily self-identify as “postmodernist” in the pejorative sense.

    Nehamas’ reading of Nietzsche, by the way, is much closer to the pomos than to the analytic-oriented treatments. (See Leiter’s early essay demolishing Nehamas’ book.) And I rather doubt that the ratio of bad to good work on Nietzsche from analytic quarters bears even the slightest resemblance to that of those stemming from lit departments and pomo-friendly philo departments. The trick, in this case, too, is actually to read the stuff.

    In any case, please share your suggestions as to the secondary works that you think could help one understand Derrida’s arguments.

    — Anon. · Jul 21, 10:45 AM · #

  28. I’m sorry but I guess that I won’t bother myself with what you “rather doubt” until you’ve engaged with the actual arguments of the figures who you dismiss.

    My first suggestion for understanding Derrida’s arguments, and for understanding his relationship to the history of philosophy is Rodolphe Gasche’s book The Tain of the Mirror. The first half of the text is on the German idealist tradition (especially Kant, Fichte, and Hegel). The second half is on Derrida’s engagement with this tradition. For Derrida’s relationship to philosophy in particular, this is the book to start with. I’d also suggest Richard Beardsworth’s book Derrida and the Political (which is not so limited in its concerns as the title would suggest). Both of these texts are written in a clear, straightforward style.

    Also, since attacks on theory typically target members of literature programs (with the implication being that these folks don’t understand real philosophy), I wonder what you make of the philosophy departments where Derrida and Co. are taught alongside A-A philosophy (e.g., Emory, Memphis, UChicago, Penn State, Villanova, Depaul, Stony Brook, etc., not to mention philosophy programs outside of the U.S.).

    — Rob · Jul 21, 11:53 AM · #

  29. Of course it’s better that Derrida and Co. be taught in philo departments than in lit departments, where their connections to the philosophical tradition are less likely to be critically illuminated, but I would revert back to the growing schism in anglophone Nietzsche scholarship where the contrast in rigor appears so dramatically — especially since Nietzsche is so unfortunately often misconstrued as a kind of proto-postmodernist. (I expect the quality of JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES to markedly improve in the wake of its new editorial board augmented by the likes of Anderson, Clark, Leiter, Gemes, Janaway, and Richardson.)

    — Anon. · Jul 21, 12:38 PM · #

  30. The editorial board of the journal will also include Keith Ansell Pearson and Gianni Vattimo — two excellent Nietzsche scholars working out of a “continental” tradition (Pearson has written extensively on Deleuze while Vattimo co-authored a text with Derrida).

    Also, my list of good secondary texts on Derrida should have included the work of Henry Staten (who has also written a great book on Nietzsche).

    — Rob · Jul 21, 01:12 PM · #

  31. There’s probably no point in hashing out our complete disagreement over the value of that trio’s work on Nietzsche, but I hope you will seriously consider making your case about analytic (or “mainstream”) philosophy’s regrettably defective engagement with Derrida and Co. in a future Chronicle piece:

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/a-brief-reply-f.html

    — Anon. · Jul 21, 02:57 PM · #

  32. I agree the Decons in the 1980s were not political enough. The charge of political tendencies in criticism sounds EXTREMELY hollow in the United States, clearly 1968 was much nearer in memory then whereas now there is little danger of youth hitting the streets in protest. Is there political life in a country where so few vote or demonstrate? Where the New York Times is taken for the Left? Where National Public Radio is basically an audio frappucino? Where “rendition” is tolerated? Where a country can go to war without declaring war? How wonderful if political movements could stir to life on campuses, but politics is life in communities and university campuses in the US are businesses, preparing businessmen for all sorts of activities—including the pursuit of the humanities.

    — Look ma, no Left · Jul 23, 10:18 AM · #

  33. I’m coming late to this party, but wonder if Rob has read J. Claude Evans’s Strategies of Deconstruction? Even though I generally agree with much of what Rob writes about deconstruction’s critics, Evans—closely reading Derrida’s early work alongside the works of Husserl with which Derrida engaged—offers a serious, substantive critique.

    — RD · Jul 23, 04:02 PM · #

  34. I have to admit that I haven’t read Evans’ book. In my earlier posts, I was thinking more about the myth of the analytic refutation of Derrida (or Deleuze, Badiou, Foucault, etc.). I didn’t mean to suggest that no one has written substantive criticisms of Derrida’s work — Foucault himself wrote a nice response to Derrida’s reading of Histoire de la folie, and he included attacks on deconstruction more generally. I also think that some of Dan Zahavi’s criticisms of Derrida are valid. These are all criticisms coming from a “continental” perspective, however.

    I’ll certainly check out Evans’ book.

    — Rob · Jul 26, 10:58 AM · #

  35. For me, the last word on Derrida is derivable from his refusal to have any sort of real dialogue with Gadamer when the latter invited it. That snub speaks volumes about a person whose work is largely derivative and, ultimately, will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

    — George K · Jul 30, 02:26 PM · #

  36. Re. 35: Right, because personality is infinitely more important than quality of work when determining who ends up in the dustbin of history.

    — Rob · Aug 6, 09:12 AM · #

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