Derrida and Company

August 16, 2010

Reading a draft for a student who is doing her senior thesis on Beckett and Derrida. She’s doing a good job, especially considering that she must overcome what is essentially, on Derrida’s part, more an elaborately defended error than a point of view. Derrida does not understand how language works, and his whole edifice is built, house on the sand, upon that. Philosophy, I think, goes most astray when it fails to be informed by poetry. Most contemporary philosophy seems to be quibbles over words, and the quibbles become pointless (as if they weren’t already) when one points out that words are less like stones than they are like light glancing off the stones. Amid the varying shimmers, we know the stones are still there; we know what stoneness is; the variations of light have not altered that, nor contradicted that, nor caused the stone not to be a stone. But we now acknowledge facets that were previously unknown, which alter and enlarge stoneness without in any way negating or contradicting it. Yet I have sat through a humanities lecture during which the philosophical lecturer spent an hour worrying about the identity of a person who sometimes plays rock music in a stadium and sometimes does not. Is he a rock star or isn’t he? That he is a rock star when he’s playing music in a stadium, or when someone references his doing so, and a papa or a student or a drug addict when he is doing things pertinent to those identities seems obvious enough to me, but did not enter the lecturer’s selection of possibilities. If I go around calling myself a rock star, I don’t think people fall into despair because their concept “rock star” is now negated, but rather assume I mean to aggrandize my reputation in some pursuit or other: “On trivia night in the bar, I am a rock star.” Theoretically, this could be the open flood gates of linguistic chaos, but in actual life, it is nothing of the sort. What am I to do when someone asks me who I am, and I realize I can answer, “Man. Teacher. Poet. Writer. Painter. Mystic. Scientist. Conservationist. Democrat.” Does my self come into being with each identity, and then suffer annihilation before transitioning into the next? Is “Scientist” a lie if “Mystic” was the truth? Nobody with an understanding of how language actually works would accuse it of alienation when it means more than one thing by a single word. That I can use the word “good” with ten different, sometimes quite ironic references, does not alter either the word’s meaning or my conception of “the good.”
My student alleges that “It is raining. It was not raining.” (quoted from Molloy) is a sign of alienation, that the character is unable to understand his environment because the words which he uses to understand it are unreliable. Yet if one quotes, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the summer of hope, it was the winter of despair” few would identify that as perceptual confusion, but rather as a clear and rather luminous description of a chaotic situation. Derrida and his ilk (I admit I don’t know who all I mean by “ilk,” but I mean something) are like boys who make up an elaborate game– lovely and amusing though not in any way objective– and then waste most of their time squabbling over “rules” that they just invented. “It is raining. It was not raining” says no more about language or identity than “The rock is dull. The rock was sparkling.” It is purely personal, purely perceptual. Neither language nor identity has altered in any way. The weather has; the light has; the mood or perspective of the observer has. Or the observer might be a scamp playing with words just to cut a figure in the world of Philosophy, which seems to have descended to a playground full of people cutting figures.

I despise the disciples of Derrida for the same reason I despise certain evangelical Christians: they insist on a very particular and arbitrary vocabulary and set of references, so that their argument can never be revealed as ignorant and mischievous.

Against my own determination that there was no room left in the ground, I planted today two crape myrtles, one purple and one dark pink.