For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.
Derrida wrote this in 1993. Sure he wasn’t a communist and mostly focused on literary theory and writing books about his mom dying of dementia or how he got circumcised and had a secret name or why writing is not just glyphs, but he was not CIA adjacent (I hate this trend of just declaring people are CIA plants because you don’t like them?), had the audacity to declare communism an undefeatable specter that will haunt the capitalist world until it dies in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise, and his theory of deconstruction made tremendous contributions to feminist and postcolonial studies.
Yeh I’ll admit these are pretty much straight barz he’s spitting. But they’re points we should all already agree on.
The issue in for me is why is deconstruction necessary? What is insufficient in the analytical tools we already have, like materialist dialectics, or what they contain themselves implicitly for analysing critically essentialized ideas?
Like there alot of clear value in Spivak but my gawd its not necessary to write like that. I struggled reading through everything I’ve read to her.The dope shit in her writings I can imagine being arrived at without reference to Derrida or deconstruction.
If I’m wrong regarding above points please point in right direction :)
Also, not that its directly relevant to the validity of her theoretical work I’ve also heard from people who studied under her that she treats her research assistants like garbage and makes them clean her driveway and shit. Might of been bullshit but lmao.
Also don’t forget how Derrida writes about cats. Peak case of critical support.
I mean, if you’d like another example where I think Derrida is helpful, there’s always gender. As far as I know, there are very few dialectical materialist accounts of gender that recognize the existence of trans and non-binary genders and those that there are usually seem like a mixture of empirical and historical facts to me. I’m trying to say that I usually find them theoretically inadequate. In contrast, when Derrida writes about Hegel or about Heidegger and their conceptions of sex/gender, it obviously doesn’t have a direct application to reality but for exactly that reason, I find it much more interesting and insightful. Now, I could of course be wrong and maybe it’s a question of what you want of out of theory, but that’s my view.
Derrida wrote this in 1993. Sure he wasn’t a communist and mostly focused on literary theory and writing books about his mom dying of dementia or how he got circumcised and had a secret name or why writing is not just glyphs, but he was not CIA adjacent (I hate this trend of just declaring people are CIA plants because you don’t like them?), had the audacity to declare communism an undefeatable specter that will haunt the capitalist world until it dies in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise, and his theory of deconstruction made tremendous contributions to feminist and postcolonial studies.
Yeh I’ll admit these are pretty much straight barz he’s spitting. But they’re points we should all already agree on.
The issue in for me is why is deconstruction necessary? What is insufficient in the analytical tools we already have, like materialist dialectics, or what they contain themselves implicitly for analysing critically essentialized ideas?
Like there alot of clear value in Spivak but my gawd its not necessary to write like that. I struggled reading through everything I’ve read to her.The dope shit in her writings I can imagine being arrived at without reference to Derrida or deconstruction.
If I’m wrong regarding above points please point in right direction :)
Also, not that its directly relevant to the validity of her theoretical work I’ve also heard from people who studied under her that she treats her research assistants like garbage and makes them clean her driveway and shit. Might of been bullshit but lmao.
Also don’t forget how Derrida writes about cats. Peak case of critical support.
I mean, if you’d like another example where I think Derrida is helpful, there’s always gender. As far as I know, there are very few dialectical materialist accounts of gender that recognize the existence of trans and non-binary genders and those that there are usually seem like a mixture of empirical and historical facts to me. I’m trying to say that I usually find them theoretically inadequate. In contrast, when Derrida writes about Hegel or about Heidegger and their conceptions of sex/gender, it obviously doesn’t have a direct application to reality but for exactly that reason, I find it much more interesting and insightful. Now, I could of course be wrong and maybe it’s a question of what you want of out of theory, but that’s my view.