Marginal Comments
There are some oddities in this piece on books about how to read Derrida and Marx.
The assumption of Granta’s How to Read series is that readers will go on to read at least some of the works discussed. Including this author in a series of this sort, aimed at a “general reader”, invites an interesting question: should one read Derrida? Is his work important, something with which any intelligent person should be familiar? In the grand scheme of things, perhaps not, but the question is complicated. What might it mean to say that an author is important, not just in a particular field, but for society as a whole?
What, indeed? Surely it’s fairly obvious that one has to figure that out in order to offer a reasonable answer to such a question. Isn’t it? Isn’t a question like ‘is Derrida’s work important?’ one that pretty much demands consideration of what is meant by ‘important’? Doesn’t one have to start by saying ‘Well what are we talking about here? Important to whom? Important for what purpose? Who wants to know?’ Words like ‘important’ are pretty obviously contextual rather than self-evident, aren’t they? Or am I confused.
In How to Read Derrida, Penelope Deutscher, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University in the United States, explains that deconstruction, the idea most closely associated with Derrida, is a way of reading that focuses on hidden contradictions, “deconstructing” the text, and often confounding the intentions of the author. This applies to radical and alternative ideas as well as established ones…To suggest that people should read Derrida, then, is to warn against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, and insist that “things are more complicated than that”.
Okay, but – is Derrida the only writer that’s true of? Are there other people who fit into the sentence ‘to suggest that people should read [__], then, is to warn against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, and insist that “things are more complicated than that”‘? Is Derrida the only writer who has ever warned against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, or pointed out that things are more complicated than that? If he’s not (and I’m hinting that I think he’s not), then is it quite true to say that to suggest that people should read Derrida, then, is to warn against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, and insist that “things are more complicated than that”? If someone – say, Derrida – is only one of many people who have said X, then is it clear that a suggestion that one should read Derrida is a suggestion that X? I’m not sure it is.
But, whatever satisfaction we may derive from Marxism’s power to explain, if Marx’s work is merely another text to be read it loses much of what he intended. For theory to “grip the masses”, as Marx put it, there has to be at least the foundation of a mass movement for it to address. Without such a movement, theory lacks direction, discipline even. Consequently, the obscurity of contemporary philosophy as exemplified by Derrida and his followers is not a purely intellectual phenomenon. Disconnected from political engagement, reading lacks urgency, and how we read, and what, becomes almost arbitrary.
Wait – what? Disconnected from political engagement, reading lacks urgency? It does? Not at my house it doesn’t! Not unless ‘political engagement’ is interpreted almost insanely broadly. Disconnected from engagement of any kind, one might say, reading lacks urgency, but then that’s pretty much a tautology – and there are more kinds of engagement than the political. Lots more. So – I beg to differ.
Isn’t “Deconstruction” just a sixty-four dollar word for good, old-fashioned analysis?
Don’t think so. Isn’t part of the point with deconstruction that because you can look beneath the text and find things that you say mean the opposite of what the author meant and you can be totally selective in doing so, you are king because you can make absolutely any text mean whatever the bloody hell you want it to? That’s intellectual rigour for you. Give me rigor mortis any day.
I think insisting “things are more complicated than that” is a pretty good summary of Derrida.
Sure, others make the same point. But they usually go on to give a more nuanced analysis. Whatever you say to Derrida, though, you always get back the same answer: “things are more complicated than that”. Even when they’re not.
I think I get it: the lacunae — what isn’t said — are as important as the text (texte?) itself.
And what isn’t said – why, golly, Barbara Jane, there’s an awful lot of what isn’t said, that can keep you busy for just years and years and years writing new texts about what isn’t said. Job security forever. Yee-ha.
“Marx was just another religious prophet”
What is the God of Marxism?
“What is the God of Marxism?”
Well, I may be reading more into Kipling than he actually put there (haven’t we just been discussing something like that?) but here goes:
Once there was The People,
Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People,
And it made a Hell of Earth;
Earth arose and smote it,
Listen! O ye slain,
Once there was The People;
It shall never be again.
Uh, where did Marx talk about a theory “gripping the masses”? Was this in some obscure letter he wrote when he was drunk?
Marx was well aware that the gripping of the masses was done by the material relations of production, and that if there was a theory driving that, it was Adam Smith’s by way of a thousand mine owners, textile factory owners, bankers, and others among the owning class. The very use of the word “theory” here is anachronistic, given that “theory” seems to reference that thing that became popular in the seventies and eighties among lit crit profs, rather than, say, the ‘theory’ that the centralizing power of industry is manifested by various characteristic changes from tenant and home labor (for instance, the worker no longer owns the tools with which he or she makes things, but finds them at the workplace. Etc.)
Marx did not say, workers of the world unite theoretically, for you have nothing to lose but your pre-suppositions. Only the academic Marxist says that.
When I asked what is the God of Marxism, I meant “God” in the literal sense of “supernatural being”. Marxism has no such concept, so it is not a religion.
Roger, try Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844. Since the paragraph also contains some comments on religion let me quote it in full:
“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is that is proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
I think JK’s first comment about Derrida is on the money. Derrida is all about complicating things by demonstrating a kind of textual play at work in philosophy and literature … differance with the “a” … all that. The problem is the complicating is never going to lead you anywhere; by definition, deconstruction never gives way to a better or more knowledgeable vantage point. Any knowledge you gain from deconstruction can always be deconstructed/complicated in turn. This is pretty much what Derrida means by “there’s nothing outside the text” — that is, there’s no knowledge or action or interpretation or critique or speech act or whatever free from this slippage and play.
That description is, of course, a kind of caricature. Maybe I could have said it better, made it a little more nuanced or complicated — but then where do you stop? In this respect, there’s always something to be said for a little pragmatism.
JK, you got me with the quote. But the context and date show that theory, here, certainly doesn’t refer to Marxist theory – which in 1844 consisted of notebook entries and some academic articles — but to the neo-Hegelian critique of religion. Marx’s comment, there, is much like Keynes’ remark that politicians are, unbeknownst to themselves, the playthings of some dead philosopher: theory is realized in the constraints and values of everyday activity.
Actually, one of the things reading is about is reading in context — and the theory remark seems to have been thrown around without much thought being given to the complete absense of anything like Marxist theory when Marx wrote it.
1) If it is possible to have a religion without the supernatural then the term has no meaning.
2) If you redefine religion to mean any movement that has certain characteristics having chosen those characteristics so as to include Communism a priori, then you are not making any sort of claim about the universe when you say that Communism is a religion, you are only playing with words. The Bad Moves section of this site used to have a link to an article on “Low redefinition” that covered this very thing.
Yes – what Paul said. I never can see why people want to insist on saying various non-religious things are religions instead of simply saying they share certain qualities, such as dogmatism and refusal to revise, with religion.
This is merely another definitional debate, imho. If a “non religion that shares certain qualities with religion” is as irrational, as deadly, as violent as religion can be (say…Marxist Leninist-Maoist thought), then it is certainly as appropriate to be as vigilant, as vocal about these “non-religions that share characteristics of religions” (NRSCRs, perhaps).
I still like, however, my original idea that if it functions in every way as a toxic religion (ritual, sacred books, prophets, death to apostates, evangelism), then it is only a definitional quibble to say “Marxism is not a religion.” You’re not “lowering the redefinition” by very much at all.
Still: the point is: irrational thought (and especially mass movements) are bad news, religious or not :)
“then it is only a definitional quibble to say “Marxism is not a religion.” You’re not “lowering the redefinition” by very much at all.”
Er – yes you are. Because if the supernatural/theist element is missing, that’s a very basic difference indeed.
A set of ideas or an ideology can be robotic, unthinking, dogmatic, and so on, and sharply criticized on those grounds, and still not be a religion.
But yes – irrational thought is bad news, religious or not.
Ah, Ophelia. You don’t see the inevitable forces of history, with the working classes uniting to overthrow their oppressors, all under the unblinking, selfless guidance of the “Revolutionary Vanguard” as very much a “theism”?
I guess I do. :)
But, again it doesn’t really matter. I guess this keeps being brought up because this topic is a repeated, albeit not very effective rhetorical response by god botherers: “Well, look what you GODLESS ATHEISTS did when in power, for God’s Sake” :)
Well, I suppose the Revolutionary Vanguard will do as a thee. I think it’s the unblinking bit that convinces me.
LOL. I just look at television specials on North Korean parades in front of Dear Leader, and I just say “Definitely a religious event.” More of the Aztec piling skulls at the foot of the pyramid type, but still a “religion” in every practical respect.
Have I ever sadi that “God Botherer” or should it be one word “godbotherer”? is my favorite new Britishism? LOL
There is in my neighborhood a strange middle aged man in his, I’m guessing, 50s, who lives with mommy and daddy and drives around town in a beat-up Ford Maverick, stopping in the middle of the street to basically “god bother” everyone.
(His parent’s modest suburban ranch house fortress is, interestingly enough, surrounded by floodlamps and security cameras.)