Derrida, historicism, and me

[buddhamonkey]

For any who may be interested, I've made a long post over on my blogspot journal about Derrida and the dominance of historicism in contemporary literary criticism -- or more, accurately, about my own experience of discovering Derrida as an English undergrad/grad at the height of the theory backlash. It should be the first part of a series tracking

Comments

[seasontoseason]

i don't have time at this moment to do something spectacular to convince you of my worth, but you seem like someone I'd like to be pen pals with-- or at least lj friends. friend me?

[buddhamonkey]

My understanding is that the line you're talking about ("il n'y a pas de hors-texte") hasn't so much been mistranslated as misinterpreted -- but very much to the effect that you suggest. Actually, there's a nice post about that passage here that I stumbled across while making that post of my own.

I hadn't realized it, but of course you're right -- one mustn't be too explicitly political, either, and one certainly shouldn't come off as a Marxist unless one is already Frederic Jameson or Terry Eagleton. Actually, I have nothing against New Historicism in itself, so much as I think it's a problem in general that the literary academy tends to impose such a narrow range of acceptable approaches at any given moment, at least for anyone who isn't already an established scholar.

Back in that time when I was a committed Derridean, I was a big fan of Spivak's too! But I haven't read her on New Historicism -- that would be interesting. Actually, she's the translator of Of Grammatology, and I hope to read her long (and I here very useful)

[conrad_zaar]

He was ahistorical, and to be ahistorical is to be apolitical, and to be apolitical is to be indifferent to the suffering of the oppressed, at best trivial and at worst a moral monster.

This line really rings true to me as a nice (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) summary of historicist attitudes towards poststructuralism. I'm in a subfield that has a strongly historicist slant, but I never caught the historicist bug myself.

[buddhamonkey]

Of course, you could easily make the case that Derrida is none of those things (amoral, apolitical, ahistorical). But right now I feel more like making a case that it's possible to be political without being historical, and ethical without being political in any explict/conventional way.

[t3dy]

tantalizing post. I'd like to hear more about the content of the papers and commentary on which elements you felt were successful. thanks for sharing.

[buddhamonkey]

Thanks. Those papers were so long ago that I don't remember them well, and I'm not about to delve back into them. But there was one about naming in the African dream sequences in Derek Walcott's Omeros, and there was one that read Spivak against J.M. Coetzee's Foe, and there was another one that critiqued the idea of "undeconstructable justice" in Derrida's later work (mainly Specters of Marx). I'll probably touch on some of the content of that last one in reconsidering my earlier ideas about Derrida as I continue reading.

At the time I thought all the elements were super successful, but I tried rereading some of the Derrida paper the other night and frankly I couldn't figure out what I meant by half of it.