Re: misc responses

Hi all,

Sorry the about the first post. It was a wrongly pushed "send" button.

In any case, Daniel posted a much too general commentary by someone named Ray
that included the sad sentence:

"The deconstructionists seem on the side of further miring us in confusion,
which is hardly helpful."

Even putting aside the total lack of specifics in such an assertion (and in
the rest of the cited text that surrounds it) and the apparent lack of
reading implied in such a careless generalization, one still wonders if the
writer has in fact read anything at all by Derrida or even by some others who
write using his work as inspiration. Derrida's philosophical project, from
the beginning (and certainly now more than ever with his work on religion and
politics), including his invocation even early on of a gesture of
"deconstruction," has never been about confusion or about the impossibility
of communication or about the disappearance of meaning. As a philosophical
discourse and as a series of acts of reading involving literary texts,
Derrida's work has always and everywhere been about quite the opposite, it
has been about carefully addressing and responsibly analyzing the problems
raised by questions of meaning and communication and reading. Even his most
"difficult" texts, such as *Glas* or *Envois* or *Cinders* have never sought
to confuse (nor, really, are they all that confusing). To challenge,
certainly, but also always to read with care and with respect and with
thoroughness and with intellectual integrity. And they, like most
philosophical writings, can be read actively and productively once one is
accustomed to the vocabulary and the syntax of the arguments; and they can be
seen clearly to be offering interpretations deeply rooted in the history of
Western thought and to be engaged in careful argument (and not the simplistic
pseudo-nihilism that is caricatured in the unfortunate and amateurish
paragraph that Daniel cites).

Whether one is reading his analyses of Plato or of Hegel, of Ponge or Genet,
of Rousseau or Marx, of Freud or Sollers, of Nietzsche or Mallarme, one
encounters everywhere arguments in favor of meanings and responsibility and
of specific interpretations and of the history of thinking and writing and of
taking positions. And one finds, in almost every interview and almost every
statement he has made explicitly about whatever is being called
"deconstruction," careful and patient explanations concerning his own work
not being anything like what is described in the words Daniel cites.

There is something to be said, sometimes, for reading.

Thanks,

--John

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Received on Wed Dec 11 14:34:12 2002