Why the fuck are there leftists out there who recommend this bloated CIA adjacent fuck?
I really dislike this kind of post and wish that there was more interest in philosophy and literature on Hexbear. Something like this is quite sad to see.
Incomprehensible gibberish about consumer culture underlined by rapid anti-communism and western chauvinism is not my idea of good philosophy
But no plz I’d like to see a defense of Derridas life long friendship with nazis like Heidegger
Are you sure you’re talking about the right person? Derrida hardly ever wrote about consumer culture, his “anti-communism” consists of a few scattered remarks critical of certain parts of the Soviet Union, he was very much against Western chauvinism, he never even met Heidegger and certainly wasn’t friends with him.
Derrida is still part of a wave of broad anti-Marxist reaction within the bourgeois academy. Like if you read Spectres of Marx, there isn’t much there that seems to actually contribute anything to Marxism. I don’t really understand how he felt justified in dedicating that book to Chris Hani, of all people.
Derrida was still a massive liberal. I can’t find it now but check out lectures he did in South Africa after the end of Apartheid. He is intellectually masturbating in front of a bunch of radical young black south africans who’ve just lived through apartheid and basically justifying the liberal (so, concretely, neoliberal) development of South Africa. Obvs not saying don’t read him or that there’s literally nothing there, but I think Marxists should definitely treat his thought as reactionary overall, methodologically and how it’s diverted and poisoned alot of intellects that could have been radicalised as Marxists. He was important in delegitimizing Marxism within academia.
Out of interest, as I’m happy to be wrong on this point: do you personally think there are elements of his thought which are of value for Marxism today? Examples I see referenced are writings on animality (so perhaps of relevance to animal rights and veganism) but I haven’t had the time or inclination to check em out, and they strike me as, at best, idealistic analyses which we could just avoid by doing dialectical materialist analyses of animality in the first place.
His concrete political positions certainly aren’t always convincing. I know that Christopher Wise has some good criticism of his ambiguous statements about Israel, for instance. But I don’t see how this vitiates his entire body of work. His primary concern is the history of Western philosophy and I always felt that there was more than a hint of Marx in the way he criticizes texts immanently with a focus on binary opposites. Now, you might say that it is no longer necessary to read philosophy at all because the science of dialectical materialism has made it obsolete, but that is not the position of Marx, Lenin or Mao. All of them take elements of their thought from Hegel because they have read him critically. Why should we not do the same? And in a way, basically everything Derrida wrote concerns the problem of reading. As far as I know, there is no dialectical materialist method of reading, so it’s not like there’s an obvious substitute for his work.
Regarding his effect on the intellectual esteem of Marxism in his time, I find it difficult to make a judgement. It seems to me that after 1968, there was no longer any possibility of worthwhile Marxist praxis in the West (for the time being at least). So I’d say there’s a lot of blame to go around for the weakness of the Marxist left in Europe in the past decades, and I do not think that French intellectuals are a major factor here. If anything, the whole intellectual environment of “continental philosophy” seems more amenable to Marxist thought than Anglo analytic philosophy, which is the only alternative in Western universities. Maybe Specters of Marx didn’t do anything for the Communist movement, but it did help a bit to make Marx seem intellectually respectable again after the decades of the Cold War.
In any case, Derrida’s thinking about text and reading seems irreplaceable to me. Literature has always been a difficult topic for Marxism (the great names have almost nothing to say about it), so I think a kind of literary theory that is actually aware of the problems and history of philosophy instead of shunting that off to another discipline seems worthwhile, and I don’t see how you get that without Derrida or thinkers like him.
There’s a good case that deconstruction and Derrida’s method of differance is just applying Marxist dialectics to reading. Derrida was obsessed with finding the “sediment” of words and thoughts, the underlying and historicised meaning behind texts left unsaid. That’s a very materialist and Marxist thing to do!
Yes, that’s pretty much what I think. If looking at how the matter of writing always resists its reduction to meaning, resulting in a history of conflict between matter and ideas, isn’t at least inspired by Marx, I don’t know what is.
