The Deconstructor
Jacques Derrida died on 8 October 2004, aged 74. He left behind a most curious legacy, hotly disputed and oft derided. The Economist, a magazine known for its tortuous civility to even its worst foes, gave him a scathing obituary which only reluctantly paid tribute to his good points.
But why was Dr Derrida so hated? The answer lies in the peculiar philosophy he espoused. He believed that all literary texts could be stripped of their ideological biases and prejudices by proper analysis — that you could take Shakespeare for example and strip the biases of his times and his culture away, thus producing an interpretation of his writing which would owe nothing to social, philosophical, cultural or political influence.
Hogwash, I say. Derrida's philosophy merely confused and impoverished without adding to the understanding of the literature he critiqued. Local journalist Janadas Devan has defended Derrida-esque jargon, saying that the specialist terms of the humanities and social sciences should be considered on par with those of the hard sciences. The refutation to this was published in 1996.
The landmark publication was an article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. It was total rubbish, written in the favoured jargon of the postmodern humanities. And it was swallowed hook, line and sinker by the target population. Alan Sokal's intention in getting it published in a well-known cultural-studies journal was satirical, not enlightening. He wanted to denounce the sort of crap that postmodern relativists spout, a sort of eternal carnival around the theme that truth (scientific or otherwise) is merely a social construct created by convention and tacit human agreement.
For those who would like to flirt with such alluring but ultimately useless philosophies, I recommend a healthy dose of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Sokal and Bricmont, 1998. In this rather neat and sparsely entertaining book, the authors give a complete account of Sokal's famous hoax and its outcomes. They challenge with great puissance the notion that science is merely some sort of privileged cultural narrative, and that you can write nonsense with a pseudoscientific vocabulary and get away with it.
I heartily recommend the book, once more. And though Derrida was personally quite a nice man by all accounts, I am sad that he chose to spend his life helping a confused world to get more confused. What a waste of a human mind!
But why was Dr Derrida so hated? The answer lies in the peculiar philosophy he espoused. He believed that all literary texts could be stripped of their ideological biases and prejudices by proper analysis — that you could take Shakespeare for example and strip the biases of his times and his culture away, thus producing an interpretation of his writing which would owe nothing to social, philosophical, cultural or political influence.
Hogwash, I say. Derrida's philosophy merely confused and impoverished without adding to the understanding of the literature he critiqued. Local journalist Janadas Devan has defended Derrida-esque jargon, saying that the specialist terms of the humanities and social sciences should be considered on par with those of the hard sciences. The refutation to this was published in 1996.
The landmark publication was an article entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. It was total rubbish, written in the favoured jargon of the postmodern humanities. And it was swallowed hook, line and sinker by the target population. Alan Sokal's intention in getting it published in a well-known cultural-studies journal was satirical, not enlightening. He wanted to denounce the sort of crap that postmodern relativists spout, a sort of eternal carnival around the theme that truth (scientific or otherwise) is merely a social construct created by convention and tacit human agreement.
For those who would like to flirt with such alluring but ultimately useless philosophies, I recommend a healthy dose of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Sokal and Bricmont, 1998. In this rather neat and sparsely entertaining book, the authors give a complete account of Sokal's famous hoax and its outcomes. They challenge with great puissance the notion that science is merely some sort of privileged cultural narrative, and that you can write nonsense with a pseudoscientific vocabulary and get away with it.
I heartily recommend the book, once more. And though Derrida was personally quite a nice man by all accounts, I am sad that he chose to spend his life helping a confused world to get more confused. What a waste of a human mind!
etched with acid at 6:44:00 am
1 Comments:
derrida is NOT hated. he is controversial, yes, but great thinkers always inspire great debates. academia would not exist without disagreements; how else would you generate new ideas? derrida is very much loved by his colleagues and students from all over the world; see here.
it is clear to me from your post that you have never read any derrida, and if you have, YOU were "confused and impoverished" by the complexity of his writing because you have never tried to, or don't have the intellectual capacity to understand them.
if you had done any research at all on the "culture wars", you'd have realised that sokal was thoroughly refuted years ago. a good, accessible article by stanley fish is available here. also read andrew ross' response you may not agree with the articles, but i implore you to seek a balanced view of things before jumping to completely reactionary and unsubstantiated conclusions.
i am surprised at your entirely reactionary anti-intellectual response to derrida's death, considering that you are the proud owner of over 6000 books. please write about what you know in the future; it's really ok not to know everything. the point is to possess enough intellectual curiosity to want to find out, something which you obviously sorely lack.
best,
hwee yee
http://queer.konvolut.net/
email: hubris@gmail.com
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