Jon Cogburn's Blog

David Auerbach on Derrida

I don't know how I missed THIS PIECE a few months ago. Discovering it now is a cool synchronicity, given Harman's nice (and definitive) recent post on "Derridean realism." Key point, that remains absolutely devastating:

But Derrida has cheated. He’s gone from an atomic relation of sign to sign and assumed that because a single signification is bereft of meaning, the entire system must be. This is a negative claim–that no meaning is possible–and he’s achieved it by narrowing the gap on both sides. First, he’s abandoned consideration of the holistic view in which a system of significations could have a meaning which is not contained in isolation in any single signification. (This is basically Quine’s argument in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism“: “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.”) Second, he’s insisted that a particular type of meaning, Husserl’s, is the only one possible, so any problem with Husserl’s admittedly naive theory extends to language in general.

So Derrida silently assumes logical atomism and a naive theory of reference, then posits that position as one side of a dichotomy and his endless deferral of meaning as the other, with no middle ground.

Anyhow, Joe Bob says to check out the whole post.*

It's a real honor to have been linked to by Auerbach, a TLS (!) critic of enviable analytical and literary powers.

[Notes:

*In the spirit of fairness, please also get a copy of Samual Wheeler's excellent Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy and Martin Hagglund's equally good Radical Atheism. I love both these books, but still think that Auerbach is correct, and moreover that the problem he isolates is even more pressing with Derrida's later (and I think ethically monstrous) Schmidt inspired political writings.**

**Another caveat- All this being said, I think there is something importantly correct and deep about Derrida's view of the necessary impossible, and the manner in which this ties in to negative theology as visualized by important philosophers like Caputo. People like Wheeler, Hagglund, and Caputo (and Rorty too for that matter) just make it impossible for me to whole heartedly jump on an anti-Derrida bandwagon.]

yet another hierarchy of failure

My basic view is that almost everyone is a failure at most things, and those who aren't are still slaves to entropy, always just on the edge of falling down.

In these regards, it's sometimes hard to be an anthropologist about your own culture. I probably don't have many insightful things to say about all of the multifaceted ways to fail at being a philosophy professor. However, I've been to just enough (and not too many) "writer's conferences"* to have a sharp eye for the various ways in which writers fail. Here's the hierarchy from top to bottom.

1. Authored multiple best sellers- Almost certainly writes in a genre such as romance, urban fantasy, or police procedurals. Surprisingly, more likely than not to still have a day job s/he hates, just to handle the health insurance! If lucky, this is at a university. If doesn't have a day job, then still spends about twenty hours a week on "the business end" of writing.
2. Authored one best seller- Will it be repeated? Probably not.
3. Self published and built enough of a "platform" to move around 40,000 units. This has only happened a handful of times. . . The sharks circle and this person will find themselves elsewhere on this list in the next few years. 
4. Authored book(s) with good distribution, but last one not a best seller, so major press has passed on exercising option, back at the conference still pitching manuscripts with all the other mopes. Platform may or may not help. One person I met had three good novels published by three different presses and was still standing in line to do five minute pitches. It made me sad.
5. Unpublished but won one of the contests supported by the conference. The agents and editors might be effusive in praise. But while they say things like, "this is quite possibly the next Confederacy of Dunces," their behavior will in no way be that of someone who really believes that. I mean, no matter what your list focuses on, you would still publish the next Confederacy of Dunces. You just would. The problem is, the industry is very small, and if it's even remotely possible the author might be a best seller some day, people will be very, very nice on the surface. But the corollary of this is that the overwhelming majority of people who win these contests still never get anything published.
6. Unpublished but with no platform whastoever. You are a mope. Enjoy the buffet, alcohol, and life affirming talks.
7. Self published, but didn't move appreciably more than 10,000 units. You are lower than the mope. The stench of failure on you is nearly suffocating, and your inability to realize this embarasses everyone else.
8. Effing crazy person, almost always paranoid in subtley frightening ways. I don't know how agents do their job, listening to pitches by people like this all day.
9. Memoir writers. A cut below that boring guy at work who won't shut up about that "really weird dream" he had last night. And nobody cares about the fact that your memoir is "Eat, Pray, Love meets X." And the contest to see who has the most effed up childhood is unseemly at this point. And stop titling books "The So and So's Daughter." It's horrible.

I won't divulge where I am in this hierarchy, other than to note that nothing I've written has yet been a best seller. On the flip side though, I don't write memoirs. That's worth something at least.

[Notes:

*writer's conference = hundreds of people drinking themselves silly in between (a) futile attempts to pitch manuscripts to a handful of agents and (b) new agey talks that fail to fortify the alcohol's wondrous despair blocking power.]

nice Salon slideshow on transgressive readings, but one that inexplicably fails to discuss David Brin and Jacqueline Carey [click link for full post]

One thing that fascinates me aesthetically is when people come up with interesting and plausible readings of a text that are consistent with everything the text says, but radically at odds with the author's intentions. Salon dot com has a really nice slideshow of ten prominent cases of this, where the another artwork reinterprets an earlier one, called "What if the villains actually were good?"

via www.newappsblog.com

really good story by my wife

It won a contest sponsored by the University of Minnesota Alumni Association and is online HERE.