Derrida

           

            Since Tuesday was the day of my Short Story final, I skipped song practice in order to work on finishing reading the stories for an hour before leaving for Philosophy class. Before lecture I skimmed through Rohinton Mistry’s “Exercisers”.

            This was the last lecture by Professor Robert Gibbs, as he announced that one of our TAs, Keagan would be giving the last lecture. I remember he gave the second lecture and I wasn’t impressed. It seems to me that the professor shouldn’t be going away when he’s getting paid to give lectures. He didn’t lecture twice in the beginning because he was sick, which is a good excuse, but this will be the second time he’s missed a class because he would be out of town. It’s hard for me to see that as acceptable.

            The professor asked if any of us came by tow truck. He said there was a big protest by tow truck drivers who are complaining about losing money because of Bill 15. He commented that it’s very strange to see tow truck drivers involved in civil disobedience because they seem like such gentle people and everyone knows that if they’ve hoisted up your car and you just approach them to ask for it back, they will gladly say “okay”.

            He began his last lecture on Derrida by telling us that with this reading we get to read something that is a reading of something we’ve already read. This is appropriate for Continental Philosophy because of all philosophical schools; Continental philosophers draw from other Continental philosophers more fully. For example, Derrida here is reading Nietzsche to argue against Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche with a re-interrogation of a fundamental series of questions.

            So philosophy is not universal and there is a problem with universal anthropology. Is there a universal thing called humanity? The question bleeds all the way out and becomes messed up a little between philosophy and anthropology.

            This lecture was given in 1968. The Vietnam War was being fought and the streets were full of anti-war protestors. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. Paris was virtually shut down because of riots protesting everything and nothing.

            After World War I came the Humanism of Sartre and Marcel. Then Personalism and then Heidegger. There was an anthropological reading of humanism in the French world but Derrida though they should have all read more Nietzsche. But Nietzsche was not widely read in France until the late 1960s. In the 1950s Anthropologism emerged to say that all philosophies were anthropological. From the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s, social scientists questioned Humanism and proclaimed the end of man. But a stronger reading of the “Humanists” would have shown that they also rejected Anthropologism. A weak reading of philosophy by social scientists produced an easy criticism. Husserl was both anti-anthropology and anti-psychology. But a thin reading made them Humanists. They interrogated and replaced it with a thing not confined to humanity. They were near the end of man before this, before Foucault and before Levi Strauss.

            “We” is a tricky pronoun and a profound philosophical issue. “We” is already metaphysical. Heidegger’s “we” certainly was.

            The professor made a two column list of words and said that we would work towards later wiping out the right column:

Left:

Proper is the most interesting word on the list. Used here in the sense of “authentic”.

Property – that which is yours, whether it is dreams or stuff. Your property is what makes you you.

Essence

Truth

Nearness/proximity of Being and man.

Right:

Present

Represent

Presencing

           

Event comes and makes you new.

Levinas is near the Other but also near something other than the other.

At the heart of the project is the question that animated the question in Being and Time. We are the one that has the problem finding the meaning of Being.

These guys were all neck deep in Husserl and his Phenomenology, which is about how things are present. The study of what appears. In the presence of things there is hidden stuff that gets through phenomena. Phenomena are present to us and what appears in our consciousness. We are the clearing where things appear. What ultimately shows up is us. We are the actors that watch the actors who are us. We are the being for whom the question of Being is in question circling back to an echo of Descartes.

The human privilege is that it is a being that can ask about Being. Dogs don’t ask about Being. Do angels ask about Being?

“We” is the entity where things become present. Specific self-presencing. “We” is the entity that asks.

I can hear my voice in a way that I can’t see my self. Speech is the ground of presence that Derrida deconstructs. It is displaced with a time lag. When you get this letter I will be gone.

That identification with self-presencing is what Derrida is attacking. Are we sure it is going to work?

Heidegger didn’t like it when dasein was translated as human. We need to think Being harder. He is disrupting anthropology.

I am as close to me as I can get. The human is practically nearby. Ontologically I am so far from me. Nearness is an illusion because it is not the nearness we want.

Derrida quotes two pages of Heidegger.

The human has a different role in relation to Being. The essence of man allows truth to appear and fade away. But we still end up with ourselves. We mistake the nearest for neighbours.

Participles once were verbs. We are trying to get at the temporality of Being but just end up with presence and self-presence.

Professor Gibbs told us to pay special attention to footnote #36 on writing and voice:

            “On the topic of what unites the values of self-presence and spoken language … Implicitly or explicitly, the valorization of spoken language is constant and massive in Heidegger … Having reached a certain point in the analysis, it is necessary to measure the extent of this valorization rigorously: if it covers almost the entirety of

Heidegger's text (in that it leads all the metaphysical determinations of the present or of

being back to the matrix of Being as presence … it is also erased at the point at which is announced the question of a Wesen that would not even be an Anwesen …Thus is explained, for example, the disqualification of literature, which is opposed to thinking and to Dichtung, and also to an artisan- and "peasant"-like practice of the letter: "In written form thinking easily loses its flexibility. . . On the other hand, written composition exerts a wholesome pressure toward deliberate linguistic formulation" … "The truth of Being. . . would thus be more easily weaned from mere supposing and opining and directed to the now rare handicraft of writing" … "What is needed in the present world crisis is less philosophy, but more attentiveness in thinking; less literature, but more cultivation of the letter"

            The problem is that instead of thinking about language only, we need to see that language is also a kind of unbinding. Metaphors are incapable of totally abandoning language. We are dragging the ladder as we move the structure. Lurking metaphysical vision, but also the failure of the same.

            Derrida is not quite for the Other. We must be both Being and the Other though neither are stable.

            Thinking does not just resound “we” but also pulls us off of it. Disrupting the present with a strange metaphysical hangover.

            Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger is not to say wrong, but is interesting in a deeper way. We cannot escape things that are not working because of our desire for proper. We cannot disengage ourselves from metaphysical tradition and neither can Derrida. Why get into the tradition of Continental Philosophy if we cannot get out?

            This was the end of Professor Gibbs’s last lecture. There was some applause.

            I rode home and had time to do a bit of reading but in choosing between being prepared for a test and having a fresh brain for a test, I’ll take the fresh brain every time. I went to sleep for half an hour and rested for another thirty minutes before going through the rest of the stories.

            Our final would be in the West Hall of University College. There was another exam finishing up when I arrived, fifteen minutes early. As I waited, I looked down from the second floor railing into the atrium where there are cushioned benches; behind which are framed wooden panels that resemble book shelves. I noticed that just for the benefit of those looking down, the tops of those panels have small bits of mirror glued in simple patterns that catch the illumination of the chandelier and whatever light may be coming in through the stained glass window to create a celestial effect.

            In the test, we had to write three essays from a choice of four topics. I chose violence, humour and authority.

            In one essay I talked about the three stories we read from Sinclair Ross in which there are three different kinds of prairie storms: a hailstorm, a dust storm and a snowstorm. In each case, the storms provide a metaphorical background for the repressed emotions in the relationships of the married couples in each story.

            In the second essay, I wrote on Donald Barthelme’s use of humour in his story Bluebeard, that deconstructs the original fairy tale into a ridiculously complex farce in order to convey that the expectations that men and women have for each other’s stereotypical behaviour are unfounded.

            In my last essay I dealt with the authority figures in the Shyam Selvadurai’s “Pigs Can’t Fly” and Rohinton Mistry’s “Exercisers”. In each case it is mostly female authority that enforces repressive traditions, but in the case of “Pigs Can’t Fly” the female authorities are merely the enforcers of gender rules laid out by men, because if a boy “turns” Gay, the mother is the one who is blamed.

            I was relieved when the test was over. I felt that I’d done my best.

            That night I tried to watch a download of the lost pilot episode of “I Love Lucy” but the download was not yet at 90% and so I couldn’t see the whole thing. For the last week I’d had the first seasons of several old TV shows on the go, but none of them were yet fully materialized in their folders. I had Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Hawaiian Eye, The Honeymooners and I love Lucy. That pilot episode of Lucy had downloaded faster than the others, but still not fast enough. I was pretty exhausted after my exam anyway and went to bed an hour early.