Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 03:20:32 +0100
From: "Gerald O'Connell" <goc-AT-gacoc.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Jacques Derrida? - critiqued up


In message <199903280102.UAA09420-AT-smtp5.mindspring.com>, John Young
<jya-AT-pipeline.com> writes
>Derrida, a Holocaust writer, yes, that would help to understand
>the post-Holocaust, post-and-continuing holocaustic, intellectual, 
>that is, one no longer deserving privilege nor honor of intellect, 
>for all intellectuals are heavily burdened with failure to
>critique their cultures, 

...this doesn't apply to Chomsky, who uses the same old-fashioned tools
of analysis, factual scholarship and logical argument to blow his
bloated culture away and condemn it out of its own mouth; but Noam isn't
groovy. Noam doesn't 'deconstruct' when analysis is called for; he
doesn't 'critique' when criticism is enough to lay bare the diseased
bones of intellectual hypocrisy; he doesn't put academic terminology to
the sword in a linguistic holocaust of his own egotistic device -
perhaps because his understanding of language is too deep for him to
believe that merely rewrapping its embedded logical structures will save
a life or liberate a soul.

There are many versions of Chomsky working quietly away to bring
intellectual honesty into the debate on the human condition, and some of
them understand that there was genocide before the holocaust and there
has been genocide since it. Some even understand the dangers of
believing that one example of genocide is somehow more pivotal than any
other.
  
>West and East, North and South, that 
>produced the worst mankind is capable of 

Really ?
Well, the Tasmanian Aboriginals can't argue the point, because they were
ALL exterminated.....

>even while each
>culture's cosseted intellectuals vaunted the advancement of 
>civilized life as a career sham.
>
>Derrida helps to grasp that never again will "Renaissance man" 
>be a badge of distinction -- the dinner-evening dazzling polymath 
>suffused with knowledge, capable of pan-critique, celebrity wise
>guy. Derrida, and, now his best and oft-ridiculed "followers," aptly
>undermine those on-shoulders-of-giants of mind by disrupting
>veneration of intellectuals as a privileged caste, by showing the
>fallacy of language expertise in which all arguments are valid
>if persuasively argued in well-ruled and -regulated environments.

Did they use an argument or language to do that ? ...oh dear !

>
>There were no intellectuals in the Holocaust camps 

and, according to extreme right-wing revisionist headbanger historians,
no jews, slavs and gypsies; as for the mentally ill and handicapped,
well they all sat around having 'dinner-evenings', stuffing themselves
on pan-fried critique....

>nor in today's.
>Which is to say there are no intellectuals, on poseurs. So I read
>Derrida and his even better acolytes -- no, not his promoters and
>detractors who negligently sport with intellect, never put it, nor
>themselves, at risk off the stage.
>
>This is not to say that his best acolytes have ever heard of
>him, and certainly would have no interest in reading his
>sympathetic paens to what once was, pre-holocaust,
>pre-body-in-pain.
>
>Thanks to Ann Kleftad for the helpful distinctions.
>

and thank you, John, for inadvertently reminding me to update my league
table of 20th century intellectual heroes and villains....

Gerald O'Connell

http://www.gacoc.demon.co.uk/


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