Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 20:31:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-crl.com>
Subject: Re: Lyotard & Derrida




Matt,

Your reading of Derrida is very compatible with my own, yet I might say 
things a little differently.

 I agree there is an ethical force to Derridean deconstruction when we use
it to expose the savagery that is legitimized by logocentrism.  I am on
another list in which rather postmodern counselors or inclined to talk in
a disgruntled way about the psychiatric diagnostic categories, for
example.  The point is that when mental health professionals believe in
those categories, in a simple logocentric way, then this can be used to
legitimize decisions and actions that are otherwise seen as harming
people.  Postmodern therapists want to look beyond those diagnostic
categories and find a 'non-pathologizing' way to characterize people. 

Similarly, just as the simple logocentrism of Plato or Aristotle was used 
to justify an aristocracy based on class divisions and sexism, so we can 
do that, too. 

So Derridean deconstruction of the categories that hold us captive has 
ethical relevance.  We agree with that.  But to say that it has ethical 
relevance is not to say that it contains an ethical prescription.  If one 
has deconstructed the logocentric structures that hold us in a class 
based framework, then one is less likely to be ethnocentric, surely, but 
there is no prescription that one should be less ethnocentric.  I like 
that.  I like to read Derrida that way.  He changes our understanding, 
but we are left to our own readings to derive our ethical prescriptions.  
They are not spelled out as a list of commandments.

By the way, I do not see deconstruction as simply a deconstruction of 
binary oppositions.  That is certainly a major element of what 
deconstruction is about, but my reading of works like White Mythology 
suggest that deconstruction also includes a demystifying of figurative 
language that captures us within a poetic frame.

Another point, "The Ear of the Other" is actually a very short and very 
readable interview, much like "Positions".  The interviews were done in 
1979, after he wrote Of Grammatology.  It includes a number of remarks 
that are useful in making sense of his denser texts.

I like, and agree, with your point, by the way, that the deconstruction 
and the 'reverse' deconstruction, are not a conceptual see-saw.  Once we 
have worked through a deconstruction, we do not go back to privileging 
the earlier signified in quite the same way.  There is a change.  But, 
still, there is the force of conceptual habit, and we do go back.

> > 
> Do you know Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism"? 

Yes.  Thank you for your comments about it.

 There is a really great
> passage there about acting "ethically" not in the sense of ethics as
> described by metaphysics but as a kind of comportment or abiding in
> relation to Being (Derrida would reject the telos--or archive, the idea
> of Being as the aim--but I think he would agree on the idea of a
> "stance", a way one positions oneself to the question--as a new way of
> being ethical but not in the sense of metaphysics) "More esential than
> instituting rules is that man find the way to his abode in the truth of
> Being" (p. 262) which is an abode found in language.  What that "means"
> or translates to I am not sure--I am also not sure what reinscription of
> deconstructed texts looks like.  There are several things that I am at al 
> loss for but I have a lot more reading to do.
> 
> What do you think?  I really enjoy this discussion too and hope to
> continue it either now or later. 

I think you said you were leaving tomorrow.  When will you return?


 I would love to send you a copy of my
> paper when it's done.  I had one paper published in a graduate journal at 
> UCSB a few years ago but I am not very pleased with it.  I have two other 
> papers that are more recent and more to my liking.  If you have access to 
> a fax machine let me know.
>
> Have you had anything published or are you at work on anything right now?

I have sent you information privately on how to fax me, and I will be
sending you a published paper, which I have also offer to other scholars
here who may have an interest.  It is called:  What Postmodernism Can Do
for Psychoanalysis: A Guide to the Postmodern Vision, published in the
American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1996, 371-394.  I have a paper that
will be coming out on Lacan shortly.  And I have two more that I am
currently working on, one in revision, and another just being planned. 

I look forward to reading your paper.

..Lois Shawver