File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9807, message 55


From: piers-AT-kuc01.kuniv.edu.kw
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 22:41:52 -0300
Subject: re: "reactionary French dandy"


Somewhere someone said that to let a violence pass without comment
is only to affirm it, on the principle that silence can be taken as consent.
Derrida may have written some crap, lots of crap may be Derridean in
inspiration--but that's no reason not to be grateful for the good bits. Way
back in 1967, Julian's "dandy" wrote a snappy critique of Levi-Strauss
which included a bit on "anthropological war" or the discipline of
anthropology's habit of effacing a culture's self-inscriptions through its
practices of classification, difference and the system of naming. He
coined the phrase "violence of the letter"--an eye-pleasing, figure-
hugging rhetoric perhaps, but one that that discipline and others are still
trying to think their ways through. If you've half a mind, Julian, and
possibly you have, you might check the work of Fabian, Thomas, and Gupta
on this. (No lit-critters, there.)

I'm also quite grateful for D's work on "the woman as veil" in
Nietzsche and western metaphysics (Spurs, 1978). Not quite to every
one's taste, I fancy. Very distracting, showily drawing the eye away from
more muscular preoccupations. Still, don't be fooled. Remember what Wilde
said about appearances.

Moues,
while looking for my beauty spot,
Piersm
/


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