Paul,
I know that this is all meant in fun but I’m afraid I cannot help but see in it little but vicious sadism. It is not merely a fantasy of Derrida’s murder; it is a lurid description of torture, which invites the reader to exult in deadly violence. Such violence, we are to conclude, is poetic justice in this case, because apparently, Derrida is guilty of rejecting belief in human consciousness or suffering. The reader is to be delighted when the god of nihilist theory is confronted with genuine nihilism.
I said on your other thread that I write as a recovering post-structuralist. Seriously, I write as someone who has read a great deal of post-structuralist theory and has concluded that some of it is convincing, some of it is not, and much of it is incomprehensible to me. There are elements of Derridean criticism that are quite intelligent and which I find useful in my approach to criticism, broadly defined. And there is a lot in him that I don’t find useful or intelligible.
What I find troubling in your approach to Derrida is that you do not seem to have given him the fair hearing that you demand that he (and other post-modern critics) give to literature. You would rather just disembowel him. And I have to say, post-modern theory has a lot to say, much of which I find quite plausible, about what might motivate the symbolic violence of your fantasy about the death of Jacques Derrida, a man with a family, friends, students, teaching responsibilities, scholarly ambitions, numerous publications, an ego, a heart, a brain, a liver, and pain receptors.
epigone
[This message has been edited by epigone (edited September 20, 2003).]
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