Derrida's Critics. posted by Richard Seymour

I haven't had the time, as I hoped to, to attempt to deal with some of the more idiotic obituaries written on the occasion of Derrida's death (or, ho ho ho, 'deconstruction'). I say "written on the occasion", although there is often little evidence of that. Some of the criticisms are so old that I had forgotten all the answers to them.

There are many reasoned criticisms to be made of Derrida's work (to select one, I would question the priority assigned to text over speech, but that's a point too easily misunderstood). Unfortunately, little of what has been written of late has been anything but hackworthy hatchet jobs. Here are some examples:

Spiked Online, banging on about 'unreason' .
The Wall Street Journal misunderstanding the lack of fixity of words to meaning - being as interested as they are in the shifting values of shares and currencies, you would think they'd have an innate grasp of this .
Johann Hari on how the bad man tried to hack apart language and reason .

And here are some people who know what they're talking about:

Bat presciently expecting philistines to stick the boot in .
The Guardian doing a decent burial .
Spike Magazine featuring Derrida replying to some of his critics. .
Spurious remembering Derrida's insurmountable patience in interviews with dimwits .
Blood and Treasure wishing he'd paid more attention in class.
Charlotte Street carries a riposte to some of Derrida's critics.
And also some ruminations in his inimitably stylish parole .

Suffice to say, most of the whining is emerging from naive liberals and fog-brained conservatives clinging desperately to Johnson's bloody rock . How difficult his theories are! And how terrible for our bourgeois, totalising apparatus, with its strenuous capitalisation of the abstract and its Humean certainty that these ideas derive from impressions and therefore from the real world. If he goes so far as to deconstruct the word "terrorism", as the Telegraph complains, how shall we wage wars for Liberty? Well, ignoramus carping posing as a rationalist critique gets you zilch in my book and, if you don't like that, I'll deconstruct your head from your neck - Jacobin style.

Update: Terry Eagleton launches a scathing attack on the philistine response to Derrida's death today:

English philistinism continues to flourish, not least when the words "French philosopher" are uttered. This week in the Guardian our home-grown intelligentsia gave a set of bemused, bone-headed responses to the death of Jacques Derrida. Either they hadn't read him, or they believed his work was to do with words not meaning what you think they do. Or it was just a pile of garbage...

And now, Mark Kaplan has produced yet another scintillating demolition job, this time on Johann Hari's pig-ignorant review of Derrida's work:

Once again, Hari has waded in, far beyond the cordon of his competence or knowledge, his shrill journalistic head bobbing above the water, repeating prefabricated banalities and in general gauchely and gormlessly exhibiting his own intellectual illiteracy. The fact that he cites, in his defense, a first class degree from Cambridge ‘specializing in philosophy’ only makes more indefensible his howlers and misconceptions. All of what he says about Derrida’s thought is, without exception, false. The nearest he gets to the truth is about ten rumours away. He cites not a single work, nor is there any direct quotation. His article is a disgrace...

Jonathan Derbyshire also has some thoughts.