La Mort du Derrida, cont.


Derrida and postmodernism are a mockery not only of science, and of a humanistic technology, but of authentic philosophy, whether analytical or speculative. His quasi-hegelian writings are the latest collections of useless, unconfirmable, unspecifiable obscurities. Students do not need phenomenology, whatever that is taken to be--pretty much subjective descriptions of consciousness with no proof or evidence offered.

Po-Mo is one of the greatest disasters for academia, even worse than Marx or Sartre, and I say that not as a conservative or puritan. Marx's economic concepts remain relevant, even if we object to marxist ideology or aesthetics; Sartre, regardless of his infatuation with "nothingness" and his cafe decadence, could write quite well, and certainly had something of a humanist's sensibility.

Neither rational or empirical, deductive or inductive, analytic or synthetic, Derrida's slithery little ideas are really a sort of a low grade pantheism, and he is the hierophant for the lit.crit. initiates who somehow crawl into academia and tenure without ever having mastered basic cognitive skills--quantitative and analytical-- that most of us have to work at for years. It is questionable whether Derrida even had the qualifications to teach in philosophy or literature departments (the French BAC for the most part still churning out 12th century clerics). Methinks Frere Jacques would not have fared too well on any objective measurement of intellectual ability, such as the GREs. But then neither would Showalter or Kristeva or Bloom or a typical UC feminist hack such as Judith Butler ( total venting stooge, really) or any of the other literary papists now spewing their drivel at the US public's expense (even Bake-field has a few po-mo pheminista smegmoid spewers out at CSUB)...
Reification of the Cephalopod

Those non-post-modernists (hopefully there are some remaining) who read a contemporary writer such as Thomas Pynchon in regards to specifiable technological as well as psychological/linguistic contexts are, I think, by necessity, required to denounce Derrida's entire project, if not speculative philosophy as a whole. Read Pynchon's essay "Is it OK to be a Luddite" (a nice antidote to continental lit.crit garbagio), and note TP's tentative approval, or at least slacker modification, of CP Snow's idea of the "Two Cultures"...