Polemos+(BB)


 * Polemos and Bad Reading:** t he two chiral Derridas: "the one who refused being photographed and the star of the movie ‘deconstruction'"



"... one has not yet begun to read me . . . in the end it is later on that all this has a chance of appearing; but also, on the other hand, and thus simultaneously, I have the feeling that two weeks or a month after my death there will be nothing left. Nothing except what has been copyrighted and deposited in libraries." (Derrida, cited in Cohen, p. 239)

"One can imagine such a reader mystified by how the //après-// //Derrida//, instead of opening ‘deconstruction’ to 21 st century logics, curled back to endless exegeses, reading Derrida according to ‘Derrida.’ This betrayal by ‘fidelity’ would be programmatic. The perspective of the anthropocene provides the violence necessary for a selective redefinition." (p. 244)

"...what Derrida names ‘archive’ leads him to turn back from crossing this rim repeatedly, and does so as if out of pedagogic imperatives—the perceived rhetorical limits of a readership." (p. 245)

Categories of bad reading:


 * 1) Bad reading as hostile unreading -- he assigns Habermas here (p. 246)
 * 2) Bad reading as opportunistic misappropriation -- he assigns Rorty here (p. 246)
 * 3) Bad reading as "the elided third category —the ‘bad’ readings of those opposed to the ‘bad reading,’ presumably in his name." (p. 246)

Bad reading as " tending to the proper name, obsessively, dutifully, yielding a soft //Derrideanism without// //deconstruction//. Deconstruction™." (p. 250)

Bad reading as exegesis

Bad reading as "caricature of deconstruction" (p. 244)

Bad reading of concepts and arguments such as "democracy to come" and X without X as merely tongue-in-cheek (p. 244)

Bad reading as deconstruction=justice merely a rhetorical move to rally the truth, but with no real substance or commitment to that substance (p. 244) -- would Spivak's strategic essentialism in the name of Derridean deconstructionism be such a bad reading?

Bad //reader// as a //Derridean// (p. 246)

Bad reading as " refinements of unifying a crafted ‘persona’ and capitalising a ‘legacy’ in narrower and more banal academic circles" (p. 245)

Bad reading as that which could turn deconstructionism into a franchise (p. 250)

Bad readers as "those who deemed themselves to be channeling a Derridean style or project, translators and the sort of servicing network that accumulated with celebrity and caricature. This other ‘bad reading’ is technically that of the Derridean who is disowned in the ‘final’ interview rather decisively. Nonetheless, one must admire the circuit of third-generation archivists and friends presuming to extend or transcribe this ‘legacy.’ Particularly so for delaying, as much as possible, the sort of painful dangers built into these situations: curling into imaginary bearers of the proper name, interested more in fetishising networks or re-iterations involved with academic capital and the pretense to channel a certain persona, banding into policing orthodoxies, retreating into the role of parochial conservators, and so on." (p. 246)


 * Cinema at Derrida's back **

"...there are the movies one recalls, and there is the cinematic operation and sheer mnemotechnics that recasts the spell, drug, or trance as a machinal iteration. Cinema is not, as Derrida opines, the fantasy-technics of writing all along but involves a logic that is pre-letteral and prehieroglyphic, back to the cave paintings, in effect programming the sensorium. It is, in this sense, //khora//-like and at the same time a ‘popular’ cultural power." (p. 248)

From the Derrida Dictionary:

" paradoxically essential to the //khora// is its ‘textual drift’" (p. 68)

"As Derrida sees it, then, //khora// is that third thing (between the intelligible and the sensible) that makes it possible to think anything like the difference between pure being and pure nothingness (or between my autonomous selfhood and your autonomous otherness); it is what makes it possible to think the difference between ‘I’ and ‘you’. To be brief, //khora// is the pre-philosophical, pre-originary non-locatable non-space that existed without existing before the cosmos. **Something like that.** Derrida refers to it as ‘a necessity which is neither generative nor engendered’ (ON, 126). Its singularity – and this is the point – is its very resistance to being identified; it is what philosophy cannot name. But since philosophy can’t quite face up to being powerless to name something (what would it mean for philosophy to know that there are things it cannot know, but which could be known intuitively, say, or imaginatively?), the ‘khoral’ section of the //Timaeus// has always been treated as a literary trifle and not as serious philosophy." (p. 68, emphasis added)