hdh-anthro

Tom Cohen
 * Polemos: ‘I am at war with myself’ or, Deconstruction™ in the Anthropocene?**

The Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012): 239–257 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/olr.2012.0044

239. I am at war with myself (contre moi-meme), it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess. Jacques Derrida, ‘Learning to Live Finally—the Last Interview’2

Two words haunt any ecologically attuned consideration of the historical hour in which our increasingly globalized world currently finds itself: one. . . is ‘anthropocene’; the other, lurking as a grim potential, or even an unfolding reality, within the notion of the anthropocene is ‘ecocide’. Kate Rigby, ‘Writing in the Anthropocene’3


 * Anthropocene** - from Geology. Framing recent centuries influence on the earth and its atmosphere as significant enough to demand a new epoch of categorization.

Different renderings of geologic epochs





240. I. Chiral ‘Derridas’ —on the other hand [chiral - non-superposable with its mirror image, ie the hand Thalidomide molecule is an example of a kind of split - left and right handed molecule. One of the molecules, was a sedative, whereas the other one was found later to cause foetal abnormalities.]



planetary collision mimes the cinematic arrival of the term anthropocene—or what I will call one of its two antipodal [relating to or situated on the opposite side of the earth.] poles of non-sense.

It is not surprising, then, that in the term’s (anthropocene) viral marketing its emerging appropriation is visible already. For instance, when it is used to promote (and rhetorically prepare the masses for) the necessity of a global pluto-corporatocratic future—since the ‘states’ are now pitiably inept, and bankrupt—jockeying for control of geo-engineering and resources.

241, Extinction: since the ‘anthropocene’ can only be named from without or after, as if by another looking back— ...Some eye, or some thing, must witness and confirm this arc, this mark in geomorphic and biomorphic time.

242. In ‘extending’ the ends of man to some imaginary ‘crossing’ to the animal, Derrida conjures and renders double-sided a metaphoric narration that mimes the 90’s pretense of opening to an otherness of ‘the other’ (subaltern, beast, or rock): that is, he performs the prospect of an empathic opening that is itself denied.

243. Does this ‘later on’ not point inevitably to the anthropocene, sometimes referenced as a ‘mutation’ to come? (Referring to Derrida's last interview quoted above)

244. It is to note that the anthropocene, a post-binarised horizon that dislocates by fiat the ‘anthropo-narcisst’ parenthesis (say, 5000 years of writing), overleaps these strategies, sifts them from within this ‘war’ with himself (and itself)—which it apparently seems to many taboo to inspect.

246. It wasn’t that Derrida was too ‘untimely’ but that he constrained his address to the too contemporary in a certain way—performing ‘Derrida’ on request or when urged to respond to academic trends or politics.

it is impossible not to note that there are, his last interview implies, different ‘bad readings’ in the view of that ‘I’ (who was at war with moi-même): and since the reading of him had not ‘begun,’ that includes the Derridean. That is, there would be the hostile unreaders every Derridean knows to take arms against (e.g. Habermas), and the opportunistic misappropriations (e.g. Rorty), but then there is the elided third category—the ‘bad’ readings of those opposed to the ‘bad reading,’ presumably in his name. That is, precisely 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.

But if Derrida occludes ‘climate change’ from his writing—would not address or write to it—it might not be accidental.

II. The Cinanthropocene—an ‘art of diversion’

One can read the ‘I am at war with myself’ as between these two or chiral Derridas—the one who refused being photographed and the star of the movie ‘deconstruction,’ in the broadest sense.

[And literally the star of the movie Derrida?]

Derrida, who would write much on graphics and photographs, would not write on cinema.

Chirality implies a distinct asymmetry between supposed doubles—the way hands are never specularly doubled or aligned to begin with. On the one hand, what is called cinema is an ‘art of diversion,’ we hear, immersed in by Derrida as escapism (mostly from being in what he calls America, with which it is nonetheless allied). It is also intimate with his early years, transporting him to a fabled ‘France,’ allied to what is without prohibition, to the ‘infantile.’

249. Cinema would be banished. It would be occluded by Derrida but not because it was a pop or ‘diversionary art’ (a banality and cliché of modernist aesthetics). Nor would it be disavowed because it was ‘infantile’, or related to ‘America’ (always problematic for him). Nor would it be banished because, in contrast to the photograph, which could be written on cinematically in effect, cinema exponentially deranges the citational relationality one could pretend to hold in place.

The unbridgeable rift between the two Derridas (‘I’ at war contre ‘myself’) accords with a rift today within the fading meme of ‘deconstruction’ as a franchise.

The attempt by ‘deconstruction’ to extend a legacy through ever more refined exegesis of Derrida (according to Derrida) has had the opposite effect according to a recent, sympathetic rebuke. For Martin McQuillan it has produced a narrowly defined entity cut off from the contemporary theory market and increasingly irrelevant to graduate students. The more it would endeavour to extend and anchor Derrida’s ‘legacy’, the more it has executed his prediction of disappearance.

[what has replaced it as of interest to 'graduate student studies'?]

254. What is clear is that ‘deconstruction’ today deconstructs nothing, curls back on itself fetishistically, and relies on a certain misreading of the persona (‘Jacques’) for instructions that were missing.

Let us conjure a splitting from which something like two chiral spheres appear that are asymmetrical, non-specular, and impact. They might reflect as in a funhouse mirror the two Derridas at war, the two cinemas (movies and the cinematisation of ‘life’). The first might well be called ‘light’ deconstruction (laboring to extend a ‘legacy,’ evolve the ‘new’ Enlightenment to come that is, Derrida pretends, in Europe’s DNA as a promise). A deconstruction resituated in an Enlightenment fable, or for short, decon-light. The other would be— let’s not call it dark deconstruction, but one without ‘deconstruction’ or the proper name. This other mode was always in alliance with one read from the anthropocene, one re-instituting the ‘wager’ in ways that have nothing to do with dissemination or survival. In terms of the algorithm of the ‘I am at war with myself,’ this latter might identify with ‘J.D.’ against ‘Derrida’ in this war, with what needs no corporate branding or face at all.

256. Nonetheless, a certain other J.D. seems to some missing as a warrior effect before these high-stakes spells of the anthropocene, these entirely new aporia, and it may be time to waken the living dead. Occupy Deconstruction™.