Response+to+Cohen

Quotes from the text are in **bold**


 * “I have simultaneously—I ask you to believe me on this—the double feeling that, on the one hand, to put it playfully and with a certain immodesty, 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. I swear to you, I believe sincerely and simultaneously in these two hypotheses” (239).**


 * “I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess” (239).**


 * “The term ‘anthropocene’ is curious, at once leaden and foppish. It carries a trace of the obscene…it seems the epitome of //anthropomorphism// itself—irradiating with a secret pride invoking comments on our god-like powers and ownership of ‘the planet’” (240).**


 * “The //anthropocene//, nonetheless, is like a falling knife, in the irreversible sense of Von Trier’s balletic collision—something that cuts through the blather, and it indexes extinction as if with a backglance” (240).**


 * “//Extinction//: since the ‘anthropocene’ can only be named from without or afar, as if by another looking back” (241).**


 * “But the term //anthropocene// is a placeholder, non-semantic, a non-word and non-name that does not adhere to any binarised sense and cannot be deconstructed” (241).**


 * “But the //translation effect// of the anthropocene continues to be applied to the ‘late Derrida’s’ strategems: some are peeled back. Instead of //hospitality//, the inhospitable. Instead of the polemical premise of neo-liberal triumphalism of the early 90s or even ‘terrorism,’ the last human-on-human antagonistic projection, ‘something //else//.’ Instead of the late strategies to embed deconstruction within the tribe’s mainline academic traditions—‘the ethical’ or ‘the political’—one turns elsewhere in Derrida: humanualism, //khora//, the monstrous” (242).**


 * “The official arc of Derrida’s narrative—that of moving from a text-based deconstruction to the world, justice, politics, ethics, religion, the contemporary—can today be speculatively reversed or refolded” (242).**


 * “It is rather the absence or lack in his writing of eco-catastrophism that is remarkable in ways, as much, say, as his disavowal of cinema, or his occlusion of whatever ‘de Man’ came to signify for him. In each case, there is something too close perhaps, impinging on (or interfering with) the ‘deconstruction’ he chose to craft in order to keep a ‘future’ open, or //survive//” (245).**


 * “Then there is the elided third category—the ‘bad’ readings of those opposed to the ‘bad reading,’ presumably in his name” (246).**


 * “Rather than represent some blindspot or a repression—or some lack as if to be //supplemented// today—one might see here the riddle of a translation-effect held at bay and to be later released, that of being read by and fromteh anthropocene. That would be the ‘later on’ toward which J.D. points in saying ‘one has not yet begun to read me.’ This other reading to come is at war with the first, the auto-immune capsule of ‘late Derrida,’ presented as warm milk to the kids, withdrawing the tequila shots of the (not yet) ‘early’ Derrida—not trusting that it was ‘time’ for that, or whether the path would not lead to a pre-emption of the brand” (247).**

I can’t drink tequila. Bad experiences.


 * “//Cinema// is not, as Derrida opines, the fantasy-technics of writing all along but involves a logic that is pre-letteral and pre-hieroglyphic, 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” (249).**


 * “The unbridgeable rift between the two Derridas…accords with a //rift// today within the fading meme of ‘deconstruction’ as a franchise. On the one hand, there would be a ‘deconstruction’ busy tending to the proper name, obsessively, dutifully, yielding a soft //Derrideanism without deconstruction. Deconstruction//****™. And on the other hand, there is what might be called a //deconstruction without ‘deconstruction’// in so far as the //anthropocene// alleviates and rereads the former—selectively and aggressively. Do writings marginal to the angelicists, corporatists, academic archivists and one-time contemporaneity seekers float to the fore?” (250).**
 * “It might give up the fetishisation of a //persona// (irrelevant to the writing), and address the new, remarkably dark aporia of the anthropocene and ecocide” (251).**


 * “//Enter, the ‘anthropocene.’// This term or non-name arrives in a tangle of forces without any appeal to //sovereignty//. It has turned the current geo-political and geo-economic climate into a paralyzed network of zombie systems (in denial) angling for a momentary advantage before the next reset hit: Euro-collapse? Methane bubbles from the tundra? Oceanic acidification?—the menu is suddenly endless.**
 * On the one hand, as said, the term manifests the essence of anthropomorphism at its peak of narcissistic self-congratulation—//anthropo-narcissus// gets a plaque name after it stamped in the geological record. On the //other// hand, it seems distinguished for practicing auto-extinction, //ecocide//” (251).**

A concept that came up a lot in our reading of //Capital//, that profit is made in the brief moments of relative advantage, by being the “first mover.” Everyone tries to be the “first mover.” That is the only goal, to move before everyone else, and before the next cyclical crisis. What does Cohen mean by “without any appeal to //sovereignty//”? Is this to say that there is no forethought, no rational planning, but only some sort of unconsidered, automatic (zombie-like) urge to follow the law of seeking momentary advantage?


 * “How might the rhetorical tools of deconstruction read the anorganic and invisible puzzle of //oil//, the rhetorical inventories of hyper-financialisation…or the global klepto-mediacracies consolidation, post democratic and neo-feudal telepoloi?” (251).**

Cohen, in a sense, shares the goal of certain “Derrideans.” He wants to make Derrida relevant. But rather than looking to **“justice, politics, ethics, religion, the contemporary,”** which, in his interpretation of the “Last Interview,” Derrida claims is not a reading of him at all, he would somehow turn the **“rhetorical tools of deconstruction”** upon things Derrida never mentioned, the “remarkable” lack in his writing on “eco-catastrophism.”

Cohen thinks Derrida has given permission for this project: **“As you see, through, in this same ‘last’ interview…Derrida provides the template, or green light, even if this is not what the //après-Derrida// has, so far, dared to ‘risk’” (251).**


 * “That these appear absent today reflects the anaesthetized state of academic culture in the //late anthropocene//—call it a sort of pre-//ptsd//—when the untimely has become unexceptional and numbingly rote. That culture’s perpetual relapse into pre-critical and crypto-humanist positions parallels that of geo-political and economic systems more broadly…Indeed, it mimes the global financial elites’ consolidation of a cognitive crony-capitalist kick-the-can-down-the-road backloop (denial) in which, mathematically, virtual generations are despoiled or cut off…Intra-generational war seems deferred in much of the West only by laced foods, ipods, and a plenitude of pharmaceuticals.**
 * Might a //mutant// or properly anarch(ival)ist deconstructive meme find its opportunities and relevance endless in this ‘environs’? It need only, for the moment, ‘sacrifice’ the proper name, the brand…since without the wager…without //contretemps//, and without the engagement of contemporary mutations, it would hardly conform to Derrida’s //practice//…One need only begin with an affirmation of extinction—and proceed to unriddle the aporia of a Western parenthesis read, now, from the //cinanthropocene//” (253).**

By an “affirmation of extinction,” is he referring to the extinction of Deconstruction™, the end of Derrideanism, or is he referring to ecocide, the self-induced extinction of the human species? Or both? By calling our era “anthropocene,” we have admitted extinction already, but we are not being self-aware about it.

I am still unsure what type of deconstruction Cohen would apply to the “mutations” of today. I have only the most superficial knowledge of Derrida and deconstruction in general, despite this excellent course (which, sadly is drawing to a close). An example of a particular project would be helpful. What would one say about oil? About international capitalism? About runaway global warming?


 * “Occupy Deconstruction****™”**