Occupy+Deconstruction

Tom Cohen

//__Polemos: ‘I am at war with myself’ or, Deconstruction TM in the Anthropocene?__// “Manically performative, she becomes ruthlessly deconstructive in her refusal of stale, weak, criminal human rituals” (240)

“anthropocene’ is curious, at once leaden and foppish. It carries a trace of the obscene ” (240).

I wonder, if you do this sort of work for long, doesn't everything contain a trace of the obscene?

“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 back glance ” (240).

//“//Some eye, or some thing, must witness and confirm this arc, this mark in geomorphic and biomorphic time. //__It__//__, the term, implies a species consciousness marking its disappearance__” (241).

An arc that can only be confirmed after its passing- is this safely part of the way it's perceived- a mark of objectivity? Or is this simply a result of the language and its use. I am reminded of this argument in my Missouri highschool that global warming wasn't "anthropogenic" -- that it would require more study to fully determine our role in the ecological change. This inevitably led to a cost benefit analysis of "what if you are wrong and it IS self-destruction? At worst for our side, we waste some money, but for yours, it is suicide." Speaking of chasing spectres...

“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).

“It would include what the 20th century called both metaphysics //and// its ‘deconstruction’ jointly, if the former had not been posited to stage the latter. Which returns to the question: deconstruction in, or ‘and,’ the //anthropocene//?” (242).

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

“Derrida adds ‘I swear to you’ to his plea of sincerity and belief—as if he had to convince someone this was not another spun labyrinth for a programmed audience: //as if// he had to convince another ‘Derrida’ this time, against whom he found himself at //war//. From the perspective of the //anthropocene// the true ‘rogue’ Derrida was the one who, through a calculation of canonical survival, responded to the urging of the 90’s cadre to write as if to ‘ethics,’ to ‘religion,’ to ‘politics’—or maintain the labyrinth of ‘hospitality’ with the pathos of undecidability as a rhetorical bait ” (243).

Not to diminish the importance of Derrida's final interview, but I keep thinking about the intention and ideas being pulled from single lines and words. How much weight do we give the words of a dying man to counteract or dissect his life's work? How much of his work is his or always to be his? In the critique of later 'Derrideans' is it even appropriate to ask them or tell them that they are doing it 'wrong' or 'bad'?

“It is interesting, then, that if one allows the //anthropocene// to read ‘deconstruction’—that is, to shatter the mythos of a Derridean //persona// the exegesis of whom delivers a legacy intact—it would be possible to select what is relevant, rather, to //it//. It reads back ” (243).

“This betrayal by ‘fidelity’ would be programmatic. The perspective of the //anthropocene// provides the violence necessary for a selective redefinition.”

“This is not to say that Derrida played to and against a rhetorical need of the readership, or to the //bad reading// or caricature of deconstruction, or that inventions like ‘democracy to come’ or ‘messianism without the messianic’—that is, the facility and carelessness of the //X without// //X// formula (since the original ‘X’ term, repeated, lingers and invariably re-roots itself)—were entirely tongue in cheek, however much the too handy app deteriorates as a short-cut or revision of the //sous rature//. Nor is it to say that rhetorical indulgences such as ‘deconstruction is “justice”’ were //only// seductions to rally the troops—who, quite naturally for humanists, wanted to be //good// (and, whether they knew it or not, Christian). Nor does it imply that the //après-// //Derrida// scene witnessed so far, a sort of soft Derrideanism without deconstruction, is less than admirable in executing its perceived program, however literalising or auto-immune the results. 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” (244).

"Anthropo-narcisst parenthesis" is an excellent phase - boxing Humanities intellectual fervor and the invention of writing as a human centric and self obsessive footnote on the pages of geological history.

“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” (247).

“If what can be called //cinematisation// drives the mnemonic and perceptual orders, and does so by way of __backloops precessionary to any phenomenological trope__, Derrida’s refusal to write on it is not due to his self-exemption from a ‘culture of cinema,’ and it is not that it is ‘diversionary’ (no more, say, than the detour of writing a deconstructive ‘ethics “of the other”’). Its relentless backloop precedes and swamps residual tropes of invention, ‘open’ futures, and ‘trace’ in a foreclosing fashion: it compromises a certain rhetoric of the //to come// as an inappropriate shortcut. Which is not quite to say that cinema is to //khora//, it seems, as writing is to //archive//. In all of this, cinema is to be heard as double” (248).

“cinema exponentially deranges the //citational// relationality one could pretend to hold in place” (249).

“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. What rises to the surface in the name of the J.D. at war with ‘Derrida,’ and what ceases to be relevant to this new //referential// //horizon//? Do writings marginal to the angelicists, corporatists, academic archivists and one-time contemporaneity seekers float to the fore? That is, not the writings on ‘archive,’ but on //khora//; not the work on ‘the animal,’ but on //humanualism//; not the rhetorician of mourning, hospitality, spectrality, //sovereignty//, and the ‘otherness of the other’ but another polemicist, at war with these” (250).

“The answer seems simple: //deconstruction// might bracket the rhetorical artefaction of a ‘late Derrida’ when read //as if// that were a movement into the world or a telos of J.D.’s writing rather than a rhetorical innovation among others. It might give up its fetishisation of a //persona// (irrelevant to the writing), and address the new, remarkably dark aporia of the anthropocene and ecocide” (251).

“Trance wars. Does it matter that the current non-present ‘present’ is not one of your run of the mill // times out of joint //, since it subsists beyond known tipping points in a posture of denial that alters life forms negatively going forward aeons?” (252).

Perhaps polemical, but how do we know this, can contend this?

That these appear absent today reflects the __anaesthetised state of academic culture__ in the //late anthropocene//— call it a sort of pre- // ptsd // —when the untimely has become unexceptional and numbingly rot e. That culture’s perpetual relapse into pre-critical and cryptohumanist positions parallels that of geo-political and economic systems more broadly, to say nothing of the unwinding of university programs” (253).

Did the linguistic (social=construction) turn do more harm than good for many departments? If we look at these sorts of questions as something of a process, you don't learn Derrida in your freshman writing class. Or if as they do, people internalize a distrust of the system or //any// system, which ultimately misses the point (or maybe not) and creates apathy.

“Of course, there is an irony here: nothing would have guaranteed J.D.’s survival and relevance to the 21st century more than—contrary to his expectations or strategy—having addressed the very zones that he occluded: //ecocide//, the mnemonic machine, cinema, an other materiality than humanists or phenomenology would recognise. Instead Derrida gave us specters ” (255).

Were those specters important? If deconstruction is shaped/ marked by the objects and language which it seeks to parse (as Cohen agrees), then perhaps part of this problem of Derrida against J.D and a toothless legacy is that it cannot yet survive being marked by the deconstruction of non-specters. Perhaps Derrida knew what he was doing. Is the occupation really a good idea? What would deconstruction of the anthropocene accomplish?

“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//™” (256).