Response+11 

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 * __ Why I am a bad reader of Derrida __**

// That is, there would be the hostile readers every Derridean knows to take arms against (Habermas), and the opportunistic misappropriations (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. (246) //

// In effect: Cinema is the absolute simulacrum of absolute survival. The counter vectors in this interview, the aporia of cinema in Derrida in the context of his disavowal, are too numerous to pursue here but involve the following (if one may present, here, a montage): (248). //

// It recalls Derrida’s late diatribe against ‘Christian marriage’ itself (the mergence of opposites), mentioned with one foot out the door. // (249)

Oh shit! SNAKES!

// …one turns elsewhere in Derrida: humanualism, khora, the monstrous. (242) //

// 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. (250) //

Is it true that deconstruction is not of use for graduate students? Which? Who? Who’s? Where? And, because I do not disagree how do I get there from here, where things look appealing, since I long for utility in a space of little resistance to such desires. But, is not the meta-extension of the legacy still an extension that is “increasingly irrelevant” and working to make it relevant by my reading?

There is something about the word anthropocene, that eludes its connection to the natural science – those distant things that creep off the page, render incomprehensible at times without enough practice. To the geo-temporal descriptions of what is to come, for what we don’t know is coming, even as the engine begins and we made the key (and part of the key hole!). Of course the pre-fix is all too human and I am all to immerse in the headspace of anthro-X to see any differently. My utterances bound by a(memory) of marks that repeat in uniform patterns of profound and original academic publishing.

// The term ‘anthropocene’ is curious, at once leaden and foppish. It carries a trace of the obscene. Arriving from an ejaculation at a geologist’s forum by Paul Crutzman, it seems the epitome of anthropomorphism itself—irradiating with a secret pride invoking comments on our god-like powers and ownership of ‘the planet.’ It is not surprising, then, that in the term’s 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. Think of the profits and power to be leveraged from the geo-engineering to come: ‘climate change’ is, it may turn out, profitable for what can no longer quite be called capital or the non-human corporate entity. // (240)

// Where, today, is this ‘unrelenting war against doxa’? (252) //

// 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 relationally one could pretend to hold in place. Instead of the still photograph with its citational structure (Eduardo Cadava), each imperceptible frame multiplies the citational abyss in a horizontal vertigo (Hitchcock) beyond mastery. Moreover, cinema is ineradicably alert to its machinal ‘materiality’ and ability to produce phenomenalities from mnemonics and points. Nor was it disavowed because the cinematic ‘mark’ precedes any scripture sign, letter, or graphic — that is, as Derrida notes, it implies in advance all deconstructive techniques. It would be disavowed in a similar manner to how ‘climate change’ would, or a certain ineluctable and non binarised ‘materiality’, or a machine trace that implacably drives (and displaces)‘psychism. // (249)

// Extinction: since the anthropocene can only be named from without or after, as if by another looking back — hence Hollywood’s routine evocations of aliens’ arriving after the fact (as in Spielberg’s A.I) (241) //

// Instead of striking at anthropo narcissism as a parenthesis from within (a ‘motif’ of deconstruction, says Specters), the entirety might be suspended from without — as by Von Triers chiral other planet, non-specular double. But the translation effect of the anthropocene continues to be applied to the late Derrida’s’ stratagems: some are peeled back. (242) //

// Thus, today, Derrida’s: I am at war against myself (contre moi-meme) needs be read more assiduously. Similar in type to Nietzsche’s ‘I have forgotten my umbrella,’ it could be applied to the rift we have just named: a pulling back from the ‘persona’ that Derrida had fashioned, marketed, and encountered coming back at him, to be ever corrected or refined (interviews, movies), a splitting in which the other I of sentence represents a JD who had long refused to be photographed than the one who appears as the star of his movie (I will return to why Derrida’s avoidance and disavowal of cinema emerges as a cipher here). (243-244) //

// Can the DNA of a ‘deconstruction’ early on claiming the most radical of auto-critiques — which one recalls with a certain melancholy — recur if it emerges at the price of various literalisations, memorialisations, pieties, and imaginaries of Jacques, or need one wait, as he suggests, for another generation, assuming it has its chance? // (245)

Who is this Nancy? (246) and why do I get the feeling she messed something up. Forget it thought Nancy is probably a nice person and irony is just how she pays rent in her hip-ass west side neighborhood, here to is a hit for the home team that this author seems to want to fire, so as to re-hire all those people who didn’t even know they could play or at least pretend not to know.

// But if Derrida occludes ‘climate change’ from his writing — would not address or write to it—it might not be accidental. (249) //

// On the one hand, as said, the term manifests the essence of anthropomorphism at its peak of narcissistic self-congratulation; anthroponarcissus gets a plaque named after it stamped in the geological record. On the other hand, it seems distinguished for practicing auto extinction, ecocide. How do the histories of writing from within the Western parenthesis interface explicitly with this acceleration, particularly with the latter’s links to carbon and imprints? (251) //

// Indeed, it mimes the global financial elites’ consolidation of a cognitive crony-capitalist kick-the-can-down-the-road backdrop of (denial) in which, mathematically, virtual generations are despoiled or cut off (hyper-debt, resource depletion, mass extinctions). 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 environ’?(253) //