The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man Book

Le tout sans nouveauté qu'un espacement de la lecture. -- Mallarmé, Preface to Un Coup de dés


I had in mind, perhaps, to perform a public service, to undertake finally Derrida's Writing and Difference, to head off the intentions of my goodreads Friends who have been intrigued by this THING. Let me stop right there. Recently some interest has been expressed among my Friends to look into what Derrida is all about, and one should, should one so might. This volume in particular was indicated. I know a little about Derrida and I know a little about my Friends; it pained me to anticipate them putting themselves through this murk, this brick, this STUFF--whatever--I didn't want to see them suffer. Enough suffering by book, enough already! These Friends of mine, whose best interest I undertook to protect and defend, are talented readers all. But Derrida? You don't want to read Derrida. Am I protecting a secret treasure which ought not be dirtied by the enjoyers of Fiction, the sullen readers of Books? No. But what do we do when faced and repeatedly threatened by this spectacle which comes under the proper name of Derrida? Read the writing and the difference, but don't beat yourself up, and don't beat up Derrida. That's all I ask. No debt is owed, no balances need be corrected. Frankly, if you find yourself curious about Derrida, I mean curious like some folks find themselves curious about that which is bandied about, then Derrida is probably not speaking to you. I mean, Derrida is not speak to you. Who is he speak to, then? I don't know. I was only overhearing.

I don't mean to warn you off Derrida, but warn you into him. What can you expect? The audience presumed is not anything like what is known as a 'common reader.' Derrida presumes, not a general familiarity with something vaguely denominated 'western philosophy,' but an intimate and thorough familiarity with and understanding of the projects of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, to limit ourselves to only three of the most complex thinkers of recent centuries. When one hears him speak of the epoché one must know what its status is in Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. When one hears "unhappy consciousness" or "force" one must hear the corresponding sections of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. When one hears "destruction of the history of metaphysics," one must know that Heidegger has read and admired all of the history of metaphysics, that Hegel is its completion. When one hears "Being" one must know whether it is Hegel's or Heidegger's. And then there are those other proper names; Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, Bataille, others rendered below.

And the 'prose,' that style and manner of Derrida in producing his texts. It is not a matter of arbitrary posing; not a matter of obfuscation of some pre-given content or 'substance.' Much more it is the question of the form and the content; the thing said and its saying. To object to Derrida's texts as they are is already to make certain presumptions about the metaphysical status of such things as substance, essence, meaning, form, etc. The very things which are in question. The very problematic of using the only language available to us to question the very thing which we are employing to question it. Of course there is no privileged meta-language, no God's point of view to which we could escape and from which we could reflect back upon our practices without having always already been tainted by being-in-the-world, temporal beings as we are, users of language.

Reading tip: the preludes to the essays are knots of the threads which will then be woven and unwoven in the course of each piece. One must read what has already been written.


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Herewith, to further embarrass myself, a short delineation and direction-giving concerning the eleven essays. I do not deign to state Derrida's theses; only to indicate a topos of each.

For better direction-giving, please do not skip Alan Bass' "Translator's Introduction."

"Force and Signification" -- A critique of a certain manner of structuralist literary criticism, pointing out a certain failure of presumption to have escaped metaphysical presuppositions.

"Cogito and the History of Madness" -- Through a close reading of a passage from Descartes which Foucault wished to use to demonstrate that social structures excluded mad and insane individuals at the same historical nexus as Descartes wanted to exclude the question of madness from philosophy, Derrida shows that Descartes did precisely the opposite; that madness was the very center of his method of radical doubt.

"Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book" -- A mediation on the work of Jabès which would seem to parallel Heidegger's own thinking with the the poet Hölderlin.

"Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas" -- Levinas, in addition to the Germans I enumerated above, is of central importance to Derrida's thinking, and is second only perhaps to Heidegger for difficulty and importance. This essay is the most significant of W&D. I read it last summer, should return to it again, and would be the one I am most interested in disseminating. As I recall, it is a devastating wrap up of the project which would seek to cleanse our language of the last vestigial trace of violence.

"'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" -- There is no point in reading this essay unless one has a close understanding of Husserl's project of establishing philosophy as rigorous science, i.e., phenomenology.

"La parole soufflée" -- An engagement with the attempts of Artaud. The title is untranslatable. For what little I know of Artaud, this appears to be a fairly clear (but it's not clear at all) working out of some of Derrida's questions about purity of speech, speech which is not always already a writing. Difficult; but one suspects that a thorough grasp of this essay will get one many miles down Highway Derrida.

"Freud and the Scene of Writing" -- An examination of how the metaphor of writing works in the thought of Freud concerning memory and its aid. Esoterica Freudiana.

"The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation" -- The second essay about Artaud, this time more expository, approaching being concerned with Artaud himself rather than Derrida working through his own concerns.

"From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve" -- This one is only for those who are interested in the question of the possibility of escaping the Hegelian dialectic. Through a close reading of Bataille's thinking against dialectic (Derrida insists that Bataille is taking Hegel seriously, that "Hegel was more right than he knew," etc) we see with what little we are left when we refuse lordship (dialectic) and insist upon sovereignty (which would seem to concern the addition of a "non" or "not" prefix to every predicate, up to and including a kind of non-atheology or not-atheology); total expenditure with no reserve. One sees even more clearly the desolation which is produced by the insistence of escaping Hegel than what we get in Kierkegaard's attempts. Dense.

"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" -- Just to state the obvious. This might be the place to begin. Myself, it felt like I must have read this previously, and in the course of this reading, it's common sense now. A critique of structuralism by way of an analysis of Levi-Strauss, especially concerning the nature-culture presupposition in his work, a presupposition which is complicated by the prohibition of incest. Anyone who still likes to talk about the nature-nurture "debate" hasn't read Derrida.

"Ellipsis" -- ...