After Foucault, after Derrida

ColoradoGuy

I've seen worse.
Staff member
Moderator
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Oct 11, 2005
Messages
6,696
Reaction score
1,534
Location
The City Different
Website
www.chrisjohnsonmd.com
p16-Liu.jpg


Oxford University Press has a new series they're calling the "After Series." They are collections of essays, and Foucault and Derrida are the first of them. Two of their offerings are reviewed in a recent number of the Times Literary Supplement. It's an interesting read. The objective is to assess the enduring impact, if any, of Foucault, Derrida (and the rest of that gang) on the actual world of literary criticism. On the one extreme we have Francis Fukuyama (a student of Paul de Man): "I decided it was all bullshit." On the other hand is the plea not to allow all the controversy about those thinkers to dismiss entirely their intellectual legacies. Inevitably things quickly become political. We have Steve Bannon recently claiming his goal is "deconstruction of the administrative state." Maybe Bannon actually has read these folks, but more likely he's just appropriating some of their language. It's not a long review and is I think an interesting one.

The result is a refreshing and welcome intellectual intervention that avoids the traps of bloodless hagiography or blanket denunciation that often ensnare critical discussions around weighty intellectual figures in general, never mind the alleged progenitors of the twenty-first century's cultural decline. Both After Foucault and After Derrida take the -- distinctly postmodern -- approach that one's disembodied textual legacy is worthier of critical dissection than one's character.

I think that last sentence is kind of cute -- it's kind of a dissolving of the "author function" beloved of deconstructionists.
 

Maxx

Got the hang of it, here
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 26, 2010
Messages
3,227
Reaction score
202
Location
Durham NC
I've just discovered the essay may be behind a pay wall. If anybody wants a copy, let me know via message.

I went for a looksee and of course there was my Grammatology fronting another article. The TLS is graphically so lovely I'll probably just subscribe for a bit.
Which excuses this little diversion (I hope). I just moved a lot of my books and this has caused a minor inversion of their order of availability. Derrida had been buried for a while but since he was last out of the heaps now he is on top -- yes its a neat little pile of what has survived -- GC Spivak's intro and translation of Of Grammatology, Glyph 7 (Writing to the Wind Bettina) and David B. Allison's translation of Derrida's Speech and Phenomena (which is Derrida on Husserl). A ton or two of other such things is elsewhere (possibly in the barn or the basement), BUT what does turn up has the value of at least turning up. I guess the lessons for me in going back over various "postmodern" endeavors is that:
a) The modern was changing form before post modern got to it (looking at Diebenkorn showed me that)
b) Structuralism (or mostly Levi-Strauss) and phenomenology provided a lot of the plausibility to be found in poststructuralism (which I think is a lot more descriptive than post modern)
c) And the same is true of Lacan and company
d) I have a lot more sympathy for Lacan and company than I've ever had for Foucault even though (or maybe because) the methodological drift toward triviality is more obvious in Lacan than it is in Foucault or maybe I've just been reading Lacan lately and hope to never read Foucault again.
e) and of course Lacan even says sometimes a methodology is just a cigar (or trivial or something)
f) but we shall see (when I subscribe and read the article)
 

Maxx

Got the hang of it, here
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 26, 2010
Messages
3,227
Reaction score
202
Location
Durham NC
I think Rabate had an article in the Cambridge guide to Lacan. That book did turn up a couple of months ago in my basement (published in 2003) and Rabate led it off with a laborious tale of a laborious prank on Lacan in 1968 that caused Lacan some amusement. Oh I did read the TLS article on the assorted Afters...there's a somewhat more interesting line of imagery in the article about Derrida and the history of the book:

Fleming uses his reading of Kleinian object relations theory to think psycho*analytically about print, and about the so-called mourning pages of early modern books. These solid black leaves, as in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, seem to stage “the entire mystery of the page itself”, rendering visible its sheer oddity.
 
Last edited:

AW Admin

Administrator
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 19, 2008
Messages
18,772
Reaction score
6,285
I think Rabate had an article in the Cambridge guide to Lacan. That book did turn up a couple of months ago in may basement (published in 2003) and Rabate led it off with a laborious tale of a laborious prank on Lacan in 1968 that caused Lacan some amusement. Oh I did read the TLS article on thea Afters...there's a somewhat more interesting line of imagery in the article about Derrida and the history of the book:

[FONT=&]Fleming uses his reading of Kleinian object relations theory to think psycho*analytically about print, and about the so-called mourning pages of early modern books. These solid black leaves, as in Laurence Sterne’s [/FONT]Tristram Shandy, seem to stage “the entire mystery of the page itself”, rendering visible its sheer oddity.

That sounds very much like someone who's been reading Viktor Shklovsky.
 

Maxx

Got the hang of it, here
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 26, 2010
Messages
3,227
Reaction score
202
Location
Durham NC
That sounds very much like someone who's been reading Viktor Shklovsky.

Really? Does he say something about mysterious black pages? I think I only read (30 years ago) his Zoo: Or Letters not About Love and his Autobiography and those seemed well, cool but not Kleinian.
 

Maxx

Got the hang of it, here
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 26, 2010
Messages
3,227
Reaction score
202
Location
Durham NC
And Terry Eagleton's 2016 article in TLS seems like a better outline of the Chronology and decline of Post structuralism:

[h=1]Structurally Unsound[/h][h=4]The slow, uncertain death of post-structuralism[/h][h=4]TERRY EAGLETON[/h]
 

Maxx

Got the hang of it, here
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 26, 2010
Messages
3,227
Reaction score
202
Location
Durham NC
Oxford University Press has a new series they're calling the "After Series."


Seems to be Cambridge:

[FONT=&quot]Elsewhere across the Atlantic, these two figures are the inaugural subjects of Cambridge University Press’s After series, essay collections that examine the legacies of iconic literary scholars from three different angles: what each figure has introduced to literary criticism; how they have changed the landscape of literary studies; and how their critical legacies have transformed the understanding of literary texts well beyond their deaths.[/FONT]
 

AW Admin

Administrator
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 19, 2008
Messages
18,772
Reaction score
6,285
Really? Does he say something about mysterious black pages? I think I only read (30 years ago) his Zoo: Or Letters not About Love and his Autobiography and those seemed well, cool but not Kleinian.

Shlovsky is perhaps best known for his ideas about ostranenie usually translated as defamiliarization or "making strange" as a principle of art. See this essay by Shlovsky and this piece in The Nation.
 

Maxx

Got the hang of it, here
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 26, 2010
Messages
3,227
Reaction score
202
Location
Durham NC
Shlovsky is perhaps best known for his ideas about ostranenie usually translated as defamiliarization or "making strange" as a principle of art. See this essay by Shlovsky and this piece in The Nation.

Yep! Wow! I forgot about the defamiliarization thing. I don't think I've ever read his own essay on it. And the Nation piece does a great job of explaining things about Shklovsky. And then there's the Lawrence Stern Connection. All very nice! Thank you so much!