Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 11:20:11 -0700
Sender: pen-l@ecst.csuchico.edu
From: A_CALLARI@ACAD.FANDM.EDU
Subject: Re: Derrida (fwd)
 
I just have some abstract reactions to the most recent postings that
re-raised the issue of Derrida/Marx (forwarded by Doug Henwood) and
postmodernism (a quote from Jim Devine, forwarded by Gil Skilman).
 
There is, in fact, much liberatory potential in post-modernism (potential
to use the methods of postmodernism in association with a number of
politics of liberation, including of course liberation from class
oppression/exploitation) and there has always been; that's why Derrida's
remarks do not come at all as a surprise (although they are remarkable for
their explicit acknowledgement of Marx as a vehicle for liberatory
struggles). Derrida's method of deconstruction can be used for a number of
purposes; but, structurally, it seems to me that it is not all that
different, in method and possible outcome, from Marx's own method of
"ruthless criticism of everything existing" as a way of historicizing
(rendering contingent, exposing the class-biases embedded in) given
concepts of society, of social agents, of economic categories, etc.. as a
prelude for the creation of a different historical imagination, as a
prelude for a critique of "what is" as we materially (not ideallly) create
the alternative(s) to capitalism (escape the economic logic of capital and
of a self-enclosed, self-defined market structure). Could Derrida's work,
then, be seen as a "prelude to the critique of modernist (bourgeois)
certainties" [in analogy to Sraffa's work as a prelude to a critique of
economics]? Isn't it better for the left to grip and use progressively the
liberatory potential of postmodernism, rather than to equate it en toto
with some kind of reactionary (reaganite Thatecherite) age of cynicism?
 
Well! that's all for now.
 
Antonio Callari.