Trying On: The American Education

The three Derrida essays that I’ve to read for this week–”The Time of the King” from Given Time, “Otobiographies” from The Ear of the Other, and “Choreographies”–are all rooted in the structure of the aporia. That is to say, at the “heart” of all of the “topics” that Derrida “thematizes”–time, the gift, being, subjectivity, sexual difference, the proper name–there is nothing. This nothing cannot be thought–it is impossible to be thought and must be seen as in the blink of an eye, from the vantage points of what comes later or what is to come. This thinking of the impossible is made possible by speech and desire; thus, “the gift,” “sexual difference,” and other such ideas exist in a space between their own impossibility and the thinking that wills them.

What can be done with aporetic structure–what Derrida, in one essay, calls the “aporetic paralysis”? It certainly makes for a nice riddle. In fact, I spent much of the morning attempting to write a dialogue between two whores on the very concept. I didn’t get far. The whores–and their author–didn’t know how to make use of the aporetic structure. I will nuance what I mean by use: is there a politics, a plan for action, a set decision, that we can clearly deduce (as if by rational logic) from the structure of the aporia? There are a few ways that I can see to think of it:

(1) No: the aporetic structure is useless. It leads to no politics, no plan, no future action. It spurs confusion. It forces us to think of (ridiculous, still more useless) ideas like the “topos,” like the “atope” on which a sexual difference that is “sexual otherwise” may be placed–categories which puzzle the mind, which works pretty well without all of this deconstructivist influence. So why nuance the gap? Why emphasize that Zarathustra slept through the great noon in a dream of wild animals? What could we possibly gain by frustrating our assumptions to this degree? What could this sort of confusion possibly save? This view might conclude, by logic of its own frustration, nothing. Derrida’s aporetic structures are not only useless; they are downright deleterious. Annoying, and wrong.

(2) Yes. The aporetic structure is a saving power–like the koan, thinking the aporia forces the reader to radically renegotiate the structural assumptions that ground thoughts of difference. “Understanding” the impossibility of the gift is like a negative theologian’s meditation on God–confronting the impossible imparts a certain dexterity of mind, a certain extreme form of Keatsian “negative capability,” that imparts all sorts of moral boons for participation not just in academia life, but in everyday political life in Western democracies: patience, fortitude, an appreciation for difficulties, a suspension of the old Hegelian will to sublatiom and Aufhebung, an ability to sit with contradiction. These skills are more like moral skills. We pick them up from reading Derrida–they are the “effects” of the sort of aporetic systems that Derrida demands we confront, even though they are also the characterological tools that we (as readers) require to confront Derrida’s impossibilities.

I am scouring the internet for traces of how the most “practical” (of academics–listen, I’ve got to bracket off these searchings somewhere) have dealt with this problem–insofar as it is a problem. (We should we reminded of something that Derrida said last week: “having a problematic” is not the same as “being problematic.”) Naturally, we turn to teachers, and it’s only a stone’s throw to a fairly significant battle that’s been raging in academia, oh, since the coal fires started in Centralia: teaching deconstruction.

So what’s the big deal about frustration? We get through it, we get over it, and in getting over it–presuming, of course, (though this is rarely ever interrogated), that we get through it in the right way–we learn and even embody practical skills that we’ll take up again in other situations. These “other situations” may be specific repetitions of the original. In other words, working through the frustration of reading “Otobiographies” won’t just help me if I finally decide to take on “White Metaphor”–the experience may help me to more carefully read Joyce, to pay attention to a cello suite that I’d normally ignore, or to listen to the complicated stories of British Union politics that my lawyer-friend likes to tell me. 

Again, it’s assumed that most of this is an internal process–it works well, or it doesn’t. But what about moderating between the two? What about border cases? And by this, I mean something quite concrete: what about those readers who (think they) “almost” get it, or who go mad in the clutches of Derrida, or who fall into a rage and abandon philosophy, or their families, or something worse? Who is it who deals with these constituents of Derrida?

The teachers, of course. So, the next question in pursuit of the value of Derrida’s frustation (the frustrating-effect of Derrida? Perhaps Derrida just frustrates me…) an interesting one: how is it that teachers teach deconstruction? And why is it that some (many) so vehemently abhor the idea, and refuse to “teach” it at all? 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566421?seq=10&Search=yes&term=otobiographies&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dotobiographies%26x%3D0%26y%3D0%26wc%3Don&item=6&ttl=52&returnArticleService=showArticle&resultsServiceName=doBasicResultsFromArticle

There is, apparently, also a book out (cited in the footnotes to the article above) by Gregory Ulmer, called Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Besides the provocative inclusion of rabbit-toting Beuys as pedagogue (I suppose that this makes a certain amount of sense–a whole lot of sense, insofar as anything makes sense in the arms of these postmodern considerations!), the book is interesting because it foregrounds something I can’t really shake: the idea that Derrida’s writings about X,Y, and Z cannot be separated from an active pedagogy. When we read Derrida, we are learning how we might read differently.

JLRH