Remora

Well, Donald Rumsfeld's crack about "old Europe" has created some odd alliances. For instance, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung actually soliticted an opinion from Jacques Derrida, hero of this site, on the matter.

Here's the story from Liberation:

"Even the very conservative and traditionally pro-American Fr. Allgemeine Zeitung consecrated two pages of editorials to Rumsfeld's remark, with contributions from philosophers as well known as the German Jurgen Habermas and the French Jacques Derrida.

Their criticisms with regard to their European friends put them in contradiction with the great American ideals of the 18th century, estimates Habermas, making reference to the influence of the great European thinkers of the Enlightenment on the "founding fathers" of American Democracy.

Derrida, for his part, wrote in the FAZ: my reaction can be summed up in a few words. I find this declaration (of Rumsfeld's) shocking, scandalous and typical. These remarks show how important the unity of Europe is."

My friend Tom in NY sent me a link to a review of the movie Derrida on the National Review site. The review is funny. Here is a graf:


"Zeitgeist Films, distributor of the documentary Derrida, currently in limited release in select cities across the country, poses the following rhetorical question on its promotional website: What if you could watch Socrates, on film, rehearsing his Socratic dialogues? The insinuation, of course, is that Jacques Derrida, the contemporary French thinker sometimes called the "father of deconstruction" deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the ancient Greek thinker sometimes called the "father of philosophy." This is true only insofar as a firecracker and a hydrogen bomb both go pop. Otherwise, the comparison is ludicrous."

This is of course true. The comparison, however, is made not so much, we think, for the reasons that Mark Goldblatt suspects -- that is, a high reverence for Derrida -- as for the usual advertising dilemma: how many people recognize philosophers' names? Derrida could, rightly, be compared to Brentano or Meinong, for instance -- solid names, but not exactly as important as Husserl or Russell. Frege would be another apposite comparison.

Goldblatt has a good time knocking down Derrida's pretentiousness:

"The high point of the film, judging from the comments of several notable reviewers, comes halfway through and consists of Derrida's five-minute meditation on the concept of love. After a token demurral and his customary song and dance about the difficulty of the topic � including the self-contradictory howler "I'm incapable of generalities" � Derrida hones in on the dilemma of whether love consists of our being drawn to the "singularity" of another person or to a set of specific qualities possessed by the person we love. In other words, do I love you for your essential you-ness or for the sum of characteristics I associate with you? He provides no answer, naturally. But, at the screening I attended, as Derrida wound down his discourse, an audible gasp rose from the sparse crowd in the theater."

Anyone who has ever heard Derrida knows that he has a weakness for his own yarn-spinning. What begins as Mallarme often ends up sounding like second rate Derrida. A pity, but not a surprise. He requires paper -- like most philosophers, actually. The Socratic exception is not going to occur again. A philosopher speaking philosophy is much like a dog speaking dog -- you have to be a dog to catch it in the latter case, and you have to be a philosopher to interrupt it in the former case. LI can understand the attraction of the idea that you will film a philosopher thinking -- it is like the idea of filming a writer writing. The witless Adaptation, which we saw last week, falls into the trap of doing the latter, and the results are both boring and insulting, to anybody who writes. The best film that shows Philosophy (that LI knows) remains The man who envied women, with that excrutiating pas de deux at the end as a man and a woman recite almost impenetrable Foucauldian speeches at each other.

Goldblatt's trope -- of Derrida as a sort of rascal, a grifter, as he calls him, more important for what some future audience (the future, you know, is always on one's side) will make of him -- a symbol of our present decadence -- is designed to say nothing about Derrida's work. The advantage is that you don't have to read it, then. Derrida has said enough about the nature of the inability to read himself. But I don't expect the National Review's guest film critic to make it through Marges de la Philosophie. Actually, if he did, he'd find many things in it reminiscent of Hayek. Ah, but that assumes he's read Hayek -- and his review gives LI no evidence that he has that degree of literacy.