I take back what I said about Spivak reading "carefully" in my last post under this title, which referenced the following comment from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:
It is my suspicion that Anglo-U.S. critics such as Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Frank Lentriccia insist so specifically on the de-centering, and on a narrative of de-centering, because the first and last Derrida they read carefully was "Structure, Sign, and Play" and the first chapter of Of Grammatology, where there is some invocation of "our epoch," meaning, specifically, an "epoch" that privileges language and thinks in structures.
-Critique of Postcolonial Reason, "Culture," 322
The word here that makes me retract the characterization "careful" (though I still hold that it is a good summary of some early passages in Derrida) is precisely "suspicion." However, the lumping together of Eagleton and Jameson under the broad heading "Anglo-U.S. critics," a heading which we should insist that Spivak is absolutely under (given the crudeness of her "Anglo-U.S." grouping), which no one who has read Jameson could do so with this ease or with this precise argument (Eagleton is a fraud and doesn't care about anything, Jameson actually tries to read Derrida carefully, if he does make many mistakes in doing so)--this could also be a reason. But "suspicion," is precisely not the attitude with which the Derrida that Spivak so ardently defends would read this "insistence" on the part of the "Anglo-U.S. critics."
Or rather, it is precisely because he does indeed tend to also engage in this suspicion that one must reject both Derrida and Spivak here, the enormous and powerful constellation that the two thinkers have generated. For the injunction to "read carefully," constantly reiterated by Derridians and Derrida himself, should never turn into suspicion--and yet, when this injunction is thrust upon the reader by Derrida and Spivak, they often do not make this corollary clear enough. Derrida at least gestures towards the fact that the lack of suspicion would be coextensive with his writing itself. But that is not the case here, with Spivak, nor is it the case in Of Grammatology when the analysis of Lévi-Strauss becomes ridicule. The ridicule is the function of an injunction to read passing over into mere suspicion.
And it is contemptible, for both thinkers, to engage in this suspicion: not because it is hypocritical, but because they do not gesture towards their failure as a failure of suspicion. Let me be clearer: one only needs to look at how Heidegger is never analyzed like Lévi-Strauss. It does not have to do with the amount of detail the reading goes into. Rather, the difference is marked by how, when Heidegger is analyzed, Derrida constantly remarks that he could just be being suspicious. This is the case in Of Spirit (whose subtitle "Heidegger and the Question" gestures already towards this possibility of suspicion) and in the "Geschlecht" series of essays, as well as in his remarks about Heidegger's Nazi involvement. Attention is called to the failure of the reading--not as the inevitable outcome of the analysis (this gesture--a somewhat different one--is not what we're talking about here, though Spivak and Derrida act as if they are the same), but as an integral part of the approach in this particular case. It doesn't always need to be there, precisely because suspicion does not always have to be the way that one approaches a text. In other words, suspicion will be that which any analysis sinks slowly towards and probably is complicit in, but at that point an effort can be made to make it evident that this is happening. When it is passed off as the moment when the analysis is most in control--as in Of Grammatology, most disgracefully in the apartheid episode in Critical Inquiry, or in his analysis of Walter Benjamin in "Force of Law," to name only a few examples--than one gets the sense deconstruction has passed into mere destruction, and the worst, worst kind: that which passes itself off as responsibility itself!
That is what is happening here in Spivak. The gesture towards "reading carefully" then becomes the oldest academic trick in the book--and does more damage than any "close reading" (with which deconstruction is too often confused with or made to seem commensurate with) could do. Spivak here is no different than Harold Bloom (when he polices culture), or Terry Eagleton when he quotes her sentences (as he does to so many others and all the time, unlike Bloom) out of context, mockingly: she is insisting on a proper Derrida, a Derrida that needs to be read before anyone can say anything about him, and to which she only has access. This is not the case in most of her writing, but it is especially annoying and irresponsible because it is in moments like these that she is precisely functioning as what everybody tries to pin her down as: the person who introduces Derrida to, precisely, "Anglo-U.S. critics." To a) not affiliate oneself with them via Derrida--and this is what is happening here--and b) insist precisely at this moment that there is a better reading that needs to be done... this isn't a defense but an easy way out of a situation in which she herself, as well as Derrida, is absolutely implicated. And it is countered not with a critical awareness respectful of alterity and the subaltern (which is precisely what its tone indicates), but with academic snobbery, in these moments in both of these writers. This, indeed, is a danger of deconstruction: the question remains whether this danger--though not able to be mitigated--can at least be diffused within a larger formation of critical practices. If the utter baseness of some of Derrida's attacks, along with those of Spivak's, can show us anything--for they do not give us knowledge, least of all the deconstruction that they pretend to be in the process of effecting--it is that our critical methods do not need to be more incisive or far reaching or more thoroughly grounded (or ungrounded), but more wide ranging and more explicit. Careful reading can be brought about otherwise--which is precisely what Derrida and Spivak allow us to think in other passages than these (which, we should note, are very few in number and often only a portion of any of the texts here indicated).
And is this analysis itself suspicion? Perhaps. I hope not: I experience it as revision, as a double-take, and also bitterness and indignation at responsibility crossing so quickly over into irresponsibility--it is the experience of reading Spivak's sentences near the end of a book that analyzes quite well and fairly a difficult and pressing condition. But now at least if suspicion exists beyond this experience or at its limits, it too will be able to be read into these words.
2 comments:
It's surprising (and quite annoying) how Heidegger's work tends to be mockingly misread when he, in sharp contrast, was an intense and serious reader of the great works of philosophy.
His readings are always Aus-einander-setzungen, which do not jump naively into suspicion, but follow what has been thought in order to think that which has not been thought, and lies there to be un-concealed: because what has not been said belongs to what has been said.
What is to be asked here, in the context of what you have discussed in the post, is if a critic like Eagleton does actually read, and if he does, what is it that he reads.
Sometimes one gets the impression that the so-called ideological readings tend to conceive of the philosophical text as a close texture of that which has been supposedly said once and for all. That is, not hermeneutically, as instances of provocations for furher suggestions, as something which requieres an effort to augment interrogability (Fraglichkeit).
Indeed you're right about ideological readings--of which I'd say Derrida's usually isn't.
Usually--perhaps in fact only as much as Heidegger.
I'll be clearer: I think you're totally right--especially given how people look at Heidegger's schemas about Seinsgeschichte and say that he merely reads being into the history of philosophy. He actually doesn't do that--or if he does it, he does it only as much as Derrida. That is, there is a point at which the reading might be ideologically motivated. But most of the time it is really a reading, even if it employs that ideology.
When Derrida reads Heidegger, his marking of his suspicion is good--he constantly worries whether his reading is really a reading or is merely sinking back into an ideological polemic. Similarly, Heidegger is aware all the time that people like Nietzsche and Hegel could not be asking the question of being in the way that he is asking it through their works. This caution is great. But sometimes both thinkers move beyond that--and that's the attitude I'm frustrated with here. I get really frustrated with the Davos disputations in Heidegger, for example--that's way over the line.
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