However, I urge you not to kowtow to the neoliberal/predatory capitalist agenda that says that liberal arts studies must be “useful” or “usable” in terms of their own rubric. This is the biggest mistake that colleges in the US have made over the past two decades. The idea that literary theorists — and what we’re really talking about here are philosophers, by the way, not “literary theorists” — need to dumb down or despecialize their rhetoric so the uneducated and uninformed can “get it” (whatever “it” is) is a false choice, one that helps the neoliberalist capitalist machine control the narrative. These people would never expect an engineer or a computer programmer or (heaven forfend!) a stockbroker to lucidly explain what it is they do so that a child could understand it—the world is far too complex—so why should literary studies be accountable to a different level of scrutiny?

Obviously I realise that there is far more to the study of literature than being able to understand a couple of theories, but the celebrity-like status of a few difficult theorists/intellectuals seems to be partly responsible for the decline we are seeing in the liberal arts. I live in Britain so I don’t know how it is wherever you’re from (I’m presuming the USA) but the value of a higher education over here is becoming the acquisition of skills necessary to work in business or assist large corporations in tax avoidance. The liberal arts are becoming irrelevant in the face of this brutal neoliberalism. The increasing competitive & privatised nature of our universities doesn’t help matters as many are now boosting maths/science/business with huge cuts to the humanities departments.

So I do care about the what the outside world thinks when it affects to such an extent my ability to follow an intellectual passion. Maybe the link is more tenuous than I, in my caffeine-deprived state, believe, but, if the sum total of an academic field is big fancy words about nothing, which is how all this can seem to the ‘uninitiated’, it will certainly not help it’s already financially crippled case. Especially under a Tory government. With all their f*cking prejudices and spin.

I think it’s about time for the obligatory Orwell quote. In ‘Politics and the English Language’ he asserts that clouded speech is “largely the defense of the indefensible”. It seems that, now more than ever, those at the forefront of this field need to make sure that such a quote is not used against them.

I am a pretty loyal Chomsky ditto-head, but I think there’s a lot of value in the po-mos. In fact, it seems that from the generative perspective, it makes perfect sense to believe that some brains mature in ways that make them less able to perceive the world according to the prevailing conventions of language. These people become the poets, novelists, and philosophers. They carve out new languages. It’s a functional necessity for them, and an evolutionary imperative for the species!

Yeah, I think Derrida was largely incoherent, as is–oh, what’s her name–Spivak. Foucault I have an easier time with. But they’re all essentially following in Nietzsche’s footsteps and working out this young language. They’re trying to express concepts that haven’t been fully formulated yet, but the ideas are in there. They’re good ideas. Powerful ideas. That they appear to be nonsensical is, I think, due to the fact that the neural activity needed to develop the concepts are struggling to survive in a hostile climate. Teach every 5 year old about poststructuralism, and I guarantee that the resulting generation will have no problem understanding the grammars of Derrida, and will think we’re silly for not.

This unconditional hospitality is frightening and transgressive, but it takes us beyond the Judeao-Christian understanding of hospitality where we are hospitable because we may be entertaining Elijah or Angels or serving Jesus or dogmatically serving our parishioners. It takes us beyond Kant with his notion of restricted hospitality that says we should welcome the stranger or the foreigner to the extent that they are citizens of another country. “

That’s part of the problem : with transforming everything in “text” there’s no difference between Bible and Nature (science), everything is “interpretation” – epistemological relativism. Some religious movements have perfectly understood the message and I doubt that they want to struggle against oppression.

Thus Derrida, contrary to Chomsky, has some bulky allies. So do postmodernism.

There’s another problem, I will be curious of your comments. Deconstruction has no priority, nothing on which you can rely. Deconstruction can fuel itself forever and destroy meaning itself. This is not what Derrida says but that’s on of the consequences he refuses to face. Oppressed need to ally one to each other to get enough strenght against oppression. Deconstruction can very easily be seen as a divide-and-rule policy. It ends in a very narcissist thought

Last problem. Deconstruction is about deconstructing evidence. The oppressed have very oftently a naive representation of the world, they are not well literate, they cannot write books such as Derrida – or as Chomsky. It is very easy to use deconstruction for deconstructing emancipatory claims of the oppressed.

To my mind there is no criteria, in Derrida’s philosophy, to avoid these consequences. But I certainly will be very interested to know if you disagree

I’m not sure I understand your argument…I don’t mean that in a combative way. I just am trying to follow it, that’s all. You say that works of literature hold “intrinsic merit” and “aesthetic merit” and seem to suggest (I might be misreading you, sorry) that these values inhere in the works themselves, somehow independent of a reader’s (complex, historical, etc.) value system.

Lear is the better play because, yes, as you say, it holds “greater aesthetic merit” than Andronicus. But “greater aesthetic merit” is simply a placeholder for “set of specific literary/philosophical/cultural/whatever values” that I acknowledge that I hold.

I don’t think that the aesthetic criticism of Harold Bloom or James Wood is particularly wrong — there’s nothing wrong with having an aesthetic response as the basis for a value judgment. And these (and other critics) are able to answer why Lear is a better play than Andronicus — within, again, their specific, idiosyncratic value systems. Certainly, some value systems are shared by all people, regardless of culture and time — the need for food, shelter, care, etc.—and Lear’s evocation of these needs (good example, by the way!) resonates all over the world and through time. It’s a great book, no doubt.

But books don’t hold magical inherent properties, aesthetic or otherwise, that exist outside of a relationship with a reader (which necessarily involves all the reader’s ideological baggage). I mean, unless that book happens to be the Bible, the magical words of God Hisself.

I think the post-modernists have a uniquely unfalsifiable philosophical position: if our very modes of rationality are inherently corrupted, then you cannot and should not ask for a rational explanation for why this is the case. Perfectly convenient for Derrida, who can just go ahead and deconstruct (i.e. poorly misinterpret) previous philosophical works. You can’t accuse him of going too far, not on his terms. If there is no set meaning behind the texts (not even a discernable range of possible meanings), how can you say that he is simply wrong?

Some claim that Chomsky is being unfair to Derrida. I think that Derrida is being unfair to the large majority of the academic community that still has some form of evidentiary standards. It is possible to “de-center” a text while still adhering to some kind of explanation. Certainly the Freudian reading of Oedipus, to use an obvious example, profoundly undermines the way that many academics regarded that text in the past. But the arguments behind this interpretation were still basically coherent.