Calarco loses his cool

Here’s Matthew Calarco’s response to my remarks about Derrida in a Larval Subjects comment thread:

“Matthew Calarco Says:

August 7, 2010 at 5:27 am
Folks, are we back to this nonsense again about Derrida? How many times does one need to cite the relevant passages on this point to get past this misreading?

Let me state this as clearly as possible:

1. The Same/Other relation does not always have the human on the “Same” side of the relation in Derrida.

2. Nor is the human always on the “Other” side of the relation in Derrida.

3. Nor is there any need for a human to be on the scene *at all* for the Same/Other relation and the effects of alterity to take place in Derrida.

There are dozens of passages on this issue throughout Derrida’s work. To save yourself some time, just use this one from ‘Eating Well’ to set the record straight.

‘. . . the processes of differance, trace, iterability, ex-appropriation, and so on . . . are at work everywhere, which is to say well beyond humanity.’

This kind of thing is Derrida 101. If you don’t understand this general point about Derrida’s work, you will not understand anything else about his larger project and you will fail to see where his work already anticipates OOO.

I suggested to Levi previously that Derrida is doing the proto-ontology for OOO. When you stop with the non-reading of Derrida and actually read his work carefully and charitably, you will see this painfully obvious point (viz., that he has already beat you to the punch in arguing for relationships of alterity, withdrawal, etc., between nonhuman beings that require no human subjects anywhere on the scene).

I say this not to defend Derrida (I’m on record in print about my deep differences with him). The point is to get the basics right so that we can have a decent conversation some day about where the real limits of his work lie in the development of a non-anthropocentric ontology. He goes a long way down this road, takes some interesting turns and some very questionable ones. But if you read him in this ridiculous fashion as a neo-Kantian, you’ll miss these things–and will also miss the important work he has done to chart a path beyond humanism and anthropocentrism.”

The first thing that needs to be said about this comment by Calarco is that it’s a terrible rhetorical failure. If you come into a room firing off the old “John Doe 101” line, along with “ridiculous” and other such words, you’re simply never going to get anyone on board.

Second, the idea that it’s “Derrida 101” to hold that Derrida is just as big a realist as Whitehead (as implied by Calarco’s shouting insistence that Derrida is already talking about non-human entities) is preposterous. That is, at best, an interesting fringe reading of Derrida that is going to require a lot of work to get across.

If it were “Derrida 101,” then we would see a lot of Derrideans working on things other than books. But we don’t see that. We see Derrideans, like Derrida himself, working on books.

If Derrida already knew that relations between inanimate entities were part of the legitimate sphere of philosophy, rather than being trapped in a correlationist bind as he truly is (but that’s no shame, because so is Heidegger) then we ought to have seen Derrideans noticing their similarities with Whitehead and Latour an awful long time ago, and going to work on these figures. At least some of them should even have followed Latour by applying deconstruction to artifacts such as subway trains and Amazon soil experiments, rather than the usual litany of Proust, Jabès, Joyce, etc. Let me repeat: it is not an accident that Derrida writes about books. Not things: BOOKS.

Also, where were all the Derrideans rushing to my aid when people were calling it “ridiculous” to talk about objects withdrawn from all relations? Now, suddenly, it is “ridiculous” for me to say that I thought of this myself.

I don’t know Calarco, but presumably this wasn’t Calarco on his best day. He loses his cool and comes off as too touchy about Derrida, and then he brings in the condescending lecture routine, which absolutely no one enjoys getting, and hence is always a rhetorical strikeout.

You all know William James on the three phases of reception of a new theory:

1. It’s ridiculous.

2. It’s obvious and therefore trivial.

3. We thought of it first!

Here Calarco brings OOO to Stage 3, and I thank him for it.

The other odd thing is that by calling it “Derrida 101,” Calarco undermines his own originality as an interpreter. What he should have done, in my opinion, is said: “Yes, I realize that most Derrideans take Derrida in a different direction, but believe me, there are actually realist resources, and you guys would really like him a lot better if you read him my way rather than the way he is usually read.”

Instead, Calarco says this: “When you stop with the non-reading of Derrida and actually read his work carefully and charitably, you will see this painfully obvious point (viz., that he has already beat you to the punch in arguing for relationships of alterity, withdrawal, etc., between nonhuman beings that require no human subjects anywhere on the scene.”

And obviously, my immediate reaction to that is inevitably going to be negative.

In what sense is it “painfully obvious” that Derrida is a realist? Lee Braver will be very interested to hear this, since he read Derrida as the very culmination of continental anti-realism. The Derrideans I knew in the 1990’s, who thought Tool-Being was a wild piece of pre-Socratic philosophy, apparently missed the “painfully obvious” Derridean realism as well, otherwise they would have congratulated me on my further development of Derrida’s existing insights. That isn’t quite the feedback they gave me, however.

I think what’s happening, to be perfectly frank, is that we have a number of people who overinvested in Derrida when his stock price was at its peak and are starting to become angry that he’s no longer Mr. Chic in continental philosophy. Hence they are retroactively projecting later discoveries into his work that simply aren’t there. When people wildly overplay their hands by saying that a rather surprising claim is “obvious” and that it’s “ridiculous” to think otherwise, then you have to suspect that shouts are being utilized to cover up the absence of arguments.