why I’ve never been much of a Derrida fan

Derrida has his good moments, but there are too many moments like this one on pages 3-4 of Positions:

“In what you call my books, what is first of all put into question is the unity of the book and the unity ‘book’ considered as a perfect totality, with all the implications of such a concept. And you know that these implications concern the totality of our culture, directly or indirectly. At the moment when such a closure demarcates itself, dare one maintain that one is the author of books, be they one, two, or three?”

At the moment when such a closure demarcates itself, dare one maintain that Led Zeppelin has recorded albums, be they eight, nine, or ten?

There is an inherent problem with this compulsive unwillingness to stand anywhere in particular even while insisting that purported gullible dupes such as the person who was kind enough to interview Derrida are the very incarnation of naiveté for daring to use such credulous words as “book.”

You can’t place yourself forever beyond all definite statement and commitment, calling everything into question, placing everything in brackets and quotation marks, while feeding off the life-energy of those who dare to do so and hence can be the gullible foils of your supposed superior sophistication.

One of the major factors that made Žižek such a perfect post-Derrida leading actor, I believe, is the compelling force of his dogmatic assertions and his willingness to take responsibility for the thing he says.

If you ask Žižek about his books, he would never in a million years begin by saying: “In what you call my books…” And I happen to think Žižek is in the right here.

In what you call my blog…