![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jan. 13th, 2014 12:21 amSo I've put it off to the last moment, as always, but I'm again having to engage Theory.
I forgot how hilarious Derrida's attack on philosophers' use of the term "the animal" for dismissing animals' individuality ends up being - English being English, anglophone thinkers have pretty much always said "animals" except those (here's the hilarity) trying to sound sophisticated by aping continental theorists (along the lines of saying "the literature of [whatever]," an act of of-abuse that tries to recapture the broad but specific range of associations of French "de" but instead achieves vagueness). So in those circles you'd pretty much have to mention "the animal" and then immediately attack your own usage or lose street cred for either improper lingo or not knowing what it's presently fashionable to put under erasure.
Not that English-speakers win an ethics competition here - presumably we mostly mean "the animal," any and all members of a rigidly defined animal category, when we say "animals." But likewise you'd think that l'animal would be no more offensive than l'homme or la femme, or l'humanité for that matter, which the French don't just use where we'd use distinction-erasing summaries about Man, Woman or Humanity, but also in a lot of cases where we'd pluralize or otherwise take pains to suggest a looser unity; i.e. "l'animal" should have some animals in it, if not des animaux. But Derrida assumes otherwise, and as I can't contest his sense of French I instead wonder whether there's something wrong with those people.
Whereas Derrida thinks it's something wrong with (pre-Derridean) philosophy. I'm told it's a cheap shot to assume that certain rigidities inherent in the language of the French make them liable to believe that language is itself inevitably rather than occasionally deceptive. And it probably is a cheap shot. But the guilt-by-association logic one sees all over in Theory (Plato abused "to be" so now your mother isn't, science caused eugenics so fuck that) does suggest a preoccupation with foundations and authorities, a refusal to admit the possibility of a pragmatic or eclectic approach, such that you wonder whether French isn't stuck in some register of assured fact-delivery where to doubt one word is to send the whole enterprise off track. You wonder if skepticism is so foreign to the French mindset that it came like vengeance when it belatedly did, a bit like the way Protestantism hit Russia via Tolstoy - something so far from what was assumed possible that no one knew how to argue with it once denial failed.
Main counterargument to the nonsense I'm saying of course being that Theory fans are almost all un-French.
I forgot how hilarious Derrida's attack on philosophers' use of the term "the animal" for dismissing animals' individuality ends up being - English being English, anglophone thinkers have pretty much always said "animals" except those (here's the hilarity) trying to sound sophisticated by aping continental theorists (along the lines of saying "the literature of [whatever]," an act of of-abuse that tries to recapture the broad but specific range of associations of French "de" but instead achieves vagueness). So in those circles you'd pretty much have to mention "the animal" and then immediately attack your own usage or lose street cred for either improper lingo or not knowing what it's presently fashionable to put under erasure.
Not that English-speakers win an ethics competition here - presumably we mostly mean "the animal," any and all members of a rigidly defined animal category, when we say "animals." But likewise you'd think that l'animal would be no more offensive than l'homme or la femme, or l'humanité for that matter, which the French don't just use where we'd use distinction-erasing summaries about Man, Woman or Humanity, but also in a lot of cases where we'd pluralize or otherwise take pains to suggest a looser unity; i.e. "l'animal" should have some animals in it, if not des animaux. But Derrida assumes otherwise, and as I can't contest his sense of French I instead wonder whether there's something wrong with those people.
Whereas Derrida thinks it's something wrong with (pre-Derridean) philosophy. I'm told it's a cheap shot to assume that certain rigidities inherent in the language of the French make them liable to believe that language is itself inevitably rather than occasionally deceptive. And it probably is a cheap shot. But the guilt-by-association logic one sees all over in Theory (Plato abused "to be" so now your mother isn't, science caused eugenics so fuck that) does suggest a preoccupation with foundations and authorities, a refusal to admit the possibility of a pragmatic or eclectic approach, such that you wonder whether French isn't stuck in some register of assured fact-delivery where to doubt one word is to send the whole enterprise off track. You wonder if skepticism is so foreign to the French mindset that it came like vengeance when it belatedly did, a bit like the way Protestantism hit Russia via Tolstoy - something so far from what was assumed possible that no one knew how to argue with it once denial failed.
Main counterargument to the nonsense I'm saying of course being that Theory fans are almost all un-French.
