Bollettino



If you can get to it, read the Independent’s profile of Anna Politkovskaya. She is a Russian dissident, dur et pur.



There are many reminders in the profile, actuated by the publication of a collection of pieces on Putin’s Russia, of just why Putin and Bush do see soul to soul. They are the same dreary blend of blinking, staring autocrat. Theirs are the souls that bloom like ragweed among cockeyed schemes for the big killing, the failure of which is inevitably narcotized by the intervention of some family friend, or bloat in the declining era of the organs of repression, looking for patrons. They both had their big chances not because of who they were, but because of who they weren’t. Bush wasn’t a Gingrich Republican; Putin was a policeman, but not the type to nab his boss (Yeltsin) for stealing the billion or so dollars his family made off with. A pair made in heaven.





"My heroes are those people who want to be individuals but are being forced to be cogs again," she [A.P.] said. "In an Empire there are only cogs." Once upon a time, the individuals who were sent to salt mines by the cogs, bugged by the cogs, imprisoned in mental asylums by the cogs, or exiled by the cogs, found an audience in the West. No longer. Probably not one person in one hundred, even among the readers of the NYRB, are aware of Politkovskaya’s existence. We are, because we read her book of reportage about the war in Chechnya. Never averse to the Zola trick, the j’accuse, Politskovskaya had the guts to show that the Russian military’s operation in Chechnya was little more than a war crime. We’d love some American reporter who would do the same in reporting on the American ‘strategy’ in Sadr City or Fallujah. It is little more than Grozny with a chocolate bar – or, I forgot, a paint job on the local school, after one has kindly blown up the local fathers and strewed the brains of some little juniors about on the street.



Here’s one of Ms. Politkovskaya’s observations:

"Because Putin, a product of the country's murkiest intelligence service, has failed to transcend his origins and stop behaving like a lieutenant- colonel in the KGB. He is still busy sorting out his freedom-loving fellow countrymen; he persists in crushing liberty just as he did earlier in his career."



"We no longer want to be slaves, even if that is what best suits the West. We demand our right to be free." Poking fun at Mr Putin, she compares him to the humble Tsarist clerk, Akaky Akakievich, a famous literary creation of Russian author Nikolay Gogol. The wretched Akakievich believed the key to being successful and popular lay with his expensive overcoat. He was concerned only with his own image but when the overcoat was stolen he discovered that his own soul was empty. Politkovskaya told The Independent: "Putin is like Gogol's Akaky Akakievich. He is a small grey person who really wants not to be grey. Putin had a historic chance to be great and not to be grey but he is still grey."



LI’d previously linked to a story about how she’d been poisoned in the days around the Beslan crisis. There’s more on that story in the profile:



“On 1 September she phoned her rebel contacts and pleaded with them to allow Aslan Maskhadov, former Chechen president and rebel leader, to journey to Beslan and persuade the hostage-takers to release their captives. Having agreed to fly to Beslan and negotiate a safe passage for Maskhadov she set off for the airport. "My last contact with Maskhadov's people was ten minutes before I got on the plane. I suppose I did more than a journalist normally does. I then got on the plane and drank some tea and then ... nothing."

Bollettino



My friend T. tells us that we should certainly move on from the Derrida issue. And we agree, but having started up the old philosophic engine – disinterred from the grease and newspapers in the garage – we’ve been thinking more of philosophers than of, say, those two great purveyors of philosophy, George W Bush (ardent student of Jesus H. Christ) and John Kerry (ardent student of Walter Lippman and Donald Duck’s secret lovechild). There was an op ed piece in the NYT this morning by Mark Taylor to balance out the Derrida as abstruse charlaton obit on Sunday. Taylor gets off to a rocky start by making Derrida one of the three great 20th century philosophers – Wittgenstein and Heidegger get to be the other two. That’s plainly nonsensical – whatever one claims for Derrida, he is not a figure in the same league as Husserl, or Russell. And of course there’s the little problem that making up these lists is time that could be spent more profitably masturbating. Taylor does do some nice abbreviated explaining, but then he spoils it all with a soft focus exit all about Derrida buying Halloween masks for his kids when he visited him in Paris one year. This, he claims, is deconstruction in action. This, LI would claim, is academia in full bourgeois decline.



Then there is Jerry Fodor’s essay on the LRB. We were referred to it through the Crooked Timber site. Fodor’s essay is about what happened to Analytic Philosophy, and his short answer is Kripke.



We always look forward to Fodor’s essays for the LRB. He’s turned into a model of lucidity. He begins his essay with a nice, unphilosophical question:



“Sometimes I wonder why nobody reads philosophy. It requires, to be sure, a degree of hyperbole to wonder this. Academics like me, who eke out their sustenance by writing and teaching the stuff, still browse in the journals; it's mainly the laity that seems to have lost interest. And it's mostly Anglophone analytic philosophy that it has lost interest in. As far as I can tell, 'Continental' philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre and the rest) continue to hold their market. Even Hegel has a vogue from time to time, though he is famous for being impossible to read. All this strikes me anew whenever I visit a bookstore. The place on the shelf where my stuff would be if they had it (but they don't) is just to the left of Foucault, of which there is always yards and yards. I'm huffy about that; I wish I had his royalties.”



Money, here, is a joke. Still, there is something about it that concentrates the mind at least as much as hanging. The upshot is this:



“So sometimes I wonder why nobody (except philosophers) reads (Anglophone, analytic) philosophy these days.



"But, having just worked through Christopher Hughes's Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, I am no longer puzzled. That may sound as though I'm intending to dispraise the book, but to the contrary; I think it's a fine piece of work in lots of ways. To begin with, the topic is well chosen. By pretty general consent, Kripke's writings (including, especially, Naming and Necessity) have had more influence on philosophy in the US and the UK than any others since the death of Wittgenstein. Ask an expert whether there have been any philosophical geniuses in the last while, and you'll find that Kripke and Wittgenstein are the only candidates.”



Fodor spends the rest of the article explaining why Kripke’s genius was expended in differing a challenge to the very basis of conceptual analysis posed by Quine’s essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In a large sense, what Quine did in that essay was challenge a distinction between the synthetic and the analytic that has a conceptual kinship with the challenge Derrida posed to the Saussurian distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic. In both cases, the distinctions are supplemented by shoring up work that, upon examination, is always insufficient:



“In a nutshell, Quine argued that there is no (intelligible, unquestion-begging) distinction between 'analytic' (linguistic/conceptual) truth and truth about matters of fact (synthetic/contingent truth). In particular, there are no a priori, necessary propositions (except, perhaps, for those of logic and mathematics). Quine's target was mainly the empiricist tradition in epistemology, but his conclusions were patently germane to the agenda of analytical philosophy. If there are no conceptual truths, there are no conceptual analyses either. If there are no conceptual analyses, analytic philosophers are in jeopardy of methodological unemployment.”



LI has never liked Kripke, although we find Naming and Necessity to be at least an interesting, and sometimes useful, book. However, we’ve never trusted the thesis of substituting a theory of possible worlds to explain proper names. Much of it, to us, seems like so much trickery, dressed up as counterfactuals. John Burgess at Princeton has a nice explanation of Kripke’s motives for devising a theory of modal necessity to explain names, laying out the salient elements of the dirty deed. First, Burgess explains the classical exampled learned by all first year philosophy grad students – the evening star and the morning star example. Here’s Burgess:



“…The puzzle that Russell (following Frege) addresses is this. Given that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ denote the same individual, how can the following be true?



(2.1) It is a substantive astronomical discovery that Hesperus is Phosphorus.



According to Russell, this would be impossible if each of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ were name in the ideal sense of ‘a simple symbol directly designating an individual which is its meaning’. For if the meaning of each name is simply the individual it designates, then since both denote the same object, the two have the same meaning, from which it would seem to follow that ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ has the same meaning as ‘Hesperus is Hesperus’. And that, surely, is no substantive astronomical discovery! In the statement of the puzzle one may replace ‘substantive astronomical discovery’ by ‘not analytic’ or ‘not a priori’ — or if George is an astronomical ignoramus, by ‘not known to George’ or ‘not believed by George’.



Russell offered a famous theory of descriptions intended to explain why the puzzle does not arise in the case of descriptions as opposed to names. But even without going into Russell’s theory it is perhaps obvious that



(2.2) It is a substantive astronomical discovery that the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the western horizon after sunset is the same as the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the eastern horizon before sunrise.



can easily be true. (Certainly Frege, who did not have Russell’s theory of descriptions, found it so.)

Russell’s solution to the puzzle is that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’, and more generally names in the ordinary sense, are not names in his ideal sense. Rather, each is associated with some description that constitutes its definition…”



Well, as you can imagine, that is a theory that needs some work. Things change over time, and that means that any description one comes up with will be inaccurate at least to the extent that something has changed – in other words, descriptions are always vulnerable to the effects of before/after. The refutation of Russell’s theory, taken as a strict identity between a proper name and a canonical definition, is easily available. Go to your local grocery store, look in the back of the Redbook, and notice the advertisement for the dietary supplement that shows Mrs. Smith at 300 pounds in 1999, and Mrs. Smith at a svelte 150 now.



It is important to keep your eye on the temporal dimension of this refutation. It is the object of the Kripke school to overlook it. To get back to Burgess, later in the paper he returns to the Hesperus/Phosphorus dilemma from Kripke’s side:



“Kripke has yet another argument against descriptive theories of names. A passing comet might have dislocated the planets, so that while Venus was still the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the western horizon after sunset, Mars rather than Venus was the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the eastern horizon before sunrise. But even so, Venus, alias, Hesperus, alias Phosphorus, would not have been anything other than itself, Venus, alias Phosphorus, alias Hesperus. Thus



(7.1) Hesperus is the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the eastern horizon before sunrise. would have been false, while



(7.2) Hesperus is Phosphorus.



still would have been true. This is so even if, in the counterfactual situation being contemplated, it were Mars that was called ‘Phosphorus’, while it were still Venus that was called ‘Hesperus’. It follows that Phosphorus is not by definition the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the eastern horizon before sunrise (and by similar reasoning, Hesperus is not by definition the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the western horizon after sunset).”



Before we go on, notice something about the method here. This is something Fodor doesn’t mention, but something that should strike anybody who has ever read any analytic philosophy. That is the inference, from the affordances of some language in some particular grammatical structure, to a metaphysical argument that supposedly makes those affordances understandable. This is called intuition, by the analytics.



For those not familiar with the term affordances – its from engineering. Donald Norman book, The Psychology of Everyday Things, popularized the word, which he claims to have taken from J.J. Gibson. Here’s what he has to say about it:



“The word "affordance" was invented by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson (1977, 1979) to refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal).

…

In POET, I argued that understanding how to operate a novel device had three major dimensions: conceptual models, constraints, and affordances. These three concepts have had a mixed reception.

To me, the most important part of a successful design is the underlying conceptual model. This is the hard part of design: formulating an appropriate conceptual model and then assuring that everything else be consistent with it. I see lots of token acceptance of this idea, but far to little serious work. The power of constraints has largely been ignored. To my great surprise, the concept of affordance was adopted by the design community, especially graphical and industrial design. Alas, yes, the concept has caught on, but not always with complete understanding.”

Here’s a plain jane example:

“The computer system already comes with built-in physical affordances. The computer, with its keyboard, display screen, pointing device and selection buttons (e.g., mouse buttons) affords pointing, touching, looking, and clicking on every pixel of the screen.”



The affordances of the proper name give us various tagging affordances. It isn’t, we think, the purpose of the proper name to imply a moment of pure presence to itself, to use the Derridean term. It is to provide an affordance across changing circumstances. The philosophic assumption must be –oh, then it is about an unchanging thing, or what remains the same, over changing circumstances. But why should we assume that? Mrs. Smith wants to show that she has changed, not that she has remained the same.

...



Damn, what's the time? We should be writing on our novel. So we will abruptly cut this here.

Bollettino



The last four years has been, in many ways, a gorgeous spectacle, a pageant of opportunities for the writer. Sometimes, government is bad. Sometimes, government is corrupt. But rarely are all branches of government as bad, as corrupt, as intellectually bankrupt, as willing to serve short term greed at the expense of any other priority, as soaked to the gills in an ethic of blind and lemming like selfishness, yoked to an astonishingly irrational messianism, as in the last four years. It is the culture of the coup. The rapture of the raptors, complete with all the dressings: the unctuous and ignorant Southerners, the Dems pawning their “liberalism” for a song, the demented likes of Zell Miller whose vacances from his accesses of fury are spent in amassing perks for Home Depot, upon whose board he will undoubtedly be ensconced when he retires in three weeks -- it is a zoo with the keepers fled. Was it like this under the Grant administration? LI got all Henry Adam-ish reading about the latest bout of Delay-ism to make its way through that thing we call the Congress like a particularly nasty form of new STD:



“The story began nearly three years ago, with an initial impetus simply to replace a $5 billion annual tax break for American exporters that the World Trade Organization had ruled was illegal. It ended this week with a 633-page behemoth that offers new tax giveaways to everyone from corporate titans like Boeing and Hewlett-Packard to an array of oil and gas producers, shopping mall developers, wine distributors, even restaurants. Many companies, like General Electric and Dell, are likely to end up with far more tax relief under the new bill than they had ever received from the old tax break. Some, like Exxon Mobil, never qualified for the old tax break at all but will enjoy tax savings now.”



There has never been a better time to buy a congressman or a cabinet member. There's never been a better time to argue a case that pits capital vs. labor before a federal court, the judges of which are most likely to have been appointed by a Reagan or a Bush. There are no laws against peculation, bribery, extortion, or other financial crimes that can’t be easily finessed if the crimes are committed by the proper players on the proper scale. There is nothing that can’t be done with money in D.C. Of course, occasionally, the Congress, remembering that decency is a matter of not showing the kids tit shots on tv, does thunder against one commercial venture: tv. But those who are true connoisseurs of obscenity know that Ms. Jackson’s endowments simply don’t compare, as pornography, to the spectacle presented, this week, by Tom DeLay’s House. Those munching sounds you heard were the collected jawings of Republicans and Democrats filling themselves to repletion with lobbyist bribes as they pushed through tax breaks, say, an airplane building company which was practically indicted, last week, for systematically bribing the Pentagon’s top Air Force procurement official, Darleen Druyun, in order to accrue perhaps as much as 10 billion dollars in extra revenue and steal a march on its competitors. The government is in that misfunction mode known to us from all the sad and edifying histories of all the falling republics. Ms. Druyun, by the way, was doled out the same punishment as Ms. Martha Stewart, such being the idiocy of our courts when it comes to white collar crime.



Matthew Josephson’s always interesting History of the Robber Barons (much dissed in the nineties by the laissez faire triumphalists – and oddly unreferenced as the laissez faire heroes unraveled all over the place in 2001 and 2002) gives us the background of Henry Adams activities during the Grant presidency:



“Late in 1869, Charles F. Adams, Jr., who was becoming a specialist in railroad affairs, came upon evidence of a “vast conspiracy” which began in an attempted seizure of one of the principal trunk-lines in the East ; then in wide ramifications enveloped the national currency system, the political leaders of several of the state legislatures, the federal government, members of the presidential cabinet itself. The machinations of the “conspirators” seemed at the time of historic significance to both the Adams brothers, who believed that successive crises had been precipitated by them, culminating finally in the nation-wide panic of 1873. Sensing the new powers at work in the situation, the deep alterations in American society, they had tried to expose the principals of the plot ; they wrote “Chapters of Erie,” unfolding the whole sensational story in a form still substantially correct. They were beating drums, setting up signal-fires ; yet no one had been alarmed, or had the time to be alarmed.”



This is Adams, from the Education, on the Gold scandal – one of the interlocking scandals that made up the substance of the book Henry and his brother wrote in 1870:



Before he got back to Quincy, the summer was already half over, and in another six weeks the effects of President Grant’s character showed themselves. They were startling—astounding—terrifying. The mystery that shrouded the famous, classical attempt of Jay Gould to corner gold in September, 1869, has never been cleared up,—at least so far as to make it intelligible to Adams. Gould was led, by the change at Washington, into the belief that he could safely corner gold without interference from the Government. He took a number of precautions, which he admitted; and he spent a large sum of money, as he also testified, to obtain assurances which were not sufficient to have satisfied so astute a gambler; yet he made the venture. Any criminal lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting, rigorously, that no such man, in such a position, could be permitted to plead that he had taken, and pursued, such a course, without assurances which did satisfy him. The plea was professionally inadmissible.



This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances from the White House or the Treasury, since none other could have satisfied him. To young men wasting their summer at Quincy for want of some one to hire their services at three dollars a day, such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles and Henry Adams jumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much voracity as Jay Gould, or his âme damnée Jim Fisk, had ever shown for Erie; and with as little fear of consequences. They risked something; no one could say what; but the people about the Erie office were not regarded as lambs.”



Like Adams and Josephson, LI believes that we live in an epoch in which the chief insights in our politics are best garnered from the profound study of teratology. How else to explain the flourishing of Delay in the era of Bush?

Bollettino



As our readers know, LI does like a good debunking. Which is why you should go to Christopher Lukasik’s “The Physiognomy of Biometrics” over at Commonplace and read about the pseudo-science into which the Defense Department is preparing to pour 11 billion dollars. Not that 11 billion is more than chump change at the Pentagon; but for us poor wankers at the LI office, 11 billion dollars is a lot of dough. We’d settle for, say, five and a half billion to pay the bills and such.



Lukasik’s article starts out with a reading of an 18th century novel that we’d never heard of , Susanna Rowson’s The Inquisitor, or Invisible Rambler, which “recounts the experiences of a wealthy gentleman who, after complaining about the amount of duplicity in the world, is mysteriously given a ring that can turn him invisible. With the power of invisibility, the gentleman boasts that now "I should find my real friends, and detect my enemies." Our Rambler becomes a self-employed detective – invisibility makes police or thieves of us all, which is why the Internet is divided between fiskers and hackers – and follows villains through the stages to their revealing acts.



How does he know who to follow?



“He knows, we later learn, because he is a physiognomist. "I never cast my eye upon a stranger but I immediately form some idea of his or her dispositions by the turn of their eyes and cast of their features," he explains, "and though my skill in physiognomy is not infallible, I seldom find myself deceived." Indeed, nearly all of the people the invisible rambler suspects eventually behave as their faces predicted they would. Throughout The Inquisitor, faces reveal seducers, gamblers, idlers, dissimulators, and a variety of crooks and fortune hunters. For Rowson at least, a person’s face becomes the probable cause for the rambler’s surveillance.”



Lukasik has an enjoyable time showing the bridge between the physiognomic craze of the early nineteenth century to the biometric superstitions of our own highly superstitious time. As he points out, matching face or body to person, which seems easy at first glance, is actually rather difficult to do mechanically. People age, they change hair dos, they get into accidents, they get wrinkles and then get rid of wrinkles, and so on and so forth. Slippery signifieds, who, if they are bent on planting bombs, can even screw up the machinery of identification with a little ingenuity:



“This has proven to be quite a problem for the industry, since biometrics, especially facial recognition systems, have not performed well when tested. A recent National Institute for Standards and Technology study, for example, found that facial recognition technology failed to match people correctly 23 percent of the time. Last year, it failed to match employees at Boston’s Logan International Airport up to 38 percent of the time, and in 2002 it failed to match Palm Beach Airport employees 53 percent of the time. According to the Economist, the 2003 government-sponsored Face Recognition Vendor Test found that "none of the systems worked well . . . when shown a face and asked to identify the subject." Martyn Gates, a facial recognition specialist, confessed to the Financial Times that "in some systems, the accuracy is almost random.



… As the Wall Street Journal reported last year, Tsumoto Matsimoto from Yokohama University was able to fool eleven different fingerprint scanners roughly 80 percent of the time using $10 worth of gelatin.”



But, as with the anti-ballistic missile shield, biometrics is booming in spite of its failures. The business of security, as Lukasik puts it, is to provide the appearance of security – and, as he doesn’t add but LI will, at a cost heavy enough to employ a bunch of Pentagon honchos when they revolve through that door.

Bollettino



Bollettino



We’ve been pondering the headline of the NYT’s Derrida obituary. The headline describes him as an “abstruse theorist” in an obvious and spiteful attempt not to describe him as a philosopher. No surprise that petty malice infected even the headline writer. But it did surprise me somewhat that nowhere on the web, at least that I’ve seen, has there been any attempt to improve on the ‘abstruse’ label. That Derrida’s writings are difficult is well known. Kant’s writings are difficult too. But by now any first year philosophy textbook can simplify Kant into a picture general enough to be taught without too much difficulty.



Surely it isn’t that hard to do the same for Derrida.



If one were to start, the effort would look something like this.



A. Begin where Derrida begins. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a programmatic turn against the naive positivistic account of the human sciences. In the nineteenth century, it was recognized that history, sociology, linguistics, and philosophy resisted the scientific models produced by the positive sciences – especially physics. Although there were candidates put forward to fill the role of the ‘laws of history’ or the ‘laws of psychology’, there was no agreement on how to find these laws, or if history, psychology, and language were even the kind of things that could be described in terms of laws. This is what Husserl would latter describe as the crisis of the sciences. In addition, there was a distinct tendency towards psychologism – as for instance Mill’s idea that numbers ‘derive’ from from empirical sense data.



There are three figures in the turn against naïve positivism who are symptomatic of what was to come to dominate 20th century philosophy: Frege, Husserl, and Saussure. Interestingly, Frege – whose influence on the development of Anglo philosophy is huge – never attracted Derrida’s attention. But Husserl and Saussure did. Why?



Because Husserl and Saussure advocate treating language as an autonomous entity. By which they meant bracketing psychological and social ‘influences” on language, and examining it as a self contained system.



Why is language important? Because it seems like language, as distinct from history or the mind (with its notorious observation problems), is the closest thing, in the human sciences, to a traditional object of the positive sciences. You can easily make the case that language was law-bound. You can find, seemingly, universals in language. And, with the development of mathematical logic around 1900, it suddenly seemed that logic could actually absorb mathematics. This was exciting insofar as logic itself was recast as the rules for a given formal language. If you consider that physics could just be considered the systematic attempt to mathematize nature, then you see the possibilities. Perhaps the positive sciences and the human sciences spring from one root.



Saussure’s program, then, treated language as autonomous. It depended on a set of strict categorical differences – the two most important of which were those between the synchronic state of language and the diachronic, and between the signifier and the signified – in order so show that language isn’t dependent for its internal workings upon an external referential context.



B. Derrida’s most important move – the one that resonates throughout his philosophy – was to examine Saussure’s set of assumptions. The assumption that, for instance, the synchronic plane of language could be absolutely separated from the diachronic invalidated a whole tradition of philosophical thinking – the Cratylian school, so to speak – which examined the etymology of words in an effort to reconstruct their essences. Derrida did not advocate returning to this school, but questioned those presuppositions by which, in one gesture, Saussure reduced the lexe to a series of distinct, unconnected-but-connected entities. Similarly, Derrida questioned the distinction between the signified and the signifier. There’s an interesting treatment of a Frege’s similar distinction, between concept and object, in an article in Ratio in 2000, by Adrian Moore. Moore has seen what Derrida was doing, and applies his critical stance, although not his method, to Frege.





C. What is the latent metaphysics that Derrida finds behind Saussure? This is a long story, but it is hinted at by the notion that the signifying unit persists as a signifying unity from one synchronic plane to the other. In other words, it constructs an ideal present. Derrida’s skepticism about the ideal present leads him to ask whether the ideal present isn’t an integral part of the code of Western metaphysics. If that Metaphysics is forced to do without it, would it lose its coherence? Now, of course at this point one could ask whether there is such a thing as one Western metaphysics. Derrida essentially accepts Heidegger’s theory that there is – that behind all the metaphysical schools there exists one common program.





D. At this point, Derrida does something interesting – and something that we can recognize, at this point in time, as consonant with the moves made by other skeptics in the Modernist tradition, like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. He does not assume that proving the falsity of an idea is the extent to which the philosopher can go. Rather, he wants to ask whether the falsity actually has a use value. Assuming, for the moment, that the metaphysics of presence clings to a falsely construed idea of the present. Then why didn’t that falsity collapse the metaphysics from the very beginning? Derrida, like M,N, and F. thinks that one shouldn’t confuse truth with use. In a sense, this is a criticism of the coherence theory of truth from within – which is why, for certain philosophers, it is so hard to understand. That is because a certain notion of the truth is the one supreme philosophic bias. That notion identifies the true with the good. That a system could be coherent and functional by eliding the truth values of its fundamental assumptions – could be set up to systematically protect them from any real investigation – is alien to the philosopher’s self image.



There now. Notice this account doesn’t use the word deconstruction once. Although eventually I would say something about deconstruction – and many other things – if I were giving a full blown account of Derrida, the more important word is “text.” That Derrida repeated uses the word text, and that it is repeatedly transformed into the word language (as, for instance, in the NYT obituary), is all about the underlying metaphysical bias Derrida is exposing.



If LI’s readers want to know why, write and ask me. I’ll then write another post about it. But you know – I haven’t done Derrida for a decade, and I don’t want to do a lot of color by numbers explanations of the guy.



PS- After I wrote this, I received an email from my friend T. in New York, who referred me to a decent obituary of Derrida in the Independent that actually mentions the text/language distinction forever lost in the NYT obituary. http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=570707

Bollettino



Me demander de renoncer à ce qui m'a formé, à ce que j'ai tant aimé, c'est me demander de mourir. Dans cette fidélité-là, il y a une sorte d'instinct de conservation. Renoncer, par exemple, à une difficulté de formulation, à un pli, à un paradoxe, à une contradiction supplémentaire, parce que ça ne va pas être compris, ou plutôt parce que tel journaliste qui ne sait pas la lire, pas lire le titre même d'un livre, croit comprendre que le lecteur ou l'auditeur ne comprendra pas davantage et que l'Audimat ou son gagne-pain en souffriront, c'est pour moi une obscénité inacceptable. C'est comme si on me demandait de m'incliner, de m'asservir - ou de mourir de bêtise. -- Jacques Derrida, interview, Le Monde



The headline in the Nouvelle Obs read: Disparition de Jacques Derrida, inventeur de la «déconstruction». Ah, Derrida might very well have smiled at that coupling of inventor and deconstruction. In a series of articles that approached Maurice Blanchot with that typical scrupulousness so maddening to those who expect their philosophers to approach a structure with a machete instead of a scalpel, or at least an ideology with several ID tags to it (ideologies, like the clothes in the marked down section, always flutter their tags), Derrida had already sussed out the venir and its variants, playing, as usual, on etymologies under the sign of the warning sign of the Sausserian arbitraire.



I devoted a good three years to the man – this is how long it took me to write, in my off and on fashion, my master’s thesis. I saw him give a talk, once, at NYU – the room was absolutely crowded with students. I’m not sure if they knew he was going to be speaking in French. And remember, this is Derrida’s French, a language that was born from the unnatural coupling of Mallarme and Heidegger.



Derrida didn’t deliver a shock to my system, the way Deleuze did, but I still love the man.



From the AP we read: “On the third stage of his asian tour in China, Jacques Chirac expressed his sadness in learning of the decease of this universal thinker, who will remain, according to the president, an “inventor, a discoverer, a master of an extraordinary fecundity.” ‘With him, France has given the one one of the great contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of the intellectual life of our time,” he emphasized, recalling that Jacques Derrida was ‘read, admired, translated, published, taught and discussed all over the world.”



He was 74, and died of cancer of the pancreas.



The NObs lists some of his works, leaving out – weirdly enough – La Grammatologie. We do like the prudent way they define deconstruction:



He is the author of numerous books, among which are Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophie, Glas, The Truth in Painting, For Paul Celan, On the Spirit, Heidegger and the Question, Inventions of the other, From right to philosophy (Du droit a la philosophie – long before he wrote this tome, I entitled my Master’s thesis – Droigt d’auteur reserve – it is a rather untranslatable pun, pointing to the place of droit – law, right, norms – and fingers – as in point out, montrer a droigt – in Derrida. The reserve part – the part maudit, the part of property, the part of dissemination – was the subdued key. But I digress), Specters of Marx. Jacques Derrida proposed, launching himself from classic philosophic texts, a deconstruction, which is to say a critique of the presuppositions of discourse. (la parole).



There are a lot of shark reactions besides that of Chirac. Jack Lang, who I do like, claimed to be floored by the death of Derrida. The mayor of Paris and one of the heads of the French communist party also chipped in their accolades.



Interesting how they flock about the term deconstruction. In France, I imagine Derrida’s real importance, outside of philosophy, wasn’t deconstruction,. but decentering. All power to the marges was the slogan of the ultra left wing in Italy in 1970, which was borrowed from J.D. That idea filtered through the left in various ways. The reception of Foucault, who didn’t like Derrida’s work, was contextualized, I think, partly in Derridian terms in the early seventies. Although perhaps I am getting that relationship optimistically backwards. American Foucaultians and Derridians have a dog and cat relationship, which isn’t known to people outside the community.



Of course, the right, who know Derrida from some article that somebody who read somebody else’s article who read a page of Marges de la philosophie, at most, will have a wonderful time jumping up and down on his grave. Bastards.



Read the NYT obit for an example. The level of intellect displayed in it, and the incredibly blah blah blah stupidity about Paul de Man (gee, the Derrida didn't trample all over his best bud when it was discovered that long before JD met him, he wrote for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper. How dare he! Denunciation is, as the House Unamerican Committee and Bill Keller know, the only way to really purify the heart!). But obits in the NYT are pretty meaningless.



Well, Jacques, I’m getting drunk tonight for you. Good night, ladies, good night sweet ladies, good night good night.

Bollettino



Curious omission



LI has just finished reviewing a rather depressing novel set in Liberia. This summer, we were supposed to review another depressing book by Douglas Farah, the WP reporter, Blood From Stones, about the “secret financial network of terror.” Farah’s beat was West Africa, and he links the arms and diamond merchants in that area to both the Hezbollah and Al Qaeda networks. We were not totally convinced by the story line he is pushing – evidence for a strong alliance between a Shi’ite group and a group well known for massacring Shi’ites in Pakistan and Afghanistan seems to me, at best, shaky, a matter of individual initiatives and an attempt at Pan-Islamic solidarity is rhetorical rather than real, and at worse, tendentious, an attempt to drag into America’s scope enemies who are really enemies of Israel and various factions in Lebanon. However, in the course of the report, Farah extensively describes the horrors of the West African breakdown and its financing through slave labor in the illicit diamond trade, as well as lumbering, and of course the ever present trade in drugs.



If our mind hadn’t been so focused, perhaps we wouldn’t have noticed that in two debates, there has been no mention whatsoever of the U.S. joke “intervention” in Liberia. This summer, Jonathan Stack and James Brabazon made a documentary showing U.S. forces waiting in the coastal waters while Liberians were slaughtered by militias. Here’s the first graf from the Times review of the documentary:



“In their brave film ''Liberia: An Uncivil War'' Jonathan Stack and James Brabazon make us witnesses to the continuing implosion in one of Africa's failed states. But they do something else as well in the documentary that has its premiere tonight on the Discovery Times Channel. They also show how the United States has turned its back on the land it created as a colony in 1821. In one of the film's many riveting images, three United States warships loom in the haze off Liberia's coast while thousands of civilians are slaughtered on shore by a ragtag army wielding American-made weapons.’



There wasn’t a question for Bush about this. Here are a two other grafs from that review:



“When President Bush embarks on an African trip in July 2003, he comes under pressure to resolve the Liberian crisis and vaguely promises to send in peacekeepers after Mr. Taylor has left. But Mr. Taylor perfectly plays President Bush, asserting that to leave before the peacekeepers arrive would be irresponsible. Buoyed by his countrymen's hope that United States marines are on the way, Mr. Taylor maneuvers himself into a position to buy time for a better deal (he's eventually given asylum in Nigeria) while blaming the United States for not intervening (the marines wait for Mr. Taylor's departure before landing shortly after the bloodbath and staying for about a month).



The film makes clear how easy it would have been to prevent the spasm of violence that swept through Monrovia, Liberia's capital, in July 2003. With President Bush in Africa and United States troopships in Liberian waters, the stars seemed aligned for the United States to help the people of its historically closest African ally. Rebel youths on bridges aimlessly firing a few mortars and grenade launchers would certainly have been no match for the heavily armed marines for whom the streets were lined with cheering, expectant citizens. But all hopes were dashed when the rebels arrived.”



The free people of a freedom loving Liberia have two strikes against them, however, insofar as the democracy loving people of the Pentagon are concerned. They are black – which means, as far as the U.S. is concerned, who cares. And they made the mistake of living in a country without significant reserves of petroleum.



Searching around for more about the recent history of Liberia, I came upon a fine article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It is a pre-9/11 article by Michael Klare entitled :The Kalashnikov Age. It makes the same point that LI has often made – the bogus classification of some weapons as WMD and some weapons as not responds more to the Western need to market weapons than any real mass destructiveness. So far, the most mass destructive weapon unleashed on the planet is the AK-47.



“ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1989, CHARLES Taylor marched into Liberia with a ragtag invasion force of some 150 amateur soldiers--members of the self-styled National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL)--and set out to conquer the country. In the months that followed, Taylor seized control of the Liberian hinterland, exacting tribute from its inhabitants, recruiting additional soldiers, and killing all who stood in his way. As many as 200,000 people died in the cataclysm, and millions more were driven from their homes. Taylor had unleashed the most deadly combat system of the current epoch: the adolescent human male equipped with a Kalashnikov--an AK-47 assault rifle.”



Klare’s statistics graf bears out my hyperbole:



“Most of the casualties in these conflicts are non-combatants. Civilians constituted only five percent of the casualties in World War I, but they constitute about 90 percent of all those killed or wounded in more recent wars. Children have been particularly victimized by these conflicts: According to the U.N. Development Program, as many as two million children are believed to have been killed--and 4.5 million disabled--in armed conflict since 1987; another million have been orphaned, and some 12 million left homeless.”



It must be admitted that the disabling of these children was accomplished not only by weapons sold to various criminals and criminal governments by western arms dealers, but also by the handy machete. There’s nothing like a machete or an ax to sever the arms and hands of human beings. As we known, in Sierra Leone and in Liberia, child soldiers were ordered to do such things. Here’s a graf from Farah’s book:



In April, 2000, in front of her battered plastic tent at the Amputtees and War Wounded Camp in Freetown, Kadia Tu Fafanah, a forty-one year old mother of nine, described how two preteen boys of the RUF used an ax to hack her legs off above the knees, leaving only two stumps:….



“It was Wednesday, January 20, 1999” Fafanah said as she sat facing a small cooking fire… “They put us in a house to burn, about one hundred of us, but it wouldn’t light. So they put the men in one line and shot them. I tried to run away, but I fell in a gutter. The children caught me. The amputated five others, but I was punished more for trying to run away. The took both my legs. They were small boys and they held me down while one cut me off.”



Here’s how they prepare the kids for what they call ‘mayhem days”: “They [children interviewed by Farah] said they were given colored pills, most likely amphetamines and razor blade slits near their temples, where cocaine was put directly into their bloodstreams. The ensuing days would be a blur: the children often remembered only the feeling of being invincible, before the drugs wore off.”



It would be interesting to Kerry and Bush talk about Liberia, but we doubt the subject is going to come up. Here’s a link to recent news from the country.