Response to a Report of Discomfort and Disengagement

As a cut-out to my feeling of discomfort and disengagement at the particular moment when "what do we do with the dialectic" was posed in class as symptomatic of my general unease with the structures of my course -- my response then being absent -- I wrote the only missive I knew, addresed to my old supervisor.

His response refigured as such:

Disengagement with the text is and always was the main frontier and horizon of reading: we'll get to it (as we'll see ... as I will later show ... after some preliminary business ... not there yet? ...); it is even perhaps the provocation and thus following the logic of the a priori the very essence of reading itself ... for your one resource in the face of the issues you mention will turn out to be a powerful one indeed, I can assure you. It is, I believe, extremely hard to catch on to the persuasive effect of a detailed and patient reading when it comes to showing a "grasp of 19th and 20th century English and American lit" (the patient working through (even if only a paragraph or two) of a Dickens text, say Bleak House, makes up for years of reading about the period etc.) One might be accused of cunning but that is better perhaps than disingenuous engagement. Coursework in English can always be negotiated with the sophistication of the so called theoretical and critical reader (this was its curse from the beginning) and then you can infiltrate the Kant and Hegel, the Nietzsche and the Rousseau under all kinds of rubics: our diverse historicities ensure that that must be so. And the philosophical turn always forgets that it is with the readings of it (turned over e.g., amongst the modernist avant-gardes) that it regains its force in the current milieu (which is dominated once again and as always by scientific paradigms as fundamentalist as the divinities that it helps support).

JWP's words are not meant to placate the sense of discomfort and disengagement. If I had expected them to function so, I would not have written "back home." Instead, by working within the immanence of the system to be destroyed, his words mark the force of intervention that separates the one who merely says "deconstruction" from one who experiences it.

Hence as a rejoinder to my previous post on the fear of the dialectic:

With the dialectic it is worth remembering that the only thing that cannot--that constantly fails in a failure more powerful than anything in ethics-- be assimilated in/by the dialectic (it chokes on it) is the dialectic itself, like the ground of reasons (ground/reason). Everything else is simply always grist to its mill. So I doubt that we can aford to do without this powerful failure. This is possibly why the animality motif might end up being quite interesting, for it concerns what can be eaten and what cannot.

How to eat well, since one must and nevertheless will continue to eat? According to the numerous anecdotes that frequented my supervised sessions, a respected scholar, after reading Derrida's "Eating Well" had trouble settling down at his dining table. I eat on my desk, sometimes having to clean up my keyboard. It is to eat with the knowledge that one is, always already in the habit of choking.