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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.2805  Tuesday, 11 December 2001

From:           Stephen Dobbin <sfdobbin@yahoo.co.uk>
Date:           Monday, 10 Dec 2001 16:38:36 +0000 (GMT)
Subject:        Derrida et al.

I’d just like to apologise to both Martin Steward and Sean Lawrence for
misattributing the term ‘Derridean’ to the former and denying it to the
latter. But in neither case was my posting meant to be in any way
malicious.

I do enjoy, however, at the beginning of a lecture hearing a phrase such
as ‘and while acknowledging, with Derrida (or Barthes, of Foucault)
that….’ shortly followed by a phrase such as ‘none the less….’

It is the sound of thirty years of academic criticism being quietly
swept under the carpet.

Sometimes, it seems, even dedicated deconstructionists allow themselves
this necessary shorthand. In Chapter 1 of Frederick Crews’ ‘Postmodern
Pooh’, Felicia Marronnez (the Sea & Ski Professor of English at the
University of California at Irvine) tells us:

“Now that we’ve dispensed with both author and reader, you will be
interested to learn that I’m going to go right on discussing them. And
the same holds for both truth and literary meaning, notions at once
fallacious and essential to the work of Deconstruction. After we have
registered the fatal instability of *our concepts*, they still remain
our concepts, all the more precious for our awareness that they, and
therefore we, fail to intersect with “reality” at any point.”

A longer excerpt from her lecture can be found at
http://www.januarymagazine.com/features/poohexc.html

Stephen.

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