From New York Times:

It was in sometime in the ’80s when I heard someone on the radio talking about Clint Eastwood’s 1980 movie “Bronco Billy.” It is, he said, a “nice little film in which Eastwood deconstructs his ‘Dirty Harry’ image.”

That was probably not the first time the verb “deconstruct” was used casually to describe a piece of pop culture, but it was the first time I had encountered it, and I remember thinking that the age of theory was surely over now that one of its key terms had been appropriated, domesticated and commodified. It had also been used with some precision. What the radio critic meant was that the flinty masculine realism of the “Dirty Harry” movies — it’s a hard world and it takes a hard man to deal with its evils — is affectionately parodied in the story of a former New Jersey shoe salesman who dresses and talks like a tough cowboy, but is the good-hearted proprietor of a traveling Wild West show aimed at little children. It’s all an act , a confected fable, but so is Dirty Harry; so is everything. If deconstruction was something that an American male icon performed, there was no reason to fear it; truth, reason and the American way were safe.

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One day, the gods retreated. On their own, they retreated from their divinity, that is to say, from their presence. What remains of their presence is what remains of all presence when it absents itself: what remains is what one can say about it. What can be said about it is what remains when one can no longer address it: neither speak to it, nor touch it, nor see it, nor give it a present.

(One might even say that the gods retreated because one no longer gives a present to their presence: no more sacrifice, no more oblation, except by way of custom or imitation. One has other things to do: write, for example, calculate, do business, legislate. Deprived of presents, presence has retreated.)

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Via

Interviews with Spivak, entitled The Post-Colonial Critic.

Link

Adam Thurschwell’s review of Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance

This is a brief review of Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. In it, he argues that the overriding political-philosophical problem of late modernity is the problem of political motivation. Critchley’s book is both an analysis and critique of how that problem has been resolved by ethical and political philosophers since Kant and a defense of his own solution, which he derives primarily from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and which issues in a call for a form of ethical anarchism. In this review I summarize his arguments and raise some critical questions about his solution, while agreeing with him about the essential nature of the problem of motivation that his book highlights.

Link

A review of Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature (Cultural Memory in the Present):

If there is no such thing as literature — i.e., self-identity of the literary thing — if what is announced or promised as literature never gives itself as such, that means, among other things, that a literature that talked only about literature or a work that was purely self-referential would immediately be annulled. You'll say that that's maybe what's happening. In which case it is this experience of the nothing-ing of nothing that interests our desire under the name of literature. Experience of Being, nothing less, nothing more, on the edge of metaphysics, literature perhaps stands on the edge of everything, almost beyond everything, including itself. It's the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world, and this is why, if it has no definition, what is heralded and refused under the name of literature cannot be identified with any other discourse. It will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational.

 

– Jacques Derrida, "'This Strange Institution Called Literature': An Interview with Jacques Derrida"[1]

 

Over the years there have been various efforts to engage Jacques Derrida's conception of literature.[2] I think it is widely acknowledged now that there is (or was) no concept or theory of any sort but instead an ongoing attraction to forms of language that make certain works of writing peculiar enough to trouble the ways in which we make sense of things. Anyhow here is what I think we think we know about Derrida's thinking with respect to literature:

 the rest of the review

Via cross-x forum

Adieu — Jacques Derrida; Pascale-Anne Brault; Michael Naas
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Autumn, 1996), pp. 1-10.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=009…3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

Link

Emergent Village Podcast

* Jack Caputo
* Richard Kearney
* 50 minutes

Here’s the mp3 file for download

(H/t: Michael O’Rourk)

Derrida parle pour l’amour




Also the text of Dissemination via Wood’s Lot

Continuing from the previous story on Derrida and the UCI affair: From the comments here is a link of interest: http://www.jacques-derrida.org/UCI%20Affair.html

More Rorty articles:

From the New York Times

From Slate (H/t: Carrie Golden)