deconstruction (but not derrida!)

For a while it meant "no wonder chix don't dig you Hunter".

But mostly people use 'deconstruct' when they mean 'analyse into its constituent parts', because a) they think it sounds better and b) they're not really thinking about what they're saying.

Most people hear it as meaning 'take apart' or 'dismantle' but it equally implies a new construction.

tr.v. de·con·struct·ed, de·con·struct·ing, de·con·structs

1) To break down into components; dismantle.

2) To write about or analyze (a literary text, for example), following the tenets of deconstruction.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
de

(*he's not arguing this)

it comes across to me more like a bad extrapolation from barthes's or foucault's polemics abt the death of the author, excedpt unfortunately the extrapolator didn't actually read the respective essays, just the titles

He is worse than I remember him being.

Perhaps I mean: I have a dim memory of the fact that he annoys me - but in between reading him I forget how poor he is. Then I read him again, 'properly', and goodness me, it's awful stuff.

but alext do you really think that deconstruction simply means "dismantle" in common usage, or just in the dictionary? do people in common usage ever "deconstruct" things they LIKE or only things they DON'T? (Derrida used the term with things he liked too, as i recall) Is it closer to "analyze" or "critique" or "interrogate" or "let's break it down" or etc?

I head someone use it on television the other evening. The problem is I can't remember where. Either Pop Idol or that property thing about making a million. Either way, it wasn't in reference to Bataille. It has entered pop vocab meaning 'unpack'. I don't know how Derrida meant it.

(*kogan gives me grief for using this phrase w/o explaining it better which is probbly fair enough)

I am just amazed, or surprised, or disappointed, no, DISMAYED is right, anew, at how poor he is when you actually get down to it.

It has entered pop vocab meaning 'unpack'.

deconstruction in popular discourse= ripping the packaging off the parcel. it's more assertive than unpack, even in journalese.

Hear, they return: the haughty distance, the coldness, the icy weary sense of the impossibility of what everyone finds it unavoidably necessary to do. The pointlessness of it all. The pointlessness of Paul de Man.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2014/03/24/140324crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all

Barish doesn’t attempt a psychiatric diagnosis of her subject. She does note that de Man had a habit of staring at his face in the mirror, which she interprets as a sign of narcissism. It may be, but narcissism doesn’t account for such an astonishing run of deceit. That is the record of a sociopath. De Man must have known the difference between right and wrong, but those concepts appear to have had no purchase on his inner life. Writing anti-Semitic articles for pro-Nazi papers, stealing from his nurse, sending his child off to be brought up by virtual strangers, lying his way through Harvard: if those things had not been easy for him to do, they would have been impossible for him to do.

De Man wasn’t loyal to his family or his country, but he wasn’t loyal to the Nazis, either. He sheltered Jewish friends in his apartment, and he helped distribute a journal for the resistance. One reason that no one in the United States suspected there might be something amiss was the sheer magnitude of the risks he took. If you were an émigré trying to hide a criminal past, would you default on your rent pretty much everywhere you lived? Would you claim to hold fictitious academic degrees, and doctor transcripts that could easily be checked? Would you talk your way out of a jam by pretending that you were the son of your uncle?

For that matter, would you become the leader of a high-profile and controversial school of literary criticism? You would not. You would try to fade into the woodwork. De Man didn’t do that. The behavior Barish describes does not seem like the behavior of a man who wants to get caught. It seems like that of a man who lacks a normal superego.

wau

ha yeah

idk abt that piece tho

well, menand, i can't even

One of his Harvard students, Peter Brooks, remembered how, in class, de Man would “sit in front of a text and just pluck magical things out of it.”

Does sound like a circus act. Do want to read him but the example from the Yeats flew past me.

there was another piece on the same subject in the NYROB, it's really...I consider De Man 1) easily the best writer of the deconstructionists and 2) the one whose work actually seems least about himself, at least on its face: De Man circles back to whatever he's looking at more reliably than JD. but Jesus Christ, his life: what a mess.

I'd be intrigued to eventually read Henri Thomas's novel inspired by de Man's emigration, bigamy, and early life in America, Le Parjure (from 1964, so before de Man had made a name for himself), but my French isn't up to it. I'm not sure if Barish talks about it.... The Brooks essay aero mentions (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/strange-case-paul-de-man/) seems more usefully skeptical than Menand about some of Barish's claims, and less awkward in dealing with de Man's criticism, but I haven't read Barish's biography, so I can't assess it.

"more usefully skeptical" yup yup

"Yet when she ends this introductory chapter by noting that “the great men of Paul de Man’s generation have now slipped away, sinking beneath the horizon along with his favorite ocean liner, the Normandie, the three-martini lunch, and, perhaps, our trustfulness concerning assertions of ‘greatness,’” we may find our own trustfulness taxed. The French liner Normandie caught fire and capsized at its pier in the Hudson River in 1942, long before de Man had ever crossed the ocean (which doesn’t prevent Barish from including a photograph of de Man and family returning from France to the US in 1964 “aboard the Normandie”).

It’s of a piece with a footnote to the statement that she discovered that de Man planned “to create an entirely Nazi journal, one dedicated to promulgating Hitler’s ideology, from his views of race to his notions about nutrition—and even his cosmology.” The footnote reads: “I shared this information, and it has since been previously published in Belgian sources not now available to me.” That does not pass any sort of muster.

One could do a review of Barish’s footnotes that would cast many doubts on her scholarship: even the most important published sources on de Man’s past, Wartime Journalism and its companion Responses, are misdated; Marcel Mauss’s famous essay “The Gift” is attributed to Georges Bataille; the claim that de Man was to be secretary of the editorial board of a new periodical, Cahiers Européens, controlled by the German Foreign Office, is footnoted: “This writer understands that an essay (citation unavailable) was produced by a student in Belgium.” That just won’t do, especially since Barish asserts that the prospectus for Cahiers Européens, nominally written by the editor of Le Soir, Raymond de Becker, is in part in Paul de Man’s handwriting."

It would seem a general principle of the biographical art that one should avoid assigning positions in Hell to one’s subjects.

Loved that line.

oh wow that nyrb piece is quite an apologia whatever the quality of barish's book

I guess deconstruction rly just means "some kind of analysis" now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWveXdj6oZU

watched this the other day... kind of interesting but kind of annoying too.

yup, the idea of analyzing and talking abt flow is good - but all those really fastmoving lyrics sheets with colours and dots and numbers are hard to grasp, went by so far couldn't figure out if I agreed w/ points made

I was never much into metric analysis, always seemed a troublesome way of making v simple points to me...

but I do remember a time when I had no understanding of what people meant by the word "flow", and a video like that addresses that confusion (even though I think it could be done more intuitively)

Very good essay on a philosopher who seems to practice deconstruction, and how you might get a politics out of that.

i'm in the new @Parapraxis_Mag on barbara johnson, that thing where people loudly complain about being silenced, lyric poetry, and my love-hate relationship with undecidability https://t.co/VX9M9RYHrz

— katie kadue (@kukukadoo) January 22, 2024