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I
have long been alienated from many writers because
of their style. I doubt if it places me in a minority
of one. It may not even place me in a minority at
all. Those from whom we on the Left would hope to
learn something comprehensible about our otherwise
incomprehensible world can be the most turgid. I refer
here to some in the Marxist school. Fredric Jameson
once, unpersuasively in my view, sought to defend
his writing from the criticism that it was part of
the genre of texts described as 'obscure and cumbersome,
indigestible, abstract'. This in turn prompted the
comment from Adam Roberts in his excellent Routledge
guide to the work of Jameson that as the latter is
a highly paid part of the critical academic machine
which makes billions alone each year selling education,
we might see his 'stylistic difficulty as a means
of repelling the ignorant and working classes and
of speaking only to those who have the expensive education
to enable them to understand'. While Roberts offered
this as one amongst a range of interpretations, as
an explanation I find it unfair. It can all too easily
be misperceived as a conscious involvement on the
part of those Marxists in academia in an exercise
aimed at reinforcing the impotence of the powerless.
Nevertheless,
it seems that much writing in the Marxist sphere remains
at best paradigmatically insular and at worst intellectually
self-referential and perhaps self-satisfying. Audience
alienation is an intellectual cul de sac for both
the writer and the reader. The collection of works
on the thought of the French deconstructionist philosopher
Jacques Derrida edited by Michael Sprinker found its
way into as many dead ends as it prised openings.
The bulk of the work aimed at interrogating Derrida's
claim to be working towards a new Marxist project
in his work Spectres Of Marx and his search for a
new International. The editor Michael Sprinker to
his credit set out his stall as early as the second
page of his introduction when he referred to Marxism
and 'the crimes committed in its name, the errors
in which it indulged, the massively undemocratic forms
of organisation which it tolerated'.
Too
often Marxists display an epistemological cataract
when confronted with such matters. They call all to
easily to mind the observation of the former Marxist
Bruce Anderson: 'the ignorance and naïveté of the
20th-century Left: its endless willingness to construct
political fantasies out of mass suffering and bloodshed.
These are under-chronicled subjects.' In this collection
Terry Eagleton and Tom Lewis jump out as analysts
with other things on their minds. Eagleton criticises
Derrida for having merely an ethical rather than a
materialist response to Stalinism. The entire Derridean
project is summed up as 'a perpetual excited openness
to the Messiah who better not let us down by doing
anything as determinate as coming'. Yet, Eagleton
is exceedingly humourous and his wit alone adds badly
needed lubrication to what in many respects is a textual
aridity. Lewis self-assuredly contents himself with
the observation that 'for Marxists there is nothing
to mourn'. Incredible, given the failures and crimes
of Marxism throughout the past century. As if the
evasive Trotskyite 'blame it all on Stalinism' mechanism
has any appeal left amongst serious or potential Marxist
thinkers trying to claw their way out of the totalitarian
abyss Marxism descended into. In one of the more engaging
essays Aijaz Ahmad takes Derrida to task for having
a 'highly problematic' view of Marxism. Here the writer
feels that Derrida occupies a contradictory position
by criticising Althusser for dissociating 'Marxism
from any teleology or from any messianic eschatology'
and then going on to create the very problematic he
objected to in Althusser by stating that 'my concern
is to distinguish the latter from the former'. A peculiar
Derridean conundrum which sends the philosopher spiralling
into an orbit of slippage making it impossible to
grasp the core of his position. All we can do is remain
appreciative of Derrida, despite the enormous difficulty
in understanding him, for having challenged the ensemble
of western rationalist thought, maintaining that it
was engaged in a dishonest pursuit of certainty and
detecting a totalitarian arrogance therein.
For
Derrida his usurpation of a totalitarian certainty
did not take the form of maintaining a regime of endless
meaning but instead sought to undermine what Foucault
called 'regimes of truth' by introducing an open framework
which could fertilise a plurality of meanings rather
than one. It is not surprising that Derrida finds
himself under attack from Ahmad for shying away from
conceptualising 'a unity of a global process' which
would supposedly explain a wide range of events from
the fall of communism, the collapse of West European
labour movements and an almost total diminution of
third World radicalisms - all combined with the rise
of fascisms throughout Europe. This 'looking from
the outside in' approach leaves us floundering and
trying to square the circle when, as Martin Shaw elsewhere
points out 'local power dynamics remain unexplored'.
One
final point on Ahmad is the seeming eyebrow he raises
at what he terms Derrida's International given that
it is based largely on critique. He calls it a very
'writerly' International. This seems to impose some
artificial dichotomy between writing and activism.
Given the writers slaughtered throughout history because
of their active role as agents in a process of change
this is insensitive. Who are the most active - those
'activists' who debate the difference between a Workers
Republic and a Socialist Republic or those 'writers'
who pull the house down round their ears and invite
the wrath of the death squads because of their commitment
to challenging the structures of power which support
a particular acquisition of knowledge which Antonio
Negri argues in this collection now amounts to accumulation?
Surely, as Orwell argued, in a time of universal deceit
telling the truth, in itself, becomes a revolutionary
act.
But
Derrida has achieved more than this. Zygmunt Baumun
has asserted that Western society had 'practically
de-legitimised all alternatives to itself' and brought
us to a point in which we were 'living without an
alternative'. At a time when Fukuyama was leading
the charge to ridicule and negate all alternatives
and impose a totalising system of capitalist democracy
on the rest of the world Derridian deconstructionism
proved to the rock of opposition on which much of
the Fukuyama critique began to flounder.
Derrida,
who had the last say in this collection, issued a
rebuff to those 'Marxists still prepared to dispense
lessons from on high'. He convincingly rejects Lewis
who alleged that Derrida saw no moral difference between
Leninism and fascism. Derrida makes the point that
Leninism however was not without totalitarianism.
Furthermore, he argues that there is a need to be
worried about the increasing rarity of 'criticism
and discussion'. Arguably, such a dearth has led Marxism
to an intellectual gulag. Perhaps those such as Derrida
can help unlock it and allow it to become the creative
force it should always have been.
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