In Derrida's chapter in Writing and Difference on Bataille and Hegel, which I don't have with me and am not inclined to revisit anyway, Derrida suggests that the way out of Hegelianism is by embracing death, which in the master-slave dialectic is elided. Derrida reads Bataille as a critic of Hegel, and uses, if I remember right, Bataille's notion of "sovereignty" as a mastery beyond the Hegelian mastery that does actually face death, or unmeaning, or alterity, etc.
My first question would be why sovereignty? Or in other words, why should death be on the side of mastery? Isn't it actually more radical to put a relationship to true mastery on the side of the bondsman, as Hegel does, than to appropriate it to lordship? Moreover, if we take Derrida to endorse Bataille's notion of sovereignty, which after all, is a real "if" given his style, doesn't it suggest that Derrida is invested in being masterful, in being right? Mixed with the disavowability of his style, this whiff of Derrida's investment in his own mastery has an unsavory character: he makes his writing hard to make himself look good.
And now I feel the urge to do some disavowing myself: I'm actually not against difficult style and I do think that in the end Derrida is surprisingly interesting in that one can read him in apparent incomprehension and with mounting frustration only to find a spark of new understanding. But where I halt my backpedaling is my sense that Derrida in the end doesn't want to be wrong, despite the extent to which embracing being wrong seems like it should be consistent with Derrida's thought.
You're not alone: John Searle wrote of Derrida, "...anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial." (New York Review of Books, 2 February 1994) Or even Foucault: "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part."
ReplyDeleteFrom my impoverished knowledge of Derrida as a person and my impressions from his work, I would certainly agree with you that Derrida seems to have been particularly interested in being "right" and that he went to rather elaborate lengths to make sure he was right, or at least that you couldn't tell him he was wrong.
I'm not sure why death has to be on either side: the slave has nothing else except his own death, the master everything else including his own death, and sometimes also the power of death over the slave, but that power is the site of a continuous power negotiation that can quickly (as in Hegel's Haiti, or modern Iran) turn against the master.