I didn’t intend to post another book recommendation, but a book came up on my Facebook feed today, and I felt moved to mention it. Just last month, Jeremy Fernando published For The Pleasure of the Text … This book is written as “attempts to read,” and specifically to read and respond to Roland Barthes.

Fernando is, admittedly, a faddish writer. But I’ve read two of his books (Reading Blindly and The Suicide Bomber and Her Gift of Death) and both were interesting, challenging, and quick reads, often more poetry and aphorism than theory, similar to The Pleasure of the Text itself. Fernando’s work is a bizarre mix of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, which he applies to soccer, prosthetic limbs, jui jitsu, terrorism, writing and reading, the other, death, game theory, and I’m sure many more eclectic topics. The combination of Derrida and Baudrillard leads him to focus on those points at which reading and writing become unintelligible and the power that lies in that unintelligibility. For example, he locates the suicide bomber’s power in her death which places her beyond interrogation, self-interest, and reason. This puts her closer to Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation (the event that inaugurated the “Arab Spring” of 2010-2011) than to the terrorists of ISIL or Hamas.

I’m sure based on that description some of y’all have no interest in Fernando’s new book, and perhaps rightfully so. It takes an odd and in many ways unpalatable author to write an entire book on the beauty of the suicide bomber. But Fernando is brilliant – if faddish and quixotic – and I’m sure he brings Derrida and Barthes into conversation in a way almost no one else is capable of. Hopefully he’s able to answer the questions raised by Mehr – in class – and Nikki – on this blog.

At 110 pages (including an original piano score half-way through) it should be a quick read and it’s pretty cheap, so I’m planning on reading it over the break. (And if anyone else is interested, you can borrow it.)

I’ll conclude with a short passage from Fernando on writing, which seems appropriate to the topic of Barthes and which in some ways reminds me of both The Pleasure of the Text and Derrida. This is taken from his obituary of Jean Baudrillard:

“The beauty of writing lies—perhaps writing only lies—in the always unwritten, the un-writeable; the always imagined, yet outside the realm of the imaginable. This is both the strength of writing and forever its weakness—trying to capture but always failing in representation. The scribbles on a page, the blobs of ink that appear, speak—the phantom of the voice seems to constantly resurrect—of something; an event, an occurrence. But the event it speaks of is always already dead; the word speaks not of it, but of a transubstantiated event, the ghost of the event—there is necromancy at play.”

TL;DR: If you’ve never read it and are interested in deconstruction, you should check out Pale Fire. It’s an excellent example of a self-negating text or self-effacing writing of the type Derrida seems to advocate.

In doing the readings on deconstruction, I was reminded of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. The book seems like a brilliant, accidental (within the universe of the book), deconstruction of itself.

The book is written wholly by Nabokov, but Nabokov employs as his narrators two fictional academics working in the English department of a local university. One is John Shade, a highly-esteemed poet, who wrote the 1000 line poem, “Pale Fire,” the focus of the book. The other, Charles Kinbote, is unremarkable, except that he lives next door to Shade, and he is (likely) schizophrenic and obsessed with Shade. Shade died recently, and Kinbote tricked Shade’s grieving wife into giving him to only extant copy of “Pale Fire” and all of Shade’s notes. Kinbote is now publishing “Pale Fire” with his own commentary. The vast majority of Pale Fire is composed of Kinbote’s commentary and footnotes. The poem (30 pages of the 204 page book) is an autobiographical account of Shade’s life in Appalachia. But the commentary is almost entirely devoted to Shade’s relationship with Kinbote and Kinbote’s home country, Zembla (also fictional). Despite the poem’s lack of any mention of Zembla or Kinbote, Kinbote is certain the poem is about himself and the deposed king of Zembla. He even explains in his footnotes how Shade’s entire life and death centered around Kinbote and Zembla. Kinbote spends more than 5 times the length of the poem elucidating these imagined linkages.

As Kinbote spells out his stories about himself and Zembla, he presumes to reveal the true meaning of the poem. And, in fact, his footnotes are very well-written and add a lot of meaning to the already moving poem (Nabokov wrote them, after all). But they simultaneously and constantly undermine themselves, and set off *Creeper* alarm-bells. For example, Kinbote cites one line from Shade’s poem – “Today I’m sixty-one.” – to go into a 2.5 page explanation of how Shade failed to invite Kinbote to Shade’s birthday party, but Kinbote knew it was only because Shade disliked birthday parties, so Kinbote spent the night watching Shade’s party from his window and went over the next day with an expensive gift. This, the footnote implies, is the actual subtext of the line “Today I’m sixty-one.” Not Lolita creepy, but still pretty creepy. (Of course, in the spirit of deconstruction, it’s possible that Kinbote can be trusted as a narrator and his descriptions can be trusted as accurate to the world of the text; the book gives no definitive evidence either way.)

The poem itself is very rich in meaning. And the commentary constantly adds to that meaning and undermines its own meaning. At the same time as this, the text itself illuminates the footnotes, and the footnotes mark out contradictions within the text. The nature of the book – a relatively short poem with abundant footnotes referring the reader to other texts – is profoundly intertextual. And every element of the book is constantly unsettling both itself and the other elements.

In these senses, it is a beautiful enactment of deconstruction. And, with apologies to Derrida, Nabokov is a way better writer than Derrida and refuses Derrida’s sometimes-gimmicky tactics.

Fore-warning: This may all be gibberish, but I will try to be clear in discussing these extremely abstract concerns.

Between the readings for the past two weeks, I’ve seen the theme of circles and circularity come up a few times. Ricoeur repeatedly refers to the “hermeneutic circle,” and Derrida decries Hegel’s circle, Saussure’s circle, and the hermeneutic circle, and describes différance as something in excess to – or both inside and outside of – the circle constructed by any structure. I think Derrida says that circularity is inescapable, which means the key question should be whether that circularity is “vicious” or not. Riceour’s circle is not (it’s a “virtuous” circle), but Derrida’s différance doesn’t actually escape circularity, and becomes vicious. Thus, I prefer hermeneutics to deconstruction.

By vicious circularity, I mean circular reasoning by which something justifies itself, forming a closed, self-justifying circle, and becomes impervious to criticism, loses all resistance, and begins circling faster and faster, extending further and further, until it results in violence. This is the mode of some naïve religious thinking, for example: The holy text is true because the holy text says it is true, and because it’s a holy text we know we can trust it. So we follow the holy text to more and more extreme ends, until we arrive at something like the Crusades or recent terroristic forms of Jihad.

I think Derrida best explains this vicious circularity in Positions on page 28, when he’s talking about Saussure. Speech is only intelligible through language, Saussure says. But language only exists as an after-effect of intelligible speech, language’s material manifestation. Saussure becomes trapped in a circle where A is a prerequisite to B, and B is a prerequisite to A. This leads Saussure to seek out a “transcendental signified” as the true center of this circle, returning him to metaphysics This metaphysics is problematic because … of reasons never articulated in the readings.

Ricoeur’s hermeneutic circle doesn’t seem vicious. Instead, there’s a feedback loop which he explains in “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text.” His circle is between interpretation and understanding, subjectivity and objectivity, distanciation and belonging, or truth and method. He describes this as a constant moving back and forth, where each informs and refines the other. Carried by this feedback loop, in understanding we posit a hypothesis – a way that the text becomes meaningful for us – and in interpretation we apply method and Structuralist analysis to test that hypothesis. This produces a new, refined, hypothesis. Our refined hypothesis returns us to the question of understanding – to how we attempt to make the text meaningful for ourselves. This produces yet another hypothesis, which returns us to testing through interpretation, which returns us to meaning-making through understanding, and so on. This circle is constantly self-critical and productive. Thus, I don’t think it results in the viciousness Derrida critiques, and it doesn’t produce a self-contained metaphysics.

Derrida’s notion of différance, on the other hand, actually just constructs another vicious circle. Adrian Costache explains this pretty well. Derrida and Costache both describe deconstruction as marking a trace of différance, which disrupts the circle and moves us into another circle. But there are only two outcomes here. Either: A. We swirl about every onward, from one center to another, growing further and further from ethics, meaning, experience, etc. until we lose all ground and guidepost. Or B. There is some point of reality which enters and grounds the circle. Costache says Derrida ground his circle in the testimony of the other. Due to the alterity of the other, her testimony carries a trace of that alterity, a trace of différance. That trace provides some link to reality.

For Costache, this is just a return to the metaphysics of presence, which substitutes a new transcendental signified. The voice of the other is made present, as something that we can grasp onto and give us meaning. This is meant to disrupt all circles of difference, but really it provides a center, a point of access to truth and reality. I think this produces a new circle, swirling around the alterity of the other. Furthermore, what defines alterity is its incomprehensibility, that we can’t know or understand it, which prevents self-criticism. We can critique ourselves, but not the alterity of the other. This circle forms a closed loop and a transcendental signifier, reproducing everything Derrida critiques.

Derrida describes deconstruction as an event – something which manifests itself in the same act that announces its arrival. This may be an answer to my concern. But I must admit I don’t fully understand the implications of deconstruction as event, so the point is lost on me. And Derrida would probably want to deconstruct the oppositions vicious-virtuous, abstract-real, productive-unproductive as themselves centered circles, but I think Derrida freezes movement at the vicious and abstract pole of the circle, rather than allowing the movement between them that becomes self-critical and productive.

I agree with Derrida that this circular pattern is inescapable, but it need not be vicious. For Derrida, a circle is a circle is a circle, and it must always be disrupted. This leads him to elevate the alterity of the other as a privileged site of disruption. Alterity just becomes a new transcendental signifier which we circle around, trapping us in a never-ending process of deconstruction. Ricoeur gives a way to make this circle virtuous, so that our circular motion can move beyond itself, freeing itself from Derrida’s trap.

Therefore: Ricoeur > Derrida. (And I’m sure Derrida would want to deconstruct that opposition, too, but poopoo to him.)

I found many of the readings for this week and the past week interesting in that many of them agree on the priority of practice or the analysis of rhetoric over theory-building. Yet those same authors are engaging almost entirely in theory-building in these pieces. Of these two weeks readings, I perceive Baskerville, Leff, Leff and Sachs, McGee, and Condit as making that prioritization. Yet the way they write – their focus on theory and method – implicitly suggests that theory is a prior question to analysis.

Almost all of them insist that theory-building and analysis are simply two different tasks within Rhetoric as a discipline and argue for pluralism. Yet this pluralism elides issues of prioritization, which each of them explicitly or implicitly articulates, and which each of them contradicts in their form by focusing on theory. As much as they claim to be pluralists, they make normative arguments about the desirability of one particular theory or of theory in general. Given those normative claims, I think it’s too charitable to separate these explications of theory from the rest of their work where they deploy the theory. In fact, making such a separation presumes precisely that implicit suggestion of these pieces that theory-building is a prior question that must be resolved before one can engage actual texts.

I suspect the tension I’m perceiving is similar to what Condit points out in Leff and McGee. Each of them have pursued the “purity” of their own theories, and in so doing they’ve reintroduced the split between form and content. Condit is referring here to text and context, but I think there’s a more fundamental form/content divide between the form of theory-building and the content of deprioritizing theory.

My personal opinion is that certain texts lend themselves to certain methods of analysis. For example, neo-classicism is often well suited to analysis of traditional political oratory like presidential speeches, but (contra Hariman) can’t tell us much about vernacular discourse. Put another way, the particular text should dictate the method of analysis. So any normative position on a theory or meta-theory leads inevitably to neglect of the text. I think these readings illustrate that.

This raises a few questions, which I can’t answer and maybe one of y’all can: What is the value of meta-theory about not engaging in theory? Is this difference between form and content an issue of pedagogy – that is, elaborating a method that students can follow or providing analysts with tools they can use? What is the difference between this and the debate over method that dominated in the 70s and 80s?