2008 Woodie Awards
Deconstructing Mr. Arafat: Towards A Double Obituary
Is the media a kaffiyeh-kissing, anti-intellectual enterprise?
Menachem Wecker
Issue date: 12/6/04 Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 1
Jacques Derrida and Yassir Arafat share about as much in common as a dead single cell amoeba and a rocket scientist; where Mr. Derrida (in part) tirelessly dismantled basic socio-cultural assumptions to better understand their operative mechanisms providing virtually every interest group-especially minority ones-with an invaluable cudgel with which they might regain their rights, Chairman Arafat amused himself largely with robbing his own people and defining modern terrorism, and it seems the only medal he might still retain celebrates his relatively insignificant achievement of nudging the Palestinian people-at first shy, but born actors soon enough-center stage, to the spotlight. To invoke Steinbeck's taxonomy: Mr. Derrida is a man, and Chairman Arafat, a mouse.
So why cast the prince and the pauper in the same obituary where the latter might parasitically steal the limelight, neutralizing the former's magnitude? Because the Yeshiva students that even know of Mr. Derrida to begin with-scarce and far between-remember little more that what they perceive as his defense of Paul de Man's early Nazi writings. As a thinker who forged a new vocabulary to the order of Freud's, Marx's, or Einstein's, and as a Jew, Mr. Derrida's resume ought to attract the Yeshiva population's attention for a guardian angel far more than a Nazi sympathizer. By tying him up with Chairman Arafat, this essay aims to repair an already prevalent but no less unfair comparison between the two.
Chief amongst the perpetuators, Jonathan Kandell's obituary in the October 10 New York Times dismisses Mr. Derrida immediately as an "Abstruse Theorist" in its title. The peculiar use of "abstruse" in the headline may come from either the Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia's (1998) "Derrida's writings are abstruse" or from Jonathan Rosenbaum's "If you think 85 minutes devoted to a 'difficult' French philosopher is bound to be either abstruse or watered-down middlebrow stuff, think again," in his November 8, 2002 review of the Derrida film for the Chicago Reader. Whether Mr. Kandell lifted his vocabulary from the Oxford Encyclopedia or from the film review remains to be seen, but Roger Kimball's October 12 editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Meaninglessness of Meaning," which called Mr. Derrida "honorary CEO and chief publicist for an abstruse philosophical doctrine," certainly plugged "confusing" into the same Microsoft Word thesaurus that Mr. Kendall used.
Aside from sharing taste in thesauri, Mr. Kendall and Mr. Kimball both seek to raid Mr. Derrida's closets in search of incriminating skeletons. Mr. Kendall argues, "Mr. Derrida's credibility was also damaged by a 1987 scandal involving Paul de Man...In defending his dead colleague, Mr. Derrida, a Jew, was understood by some people to be condoning Mr. de Man's anti-Semitism." To Mr. Kendall, apparently, Mr. Derrida hates Jews-and as he is Jewish he must hate himself to no end-and some nameless group of individuals seems to hold him accountable for it. In proper mannerist form, Mr. Kimball follows suit and declares, "the flood of...mendacity...to exonerate Mr. de Man, cast a permanent shadow over deconstruction's status as a supposed instrument of intellectual liberation." Like Mr. Kendall, Mr. Kimball appears content simply summoning the mysterious dissenters, without properly accounting for them. In her "Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher" at the Washington Post, Patricia Sullivan, after referring to deconstruction as "diabolically difficult" (diabolically!), also casts the de Man card on the table and seems to have learnt much from the Kendall-Kimball tag team in the ways of alluding to anonymous critics whenever convenient.
Unfortunately, though, de Man is not a trump card. So misconstrued were these attacks on Derrida that The Nation's Ross Benjamin's "Hostile Obituary for Derrida" argued that, "Kandell referred to Derrida's 'contortionist defense of his old friend,' insinuating that Derrida had exculpated de Man in a speech...While the speech has often been misconstrued as an apologia for de Man's wartime journalism, Derrida did not condone his friend's youthful writings, but rather tried to rescue de Man's later work." Derek Attridge's and Thomas Baldwin's article in The Guardian-one of the finest obituaries for Mr. Derrida-called the discovery of de Man's wartime journalism "a personal blow to Derrida...he gave an extraordinarily moving speech expressing the complex emotions provoked by the disclosure."
The London Times steals the show though, with its "Is Derrida dead? A conceptual foundation for the deconstruction of mortality." The author records: "Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida? The obituarists' objective attempts to place his life in a finite context are, necessarily, subject to epistemic relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are mere 'narrations' or social constructions...Is God dead?" The short article concludes, "We know only two things. We do not know. And M Derrida is in no position to enlighten us." The obituary would be funny, if it did not demonstrate to such a large extent how misunderstood Mr. Derrida was and is.
If the media found Mr. Derrida diabolical and abstruse, it found Chairman Arafat a tragic hero of sorts. A November 11 CNN article entitled "Palestinian leader Arafat dies at 75: State funeral to be held in Cairo" quotes President Bush calling Chairman Arafat's death "'a significant moment in Palestinian history.'" BBC reports French President Jacques Chirac's calling Chairman Arafat "a man of courage and conviction who for 40 years incarnated the Palestinians' fight for recognition of their national rights." Granted Mr. Chirac called Derrida "one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time," according to the Nation, but the President seems to have offered no words on Mr. Derrida. What can it mean that the United States finds Chairman Arafat noteworthy and Mr. Derrida dispensable?
What, additionally, can it mean that the CNN reporter argues that Chairman Arafat "passionately sought a homeland for his people but was seen by many Israelis as a ruthless terrorist and a roadblock to peace." The reporter takes it as given that the Chairman passionately sought a homeland, whereas the terrorist and roadblock to peace presents merely Israeli speculation. The BBC obituary, entitled "Veteran leader Yasser Arafat dies," argues, "Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who led his people's struggle for 40 years, has died aged 75 in a French hospital." Again, the invocation of leading his people's struggle, with no mention of billions of dollars and Swiss bank accounts. The Washington Post's John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore called the Chairman, "the man who embodied the cause of the Palestinian people for four decades," (they could not find the heart to call Chairman Arafat "diabolical," as the Post called Mr. Derrida) while NPR claimed, "Many Palestinians revered Arafat as the embodiment of their national aspirations, first in his role as guerrilla fighter and then as a peacemaker and a de facto statesman. At the same time, his rule over the Palestinian territories was criticized as being authoritarian and harboring corruption. Many Israelis never stopped regarding Arafat as a terrorist." The NPR piece later refers to Arafat walking away from Barak's deal, "Soon afterward, a second Palestinian intifada began. Approximately 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians have been killed." The intifada just began by itself, eh? Good thing no one started it!
And therein lies the rub. The media promotes an ideology of kaffiyeh-kissing and anti-intellectual platform; it elevates Chairman Arafat because he is a doer, a political activist, whose resume is stuffed with easily measurable actions. Mr. Derrida, on the other hand, produces stuff of the transcendental, theoretical nature. Society can hardly build bridges with his words, and to invoke the famous Platonic critique, you can hardly eat your works of art, though they may mimetically depict bowls of fruit. To understand Mr. Derrida is to contextualize his ideas with the larger literary river that has preceded him for many centuries, and aims many centuries beyond. To understand Mr. Derrida, one must evaluate his ideas and his writing simultaneously, to appreciate how the two coexist. In short, one must cash in the utilitarian currency of political activism for a softer money, one less defined around the edges.
It hardly comes as a surprise that many opt for the royal road and avoid the pass less taken, but the irony in this case proves blinding. That Chairman Arafat should receive the media's flowers and tears to the exclusion of Mr. Derrida's is to not only cast the baby while maintaining the bathwater, but also awarding the water a Nobel Peace Prize.
Deconstruction almost single-handedly granted the Palestinians (and the feminists, the African Americans and every other oppressed group-ironically the Jews as well) a vocabulary with which to wage war for their rights. Like Poe's Red Death, Deconstruction slowly conquered the literature wings of the country's top universities, not even pausing afterwards to take over philosophy departments as well as anthropology, architecture and many others. Deconstruction created a grammar with which to illuminate arguments that used complicated words to obfuscate basic sociology. In a sense, it may not be entirely incorrect to say that without Mr. Derrida, Chairman Arafat would still be engaged in part time political campaigning on his college campus with little interest in his checkered soap box.
Menachem Wecker writes for The Jewish Press, New Voices, and, when he gets a chance, The Yeshiva University Commentator. He serves on the editorial board of both New Voices Webwire and The Commentator.
So why cast the prince and the pauper in the same obituary where the latter might parasitically steal the limelight, neutralizing the former's magnitude? Because the Yeshiva students that even know of Mr. Derrida to begin with-scarce and far between-remember little more that what they perceive as his defense of Paul de Man's early Nazi writings. As a thinker who forged a new vocabulary to the order of Freud's, Marx's, or Einstein's, and as a Jew, Mr. Derrida's resume ought to attract the Yeshiva population's attention for a guardian angel far more than a Nazi sympathizer. By tying him up with Chairman Arafat, this essay aims to repair an already prevalent but no less unfair comparison between the two.
Chief amongst the perpetuators, Jonathan Kandell's obituary in the October 10 New York Times dismisses Mr. Derrida immediately as an "Abstruse Theorist" in its title. The peculiar use of "abstruse" in the headline may come from either the Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia's (1998) "Derrida's writings are abstruse" or from Jonathan Rosenbaum's "If you think 85 minutes devoted to a 'difficult' French philosopher is bound to be either abstruse or watered-down middlebrow stuff, think again," in his November 8, 2002 review of the Derrida film for the Chicago Reader. Whether Mr. Kandell lifted his vocabulary from the Oxford Encyclopedia or from the film review remains to be seen, but Roger Kimball's October 12 editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Meaninglessness of Meaning," which called Mr. Derrida "honorary CEO and chief publicist for an abstruse philosophical doctrine," certainly plugged "confusing" into the same Microsoft Word thesaurus that Mr. Kendall used.
Aside from sharing taste in thesauri, Mr. Kendall and Mr. Kimball both seek to raid Mr. Derrida's closets in search of incriminating skeletons. Mr. Kendall argues, "Mr. Derrida's credibility was also damaged by a 1987 scandal involving Paul de Man...In defending his dead colleague, Mr. Derrida, a Jew, was understood by some people to be condoning Mr. de Man's anti-Semitism." To Mr. Kendall, apparently, Mr. Derrida hates Jews-and as he is Jewish he must hate himself to no end-and some nameless group of individuals seems to hold him accountable for it. In proper mannerist form, Mr. Kimball follows suit and declares, "the flood of...mendacity...to exonerate Mr. de Man, cast a permanent shadow over deconstruction's status as a supposed instrument of intellectual liberation." Like Mr. Kendall, Mr. Kimball appears content simply summoning the mysterious dissenters, without properly accounting for them. In her "Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher" at the Washington Post, Patricia Sullivan, after referring to deconstruction as "diabolically difficult" (diabolically!), also casts the de Man card on the table and seems to have learnt much from the Kendall-Kimball tag team in the ways of alluding to anonymous critics whenever convenient.
Unfortunately, though, de Man is not a trump card. So misconstrued were these attacks on Derrida that The Nation's Ross Benjamin's "Hostile Obituary for Derrida" argued that, "Kandell referred to Derrida's 'contortionist defense of his old friend,' insinuating that Derrida had exculpated de Man in a speech...While the speech has often been misconstrued as an apologia for de Man's wartime journalism, Derrida did not condone his friend's youthful writings, but rather tried to rescue de Man's later work." Derek Attridge's and Thomas Baldwin's article in The Guardian-one of the finest obituaries for Mr. Derrida-called the discovery of de Man's wartime journalism "a personal blow to Derrida...he gave an extraordinarily moving speech expressing the complex emotions provoked by the disclosure."
The London Times steals the show though, with its "Is Derrida dead? A conceptual foundation for the deconstruction of mortality." The author records: "Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida? The obituarists' objective attempts to place his life in a finite context are, necessarily, subject to epistemic relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are mere 'narrations' or social constructions...Is God dead?" The short article concludes, "We know only two things. We do not know. And M Derrida is in no position to enlighten us." The obituary would be funny, if it did not demonstrate to such a large extent how misunderstood Mr. Derrida was and is.
If the media found Mr. Derrida diabolical and abstruse, it found Chairman Arafat a tragic hero of sorts. A November 11 CNN article entitled "Palestinian leader Arafat dies at 75: State funeral to be held in Cairo" quotes President Bush calling Chairman Arafat's death "'a significant moment in Palestinian history.'" BBC reports French President Jacques Chirac's calling Chairman Arafat "a man of courage and conviction who for 40 years incarnated the Palestinians' fight for recognition of their national rights." Granted Mr. Chirac called Derrida "one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time," according to the Nation, but the President seems to have offered no words on Mr. Derrida. What can it mean that the United States finds Chairman Arafat noteworthy and Mr. Derrida dispensable?
What, additionally, can it mean that the CNN reporter argues that Chairman Arafat "passionately sought a homeland for his people but was seen by many Israelis as a ruthless terrorist and a roadblock to peace." The reporter takes it as given that the Chairman passionately sought a homeland, whereas the terrorist and roadblock to peace presents merely Israeli speculation. The BBC obituary, entitled "Veteran leader Yasser Arafat dies," argues, "Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who led his people's struggle for 40 years, has died aged 75 in a French hospital." Again, the invocation of leading his people's struggle, with no mention of billions of dollars and Swiss bank accounts. The Washington Post's John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore called the Chairman, "the man who embodied the cause of the Palestinian people for four decades," (they could not find the heart to call Chairman Arafat "diabolical," as the Post called Mr. Derrida) while NPR claimed, "Many Palestinians revered Arafat as the embodiment of their national aspirations, first in his role as guerrilla fighter and then as a peacemaker and a de facto statesman. At the same time, his rule over the Palestinian territories was criticized as being authoritarian and harboring corruption. Many Israelis never stopped regarding Arafat as a terrorist." The NPR piece later refers to Arafat walking away from Barak's deal, "Soon afterward, a second Palestinian intifada began. Approximately 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians have been killed." The intifada just began by itself, eh? Good thing no one started it!
And therein lies the rub. The media promotes an ideology of kaffiyeh-kissing and anti-intellectual platform; it elevates Chairman Arafat because he is a doer, a political activist, whose resume is stuffed with easily measurable actions. Mr. Derrida, on the other hand, produces stuff of the transcendental, theoretical nature. Society can hardly build bridges with his words, and to invoke the famous Platonic critique, you can hardly eat your works of art, though they may mimetically depict bowls of fruit. To understand Mr. Derrida is to contextualize his ideas with the larger literary river that has preceded him for many centuries, and aims many centuries beyond. To understand Mr. Derrida, one must evaluate his ideas and his writing simultaneously, to appreciate how the two coexist. In short, one must cash in the utilitarian currency of political activism for a softer money, one less defined around the edges.
It hardly comes as a surprise that many opt for the royal road and avoid the pass less taken, but the irony in this case proves blinding. That Chairman Arafat should receive the media's flowers and tears to the exclusion of Mr. Derrida's is to not only cast the baby while maintaining the bathwater, but also awarding the water a Nobel Peace Prize.
Deconstruction almost single-handedly granted the Palestinians (and the feminists, the African Americans and every other oppressed group-ironically the Jews as well) a vocabulary with which to wage war for their rights. Like Poe's Red Death, Deconstruction slowly conquered the literature wings of the country's top universities, not even pausing afterwards to take over philosophy departments as well as anthropology, architecture and many others. Deconstruction created a grammar with which to illuminate arguments that used complicated words to obfuscate basic sociology. In a sense, it may not be entirely incorrect to say that without Mr. Derrida, Chairman Arafat would still be engaged in part time political campaigning on his college campus with little interest in his checkered soap box.
Menachem Wecker writes for The Jewish Press, New Voices, and, when he gets a chance, The Yeshiva University Commentator. He serves on the editorial board of both New Voices Webwire and The Commentator.