Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This has generated in both science and in philosophy a demand for the precis and the best of sort of book which will give the exhausted middlebrow white collar worker who aspires to finer things The Big Picture. My words sound disimissive but actually are not, for I am precisely one of these types of readers. It is not "pretentious", in a world where one of our leading literary-critical lights, Stanley Fish, has stated "I won't read a poem unless I'm paid." That is, in a world where the elect have elected damnation, the person who reads a poem in his limited spare time if more human, and more truly "educated" than Stanley Fish.

I shall be brief. Caputo's seminar and book make clear that in a culture carrying out a war on memory and reducing an open, multidimensional world to the Euclidean geometry of a web page, Derrida's type of analysis has intellectual respectability and it is sorely needed.

His analysis of the structural relationship of justice and law, for example, shows us how to avoid anarchy on one side and Fascism on the other, for it shows a working policeman (who may believably be a graduate of Norte Dame rather than Princeton) how to use his common sense, but avoid racial profiling. That is, there is currently a move against the use of racial profiling in stopping cars and suspects: this profiling was initially enforced top-down by administrators in a rigid and unimaginative way, and it used poorly designed computer software (from the production of which the actual cops were rigorously excluded) which necessarily had racist results. Counterpressure by minorities shall, it is thought by beat cops and the Smokeys, actually prevent them from stopping minorities at all.

Both sides are demanding perfect justice, perfectly encoded in law and in software: but Derrida and Caputo show us two necessary truths (1) justice and law shall never merge, and (2) we should ever seek to merge them, indeed the very process is what Dr. King died for. This means, in my example, that at this point cops should probably err on the side of compassion, and indeed let suspicious cars go if they are driven by minorities, and come down a bit harder on drunken white boys. This is not perfect justice but the brutal fact is that the drunken white boys will probably get off.

The strange alliance with Roman Catholicism is this. America itself was founded by Puritans who wanted to found a city on a hill. Much to their distress, however, the joint actually had to be built by imperfect riff raff including African slaves and my Irish ancestors. Our Constitution, which to me is a holy document, gives the riff raff equal time but when the riff raff gets to the mike, it tends to say the wrong thing, since the terms of the discourse are set by the Puritans.

In the black and white world of the Manichean Puritan, black is more acceptable than grey, and thus the most Satanic messages of rock and roll are actually USED as a technique for social control. As to the chaos that results, well, are there no SWAT teams: are there no helicopters: are there no maximum security prisons.

In this brutal world, the agenda is set by Rep. DeLay, but true subversion for the underclass and the soon to be downsized may be maintaining an even strain. Deconstruction in a nut shell gives the riff raff a way to smooth out the edges, just enough, and lose some of the riff and the raff. Basically, the Puritans are wrong, but they run the shop and we must discourse, we must negotiate, we must compromise, we must play ball with them. French theory is a useful appliance for so doing. Perhaps that's why it is so hated by the commanding heights of academe, which contrary to their popular reputation actualy pour down scorn on deconstrction, from the Non Placet at Oxford issued in protest to Derrida's honorary degree, to Harold Bloom. Like to Roman senator, the leading lights say deconstruction must be destroyed in the oddest damn contexts: yet it keeps on Popping Up in the damnest places, here at Notre Dame.

Robert Bly has pointed out that the geometry of Hell is probably Euclidean, and two-dimensional. Deconstruction shows that we are creatures who are thrown into a world of many more dimensions that we are capable of handling, but that we must try anyway, indeed that is a definition of our thrown-ness. In a nut shell read this book in your less than abundant spare time.