Mark Bauerlein: TRUTH, READING, DECADENCE
..... French theorists judged this approach naive. They challenged any presumption of stable significance in the literary object. Derrida pushed a radical skepticism that targeted the very idea of core meaning, original intention, or truth in or behind or before or under the work itself. The one-million-times-cited sentences on decentering in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” the paper Derrida had read at the Hopkins conference, were taken by first-generation American theorists as a decisive subversion of any interpretation that claimed to get it “right.”
Claims to true interpretation, Derrida said, rested upon a “center,” something outside the work that explained constituents of it—an author’s psychology, his religion, his class relations, and so on. Freud interprets Hamlet by invoking the Oedipal triangle, Marx takes Robinson Crusoe as capitalism in its fundamental form. Here’s the problem, Derrida insisted. This center is taken for granted—it has to be, in order to determine what the phenomenon means. Conventional criticism uses the center to interpret a work, but it does not interpret the center itself. God explains the Bible—we don’t explain God. The center determines the significance of the work but is not implicated in the work. The center is in the work and, at the same time, outside it.
Derrida found in this within/without center an
insurmountable contradiction, one that set criticism on a different path. His
followers caught the direction instantly. The new theory demanded that the
“center” undergo interpretation as well. It, too, should be understood as a
text to be analyzed in its turn, not a ground to be presupposed. One had to
presuppose something, the Derrideans admitted, or else one could not say
anything. But one could get through the impasse by being super self-conscious
about it. Hence the endless qualifiers, scare-quotes, parenthetical remarks,
and circling-backwards in deconstructive discourse. In this theory of reading,
self-reflexivity would never stop. Interpretation must go on! This embrace of
the heroic role of the endless interpreter swept everyone away. The search for
the central truth of a literary work was over. The rehearsal of the
forever-deferred and “problematized” truth of the work took its place. No more
truth, only “reading.”…
https://www.firstthings.com/
Andrew Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the liberal left
A pre-history of post-truth, East
and West. By MARCI SHORE
Michiko Kakutani - The death of
truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump
Farewell to reality - WHY WE’RE
POST-FACT by Peter Pomerantsev
How capitalism created the
post-truth society — and brought about its own undoing. By Keith Spencer
Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism and
its impact, explained
Why can’t we agree on what’s true
any more? By William Davies
Alexander
Klein: The politics of logic
Walter
Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)
Didier Fassin: The blind spots of
left populism
What happened to democracy in 2020?
My Correct Views on Everything:
Leszek Kolakowski's correspondence with E.P. Thompson
Ivan Turgenev on Hamlet and Don
Quixote // The madness in Hamlet and Don Quixote
Salman Rushdie: how Cervantes and
Shakespeare wrote the modern literary rule book
Nikolai Berdyaev: The Religion of
Communism (1931) // The Paradox of the Lie (1939)
