The “left” seems to think Derrida won that little match hands down (well, assuming that there was a game to be “won”). I am not so sure. Searle’s naturalism is really closer to traditional materialism than to the Heideggerian-marxo-semiotic-anthropology of Derrida (tho’ of course the continental sort attaches “vulgar” to Searle’s naturalism, as he/she does to about any sort of “ism” hailing from Amerika); Of Grammatology is really overwhelming, exceedingly verbose, obscure bric a brac that makes Hegel’s Phenomenology seem about like Hobbes. It’s rather odd that Derrida is even taken to be a leftist or progressive, given the obscurity, the denial of denotation (including one would assume statements concerning economic injustice) and his praise of Heidegger (of course in the wonderland of postmod, Heidegger has more cred. than say a Carnap, even tho’ Carnap did align himself with socialists on occasion–as did other analytical types, including Russell). I don’t idolize Searle’s writing (he does seem a bit pedantic and somewhat obvious at times), but ontologically at least, his naturalism seems closer to an orthodox, if somewhat de-hegelized marxism, and constructivism, for lack of a better term. Like Marx, Johnny Searle read his Leviathan: more than most conties could say……………………

The “left” seems to think Derrida won that little match hands down (well, assuming that there was a game to be “won”). I am not so sure. Searle’s naturalism is really closer to traditional materialism than to the Heideggerian-marxo-semiotic-anthropology of Derrida (tho’ of course the continental sort attaches “vulgar” to Searle’s naturalism, as he/she does to about any sort of “ism” hailing from Amerika); Of Grammatology is really overwhelming, exceedingly verbose, obscure bric a brac that makes Hegel’s Phenomenology seem about like Hobbes. It’s rather odd that Derrida is even taken to be a leftist or progressive, given the obscurity, the denial of denotation (including one would assume statements concerning economic injustice) and his praise of Heidegger (of course in the wonderland of postmod, Heidegger has more cred. than say a Carnap, even tho’ Carnap did align himself with socialists on occasion–as did other analytical types, including Russell). I don’t idolize Searle’s writing (he does seem a bit pedantic and somewhat obvious at times), but ontologically at least, his naturalism seems closer to an orthodox, if somewhat de-hegelized marxism, and constructivism, for lack of a better term. Like Marx, Johnny Searle read his Leviathan: more than most conties could say……………………

ps - Rob, how far are you into that Deleuze book? That’s another one that’s on my summer reading list.

If you want to like Derrida more, I’d suggest either his short, early monograph on Condillac “Archeology of the Frivolous” or the also short book “Spurs” about Nietzsche’s style. They’re super fun and politically/historically inconsequential.

It is within this framework of spectrality—bringing in the impossible but irrepressible relation between appearance and reality, materiality and ideality, spirit and “the real”—that Macherey reviews Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the Marxian legacy. In Ted Stolze’s translation, Macherey credits Derrida with encouraging a rereading of Marx that, in his view, leads “to a free appropriation of Marx’s ‘inheritance.”’ Macherey understands Derrida’s contribution to consist of a reconsideration of several of Marx’s key texts in which references to ghosts and the like are introduced “not only as a figure of rhetorical style but as a determination of those texts’ contents of thought.” The different forms of spectrality that Derrida finds suggests a Marx divided at times against himself and in turmoil over the distinction between the spirit world and the world of objects, over the demarcation between appearance and reality to which he turned incessantly and which, in the end, haunts his work. Yet, despite the value of showing the fundamental instability of these distinctions in some of Marx’s writings—the impossibility of preserving a notion of reality which is not also “apparent” and of preserving an apparition which is not simultaneously “real,” and hence creating a sense of the immaterial material, the insensible sensible—Derrida, according to Macherey, accomplishes his transformation of Marx’s spirit into something presumably usable today by reducing Marx’s work “to a history of ghosts.” In this sense, Macherey tells us, Derrida “dematerializes” Marx and “deontologizes” Marx’s thought, if only to provide us with a “new science of spirit.” We can detect, reading symptomatically if not spectrally, in Macherey’s appraisal a trace of doubt in the efficacy of Derrida’s project since, in his view, Derrida’s reduction involves drawing “Marx alongside his ghosts” and appears to succeed perfectly “on the condition of filtering his inheritance to the point of retaining from Capital only book 1, section 1: Marx without social classes, without the exploitation of labor, without surplus-value . . . [which] risks, in fact, no longer being anything but his own ghost.”

Btw I think that confusing passage about culture is the translator’s bad (going for a word for word thing). The thought I won’t apologise for, but the language is clear and natural enough:

“Une culture a commencé avant la culture - et l’humanité. La capitalisation aussi. Autant dire que, par là même, elle est destinée à leur survivre.” which is: A kind of culture had begun prior to culture - and to humanity. As had capitalisation. Which is to say, by the same token, it is destined to survive them.

(”humanity” doubtless not referring to our species but the idea of ourselves and quality of ourselves we produce through culture).