Adam Rosen-Carole

Demanding Politics

“Deconstruction,” Derrida once remarked, “is seen as hyperconceptual, and indeed it is; it carries out a large-scale consumption of concepts that it produces as much as it inherits – but only to the point where a certain writing, a writing that thinks, exceeds the conceptual ‘take’ and its mastery. It therefore attempts to think the limit of the concept; it even endures the experience of excess; it lovingly lets itself be exceeded.” Derrida’s writerly practice is certainly extravagant. A patient and protracted, rigorously immanent conceptual labor, to be sure, never heedless of the official ambitions and self-understandings or the authoritative, traditional interpretations of the texts under scrutiny, or simply reckless in its enthusiasm for exposing aporia there where a text or tradition seems most self-confident, self-centered, or fully accomplished, Derrida’s writerly practice is nevertheless nothing less than exorbitant, indeed somewhat itinerant in its associational expansiveness. Derrida’s writings are, one might say, extra-clinical enactments of the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis to say everything that comes to mind, but without the focusing force of transference. Their extraordinary capacity to sustain exposure to and integrate without thetically or thematically flattening, thus to assemble, or constellate, fleeting impressions and potentially misleading or distracting, certainly unauthorized impressions and connections with concerted, conceptually focused, philosophically pointed and pertinent, immanently critical readings is both their glory and the source of a worry. Derrida’s interest in implicating the serious in the frivolous and vice versa, or more broadly, what one might call his writerly shamelessness, evinces an exorbitant narcissism, a writerly ethos of refusing censorship, an “hyperconceptual” penchant for excess that seems to both condition his truly unparalleled and startlingly acute insights, but also to suffuse his texts with so many loose threads and frayed edges that these texts cannot but seem suspiciously underdeveloped, or brittle in their very grandiosity – as if something were being hidden, or perhaps avoided, by means of their unlimited capaciousness. One way to phrase this worry would be to ask whether Derrida’s writerly impudence, the iconoclastic dimension of deconstruction, squares with the requirement of mutual authorization to critique constitutive of normativity. If Derrida’s writerly practice is as given to unregulated and unregulatable excess as it seems, might there be an at once anti-democratic and philosophically problematic aspect to its seemingly anti-authoritarian ethos of unlimited affirmation? Drawing Derrida into conversation with Brandom and Cavell, the question will be whether the “consumption of concepts that it produces as much as it inherits” renders deconstruction, by virtue of its nominalism, a form of nihilism – a creative consumerism.

Sample Paper: Rosen-Carole – Ontological Indeterminacy

Presentation date and time: 3:15pm-4:30pm, Saturday May 3rd, 2014.