DERR!DA:

I’m not sure if you remember Jacques Derrida, but I do. He pioneered Deconstruction in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arguably, his most salient contribution was in the discussion of race. If you will pardon my flippancy, Deconstruction probably did more for black people than Reconstruction did.

In order to understand Deconstruction, it helps to know Derrida’s backstory. Scholars posit that he was inspired to deconstruct reality because he was rejected from University; well into his later years, he advocated for the rights of high school students to a philosophical education. The reasons for Derrida’s initial rejection lay in his ethnic background; the school had a quota for Jews, and it was over capacity. By contemporary standards, we might say that this brilliant man was a victim of institutional racism; we would even go to considerable lengths in making that label absolutely final. But I have to wonder: had he been born in America, and had he applied to a University here, what would we call it if he was rejected for being white? I mean: CLEARLY that’s just as Absurd, from an Individual standpoint. It would be as if the Individual were no more than the figurehead of its colony, containing all of the colony’s history, but nothing more.

The irony wouldn’t be lost on someone like Camus, but what would Derrida himself have said? The tricky thing is that Derrida went to some considerable lengths to obscure his own public identity; we know not even why, so he remains mysterious to us. Besides: he had quite the temper, especially in regard to public figures who (mis)interpreted(?) his work. Not only don’t we know even what we don’t know about him, but what is more: we don’t even know if we do or do not know that.

This much, at least, we know is true: that Derrida proved, indefinitely but consequentially, that race does not fundamentally exist. His work is often cited as contributive to the end of Apartheid in South Africa. What boggles my mind is this: that even staunch Derrideans who deny the objective quality of Truth still support policies such as Affirmative Action.

Regarding my previous question, I can say with some certainty that the Derridean deconstruction of race can be used to challenge Affirmative Action. If the same man might face the same discrimination for being white as he does for being Jewish, the context of the offence does not matter, for not only DON’T the ends justify the means in such matters, (lest we become proto-Fascists,) but the tendency to classify a man AS either a Jew or a white man is equally “logocentric” in both cases. (Though I must confess that, from a certain point of view, I am speaking as the expression of both categories, and Derrida’s contemporary Deleuze would not hesitate to string my various group identities together in classifying my subjectivity.)

All of this might seem like some graduate-level stuff, but it’s not uncommon as an UNCONSCIOUS tendency, for which poststructuralists frequently act as apologists, far more so than they apologize for them. People who defend Affirmative Action operate according to Group Identity. It used to be the function of philosophy to transcend this tendency, but the problem with the poststructuralists is that they have reached a pact with it. Derrida himself spoke to a group of white, South African college students who expressed a common feeling of guilt for being born white, and yet he did not console them as one would expect a father figure to do, saying: “I did not feel bad for being Jewish.”

Incredibly, the only man I’ve known to even draw a parallel between one form of marginalization and another is Jordan Peterson. Peterson might not understand Marxist economics, but he certainly understands the tendency to render people “irrelevant by pedestalization”, which was how Alan Watts described Jesus Christ and the failures of the Christian Church to imitate their Lord and Saviour. (Watts was applauded uproariously for that observation; if you ever find the audio from that lecture online, you’ll hear it.)

Foucault and Deleuze were perhaps the two intellectual figures who “understood” Derrida the best, often citing him and writing forewords. The new French clique tried to transcend the loneliness of their existentialist forefathers by representing ALL cliques, so Derrida’s methods were employed to deconstruct the Individual Itself. “Man” was reduced to the sum of his group identities, and now here we are; it has become common sense in schools and streets alike.

The tragedy of Derrida is not remembered as a sort of Kafkaesque tale (again, pardon my Jewish leanings) of a rational man contending with an impersonal, Absurd bureaucracy. The Absurd Hero has also been swallowed up in the stream of signification and redefinition. The tragedy was purely institutional. It is as though the victims of institutional racism were not individuals but the institutions themselves, in whose interest “we” (a pronoun Derrida outspokenly shied away from) must reform them. Corporate neoliberalism, of the sort that Charles Reich describes as Consciousness II, at most a cocoon state by which to reach the Hippy Mind, loves to perpetuate itself via Deconstruction.

One has to be a bit suspicious when one attends a stage production wherein half the cast is black and the other half is white. Statistically, this is not a proportionate representation of the State of Nature, wherein black people comprise only 12.3 per cent of the American population, and this is significant considering that the United States is among the most diversified of nations. Now, of course, it is a formal fallacy to presume that the state of Nature dictates the Way Things Ought to Be, though critics such as MacIntyre challenge the identity of the Naturalist Fallacy as a fallacy and writers such as, say, Shakespeare declared, however indirectly, through the voice of an adolescent, that theatre ought to hold the “mirror up to [N]ature”. When you see a cast that is an Oreo (about half-white and half-black), you can be willing to bet that something is artificial, unless of course it just so happened that the casting call was put out in a community with a disproportionate amount of African Americans (through no fault of their own).

It’s one thing when directors tokenize a group by including a few characters of that group, and it’s another when the characters are written to look the part, as in Porgy and Bess, which is almost entirely a black cast. Yet there is something fishy going on wherever, say, a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has an “equally representative” choir. It proves that somewhere, SOMEONE, from a position of influence, decided that this is how the World ought to look: Half-black, half-white, and with exclusion to the middle. It implies that SOMEONE POWERFUL believes in race in a pre-Derridean sense, and though he or she means to champion the end of racism, he or she will use racism towards it. It implies that blacks and whites are fundamentally born separate, that our melanin can be categorized two ways, but that we can go no further, even in an age of subatomic quantum physics that refuses all manner of absolute atomization. Finally, the implication is that this is the state that we are born into, that it is the state of Nature, though Derrida said in an interview that one of his central goals is not to naturalize the artificial world; he even reminded the interviewer and his audience that the very film set which housed the interview was entirely artificial.

Ask neoliberals this: if something as quintessential and universal as GENDER can be called a social construct, why can’t race? Why can we switch gender at will, but we cannot wear face-paint or use regional vernacular belonging to minority groups? Above all, why can the Individual no longer aspire towards a moral objectivity, irrespective of the identity of the speaker, as MacIntyre aspires towards? Is it because even MacIntyre seeks to reduce us to the mere representation of our tribes?

I suppose that this is why Sartre was called the last intellectual; most of his philosophy was used to disidentify. If a school rejects me because it has too many Russians, it’s bad faith to say: “The school knows what it’s doing; let’s rejoice that I am represented by my fellows, to an optimum capacity, so that I might return and please my family to know that our nationality is honoured.”  Only in an extremely privileged society would this even be thinkable; in the Philippines, (I’m told, by Joseph) I would probably be dead, unless I found some alternative to education in order to eat.

The Jungian argument, as employed by Peterson, for which alone we might pardon his reactionary intrusiveness, is to expose the INNER contradiction of Affirmative Action. Yet sociologically it’s not hard to imagine the external dangers. What made the O.J. Simpson trial so outrageous was that it demonstrated that, as Howard Beale declared at the end of Network, some twenty years earlier, “the individual is finished”. The Ideal Law, the likes of which Kim Wexler and Charles McGill represent, in different ways and to varying extents, (though Saul Goodman comes to identify one with the other) in Better Call Saul, promises to protect each Individual Life from the tyranny of institutions, the barbarism of mobs, and the villainy of other individuals. Yet when someone like Johnny Cochran can exonerate his client, who was “dead to rights”, by playing the Race Card, turning a murder case into a racial issue, it’s the ultimate postmodern miscarriage of justice.

This is the Darker Side of Deconstruction: that just as easily as one can deconstruct race, one can RECONSTRUCT it, in a new context wherein the Rights of the Individual and the Individual’s Family have yet to BE Reconstructed. Derrida insisted that a Truth will always re-emerge sooner or later, though his goal is to forestall this for as long as possible. If he had to defend Cochran, as though the lawyer were himself on trial for the criminal litigation, (if ever a criminal lawyer was a “criminal lawyer”, in the Saul Goodman sense, it was Cochran, and that alone allows me to forgive him even slightly, as a conman,) Derrida would probably say this: “It was inevitable that the Race Card would eventually be played, and history ought to be ready to receive it. Take comfort in the fact that, just as inevitably, individual rights will yet again be reconstructed; though you may not enjoy a victory on behalf of your lost loved one today, know that someone, somewhere, will. Yet if we are to prioritize YOUR plight and YOUR nostalgia for the life of an innocent individual victim over the victimhood of an entire RACE, then we will simply be resisting the natural process of differance*, and such an artificial imposition will only ensure that our legal institution will regress to its hierarchical origins as a slave state.”

*Though Word does not recognize this word, scholars ought to.

Of course, it is impossible to put words in Derrida’s mouth, but one can see how the premises play out. The evils of Deconstruction ought not to be understated; any one of us can imagine the institutional and moblike applications. The trick is in this: to use Deconstruction as the Eastern mystics did, many millennia before Derrida wrote and spoke. We must deconstruct illusions such as race, laying them to rest PERMANENTLY, at least until the end of the next Yuga Cycle, while all the while reconstructing Sacred Truths which we can live by. This implies an epistemology whereby artificial forms of divisions are supplanted so as to make ROOM for NATURAL KNOWLEDGE, that ideals such as Justice and Individuality might be regarded as no less, nor even equal to, illusions such as hatred and prejudice, except perhaps in that final state of Enlightenment wherein all ignorance is fundamentally forgiven and the practitioner, no longer physically necessary, passes into Nirvana.

Absolute poststructuralism offers us No Exit, even more so than Sartre[anism] did, and both French schools deny this Transcendental Plane, though one seeks to “confront” Reality while the other demolishes it. Yet it is my feeling and intuition that, despite our mass confusion, our generation is ready to embrace the Domain of the Transcendent Reality Again. Conversations with college students who meditate give me Hope. Thus, I seek to expose the lies while reconstructing the Truths, and even as those Truths are also deconstructed as the lies were I shall cling to them, for they are my approximation of Being. So long as enough well-meaning and intelligent men and women join me in this venture, the results will inevitably produce healing.

[({DM.A.A.)}]