People seem to have tired of talking both about the Derrida Professor’s having been found guilty by NYU of sexual harassment, and the lawsuit the grad student she harassed has filed against her and the school. But Ronell’s animating intellectual commitment – deconstruction – is worth revisiting, and here are two comments on it, from very different political positions.
First: Martin Jay, reviewing, in 2011, a book of interviews with Ronell.
[Ronell] depends … heavily on mobilizing the tired rhetoric of combat that animated the “theory wars” of the 1980s. AR herself seems frozen in that moment, a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers on a remote Pacific island still fighting for the emperor long after he surrendered. There are, after all, just so many times you can act out Zéro de conduite before the audience gets tired of adolescent rebelliousness as a mode of critique. Intellectual mooning grows as tedious as the real thing. It is fair to say that the ranks of her regiment are in fact getting thinner and thinner as the scandal and provocation of deconstruction recede further into the past.
Second, Francis Fukuyama, in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Q. You have an unusual background for a political scientist. You majored in classics at Cornell, then did graduate work in comparative literature at Yale, where you studied with Paul de Man. Later you spent time in Paris sitting in on classes with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Any memories from this journey through deconstruction?
A. I decided it was total bullshit. They were espousing a kind of Nietzschean relativism that said there is no truth, there is no argument that’s superior to any other argument. Yet most of them were committed to a basically Marxist agenda. That seemed completely contradictory. If you really are a moral relativist, there is no reason why you shouldn’t affirm National Socialism or the racial superiority of Europeans, because nothing is more true than anything else. I thought it was a bankrupt way of proceeding and decided to shift gears and go into political science.
The superannuated subversion both men evoke suggests a reading of Ronell’s recent troubles in which, perversely, she rather got what she wanted: A new lease on academic deviancy.
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Which, Jay notes, Ronell believes Derrida invented.
“One cannot imagine how whited-out the academic corridor was when Derrida arrived on the American scene. There was really no room for deviancy, not even for a quaint aberration or psychoanalysis,” she asserts, blithely erasing Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, Natalie Zemon Davis, Hayden White, Florence Howe, etc., from memory.
August 27th, 2018 at 10:52PM
have you read her books? The Test Drive is quite good.
Fukuyama was as wrong in his assessment of that crowd as he has been on events/trends that really matter and are more directly in his field/specialty, no meaningful accountability for punditry I realize,
she is more of an example a kind of Woody Allenish neuroticism than of deviancy (speaking of his film personae and not his no longer private life) makes her lectures often hard to bear. You might have been able to study some of Hayden White at a major university in the 80’s but not so much most of the others on that list.
August 27th, 2018 at 11:21PM
dmf: I not only read Hayden White, but attended lectures he gave at U Chicago – recall him as a learned, witty, and engaging character. Also: I studied pretty much everyone on that list as an undergrad (NU) or grad (Chicago) student. The only ones I didn’t study/read were Chomsky, Davis, and Howe.
Actually, on Howe: I think I took a course with her at Goucher College! where I spent an unhappy year before transferring (after working for a year) to NU. (Would only have spent a semester, but my mother explained that she and my father had already paid for the full year. It’s not that Goucher wasn’t a good school – it was excellent. Just a terrible fit for me.)
August 28th, 2018 at 11:04AM
ah I didn’t realize that you and she were of the same generation coming into teaching in the 80’s, in that period I had to study most of those folks on my own as they couldn’t be found in classes then and other than my few profs at Stony Brook had to head to Europe to study “continental” (or folks like Octavio Paz) writers, outside of some seminars in English, religion, and foreign language studies programs this is still largely the case in the US tho there is a small revival of Arendt for obvious reasons.
August 28th, 2018 at 12:27PM
This time it’s not football in Texas but . . . something (I don’t know what) in New York.
We’ll be back.
August 28th, 2018 at 4:27PM
JND: Laugh Out Loud!
August 30th, 2018 at 9:48AM
Funny thing about this particular dust-up is that I’ve yet to see any reference to AR’s undergrad students. Is she a good/mediocre/inspiring/off putting teacher? After all, it’s those guys and gals that pay her freight, as well as that of uni presidents that slither between university paid housing in the Hamptons and that in Chelsea. Looks as if no one really cares what happens to those that underwrite this daisychain of academic excess….
August 30th, 2018 at 10:32AM
charlie: A complete guess would be that AR has little or nothing to do w/ undergrads.
August 30th, 2018 at 11:41AM
In that case, AR has a lot in common with Athletic Departments….