Today I went back to the comment thread on Eric Schliesser’s post on the continental/analytic divide, which I commented on here. Generally I avoid comments sections because they are often just time-sucking, inefficient ways to have debates. Plus, there are inevitably (and I mean that in the strictest sense) wild non sequiturs, offensive, and infuriating remarks made that only serve to reinforce the notion that rational dialogue (and ultimately, if I can be permitted a hyperbolic moment, democracy) is doomed to fail. The comments on Schliesser’s post are mostly tolerable, but I want to highlight a series of comments made between Mohan Matthen, John Drabinski, and Daniel Nagase.
At comment 23, Matthen chooses a difficult, presumably impenetrable passage of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. This passage, on its own, is supposed to demonstrate the very problem with continental writing. (Incidentally, if it did perform in this way it would serve to reinforce Schliesser’s point that a lot of ‘continental’ philosophy trades in such performativity.) This is precisely the kind of game that is often initiated at Leiter’s blog and to which I alluded in my earlier post. Drabinski chimes in at comment 61 to say that the Derrida passage makes perfect sense, and then at 67 Matthen asks Drabinski to unpack the passage for him, although you can tell right away that a trap is being laid. Before Drabinski replies, Nagase (comment 77) asks Matthen to defend the legitimacy of his tactic, and largely, I think, succeeds in deflating Matthen’s tactic (Drabinski thinks so too).
Matthen pushes Drabinski at 82, but instead of taking the bait, Drabinski precisely lays out the game that Matthen is playing. What is so helpful about Drabinski’s reply at 89 is how he shows that what Matthen is trying to do is to get Drabinski to ‘clearly’ articulate the obscure Derrida passage only so he (Matthen) can then reply, ‘Now why didn’t he just say that’?, in which case Drabinski would look like a dupe and Derrida would be exposed as the charlatan that ‘analytic’ philosophers believe him to be. Read Drabinski at comment 89 for yourself; Matthen concedes the game at 92.
Do you know Drabinski? We’ve been FB friends since he defended me on New APPS months ago when I was being savaged.
Hey, Jason. No, I don’t know him personally, but I used some of his stuff in my dissertation. I’ll have the chance to meet him and express my admiration for his comments in person in May when I travel up to the North American Levinas Society conference in Anchorage. I’ve heard good things about him.
He seems to be a really great guy.
there is a bit of likely apocrypha attributed to William James that I really like where he is said to have rejected an offer to join a new philosophy society for conferences on the grounds that it takes too long to even come to common working definitions for any proper philosophy to be done in such limited exchanges (I heard Derrida say something similar) , and I think that this sums up most of what happens, and doesn’t happen, on blogs. Wittgenstein,Deleuze and Foucault had some related things to say about the limits of debate but that’s another tangent for another day. cheers
It is a good point, DMF. It bothers me that I “bother” people when I ask them to define basic definitions, though I warn them that I ask because I am unfamiliar with their use of the term. Honestly, I do not usually get a better reaction than from my first-year students who have not yet come to understand why we must be precise about definitions and how likely it is that two interlocutors have different working definitions. I would expect more of academics.