leiter excluding my comments?

On the thread I’ve been obsessing about for the past few days I’ve made three comments. Only the first has been approved by Leiter; the other two are pending and, I suspect, will not be approved. Other comments have appeared since I made mine, which leads me to believe that I’ve been excluded. If they do eventually appear, all the better. The first responded to two of Leiter’s own responses and basically reiterated my call for substantial criticism of the issue under question (i.e., ‘bad’ philosophy). It also suggested that the purpose of Leiter’s post is to perform quality control on the NDPR, by chastising their editorial decisions. Leiter contends:

BL COMMENT: I’m not entirely sure where this particular discussion is going. Bad philosophy is bad, and should be held up for ridicule. Someone really patient, with endless time, can write up a careful critique of bad philosophy–scholars have done that on occasion, with limited effect. The readers of the NY Times are not the audience for this discussion. Bad philosophy is still well-represented in academic philosophy departments in the US and elsewhere; indeed, there’s an entire professional organization, SPEP, which champions bad work on and inspired by the Continental traditions in philosophy.

BL COMMENT: No one has questioned the quality of NDPR, indeed, the opposite. The particular nonsense at issue here is anomalous, and can be attributed, no doubt, to the fact that the editorial board includes some hacks and “Jewish poker” philosophers like Simon Critchley. So it goes.

I think the only way to make sense of Leiter’s post is to see it as an indictment of the NDPR’s decision to include Marder’s review of Skempton. If this isn’t its purpose, then we have to conclude that it’s an open forum to beat up on the SPEP crowd. I also asked, in my filtered comment, for a criterion that can help uninitiated outsiders (for several comments worry about these folks’ encounter with philosophy) determine when a piece of philosophical writing is bad or good. It seems like the first criterion would be: if it’s written by a marginal philosophy professor and focused on a contemporary French Sophist, then it’s bad. I invite others to provide helpful criteria for non-philosophers.

Here’s my second comment, just in case it doesn’t get approved by Leiter. It basically responds to one commentator, who first admits that Deleuze has written some good stuff before lamenting: ‘when I see what qualifies as Deleuze-inspired “theory” in film studies and other disciplines I’m horrified and embarrassed’. I immediately thought of John Mullarkey, who must terrify this commentator. In any case, my controversial comment:

I disagree with Sistare and Garrett. There’s nothing heated about this exchange. In fact, it’s only now becoming a genuine discussion. Remember, we shouldn’t worry about what other programs are doing with philosophers because they represent themselves. Literature departments have been written off countless times in this forum, so let’s just write off film studies too. Who cares if they do crazy things with Deleuze, so long as philosophers do sane things with Deleuze. But that means that such a thing is possible, but that can’t be because Deleuze is one of those guys beloved by the SPEP cadre. Now I’m confused.

Dear Brian: could you please approve my pending comment?

[Update: Leiter has approved my second comment, but not my first. He also asks for SPEP-affiliated philosophers who have done good work on Deleuze!]

sucked into the vortex

For some unknown reason, I’ve decided to comment over at Leiter’s blog. It’s becoming an annual event for me. I’m wasting my breath, for sure, but I guess I just got tired of biting my tongue. (My comments are some of the last.)

What’s astonishing about reading the comments on the blog is the level of disdain that is felt for continental philosophy. It is utterly dismissed and ridiculed. Of course, this is all done with outdated criticism and caricature that often identifies continental philosophy with deconstruction, and most of the commentary is so nonspecific that it could be about anything. It’s raw, however, and there’s something refreshing about that. Academics typically tip-toe around wielding allusions and masks, afraid to say anything about anyone specifically. But again, it’s not enough to simply say that Critchley wrote/edited it. You need to do some of that analysis you’re so fond of. Otherwise, it’s a famous fallacy.

Here’s a tutorial:

[FYI: The bubble reads, 'Haters Gonna Hate']

the anniversary of a blog post

I’ll admit that I subscribe to Leiter’s Leiter Reports blog. Almost exactly one year ago Leiter posted on his Nietzsche blog an analysis and indictment of what he called ‘party line continentalists’ and the graduate departments that hold this line. In that post, which generated not a few comments, I pointed out that Duquesne (my doctoral institution) does not qualify as a party line school, although it was included in Leiter’s list. It was made fairly clear that a party line continentalist is someone under the spell of postmodernism and deconstruction, and that most folks who follow too closely in Derrida’s footsteps methodologically, ideologically, or philosophically can be sure that they are the target of Leiter’s critical gaze.

My refutation of Leiter was largely empirical, citing the absence of Derrideans and deconstructive scholarship in the Duquesne department. In short, Duquesne does not qualify as a party line continental school under Leiter’s definition. In the spring, however, Duquesne hired Michael Marder, a New School PhD who does some work with Derrida, including this recent NDPR review of Simon Skempton’s Alienation after Derrida. My empirical refutation has now been invalidated, it seems. Now Derrida is a presence at Duquesne, but this does not necessarily qualify it for party line status; a non-empirical refutation could be advanced. If I were more of a narcissist, I’d assume that the meaning of today’s elliptical post by Leiter is a reference to our brief exchange one year ago. His post, oh-so-provocatively, simply quotes the first line of Marder’s review and adds: ‘Discuss’. Surely a barrage of Leiteriffic comments is soon to follow.

[Update: by 'subscribe to Leiter's Leiter Reports...' I mean that I subscribe to it in Google Reader.]