The cults, claques, and cliques of Derrida devotees will surely reach for their hankies; everyone else will look on dry-eyed.
Mourning, deconstruction-style.
Derrida (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Univ. of California at Irvine) laments the deaths of his friends and fellow philosophers in this collection of 14 essays. The dead so honored include Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard—each of whom is lauded individually through a range of genres, including the typical (condolence letters, memorial essays, eulogies, and funeral orations) and the atypical (academic lectures). Derrida, the godfather of deconstruction, whose theories of interpretation have stimulated unprecedented productivity in academia, offers some curiously stale and sterile words to mark the passing of his loved ones, as in these for Barthes: “The metonymic force thus divides the referential trait, suspends the referent and leaves it to be desired, while still maintaining the reference.” To translate: “I love you and will never forget you.” Brault and Naas write that we need “to learn something more from Jacques Derrida about taste, about a taste for death,” but on the contrary: most people mourn truly, deeply, and powerfully without instruction in the opposition between the signifier/signified dyad. With the death of a loved one, grief and mourning rip into our lives and shatter the orders of affection we wish to maintain; unfortunately, too little instruction is needed to grasp its power. Mercifully, some less jargon-ridden sentiments do appear here, including the eulogies to Deleuze and Lyotard; still, these passages do little to elicit the interest of the general reader, as one enters into the relationship only at its very end. Still, Derrida can reach a plaintive and stirring lamentation to highlight, appropriately enough, the failure of words to communicate when we need them most.
The cults, claques, and cliques of Derrida devotees will surely reach for their hankies; everyone else will look on dry-eyed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-226-14316-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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