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1)Teaching Derrida this week and just reread Barbara Johnson’s definition of critique in the introduction to Dissemination:
2)“The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are...
3) their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself.”
4) Isn’t this what we all are trying to do?
5) Johnson also specifies that deconstruction is not the same as destruction; it is not a form of “textual vandalism,” but “a careful teasing out of the warring forces of signification within the text itself.”
6) Her vision of deconstruction requires attention both to what a text both does and does not see, what it does and does not accomplish.
7)“In other words,” she tells us, “the deconstructive reading does not point out the flaws or weaknesses or stupidities of an author, but the necessity with which what he does see is systematically related to what he does not see.”
8) What she doesn’t say explicitly is that none of this works if we aren’t at least making an effort to understand what the author DOES see, IS accomplishing, IS trying to say.
9) When I was an undergrad I wrote a paper for Johnson on memory in Benjamin and Baudelaire. I anguished over it. I cared so much and it fell so far short of what I wanted to say.
10)When I got it back, her comments seemed to be on a much smarter, much better paper than the one I had written. That smarter paper was the paper she read—she was so brilliant and so generous that her imagination filled in the gaps.
11)And her generosity helped me to imagine the much smarter paper it could have been.
12)I have always aspired to be like Johnson, a person who tries to read the best version of everything & who truly tries to hear what people are trying to say. (I usually fail at this.)
13)To me Johnson epitomizes the very best of critique and the very best of post-critique, which is--among other things--a reminder that angry righteousness isn’t the only readerly mode available to us.
14) She cared deeply about inclusion, critical stakes, and justice. She took joy and found pleasure in thought, language, and criticism.
15)There are plenty of mischaracterizations, oversimplifications, and straw men to be pointed out in this debate. But might it not also be possible to read an argument--even a polemical argument--and think about what its author is actually trying to do?
16)Tl;dr: no meaningful critique without generosity.
