In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.
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Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.

M. Derrida's voluminous writings in our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all – as every reader can very easily establish for himself (and for this purpose any page will do) – his works employ a written style that defies comprehension.
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When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.

Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.
...

Yours sincerely,

Barry Smith
(Editor, The Monist)

Hans Albert (University of Mannheim), David Armstrong (Sydney), Ruth Barcan Marcus (Yale), Keith Campbell (Sydney), Richard Glauser (Neuchâtel), Rudolf Haller (Graz), Massimo Mugnai (Florence), Kevin Mulligan (Geneva), Lorenzo Peña (Madrid), Willard van Orman Quine (Harvard), Wolfgang Röd (Innsbruck), Karl Schuhmann (Utrecht), Daniel Schulthess (Neuchâtel), Peter Simons (Salzburg), René Thom (Burs-sur-Yvette), Dallas Willard (Los Angeles), Jan Wolenski (Cracow)
Internationale Akademie für Philosophie, Obergass 75, 9494S Schaan, Liechtenstein.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

Thus Adam's Eden-plot in far-off time:
Colour-rampant fowers, trees a myriad green;
Helped by God-bless'd wind and temp'rate clime.
The path to primate knowledge unforseen,
He sleeps in peace at eve with Eve.
One apple later, he looks curiously
At the gardens of dichromates, in whom
colourless green ideas sleep furiously
then rage for birth each morning, until doom
Brings rainbows they at last perceive.
D. A. H. Byatt

Well, I disagree.

Having read some about Derrida ("about" rather than the original, which is rather obscure), I feel uncomfortable with this being the first post people will be reading here. Derrida's seminal contribution to shattering the concept of duality in philosophy (by introducing a non-binary understanding of philosophical concepts); his approach toward questioning values, and his contribution and collaboration with architecture cannot be dismissed just like that. I understand why the French academia considered him controversial and wrote the letter, but surely they gave this matter plenty of thought rather than knee-jerk reacting by lumping him with "new age", with which he has absolutely nothing to do.

I feel particularly uncomfortable with how Derrida is lumped with Foucault below. And coming from fields where Foucault is very well respected, I must say I'm surprised, to say the least, not only at the generalization, but at the categorical dismissal of some of the most fascinating ideas in contemporary social science and humanities.

Oh, no. The pendulum was displayed in the 19th century by a Jean Bernard Leon Foucault and is an entirely different matter. :)

Do we know each other...? (I mean, why would it be 'obvious' for me to think anything? ah, well, never mind)

Anyway: I can't provide a concise account of "Foucault's fascinating ideas" in their entirety in an Ayal post (actually, some Intro to Foucault would perhaps make a good article!), but I can give you a few concepts of his thinking which are important to the study of social deviance.

Foucault's main work in this field is his 1979 book Discipline and Punish, which offers a new way of thinking about punishment and has revolutionalized criminological thought. Foucault identifies a change of paradigms in the perception and practice of punishment; while early modern times are characterized by physical, public punishment, modernity and industrialization bring with them a change in focus from the body to the soul of the subjects. Through the creation of knowledge, which consists of a disciplinary setting of "normal" standards, modern practices of technologies, ranging from prisons to hospitals to military barracks to schools, focus on measuring and normalizing individuals, while inflicting them to a controlled permanent "gaze" and even internalizing the controlled, normalized structure and exercising self-control.

This approach has several substantial and methodological novelties. Firstly, it entwines the exercise of power with the creation of knowledge. Penal or other disciplinary practices need knowledge - technologies and strategies emerging from the perception of the problems involved - to excuse, justify and facilitate them; power, in its turn, provides a comfortable "petri-dish" to the creation of further knowledge.

Secondly, this approach, due to the importance it ascribes to knoweldge, focuses on what Foucault calls an "empiricism of the surface": a study not so much of what was done in regard to a problem, but more of what was said, how it was said, and what conditions of possibility brought up the knowledge. In some respects this is an answer to Marxist paradigms, which looked at rhetoric as a "superstructure" which strengthens the hegemony of what was "actually" happening.

This is connected to a third and important point: the more or less value-free approach. Foucault does not accept an absolute "truth" about the nature of a problem, but rather questions the creation of an existing "truth". Someone above wrote something about "giving legitimacy to false narratives"; to see it that way would be an inaccuracy. Don't know about Derrida, but Foucault was not into legitimizing or delegitimizing anything, and he certainly did not make observations about the "truthfulness" or "Falseness" of the emerging narrative. Which is not to say he did not advocate civil rights and activism. For the purpose of analysis, though, he preferred to question the production and emergence of a narrative, rather than make qualitative assumptions about it.

Feel free to ask anything; this stuff is rather obscure when presented like this with no background or anything.

"...this stuff is rather obscure when presented like this with no background or anything."

To say the least.

I asked for an explanation because I am quite fascinated with the post-modern way of articulating ideas, and I must admit I don't think I know more about Foucault than before your reply.

I mean, why do people bother to spend so much time on saying nothing? If he's not "into legitimizing or delegitimizing anything", how can he "advocate civil rights and activism"?

Where can I see the "revolutionized criminological thought", resulting from his work in other places (i.e.: someone actually understood what he wanted to say, and tried to implement an idea or two in real life, a law etc.)?

And how come that power which is derived from locking people up (or inflicting some other punishments) can gain more knowledge? This is way too general.

If you'd care to continue and elaborate, I'd be grateful.

I can read Hebrew... it's the writing my computer won't do.

Perhaps an example would be instructive (and I'll try and provide an example that doesn't relate to my dissertation, because 'ein hanachtom' and all that). Let's say we're trying to learn something about drug policy. The lawyer's question might be "how shall we construct and apply the law to prohibit drugs" or "how can we balance the defendants' rights and a drug free society in drug related criminal procedure?"

Now, the sociological, external, perhaps Marxist perspective on this, might be (and is in several studies): "Drugs aren't really the problem you claim it is. What in fact is being done is that you are using the legal rhetoric, which doesn't mean anything, to mask and guise a policy that is actually aimed at policing the underclass. See - you've criminalized heroin and marijuana and crack because you link them to ethnic minorities and the underclass, while barbiturates and sleeping pills, used by housewives, are not criminalized. The TRUTH is that both issues are merely lifestyle choices, while you proclaim them to be an enemy of the public".

Now, as you see, these two views are not compatible with each other. While doctrinal law takes the definition of drugs as a "national problem" or a "moral enemy", sociology completely discounts legal rhetoric and provides us with the alternative account of power.

What the Foucauldian approach does for us is that it goes beyond this gap. Foucault is not interested in saying what the "truth" is; in fact , he doesn't buy into a single, truthful story of what is going on. A Foucauldian way to look at these drug issues would be the following: "Let's look at the conditions, historically and epistemologically, that surrounded the criminalization of drugs. What in them allows us to look at drugs as a disease, and what allows us to see them as a personal choice? What was the status of medicine, chemistry, religion, economic policy at the time? How did this status of competing narratives about drugs bring about the emergence, and prevalence, of a certain way to see the problem? How did this way change over time? Was it always treated as an illness that needed to be therapeutically approached? Or as a moral fault? Or as an economic enterprise that needs to be abolished? Or contained (regulated)? And suppose at some point it was seen as an illness. How did that shape the policies involving drugs in hospitals? In prisons? In schools? How did that award power to therapeutic communities? What did it do to the status of police people versus the status of addiction experts and social workers? And (here's where we come to the part where power generates knowledge) how did the emergence of practices that treat drugs, say, as an illness, to the generation of more medical knowledge about the problem? How were the perceptions of the problems subsequently get refined, altered, modified, or abolished?

So here's one example of how this could be used. In my work, I use it to explain things about legal approaches toward disobedience (my case study involves the military justice system); others have used this framework to look at the emergence of phrenology (the study of people's skulls to determine criminality), to the Kennedy murders (how the commission made sense of Lee Harvey Oswald's life-story so as to provide a sufficient account of the murder), to the emergence of eugenics, to the J. Edgar Hoover crime policy in the early New Deal period, etc, etc.

The thing with Foucauldian thought (and perhaps that's what some people have difficulty with) is that it's not a theory that yields practical reform suggestions. If what one wants to do is see "how to implement an idea in real life", this is not the way to go. This can help understand patterns of knowledge creation and meaning making, but it's not something you go with to a committee. What Foucault was trying to do was to break free from the conventions about "what a problem is" and ask the question "how did it come to be that we started seeing this problem in this way". His hope for advocacy of civil rights was not part of his scholarship, but of his personal agenda; in an interview before his death, someone confronted him with the frustration experienced by the "disciplinarians" (social workers, doctors, lawyers, etc) at the inability to find an agenda for action. Foucault agreed that he was advocating no agenda as a scholar, except perhaps offering alternative ways to see problems and issues, rather than feeding you the "right" perception of them with a spoon. But apparently this did not make him a nihilist: a professor of mine who met Foucault in the mid-seventies and told him how despaired he was at reading Foucault before entering law school says that Foucault encouraged him to fight for what he thought was right and important, though not to accept anything as a given.

Whoa! Heavy conversation for a Monday evening. But feel free to ask whatever, and I'll try to clarify whatever isn't.

See, I *am* using Windows XP; and my Hebrew works fine everywhere, except when I fill in internet forms or post stuff on the Ayal.

do you get jibrish instead of hebrew? if so, the problem might be google toolbar or some other plugin or spyware in your browser.

Toda Raba! That's a pretty good website! I'll deal with this right after I return from my vacation in Amsterdam and Israel.
Back to Derrida...