| |
|
Damnit. I was going to say Jacques Derrida but now I'm going to have to go for Judith Butler, aren't I? Just to protect her against the ravening hordes? But I don't think she is my favourite philosopher (just my favourite theorist of gender/sexuality/kinship), so I won't. I'll stick with Derrida, because he enables some very good theories of gender (even though Avital Ronell, Drucilla Cornell, Judith Butler et al. do a better job of elaborating those theories) but he does so as part of a wider project.
Anyway. Why Derrida? Hmm. Because there are very few writers who can make me breathless with pleasure in language and with the pleasurable sense of new interfaces opening up between me and the world, the world tilting on its axis. Because it's in his thought that I begin to understand the relationship between pleasure in language and the tilting of the world on its axis. Because he worked out a method of philosophizing that was so much more concrete and followable than anything I'd come across before, in its insistence on the level of the signifier (which is, after all, all we've got: no point telling me that, although Dan Brown's work looks like nonsense, it means something very profound: how does it mean it?). Because all of that pleasure and concreteness is so bound up with a political and ethical imperative not to let power and its names have control of the meanings we circulate and the meanings we experience, and not to bind the Other into our systems of recognizability. And because, like the best writers, he so often says things which resonate in a way that I instantly recognize as true, but in a form which is so concise and accurate and stunning that it re-organizes the way I think about its truth.
Also: beautiful, personable, funny and warm as a speaker, and deeply genderfucked in his writing. So, actually, I don't have to feel bad about not nominating a woman, given how often he said he was a woman (and what would it mean to insist that he wasn't? Whose investment in binary systems and in consistency of identity would be enforcing that statement?) |
|
|
])