The Center Has to Hold

This week's reading? Derrida.

Yikes.

I'm interested in Derrida's post-structuralist contributions, but I read some of "Plato's Pharmacy" at the beginning of the semester and his work is not something you casually dip into.  Seems like you would need years of grad school toiling to get a handle on him.

So let's do the Jeopardy/Cocktail Party summary, shall we? (note, I know my JCP summaries are often wrong, but I just want to give you enough buzzwords to bullshit the asshole would talk about this shit at a party anyway.)

Jacques Derrida was born to a Jewish family in Algiers. (So was Helene Cixous, so there must have been something about Antisemitism in that French colony that got people thinking differently.) Dude failed his baccalaureate, then spent his time reading stuff he was really interested in, like Rousseau, Gide, Camus, and Nietzsche.  Fast forward, dude gets into some good schools, studies then blows everybody's mind with Deconstructionism in 1966. (Wow, I am as old as Deconstructionism.)

Deconstruction is, I guess, a way of challenging the Western way of thinking. Derrida showed how all centers (the things we take as the ultimate: God, straight white men, beauty) are problematic because they marginalize other concepts. Instead, Derrida advocates the Play of Binary Opposites, where the center and the marginalized  do this funky kind of dance like this:

Is it two faces? Or a candle stick? Is it good or is it evil? Is it heaven or is it hell? You get the picture. Then, Derrida would write stuff and cross it out, put it Under Erasure to show that the words he was using were inadequate to explain what he was trying to explain but he still had to use them.

Shit, go here, because this dude explained it better than I ever could.

Here's my problem —look, I like Derrida and I'm glad his method of analysis ushered in an era of challenging the canon and inclusion —but ain't nobody got time for that in real life.

There is a Center in this country and if you are one of the marginalized, your safety depends on you knowing the rules and, even then, you might still be in danger. For example, when I learned how to drive, my mother, like many Black mothers, taught me how to behave when I was stopped by the police: put my hands on the steering wheel, be polite, comply with the officer. But when I was out with my white friends, I saw how they behaved when stopped by the police —challenging, annoyed, even belligerent a few times. They could bump up against the center of the traffic cop's authority. My Black ass, on the binary opposite other hand, needed to know where the Center was and what its rules were or else I might find myself in jail or worse.

Another example is 12 Years a Slave, which I saw this weekend.

Go see it.

Solomon Northrup knew the center: white men. He even experienced the binary play of opposites (I think) as a free Black Man in a country that enslaved most of its Black citizens. But when Northrup was kidnapped and sold into slavery, he had to locate the Center, figure out its rules, and strictly adhere to them just to survive long enough for Brad Pitt to come and save him. I think that is the experience of many marginalized peoples.

Nothing wrong with deconstructing things in the safety of my mind, though.