In Praise of Big Pictures

Speaking of biographers and the writing of biographies Jacques Derrida once said: 

“We should not neglect the fact that some biographies written by people who have authority in the academy finally invest this authority in a book which—for centuries sometimes—after the death of an author represent the truth, “the truth.” Someone interested in biography writes a life, “life and works” . . . well documented, apparently consistent, and it’s the only one published by—under the authority of—a good press. And then . . . his life image is fixed and stabilized for centuries. That’s why I would say that the one who reads a text by a philosopher, for instance a tiny paragraph, and interprets it in a rigorous, inventive, and powerfully deciphering fashion is more of a real biographer than the one who knows the whole story.” 

 

This is a disarmingly solipsistic view of culture of a kind one might expect from Derrida and which helps to explain why Paul DeMann’s fascism was so easily overlooked throughout the American academy. The “whole story” is as much an interpretive and political act as reading a good paragraph with a jeweler’s loop. 

 

Which do you prefer as a reader? Must I have a preference? May I please read Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” and still crave knowing the history of his autodidacticism? 

 

What is it about postwar 20th century French intellectuals that they would splice apprehension so easily? One reason is that deconstruction’s fundamental assertions about language depend on a reified notion of the analytic process. The other? Its the oldest story of them all–a man has something to hide. 

 

I prefer “big candor” and analytic philosophy to Derridean attacks on authority. And guess what? I can do this without being bourgeois. Why? Because I believe reality is composed of the true objects of our acquaintance. I’m still a peasant.