Derrida part quoi?

This post over at Levi's talks about something close to my heart so I thought I'd repost my comment here.

I’m writing about this very passage right now. As a lit crit guy you would expect me to have a militancy about the supposed universality of Derrida’s claim. But actually, respect to Adam, as a lit crit guy I always read this passage as much LESS than that.

Remember how D loves to cleave close to the text he’s analyzing–why he appeals to lit crit close readers in the first place. I (and apparently Spivak, who offers a very different translation of the sentence in question) always thought (ie BEFORE converting to OOO) that D was ONLY saying, “Given the kind of closed system textuality that Rousseau prescribes, there is NO OUTSIDE-TEXT.”

That is, *Rousseau can’t go around making claims about nature, not because there is nothing out there, but because the way he models thinking, he sets textuality up as a black hole.

It’s PRECISELY the kind of generalization about reality that D’s fans (and critics) think he’s making that is at issue. This kind of sweeping statement is what becomes a black hole.

When I’m feeling charitable towards D I imagine he thinks that by imploding this sort of generalization he is leaving non-textual objects intact.

In fact then, D is claiming that texts are OBJECTS. They can only have *vicarious relations with non-texts.

Which is why I argue in EwN that there are coral reefs and bunnies, but NO NATURE.

(Then I am accused of being a nihilist by the eco beautiful souls, and receive threats of having bacon fat poured over my head, literally. Wash rinse repeat.)

When I formulated this interpretation

1) 9.9 out of 10 Derrideans thought exactly what Levi is arguing they thought.
2) I was writing a Deleuzian diss. on food and for sure held that food was REAL.

Addendum: notice the rather rigorous difference between my argument and what some have claimed on Levi's blog, that D is OOO avant la lettre. Nothing could be further from the truth.

D ABSTAINED from ontology for the simple reason that he thought it tainted by the generalization-disease I note above. Unfortunately this defaults to various forms of antirealism, as noted by Levi.

For me, Derrida's is a sin of OMISSION.