3 ms·
As far as influence on contemporary progressivist ideologies, Derrida's impact is rather minimal, likely owing to how difficult reading him is. The historian Mi
by imbnwa 6y ago
As far as influence on contemporary progressivist ideologies, Derrida's impact is rather minimal, likely owing to how difficult reading him is. The historian Michel Foucault is orders of magnitude more influential on American humanities departments and modern progressivist ideologies.
Most of the major American writers in the 80s, 90s, 00s, like Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, et al, are big readers of Foucault and the intense use of the word "normalize" you see amongst Left-leaning youth nowadays bears a direct lineage from Foucault as a technical term in his work.
Of course, the relationship of an author to his readers is never fidelitous, likely owning to physics, so reading Foucault, then his readers, then modern popular ideologies will always bear striking differences.
- dopidopHN 6y agoFun fact: My first time reading Derrida or Guattari was in a US philo book club. In english. I'm French. I read the books in my mothers tongue of course. But it was really interesting to see how the pedantic translation gets in the way. I'm not the only one the 'teacher' of that group speaks decent french and was using me a lot to 'demistify' some fancy translation. "Does the sentence sound contrived in french? because it's hard to follow in English" It's interesting, I have only the minimal French background in philosophie, it's mandatory to take 2 years in high-school. But I was less lost than some US folks with more comprensive training in that field. ( I did read some Guattari in high school, but nothing comprenhensive )
- ducharmdev 6y agoI would be very curious about your perspective myself if I were in that book club! It's interesting that you say the translation got in the way of understanding the text; I can see how the literary quality of this type of philosophy would not do well with one-to-one translations.