Word-Fetish
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| Jacques Derrida, author of Of Grammatology, seminal text of Deconstructionism |
On where her ideas come from:
At the same time that I seem to be a word fanatic—I’m highly verbal as you can see—still, I believe that all my deepest ideas, my most original thinking is coming from a level beneath the level of words. What I’m doing is simply translating into words my actual sensory impressions…
This is your id talking...
Oh, the id, yes—but the language of the body—it’s like Freud’s idea of polymorphous perversity.
On French post-structuralists:
Parasites! Parasites!
They slap abstractions on top of experience. We do not need Paris to explain an American and North American phenomenon! Oh please! They’re all poseurs. I’m gonna drive them into the sea…
I feel that my entire generation of the ’60s—the generation most influenced by pop culture—did not go on in the graduate schools. And what you had were these ’50s people, obsessed with words, who fell completely under the sway of the school of Saussure. They need Derrida to explode their own word-fetishism. Well, we don’t need that, okay. We who grew up listening to Jimi Hendrix and watching Antonioni and so on, we do not need Derrida.
The most hilarious thing now: the new Foucault biography. It’s hilarious “how Foucault went to California, and had LSD on the edge of a cliff, and went to the S&M bars in San Francisco, and [gasp!] isn’t he open? Isn’t he wonderful?” Well this just proves my point, okay. The American 1960s had it all, and those people in France, they had to come to us–on their knees.
Camille Paglia
(November 1992)
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