Jacques Derrida has never been my favorite. I've tried, but the (French) postmodern philosophers just don't resonate with me... ( )

We are still far from determining the essence of forgetting. Precisely there where forgetting reveals itself to us in its full extent are we still only too vulnerable to the danger of understanding forgetting as but a human fact.

It was exciting to read Spurs over the weekend, the opening interval of the World Cup. Apparently Derrida and Jean Genet used to attend club matches in France together. I marvel at what that could have involved: the thunk of the ball, the deferred penetration of the castrated goal and, well, all those penises. Spurs sets a risible tone. The introduction as overture plays with the meanings of coup and tympana: the search as drumbeats, the forceful pounding an alert as well as an erotic culmination. Derrida arrives on stage to extend the prose proem, albeit one in a nonlinear fashion, accepting Nietzsche's assertion that Truth is a woman (from the opening aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil) he speaks of character and seduction. The word for Spur is etymologically similar to Style. Style and stylus refer to a pointed intrusion, a jabbing, almost like the ship splitting the waters. This carnival cruise continues revealing a missing umbrella which prompts Derrida to conclude that neither Nietzsche's thought nor his texts were or are centralized. An interrogation of Heidegger's Nietzsche follows, one with Derrida sight reading from Heidegger's text while staring at his own upraised thumb instead of ponder Nietzsche himself. This is a bit maddening but a lot of laughs as well. ( )

Spurs (Eperons in the original French) is Derrida's treatment of Nietzsche's styles, which is to say his stylus, which is rather his phallus, approached through its apparent complement, Nietzsche's representation of "woman." Nietzsche is justifiably famous for both the seeming lucidity of his prose and the archness of his wordplay; Derrida is justly notorious for the opacity of his prose and the profundity of his wordplay. (The hieratically arcane Pierre Klossowski also deserves some mention, in consequence of Derrida's reliance on his translations of Nietzsche.) This combination cannot but awesomely challenge the stoutest of translators, and my hat is off to Barbara Harlow for even attempting the English contents of this volume. Still, as if in admission of the practical impossibility of a translator doing full justice to the text, the original French is reproduced here in parallel.

An introduction is furnished by Stefano Agosti, who insists that "If one is going to speak of Derrida's 'text', one can, finally, but re-state it, only prolong it" (25). Accordingly, Agosti tries to extend and outdo Derrida's verbal convolutions, to the point where the English translation (I cannot vouch for the French) becomes a nearly unreadable blow to the head. (The lexical touchstone of Agosti's introduction is the coup.)

Despite the elegance of the design, with its tallish page dimensions and enigmatic drawings by Francois Loubrieu, I fault this edition severely for its typography. In the English text (the French seems better managed) there are routine substitutions of em dashes for hyphens, hyphens for en dashes, and so forth. Especially in the context of Derrida's inventive vocabulary and his sometimes halting, digressive presentation, these confusions of punctuation are unkindnesses to the reader. Likewise, the use in both the French and the English translation of French double-angle quote marks, and only French double-angle quote marks, creates serious hazards of reading. Spurs often finds Derrida quoting Nietzsche quoting another -- even if this last is merely scare quotes -- and these nested quotes quickly become entangled, so that the compounded intertext sometimes requires a diligent reader to go back to the start of the paragraph and count the marks inward to the verbiage at stake. This last process is hardly assisted by the short lines, the lack of either indentations or line spacing at the paragraph breaks, and the absence of full justification. (The text is merely left-justified.) And parentheses are an instrument of abuse similar to the quotation marks.

But intellectual frustration is in many ways the goal of the book. Ultimately, Spurs is concerned with the undecidability of signification and the ways in which texts undergo their loss of contexts. These themes are implicitly demonstrated throughout, becoming gradually more overt, and fully explicit only in the penultimate section on "Abysses of truth" and a sort of coda: " 'I have forgotten my umbrella'." At the last, Derrida insists that his own writing (like Nietzsche's) is "indecipherable ... cryptic and parodying" (137). The disingenuous denial of the anamnesis of the umbrella is a failure to forget the phallus, an exposure of the simultaneous ubiquity and absence of sexual difference. Read it if you must.

Derrida argues that an examination of style in Nietzsche, specifically his style(s) concerning the trope or metaphor of woman, reveals an understanding of truth. This conception of truth (on the part of Nietzsche, and/or of Derrida) is not fixed but by design a restless dynamic (or "undecidability" [105]) between various profferred accounts, and Derrida explores several positions the concept of woman assumes in Nietzsche's writings. "The heterogeneity of the text ... mark[s] the essential limit of such a codification [of woman, of truth]." [95]

That said, I do not conclude that Derrida claims there is no truth. Rather, he seems to mount an epistemological rather than an ontological argument: truth is undecidable, not non-existant. Note to claim decisively there is no truth, is equally undecidable. So Derrida makes no ultimate claim as to truth's Being, concluding only that to seek it, is to discover its undecidability. I take this to be the epistemological stance within anti-foundationalism, as opposed to the ontological stance (often leveled as an accusation against anti-foundationalists by critics, and just as often unjustly).

The 'spur' of the title is a promontory or prow, an extension which meets an adversary in advance of the main body. "Thus the style would seem to advance in the manner of a spur of sorts (eperon). Like the prow, for example of a sailing vessel, its rostrum, the projection of the ship which surges ahead to meet the sea's attack and cleave its hostile surface." [39]

(The trope) Woman is used by Nietzsche (argues Derrida) to indicate power over distance, something which works precisely because it is never fully engaged. "On the one hand ... Nietzsche revives that barely allegorical figure (of woman) in his own interest. For him, truth is like a woman." [51] Then, "But, on the other hand, the credulous and dogmatic philosopher who believes in the truth that is woman, who believes in truth just as he believes in woman, this philosopher has understood nothing." [53] And finally: "Woman, inasmuch as truth, is scepticism and veiling dissimulation. This is what must be conceivable." [57]

Later Derrida links the above investigation with the idea of truth as propriation, and suggests that the link to propriation (property) is a limit to the detriment of our understanding of truth. And what would truth look like, were it not to operate like an "appropriating" force? Derrida suggest this would be a productive line of enquiry.

I am left, incidentally, with the impression that Nietzsche is all too easily read as misanthrope or chauvenist, an impression initially developed after reading Nietzsche first-hand.

Derrida notes [37] that deconstruction is an affirmative interpretation, and his lecture here builds upon work from the past two years. Interesting: I've most often heard of deconstruction as an undermining enterprise, and the term itself seems to suggest this. I'm sure Derrida is playing with this very sense when making the statement.

Whether due to an ineffective translation, or the fact it presumes a familiarity with Derrida's lecture that I cannot claim, the introduction by Stefano Agosti was useless to me. I skipped it after a few pages and read the lecture itself with much greater interest and reward.

Loubrieu's line drawings are utterly impenetrable, though I made little effort to link them to the text or engage them on their own. Later. ( )