Jay Miller

This chapter contrasts Derrida's strategies of “deconstruction” with Paul de Man's. It shows how each characteristically puts an essay together to make it performatively effective. The author's primary concern is to understand better Derrida's rhetorical strategies in his essays by contrasting them with de Man's. He begins the comparison with a description of de Man's essay. Unlike de Man's essay, Derrida's “Faith and Knowledge” does not end in a climactic unforeseen concluding formulation. It just sort of stops, without by any means having exhausted the energy of repetition with a difference, or “iterability,” that has generated section after section, followed by a short unnumbered coda in italics and parentheses. The author concludes that the juxtaposition of an essay by de Man and an essay by Derrida demonstrates their radical differences in rhetorical strategy.

J. Hillis Miller (1928–2021) was one of the most prominent figures in literary criticism and theory. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University, he taught at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University and the University of California at Irvine. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 2002. Miller was president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1986 and contributed significantly to professional academic institutions and organizations throughout his career. As an important representative of the Yale School, he had close relationships with Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom. Dr. Ning Yizhong did postdoctoral research under his supervision at UCI from 1997 to 1998. This is part of his interviews with Professor Miller during that time. In this interview, Miller talks about the Yale School in general, and Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Harold Bloom in particular. 1.

Traditional Chinese philosophy, if engaged at all, is often regarded as an object of antiquated curiosity and dismissed as unimportant in the current age of globalization. Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars, this book, however, challenges this judgement and offers an in-depth study of pre-modern Chinese philosophy from an interdisciplinary perspective. Exploring the relevance of traditional Chinese philosophy for the global age, it takes a comparative approach, analysing ancient Chinese philosophy in its relation to Western ideas and contemporary postmodernist theories. The conversation extends over a broad spectrum of philosophical areas and themes, ranging from metaphysics, hermeneutics, political theory, religion and aesthetics to specific philosophical schools including Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. By engaging many time-honoured philosophical issues from a comparative perspective, this book bridges the gap between Eastern and Western thought and emphasises the need for a newly fortified global humanism and a deeper appreciation of different philosophical and religious values in an age gripped by large-scale crises. Arguing that traditional Chinese philosophy has immediate relevance to the many challenges of modern life, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Asian Philosophy and Asian Studies in general.

This essay attempts to ‘read’ the first page of Jacques Derrida's Glas, while at the same time reporting as best I can what actually goes on when I make this effort of reading. I try to exemplify in detail my claim that what goes on in reading is much stranger and more complex that one might think. An intricate series of events took place when I first received Glas in the mail and opened it, reading first the single-sheet insert and then looking at the cover, the title page, and, finally, the first page of the text proper. In my case, at least, in addition to trying to make sense of the words on the page, all sorts of somatic and affective responses were involved, as well as a constant unsuccessful attempt to create a coherent mental image based not only on the way the words are arranged on the page, but also on the bewildering complexity of what the words say.

My topic is authenticity in or perhaps as painting, not the authenticity of paintings; I know next to nothing about the problem of verifying claims of authorship. I am interested in another kind of genuineness and fraudulence, the kind at issue when we say of a person that he or she is false, not genuine, inauthentic, lacks integrity, and, especially when we say he or she is playing to the crowd, playing for effect, or is a poseur. These are not quite moral distinctions (no one has a duty to be authentic), but they are robustly normative appraisals, applicable even when such falseness is not a case of straight hypocrisy but of lack of self-knowledge or of self-deceit. (A person can be quite sincere and not realize the extent of her submission to the other’s expectations and demands.) This sort of appraisal also has a long history in post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquely modern forms of social dependence, and they are prominent worries in the modern novel.

Leitch speaks of his procedure with my work as employing an "abrupt asyndetic format" and as being "a metonymic montage in which themes and citations are playfully and copiously combined." One form of this playfulness is the panoply of figures he uses to describe me and my criticism. The need to use figures for this is interesting, as is their incoherence, though the figures can be shown to fall into a rough antithetical pattern. At one moment the deconstructive critic is a fairy godmother able to turn the pumpkin of the Western tradition into a phantasmal coach. He is a magician or wizard who shows that things are not what they have seemed with the great texts of our tradition or who turns them into something other than what they have seemed solidly to be, pragmatic pumpkins, unequivocally there. At the next moment the deconstructer is a disco dancer, moving sideways in the "lateral dance of interpretation" . The more or less benign fairy godmother and dancer then turns into a "nihilistic magician - who dances demonically upon the broken and scattered fragments of the Western tradition." He becomes a ferocious shaman, "Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come/Into the desolation of reality" . He is "a bull-deconstructer loose in the china shop of Western tradition" . In the next moment the bull metamorphoses into a lamb, as Leitch realizes the conservative aspects of deconstruction, the way it claims to be rescuing and preserving aspects of our culture which have always been there, both in literary and philosophical works and in the techniques of interpreting them. The same point is made more sharply and critically by William E. Cain in another recent essay on my work . In the final paragraph of his essay, Leitch has fun inventing permutations of an image of sand in the salad from one of my essays. Will deconstruction sandblast the whole shebang, or will the alien grain of sand turn into a pearl of price? J. Hillis Miller is Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English at Yale. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line" and "The Critic as Host"