Here; an excerpt:
I've been bumped off course by Mark C. Taylor's recent end-of-career proposal to retire the entire institution of tenure along with himself. This has caused me to think about things I would have preferred not to be thinking about, including the oeuvre and career trajectory of Mark C. Taylor himself.
My interest piqued by what struck me as his highly dishonorable proposal to dismantle the very system that had enabled him to thrive, I decided to go back and see what in the way of research this enablement had yielded. Here is a bit of what I read in Taylor's 1987 book, Altarity:
"Altarity" most closely approximates "alterity;" the difference between them is nothing more and nothing less than the difference between an e and an a. A strange, nearly foreign word in English, "alterity" (Latin, alteritatem (sic)-- being outside (sic)) means "the state of being other or different; diversity, otherness." The more common French term alterité, is the contrary of identité and specifies otherness or that which is other. "Altarity" folds into "alterity," even as "alterity" is implicated in "altarity." Though recalling the Derridean gesture of substituting an a for an e, the writing of Altarity is not a simple repetition of the translation of différence into différance. Altarity evokes dimensions of difference and aspects of otherness overlooked, excluded, or repressed by the notion of différance (xxix).
At least it can be said that Taylor seems to be having a good time. While "altarity" would not in the end make its way into the lexicon, in those optimistic days one can understand why an English-speaking deconstructionist would have supposed that there was room for a homegrown misspelled-word-that-is-not-a-word. Taylor's wordplay offers an interesting window into an earlier, in some ways more innocent and carefree period of American Derrideanism, when the style of it had not yet become the butt of so much ridicule, and its exponents were free to play in ways that today they would likely try to avoid for fear of serving up more inadvertent self-parody to their opponents....
I am personally very sympathetic to the analysis of Chomsky and others, for whom a certain variety of philosophical obscurantism results not just from sloppiness or from lack of intellectual rigor, but is indeed an intrinsic part of its proponents' strategy for protecting their racket. The usual line of criticism approaches the phenomenon of French obscurantism with the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy (a measure by which it is doomed in advance), when what is in fact needed is sociology. It has often struck me that much American 'continental' philosophy depends on a total ignorance of the social milieu of the Parisian professoriat, and on a consequent inability to detect that what looks like the difficult expression of difficult ideas in writing is in fact just rarefied sociolect. Now sociolect, whether among carnies or professors, helps a group to cohere, and this helps it to survive. For Parisian professors as for speakers of carnie cant, all the better if outsiders are unable to understand....
(For those keeping track, this is an actual ad hominem.)
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