Given the long and deplorable influence of German on American scholarly prose, this inspires only Schadenfreude.
I'm not singling out the Germans, mind you. I smirk also when the French complain of American modes of thought polluting their schools: when municipal bureaucrats let contracts not for demolition but for deconstruction, I say that we have injuries to avenge.
'deconstruction' in the French theory was only use by Derrida as a mean to critique a literary work.
What it means is that you only judge the works by itself. You should not judge it by the standards of the time you read it, nor by the standard of the time it was written, nor by its author life. You judge it by its internal contradictions, its hypocrisy. Your external knowledge should have no impact on how you judge the quality of literary works. How to do that? You find contradictions, and that's what deconstruction is, a mean to find internal contradictions.
How deconstruction is pollution in your mind? Please, tell me.
I'll tell you what happened. People don't read, they parrot idiotic beliefs they heard/read from other idiots who didn't grasp it in the first place, in order to singe knowledge or competency they don't have. It's American scholars who used deconstruction to mean something other than Derrida's definition, and north American idiots who conflated the two, then podcasted their beliefs without reading the man once, and expended their idiocy to other, gullible people who can't read themselves (not their fault, when you work a straining job I understand reading Derrida isn't your priority).
I did not say that deconstruction was pollution. I do think that many of a generation of American scholars found it hard to write or think other than in terms worked out in Paris between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s.
I used the word "polluting" in referring to American thought as influencing French, and that perhaps was a little strong. What I had in mind is mentioned for example in https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59584125.
yeah, sorry, i was talking about the "injuries to avenge".
> I do think that many of a generation of American scholars found it hard to write or think other than in terms worked out in Paris between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s.
None of the american scholars are postmodern, i'm pretty sure postmodernism died with the first Gulf war, or at least post 9-11 in France, on account on Baudrillard's book. It wasn't even really present in the US because in the US, Habermas and the Frankfurt school were way, way more popular than postmodernism, which was seen as unintelligible and way to complicated. Habermas wrote a virulent critique of postmodernism in "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity", and that buried Foucault, Lyotard and a bit of Baudrillard in the US.
The fact that idiots who fake their knowledge in north America say that Postmodernism and Frankfurt school Critical theory are the same when they criticize each other so much the best arguments against PM is from Habermas and one of the only common point between all postmodern authors were their rejection of Hegel's dialectic and metanarratives (yeah, when said like this you might think Nietzsche was the first postmodern author) is fun. It is also really postmodern though.
What really grind my gears is that the same type of people who argue against "postmodernism" (that they don't understand) seems to understand how politics are linked with science and authority through at least the language (in my country, the "masks are useless, don't create shortage for nurses"/"masks are usefull, everybody should wear one" was a plain example of that). Which is _exactly_ what Lyotard describe in "the postmodern condition". They _totally_ agree with the single most postmodern book, they just don't know it. Which is fine. What is not fine is holding this opinion on science and politics then criticizing postmodernism for stuff it's not, or just broadly without explaining why. It shows that those shitheads don't know what they are talking about, they either didn't understand, or didn't read (i'm quite certain it's the second). The issue is when gullible, uninformed people believe them. Which was fine when it was americans, but now some French people believe it too and not only i have to fight those misconceptions online, i have to explain to people IRL how gullible they are and how idiotic their favorite anglo podcaster is.
I'll also link something i have in my pockets, because _I want_ people to understand how brilliant and ahead of their time Lyotard and Baudrillard were (and talking about them as if they "injured" anything is nonsense). It's a 5-10 minute read, in english, and probably the best, shortest resource ever to understand postmodernism (it's kind of inaccurate though, but i don't want to nitpick when it's a 100 times better than what you read elsewhere):
I'm not singling out the Germans, mind you. I smirk also when the French complain of American modes of thought polluting their schools: when municipal bureaucrats let contracts not for demolition but for deconstruction, I say that we have injuries to avenge.