Johann Hari

George Best should not have died in hospital. He should have died in prison. The “football legend” first beat his wife, Alex Best, on her 25th birthday, when he punched her to the floor and kicked her six times in the chest and face. She ran to the police, but she was persuaded by George’s friends not to press charges. Like many battered wives, she said at the time, “I know he loves me. He has an illness. He’s an alcoholic. He can’t control it.” This was just the kick-off for a long campaign of domestic violence – the equivalent of Manchester United playing Grimsby Town.

The beatings continued, with Alex periodically running away and being lulled back. He smashed her car windows and threw a brick through the window of their living room. He gave her a broken lip and a swollen face on Christmas Day 2003. “So what if she’s in hospital? It’s the best place for her,” he snapped the next day at reporters. In the periods when she fled to her family, he would spew abuse at her via reporters. “She was just a waitress on a plane when I met her. She had nothing, she was nothing, before me,” he told one. In a bizarre act of projection, he started to accuse her of having a secret drink problem. He even blamed her for his alcoholic impotence, saying he “couldn’t perform his duties” with her after she “tormented him”. The bitch, in short, deserved it.

When Paul Gasgcoine was convicted of thumping, head butting and hospitalising his wife Sheryl over seven years – as well as physically abusing her children – “Bestie” leapt to his defence. “We all give the wife a good slap. I know I do,” he said. Best’s self-pitying bleating revealed he had no understanding that a terrified woman would not respond to his sexual advances. “Alex didn’t want me in bed, that was the worst thing,” he told an interviewer. “Night after night, I would go to bed, she would always be three hours behind me. She’d vacuum. She’d iron clothes. We had a cleaner, for goodness’ sake, but she’d be cleaning into the small hours. She couldn’t bear me to touch her,” he said, mystified.

So why is Britain poised to fall silent this week in memory of a violent, vicious thug? Would we do the same for, say, a paedophile? Just a few days after it was revealed that 30 percent of Brits believe rape victims are partly or wholly responsible for being attacked, it seems kicking your wife is still a second-rate crime, easily trumped by a talent for kicking a ball. All through his life, other people normalised Best’s beatings. His cleaner Susie Leedham said Alex “humiliated him” and George “bought her a necklace but got nothing in return.” One columnist said Alex had “not done badly out of him”, and claimed Best and Gazza’s only flaw was that “they are suckers for romance.” Even as he is lowered into the ground, the fawning obituarists – who say “his drinking never harmed anybody but himself” and praise his “greatness” – are making domestic violence seem a the trivial, trifling flaw in an otherwise great man.

No. Dear God, no. As I marked the 40th anniversary of the crime against humanity that is the Sound of Music with a sad, mournful silence, the news came. Can it be true? Would Andrew Lloyd Webber really open a new production of this Holocaust-sing-song in the West End next year, and hold Pop Idol auditions to discover a new poisoned midget to play Gretl and the rest of the Von Tapp brats? Would he really dredge from the abyss a few of my least favourite things?

Christopher Plummer - the man condemned to history as Captain Von Trapp – called the movie The Sound of Mucus, and said working with Julie Andrews was “like being hit over the head with a huge Valentine’s Day card every day.” He was too generous. This is a film so sickly, so laden with treacle, that diabetics should be banned from watching it for the sake of their health. Every time my ex-boyfriend surrendered to the screeching gay stereotype and hosted a singalong Sound of Music party – why not hold it in a bloody closet? – my teeth would ache and turn brown in my mouth. I would pine for the ending to somehow, someway change so the Nazis could finally capture those insufferable singing midgets and make sure they had sung ‘Goodbye, Farwell, Auf Weidersehn, Goodnight’ for the last time.

It was the small details that would enrage me first. Is Lisl the most improbable sixteen year-old since Olivia Newton John first warbled about those summer nights? Why are the children’s favourite things – “brown paper packages tied up with string” or “raindrops on roses” – so rubbish? Why would Captain Von Trapp choose Fraulein Maria – a pillar of human valium wearing old curtains – over the classy, cruel Baroness, clearly one of the great shags of mid-twentieth century Austria?

But then the bigger picture provokes me. This is a movie that helped reinvent the image of Austria after the war as a land that greeted the Nazis with sad screechings of Eidelweiss and enraged rippings of the Nazi flag. In reality, the hills were alive with the sound of Austrians herding the Jews into deathcamps. The Catholic Church was not run by benign humanitarian nuns and cheeky Mother Superiors; their leader in the Vatican was busy earning his title as “Hitler’s Pope.” Believe me, I have Austrian relatives, and I have confidence that, while the Germans have become benign, repentant pacifists, Austrians have not confronted their fascist past – remember Jorg Haider? – and in some small, irrational way, I blame Julie Andrews and her bogus retelling of the Holocaust.

Worse still, the Sound of Music cheapens one of my genuinely favourite things: the musical. It provides a glib, brain-dead template for a thousand sub-Hammersteins to imitate, while just a few years later Stephen Sondheim would show that it can be just as profound and enriching as any other art-form. You wouldn’t know it from those malign imps howling “Doe Rae Me” for what seems like several ice ages.

Please, Andrew Lloyd Webber, I beg you: keep your Von Trapp shut.

I am a signed-up member of Amnesty International, but I have come to the conclusion that the death penalty should be brought back for one crime and one crime only: leaving your mobile phone on in the theatre. Richard Griffiths was far too soft when, last Saturday, he stopped his performance in ‘Heroes’ and told a woman whose phone had rung three times to get out. He should have left her swinging by her snapped neck from the rafters of the Wyndhams Theatre.

About five years ago I saw an amazing production of Uncle Vanya at the Young Vic, performed in an intimate in-the-round space. While Linus Roache was emoting, an obese American tourist in front of me actually answered his phone and said, “Hey! I’m in London, seeing this really boring play,” he declared, “how are you?” We were all so stunned we said nothing, until he began to eat a bag of crisps as his conversation continued.

If Londoners stop short of dealing with this by the rope, surely we can copy New York and introduce an on-the-spot £50 fine for letting your phone ring during a live performance?

Let me tell you a hilarious joke. The other day, I saw an incontinent old woman in a supermarket, and she pissed herself. OK, here's another. I saw a man get up out of his wheelchair, and he was so mentally disabled he just walked into a wall. Wait, I know this might kill you but there's one more. I saw a teenage single mum who was wearing a shell-suit and she was so thick she barely knew her own name. And she had three children. Did I mention she was thick? And fat? And spotty? Did I say she lived on benefits?

Welcome to the spleen-rupturing hilarity of Little Britain. This is a golden age of British TV comedy - The Thick of It, Chris Morris, Nighty Night, Ricky Gervais, Peep Show, Peter Kay, John Sullivan, David Renwick, Coronation Street - so it is disturbing to me that this sadistic, unfunny piece of spite has captured the public imagination. Little Britain has been a vehicle for two rich kids to make themselves into multimillionaires by mocking the weakest people in Britain. Their targets are almost invariably the easiest, cheapest groups to mock: the disabled, poor, elderly, gay or fat. In one fell swoop, they have demolished protections against mocking the weak that took decades to build up.

Look at Vicky Pollard, the thieving, scrounging single mum who swaps her baby for a Westlife CD. She is a walking, smoking Richard Littlejohn column, a compendium of every prejudice ever spewed towards single parents. (No wonder Littlebrain describes the show as "brilliant" and uses Vicky as a shorthand to abuse all single mums everywhere).

A few years ago, the bilious 1990s backlash against single parents living on crumbling estates - like my sister - was slowly receding. Then Vicky was born. Matt Lucas and David Walliams used the clothes worn by poor people (Kappa, Burberry) and even the names they give their children (Destiny, Shannon, Bethany) as cheap punchlines. They unwittingly incited their armies of child fans to hunt down the Vickys in their playground.

Imagine a comedy where a British Asian wearing a sari, or naming their child Apu or Karim or Gita, was the joke and the punchline. It's (rightly) unthinkable. But abusing the white working class is rewarded with viewing figures topping 10 million. We look back on Jim Davidson blacking up as a head-scratching, imbecile black man with horror. But why is a public schoolboy dressing up as a head-scratching, imbecile single mother any better?

Walliams has tried to defend himself by saying: "These characters are fun. You want to spend time with them. You don't despise them. You're laughing with them, not at them."

Has he ever logged on to one of his own fan-sites? Listen to one typical message: "Down here in Bristol, we have an area called Southmead [one of the most deprived parts of Britain], which is absolutely packed with Vickys wearing their fluorescent track-suits. I was coming home on the bus today and, as always, there were millions sat at the back all holding their babies that they had when they were 12 and every other word was f**k this and f**k that and that's just the babies! They all have council flats and not a GCSE to their name. Do the Vickys out there not watch television, because if they do surely they would have seen Vicky on TV and thought, that's me! Do they not realise we are taking the piss out of them?"

This is one of the more publishable comments. The people who supposedly like Vicky and want to spend time with her are mysteriously silent, drowned out with people recounting how they hate the "slags" and "whores" and "idiots" who resemble her. A typical recurring theme on the Little Britain discussion boards is the hilarity of poor people wearing fake designer clothes. Here's a side-splitting thought I'd like to offer: they wear fake designer clothes because they can't afford to nip into House of Fraser to buy the real ones. They're too poor. Oh, my aching sides.

True, there were some posh characters who were also ridiculed in the first series - but they have slowly died away as Lucas and Walliams give us, the British public, what we want: an excuse to mock the vulnerable.

The surviving characters are barely any better. There's Daffyd, "the only gay in the village", who is based on one endlessly repeated comic premise: there is no prejudice against gay people in Britain any more, but shrieking gay misery-queens like Daffyd are so obsessed with being victims they obsessively see prejudice where there is none. Sweet old ladies point him towards the Local Fisting Club while he insists he is surrounded by homophobes.

The figure of Daffyd is now routinely used by anti-gay right-wingers - step forward again, Littlejohn - to ridicule people like Peter Tatchell. Why are you talking about the victims of homophobia when this is already a pro-gay paradise? What are you, the only gay in the village? I know Matt Lucas is gay (although he is still so conflicted about his sexuality he almost never discusses it publicly). And I know he is not responsible for how idiots might twist his jokes for their own agenda -- but the problem is, they didn't have to do much twisting. The show is cluttered with ugly prejudices, and they are not ancillary to the jokes: they are the joke.

Victoria Wood (a genuinely great comedian) was right to recently dub Little Britain "very misogynistic". Dozens of sketches hinge upon the ugliness of female flesh, and barely a woman is shown without the actors playing her being padded into monstrous fat-suits. It's hard to escape the conclusion this is a gay man's woman-hatred with a laughter track, a sketch-long recoil from breasts and vaginas.

Perhaps a tiny sliver of this would be forgivable if the show was actually funny, but it is as entertaining as a burning orphanage. Little Britain represents the return of catchphrase comedy, which actually trumps sarcasm as the lowest form of wit. Catchphrases are humour for people without a sense of humour: you can watch a sketch waiting for the dull, repeated phrase - "yeahbutnobutyeah", "I don't want it" - and feel like you've Got It and you are In On the Joke without any mental dexterity or understanding. (That's why it is so popular with children). The shining light of Noughties comedy is as sophisticated as the British policeman from 'Allo 'Allo, guaranteed a laugh for bleating "Good moaning".

But the blame for Little Britain lies out here in Big Britain. When the show first started, it was not the bile-fest it is today. There was a gentler, absurdist edge to the first series, but it soon became clear that the viewers preferred a comedy of jeering and sneering. The jokes curdled and became poisonous - and Walliams and Lucas were simply giving us what we want. So what does it say about us that we are a nation that pines for gags about stupid, poor people and old women pissing themselves in public?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

POSTSCRIPT: There's a critical response to this at http://drinksoakedtrotsforwar.blogspot.com/2005/11/in-defence-of-little-britain.html

and another at http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/blog/?p=822

Where are all the London songs? In New York City, it feels like every street vibrates to a remembered tune – you find yourself humming that if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere, before you turn a corner and sing a pledge that you’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Statton Island too. This city is as romantic, as beautiful, as soulful as any Greenwich Village haunt – so why haven’t we stirred songwriters in the same way?

I tried to programme my i-Pod with an impromtu ‘Best London Songs…. Ever!’ album this week, and it was embarrassingly sparse. There’s a few Blur songs from the 1990s wittering about the Westway, the Pet Shop Boys singing about West End Girls and East End Boys, a bleak dirge about the Streets of London - but only the Kinks have forced their way into my mental map of London. I have never been able to pass through Waterloo station without thinking that as long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset, I am in paradise. But outside Waterloo, I am a London boy trapped with the tunes of New York City.

Clear that diary and cancel those dates: over the next two months, the National Film Theatre is screening every movie ever made by Billy Wilder, the greatest film-maker ever to walk onto one of Hollywood's back lots. His best films are studies of the loneliness of life in a megalopolis, so there’s something strangely appropriate about watching his films in the heart of London - a city of seven million strangers all hurrying past each other in their quest for authentic human contact.

From Shirley MacLain’s suicidal lift operator in The Apartment to Gloria Swanson’s forgotten star in Sunset Boulevard to Barbra Stanwick’s demented housewife in Double Indemnity, these are films about the lurching, desperate things people do when they feel alone in a sea of people. Wilder’s world-view was smelted in early twentieth-century Vienna, a claustrophobic concentration of ideas, people and panic. London today is its successor: when we watch Wilder this month, we will be watching ourselves.

What’s wrong with Trevor Nunn? He has become addicted to cramming his slick, quick theatre productions with aggravating technical gimmicks. Last year, when he directed the trilogy of Russian plays by Tom Stoppard (or "God" as I think of him) at the National Theatre, he insisted on setting the action against a huge video-screen that provided pixely graphics: a swirling ocean, a Siberian landscape… It was more like playing Doom than watching Chekhov.

This week I checked out his production of Richard II at the Old Vic and it was just as grating. The action is punctuated with pointless video clips of the poll tax riots and an endless loop of the "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England" speech. Please – somebody track down Nunn’s Innovations catalogue and burn it.

London has a new hobby - being punched in the head. Michael Stevens is a smart, delicately beautiful 22 year-old who just graduated with a Law degree from Oxford, at weekends he enjoys “beating the fuck out of people”, he tells me this week. He’s not alone: white collar boxing clubs are jabbing and whacking all
over London, crammed with everyone from city execs to
tube drivers.

Michael is a member of the Real Fight Club, a
4000-member orgy of testosterone open to anybody aged 25 to 45 who wants to be trained to clamber into a boxing ring and punch, punch, punch. Their slogan? “Pugilism is Back.” As an effete liberal whose idea of a well hard night is to read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and try to figure out what the hell he is saying, I expect to be mystified (and a bit sickened) as I head to the ExcelCentre to see a demonstration of the club’s ‘work’.

Michael is teaching some lads to jab as he explains,
“In our culture, we pretend people don’t have violent
natures, but it’s not true. This is a way to let out
your violent instincts in a safe, controlled way. When
I’ve been boxing, my aggression is all used up. But if
I go for a while without it, I feel more tense, more
likely to snap.” Hmmm. I would prescribe Freud not
fighting, therapy not thuggery. But he steps into the
ring and, for a moment all I can hear is the sound of
panting and the insistent thwacks of a boxing glove.
The looming herd of potential recruits begins to yell,
“Level him!” and “Knock him out!” It’s as if curdled
layers of rage are constantly lying dormant, just
below their skin.

But even my cholestorol-heavy heart beats faster. I
decide to book myself a boxing lesson with CityBoxer,
a gym buried under the arches near Shadwell tube. This
isn’t smart: as my teacher, John Houston, wraps
bandages around my hands and helps me into my boxing
gloves, I explain I was the kid who straggled at the
back when teams were being picked in PE lessons.
“Johann, please step into the ring,” he says. He
teaches me to walk with my back foot, to move
sideways, to keep my fists up and my mouth closed
(your jaw can be snapped, apparently). He is
ludicrously polite as I float like an elephant and
sting like a gnat.

But something even more horrible than the sight of me
flailing about happens: I realise I am enjoying it.
My liberal spirit is shocked to find itself stirred by
a jolt of raw, primal violence. After an hour of
pitiful punching and panting - more Toruette's than
Tyson - I walk out of the ring with my usual low-level
tetchiness melted away. Perhaps Michael - and Chuck
Palahniuk, who wrote Fight Club - are right: the
sanitising of violence from bourgeois life leaves us
with an evolutionary instinct that has nowhere left to
go. Isn’t it better for men to smash it out in the
boxing ring than by attacking their girlfriends or
bottling somebody at closing time?

Now, if only somebody can invent a form of boxing
where I get to hit somebody and they never hit back, I
might even consider entering the ring again…

Until last year, Foyles – London’s largest bookshop –
was a little chunk of Eastern bloc communism on the
Charing Cross Road. If you wanted to do something as
eccentric as buy a book, you had to wade through
incomprehensible layers of bureaucracy. First you had
to battle to find the tome, not easy in a shop with no
stock-list. Then you had to queue to get a bill. Then
you had to queue at a second counter to pay – and if
the bill was smudged, you were marched back to Till
(Gulag?) Two with a sneer.

But since its owner Christina Foyle died,
Foyles’ Berlin Wall has crumbled. Now there are
computers and one-stop tills and I even saw a staff
member smile. And, somehow, it has lost its surly
charm. Who needs another hyper-efficient Borders? I
miss the dusty palace of chaos that fell in 2004.

On Saturday afternoon I was loitering in Trafalgar
Square, trying desperately to avoid the winged vermin
as I waited for an American friend who insisted on
meeting against a photogenic backdrop. It was the
first chance I have had to dreamily admire the
pedestrianisation of the end facing the National
Gallery. The clean, clear pavements and lolling
Londonders there have changed the square from being a
glorified traffic island to a classy European city
centre.

Isn’t it time to extend the pedestrianisation even
further? The howling, polluting car lobby said the
changes in Trafalgar Square would cause logjams
throughout central London – but nothing of the sort
has happened. My fantasy is to see the
pedestrianisation of the central square mile of the
West End, reclaiming everything from Piccadilly Circus
down to Parliament Square for the sixty percent of
Londonders like me who don’t own cars. How about it,
Ken?

London’s living rooms are vibrating once again to the high-pitched squeal, “Remember you’re a Mitchell!” Yes, Barbara Windsor wiggled her way back to Albert Square this week, and yet again the press is fawning over “everybody’s favourite Eastender” and “a working class hero.” But I don’t think a lover and defender of
a gang of torturing, slashing thugs is heroic, no matter how many times her bra pings off into Sid James’ face.

The Krays belong to a strange lost slice of London’s history. When we hear about warlords in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seems impossibly foreign – armed gangs challenging the authority of the state? But the Krays brought warlordism to where I live – East London – only fifty years ago. Barbra Windsor teetered and tottered around their human rights-meltdown, offering nothing but her famous giggle, some sexual favours and a clutch of excuses.

She still describes the Krays mistily as “charming and polite”, and spews the lines used to defend fascistic tyrants everywhere: they seemed nice to me (they got her a rehearsal room for free once), they only killed Bad People, they kept crime down. Her mate and fellow Eastender Mike Reid says, “Had the Krays remained free, the London of today would be a safer place. During their reign there was no mugging.” Of course – what’s a bit of torture and butchery (not to mention abuse of underage children) if it keeps down the mugging rate?

I tested the real popularity of Babs and Reid’s theories here in the East End by heading round the corner to the Blind Beggar pub, the sweetly dingy hole where those “charming, polite” Krays tortured and shot a man in the head in what they called a “public execution.”

Most of the customers were Aussies or Asians with no memory of that time, but a few old cockneys were nestling in a corner. Jessie Glass, 62, said, “They were just gangsters, nothing more.” I offered him the standard list of excuses. Weren’t they generous with their money? “Yeah, other people’s money.” Didn’t they only hurt their own? “What about the jurors in their murder trial? The brothers threatened them, that’s why they got off. There were a lot of people terrified of the Krays who had nothing to do with crime.” Weren’t they nice to women? “What about the teenage wife Charlie Kray was so fucking horrible to she committed suicide?” And, he could have added, what about the wives and children of the men they doused in petrol and tossed matches at?

If you are hungry for real working class heroes, here’s one: the barmaid from the Blind Beggar – still living in hiding as Mrs X – who risked her life to testify against the Bruvvers. She was not prepared to wipe the memory of the Krays shooting a man in cold blood from her mind, and she risked her life for justice. Doesn’t she deserve our respect a little bit more than a screeching blamange still reminiscing happily about the days when the East End cowered infear? Here’s a new slogan for you Babs – remember you’re a Kray-lover.

It’s true: Kate Moss glamorises a hideous, hidden habit, and H&M should have shred her contract long ago. No, not her coke use – it’s ridiculous to sack her for that. It’s glamorising her gaunt, fleshless frame that does real harm. There isn’t a teenager in town who is more likely to use cocaine now it’s been up Kate’s skinny nostrils – but there are tens of thousands of girls starving themselves or ramming their fingers down their throats after being indoctrinated into believing Moss and the rest of that pack of supermodel-twiglets are "the ideal shape." The bulimics and anorexics I know are in a worse state than weekend coke users. If we were really worried about the health of impressionable people, casting off Kate Moss would be the first step in a culling of the stick-thin fashion industry.

London’s video shops are dying. There are long, lingering closing down sales at the two rental shops nearest to my flat, and the local Blockbuster is emptier every time I go there. There might even be a corpse in Comedy clutching a copy of Jurassic Park III. The decline began about five years ago, when they decided to stock mountains of copies of the latest hit or putrid sequel and flog off the back catalogue to make space for Spiderman II. When I recently tried to hire The English Patient – I had resisted a crispy Ralph Fiennes for too long – nobody had it. Everyone is shifting to online video libraries because they have those old, obscure movies you’ve always wanted, but I will miss the shiny plastic video-palaces at the bottom of the road.

Ah, the joys of the Edinburgh festival. Some peole lock here for the movie premieres, some for the wild treet performances, some for the stand-up. Not me. ight years ago, I invented a sport that can only be layed in this manic town-on-a-hill in August. It´s alled Find The Worst Show on the Fringe.

The rules are strict: the terrible, terrible theatre that wins the game cannot be ironic in any way. Its performers must be entirely, blissfully unaware of its horrors. That´s why otherwise-tempting items in the Fringe brochure - like this year´s ´Terrorist – the Musical! - are ruled out before we´ve even begun: too self-aware. No, the real winners are to be found in the obscure venues, the ones that serve as the town garbage dump or Edinburgh´s abbatoir outside festival-time. They come from painfully sincere people offering Art, Art, Art.

Okay, so it´s not David Beckham in shorts, but this journey into the theatrical abyss has given me and my thespy friends almost infinite joy. You’ll understand why if you come on a journey with me to join the audience of 2002’s ´The History of Communism (as Told to the Mentally Ill)’, performed by the People´s Theatre of Moldovia. Entirely in Moldovian. With no subtitles. The show opens with a gaggle of actors - clad only in straight-jackets - swarming onto the stage and babbling incessantly. One of them spits at the audience; another slips out of her straight jacket and begins to throw paper aeroplanes directly at your face and mine. One woman is poked in the eye and walks out.

At this, the cast falls silent. They begin to re enact the purges and gulags - entirely through the medium of dance. This lasts two hours in real-time, but to me it felt somewhat longer than the 70 years it took the non-theatrical Soviet Union to collapse. By the end, everybody is dressed as Stalin and cackling wildly, before charging out on the Edinburgh streets and disappearing up an alley.

This might sound like a sure-fire winner. Oh, how naïve you are. This game has many contenders; that year, it was trumped by a theatrical Hiroshima called ´Molly Bloom´, a musical adaptation of James Joyce´s Ulysees. It was a one-woman show - and what a woman.

As the lights fade up on a venue slightly larger than my oven, an Italian woman in a pornographically low-cut top explains that ¨Eye haaave never pearform-ed in Eeenglish before, plees bear weeth me.¨

She then snaps her fingers. The lights change and she crouches over a bucket, yelling "Woosh! Woosh!" As she begins to sing, it becomes clear she is supposed to be miscarrying. This is conveyed through a song entitled ´The Rap of Spunk´, and in it she explains how she came to this state. I cannot print the sexual details here - I´m not sure I could print them anywhere, because her Dublin accent bears more resemblance to Klingon than English - but suffice to say the song contains the line, "Have you ever seen such a thing in your life/ A man milking his wife?"

Alas, if you commit to the quest for gloriously, stupidly dire shows like this, you have to endure a lot of plays that are just plain dull. In 2001, a friend and I went (along with a grand total of two other people) to a show called ‘Where is Father?’, an insufferably long melodrama in which a family gather around the bed of their dying patriarch and weep. After two hours of this – played out in a relentlessly naturalistic style – something strange happened. The cast get up and walk off the stage, including the patriarch who is supposed to be dead. They then return to the stage and stand, staring at the audience. I perked up, scribbling the word “Brechtian” in my notebook. Only after a whole minute of a blinking cast standing stiffly at the center of the stage did it suddenly hit me: this was the curtain-call, and we had all been so bored we simply hadn’t noticed.

But for every ten coma-inducing shows like this, there is a glistening, glorious piece of crap. Two years ago, there was ´Graham - The World´s Fastest Blind Man", Eastleigh Youth Theatre´s attempt (oh yes, a musical) to tell "the amazing true life story of World Champion Blind Athlete Graham Salmon MBE". In 1999, there was ´Crucifixion´, a show about Jesus Christ being detained in Auschwitz. It was acted by three men: one was strapped into a whirling torture device that spun him round at high speed throughout the show until he vomited. The other two would hit him periodically with foam maces, yelling, ¨Repent, son of God! Repent!"

And this year? So many choices... Do I want to see fringe favourite Shakti offering a "unique
interpretation of Anne of Green Gables through the medium of dance"? Yes please. Do I want to check out ‘The Bright Side of Alzheimers’, a totally straight-faced show about, well, the bright side of Alzheimer’s? Oh yes. But my mouth only truly waters when I read - obsessively and repeatedly - the Fringe Brochure blurb for a show called "Me, Not I”. It reads simply: "Theatre at its purest! No script, only unique, repetitive everyday actions. An absolute Zen-like experience: actors as living instruments of the Orchestra - noises become music in the dramatic harmony of performed reality. Direct from Moscow."

It opens at the Sweet Ego venue on the 19th. I´ll see you all on the front row: this one could go Olympic.

At the turn of the century, the last rites were delivered over the yellowing flesh of political comedy. Bill Hicks was gone, Spitting Image’s puppets were melted into candles, and even Ben Elton’s rabid rants about The Thatch rang hollow now he was raking in millions writing lyrics to the tunes of uber-Tory Andrew Lloyd-Webber. The genre flat-lined throughout the noughties. The Edinburgh Fringe rocked – if at all – with strictly post-political laughter.

But a funny thing crawled from the wreckage of the London massacres. A very funny thing, in fact: the resurrection of political comedy. Browsing through the fringe brochure from London, I realised the Edinburgh Festival is now – for the first time in decades – soaked, saturated and sodden with politics. You want gags about suicide-murders? Abu Graib? Live8? The Daily Mail? The IMF and macroeconomics? The CIA’s toppling of Iranian PM Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953? The consequences for industrial society of hitting peak oil production? The grandchildren of Lenny Bruce are providing all this and more this summer.

I decided to bellyflop into this hypermarket of political comment for a long weekend to ask: can our political comedians (and their armies of hecklers) reveal something about Britain that gets lost in the rivers of newsprint and aeons of News24?

As I stumble towards my seat for Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver’s stand-up show at the Pleasance – my first of twenty-three gigs – a voice-over announces, “This show will operate on a First-Past-The-Post basis. You only need to laugh at thirty-five percent of our jokes for this show to be declared a raging success.” The audience cheers. My political nerd’s heart soars. Can it be – comedy about electoral reform?

Zaltzman walks onto the stage, a man as pale as a veal calf and with half a head of curly ginger hair. He is followed by Oliver, who has scruffy trainers and a sweet smile. They open by asking who voted in the general election. There is a grudging raising of hands. Then they ask who didn’t, and there is another smattering of hands. Oliver looks puzzled. “About forty percent of you couldn’t be bothered to vote about whether you voted. That’s taking apathy to an almost admirable level.” Zaltzman explains that talk about floating voters is a bit misleading – “It doesn’t mention they are floating face-down on a reservoir of disillusionment.” At times, he says, it seems general elections are “only about how loudly you get to shout the word ‘bastard!’ at your TV screen.” This captures the low, grief-stricken mood among most liberal people better than anyone else I’ve heard.

And the show has dagger-sharp political points to make. Zaltzman suggests that we have got it the wrong way round when it comes to labelling Fair Trade products. “Surely behaving like a decent human being should be taken for granted, not some little treat, an ethical add-on. That’s why, instead, we should label all the unfair trade products. I suggest this sign.” And he holds up a silhouette of an obese businessman pissing on an emaciated African child.

They apologise that some of their material might seem flat, but they have outsourced their joke-writing to a ten year old boy in Indonesia to save cash. “Some of it’s a bit specific to his own life. He wrote us the gag: ‘What’s up with guy hitting me with a stick? What’s it all about, eh?’” Whenever a joke fails, Oliver pleads, “Have a heart! He’s only ten!” The two men are accompanied on stage by a mini-Tony Benn doll, who offers increasingly rambling and bizarre responses. “Will I ever fall in love again, Tony?” Zaltman asks. Mini-Benn snaps back, “Of course, the borders of Kuwait and Iraq were drawn by the British.”

The gig has its longeurs – a lengthy skit outlining the future of Europe through the prism of a Doom-style adventure game doesn’t work, and there’s too much neurotic reliance on props and gimmicks. I found myself wishing they had greater confidence in their ability to hold an audience for an hour without these distractions. But the wordplay is always super-smart. Zaltzman suggests invading Iran next, “to save on printing costs.” He frets that North Korea might be developing “a pensions time-bomb.” And Britain has had a “historyectomy”, they explain: if that doesn’t enter the language, it’s a crime.

And yet, and yet… I watched the show with increasing nervousness. The reason is simple: their ideas are so good, I fear they will crop up in future Tory manifestoes. Oliver suggests that asylum seekers should be cryogenically frozen on their arrival in Britain until it is safe to return them to their own countries - by firing them from an immense Humanitarian Cannon. If David Davis had been in the audience, I suspect a small lightbulb would have pinged above his head. After all, in the real, non-satirical world, the Tories fought the last election on a promise to process all asylum seekers on an island that doesn’t[ital] exist[ital]. But then Zaltzman makes me realise why the Tories will never espouse this plan: “Nobody would want the freezer in their town.”

This undertone of disgust at the British right – and the widespread ignorance of British history – runs through all the political gigs here. Chris Addison - a tall, skinny streak of human adrenaline playing at the Assembly Rooms - says, “This is a great time to be British. You sit at home and watch the news, and it will say that India is on the brink of war with Pakistan over Kashmir, Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other, Ian Paisley is refusing to let the IRA surrender – and you can say, ‘We did that.’”

But some of the most disturbing comedy in town consists simply of reading out chunks of reality. Dave Fulton, an American comic living in London, gets an easy but apt laugh when he says, “I’m sorry, I can’t write jokes about George Bush while he’s still talking for himself.” He recites some genuine Bush lines, to roars and applause: “I honoured to shake the hand of the brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein.” “Space is still a high priority for NASA.” “It isn’t pollution that is harming our atmosphere. It is the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.” Stewart Lee, in his show Nineties Comedian, reads out some of the Abu Graib trial transcripts. “The attorney for Charles Graynor, the soldier who was leading an Iraqi out a cell on a dog leash, actually said the man was “not being draggied but crawling of his own free will”. This makes me think – what defences did they consider but reject? And, more importantly, what exactly was he crawling towards? I like to this it was the Western ideal of democracy.”

By the second day, I am beginning to see patterns emerging in the comedy. Fulton delivers his act in front of two massive Stars and Stripes, and says, “I know, I know, it’s kinda funny seeing them when they aren’t burning.” Robert Newman – whose honed, densely-written anarchist act is like Noam Chomsky with a ukelele – recalls telling an American, “The rest of the world has a flag too. It’s the same as yours, but on fire.” Similarly, a thousand jokes are splattered over the idea of suicide-bombers receiving 72 virgins. Scott Capuro says, “I don’t get it. Wouldn’t they rather just have three slags?” Andre Vincent asks, “Do the female suicide bombers get 72 male virgins? How crap would that be? She would just take out one breast and the whole lot of them would be done.”

But the stars of this year’s festival are a trio of Muslim comedians, bringing us gags from the front-line against both Islamophobia and jihadism. Paul Chowdry is a handsome, cheek-boned second-generation Brit – although he adds, “When I was growing up in North London, I didn’t know what second generation meant. For years, I thought I was an extra on Star Trek.” He plays deftly with the prejudices rising against Asian-looking men: “I never used to be able to get a seat on the train. Now I get the whole carriage. Sometimes the whole network.” He nervously approaches the only other Asian guy in the audience and says: “Is that your bag?” He explains his experience of 7/7: “I was speaking to a friend on the 7th July and he was really upset, just shaking and crying for hours. So I called the police. He was Muslim, you can’t be too sure.” He is just as deft at ridiculing the clichés of an age of terror. He points to an empty row of seats, shakes his head sadly, and sighs, “They let the terrorists win.”

Omar Marzouk is an Egyptian-Danish comedian (not, this is not the start of a joke) who opens his gig at the Pleasance Dome by saying the government should help Muslims take on the suicide-bombers. “They should issue us all with fake suicide-bombs, so if one of them gets on the bus we can say, ‘Don’t worry. I got this one.’” He believes the figures showing a rise in attacks on Muslims are misleading: “It’s not that there’s more prejudice. It’s just that after the shooting, Muslims aren’t running away. They’re saying, ‘Is it a thug or is it the police? If I run, do I get shot?’ If they are grabbed by a BNP thug, they think ‘Oh! Thank god! I’m only going to get my ass kicked!’”

Both Chowdry and Marzouk use conventional racist humour – the kind Bernard Manning still spews out – to invert prejudice rather than reinforce it. Chowdry rants, “Nandos is a Portuguese chain. They come over here, they steal our jobs…” He talks about becoming so enraged by being put through to call centres in India that he decides to join the BNP. He phones to sign up and… gets put through to a call centre in India. Marzouk tells a Scottish heckler in the audience, “Sorry, you need to add vowels or I cannot understand you. I’m making the effort to speak English, you should too. Integration is a two-way street.” More provocatively, he tells the audience the (true) story of how the Danes let an Iraqi warlord escape from their prisons just before the war. “They must have figured, ‘He’s a Paki, he’ll never leave the country willingly.’” It’s a strange moment, and the mostly white audience doesn’t quite know how to react.

Both shows have their flaws. Chowdry has oceans of natural charisma and some great lines, but at times his material is stretched Karen Carpenter-thin over an hour long set. Marzouk has a tendency to offer strangely unironic, uncomic platitudes – “we all have to live together” – when in fact he has made these points much better through his gags.

But the best Muslim stand-up – and perhaps the best stand-up on the fringe – is Shazia Mirza. A tinder-dry woman from Birmingham, she lives trapped in a pincer movement between two prejudices: those of the wider society against Muslims, and those of many Muslim men against an independent, brilliant woman who earns her living by daring to stand in front of clumps of white men, unveiled and laughing. Her break-through set last year toyed with the first set of prejudices. She would introduce herself with the words, “My name is Shazia Mirza. At least, that’s what it says on my pilot’s license.” Later, she would ask, “Does my bomb look big in this?” But this year – in an even more powerful show – she delivers a long comedic howl against the way Muslim women are treated as second-class citizens, both within their own community and by many well-meaning liberals deferring to what they think of as a fixed and unchanging Muslim culture.

She explains how, as a girl, she was taught by her parents to fear and dread sex. “My mother would constantly say, ‘Don’t go out after 4pm, you will be raped.’ Do all rapists come out a 4.01pm? Do they say, ‘Oy, Ahmed, let’s get her before Countdown?’ And she would say, ‘Don’t have a parting in your hair.’ As if men go, ‘Whoar, look at the parting on that.’ I always wanted to be like my white friends, who had abortions, herpes and chlamidya. And my mother would say, ‘Wait until you are married, your husband will give you all of that.’” Miriza tells us about scores of disastrous “arranged dates”, in which educated Muslim men who have always lived in the West express their contempt for a woman who fails to show them “respect”. One man says simply, “Do you realise if we were still in Pakistan, you would be beheaded?” Another writes to her father saying, “In a lesser family, she would be killed.” But Mirza refuses to submit to this militant misogyny. “If men are the ones with no self-control, why do we have to be covered head to toe?” she demands. “Surely it’s them who should be covered up – or, better yet, chained.”

Mirza takes her audience on a tour of the sexual dysfunctions that are thrown up by her community’s conservative morality. “My dad has sex with prostitutes,” she says. “It’s okay, my mum pays. She hates sex.” She has a Turkish friend who has been told constantly that she must have her hymen intact on her wedding night, so she only has anal sex on dates. ““I’ll be a virgin on my honeymoon”, she says. Yeah, a virgin with haemorrhoids.” She was constantly being told that any hint of a nipple through a woman’s top can “bring a devout Muslim man crumbling into a state of total moral collapse.” “So,” she says, “these tough suicide-bombers can strike fear into the heart of London – so long as nobody opens a copy of the Sun newspaper.” She explains softly, “I’m terrified I’ll die a virgin. Not because I’m obsessed with sex. I’m not, I don’t think it’s that big a deal. But I don’t want to get to Paradise and have to sleep with one of the suicide-bombers.”

If I could pay for every Muslim girl in Britain to see this show – to realise they can rebel and survive – then I would.

Who would have thought, just a year ago, that the Edinburgh Fringe would become a front in the fight against jihadism? But, in a small way, it is now. One of the reasons Christianity has (thankfully) lost much of its potency in Britain is because it has been so thoroughly filleted and poached by comedians. All three Muslim stand-ups show that one of the best ways of undermine their own fundamentalists is to ridicule their preposterous superstitious delusions. Laughter is the antithesis of the turgid Puritanism of the religious fundamentalist, an acid that dissolves their self-importance.

We will know the fight against Islamic fundamentalism has been won when, one day, Chowdry, Marzouk and Mirza can bring a show called ‘The Life of Ahmed’ to the Edinburgh Fringe, ridiculing the life of the Prophet Mohammed. This year’s amazing rebirth of political comedy brings that day just a little bit closer.

NOTE TO READERS: Apologies if updates to this site or responses to e-mails are a bit tardy at the moment, I am in Venezuela working on some stories at the moment. I'll try to keep it regular!

For some reason, the magazine Cineaste has asked me to name my 25 favourite films, along with the three I think are most over-rated. No doubt I've forgotten some movies I really love, but here's the list I came up with:

Favourites:

1. Casablanca
2. Network
3. All About Eve
4. Stardust Memories
5. Harold and Maude
6. Kiss Me Deadly
7. Naked
8. Fight Club
9. Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
10. Memento
11. Threads
12. House of Cards and To Play the King (strictly, they are TV series, but – pah!)
13. Annie Hall
14. Y Tu Mama Tambien
15. Sunset Boulevard
16. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
17. La Dolce Vita
18. Six Degrees of Separation
19. The Lady From Shanghai
20. If…
21. A Streetcar Named Desire
22. September
23. Dynasty – the Reunion
24. Eternal Sunset of the Spotless Mind
25. Performance

(I nearly included Nowhere, Beaches, Psycho, The Birds, The Wizard of Oz, Persona, Krampak, Beauty and the Beast, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Velvet Goldmine, Bent, West Side Story, Total Recall and every other movie Woody Allen has ever made...)

And most over-rated...

1. Goodfellas
2. Anything else by Martin Scorcese, with the possible exceptions of Last Temptation of Christ and Gangs of New York
3. The Shining

(I nearly included Schindler's List, the King and I, Magnolia, almost all of Robert Altman's films, Il Leopardi, and anything at all by Bernardo Bertollucci)

Anyone have some suggestions for films I should have included?

It's happened; I've found my limit. Normally, in my flat we will gobble up any and every reality TV show in town. We roared as Natalie Appleton gibbered in the jungle, rocking back and forward moaning, "I touched a tree, I touched a tree ..." We purred when Big Brother 5 descended into a Balkan cess-pit. When Ricardo, the Brazilian transvestite from the Salon, was buried up to his neck in fish guts and told to eat, eat, eat them, we nearly died in ecstasy.

But - forgive me - I'm tempted to become one of those insufferable people who says, "Wait a minute. This one goes too far." Channel Five has been broadcasting a show called Make Me a Supermodel for the past fortnight. It does exactly what it says on the tin: 12 skeletons smeared with lip-gloss are competing for a modelling contract before the dead eyes of "judge" Rachel Hunter. They have to strip, pout and starve their way to the stardom - and to my astonishment, I'm not cheering them on.

Let's have a look at this show's contenders. One admits she was slashing at her own flesh with razors until three weeks ago. Another brittle, bony girl bursts into tears whenever food is mentioned, and reacted to one of her friends saying that she fancied a Big Mac by descending into a stammering, weeping rage. And the response of the judges to this bevy of borderline psychiatric cases in their late teens? "I don't really care," says Perou, a fashion photographer, with a shrug. "People get knocked back all the time."

But after a few episodes of horrified gawking, I realised that I was grateful this show exists. It unwittingly exposes the fashion industry far better than any undercover-camera job. The judges - like the industry at large - have no clue about the damage they wreak.

After inspecting the flesh, one of them wittered, "I'm really shocked - so many of them have such bad skin for their age." I was watching the show with an ex-model friend, and she spluttered, "Can't you see half of them are vomiting their guts up every morning? Of course their skin is like that."

The programme shows that the norm of female beauty promoted by the fashion world - and internalised by almost every woman in Britain - requires women to make themselves ill.

Well, you might say, there is always going to be a notion of beauty, and some people will always fail to meet it and feel lousy. That's true enough; there's no point espousing a fake egalitarianism of the flesh, where I pretend I'm as fit as Jude Law and it's only a nasty fashion industry that prevents us all from recognising it.

But it's important to understand that no particular type of beauty is programmed into our brains at birth. Your attraction to one type over another - anorexic women over normal women, say - is a complex product of advertising, culture and social conditions. The beauties of Rubens' paintings would be considered grade-A mingers today.

Beauty is an elastic concept; it is vulnerable to being hijacked by (in the 17th century) great artists, or (today) by particular industries with creepy agendas and massive marketing budgets. Men do not "naturally" fancy anorexic women; they are made to.

So the problem isn't that some people are more attractive than others. It's that the particular form of Western female beauty created and policed by a small minority of people in "trend-setting" industries today is a bizarrely unhealthy one. The people involved should not be allowed to escape their responsibility. The glossy offices of Vogue are built on the bodies of thousands of self-starved young girls. Every catwalk model walks over a tide of bulimic bile.

Interestingly, our norm for male beauty isn't nearly so bad. If I strived (in an absurd mission) to look more like Brad Pitt, I would have to work out, develop muscles and lose my swelling flab - hardly unhealthy. If my female friends strived to look like Kate Moss, they would have no choice but to starve themselves for years.

Some people believe the problem is that the fashion industry is dominated by gay male designers, who have promoted a boyish, breast-free, hipless look. Others believe that - in a time of abundant food and growing obesity - we unconsciously set up a starved ideal to limit our own abundant appetites.

I suspect there's some truth in both these claims - but they do not offer anything like a full explanation.

But until we demand change, we will continue to require sickness from women if they want to be regarded as beautiful. Here are two snapshots of the Frankenstein 'beauties' we have created: Liz Hurley eats only one meal a day, and fends off her hunger cravings by allowing herself six raisins for lunch on "special days". Mariah Carey recently said, "I feel so bad for those starving African children. I mean, I'd love to be that skinny and all, but not with all of those flies and diseases."

Do we really want Western women to pine for African emaciation - or do we want to reject this "Make Me a Supermodel" mentality?

In just one generation, the land of the stiff upper
lip has become the land of the permanent stiffie. Only
a few decades ago, Kinglsey Amis and Phillip Larkin
would lament the unavailability of porn in their
letters to each other, and share the odd dull nude
photograph. Today, a tide of bodily fluids leaks into
every e-mail inbox; nobody is more than a click away
from HARDCORE FUCK ACTION!!! and BARELY LEGAL BITCHES FREE CLICK HERE. The most-watched movie in Britain last year was not the latest Lord of the Rings or
Harry Potter flick. No; the winner by a spurt was the
stolen home movie in which former Blue Peter presenter John Leslie has sex with Abi Titmus – downloaded by six million of us. The language of internet porn – twinks, bears, bitches – can be heard in every pub, playground and post office queue.

Even the most frigid Brit can spot the sexual
differences. The mainstreaming of hardcore porn is now
splashing onto Britain’s high streets and town
centres. Vibrators are now sold in Boots, the
spiritual home of middling Middle England. The
obscenity laws lie lifeless on the statute book.
British sexual exhibitionism pokes forward from Ibiza
to the nation’s two-hundred dogging sites. (If you
don’t what dogging is, like every other sexual act on
earth it is just a google away).

Yet there is still one lingering left-over from our
Puritan past: the sudden ubiquity of porn has barely
been discussed in public. Only twenty years ago, there
was a public ruck – sparked by Clare Short – about
Page Three girls. Today, those same girls can be seen
by anyone being – to use the language of the web
–spit-roasted, gang-banged and fucked raw. Yet if your
only source of information was the press, TV shows and
Hansard, you would have no idea.

This week – with the release of a Hollywood biopic of
Alfred Kinsey, the legendary sex researcher whose
writings shocked 1950s America – is a good time to
finally realise how far we have come (and, indeed,
cum). Kinsey’s agenda was simple and brave: to
eradicate sexual shame and melt sexual taboos. His own life was littered with the victims of Judaeo-Christian sexual repressions. Kinsey’s father was a bullying, violently repressed bigot, in part because he was brutally punished for masturbating when he was an adolescent. (He railed against zip-flies as “the most depraved invention of all”, because they provided ready access to the penis.) As a scout, Kinsey himself was told that “any action which causes the sex fluid to be released” would “cause epilepsy or even death.”

He was advised, whenever he felt the urge, to sit with
his testicles in a bowl of cold water and read the
Sermon on the Mount. As a grown man and the first
serious modern student of human sexuality, Kinsey
spent his life documenting the guilt and samizdat sex
of his time. He discovered a world of married couples
who knew nothing but the missionary position; of grown women who did not know where their clitoris was, or that it even existed; of gay people who despised their own sexual urges.

But today – thanks largely to the web – we are
beginning to live in the world Kinsey sought. It’s a
place where no sexual act remains in the shadows and – as one of Kinsey’s students puts it in the film –
“fucking is nothing more than friction and harmless
fun.”

Yet the few people who have tried to discuss to this
new Age of Porn are stuck with a batch of sterile,
rote-learned positions that haven’t evolved since the
early 1970s. This triumvirate can be dubbed the
Christian Puritans, the Feminist Puritans, and the
Libertines. Leslee Unruh is the poster girl for the
Christian anti-porn Mullahs. She’s the sassy,
aggressive leader of America’s Abstinence
Clearinghouse, an evangelical group who have been
leading pickets of Kinsey across the US. “Kinsey
should be looked upon in the history books as Hitler,
as Saddam Hussein,” she explained last month, before
adding that internet porn is “turning America into
Sodom and Gomorrah.” This voice is louder and clearer
since George Bush’s “moral values” re-election, and it
has its British representatives in Melanie Phillips
and the Daily Mail.

The Feminist Puritans – still epitomized by the
dungaree-wearing radical Andrea Dworkin – recoil not
at the “filth” of porn but at its misogyny. They
describe it as “a way of sexually enslaving women,” a
system of “male truth” that is “forced on women and
wrecks their lives.” And the Libertines? They are
simply the mirror-image of the anti-porn hysterics.
From disciples of Kinsey like Gore Vidal to “pro-porn
feminists” like Camille Paglia, they unquestioningly
celebrate the rise of digital porn as a glorious
Dionysian orgy following two millennia of unnatural
Christian repression.

And that’s it. Those three shagged-out arguments
compromise our shallow response to the new global
peep-show. Yet when I look around at people who are
(like me) in their twenties, I see porn shaping us in
a thousand ways, none of which can be answered by
reading from these sagging scripts. There are advances
that would make Kinsey hard with joy. Today’s teens
and twentysomethings are probably the most sexual
literate in European history. Many use the web as a
digital Karma Sutra and suck more forms of rewarding
sexual expression from it than our grandparents could
ever have dreamed.

But I also see victims. There’s the men who describe
themselves as “chronic porn addicts” and admit the
presence of ten million fantasy women forever splayed
in the corner of their flat has warped their emotional
lives. There’s the teenage lads with wildly
unrealistic expectations that women are constantly “up
for it” and infinitely sexually pliable. And there are
girls trying to meet those swollen expectations –
girls who have internalised the norms of pornography
and try to convince themselves that they enjoy their
boyfriends’ endless requests for anal sex, sex toys
and being “shared” with his mates.

None of these changes can be understood with reference to the spent debate about whether porn is a Demon or Saviour. It’s a pointless argument: we cannot even eradicate child pornography, which is universally and rightly abhorred; how could we ever contemplate eliminating porn itself?

Instead, the discussion needs to focus now on how we
can equip ourselves for life in this new Kinseyean
age. Kinsey, like the early twentieth-century sex
reformers like George Bernard Shaw and Marie Stopes,
believed that sexual freedom would act as a balm,
soothing extreme forms of sexual activity like
prostitution, paedophilia and rape. They certainly did
not believe it would actually lead to more extreme
sexualities: Ibsen did not imagine Nora was walking
out of her Doll’s House to be fisted and face-fucked.
Yet that does seem to be the real-world effect of
growing sexual freedom. Among the straight male
friends who spoke to me for this article, the
recurring theme was that internet porn had led them to
explore more unusual and – to them – disturbing forms
of sexual expression. As one put it, “You just get
bored with a parade of ordinary-looking vaginas. After
a while, I found myself looking up things I would
never have imagined I would want to see.”

The evidence for this isn’t just anecdotal. The
psychologist Jennings Bryant has studied the effects
of massive and sustained exposure to non-violent
pornography – and found that men rapidly began to seek more and more extreme material as their exposure to porn increased. They found that “pornography can transform a male who was not previously interested in the more abusive types of pornography into one who is turned on by such material.” Some of this went in very disturbing directions: the Canadian psychologists Jacks Check and Ted Guloien have conducted an extensive study of the effect on ordinary men of sustained exposure to imagery depicting rape. They found that found that the men’s internal inhibitions against committing rape were significantly undermined, and they were more likely after seeing the imagery to trivialise or condone rape. Both of these effects have been replicated in dozens of studies. So will one the features of this new age – in addition to the welcome growth in sexual openness – be a terrible wave of increased sexual assaults?

One 17 year-old – a product of the Age – suggested to
me one way to halt this. “Young men need to be taught
from adolescence to be porn-savvy. Everybody knows
from the time they’re a child to be sceptical of the
claims of advertising, but young lads don’t know to be
sceptical about the claims involved in porn. My first
experience of women in a sexual context was seeing
them on websites as cum-hungry bitches. I guess I
started looking at it when I was eleven or twelve, and
it led me to make some terrible mistakes approaching
girls and expecting them to be into anything and
everything. The sex education we got was like
something from another age. We were told in class what a vulva was when I was 14, but by that time I had been inspecting them in detail on my computer screen for years, and so had every other lad in the room. I knew what they looked like; what I didn’t know was that there was such a huge emotional gap between porn and reality. That’s what they need to start teaching.”

Are we going to carry on pretending in schools and in
public that the internet sex-show doesn’t exist? When it comes to hardcore porn we are – to borrow Jean-Paul Sartre’s ambiguous phrase – condemned to be free. Do we want to prepare ourselves for this powerful and warping intoxicant, or do we want to remain unsheathed and unprepared?

In the New Zeland Herald, a newspaper where my columns are often reprinted, there has been a comment on my Derrida obit by Francis Grant:

"Pointy-heads do battle

I learned of the death of superstar French philosopher Jacques Derrida by email from an old uni mate schooled in the rational disciplines of science and medicine.

"So Jacques Derrida is dead," he wrote. "But what is death? Indeed, what is what?"

The former literary theory student in me had to play the game: "Death is not dearth although the difference between the two words, or signifiers, is also part of its meaning. The death of Derrida is also a dearth of Derrida and every other meaning which is like death but different."

The official announcement of Derrida's death on October 8 at age 74 was made by the office of French President Jacques Chirac.

Derrida is one of the few late 20th-century philosophers people outside academia are likely to have heard of, but it's hard to imagine Dubya or Blair giving a radical theorist, cultural commentator and activist such eminence.

Around the world, news of the celebrity thinker's demise wasn't always being treated with such reverence. Like former students, still harbouring grudges over the wilful obscurity of Derrida's texts, some obituary writers couldn't resist a poke at the philosopher notorious for such illuminating sound bites as: "Thinking is what we already know that we have not yet begun."

The august Times, for example, ran a wicked parody of Derrida's infamously abstruse and contradictory writing style, titled "Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida?"

The jokes, the satire and the pig philosophy were predictable. So, too, was divided opinion over the philosopher's worth. With his celebrity status (he packed the Town Hall when he visited Auckland in 1999), movie-star tan and silver hair, Derrida was always controversial in intellectual circles, a fact he fuelled with enigmatic and evasive answers to attempts to get him to explicate his theories.

Less predictable was the length and fury of the pitched battle being waged between fans and foes over his significance.

Was Derrida the saviour of the humanities, under pressure to perform as a research discipline, or a villain out to erode the foundations of Western civilisation? It's a slugfest still raging in newspapers, learned publications and websites such as Arts and Letters Daily.

In contrast to the academic's reputation for cool and collected debate, the combatants are not pulling any punches.

If you've heard or used - misused, the experts would say - the word "deconstruction", you've been influenced by Derrida, whose radical ideas about the elusive nature of language, meaning and truth have influenced fields as diverse as anthropology, architecture and law.

To devotees, deconstruction was an exciting new way to pull apart authoritarian or ideological thinking. To detractors it was nothing less than nihilism and an attempt to destroy Western thought and its glorious heritage from the Age of Reason.

Among the first to have a go was British journalist Johann Hari. The King's College, Cambridge, philosophy graduate (double first), obviously still in recovery from Derrida's writings, launched an attack in the Independent, "Why I won't be mourning Jacques Derrida."

He called the Frenchman "the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language and reason."

The column earned him buckets of scorn from academia, including the kind of dumb, knee-jerk response the Ivory Tower usually prides itself on not having.

"Dear Mr Hari, you are an idiot," wrote a professor from Goldsmith's College, University of London.

When pointy-heads fight it's not pretty, but when politicians enter the fray things turn truly ugly.

The Guardian newspaper asked "key thinkers" in Britain what they knew of Derrida's work. Most memorable was the response from Denis MacShane, Minister for Europe.

"The core of Derrida's thinking is that every text contains multiple meanings. To read is neither to know nor to understand, but to begin a process of exploration that is essential to comprehend oneself and society. This is, however, the sort of pretentious bullshit language a Minister for Europe can only use when speaking French."

There you have it in a nutshell. Froggy faddishness and frivolity vs good old Anglo common sense.

The Francophobia isn't confined to cross-Channel relations. Two academics to weigh in with scathing obituaries in the National Review were the authors of a work entitled "Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France".

It's the kind of prejudicial reaction that has got Terry Eagleton, professor of cultural theory at Manchester University and one of the most accessible writers in the field, hopping mad. He leapt to Derrida's defence with a stinging tirade in the Guardian against his compatriots' "bemused and bone-headed" responses.

"English philistinism continues to flourish, not least when the words of French philosophers are uttered," he wrote.

The bitterly opposed camps number not only the Anglo and Francophiles but also the the liberal vs conservative, appalled by Derrida's claim there is no such thing as authorship, finite meaning, transcendent moral authority or absolute truth.

Nowhere are the divisions more bitter than within academe itself, between English departments and humanities and philosophers and scientists who pride themselves on rationality.

"He [Derrida] is difficult to summarise because it's nonsense," huffed British philosopher Roger Scruton in the Guardian.

In Arts and Letters Daily, Brian Leiter, philosophy professor at the University of Texas, Austin, claims: "American philosophers thought he was a fraud, a betrayal to philosophy's history."

To give the Derrida deriders their due, you don't have to look far among the welter of tributes on the internet to find examples of the kind of pernicious, "anything goes" influence they complain of.

A Derrida acolyte describes the first, giddy days of her conversion. "In typically nerdy fashion, I went overboard. I began speaking in tongues in my classes, wrote papers in opaque, outlandish language. I Derrida'd everything, wrote papers on semiotics and Zen koan ... "

It may prove an unfortunate irony that the man who interpreted binary oppositions - truth, falsity, darkness and light, man, woman, self and other - as a hallmark of rigid, ideological thinking, should leave a legacy so firmly divided.

Much of Derrida's writing is devoted to exposing how such oppositions were also perversely connected and he might have enjoyed the schizophrenic response to his obituary in the New York Times.

While fans were grossly offended at the mention of their hero's abstruseness and murky explanations of his own theories, the foes read the same text as hagiography of the worst kind.

The best story about Derrida is probably apocryphal. An audience member at a Derrida lecture in Kansas confronted the master with a scene from the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her friends finally meet the Wizard, who is all-powerful until Toto the dog pulls away the curtain to reveal a very small man.

"Professor Derrida, are you like that?" the accuser asked. Derrida paused, then replied: "You mean like the dog?"

In all the commentaries on his death, there has been a dearth of the sense of humour which some assert the soccer-mad, soap opera-loving philosopher possessed in abundance. How else could you explain a man who described his own invention thus: "Deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible."

If Derrida's theories are correct, there is unlikely to be a resolution to the problem of his legacy any time soon. For if meaning, as he asserted, is a slippery, temporal process, constantly modified by what comes next and therefore always deferred, no one is going to get the last word.

The deep thinker as pop star

Only rarely do philosophers escape from the rarefied world of the universities into public notice. But Frenchman Jacques Derrida broke the mould. When he died this year the controversy about his ideas and his status became more fierce than ever.

He had achieved almost pop-star status, packing halls around the world, including Auckland. His detractors argue that his philosophy, expressed in mischievously obscure prose, is not much more profound than pop music, but it has certainly helped produce a set of beliefs with an influence far outside academic philosophy.

Building on a foundation laid by the linguist Saussure, and others such as Lacan and Barthes, he argued that meaning could not exist independently of language.

A traditional reader believes language can express ideas without changing them, and the author is the source of its meaning. Derrida challenged this assumption and the Western cultural belief that language is a clear way to communicate."

Only a handful of privileged people will ever admit to themselves that they fear and hate poor people. It's a strange phenomenon: individuals consistently act to protect their own privilege and damn the poor, but they do not think about it in such naked terms. Instead, the privileged create subtle myths that suggest the poor are dirty and stupid and lazy, and therefore deserve their poverty.

Think I'm exaggerating? Let's take a look at The Little Book of Chavs, which I found on the counter of Borders this week. "Chavs" are, it explains, "imbeciles" who do jobs like hairdressing, cleaning, bar-work and being a security guard. They live on "Pot Noodles, cheap cider and McDonald's for Sunday lunch". The extremely popular website www.chavscum.co.uk tells us how to spot a chav: "Chavs have such a tribal dress code that you can spot one yards away! Now what makes the Chavs [sic] attire so funny is they think they are at the cutting edge of fashion... In reality they look like a bunch of pikeys!"

Of course, the people who read this book and website will insist they don't hate all poor people. Just all the ones who live on estates and talk about their mobiles and wear tracksuits. This category sounds suspiciously large to me. Indeed, whenever I hear the term chav, I hear naked and defensive class hate; it is a category that now embraces almost all white, working-class people below the age of 40. The lexicographer, Susie Dent, identifies the word as "just one of the many newly popular, blatantly classist labels that have become popular over the past year. Look at 'council house chic', which describes brands like Burberry and Kappa. Or 'the Croydon facelift', where a chav's hair is pulled back so tight it makes the skin taut".

These are words and phrases that make it possible for privileged people to laugh at and hate the poor without admitting to themselves that this is what they are doing. Indeed, one of the things about chavs that seems to anger middle-class people is their loudness and lack of "taste". "Why are chavs so in your face? Why can't they just shut up?" asks one website. They want their poor people to be passive, silent, unseen. They want them to be a kind of trainee middle class, humbly saving up to buy the same labels as decent Middle England folk. If they develop a value system of their own - or if they dare to intrude into middle-class space in any way - then they must be put in their place with this degrading and cruel label.

Many of my relatives do chav jobs: my grandmother cleaned toilets for a living. My dad is a bus driver. My nephews have "Chav names", according to ChavScum. When I hear the children of privilege ranting about chavs, I want to lock them on a council estate with three kids, no education and a hundred quid a week to see how they cope.

The extent to which the chav label hides real social problems can be seen if we look at the story of a young working-class woman who has been described as "the ultimate chav" - Jade Goody. Jade was ridiculed when she appeared on reality TV show Big Brother a few years ago because of her lack of general knowledge and apparent illiteracy. Nobody asked how she had become this way. When she was two, her father dumped her seriously disabled mother and ended up in prison. Jade did not go to school much because she insisted on staying at home to help her mother dress, eat and get around. For showing this degree of compassion in extremely tough circumstances, Jade is slapped down as a "moron".

For every chav, there is a story like this. Growing up on an estate in Britain has been an unusually tough experience over the past 20 years. Britain's biggest social problems - from poverty to addiction to unemployment - have been played out on chavs, and they have coped as best they can. The "underclass" routinely denounced by rich politicians and journalists is the direct product of the decades of Thatcherism that rolled out unemployment and slashed school budgets and provision for the poor across Britain. If one of their coping strategies is to fetishise a few silly fashion labels, isn't that forgivable? I don't hear anybody mocking the rich and middle classes for doing exactly the same thing - or is Nicole Farhi acceptable while Burberry is vulgar?

Not very far from the surface of talk about chavs is the idea that the poor are culturally - or even in some way genetically - deserving of their circumstances. Do you think people are poor because of lousy educational opportunities, wildly unequal social conditions and layer upon layer of middle-class privilege? Think again, say the prophets of chav-hate. ChavScum tells us the real reason: "Stupidity, alas, breeds stupidity." One poster on their message board explains, "They have no shame because they have no brains - it really is as simple as that." No need to worry about redistributing wealth or investing in schools; there is simply a genetic sub-race of stupid, crude chavs who will always eat crap and think crap and can be happily ignored. Sit back and enjoy your privilege - you deserve it. Even in polite liberal company, the white working class are routinely abused in shockingly vicious terms that aren't used about any other minority. How often have you heard people talk about "white trash"? I've even noticed a weird phenomenon where people try to justify their hatred of poor people by saying the poor are racist and homophobic. In fact, the Institute for Public Policy Research conducted extensive research in 1997 into the attitude towards other ethnic groups among British people. It found that the white working classes were - in many important respects - the least racist of all groups. They were more likely to have had sex with members of another ethnic group and more likely to "marry out" than anybody else. It's easy to blather about multiculturalism from a wine bar; on my sister's estate, these supposedly racist chavs are actually doing the real anti-racist work of falling in love with black and Asian people and producing a post-racist generation of "miscegenated" kids.

As for homophobia, who is the latest chav icon - the Queen of the council estates - but Nadia Alamada, Big Brother's transsexual winner? If you want to be a snob and sneer at white working-class people, fine, but please don't tell me you are doing it for anti-racist, pro-gay reasons.

The snobbery of the right is, as ever, even worse. One newspaper recently sent Petronella Wyatt - the talentless daughter of the late Lord Wyatt - to East Croydon to meet some chavs. This is a woman who quit Oxford University because the other students were "common", only to walk - after blatantly playing on her father's name and connections - into a string of high-paying jobs. Yet she feels perfectly entitled to mock the "laziness" and "vile food" of chavs. (Memo to Petronella: they can't afford to shop in the Fortnum & Mason's food hall.)

She reports with shock that chavs "take so long over one Big Mac". That's because they don't have any money or anywhere else to go, except back to their cramped houses. Didn't this occur to you, Petsy? Did you imagine they would just pop into Harvey Nicks for a few drinks and a spot of shopping that night?

Give me a chav over a snob any time.

POSTSCRIPT: Lots of responses to this piece:

CJ wrote:
"I don't know if your chav article is predominantely tongue-in-cheek, or possibly some form of catharsis for your own guilty prejudices, but equating "chav" with "poor" betrays your misunderstanding of the concept of a "chav".

Maybe after you've been physically assualted for simply looking at someone, or witnessed a group of tracksuit wearing youngsters verbally abusing and spitting on a long-haired individual dressed in black because they're "a fucking goth cunt", or watched a 20 year old drunk mother swearing at her 5 year old child in public at the top of her voice you'll be better qualified to opine on the chav phenomenon.

Your points about middle class snobbery are valid - such vile snobbery only antagonises the chavs' feelings of exclusion and persecution - but primarily chavs are characterised by their lack of social responsibility. The chav problem is not a class issue but a moral issue."

Dan_a_Dude said:
"tell me have you ever been beaten up by chavs just for walking past and not saying anything, i did and i got my nose broken so you can shut up in defence of the chav"

Mazzdontbother said:
Let's examine Jon Hari's bullshit in more detail.

Right - "Chavs=poverty". When challenged about wearing shitty burberry hats and labelled sportswear, your typical chav on this site defends his clothes by bragging how much he spends on them. People spending £50 on tracky tops and £100 on trainers are not in serious poverty. If they are, I rarely spend more than £30 on a jumper or £40 on shoes so I must be in need of an Oxfam appeal. Sure you get poor ones who buy fakes from the market but you get poor goths, poor skaters. Chavs do not = the poor, unless you are fucking stupid or are trying to twist the argument to suit your own agenda, like Mr Hari. It's a fashion trend.

I don't know about cleaning as a chav job but hairdressing is a career goal for female chavs since they get to spend the entire day gossiping with other female chavs about blokes and celebrities and being a security guard certainly seems to attract the dimmer male and they get to wear a cap. Don't forget the well-paying chav professions such as being a premiership footballer or a soap opera star or being in Blazin Squad.

They do live on pot noodles, Maccy Ds and cheap cider and they do dress in awful pikey clothes. I suppose these are the only food and clothes the working class can afford in Mr Hari's deluded mind.

"whenever I hear the term chav, I hear naked and defensive class hate" - yes, you and everyone else who has a giant chip on their shoulder about being from a working class background and looks for opportunities to rant about it. It's easy to hear what we want to and twist things to suit us. The vast majority of us using the term chav don't think we mean the working class. Of course we're LYING or IN DENIAL aren't we but it's funny that people who use the terms nigger and faggot rarely try to tell you they don't mean black people or homosexuals. I could give a fuck about left wing political correctness - if I hated the working class, I'd say so. I hate journalists.

Chavs don't just live on estates, the suburbs are crawling with them. Go out in Bromley today, the most middle-classiest suburb in Britain and play count the chavs. They do however wear tracksuits and annoy everyone with their fucking toy phones. How are these exclusively working class attributes?

I'm sure Susie Dent's lexicography work is of great benefit to mankind, just like the people who produce surveys telling us what music we like to listen to when we're having sex, but someone ought to point out to her that the terms chav, council house chic and Croydon facelift have been around for years. It's just "over the past year" that out-of-touch knob ends in the media have discovered them, mainly from being emailed the chavscum URL or chancing across the book in Charing Cross Road.

Believe it or not, loudness and lack of taste annoy people besides the Middle England types who have got Mr Hari's back up, along with the backs of every other trendy Guardian and Independent journalist who earn the same salaries as the bankers and stockbrokers and insurance people and have the same priced houses but would hate to be thought of as middle class. Some call them the chattering classes, I call them the middle class in denial. These people hate more than chavs, they hate the average British citizen: the nationalistic prole who distrusts the marvellous EU and is against immigration and wants to be tough on criminals and rallies to nationalistic causes and has an England flag on their car and doesn't really care about Iraq and votes Labour or Tory. Of course THAT wouldn't describe the working class at all, although you could make as much of a case for it as for chavs being the working class.

The bit about his family is very moving but cleaning toilets and driving buses are not chav jobs for the simple reason that they involve hard work. Out of interest, what would Mr Hari do if he heard someone from a council estate ranting about chavs? Of course people from council estates ARE chavs aren't they so that wouldn't happen. People on council estates are all tracksuited, trouble-making scum apparently and it's not their fault, the poor dears. That's the message I take from Mr
Hari's pile of patronising liberal shite anyway.

Jade Goody may well have a perfectly good excuse for being a moron but a moron she is and since she became a highly visible celebrity by her own choice, I have absolutely no sympathy for her. In my opinion, the more abuse reality TV contestants are given, the sooner idiots will stop wanting to be them and the sooner this garbage will be off our screens and twats in Mr Hari's profession will have to find something else to write about in the summer months.

I fear "underclass" is the word that has confused some people and given others an excuse to start their ranting about class prejudice. Chavs are not an underclass because they are poor, they are an underclass because they are scum. Middle class chavs are also the underclass. A chav is still the underclass even if it wins the lottery or becomes a celebrity and has millions of pounds and lives in a mansion. The modded Rolls Royce in the drive is the giveaway. The chav does not display no taste because it is poor, it displays no taste because it is stupid.

I think we've covered the chavs=poor people angle. If that's Mr Hari's opinion of poor people, that's up to him although I think a lot of poor people will be very offended. Yes chavs are stupid and stupidity does breed stupidity, usually behind a bus stop with a Mars bar wrapper as a failed contraceptive. Perhaps if we could persuade him that being a chav is a lifestyle choice made by people who are often working class and are often middle class also, we could talk intelligently about why people choose to be stupid but he prefers to believe that people are automatically chavs because they are poor. I find that more offensive and more indicative of class prejudice than anything on chavscum.co.uk but that's just me.

It's true that middle class white people are afraid to point out the bad things in minority cultures - witness the muted reaction to homophobia in reggae when similar lyrics from white bands would inspire protest marches. However politically correct journalists like Hari should talk - they're the reason for it! It's twats like him who would be the first to cry racism if you did say something about violent black youths or fundamentalist muslims. [Er, I talk about fundamentslist Muslims all the time. And I wrote a whole piece condemning reggae murder music. but never mind... - JH] You can imagine his column on the subject - "how dare we as white, privileged, middle class etc... evil western culture... slavery... Iraq... ohhh feel the guilt!" [He clearly doesn't know anthing about me... - JH] So people talk about
white trash because they feel they aren't allowed to talk about black trash or Asian trash, although of course such people exist in the same proportions in every community.

Of course the white working classes are more likely to have affairs with minorities since minorities generally live in working classareas.
These are also the areas where the BNP win council seats however, while they rarely poll more than a few votes in the middle class white towns.

This is another topic though and nothing to do with chavs.

Nadia is not a chav icon but a source of amusement to them. Big Brother is watched by chavs but it's not a chav show. It's had the occasional chav on it but most of its contestants are dreadful media types like Jon Hari who crave the world's attention to make up for their lack of self esteem. It's well known that the vote on that programme is swung not by chavs but by teenage girls and homosexual men, the only people who view it as more than a freak show and who actually care who wins.

If Jon Hari thinks chavs don't have a problem with gays, then as I said in my email, I'd like him to spend a Saturday night out with them at any chav pub in any home counties town centre.

Petronella Wyatt is one of Mr Hari's sort but she works for a right wing newspaper instead of a left wing one so her editor told her to write a piece about how awful chavs are while Hari's editor told him [Er, my editor never 'tells' me to write anything, ever. All my ideas are my own - JH] to write a piece about how awful people who call "the working classes" chavs are. Naturally neither Hari nor Wyatt know the first thing about what they're writing about. She should indeed stick to writing about Fortnum and Masons and Harvey Nicks and Hari should stick to writing sneery pieces about Bush. (Memo to Hari: you're as bad as each other)."

Chris wrote:
"thanks for your interesting piece 'In defence of the Chav'. I agree that it is a classist derogatory term with little depth or insight. I agree with your assertions of all the shit that the poor have to deal with. However, to suggest that those labelled 'Chavs' (who exactly are they anyway?) are amongst the most tolerant people in our society with regards to issues of race and sexuality is surely a case of eulogising the 'working class'. Maybe they are relatively when one takes into account their situation but surely not practically. Poverty, unemployment and lack of education breeds ignorance I'm afraid. It's hardly a scientific study but I grew up in Dagenham, Essex all my life (my family worked on the Ford plants, I'm a primary school teacher).

Now there's no way I'm going to look down my nose at my family who I think are an awesome bunch of people but their opinions on race and sexuality are, in my opinion, uneducated ones. Pop round the pubs of Essex Johann and ask them what they think of 'coloureds', 'pakis' or 'asylum seekers' or 'irons' (gays). Even your admirable tolerance might be a bit tested. I remember as a child being praised and given sweets by the people who worked in my dad's car spares shop (and the punters) for giving a 'paki' a black eye in playground fight. My dad's opinions are as racist or as homophobic as you could imagine. There is, I'm afraid still the 'nicking our jobs' or the 'god made adam and eve not adam and steve' mentality. Surely, it's no suprise that in a society where the poor have (intentionally) been completely depoliticiesd, they vent their anger at imagined threats such as asylum seekers or ethnic immigrants. A question: who is it that carries out the racist and homophobic assaults in this country?"

Jeremy wrote:
"Dear bleeding heart liberal Islington media cunt,

I see you are standing up for chavs against us toffee-nosed middle class types. Here at the chavscum forums, we're used to people making similar arguments although they usually phrase it more like "FUK OF U SNOBS OR IL STAB U" so you do win points for literacy.

You lose points however for not knowing what the fuck you are talking about. Of course this is to be expected from a British newspaper columnist. Not a single fucking one of you - from Richard Littlejohn to Polly Toynbee - has ever known what the fuck they were talking about on any issue they've ever written about. I doubt they'd have hired you if you
did. You're not there to know anything, you're there to latch onto the latest news story, bit of gossip or in this case buzzword and write five hundred words of utter bollocks related to it. If it's provocative, self-righteous and tiresomely unfunny, all the better. Oh and while you might once have stood out for having a platform to spout your bullshit, these days you're just a glorified blogger. There are 15 year olds on this forum whose own bollocks is virtually indistinguishable from yours.

How do I know you don't know what the fuck you're on about? In your article you defend chavs by using the celebrity Jade Goody as an example and you mention you have family in allegedly "chavvy" professions like bus driving. All the while you skirt around the obvious fact that you don't know any chavs. I bet you've never even met a chav and I reckon if a wimpy, cocaine-snorting media cunt like yourself were confronted by a gang of them on your way to the latest chic eatery in Soho, you would run a fucking mile.

By not knowing any chavs, you miss the reason why they're hated. It's not because of their burberry hats or their stupidity or their tastelessness, even though we mock them for that. There are plenty of tasteless, badly-dressed idiots about who no one hates. We hate them because they're also aggressive, violent, bullying, trouble-making thugs, who bring fear and misery to millions of people in this country who don't live in fucking posh parts of London. [I live in the dazzlingly posh area of... err... Whitechapel, East London... - JH] If you ever left your little "village" in Zone 1, you'd learn it's virtually impossible to go for a pleasant Friday or Saturday night out in most towns in this country. Pick any commuter belt town in the Home Counties and go out there next Saturday night, I dare you. [I have done this often - JH] Take your anorexic 21 year old "research assistant" to the Wetherspoons in the middle of town and stay there till chucking out time, then wander the town centre for a while before getting a taxi home. Then write another column about how poor, oppressed chavs have it tough.

Oh and by the way, we're not the "middle class", we're from a very broad cross section of society, from the well off to students to
alternative lifestyles to ordinary working class council estate dwellers, who incidentally resent cunts like you implying they're chavs. Chavs are not only working class, they're also from all sections of society. It's a lifestyle you twat, not a class. You'll find them on estates yes, but also in the nice, leafy suburbs and in quaint olde English villages. East Kent, where I live, is infested with them from Bromley and Bexley all the way down to Margate. You don't see them so much in central London because even chavs don't want to live next door to media twats like you.

Do you know who IS the middle class? Wankers like you in the media who earn upper middle class salaries and live in homes with upper middle class property prices but think they're excluded from being labelled middle class because they live in an £400,000 urban apartment in Clapham [I wish! - JH] and not a £400,000 semi-detached house in Slough. Wow, you're practically down with the working man aren't you. Reality check, arsehole!

You're as middle class as Richard Briers in a 1970s sitcom. [Okay, you've got to admit: that's a good line - JH] And you're a media wanker to boot.

Please fuck off and die."

"Who needs Marx and Engels when we have Rodgers and Hammerstein?" asks the American performance artist Tim Miller in his new show, Us. He's not kidding. "If you want to understand my country and the way we view ourselves, don't look at the novels of Norman Mailer or Edward Hopper's paintings or Ralph Nader's speeches. Go see a musical. The Broadway musical is America's most truly political art-form."

At first this sounds ridiculous - the Communist Manifesto vs The Sound of Music? Chomsky vs Sondheim? "But look at the political figures Broadway has to offer," Miller replies. "That little anarchist Oliver. Jesus as a sweet queer hippie who hangs out with prostitutes. And you know, South Pacific was banned across most of the Deep South because it showed an inter-racial love story way ahead of its time. And, yes, look at The Sound of Music. It shows we should quit organised religion and fight fascism through song and dance."

It's a strangely infectious way of looking at the United States. I decided to check out the politics of Broadway's current box-office breakers - and I learnt more about post-September 11 America than in a thousand yellowing copies of The New York Times.

First stop Wicked, the bizarre political fable that has sold out the massive Gershwin Theatre until the summer of 2005. It's a prequel to The Wizard of Oz - a reinterpretation for everybody who instinctively despised that self-righteous little bitch Dorothy, a retelling for all those kids who sided with the lonely, bitter, brilliant Wicked Witch of the West.

Wicked begins where Wizard ends. The Wicked Witch Elphaba has been melted into a pool of green gunk by the Kansas crusader; Dorothy has returned to the black-and-white banality of home. "Isn't it nice to know that good really does conquer evil?" witters Glinda - the Good Witch of the North - with a dim-witted twinkle. The Ozian masses dance around their new queen, congratulating themselves on living in "the most wonderful place on earth".

But something is wrong. "Is it true you knew the Witch when you were young?" somebody yells from the crowd. Glinda's beaming smile droops - and in flashback we begin to learn how these women became polarised witches pining for each others' deaths. It turns out that it's not easy to be a girl with luminescent green skin in Oz. Elphaba repulsed her own parents, and she had been shunned by the other kids. She was only sent to school at all by her pompous father, the Governor of Munchkinland, to look after her paralysed, idealised sister Nessa Rose.

As she waded through the insults and bullies, Elphaba gradually realised that Oz was not the Paradise its citizens endlessly, brainlessly chant about. The talking animals who performed all the tough, tedious jobs in Oz were being increasingly blamed for everything that went wrong, from the Great Drought to vague "subversive activities" known only to the Wizard. The ordinary residents of Oz reassured themselves by deferring to the Wizard and muttering: "No, no, it couldn't happen here. Not in Oz."

Oz is not, the audience slowly realises, the Munchkin-filled land of magic that Dorothy imagined; it is a Technicolor tyranny. The dictatorial Wizard tried to co-opt Elphaba - and her magical powers - into his police state. "The way to bring people together is to give them a really terrible enemy," he told her. Elphaba rebelled - and became the perfect propaganda foe, an Emanuel Goldstein for the Yellow Brick Road. The Wizard falsely accused Elphaba of having elaborate weapons and evil intentions - but far from being "wicked", the late Witch was a freedom fighter trying to rescue the people of Oz. Confronted with his crimes, the Wizard insists: "[You can call me] a traitor or liberator/ Is one a crusader or ruthless invader?/ It's all in which label is able to persist."

Wicked is not perfect. Stephen Schwartz's score doesn't match the brilliance of the concept ("Defying Gravity" is the only really hummable tune), and the script is a weak adaptation of Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel. But this is a show that is connecting with American audiences today, and it's not hard to see why.

If South Pacific was a musical for an America finally confronting its racism, Wicked is a musical for a frightened, confused, suspicious America that can no longer believe its leaders. Is the grand Wizard in the White House lying to us? Is black, white and green good? Whatever you think the answers are, it is revealing that this is the Great White Way's sell-out success of 2004.

Americans can, it seems, bear to hear subversive messages so long as they are told to them by cartoon characters, storybook witches or puppets. Isn't the most politically subversive show on American TV The Simpsons? (Compare it to the saccharine propaganda of The West Wing.) This is the lesson not only of Springfield and Wicked, but also of the show that collected an Aladdin's Cave of awards at the Tonys this year: Avenue Q, playing at the John Golden Theatre.

Avenue Q is, basically, a puppet porn-show. A series of puppets (and, even more strangely, Gary Coleman, the tiny actor from Diff'rent Strokes, who plays himself) living on a Sesame Street-substitute, present a series of uncomfortable truths in musical form. A blue puppet - clearly based on the Cookie Monster - has the show-stopping number, "The Internet is for Porn". Forget all this guff about the new economy or amazon.com, he sings: "Why do you think the net was born?/ Porn, porn, porn."

Meanwhile, another set of puppets is singing a sad duet, "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist". They explain: "Doesn't mean we go around committing hate crime/ Look around and you'll see no one's really colour-blind/ Ethnic jokes might be uncouth/ But you laugh because they're based on truth."

Yes, Avenue Q is quite strange. Student bars across Britain are filled every freshers' week with students saying: "You know Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street? I reckon they were, like, gay. And I reckon Kermit was a really dirty shag." This musical is, essentially, that joke stretched out over a couple of hours. It's a one-gag show, but it's a very funny gag, and well-executed enough to sustain the audience's attention.

But how does Tim Miller's thesis stand up? Is Avenue Q filled with daring political comment? Well, it plays on (and plays to) the puritanism of Middle American culture. Mainstream US culture - even in New York - is much more conservative than Britain's. There is no nudity and little swearing on TV; there are no ladettes; and asking where the "toilet" is seems rude and obnoxious. Avenue Q's blatant comment on sexual politics is, in this climate, refreshing. At the start of a relationship, one male keeps saying: "Come." His girlfriend adds: "Mittment." And so it continues: "Come." "Mittment." "Come." "Mittment."

In a culture that is relentlessly, gloriously, maddeningly upbeat, it is also strangely radical to have a musical whose recurring theme song is "It Sucks to Be Me". Gary Coleman describes himself as "on a slow, tiresome walk to the grave". No sugar-filled, diabetic-slaughtering romance here; a couple in love sing: "The more you love someone, the more you want to kill them/ The more you love someone, the more you want them dead." And it leaves the audience with a final number that tells them: "Everyone's a bit unsatisfied/ Everyone goes around a little empty inside." In a society where "the pursuit of happiness" is a constitutional right - in a society soaked in Seroxat, a society where a moment's misery is seen as a crime - Avenue Q is quietly political.

It's much more revealing, however, to revisit Rent, the biggest Broadway hit of the Nineties, still packed every night at the Nederlander Theatre. The show's premise is simple; it's La bohème relocated to the East Village, with Puccini's tubercular (syphilitic?) lovers replaced by HIV-positive heroin addicts who are "dying in America at the end of the millennium". Worried about the growing American underclass? Rent shows the reaction of most Americans: "Leave your conscience at the tone," honey.

Roger - "the pretty-boy front man who wastes opportunities" - hasn't left his squat in over a year, not since the morning when "his girlfriend April left a * * note saying 'We've got Aids'/ before slitting her wrists in the bathroom". One evening Mimi - a Hispanic girl who lives downstairs and is famous for having "the best ass beneath 14th Street" - knocks on his door to ask if he has a spare candle. In classic musical style, it's love at first sight, but even here - as the ballad "Will You Light My Candle?" begins - there is a dark subtext undercutting the romance. On one level, it's a typical Rodgers and Hammerstein falling-for-her number - but Mimi needs Roger's candle so she can melt down her smack.

The show is at its best when this Arctic cold remains close to the surface. Roger and Mimi fall in love in a New York gradually being swept clean of junkies and homeless people by Mayor Rudy Giuliani's programme of social cleansing. Bohemia is slowly becoming Calcutta. Rent begins and ends at Christmas, but its author Jonathan Larson insists on cruelly undercutting the sentimentality of his own scenario. Carol singers jeer: "Christmas bells are ringing/ Christmas bells are ringing/ Somewhere else. Not here."

Rent still has a blunt emotional power. Larson died of Aids during the rehearsal process, before he knew that his tiny off-Broadway show defined Nineties New York. This autobiographical coda makes Roger's determination to write "one great song/... before the sun sets on another empty life" all the more bitter.

Yet, if anything illustrates how New York has changed in the past three years, it's watching Rent again. This was a great musical on 10 September 2001, but many of its themes have melted as surely as the Wicked Witch. One of Rent's central ideas is the complaint that America has become a husk, an empty and artificial country obsessed with logos and tranquillisers and Diet Coke. One character complains that Americans live in "Cyberland", where "they've closed everything real down/ And replaced it with virtual life". Americans can only escape this insulated bubble of unreality, she says, by making "a leap of faith".

I remember really agreeing with that when I first saw Rent. Has there ever been better proof of that arthritic cliché, "Be careful what you wish for"? Somebody did make a "leap of faith" in New York, somebody from far beyond the land of logos and Diet Coke. Suddenly artificiality seems attractive, and nobody pines for the sting of hard-edged reality any more.

The production is still amazingly fresh, including a (surprisingly) terrific performance by Melanie "Scary Spice" Brown as Mimi. But nothing seems as dated as the recent past. Rent's score and script are full of those self-consciously neurotic we're-tough-us-New-Yorkers lines you just don't hear since September 11. One character declares: "I'm a New Yorker. Fear is my life." Another says, in a line that was greeted with pained silence the night I saw the show: "New York City. Times are shitty, but at least they can't get worse."

These days, New Yorkers live like people whose houses are built on a fault line. They know one day - maybe tomorrow - something terrible will happen to them again, but they carry on regardless. That's why, if you watch Rent today, its centre of gravity seems to have shifted. Roger doesn't feel like the show's central character any more. He has been displaced by his best friend Mark, who once seemed to be a minor presence. Surrounded by dying friends, Mark is HIV-negative and numb. He tells us: "I don't buy emotion/ I rent." He watches everything bewildered, not quite sure how to react or how to fend off the looming loss and fear. At moments, he curses that he is "the one of us to survive". Mark gets the biggest cheer every night, an usher at the show told me. New Yorkers are all Marks now.

Political theatre is always best when it is subtle. David Hare's hectoring big-P political plays are never as powerful - or effective - as his small plays such as Amy's View; the ones that seem at first to touch on politics only incidentally.

So it's no surprise that the most overtly political show on Broadway at the moment is easily the least politically interesting. The musical adaptation of Aristophanes' play The Frogs, playing at the Lincoln Center Theatre, doesn't just suggest analogies between ancient Greece and the present day; it rams them into every single orifice of every single audience member until they howl, scratch and beg for mercy.

Dionysus (played by the comedian Nathan Lane) is appalled by the Peloponnesian War, "a war we can't win, a war we shouldn't be in... and even the simplest words fail our leaders". He decides to venture into Hades in order to bring back either William Shakespeare or George Bernard Shaw to write a play that will "convince the populace of the folly of the course we are embarked on".

Cue a plague of jokes about as funny as being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. "Hades - it's a hell of a town!" declares Lane, mugging and gurning in desperation at the comatose audience. There are then slow rhapsodies about the power of art to change society - and more lame jokes. He is warned to watch out for the huge and dangerous Bush-frog. "It makes pre-emptive strikes and then forgets why it attacked in the first place," he's told. And on it goes, each lame joke greeted with feeble, self-regarding applause and laughter that comes like a slow belch.

Unlike Wicked and Rent, there is nothing here to discomfort the unthinking Gucci-clad audience members who simply want to bask in the reflected glory of their own mild liberalism. This is everything political theatre shouldn't be. And perhaps that's the most obnoxious thing about this show: that it preaches about the transformative power of art when it is such a desperately mediocre work of art itself. But the producers of The Frogs deserve credit for one thing: they have managed to stage a show about a descent into the underworld that really is a journey into hell.

So, after four Broadway musicals and four political worlds, is Tim Miller right? Is the Broadway musical a good map through US politics just three weeks away from a presidential election? The only way to answer that is by posing another question. Does anybody really think I would have learnt more about American politics by reading a triumvirate of speeches by George Bush, John Kerry and Ralph Nader?

Tim Miller's show 'Us' is at the Drill Hall, London WC1 from 17 to 27 November (020-7307 5060)

The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the intellectual foundation of the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation. As he is buried this week, it is time to ask whether his ideas - and the long, agonising postmodern intellectual spasm - should be buried with him.

I have friends who still awake weeping at 3am with nightmares about trying to understand Derrida in time for their final exams. It's true his writing is wilfully obscure, and at times he lapses into gibberish. But in fact, once you learn how to boil down his prose, his ideas are fairly simple - and pernicious.

Derrida believed Western thought has been riddled since the time of Plato by a cancer he called "logocentrism". This is, at its core, the assumption that language describes the world in a fairly transparent way. You might think that the words you use are impartial tools for understanding the world - but this is, Derrida argued, a delusion. If I describe, say, Charles Manson as "mad", many people would assume I was describing an objective state called "madness" that exists in the world. Derrida would say the idea of "madness" is just a floating concept, a "signifier", that makes little sense except in relation to other words. The thing out there - the actual madness, the "signified" - is almost impossible to grasp; we are lost in a sea of opposing words that prevent us from actually experiencing reality directly.

Derrida wants to break down the naive belief that there is an objective external reality connected to our words that can be explored through language, science and rationality. Any narrative we construct to understand the world will inevitably be built on supressed violence and exclusion. So, for example, the narrative of 'madness' has been shown by Derrida's colleague and friend Michel Foucault to be a highly elastic concept that is used to stigmatize 'dissidents'; it is a categry that serves the powerful. None of our words is immune to these power-games. There is tension, opposition and power in even the most simple of concepts.

So there are, Derrida concluded, no universal truths, no progress and ultimately no 'sense', only "decentred", small stories that are often silenced by a search for rationality and consistency. The search for intellectual coherence is 'violent' and must be shunned.

Derrida claimed he was offering a critique within the Enlightenment tradition - yet within his own explanatry framework he made Enlghtenment values untenable. (He spoke openly of using tactics of "duplicity" and "the playing of a double game" to "challenge" the Enlightenment. He explained he was operating wthin the language of reason since there was no other, but he would try to lay traps for reason by posing it problems it could not answer. This was designed to expose the inherent contradictions in reason and ultimately destroy it.)

Most of his followers therefore work on the assumption that the Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.

Behind every reasoned argument, Derrida believed, there is a raw decision with no rational or reasoned basis. Everything else is a polite excuse. So the foundation our Enlightenment culture is built on - the absolutely fundamental assumptions we act on every day - are rotten. All we can hope for is to destroy this "metaphysics of presence", which is the assumption that we can expect immediate access to meaning. Then we might be able to experience a few 'concepts' - somehow. Derrida's method for destroying language is deconstruction - a technique that makes us see that "signifiers" are so ambiguous and shifting that they can mean anything or nothing.

Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language, reason and the attempt to tell big stories about how we became as we are. All we are left with - if we accept Derrida's conclusions - is puzzled silence and irony.

If reason is just another language game, if our words cannot match anything out there in the world without doing 'violence' to others - what can we do except sink into nihilism, or turn to the supernatural?

The deconstructionist virus has swept through the humanities departments of universities across Europe and America. But the best way to demonstrate the intellectual collapse this has caused is by looking at the impact of postmodernism on fiction. The fiction the preceded postmodernism - for all its flaws - usually engaged with the world. At its best, it even tried to change it: John Steinbeck hitched a wagon across Depression-scarred California and found a family that became the subject for The Grapes of Wrath.

Compare that to postmodernist fiction, a form of torture so heinous that it surely contravenes the Geneva Convention. Look at the execrable novels of Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, trapped in self-referential Derridan word-games and irrelevance while a world warms and wails outside their pages. The critic Dale Peck has described the postmodern implosion of the novel perfectly: "This is a tradition that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything."

Now magnify that effect across the humanities: imagine this deflation happening in anthropology, sociology, philosophy ... you get the idea. There is nothing more depressing than meeting smart graduate students who should be researching really important subjects, only to find they are writing a postmodern deconstruction of the idea of happiness or wealth or human rights, or a thesis with a name like "Is Anthropology Really Possible in Post-Modern Space?". Of course we should always question the ctegories of our thought - but the wave of deconstruction seems to have reduced academics to doing nothing else. The passivity and irrelevance of European intellectuals and American universities over the past three decades is largely due to the wrong turn they have taken into masturbatory post-modernism; Derridan readings invariably in my experience encourage confusion and passivity in the face of injustice, rather than action.

To be fair to him, late in his life Derrida seems to have begun to understand the terrible forces of ultra-scepticism he unleashed. Very few people can actually bear to be nihilists; very few people can preach a message of paralysis and despair for long. So Derrida declared in the early 1990s that there are some "infinitely irreducible" ideas that should not be deconstructed - particularly justice and friendship.

But it was too late. Derrida had vandalised all the tools he could have used to make a case for justice. If reason is just an "exclusionary strategy", if words are mere symbols in a dense fog, if everything must be broken into warring fragments, how can he suddenly call a halt to the process of deconstruction when it comes to one particular value he happens to like? Is his use of the word "justice" somehow immune to all the rules he spent his career articulating? How could he formulate the concept without violently excluding, say, the unjust? How can the battle between thsoe two words be saved from endless mutual obfuscation?

Derrida was left making the preposterous case that justice is a "Messianic" concept that would somehow be revealed to us once we stripped away language and reason.

I suppose it's touching that Derrida made a tragic final attempt to chain his own decontructionist beast. But the time for him to dissociate himself from nihilism was decades earlier, when he first launched the idea of deconstruction. He should have admitted that, yes, division and tension can be found in all things - but sometimes we need to accept that and build larger categories anyway, witout being accused of 'supression'.

Buried in Derrida's philosophy there are small nuggets of insight. It is worth bearing in mind that the Enlightenment project has contingent and uncertain roots, even if it is the best hope we have. It is essential to know that the structure of language determines our thought much more than we understood before Wittgenstein, and that grand narratives are inherently dangerous unless their exponents admit that they are partial and always doomed to be (at best) necessary fictions.

Derrida could have drawn the sane conclusions from this at the start of his career: that we should show a greater degree of scepticism both toward language and narratives than before. But Derrida always promoted a far more shrill and silly agenda to unpick and 'expose' the Enlightenment tradition.

And build what in its place? Derrida neglected to discuss alternatives except in language so opaque it is impossible to decipher. In the real world, the alternatives to reason (Divine revelation? Superstition? Pure will? Despair?) are even more flawed and even less likely to lead to the "liberation" Derrida claims to seek.

We can see this in Derrida's personal route out of nihilism - through susperstition. Not for nothing was Derrida described as "a Jewish mystic"; he even wrote about his belief in ghosts, which seems to be literal (if one can assume anything in Derrida is literal or rational).

When there are urgent crises in the world that need serious intellectual application, it is faintly disgusting for left-wing intellectuals to spend their time arguing about whether the world is really there at all or whether it can ever be described in language or whetehr there are ghosts about the place. To claim to do so in the name of "true justice" is simply insulting to the victims of injustice. No hungry person craves deconstruction. No tyrannised person feels they are trapped in a language game. It is not only shallow but decadent to claim to be on the left and to dedicate your energy to these demoralising intellectual games.

Terry Eagleton is a Marxist academic with whom I disagree on many things (like the Soviet Union) - but we have a shared belief in rational Enlightenment politics based on notions like evidence, truth and open dispute. He chides Derrida for believing in "the emptiness of desire, the impossibility of truth, the fragility of the subject, , the lie of progress and the pervasiveness of power... [Derrida] greets the suggestion there has been any progress in human history with scorn while [he] regularly avails himself of anaesthetics and water closets."

Eagleton continues, "Derrida says there are moral judgements, but they lack any sort of moral or rational basis. There is no longer any relation, as there was for Aristotle or Marx, between the way the world is and how we ought to act within it, or between the way we are and what we ought to do... These judgements are left accordingly hanging in the air. For Derrida ethics is a matter of absolute decisions - decisions which are vital and necessary but also utterly 'impossible', and which fall outside all given norms, forms of knowledge and modes of conceptualisation. One can only hope he is not on the jury when one's case comes up in court."

Just so. There is no doubt a space for a continuing debate about post-modern thought in the more obscure philosophy departments, in the same way that some people still discuss Berkeley's idealism and other philosophical ideas that nobody would ever actually act on.

But to allow it to dominate so much of the humanities, as it has for decades, to allow it to paralyse thought at a moment when the world faces unprecedented crises, is almost pathologically deranged. Academics, novelists and serious thinkers have been parked in the Derridan dead-end for too long.

POSTSCRIPT:

It’s very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher – even one as bankrupt and silly as Derrida or Antonio Negri – you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics. Although there are always some appreciative adademics - or some intelligently critical ones - too often they don’t try to answer you or rebut what you say; they simply accuse you of being stupid.

In case you think I’m exaggerating, here is one typical e-mail:

"Dear Mr. Hari,
You are an idiot.
Professor Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Goldsmith's College, University of London."

(Feel free to respond to Professor Duttmann at ADuttmann@aol.com)

(I seriously considered becoming an academic for a time. E-mails like this remind me why I opted for journalism instead).

This is the MO of the postmodern academic charlatans. If I wasn’t ridiculously intellectually self-confident (I wouldn't normally mention this, but I got a double first from King’s College, Cambridge specialising in philosophy, darling) I would probably be intimidated by this stuff – and that’s very revealing. These writers use deliberately opaque prose and their arguments are often manifestly absurd (remember Negri arguing that "he doesn’t believe in memory" because it "dulls the revolutionary spirit" when I confronted him with his obscene apologetics for the Soviet Union and Maoism?). When anybody calls them on it, they call their critics thick. Most people lack the confiedence to see through it.

Don’t get me wrong. The last thing I would offer is a populist anti-intellectual argument. There are many views that can only be expressed in extremely complex language, and not just scientific views. I always thought the sneering at Gordon Brown for talking about "neo-endogenous growth theory", for example, was daft – it’s a complicated economic theory and can’t be boiled down into words of two syllables. Plenty of what I write (and more of what I’d like to write) wouldn’t be accessible to the general readership of a popular newspaper. Try discussing Marx’s Capital or pensions policy or the WTO in very simple language – it’s tough.

The rule is not 'Don't use complex language.' It’s: 'use the most straight-forward language possible.' Sometimes the most comprehensible language will still be complex and tough because the subject is; but most often, simple language will do. With Derrida and Negri, the convoluted language masks facile or empty thought. If they wrote in clear prose, there would be nothing there.

Another tactic academics use is to criticise you for not being an academic, as though the very medium of journalism was worthless. So for example, I received this:

"Dear Mr Hari

I am writing to you in anger concerning your appallingly ill-informed column on the late Jacques Derrida. Virtually every sentence imputes ideas into Derrida's work that are simply not there. As a research student completing a Ph.D in philosophy, I am expected to give precise and full references to any claim or counter-claim that I make in my work. As a journalist, you obviously do not feel the obligation to do so.

Your column evinces a lack of philosophical culture, a lack of integrity, a lack of honesty, a lack of rigour, a lack of decency, a lack of probity, and most of all, a lack of responsibility. Little wonder that your profession is held in such low esteem. If I could be bothered, I would reach over to my shelves, and provide you with full citations from Derrida's work that would refute the claims made in your column. However, I feel that it would be better to allow you to read Derrida's work for yourself.

Yours sincerely

William Hutson"

Now, unfortunately, in a newspaper column you can’t use footnotes or extensive references. Any intelligent person understands that. Should philosophical ideas therefore never be discussed in newspapers? Is philosophy for a tiny academic elite? But note also the implicit snobbery: "a lack of philosophical culture." No, I don’t write in wilfully obscure prose (although I can – how do you think I got that double first?) and, no, I do not share the mindset of the postmodern academy. I believe in social engagement, not a retreat into postmodern confusion and apathy: that, to them, is in itself evidence of stupidity and crudity.

Anyway, my reading of Derrida is not – as Hutson implies - very controversial even in academic circles: take a look at Professor Mark Lilla’s ‘The Reckless Mind – Intellectuals in Politics’, which takes a similar view. Or at Eagleton's 'After Theory'.

Hutson can’t be a very good Derridan if he’s trying to rebut me with quotes from Derrida. For a start, Derrida contradicted himself – as everybody knows, and the late Professor admitted - all the time, and when he was challenged on it he would say that he was being "playful" and "appreciated irony." And he often spoke in blatantly contradictory language. For example, speaking on a simple political matter, he said: "Senator, it is simply false to say that funding the SSC [the superconducting supercollider] will interfere with support for research on high temperature superconductivity. But it is above all not true. And vice versa."

Anyway, is Hutson trying to say my reading is wrong because I have misunderstood the author’s intention? Hello?

Occassionally intellectual life will take a wrong turn. I think the agonies of epistemological doubt and ultra-scepticism unleashed by Derrida and his fellow postmodern intellectuals have been a terrible wrong turn, especially at a time when we have rarely needed engaged intellectuals more. To argue - as Michel Foucault did - that the Enlightenment tradition is simply a bankrupt veil for violence, and that we should revert to public lynching ("popular justice"), is dangerous. To try to destory the possibility of Enlightenment discourse - as Derrida in practice did - is dangerous. Okay, so few people will take it seriously and act on it (indeed, I would wager that nobody will) - but it distracts the intellectual classes and universities that could be doing something worthwhile.

Anybody who tries to make this case inevitably opens themselves up to accusations of stupidity, I guess; I open myself up tpo accusations that I "just don't understand the turn we have taken," as one e-mailer put it. No; I get it perfectly well - I just don't agree.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Professor Clifford Staples of the University of North Dakota wrote to explain:
“I'm a U.S. academic sociologist and have been through all the pomo stuff (I actually find some of it quite liberating and useful. Deconstruction of a sort is an utterly necessary element of any good critical sociology), but of course you are correct concerning Derrida and the endgame of nihilism).

My colleague and friend Bob Antonio from the University of Kansas writes brilliantly, I think, on the continued relevance and necessity of Enligtenment-inspired Modern Social Theory (see his work over the last ten years in the American Journal of Sociology (mostly) "Nietzsche's Anti-Sociology," After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism.").

In the same vein, I am currently working on Richard Rorty, reading him from the MST tradition. Rorty's pragmatism gets him most of the way to social theory, but his armchair empirical speculations-- as evidence in Geras' devestating critique in Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind shows, is his undoing. But I was interested to see in some of your comments how you come close to the "ungroundable" liberalism of Rorty that gets Geras so worked up. This is the stuff I live for (well, that and golf and sex and my daughter and freedom and justice and so forth).”

Gregory Fried, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Sussex University, wrote:
"As an academic who has read and written on Derrida, I just wanted to let you know that your treatment was, to my mind, fully on target. Very well, it might not satisfy the pedantry of Derrida's more obsessive followers (what would?), but as you say: may not journalism treat philosophy seriously?
And you pay Derrida at least that much of a compliment: you do take him seriously.

In particular, what I think you get right is how the "mad axeman of Western philosophy" pulled down the edifices of reason that support our free institutions -- and only too late realized that what he had done was NOT
effect a new, deeper form of liberation. In his last decade, he scrambled to build a shadow-edifice, but to no avail.

I plan to use your appraisal when I teach him in the future, at least to get students started.

If you ever do wish to put yourself to sleep with an "academic" deconstruction of the Grand Deconstructor, try my book, 'Heidegger's
Polemos', which treats both Heidegger's politics and the effects of that politics on the postmodernist left."

James Lindgren, Professor of Law at Northwestern University, said:
“I found some of the responses to your Derrida "eulogy" hilariously inept. So your critics know the absolute truth of what Derrida meant and you don't. Given the impossibilities of language that Derrida claims, how can this even be possible? Either Derrida is wrong about language or your critics are wrong to be certain that you misunderstood Derrida. I think your critics, particularly the philosophy student that attacked you, need to do a little more critical thinking. There is some wheat among the chaff in Derrida, but it takes a genuinely critical eye to pull it out."

Professor Christopher Morris from the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland wrote:
"About Derrida: his influence in the US is not inconsiderable. But one should note that no serious philosophy dept in the English-speaking world has any full-time prof. who takes Derrida seriously. His influence is entirely in depts of literature and other fields where, sadly, there are few publicly discernable standards of excellence. There are many smart thinkers who cannot express themselves. In English-speaking depts of philosophy virtually no graduate student can obtain a degree w/o learning to express him or herself reasonably clearly. Derrida's opacity has nothing to do with the depth of his thinking.

I trust you won't be bothered by the nasty mail you receive."

Stephen Barrell of Newnham e-mailed to say:
"I read your piece on Derrida in todays independent with some interest, but it left me with a lot of questions and points that I was hoping that you might be able to address for me:

1. Deconstruction of our most cherished values may seem pernicious while their objects continue to sufuse the world we find ourselves in, but why would this invalidate what deconstruction demonstrates to us? Surely the world is filled with unpalatable ideas which we are none the less forced to accept. I'm not for a moment suggesting that Derrida's critiques are self-evident or necessarily valid, but surely we need a more incisive criterion when judging them than the taste they leave in our mouths. More specifically, if we are to attack the theory of the floating signifier we will need to attack the entirety of structuralism and post-structuralism, the Saussurean school of linguistics, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein as well as numerous other figures from the history of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, cybernetics, marxism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, etc...

At the heart of this theory is an approach to the problem of essence and the status of universals, putting us firmly into the camp of metaphysics (a great title for critique of sexuality in metaphysics) where ethico-political arguments will necessarily be of little use to us.

2. Indeed, we do quickly descend into absurdity if we try to treat metaphysics as ethics (the infamous slide from 'is' to 'ought'), of course you are right to suggest that it would be lunacy for a society to ignore a serial killer on the grounds that madness is an indeterminate signifier, but it would be just as ridiculous to attempt to understand the actions of our serial killer through an appeal to the quantum mechanics that structure its
body, but no one would argue that quantum physics is a decadent conceit. We will need to go elswhere to find a place for ethics in Derrida's system.

3. Assuming that we might be able to sidestep the question of whether Derrida's work rests on sound principles, why should we imagine that deconstruction can only lead to nihilism? (I'm not disputing the fact that many people have tried to take derrida's work in this direction and that its a very real trap for the lazy thinker). Why should we not experience derrida's work as a liberation? If it turns out that we can validly argue that the beliefs we esteem are a product of metanarratives (and this puts us far closer to Lyotard than it does Derrida) and harbour something equally as
pernicious as their object at their base why should this lead us to ethical paralysis? If deconstruction shows us that all that was solid melts into air and that this shifting techtonic is part of our own essential structure
surely the result must be that we are called on to act. Deprived of the luxury of simple formulae or pat answers we are reinvigorated as ethical agents who, while aware that meaning and right are transitory phenomena, are forever impelled to fully engage with the world as we meet it without certainty but with urgency. In this sense deconstruction would not signify the death knell for ethics but would be its birth cry.

4. Finally, on a far more pedestrian note, if derrida's metaphysics of presence appear incomprehensible and much of his writing strikes us as giberish perhaps we should take this as a sign that Derridas ideas are
subtle and, as with any new idea we're presented with, requires a level of commitment from us before we can engage with it on a critical level.

Thanks for taking the time to look over this. I admit that there was very little in your article that I agreed with, but I certainly found it interesting. I think youre absolutely right to suggest that a naive and nihilistic form of deconstruction does run rife through humanities departments, but I would suggest that this is more a result of lazy thinking than Derrida's logocidal intent and we do him an injustice if we crucify him for his followers sins.

Keep on working people up, it gets things done..."

And from Michael Deitich:
"you say, 'no tyrannised person ever felt they were trapped in a language game.'

hmmm....can you spell Kafka?"

I replied: "Good point. The central character in 'The Trial' is clearly oppressed not by people who subject him to judicial kidnapping and hold him without informing him of the charges against him. No - he was oppressed by the terrors of langauge.

I have been a fool. I assumed the people in Guantanomo needed a high-profile and popular campaign to guarantee their basic human rights. In fact, they needed the concept of Guantanomo to be deconstructed."

Perian Wyar wrote to say:
"As much as it is shooting fish in a barrel, I'm glad that you're busting on Derrida. It never gets old.

The attractiveness of postmodern concepts is that they offer an eternal retreat- every time you see a concept you find threatening, you can just climb another tree by calling its basic concepts invalid on whatever criteria you choose. It is a shortcut in intellectual rigor- all justification and no justice."

Dave Boucher wrote:
"I think the ultimate irony (one might even call it Derridean) is that neither Derrida's critics nor his pseudo-followers have any understanding of deconstruction. Deconstruction is the perfectly free-floating signifyer that is used to instantly 'shut up' one's opponents (a conservative will simply roll his eyes, incant the magic word 'deconstruction' and thus dismiss his opponent; the pseudo-leftist will simply steel his face, cite the magic word 'logocentric' and thus dismiss his opponent). Alas, neither side makes any effort to actually understand what of value there might be in deconstruction.

To somewhat randomly illustrate some of the many errors in your post:

'The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the intellectual foundation of the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation.'

This, quite simply, completely misunderstands deconstruction as an historical phenomenon. Post-structuralism (of which deconstruction was one version) was a reaction to the horrors of the twentieth century and (new for France) an attack on the totalizing theories (like Marxism) that had emerged from modernity. One can debate whether or not these totalizing theories were true inheritors of the Enlightenment (a similar debate took place in the 1940s in American political theory between the followers of Sabine and emigres like Strauss) as post-structuralists like Derrida believe, but one cannot assert that it is a product of decadence (except to say that it is a reaction to the decadence all around us).

'Most of his followers therefore work on the assumption that the Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.'

Again, you are ignoring the context in which Derrida wrote -- that of hyper-political France of the mid-twentieth century. The Enlightenment in France gave us the Terror and, by the 1950s, the 'truth' that the culmination of knowledge was the French Communist Party! This was a delusion that needed to be, and thank God was, smashed. Or have you failed to notice that the primary casulty of post-structuralism was precisely its intended target -- Marxism? Why do you think communists like Eagleton are so worked up about deconstruction?

'Behind every reasoned argument, Derrida believed, there is a raw decision with no rational or reasoned basis.'

Yes, and how is this different from Kierkegaard's argument that all 'knowledge' rests on a "leap of faith" or Kuhn's argument that all scientific knowledge exists within a paradigm that is itself neither true nor false? Or do you condemn Kierkegaard and Kuhn as nihilists too?

'And build what in its place? Derrida neglected to discuss alternatives'

Of course he neglected to discuss alternatives -- since the evils of the modern world are primarily a result of the systems modernity build, why would you possibly want to build yet another system? The problem is not a neglect of alternatives, the problem is that Derrida's pseudo-followers have constructed their own monstrous system (see below).

'When there are urgent crises in the world that need serious intellectual application, it is faintly disgusting for left-wing intellectuals to spend their time arguing about...'

Except that most of the 'urgent crises' in the world have been CAUSED by the left-wing! As intellectuals, French post-structuralists engaged in the project of tearing down the left-wing illusions of the intelligentsia that had enabled these urgent crises. And by the way, tyrannized people DO write about being trapped in language-games, or have you never read an East European novel?

'But to allow it to dominate so much of the humanities, as it has for decades, to allow it to paralyse thought at a moment when the world faces unprecedented crises, is almost pathologically deranged. Academics, novelists and serious thinkers have been parked in the Derridan dead-end for too long.'

Huh? Since when have academic pseudo-followers of Derrida been paralyzed? Walk into any humanities class and you will get an hour-long hate-speech diatribe of Absolute Truth (men bad, women good; white bad, black good; straight bad; gay good). Of course, this shows that Derrida's 'followers' do not understand him any better than you do. Academia could use some deconstruction, and we could start with the Absolute Dualities of Men/Women, White/Black and Straight/Gay.

'It's very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher - even one as bankrupt and silly as Derrida or Antonio Negri - you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics.'

Why is it interesting to note that when you condemn a philosopher you clearly don't understand (and criticize by name-calling -- 'silly,' 'bankrupt'), you in turn get condemned by name-calling? Since when is there anything new in the dynamic of the sandbox?

'Don't get me wrong. The last thing I would offer is a populist anti-intellectual argument."

Huh? Your post IS an anti-intellectual 'argument'!

'Another tactic academics use is to criticise you for not being an academic, as though the very medium of journalism was worthless. '

Well, the medium of journalism IS worthless, although it is one step above academia.

"Anyway, my reading of Derrida is not - as Hutson implies - very controversial even in academic circles: take a look at Professor Mark Lilla's ˜The Reckless Mind - Intellectuals in Politics', which takes a similar view. Or at Eagleton's 'After Theory'."

Ugh! Citing an uniformed, neo-conservative denunciation of Derrida and a fraudulent, communist denunciation of Derrida is not reassuring as to your understanding of deconstruction. Instead, you should read Vincent Descombes' Modern French Philosophy for an examination of Derrida philosophically (Descombes, by the way, is not a deconstructionist or a supporter of deconstruction, but at least he understands it) and Morris Abrams' How to Do Things with Texts for an examination of deconstruction as literary criticism (Abrams was also not a deconstructionist). Alas, these are the only two texts critical of deconstruction that I have ever found that also understand it.

Sorry, but I have to conclude "a pox on both your houses."

Somebody from besht03@patriot.net wrote to say:
“Pynchon ain't who you think he is: his meta-narratives, while balancing out, are real, objectively actual--that his world is tragic forces overlapping between the heroes and the villains--arguably in too calculatedly schema that end up losing much of the world\'s messiness and resistance to the moral imperative of doing good--but no mistake about it--these things are not word games--they presuppose a real world where consequences play out--in Gravity's Rainbow, the protagonist, Lt. Slothrop and his girlfriends wink out loose coherence; but this is not a narrative game--the novel has a very real Lt. Slothrop actually, not only allegorically, disappearing.

Its politics aside, for its descriptive language alone, forgetting the modernist and post-modernist (not the same thing as deconstructionist) allusions--this is one of the great novels. Try to reread it. From personal experience, reading Gravity's Rainbow in a Tel Aviv bomb shelter 1973 and in Lebanon in 1978 where we saw with our own eyes "A screaming comes across the sky" try to trust me when I say the novel is not some incestuous pointless interior self-referential monologue. This is not Derridean--there's some real bad mojo out in the world and Pynchon's taken a long hard look at it. Once you get past the first couple of chapters it will come easier. I don't know about the other feller.”

Jeb Bishop from Chicago wrote:
“Thank you for your article on Derrida. I studied philosophy for seven years and read a fair amount of Derrida both in French and in English translation, though nowhere near all of his work, and my reading was concentrated entirely on his earlier writings, the ones most specifically addressing philosophy and philosophers.

While there is no question that his verbiage is infuriating at times, I think it's a mistake to see him as nothing but an anarchic, anti-rationalist nihilist. At what I think of as his best, he makes a case that (among other points) we have no access to reality unmediated by concepts, i.e. language, and that any attempt to give a final explication of the meaning of a text is doomed because there is nothing to put such an explication on a more "foundational" level than any other piece of language. Whether or not you think he's made that case successfully (and I am not taking a stand on that), those are serious ideas worthy of discussion, not just a pseudointellectual shell game.

And in many of his writings he can in fact be found taking philosophical argument seriously, and attempting in good faith to construct arguments for his positions. I think here of Speech and Phenomena, many of the essays in Margins of Philosophy, the interviews in Positions, and significant parts of Limited Inc., especially the Q&A with Gerald Graff in the appendix. In the latter, for one, he is at pains to reject what he considers misinterpretations of his ideas (which itself shows that he accepts that some interpretations are better than others), arguing that he never claimed that linguistic meaning is completely undecidable, but only that its decidability is always limited to a particular context of discussion, and is never absolute in some God's-eye-view, transcontextual, ahistorical sense.

Again, whether he succeeds in his effort is one question, but the ideas themselves are both intelligible and nontrivial. Of course there is also the "bad," for me generally later, Derrida, as epitomized by the quote you give about the supercollider, or his ridiculous reaction to the events of September 11th. I'm not interested in defending or explaining that side of him, but only in pointing out that there is also, I think, a "good" side of his work.
Finally, I must take exception with your condemnation in passing of the writings of David Foster Wallace. While his style can be grating and smug, it's just factually incorrect to dismiss his work as nothing but self-referential semantic games. Infinite Jest, his major work so far, is in many ways a quite conventional novel, telling the interwoven stories of a large cast of well-drawn characters, and engaging issues of addiction, entertainment, and the sense of desperation in modern life in a passionate, heartfelt, moving, and non-ironic manner. Of course Wallace does also attempt to stretch form and storytelling convention in the book, but there's nothing nihilistic, or even especially Derridean, about his approach to that.”

A charmer called Aquarius Jackson e-mailed to say:
“I've read After Theory, and I think you're flattering yourself a bit too much by aligning Eagleton with yourself on Derrida. As a Marxist, Eagleton naturally had problems with poststructuralism and postmodernism, but he was also to intelligent and respectful not to call Derrida the "mad axeman of Western Philosophy" right after his death. I suspect his response to Deridda's passing was more measured and reasoned than yours.
Mark my words, "Johann Hari," I will outlive you just long enough to call you the "mad axeman of the blogosphere" right after you die. You've already made a convincing case "Why I won't be Mourning for Hari." Of course, I probably won't be able to publish it anywhere but a blog, because nobody's going to care when you die. Mark my words.”
Those words are, indeed, marked.

L Brunswick said:

"Your blog on Derrida was spot on. As you explained, the central problem is that he has a political motivation, but his ideas render political projects impossible. I would add that if there are no reality and no values, then it is impossible to have a political philosophy that describes what is the good society.

I think a lot of why the post-structuralists go wrong is that they were very influenced by Rousseau. This is partly because they are French and so were taught him growing up, and partly because the 19th century German philosophers they have taken up, such as Hegel and Neitzsche, were also very influenced by Rousseau (see Bernard Yack's remarkable book, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Neitzsche).

Rousseau taught that human beings are naturally asocial, and in that case to live in society is to be terribly oppressed (unless, he thought, you totally surrender your self). Foucault is following Rousseau here, as is Derrida, the latter making language, a feature of social existence, the means of oppression. Hence the post-structuralists strive for liberation, but believe it is impossible to achieve in even the smallest degree.

Rousseau could claim that the humans originally lived a solitary existence because at the time there was no solid knowledge about pre-history. More recently scientists have determined that humans have always been social, living originally in band societies, and so have social motives along with self-oriented ones (see Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, which is aimed directly at the post-modernists). Hence you have a basis for universal values, not in metaphysics, but rather in human nature.

Interestingly, many members of the English Enlightenment, in particular Hobbes and Smith, also believed that humans originally lived in band societies, and they had views of human nature rather similar to those of the evolutionary psychologists. It was on this basis that they developed their liberal political philosophies.

Something else: Though Derrida attacks metaphysics, he is himself actually quite metaphysical. For instance, to say that we cannot know reality directly, but only through language, is a version of cartesian dualism where mind and matter are in two different universes. More truly post-metaphysical is Heidegger, who throws cartesian dualism away and describes human existence as always already involved in the world, including understanding it.

Derrida is also metaphysical in that he assumes that distinctions are all up in the non-material symbolic realm, and so the body, allegedly dumb, disorderly matter, cannot produce them. Actually, the body is itself a structure of distinctions, and makes further distinctions in the process of its material, biological, social, and linguistic living (see Merleau-Ponty's books The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception.) As Wittgenstein said, what we finally have are the activities of living, and he meant that in a literal, biological sense.

A third way Derrida is metaphysical is that he assumes that meaning has validity only if it is total and absolutely non-contradictory. He is here following Socrates' method of the elenchus, where you propose a definition, but then throw it away if it is shown to be in some way imperfect. But actually, as Wittgenstein shows, real, useful meanings are
always imprecise. "

John Williamson wrote:
"I encourage critics of Derrida to step forward and air their critiques and I also encourage Derrida's definders to make their case. While I
fall in the pro-Derrida camp, I feel that Derrida's defenders perform a disservice to public discourse about Derrida whenever they attack a critic. I wholeheartedly agree with your point that you should not be required to footnote every remark and that you as a journalist have a valuable role to play in discourse that is different from the role of
academics.

Regarding the substance of your remarks on Derrida, I believe Derrida was attempting to solve a difficult problem. Namely, he wanted to critique the fundamentals of language and philosophy while operating within the bounds of language and philosophy. While deconstructionism asserts the presence of a bias in all language, I am not persuaded that it is nihilism or anything close. One of Derrida's main theses was that language and philosophy always served some group or interest. His most persuasive arguments used the language and formulations within the text he critiqued. Working within the text is deconstruction with a little 'd' at its best.

When I first started reading Derrida, I actually expected to find the nihilist critics described. But when reading Derrida on a variety of
subjects, I was surprised at how little he fit this description. Derrida's positions do not lend themselves to sound bites, but he always takes a stand. While some people may find his work dense or impenetrable, I would say to these people, take a breath, read slowly, give it some time. Derrida is worth the effort."

Phillip Ross wrote:
I loved what you had to say about Derrida, but do think that there's a lot of confusion still about postmodernism -- my academic subject
speciality. Postmodernism is a period of time marked by anxiety and uncertainty. It's a diverse period. Somehow, though, it has come to be associated with just one style of writing, one type of thinking. Perhaps this is evidence of the powerful influence of certain thinkers and writers.

But in time we'll look back on the postmodern period as we do the Romantic period, or perhaps impressionism. Certain themes will stand out, certain figures will stand out. But I don't think we're going to toss out everything produced in the second half of the 20th century. Rorty will stand out as an important figure; Derrida, hopefully, will lose some of
his sway. Infinite Jest will remain a major novel; Pynchon will fade away. Other, more traditional-seeming novelists today, like Graham Swift, may come to be regarded as offering better representations of our period, while works by writers like Amis and Rushdie will lose their appeal. This is all speculation of course -- or perhaps wishful thinking."

FURTHER POSTSCRIPT: Just stumbled across this comment froma few years back by Noam Chomsky, with whom I have disagreed on many issues:

"I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of--those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed."

Absolutely right. I see a Popular Front in defence of basic Enlightenment values forming here...

Nick Cohen, Observer columnist, wrote to Professor Gluckman:
"I read your impudent and vulgar email to Hari on the net. What is striking about it, apart from the obvious points about intelligent people paying their taxes to keep fools like you in work, the inability of tenured buffoons to stand by the basic principles that justify their universities, is its white male Eurocentric pseudo-self-confidence. Why on earth do you take the statement "Derrida is dead" to mean that Derrida is dead? I read it to mean that he was alive and well and living in a council flat in Doncaster. But then I'm not a part of the oppressive state which seeks to brainwash the young by filling their minds with debilitating, obscurantist drivel."

POST-POST-POST-SCRIPT: You can read a very interesting comment on this article at

http://www.logopolis.org.uk/weblog/2004/10/of-all-comments-made-about-jacques.html

and another interesting one at

http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2004/10/derrida_et_al.html

and a rather snide one at

http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2004/10/insulting-dead.html

(Watch out for the 'you-don't-accept-our-view-so-you-are-intellectually-illiterate' mentalty there. This is a guy who thinks Antonio Negri can be intellectually engaged with.)

The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the intellectual foundation of the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation. As he is buried this week, it is time to ask whether his ideas - and the long, agonising postmodern intellectual spasm - should be buried with him.

I have friends who still awake weeping at 3am with nightmares about trying to understand Derrida in time for their final exams. It's true his writing is wilfully obscure, and at times he lapses into gibberish. But in fact, once you learn how to boil down his prose, his ideas are fairly simple - and pernicious.

Derrida believed Western thought has been riddled since the time of Plato by a cancer he called "logocentrism". This is, at its core, the assumption that language describes the world in a fairly transparent way. You might think that the words you use are impartial tools for understanding the world - but this is, Derrida argued, a delusion. If I describe, say, Charles Manson as "mad", many people would assume I was describing an objective state called "madness" that exists in the world. Derrida would say the idea of "madness" is just a floating concept, a "signifier", that makes little sense except in relation to other words. The thing out there - the actual madness, the "signified" - is almost impossible to grasp; we are lost in a sea of opposing words that prevent us from actually experiencing reality directly.

Derrida wants to break down the naive belief that there is an objective external reality connected to our words that can be explored through language, science and rationality. Any narrative we construct to understand the world will inevitably be built on supressed violence and exclusion. So, for example, the narrative of 'madness' has been shown by Derrida's colleague and friend Michel Foucault to be a highly elastic concept that is used to stigmatize 'dissidents'; it is a categry that serves the powerful. None of our words is immune to these power-games. There is tension, opposition and power in even the most simple of concepts.

So there are, Derrida concluded, no universal truths, no progress and ultimately no 'sense', only "decentred", small stories that are often silenced by a search for rationality and consistency. The search for intellectual coherence is 'violent' and must be shunned.

Derrida claimed he was offering a critique within the Enlightenment tradition - yet within his own explanatry framework he made Enlghtenment values untenable. (He spoke openly of using tactics of "duplicity" and "the playing of a double game" to "challenge" the Enlightenment. He explained he was operating wthin the language of reason since there was no other, but he would try to lay traps for reason by posing it problems it could not answer. This was designed to expose the inherent contradictions in reason and ultimately destroy it.)

Most of his followers therefore work on the assumption that the Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.

Behind every reasoned argument, Derrida believed, there is a raw decision with no rational or reasoned basis. Everything else is a polite excuse. So the foundation our Enlightenment culture is built on - the absolutely fundamental assumptions we act on every day - are rotten. All we can hope for is to destroy this "metaphysics of presence", which is the assumption that we can expect immediate access to meaning. Then we might be able to experience a few 'concepts' - somehow. Derrida's method for destroying language is deconstruction - a technique that makes us see that "signifiers" are so ambiguous and shifting that they can mean anything or nothing.

Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language, reason and the attempt to tell big stories about how we became as we are. All we are left with - if we accept Derrida's conclusions - is puzzled silence and irony.

If reason is just another language game, if our words cannot match anything out there in the world without doing 'violence' to others - what can we do except sink into nihilism, or turn to the supernatural?

The deconstructionist virus has swept through the humanities departments of universities across Europe and America. But the best way to demonstrate the intellectual collapse this has caused is by looking at the impact of postmodernism on fiction. The fiction the preceded postmodernism - for all its flaws - usually engaged with the world. At its best, it even tried to change it: John Steinbeck hitched a wagon across Depression-scarred California and found a family that became the subject for The Grapes of Wrath.

Compare that to postmodernist fiction, a form of torture so heinous that it surely contravenes the Geneva Convention. Look at the execrable novels of Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, trapped in self-referential Derridan word-games and irrelevance while a world warms and wails outside their pages. The critic Dale Peck has described the postmodern implosion of the novel perfectly: "This is a tradition that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything."

Now magnify that effect across the humanities: imagine this deflation happening in anthropology, sociology, philosophy ... you get the idea. There is nothing more depressing than meeting smart graduate students who should be researching really important subjects, only to find they are writing a postmodern deconstruction of the idea of happiness or wealth or human rights, or a thesis with a name like "Is Anthropology Really Possible in Post-Modern Space?". Of course we should always question the ctegories of our thought - but the wave of deconstruction seems to have reduced academics to doing nothing else. The passivity and irrelevance of European intellectuals and American universities over the past three decades is largely due to the wrong turn they have taken into masturbatory post-modernism; Derridan readings invariably in my experience encourage confusion and passivity in the face of injustice, rather than action.

To be fair to him, late in his life Derrida seems to have begun to understand the terrible forces of ultra-scepticism he unleashed. Very few people can actually bear to be nihilists; very few people can preach a message of paralysis and despair for long. So Derrida declared in the early 1990s that there are some "infinitely irreducible" ideas that should not be deconstructed - particularly justice and friendship.

But it was too late. Derrida had vandalised all the tools he could have used to make a case for justice. If reason is just an "exclusionary strategy", if words are mere symbols in a dense fog, if everything must be broken into warring fragments, how can he suddenly call a halt to the process of deconstruction when it comes to one particular value he happens to like? Is his use of the word "justice" somehow immune to all the rules he spent his career articulating? How could he formulate the concept without violently excluding, say, the unjust? How can the battle between thsoe two words be saved from endless mutual obfuscation?

Derrida was left making the preposterous case that justice is a "Messianic" concept that would somehow be revealed to us once we stripped away language and reason.

I suppose it's touching that Derrida made a tragic final attempt to chain his own decontructionist beast. But the time for him to dissociate himself from nihilism was decades earlier, when he first launched the idea of deconstruction. He should have admitted that, yes, division and tension can be found in all things - but sometimes we need to accept that and build larger categories anyway, witout being accused of 'supression'.

Buried in Derrida's philosophy there are small nuggets of insight. It is worth bearing in mind that the Enlightenment project has contingent and uncertain roots, even if it is the best hope we have. It is essential to know that the structure of language determines our thought much more than we understood before Wittgenstein, and that grand narratives are inherently dangerous unless their exponents admit that they are partial and always doomed to be (at best) necessary fictions.

Derrida could have drawn the sane conclusions from this at the start of his career: that we should show a greater degree of scepticism both toward language and narratives than before. But Derrida always promoted a far more shrill and silly agenda to unpick and 'expose' the Enlightenment tradition.

And build what in its place? Derrida neglected to discuss alternatives except in language so opaque it is impossible to decipher. In the real world, the alternatives to reason (Divine revelation? Superstition? Pure will? Despair?) are even more flawed and even less likely to lead to the "liberation" Derrida claims to seek.

We can see this in Derrida's personal route out of nihilism - through susperstition. Not for nothing was Derrida described as "a Jewish mystic"; he even wrote about his belief in ghosts, which seems to be literal (if one can assume anything in Derrida is literal or rational).

When there are urgent crises in the world that need serious intellectual application, it is faintly disgusting for left-wing intellectuals to spend their time arguing about whether the world is really there at all or whether it can ever be described in language or whetehr there are ghosts about the place. To claim to do so in the name of "true justice" is simply insulting to the victims of injustice. No hungry person craves deconstruction. No tyrannised person feels they are trapped in a language game. It is not only shallow but decadent to claim to be on the left and to dedicate your energy to these demoralising intellectual games.

Terry Eagleton is a Marxist academic with whom I disagree on many things (like the Soviet Union) - but we have a shared belief in rational Enlightenment politics based on notions like evidence, truth and open dispute. He chides Derrida for believing in "the emptiness of desire, the impossibility of truth, the fragility of the subject, , the lie of progress and the pervasiveness of power... [Derrida] greets the suggestion there has been any progress in human history with scorn while [he] regularly avails himself of anaesthetics and water closets."

Eagleton continues, "Derrida says there are moral judgements, but they lack any sort of moral or rational basis. There is no longer any relation, as there was for Aristotle or Marx, between the way the world is and how we ought to act within it, or between the way we are and what we ought to do... These judgements are left accordingly hanging in the air. For Derrida ethics is a matter of absolute decisions - decisions which are vital and necessary but also utterly 'impossible', and which fall outside all given norms, forms of knowledge and modes of conceptualisation. One can only hope he is not on the jury when one's case comes up in court."

Just so. There is no doubt a space for a continuing debate about post-modern thought in the more obscure philosophy departments, in the same way that some people still discuss Berkeley's idealism and other philosophical ideas that nobody would ever actually act on.

But to allow it to dominate so much of the humanities, as it has for decades, to allow it to paralyse thought at a moment when the world faces unprecedented crises, is almost pathologically deranged. Academics, novelists and serious thinkers have been parked in the Derridan dead-end for too long.

POSTSCRIPT:

It’s very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher – even one as bankrupt and silly as Derrida or Antonio Negri – you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics. Although there are always some appreciative adademics - or some intelligently critical ones - too often they don’t try to answer you or rebut what you say; they simply accuse you of being stupid.

In case you think I’m exaggerating, here is one typical e-mail:

"Dear Mr. Hari,
You are an idiot.
Professor Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Goldsmith's College, University of London."

(Feel free to respond to Professor Duttmann at ADuttmann@aol.com)

(I seriously considered becoming an academic for a time. E-mails like this remind me why I opted for journalism instead).

This is the MO of the postmodern academic charlatans. If I wasn’t ridiculously intellectually self-confident (I wouldn't normally mention this, but I got a double first from King’s College, Cambridge specialising in philosophy, darling) I would probably be intimidated by this stuff – and that’s very revealing. These writers use deliberately opaque prose and their arguments are often manifestly absurd (remember Negri arguing that "he doesn’t believe in memory" because it "dulls the revolutionary spirit" when I confronted him with his obscene apologetics for the Soviet Union and Maoism?). When anybody calls them on it, they call their critics thick. Most people lack the confiedence to see through it.

Don’t get me wrong. The last thing I would offer is a populist anti-intellectual argument. There are many views that can only be expressed in extremely complex language, and not just scientific views. I always thought the sneering at Gordon Brown for talking about "neo-endogenous growth theory", for example, was daft – it’s a complicated economic theory and can’t be boiled down into words of two syllables. Plenty of what I write (and more of what I’d like to write) wouldn’t be accessible to the general readership of a popular newspaper. Try discussing Marx’s Capital or pensions policy or the WTO in very simple language – it’s tough.

The rule is not 'Don't use complex language.' It’s: 'use the most straight-forward language possible.' Sometimes the most comprehensible language will still be complex and tough because the subject is; but most often, simple language will do. With Derrida and Negri, the convoluted language masks facile or empty thought. If they wrote in clear prose, there would be nothing there.

Another tactic academics use is to criticise you for not being an academic, as though the very medium of journalism was worthless. So for example, I received this:

"Dear Mr Hari

I am writing to you in anger concerning your appallingly ill-informed column on the late Jacques Derrida. Virtually every sentence imputes ideas into Derrida's work that are simply not there. As a research student completing a Ph.D in philosophy, I am expected to give precise and full references to any claim or counter-claim that I make in my work. As a journalist, you obviously do not feel the obligation to do so.

Your column evinces a lack of philosophical culture, a lack of integrity, a lack of honesty, a lack of rigour, a lack of decency, a lack of probity, and most of all, a lack of responsibility. Little wonder that your profession is held in such low esteem. If I could be bothered, I would reach over to my shelves, and provide you with full citations from Derrida's work that would refute the claims made in your column. However, I feel that it would be better to allow you to read Derrida's work for yourself.

Yours sincerely

William Hutson"

Now, unfortunately, in a newspaper column you can’t use footnotes or extensive references. Any intelligent person understands that. Should philosophical ideas therefore never be discussed in newspapers? Is philosophy for a tiny academic elite? But note also the implicit snobbery: "a lack of philosophical culture." No, I don’t write in wilfully obscure prose (although I can – how do you think I got that double first?) and, no, I do not share the mindset of the postmodern academy. I believe in social engagement, not a retreat into postmodern confusion and apathy: that, to them, is in itself evidence of stupidity and crudity.

Anyway, my reading of Derrida is not – as Hutson implies - very controversial even in academic circles: take a look at Professor Mark Lilla’s ‘The Reckless Mind – Intellectuals in Politics’, which takes a similar view. Or at Eagleton's 'After Theory'.

Hutson can’t be a very good Derridan if he’s trying to rebut me with quotes from Derrida. For a start, Derrida contradicted himself – as everybody knows, and the late Professor admitted - all the time, and when he was challenged on it he would say that he was being "playful" and "appreciated irony." And he often spoke in blatantly contradictory language. For example, speaking on a simple political matter, he said: "Senator, it is simply false to say that funding the SSC [the superconducting supercollider] will interfere with support for research on high temperature superconductivity. But it is above all not true. And vice versa."

Anyway, is Hutson trying to say my reading is wrong because I have misunderstood the author’s intention? Hello?

Occassionally intellectual life will take a wrong turn. I think the agonies of epistemological doubt and ultra-scepticism unleashed by Derrida and his fellow postmodern intellectuals have been a terrible wrong turn, especially at a time when we have rarely needed engaged intellectuals more. To argue - as Michel Foucault did - that the Enlightenment tradition is simply a bankrupt veil for violence, and that we should revert to public lynching ("popular justice"), is dangerous. To try to destory the possibility of Enlightenment discourse - as Derrida in practice did - is dangerous. Okay, so few people will take it seriously and act on it (indeed, I would wager that nobody will) - but it distracts the intellectual classes and universities that could be doing something worthwhile.

Anybody who tries to make this case inevitably opens themselves up to accusations of stupidity, I guess; I open myself up tpo accusations that I "just don't understand the turn we have taken," as one e-mailer put it. No; I get it perfectly well - I just don't agree.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Professor Clifford Staples of the University of North Dakota wrote to explain:
“I'm a U.S. academic sociologist and have been through all the pomo stuff (I actually find some of it quite liberating and useful. Deconstruction of a sort is an utterly necessary element of any good critical sociology), but of course you are correct concerning Derrida and the endgame of nihilism).

My colleague and friend Bob Antonio from the University of Kansas writes brilliantly, I think, on the continued relevance and necessity of Enligtenment-inspired Modern Social Theory (see his work over the last ten years in the American Journal of Sociology (mostly) "Nietzsche's Anti-Sociology," After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism.").

In the same vein, I am currently working on Richard Rorty, reading him from the MST tradition. Rorty's pragmatism gets him most of the way to social theory, but his armchair empirical speculations-- as evidence in Geras' devestating critique in Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind shows, is his undoing. But I was interested to see in some of your comments how you come close to the "ungroundable" liberalism of Rorty that gets Geras so worked up. This is the stuff I live for (well, that and golf and sex and my daughter and freedom and justice and so forth).”

Gregory Fried, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Sussex University, wrote:
"As an academic who has read and written on Derrida, I just wanted to let you know that your treatment was, to my mind, fully on target. Very well, it might not satisfy the pedantry of Derrida's more obsessive followers (what would?), but as you say: may not journalism treat philosophy seriously?
And you pay Derrida at least that much of a compliment: you do take him seriously.

In particular, what I think you get right is how the "mad axeman of Western philosophy" pulled down the edifices of reason that support our free institutions -- and only too late realized that what he had done was NOT
effect a new, deeper form of liberation. In his last decade, he scrambled to build a shadow-edifice, but to no avail.

I plan to use your appraisal when I teach him in the future, at least to get students started.

If you ever do wish to put yourself to sleep with an "academic" deconstruction of the Grand Deconstructor, try my book, 'Heidegger's
Polemos', which treats both Heidegger's politics and the effects of that politics on the postmodernist left."

James Lindgren, Professor of Law at Northwestern University, said:
“I found some of the responses to your Derrida "eulogy" hilariously inept. So your critics know the absolute truth of what Derrida meant and you don't. Given the impossibilities of language that Derrida claims, how can this even be possible? Either Derrida is wrong about language or your critics are wrong to be certain that you misunderstood Derrida. I think your critics, particularly the philosophy student that attacked you, need to do a little more critical thinking. There is some wheat among the chaff in Derrida, but it takes a genuinely critical eye to pull it out."

Professor Christopher Morris from the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland wrote:
"About Derrida: his influence in the US is not inconsiderable. But one should note that no serious philosophy dept in the English-speaking world has any full-time prof. who takes Derrida seriously. His influence is entirely in depts of literature and other fields where, sadly, there are few publicly discernable standards of excellence. There are many smart thinkers who cannot express themselves. In English-speaking depts of philosophy virtually no graduate student can obtain a degree w/o learning to express him or herself reasonably clearly. Derrida's opacity has nothing to do with the depth of his thinking.

I trust you won't be bothered by the nasty mail you receive."

Stephen Barrell of Newnham e-mailed to say:
"I read your piece on Derrida in todays independent with some interest, but it left me with a lot of questions and points that I was hoping that you might be able to address for me:

1. Deconstruction of our most cherished values may seem pernicious while their objects continue to sufuse the world we find ourselves in, but why would this invalidate what deconstruction demonstrates to us? Surely the world is filled with unpalatable ideas which we are none the less forced to accept. I'm not for a moment suggesting that Derrida's critiques are self-evident or necessarily valid, but surely we need a more incisive criterion when judging them than the taste they leave in our mouths. More specifically, if we are to attack the theory of the floating signifier we will need to attack the entirety of structuralism and post-structuralism, the Saussurean school of linguistics, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein as well as numerous other figures from the history of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, cybernetics, marxism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, etc...

At the heart of this theory is an approach to the problem of essence and the status of universals, putting us firmly into the camp of metaphysics (a great title for critique of sexuality in metaphysics) where ethico-political arguments will necessarily be of little use to us.

2. Indeed, we do quickly descend into absurdity if we try to treat metaphysics as ethics (the infamous slide from 'is' to 'ought'), of course you are right to suggest that it would be lunacy for a society to ignore a serial killer on the grounds that madness is an indeterminate signifier, but it would be just as ridiculous to attempt to understand the actions of our serial killer through an appeal to the quantum mechanics that structure its
body, but no one would argue that quantum physics is a decadent conceit. We will need to go elswhere to find a place for ethics in Derrida's system.

3. Assuming that we might be able to sidestep the question of whether Derrida's work rests on sound principles, why should we imagine that deconstruction can only lead to nihilism? (I'm not disputing the fact that many people have tried to take derrida's work in this direction and that its a very real trap for the lazy thinker). Why should we not experience derrida's work as a liberation? If it turns out that we can validly argue that the beliefs we esteem are a product of metanarratives (and this puts us far closer to Lyotard than it does Derrida) and harbour something equally as
pernicious as their object at their base why should this lead us to ethical paralysis? If deconstruction shows us that all that was solid melts into air and that this shifting techtonic is part of our own essential structure
surely the result must be that we are called on to act. Deprived of the luxury of simple formulae or pat answers we are reinvigorated as ethical agents who, while aware that meaning and right are transitory phenomena, are forever impelled to fully engage with the world as we meet it without certainty but with urgency. In this sense deconstruction would not signify the death knell for ethics but would be its birth cry.

4. Finally, on a far more pedestrian note, if derrida's metaphysics of presence appear incomprehensible and much of his writing strikes us as giberish perhaps we should take this as a sign that Derridas ideas are
subtle and, as with any new idea we're presented with, requires a level of commitment from us before we can engage with it on a critical level.

Thanks for taking the time to look over this. I admit that there was very little in your article that I agreed with, but I certainly found it interesting. I think youre absolutely right to suggest that a naive and nihilistic form of deconstruction does run rife through humanities departments, but I would suggest that this is more a result of lazy thinking than Derrida's logocidal intent and we do him an injustice if we crucify him for his followers sins.

Keep on working people up, it gets things done..."

And from Michael Deitich:
"you say, 'no tyrannised person ever felt they were trapped in a language game.'

hmmm....can you spell Kafka?"

I replied: "Good point. The central character in 'The Trial' is clearly oppressed not by people who subject him to judicial kidnapping and hold him without informing him of the charges against him. No - he was oppressed by the terrors of langauge.

I have been a fool. I assumed the people in Guantanomo needed a high-profile and popular campaign to guarantee their basic human rights. In fact, they needed the concept of Guantanomo to be deconstructed."

Perian Wyar wrote to say:
"As much as it is shooting fish in a barrel, I'm glad that you're busting on Derrida. It never gets old.

The attractiveness of postmodern concepts is that they offer an eternal retreat- every time you see a concept you find threatening, you can just climb another tree by calling its basic concepts invalid on whatever criteria you choose. It is a shortcut in intellectual rigor- all justification and no justice."

Dave Boucher wrote:
"I think the ultimate irony (one might even call it Derridean) is that neither Derrida's critics nor his pseudo-followers have any understanding of deconstruction. Deconstruction is the perfectly free-floating signifyer that is used to instantly 'shut up' one's opponents (a conservative will simply roll his eyes, incant the magic word 'deconstruction' and thus dismiss his opponent; the pseudo-leftist will simply steel his face, cite the magic word 'logocentric' and thus dismiss his opponent). Alas, neither side makes any effort to actually understand what of value there might be in deconstruction.

To somewhat randomly illustrate some of the many errors in your post:

'The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the intellectual foundation of the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation.'

This, quite simply, completely misunderstands deconstruction as an historical phenomenon. Post-structuralism (of which deconstruction was one version) was a reaction to the horrors of the twentieth century and (new for France) an attack on the totalizing theories (like Marxism) that had emerged from modernity. One can debate whether or not these totalizing theories were true inheritors of the Enlightenment (a similar debate took place in the 1940s in American political theory between the followers of Sabine and emigres like Strauss) as post-structuralists like Derrida believe, but one cannot assert that it is a product of decadence (except to say that it is a reaction to the decadence all around us).

'Most of his followers therefore work on the assumption that the Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.'

Again, you are ignoring the context in which Derrida wrote -- that of hyper-political France of the mid-twentieth century. The Enlightenment in France gave us the Terror and, by the 1950s, the 'truth' that the culmination of knowledge was the French Communist Party! This was a delusion that needed to be, and thank God was, smashed. Or have you failed to notice that the primary casulty of post-structuralism was precisely its intended target -- Marxism? Why do you think communists like Eagleton are so worked up about deconstruction?

'Behind every reasoned argument, Derrida believed, there is a raw decision with no rational or reasoned basis.'

Yes, and how is this different from Kierkegaard's argument that all 'knowledge' rests on a "leap of faith" or Kuhn's argument that all scientific knowledge exists within a paradigm that is itself neither true nor false? Or do you condemn Kierkegaard and Kuhn as nihilists too?

'And build what in its place? Derrida neglected to discuss alternatives'

Of course he neglected to discuss alternatives -- since the evils of the modern world are primarily a result of the systems modernity build, why would you possibly want to build yet another system? The problem is not a neglect of alternatives, the problem is that Derrida's pseudo-followers have constructed their own monstrous system (see below).

'When there are urgent crises in the world that need serious intellectual application, it is faintly disgusting for left-wing intellectuals to spend their time arguing about...'

Except that most of the 'urgent crises' in the world have been CAUSED by the left-wing! As intellectuals, French post-structuralists engaged in the project of tearing down the left-wing illusions of the intelligentsia that had enabled these urgent crises. And by the way, tyrannized people DO write about being trapped in language-games, or have you never read an East European novel?

'But to allow it to dominate so much of the humanities, as it has for decades, to allow it to paralyse thought at a moment when the world faces unprecedented crises, is almost pathologically deranged. Academics, novelists and serious thinkers have been parked in the Derridan dead-end for too long.'

Huh? Since when have academic pseudo-followers of Derrida been paralyzed? Walk into any humanities class and you will get an hour-long hate-speech diatribe of Absolute Truth (men bad, women good; white bad, black good; straight bad; gay good). Of course, this shows that Derrida's 'followers' do not understand him any better than you do. Academia could use some deconstruction, and we could start with the Absolute Dualities of Men/Women, White/Black and Straight/Gay.

'It's very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher - even one as bankrupt and silly as Derrida or Antonio Negri - you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics.'

Why is it interesting to note that when you condemn a philosopher you clearly don't understand (and criticize by name-calling -- 'silly,' 'bankrupt'), you in turn get condemned by name-calling? Since when is there anything new in the dynamic of the sandbox?

'Don't get me wrong. The last thing I would offer is a populist anti-intellectual argument."

Huh? Your post IS an anti-intellectual 'argument'!

'Another tactic academics use is to criticise you for not being an academic, as though the very medium of journalism was worthless. '

Well, the medium of journalism IS worthless, although it is one step above academia.

"Anyway, my reading of Derrida is not - as Hutson implies - very controversial even in academic circles: take a look at Professor Mark Lilla's ˜The Reckless Mind - Intellectuals in Politics', which takes a similar view. Or at Eagleton's 'After Theory'."

Ugh! Citing an uniformed, neo-conservative denunciation of Derrida and a fraudulent, communist denunciation of Derrida is not reassuring as to your understanding of deconstruction. Instead, you should read Vincent Descombes' Modern French Philosophy for an examination of Derrida philosophically (Descombes, by the way, is not a deconstructionist or a supporter of deconstruction, but at least he understands it) and Morris Abrams' How to Do Things with Texts for an examination of deconstruction as literary criticism (Abrams was also not a deconstructionist). Alas, these are the only two texts critical of deconstruction that I have ever found that also understand it.

Sorry, but I have to conclude "a pox on both your houses."

Somebody from besht03@patriot.net wrote to say:
“Pynchon ain't who you think he is: his meta-narratives, while balancing out, are real, objectively actual--that his world is tragic forces overlapping between the heroes and the villains--arguably in too calculatedly schema that end up losing much of the world\'s messiness and resistance to the moral imperative of doing good--but no mistake about it--these things are not word games--they presuppose a real world where consequences play out--in Gravity's Rainbow, the protagonist, Lt. Slothrop and his girlfriends wink out loose coherence; but this is not a narrative game--the novel has a very real Lt. Slothrop actually, not only allegorically, disappearing.

Its politics aside, for its descriptive language alone, forgetting the modernist and post-modernist (not the same thing as deconstructionist) allusions--this is one of the great novels. Try to reread it. From personal experience, reading Gravity's Rainbow in a Tel Aviv bomb shelter 1973 and in Lebanon in 1978 where we saw with our own eyes "A screaming comes across the sky" try to trust me when I say the novel is not some incestuous pointless interior self-referential monologue. This is not Derridean--there's some real bad mojo out in the world and Pynchon's taken a long hard look at it. Once you get past the first couple of chapters it will come easier. I don't know about the other feller.”

Jeb Bishop from Chicago wrote:
“Thank you for your article on Derrida. I studied philosophy for seven years and read a fair amount of Derrida both in French and in English translation, though nowhere near all of his work, and my reading was concentrated entirely on his earlier writings, the ones most specifically addressing philosophy and philosophers.

While there is no question that his verbiage is infuriating at times, I think it's a mistake to see him as nothing but an anarchic, anti-rationalist nihilist. At what I think of as his best, he makes a case that (among other points) we have no access to reality unmediated by concepts, i.e. language, and that any attempt to give a final explication of the meaning of a text is doomed because there is nothing to put such an explication on a more "foundational" level than any other piece of language. Whether or not you think he's made that case successfully (and I am not taking a stand on that), those are serious ideas worthy of discussion, not just a pseudointellectual shell game.

And in many of his writings he can in fact be found taking philosophical argument seriously, and attempting in good faith to construct arguments for his positions. I think here of Speech and Phenomena, many of the essays in Margins of Philosophy, the interviews in Positions, and significant parts of Limited Inc., especially the Q&A with Gerald Graff in the appendix. In the latter, for one, he is at pains to reject what he considers misinterpretations of his ideas (which itself shows that he accepts that some interpretations are better than others), arguing that he never claimed that linguistic meaning is completely undecidable, but only that its decidability is always limited to a particular context of discussion, and is never absolute in some God's-eye-view, transcontextual, ahistorical sense.

Again, whether he succeeds in his effort is one question, but the ideas themselves are both intelligible and nontrivial. Of course there is also the "bad," for me generally later, Derrida, as epitomized by the quote you give about the supercollider, or his ridiculous reaction to the events of September 11th. I'm not interested in defending or explaining that side of him, but only in pointing out that there is also, I think, a "good" side of his work.
Finally, I must take exception with your condemnation in passing of the writings of David Foster Wallace. While his style can be grating and smug, it's just factually incorrect to dismiss his work as nothing but self-referential semantic games. Infinite Jest, his major work so far, is in many ways a quite conventional novel, telling the interwoven stories of a large cast of well-drawn characters, and engaging issues of addiction, entertainment, and the sense of desperation in modern life in a passionate, heartfelt, moving, and non-ironic manner. Of course Wallace does also attempt to stretch form and storytelling convention in the book, but there's nothing nihilistic, or even especially Derridean, about his approach to that.”

A charmer called Aquarius Jackson e-mailed to say:
“I've read After Theory, and I think you're flattering yourself a bit too much by aligning Eagleton with yourself on Derrida. As a Marxist, Eagleton naturally had problems with poststructuralism and postmodernism, but he was also to intelligent and respectful not to call Derrida the "mad axeman of Western Philosophy" right after his death. I suspect his response to Deridda's passing was more measured and reasoned than yours.
Mark my words, "Johann Hari," I will outlive you just long enough to call you the "mad axeman of the blogosphere" right after you die. You've already made a convincing case "Why I won't be Mourning for Hari." Of course, I probably won't be able to publish it anywhere but a blog, because nobody's going to care when you die. Mark my words.”
Those words are, indeed, marked.

L Brunswick said:

"Your blog on Derrida was spot on. As you explained, the central problem is that he has a political motivation, but his ideas render political projects impossible. I would add that if there are no reality and no values, then it is impossible to have a political philosophy that describes what is the good society.

I think a lot of why the post-structuralists go wrong is that they were very influenced by Rousseau. This is partly because they are French and so were taught him growing up, and partly because the 19th century German philosophers they have taken up, such as Hegel and Neitzsche, were also very influenced by Rousseau (see Bernard Yack's remarkable book, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Neitzsche).

Rousseau taught that human beings are naturally asocial, and in that case to live in society is to be terribly oppressed (unless, he thought, you totally surrender your self). Foucault is following Rousseau here, as is Derrida, the latter making language, a feature of social existence, the means of oppression. Hence the post-structuralists strive for liberation, but believe it is impossible to achieve in even the smallest degree.

Rousseau could claim that the humans originally lived a solitary existence because at the time there was no solid knowledge about pre-history. More recently scientists have determined that humans have always been social, living originally in band societies, and so have social motives along with self-oriented ones (see Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, which is aimed directly at the post-modernists). Hence you have a basis for universal values, not in metaphysics, but rather in human nature.

Interestingly, many members of the English Enlightenment, in particular Hobbes and Smith, also believed that humans originally lived in band societies, and they had views of human nature rather similar to those of the evolutionary psychologists. It was on this basis that they developed their liberal political philosophies.

Something else: Though Derrida attacks metaphysics, he is himself actually quite metaphysical. For instance, to say that we cannot know reality directly, but only through language, is a version of cartesian dualism where mind and matter are in two different universes. More truly post-metaphysical is Heidegger, who throws cartesian dualism away and describes human existence as always already involved in the world, including understanding it.

Derrida is also metaphysical in that he assumes that distinctions are all up in the non-material symbolic realm, and so the body, allegedly dumb, disorderly matter, cannot produce them. Actually, the body is itself a structure of distinctions, and makes further distinctions in the process of its material, biological, social, and linguistic living (see Merleau-Ponty's books The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception.) As Wittgenstein said, what we finally have are the activities of living, and he meant that in a literal, biological sense.

A third way Derrida is metaphysical is that he assumes that meaning has validity only if it is total and absolutely non-contradictory. He is here following Socrates' method of the elenchus, where you propose a definition, but then throw it away if it is shown to be in some way imperfect. But actually, as Wittgenstein shows, real, useful meanings are
always imprecise. "

John Williamson wrote:
"I encourage critics of Derrida to step forward and air their critiques and I also encourage Derrida's definders to make their case. While I
fall in the pro-Derrida camp, I feel that Derrida's defenders perform a disservice to public discourse about Derrida whenever they attack a critic. I wholeheartedly agree with your point that you should not be required to footnote every remark and that you as a journalist have a valuable role to play in discourse that is different from the role of
academics.

Regarding the substance of your remarks on Derrida, I believe Derrida was attempting to solve a difficult problem. Namely, he wanted to critique the fundamentals of language and philosophy while operating within the bounds of language and philosophy. While deconstructionism asserts the presence of a bias in all language, I am not persuaded that it is nihilism or anything close. One of Derrida's main theses was that language and philosophy always served some group or interest. His most persuasive arguments used the language and formulations within the text he critiqued. Working within the text is deconstruction with a little 'd' at its best.

When I first started reading Derrida, I actually expected to find the nihilist critics described. But when reading Derrida on a variety of
subjects, I was surprised at how little he fit this description. Derrida's positions do not lend themselves to sound bites, but he always takes a stand. While some people may find his work dense or impenetrable, I would say to these people, take a breath, read slowly, give it some time. Derrida is worth the effort."

Phillip Ross wrote:
I loved what you had to say about Derrida, but do think that there's a lot of confusion still about postmodernism -- my academic subject
speciality. Postmodernism is a period of time marked by anxiety and uncertainty. It's a diverse period. Somehow, though, it has come to be associated with just one style of writing, one type of thinking. Perhaps this is evidence of the powerful influence of certain thinkers and writers.

But in time we'll look back on the postmodern period as we do the Romantic period, or perhaps impressionism. Certain themes will stand out, certain figures will stand out. But I don't think we're going to toss out everything produced in the second half of the 20th century. Rorty will stand out as an important figure; Derrida, hopefully, will lose some of
his sway. Infinite Jest will remain a major novel; Pynchon will fade away. Other, more traditional-seeming novelists today, like Graham Swift, may come to be regarded as offering better representations of our period, while works by writers like Amis and Rushdie will lose their appeal. This is all speculation of course -- or perhaps wishful thinking."

FURTHER POSTSCRIPT: Just stumbled across this comment froma few years back by Noam Chomsky, with whom I have disagreed on many issues:

"I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of--those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed."

Absolutely right. I see a Popular Front in defence of basic Enlightenment values forming here...

Nick Cohen, Observer columnist, wrote to Professor Gluckman:
"I read your impudent and vulgar email to Hari on the net. What is striking about it, apart from the obvious points about intelligent people paying their taxes to keep fools like you in work, the inability of tenured buffoons to stand by the basic principles that justify their universities, is its white male Eurocentric pseudo-self-confidence. Why on earth do you take the statement "Derrida is dead" to mean that Derrida is dead? I read it to mean that he was alive and well and living in a council flat in Doncaster. But then I'm not a part of the oppressive state which seeks to brainwash the young by filling their minds with debilitating, obscurantist drivel."

POST-POST-POST-SCRIPT: You can read a very interesting comment on this article at

http://www.logopolis.org.uk/weblog/2004/10/of-all-comments-made-about-jacques.html

and another interesting one at

http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2004/10/derrida_et_al.html

and a rather snide one at

http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2004/10/insulting-dead.html

(Watch out for the 'you-don't-accept-our-view-so-you-are-intellectually-illiterate' mentalty there. This is a guy who thinks Antonio Negri can be intellectually engaged with.)

The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the intellectual foundation of the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation. As he is buried this week, it is time to ask whether his ideas - and the long, agonising postmodern intellectual spasm - should be buried with him.

I have friends who still awake weeping at 3am with nightmares about trying to understand Derrida in time for their final exams. It's true his writing is wilfully obscure, and at times he lapses into gibberish. But in fact, once you learn how to boil down his prose, his ideas are fairly simple - and pernicious.

Derrida believed Western thought has been riddled since the time of Plato by a cancer he called "logocentrism". This is, at its core, the assumption that language describes the world in a fairly transparent way. You might think that the words you use are impartial tools for understanding the world - but this is, Derrida argued, a delusion. If I describe, say, Charles Manson as "mad", many people would assume I was describing an objective state called "madness" that exists in the world. Derrida would say the idea of "madness" is just a floating concept, a "signifier", that makes little sense except in relation to other words. The thing out there - the actual madness, the "signified" - is almost impossible to grasp; we are lost in a sea of opposing words that prevent us from actually experiencing reality directly.

Derrida wants to break down the naive belief that there is an objective external reality connected to our words that can be explored through language, science and rationality. Any narrative we construct to understand the world will inevitably be built on supressed violence and exclusion. So, for example, the narrative of 'madness' has been shown by Derrida's colleague and friend Michel Foucault to be a highly elastic concept that is used to stigmatize 'dissidents'; it is a categry that serves the powerful. None of our words is immune to these power-games. There is tension, opposition and power in even the most simple of concepts.

So there are, Derrida concluded, no universal truths, no progress and ultimately no 'sense', only "decentred", small stories that are often silenced by a search for rationality and consistency. The search for intellectual coherence is 'violent' and must be shunned.

Derrida claimed he was offering a critique within the Enlightenment tradition - yet within his own explanatry framework he made Enlghtenment values untenable. (He spoke openly of using tactics of "duplicity" and "the playing of a double game" to "challenge" the Enlightenment. He explained he was operating wthin the language of reason since there was no other, but he would try to lay traps for reason by posing it problems it could not answer. This was designed to expose the inherent contradictions in reason and ultimately destroy it.)

Most of his followers therefore work on the assumption that the Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.

Behind every reasoned argument, Derrida believed, there is a raw decision with no rational or reasoned basis. Everything else is a polite excuse. So the foundation our Enlightenment culture is built on - the absolutely fundamental assumptions we act on every day - are rotten. All we can hope for is to destroy this "metaphysics of presence", which is the assumption that we can expect immediate access to meaning. Then we might be able to experience a few 'concepts' - somehow. Derrida's method for destroying language is deconstruction - a technique that makes us see that "signifiers" are so ambiguous and shifting that they can mean anything or nothing.

Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language, reason and the attempt to tell big stories about how we became as we are. All we are left with - if we accept Derrida's conclusions - is puzzled silence and irony.

If reason is just another language game, if our words cannot match anything out there in the world without doing 'violence' to others - what can we do except sink into nihilism, or turn to the supernatural?

The deconstructionist virus has swept through the humanities departments of universities across Europe and America. But the best way to demonstrate the intellectual collapse this has caused is by looking at the impact of postmodernism on fiction. The fiction the preceded postmodernism - for all its flaws - usually engaged with the world. At its best, it even tried to change it: John Steinbeck hitched a wagon across Depression-scarred California and found a family that became the subject for The Grapes of Wrath.

Compare that to postmodernist fiction, a form of torture so heinous that it surely contravenes the Geneva Convention. Look at the execrable novels of Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, trapped in self-referential Derridan word-games and irrelevance while a world warms and wails outside their pages. The critic Dale Peck has described the postmodern implosion of the novel perfectly: "This is a tradition that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything."

Now magnify that effect across the humanities: imagine this deflation happening in anthropology, sociology, philosophy ... you get the idea. There is nothing more depressing than meeting smart graduate students who should be researching really important subjects, only to find they are writing a postmodern deconstruction of the idea of happiness or wealth or human rights, or a thesis with a name like "Is Anthropology Really Possible in Post-Modern Space?". Of course we should always question the ctegories of our thought - but the wave of deconstruction seems to have reduced academics to doing nothing else. The passivity and irrelevance of European intellectuals and American universities over the past three decades is largely due to the wrong turn they have taken into masturbatory post-modernism; Derridan readings invariably in my experience encourage confusion and passivity in the face of injustice, rather than action.

To be fair to him, late in his life Derrida seems to have begun to understand the terrible forces of ultra-scepticism he unleashed. Very few people can actually bear to be nihilists; very few people can preach a message of paralysis and despair for long. So Derrida declared in the early 1990s that there are some "infinitely irreducible" ideas that should not be deconstructed - particularly justice and friendship.

But it was too late. Derrida had vandalised all the tools he could have used to make a case for justice. If reason is just an "exclusionary strategy", if words are mere symbols in a dense fog, if everything must be broken into warring fragments, how can he suddenly call a halt to the process of deconstruction when it comes to one particular value he happens to like? Is his use of the word "justice" somehow immune to all the rules he spent his career articulating? How could he formulate the concept without violently excluding, say, the unjust? How can the battle between thsoe two words be saved from endless mutual obfuscation?

Derrida was left making the preposterous case that justice is a "Messianic" concept that would somehow be revealed to us once we stripped away language and reason.

I suppose it's touching that Derrida made a tragic final attempt to chain his own decontructionist beast. But the time for him to dissociate himself from nihilism was decades earlier, when he first launched the idea of deconstruction. He should have admitted that, yes, division and tension can be found in all things - but sometimes we need to accept that and build larger categories anyway, witout being accused of 'supression'.

Buried in Derrida's philosophy there are small nuggets of insight. It is worth bearing in mind that the Enlightenment project has contingent and uncertain roots, even if it is the best hope we have. It is essential to know that the structure of language determines our thought much more than we understood before Wittgenstein, and that grand narratives are inherently dangerous unless their exponents admit that they are partial and always doomed to be (at best) necessary fictions.

Derrida could have drawn the sane conclusions from this at the start of his career: that we should show a greater degree of scepticism both toward language and narratives than before. But Derrida always promoted a far more shrill and silly agenda to unpick and 'expose' the Enlightenment tradition.

And build what in its place? Derrida neglected to discuss alternatives except in language so opaque it is impossible to decipher. In the real world, the alternatives to reason (Divine revelation? Superstition? Pure will? Despair?) are even more flawed and even less likely to lead to the "liberation" Derrida claims to seek.

We can see this in Derrida's personal route out of nihilism - through susperstition. Not for nothing was Derrida described as "a Jewish mystic"; he even wrote about his belief in ghosts, which seems to be literal (if one can assume anything in Derrida is literal or rational).

When there are urgent crises in the world that need serious intellectual application, it is faintly disgusting for left-wing intellectuals to spend their time arguing about whether the world is really there at all or whether it can ever be described in language or whetehr there are ghosts about the place. To claim to do so in the name of "true justice" is simply insulting to the victims of injustice. No hungry person craves deconstruction. No tyrannised person feels they are trapped in a language game. It is not only shallow but decadent to claim to be on the left and to dedicate your energy to these demoralising intellectual games.

Terry Eagleton is a Marxist academic with whom I disagree on many things (like the Soviet Union) - but we have a shared belief in rational Enlightenment politics based on notions like evidence, truth and open dispute. He chides Derrida for believing in "the emptiness of desire, the impossibility of truth, the fragility of the subject, , the lie of progress and the pervasiveness of power... [Derrida] greets the suggestion there has been any progress in human history with scorn while [he] regularly avails himself of anaesthetics and water closets."

Eagleton continues, "Derrida says there are moral judgements, but they lack any sort of moral or rational basis. There is no longer any relation, as there was for Aristotle or Marx, between the way the world is and how we ought to act within it, or between the way we are and what we ought to do... These judgements are left accordingly hanging in the air. For Derrida ethics is a matter of absolute decisions - decisions which are vital and necessary but also utterly 'impossible', and which fall outside all given norms, forms of knowledge and modes of conceptualisation. One can only hope he is not on the jury when one's case comes up in court."

Just so. There is no doubt a space for a continuing debate about post-modern thought in the more obscure philosophy departments, in the same way that some people still discuss Berkeley's idealism and other philosophical ideas that nobody would ever actually act on.

But to allow it to dominate so much of the humanities, as it has for decades, to allow it to paralyse thought at a moment when the world faces unprecedented crises, is almost pathologically deranged. Academics, novelists and serious thinkers have been parked in the Derridan dead-end for too long.

POSTSCRIPT:

It’s very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher – even one as bankrupt and silly as Derrida or Antonio Negri – you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics. Although there are always some appreciative adademics - or some intelligently critical ones - too often they don’t try to answer you or rebut what you say; they simply accuse you of being stupid.

In case you think I’m exaggerating, here is one typical e-mail:

"Dear Mr. Hari,
You are an idiot.
Professor Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Goldsmith's College, University of London."

(Feel free to respond to Professor Duttmann at ADuttmann@aol.com)

(I seriously considered becoming an academic for a time. E-mails like this remind me why I opted for journalism instead).

This is the MO of the postmodern academic charlatans. If I wasn’t ridiculously intellectually self-confident (I wouldn't normally mention this, but I got a double first from King’s College, Cambridge specialising in philosophy, darling) I would probably be intimidated by this stuff – and that’s very revealing. These writers use deliberately opaque prose and their arguments are often manifestly absurd (remember Negri arguing that "he doesn’t believe in memory" because it "dulls the revolutionary spirit" when I confronted him with his obscene apologetics for the Soviet Union and Maoism?). When anybody calls them on it, they call their critics thick. Most people lack the confiedence to see through it.

Don’t get me wrong. The last thing I would offer is a populist anti-intellectual argument. There are many views that can only be expressed in extremely complex language, and not just scientific views. I always thought the sneering at Gordon Brown for talking about "neo-endogenous growth theory", for example, was daft – it’s a complicated economic theory and can’t be boiled down into words of two syllables. Plenty of what I write (and more of what I’d like to write) wouldn’t be accessible to the general readership of a popular newspaper. Try discussing Marx’s Capital or pensions policy or the WTO in very simple language – it’s tough.

The rule is not 'Don't use complex language.' It’s: 'use the most straight-forward language possible.' Sometimes the most comprehensible language will still be complex and tough because the subject is; but most often, simple language will do. With Derrida and Negri, the convoluted language masks facile or empty thought. If they wrote in clear prose, there would be nothing there.

Another tactic academics use is to criticise you for not being an academic, as though the very medium of journalism was worthless. So for example, I received this:

"Dear Mr Hari

I am writing to you in anger concerning your appallingly ill-informed column on the late Jacques Derrida. Virtually every sentence imputes ideas into Derrida's work that are simply not there. As a research student completing a Ph.D in philosophy, I am expected to give precise and full references to any claim or counter-claim that I make in my work. As a journalist, you obviously do not feel the obligation to do so.

Your column evinces a lack of philosophical culture, a lack of integrity, a lack of honesty, a lack of rigour, a lack of decency, a lack of probity, and most of all, a lack of responsibility. Little wonder that your profession is held in such low esteem. If I could be bothered, I would reach over to my shelves, and provide you with full citations from Derrida's work that would refute the claims made in your column. However, I feel that it would be better to allow you to read Derrida's work for yourself.

Yours sincerely

William Hutson"

Now, unfortunately, in a newspaper column you can’t use footnotes or extensive references. Any intelligent person understands that. Should philosophical ideas therefore never be discussed in newspapers? Is philosophy for a tiny academic elite? But note also the implicit snobbery: "a lack of philosophical culture." No, I don’t write in wilfully obscure prose (although I can – how do you think I got that double first?) and, no, I do not share the mindset of the postmodern academy. I believe in social engagement, not a retreat into postmodern confusion and apathy: that, to them, is in itself evidence of stupidity and crudity.

Anyway, my reading of Derrida is not – as Hutson implies - very controversial even in academic circles: take a look at Professor Mark Lilla’s ‘The Reckless Mind – Intellectuals in Politics’, which takes a similar view. Or at Eagleton's 'After Theory'.

Hutson can’t be a very good Derridan if he’s trying to rebut me with quotes from Derrida. For a start, Derrida contradicted himself – as everybody knows, and the late Professor admitted - all the time, and when he was challenged on it he would say that he was being "playful" and "appreciated irony." And he often spoke in blatantly contradictory language. For example, speaking on a simple political matter, he said: "Senator, it is simply false to say that funding the SSC [the superconducting supercollider] will interfere with support for research on high temperature superconductivity. But it is above all not true. And vice versa."

Anyway, is Hutson trying to say my reading is wrong because I have misunderstood the author’s intention? Hello?

Occassionally intellectual life will take a wrong turn. I think the agonies of epistemological doubt and ultra-scepticism unleashed by Derrida and his fellow postmodern intellectuals have been a terrible wrong turn, especially at a time when we have rarely needed engaged intellectuals more. To argue - as Michel Foucault did - that the Enlightenment tradition is simply a bankrupt veil for violence, and that we should revert to public lynching ("popular justice"), is dangerous. To try to destory the possibility of Enlightenment discourse - as Derrida in practice did - is dangerous. Okay, so few people will take it seriously and act on it (indeed, I would wager that nobody will) - but it distracts the intellectual classes and universities that could be doing something worthwhile.

Anybody who tries to make this case inevitably opens themselves up to accusations of stupidity, I guess; I open myself up tpo accusations that I "just don't understand the turn we have taken," as one e-mailer put it. No; I get it perfectly well - I just don't agree.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Professor Clifford Staples of the University of North Dakota wrote to explain:
“I'm a U.S. academic sociologist and have been through all the pomo stuff (I actually find some of it quite liberating and useful. Deconstruction of a sort is an utterly necessary element of any good critical sociology), but of course you are correct concerning Derrida and the endgame of nihilism).

My colleague and friend Bob Antonio from the University of Kansas writes brilliantly, I think, on the continued relevance and necessity of Enligtenment-inspired Modern Social Theory (see his work over the last ten years in the American Journal of Sociology (mostly) "Nietzsche's Anti-Sociology," After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism.").

In the same vein, I am currently working on Richard Rorty, reading him from the MST tradition. Rorty's pragmatism gets him most of the way to social theory, but his armchair empirical speculations-- as evidence in Geras' devestating critique in Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind shows, is his undoing. But I was interested to see in some of your comments how you come close to the "ungroundable" liberalism of Rorty that gets Geras so worked up. This is the stuff I live for (well, that and golf and sex and my daughter and freedom and justice and so forth).”

Gregory Fried, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Sussex University, wrote:
"As an academic who has read and written on Derrida, I just wanted to let you know that your treatment was, to my mind, fully on target. Very well, it might not satisfy the pedantry of Derrida's more obsessive followers (what would?), but as you say: may not journalism treat philosophy seriously?
And you pay Derrida at least that much of a compliment: you do take him seriously.

In particular, what I think you get right is how the "mad axeman of Western philosophy" pulled down the edifices of reason that support our free institutions -- and only too late realized that what he had done was NOT
effect a new, deeper form of liberation. In his last decade, he scrambled to build a shadow-edifice, but to no avail.

I plan to use your appraisal when I teach him in the future, at least to get students started.

If you ever do wish to put yourself to sleep with an "academic" deconstruction of the Grand Deconstructor, try my book, 'Heidegger's
Polemos', which treats both Heidegger's politics and the effects of that politics on the postmodernist left."

James Lindgren, Professor of Law at Northwestern University, said:
“I found some of the responses to your Derrida "eulogy" hilariously inept. So your critics know the absolute truth of what Derrida meant and you don't. Given the impossibilities of language that Derrida claims, how can this even be possible? Either Derrida is wrong about language or your critics are wrong to be certain that you misunderstood Derrida. I think your critics, particularly the philosophy student that attacked you, need to do a little more critical thinking. There is some wheat among the chaff in Derrida, but it takes a genuinely critical eye to pull it out."

Professor Christopher Morris from the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland wrote:
"About Derrida: his influence in the US is not inconsiderable. But one should note that no serious philosophy dept in the English-speaking world has any full-time prof. who takes Derrida seriously. His influence is entirely in depts of literature and other fields where, sadly, there are few publicly discernable standards of excellence. There are many smart thinkers who cannot express themselves. In English-speaking depts of philosophy virtually no graduate student can obtain a degree w/o learning to express him or herself reasonably clearly. Derrida's opacity has nothing to do with the depth of his thinking.

I trust you won't be bothered by the nasty mail you receive."

Stephen Barrell of Newnham e-mailed to say:
"I read your piece on Derrida in todays independent with some interest, but it left me with a lot of questions and points that I was hoping that you might be able to address for me:

1. Deconstruction of our most cherished values may seem pernicious while their objects continue to sufuse the world we find ourselves in, but why would this invalidate what deconstruction demonstrates to us? Surely the world is filled with unpalatable ideas which we are none the less forced to accept. I'm not for a moment suggesting that Derrida's critiques are self-evident or necessarily valid, but surely we need a more incisive criterion when judging them than the taste they leave in our mouths. More specifically, if we are to attack the theory of the floating signifier we will need to attack the entirety of structuralism and post-structuralism, the Saussurean school of linguistics, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein as well as numerous other figures from the history of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, cybernetics, marxism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, etc...

At the heart of this theory is an approach to the problem of essence and the status of universals, putting us firmly into the camp of metaphysics (a great title for critique of sexuality in metaphysics) where ethico-political arguments will necessarily be of little use to us.

2. Indeed, we do quickly descend into absurdity if we try to treat metaphysics as ethics (the infamous slide from 'is' to 'ought'), of course you are right to suggest that it would be lunacy for a society to ignore a serial killer on the grounds that madness is an indeterminate signifier, but it would be just as ridiculous to attempt to understand the actions of our serial killer through an appeal to the quantum mechanics that structure its
body, but no one would argue that quantum physics is a decadent conceit. We will need to go elswhere to find a place for ethics in Derrida's system.

3. Assuming that we might be able to sidestep the question of whether Derrida's work rests on sound principles, why should we imagine that deconstruction can only lead to nihilism? (I'm not disputing the fact that many people have tried to take derrida's work in this direction and that its a very real trap for the lazy thinker). Why should we not experience derrida's work as a liberation? If it turns out that we can validly argue that the beliefs we esteem are a product of metanarratives (and this puts us far closer to Lyotard than it does Derrida) and harbour something equally as
pernicious as their object at their base why should this lead us to ethical paralysis? If deconstruction shows us that all that was solid melts into air and that this shifting techtonic is part of our own essential structure
surely the result must be that we are called on to act. Deprived of the luxury of simple formulae or pat answers we are reinvigorated as ethical agents who, while aware that meaning and right are transitory phenomena, are forever impelled to fully engage with the world as we meet it without certainty but with urgency. In this sense deconstruction would not signify the death knell for ethics but would be its birth cry.

4. Finally, on a far more pedestrian note, if derrida's metaphysics of presence appear incomprehensible and much of his writing strikes us as giberish perhaps we should take this as a sign that Derridas ideas are
subtle and, as with any new idea we're presented with, requires a level of commitment from us before we can engage with it on a critical level.

Thanks for taking the time to look over this. I admit that there was very little in your article that I agreed with, but I certainly found it interesting. I think youre absolutely right to suggest that a naive and nihilistic form of deconstruction does run rife through humanities departments, but I would suggest that this is more a result of lazy thinking than Derrida's logocidal intent and we do him an injustice if we crucify him for his followers sins.

Keep on working people up, it gets things done..."

And from Michael Deitich:
"you say, 'no tyrannised person ever felt they were trapped in a language game.'

hmmm....can you spell Kafka?"

I replied: "Good point. The central character in 'The Trial' is clearly oppressed not by people who subject him to judicial kidnapping and hold him without informing him of the charges against him. No - he was oppressed by the terrors of langauge.

I have been a fool. I assumed the people in Guantanomo needed a high-profile and popular campaign to guarantee their basic human rights. In fact, they needed the concept of Guantanomo to be deconstructed."

Perian Wyar wrote to say:
"As much as it is shooting fish in a barrel, I'm glad that you're busting on Derrida. It never gets old.

The attractiveness of postmodern concepts is that they offer an eternal retreat- every time you see a concept you find threatening, you can just climb another tree by calling its basic concepts invalid on whatever criteria you choose. It is a shortcut in intellectual rigor- all justification and no justice."

Dave Boucher wrote:
"I think the ultimate irony (one might even call it Derridean) is that neither Derrida's critics nor his pseudo-followers have any understanding of deconstruction. Deconstruction is the perfectly free-floating signifyer that is used to instantly 'shut up' one's opponents (a conservative will simply roll his eyes, incant the magic word 'deconstruction' and thus dismiss his opponent; the pseudo-leftist will simply steel his face, cite the magic word 'logocentric' and thus dismiss his opponent). Alas, neither side makes any effort to actually understand what of value there might be in deconstruction.

To somewhat randomly illustrate some of the many errors in your post:

'The popularity of Jacques Derrida's philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence. Western intellectuals have never been more safe, more comfortable or more free - so they have turned to a wild, often absurd philosopher who trashes the intellectual foundation of the humanities (and any coherent political project) in a search for intellectual stimulation.'

This, quite simply, completely misunderstands deconstruction as an historical phenomenon. Post-structuralism (of which deconstruction was one version) was a reaction to the horrors of the twentieth century and (new for France) an attack on the totalizing theories (like Marxism) that had emerged from modernity. One can debate whether or not these totalizing theories were true inheritors of the Enlightenment (a similar debate took place in the 1940s in American political theory between the followers of Sabine and emigres like Strauss) as post-structuralists like Derrida believe, but one cannot assert that it is a product of decadence (except to say that it is a reaction to the decadence all around us).

'Most of his followers therefore work on the assumption that the Enlightenment - the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress - is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.'

Again, you are ignoring the context in which Derrida wrote -- that of hyper-political France of the mid-twentieth century. The Enlightenment in France gave us the Terror and, by the 1950s, the 'truth' that the culmination of knowledge was the French Communist Party! This was a delusion that needed to be, and thank God was, smashed. Or have you failed to notice that the primary casulty of post-structuralism was precisely its intended target -- Marxism? Why do you think communists like Eagleton are so worked up about deconstruction?

'Behind every reasoned argument, Derrida believed, there is a raw decision with no rational or reasoned basis.'

Yes, and how is this different from Kierkegaard's argument that all 'knowledge' rests on a "leap of faith" or Kuhn's argument that all scientific knowledge exists within a paradigm that is itself neither true nor false? Or do you condemn Kierkegaard and Kuhn as nihilists too?

'And build what in its place? Derrida neglected to discuss alternatives'

Of course he neglected to discuss alternatives -- since the evils of the modern world are primarily a result of the systems modernity build, why would you possibly want to build yet another system? The problem is not a neglect of alternatives, the problem is that Derrida's pseudo-followers have constructed their own monstrous system (see below).

'When there are urgent crises in the world that need serious intellectual application, it is faintly disgusting for left-wing intellectuals to spend their time arguing about...'

Except that most of the 'urgent crises' in the world have been CAUSED by the left-wing! As intellectuals, French post-structuralists engaged in the project of tearing down the left-wing illusions of the intelligentsia that had enabled these urgent crises. And by the way, tyrannized people DO write about being trapped in language-games, or have you never read an East European novel?

'But to allow it to dominate so much of the humanities, as it has for decades, to allow it to paralyse thought at a moment when the world faces unprecedented crises, is almost pathologically deranged. Academics, novelists and serious thinkers have been parked in the Derridan dead-end for too long.'

Huh? Since when have academic pseudo-followers of Derrida been paralyzed? Walk into any humanities class and you will get an hour-long hate-speech diatribe of Absolute Truth (men bad, women good; white bad, black good; straight bad; gay good). Of course, this shows that Derrida's 'followers' do not understand him any better than you do. Academia could use some deconstruction, and we could start with the Absolute Dualities of Men/Women, White/Black and Straight/Gay.

'It's very interesting to note that whenever you criticise a philosopher - even one as bankrupt and silly as Derrida or Antonio Negri - you get waves of indignant e-mails from academics.'

Why is it interesting to note that when you condemn a philosopher you clearly don't understand (and criticize by name-calling -- 'silly,' 'bankrupt'), you in turn get condemned by name-calling? Since when is there anything new in the dynamic of the sandbox?

'Don't get me wrong. The last thing I would offer is a populist anti-intellectual argument."

Huh? Your post IS an anti-intellectual 'argument'!

'Another tactic academics use is to criticise you for not being an academic, as though the very medium of journalism was worthless. '

Well, the medium of journalism IS worthless, although it is one step above academia.

"Anyway, my reading of Derrida is not - as Hutson implies - very controversial even in academic circles: take a look at Professor Mark Lilla's ˜The Reckless Mind - Intellectuals in Politics', which takes a similar view. Or at Eagleton's 'After Theory'."

Ugh! Citing an uniformed, neo-conservative denunciation of Derrida and a fraudulent, communist denunciation of Derrida is not reassuring as to your understanding of deconstruction. Instead, you should read Vincent Descombes' Modern French Philosophy for an examination of Derrida philosophically (Descombes, by the way, is not a deconstructionist or a supporter of deconstruction, but at least he understands it) and Morris Abrams' How to Do Things with Texts for an examination of deconstruction as literary criticism (Abrams was also not a deconstructionist). Alas, these are the only two texts critical of deconstruction that I have ever found that also understand it.

Sorry, but I have to conclude "a pox on both your houses."

Somebody from besht03@patriot.net wrote to say:
“Pynchon ain't who you think he is: his meta-narratives, while balancing out, are real, objectively actual--that his world is tragic forces overlapping between the heroes and the villains--arguably in too calculatedly schema that end up losing much of the world\'s messiness and resistance to the moral imperative of doing good--but no mistake about it--these things are not word games--they presuppose a real world where consequences play out--in Gravity's Rainbow, the protagonist, Lt. Slothrop and his girlfriends wink out loose coherence; but this is not a narrative game--the novel has a very real Lt. Slothrop actually, not only allegorically, disappearing.

Its politics aside, for its descriptive language alone, forgetting the modernist and post-modernist (not the same thing as deconstructionist) allusions--this is one of the great novels. Try to reread it. From personal experience, reading Gravity's Rainbow in a Tel Aviv bomb shelter 1973 and in Lebanon in 1978 where we saw with our own eyes "A screaming comes across the sky" try to trust me when I say the novel is not some incestuous pointless interior self-referential monologue. This is not Derridean--there's some real bad mojo out in the world and Pynchon's taken a long hard look at it. Once you get past the first couple of chapters it will come easier. I don't know about the other feller.”

Jeb Bishop from Chicago wrote:
“Thank you for your article on Derrida. I studied philosophy for seven years and read a fair amount of Derrida both in French and in English translation, though nowhere near all of his work, and my reading was concentrated entirely on his earlier writings, the ones most specifically addressing philosophy and philosophers.

While there is no question that his verbiage is infuriating at times, I think it's a mistake to see him as nothing but an anarchic, anti-rationalist nihilist. At what I think of as his best, he makes a case that (among other points) we have no access to reality unmediated by concepts, i.e. language, and that any attempt to give a final explication of the meaning of a text is doomed because there is nothing to put such an explication on a more "foundational" level than any other piece of language. Whether or not you think he's made that case successfully (and I am not taking a stand on that), those are serious ideas worthy of discussion, not just a pseudointellectual shell game.

And in many of his writings he can in fact be found taking philosophical argument seriously, and attempting in good faith to construct arguments for his positions. I think here of Speech and Phenomena, many of the essays in Margins of Philosophy, the interviews in Positions, and significant parts of Limited Inc., especially the Q&A with Gerald Graff in the appendix. In the latter, for one, he is at pains to reject what he considers misinterpretations of his ideas (which itself shows that he accepts that some interpretations are better than others), arguing that he never claimed that linguistic meaning is completely undecidable, but only that its decidability is always limited to a particular context of discussion, and is never absolute in some God's-eye-view, transcontextual, ahistorical sense.

Again, whether he succeeds in his effort is one question, but the ideas themselves are both intelligible and nontrivial. Of course there is also the "bad," for me generally later, Derrida, as epitomized by the quote you give about the supercollider, or his ridiculous reaction to the events of September 11th. I'm not interested in defending or explaining that side of him, but only in pointing out that there is also, I think, a "good" side of his work.
Finally, I must take exception with your condemnation in passing of the writings of David Foster Wallace. While his style can be grating and smug, it's just factually incorrect to dismiss his work as nothing but self-referential semantic games. Infinite Jest, his major work so far, is in many ways a quite conventional novel, telling the interwoven stories of a large cast of well-drawn characters, and engaging issues of addiction, entertainment, and the sense of desperation in modern life in a passionate, heartfelt, moving, and non-ironic manner. Of course Wallace does also attempt to stretch form and storytelling convention in the book, but there's nothing nihilistic, or even especially Derridean, about his approach to that.”

A charmer called Aquarius Jackson e-mailed to say:
“I've read After Theory, and I think you're flattering yourself a bit too much by aligning Eagleton with yourself on Derrida. As a Marxist, Eagleton naturally had problems with poststructuralism and postmodernism, but he was also to intelligent and respectful not to call Derrida the "mad axeman of Western Philosophy" right after his death. I suspect his response to Deridda's passing was more measured and reasoned than yours.
Mark my words, "Johann Hari," I will outlive you just long enough to call you the "mad axeman of the blogosphere" right after you die. You've already made a convincing case "Why I won't be Mourning for Hari." Of course, I probably won't be able to publish it anywhere but a blog, because nobody's going to care when you die. Mark my words.”
Those words are, indeed, marked.

L Brunswick said:

"Your blog on Derrida was spot on. As you explained, the central problem is that he has a political motivation, but his ideas render political projects impossible. I would add that if there are no reality and no values, then it is impossible to have a political philosophy that describes what is the good society.

I think a lot of why the post-structuralists go wrong is that they were very influenced by Rousseau. This is partly because they are French and so were taught him growing up, and partly because the 19th century German philosophers they have taken up, such as Hegel and Neitzsche, were also very influenced by Rousseau (see Bernard Yack's remarkable book, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Neitzsche).

Rousseau taught that human beings are naturally asocial, and in that case to live in society is to be terribly oppressed (unless, he thought, you totally surrender your self). Foucault is following Rousseau here, as is Derrida, the latter making language, a feature of social existence, the means of oppression. Hence the post-structuralists strive for liberation, but believe it is impossible to achieve in even the smallest degree.

Rousseau could claim that the humans originally lived a solitary existence because at the time there was no solid knowledge about pre-history. More recently scientists have determined that humans have always been social, living originally in band societies, and so have social motives along with self-oriented ones (see Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, which is aimed directly at the post-modernists). Hence you have a basis for universal values, not in metaphysics, but rather in human nature.

Interestingly, many members of the English Enlightenment, in particular Hobbes and Smith, also believed that humans originally lived in band societies, and they had views of human nature rather similar to those of the evolutionary psychologists. It was on this basis that they developed their liberal political philosophies.

Something else: Though Derrida attacks metaphysics, he is himself actually quite metaphysical. For instance, to say that we cannot know reality directly, but only through language, is a version of cartesian dualism where mind and matter are in two different universes. More truly post-metaphysical is Heidegger, who throws cartesian dualism away and describes human existence as always already involved in the world, including understanding it.

Derrida is also metaphysical in that he assumes that distinctions are all up in the non-material symbolic realm, and so the body, allegedly dumb, disorderly matter, cannot produce them. Actually, the body is itself a structure of distinctions, and makes further distinctions in the process of its material, biological, social, and linguistic living (see Merleau-Ponty's books The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception.) As Wittgenstein said, what we finally have are the activities of living, and he meant that in a literal, biological sense.

A third way Derrida is metaphysical is that he assumes that meaning has validity only if it is total and absolutely non-contradictory. He is here following Socrates' method of the elenchus, where you propose a definition, but then throw it away if it is shown to be in some way imperfect. But actually, as Wittgenstein shows, real, useful meanings are
always imprecise. "

John Williamson wrote:
"I encourage critics of Derrida to step forward and air their critiques and I also encourage Derrida's definders to make their case. While I
fall in the pro-Derrida camp, I feel that Derrida's defenders perform a disservice to public discourse about Derrida whenever they attack a critic. I wholeheartedly agree with your point that you should not be required to footnote every remark and that you as a journalist have a valuable role to play in discourse that is different from the role of
academics.

Regarding the substance of your remarks on Derrida, I believe Derrida was attempting to solve a difficult problem. Namely, he wanted to critique the fundamentals of language and philosophy while operating within the bounds of language and philosophy. While deconstructionism asserts the presence of a bias in all language, I am not persuaded that it is nihilism or anything close. One of Derrida's main theses was that language and philosophy always served some group or interest. His most persuasive arguments used the language and formulations within the text he critiqued. Working within the text is deconstruction with a little 'd' at its best.

When I first started reading Derrida, I actually expected to find the nihilist critics described. But when reading Derrida on a variety of
subjects, I was surprised at how little he fit this description. Derrida's positions do not lend themselves to sound bites, but he always takes a stand. While some people may find his work dense or impenetrable, I would say to these people, take a breath, read slowly, give it some time. Derrida is worth the effort."

Phillip Ross wrote:
I loved what you had to say about Derrida, but do think that there's a lot of confusion still about postmodernism -- my academic subject
speciality. Postmodernism is a period of time marked by anxiety and uncertainty. It's a diverse period. Somehow, though, it has come to be associated with just one style of writing, one type of thinking. Perhaps this is evidence of the powerful influence of certain thinkers and writers.

But in time we'll look back on the postmodern period as we do the Romantic period, or perhaps impressionism. Certain themes will stand out, certain figures will stand out. But I don't think we're going to toss out everything produced in the second half of the 20th century. Rorty will stand out as an important figure; Derrida, hopefully, will lose some of
his sway. Infinite Jest will remain a major novel; Pynchon will fade away. Other, more traditional-seeming novelists today, like Graham Swift, may come to be regarded as offering better representations of our period, while works by writers like Amis and Rushdie will lose their appeal. This is all speculation of course -- or perhaps wishful thinking."

FURTHER POSTSCRIPT: Just stumbled across this comment froma few years back by Noam Chomsky, with whom I have disagreed on many issues:

"I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of--those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed."

Absolutely right. I see a Popular Front in defence of basic Enlightenment values forming here...

Nick Cohen, Observer columnist, wrote to Professor Gluckman:
"I read your impudent and vulgar email to Hari on the net. What is striking about it, apart from the obvious points about intelligent people paying their taxes to keep fools like you in work, the inability of tenured buffoons to stand by the basic principles that justify their universities, is its white male Eurocentric pseudo-self-confidence. Why on earth do you take the statement "Derrida is dead" to mean that Derrida is dead? I read it to mean that he was alive and well and living in a council flat in Doncaster. But then I'm not a part of the oppressive state which seeks to brainwash the young by filling their minds with debilitating, obscurantist drivel."

POST-POST-POST-SCRIPT: You can read a very interesting comment on this article at

http://www.logopolis.org.uk/weblog/2004/10/of-all-comments-made-about-jacques.html

and another interesting one at

http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2004/10/derrida_et_al.html

and a rather snide one at

http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2004/10/insulting-dead.html

(Watch out for the 'you-don't-accept-our-view-so-you-are-intellectually-illiterate' mentalty there. This is a guy who thinks Antonio Negri can be intellectually engaged with.)

'Thank you Florida!" cries the elected President of the United States in the opening shots of Fahrenheit 9/11. Al Gore is being lapped by waves of joy and cheer and relief. "Oh, thank you Florida!" he yells again as he punches the air. Michael Moore asks, "Was it all a dream? Did the last four years really happen?" In just 30 seconds, he has captured perfectly the mood of many Americans and most of the world.

Then we are back in reality. Moore shows those years as they happen in the memory of any liberal: the events of Bush Time seem to blur into one another as in a stress dream, a full-bladder nightmare. One moment Bush's first cousin at Fox News is declaring that Dubya has won Florida after all. Then, suddenly, we're at the Bush inauguration, an event so enraging that the Presidential motorcade has to screech down Pennsylvania Avenue to avoid treefuls of rotten fruit. Eight months of the President-Select sliding down the opinion polls and failing to pass his set-piece legislation flicker by in a moment - and then two planes shark out of the New York sky.

It is in these opening minutes that Moore is at his best: clear, fact-based, and understated. He does not show us the footage of 11 September. Against a black screen, we hear only smashing and burning and weeping. We are forced to reimagine those images; he rescues that terrible footage from encroaching banality.

For seven minutes after being told "America is under attack," Bush sits in a Florida classroom and reads "My Pet Goat" to infants. As this footage of the President stumbles on, the Bushie propaganda about a heroic Commander-in-Chief collapses into dust as surely as the Twin Towers half a continent away.

Moore tries to imagine what Bush was thinking in those minutes, shorn of a smooth corporate script. The film-maker's attention turns to the Bush family's links with the Saudi royal family who have controlled Saudi Arabia, with US support, for more than 50 years.

Many of Moore's critics think the film breaks down at this point. I do not. The sweltering relationship between the House of Bush and the House of Saud is a topic that has been ignored by the mainstream US press for too long; American citizens should know about it.

The Bush family and its related businesses has raked in $1.4bn from the Saudis over the past three decades, as documented by US journalist Craig Unger. It is legitimate to ask - as Moore does - whose interest the Bushes put first: the countrymen who elect them (or not, as in 2000) or the billionaire torturers who pick up the family tab.

Fahrenheit 9/11 gives one example where the Bushes clearly appear to have put Saudi business interests first. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on New York, all domestic flights were grounded. Yet 22 members of the Bin Laden family and other senior Saudis were explicitly authorised by the White House to flee the country while Ground Zero burned. A former FBI investigator explains to Moore that any decent detectives would have wanted to talk with the Bin Ladens, if only to establish that they were no longer in contact with Osama. "Can you imagine," Moore asks, "if Bill Clinton had arranged flights out of the country for the McVeigh family immediately after the Oklahoma bombing?"

All important stuff; but then the film melts into a strange political gloop, where significant facts are stickily mixed with half-arguments, innuendos and outright dishonesties. Moore says that the Carlyle Group - with Poppy Bush and leading Saudis on its board - "benefited directly from 9/11". What is he hinting? Then he whizzes on to claim that the US only bombed Afghanistan because it wants to build an oil-gas pipeline through the country. Is that old canard still in circulation? The pipeline plans were dropped in 1998 and have not been revived; don't you think al-Qa'ida camps across Afghanistan are a more likely explanation? Then, just as fast, we're onto Bush's record of dodging military service and gripes about airport security - and I suddenly wanted to give the movie a heavy dose of Ritalin. After a careful opening Moore seems to be hurling as many allegations at the audience as he can, in the hope that a few will stick and the rest will add up to a general atmosphere of suspicion.

I was already disorientated and trying to figure out what Moore was trying to say when, with no attempt at coherence, Moore abruptly dedicates the last two thirds of the film to the invasion of Iraq. He does not try to draw any connections for the viewer with what went before. He does not seem to have noticed that the House of Saud vehemently opposed the Second Gulf War (and, indeed, loathes the Sharon-loving Bush approach to Israel). Doesn't he at least have to address that point? Wouldn't his (valuable) points about the Saudi-Bush nexus have more credibility if he did? But this would require a hint of subtlety. Instead Moore careers on. In a shameful moment, he depicts Iraq prior to the US invasion as a blissful idyll where small children fly kites and old women chuckle. If we are attacking the myriad lies of the Bush administration - as all decent people should - then we must be scrupulously honest ourselves.

And yet, and yet... There are scenes of the invasion of Iraq that will napalm the conscience of anybody (like me) who supports the invasion. US soldiers sing "Burn motherfucker, burn!" as they bomb Baghdad; soldiers jab at a dead Iraqi and laugh, "Ali Baba still has a hard-on!"; Moore cuts to Britney Spears, who declares - in the manner of a lackey in a totalitarian society - that "we should just support the President in everything he does... We should just trust him." Yet these scenes lose much of their potential impact because Moore presents them without moral candour. The images of burned or slain Iraqi children would be more honest if Moore also told us how many children were being murdered by Saddam too. But this isn't an intelligent movie with an intelligent analysis. It's fast-food politics, filled with the sugar and carb of cheap sensation and low on nutrition.

It's a shame. American liberals needed this film to energise them in the most important election year for decades, and most of the facts are on their side. They needed a movie that offered its huge audience more vitamins and less lard.

It's customary to begin theatre reviews with a neat summary of plot, but Simon Gray's revised play The Holy Terror is so scrappy it's hard to remember what it was supposed to be about. The protagonist Mark Melon emerges from behind the stage curtain and begins to address the audience as if he were talking to a branch of the Women's Institute in Chichester (a town he keeps confusing with Colchester. Oh, the hilarity.) He has been a publisher - "the enfant terrible of publishing... a great publisher who never missed a chance" - and he has had a breakdown.

The play then takes a ramble around Melon's rather uninteresting life. At great length, he confronts his son about not working for his A-levels. Then a stuffy old man at his publishing company objects to Melon's idea that they should publish sex manuals with titles like (cue incomprehensible audience laughter) Masturbation Without Shame.

Simon Gray, in a written introduction to the play, seems to believe The Holy Terror is about something else entirely. He thinks it is about a man who has an agreement to have an "open marriage" with his wife, but who goes mad when he suspects his wife of having an affair. The audience could be forgiven for missing this, since his wife is hardly mentioned in the play's first half, and when she does appear she is a one-dimensional bore.

The anecdotes about publishing that pad out the play until Melon's wife appears are entirely uninteresting. One of his writers develops paranoid schizophrenia, and the audience is encouraged to chuckle at his decision to write "an epic poem in Glaswegian patois". When a playwright is reduced to scraping for laughs by showing his audience the ramblings of somebody who is mentally ill, you know he's in trouble.

Occasionally Gray stumbles across an interesting theme - the tension between art and commerce, the misogyny of straight English men - but he always picks himself up, brushes himself down and carries on as if nothing has happened. The female characters are particularly dreadful. They are part of that special species of women that only exist in plays written by men with flagging libido in late middle-age. You know the type: with short skirts and long legs, they dedicate their lives to telling tubby middle-aged men how attractive they are. Oh, please.

The only mildly interesting reflection that could emerge from this play is about the nature of laughter in British theatres. Why do audiences strain and stretch themselves to laugh at material which is manifestly unfunny? At the press night, the audience chuckled away at material that would not even raise a smile on television. A character declares, "My boyfriend is called Wong. He's half-Chinese, half-Scottish." The audience roared. Hello? Did I miss the queue for free nitrous oxide on the way into the theatre?

Simon Callow does amazingly well to pour his near-nuclear energy into this coma patient of a play. Seeing such a great actor work such anorexic material is a bit like seeing a Formula One driver wheeze about in a Skoda: as Callow spasms and howls his way across the stage, you wonder why he is wasting his energy. He is reduced to milking the word "bonk" for laughs - for three agonising minutes. I wanted to cry.

Seeing The Holy Terror is less like watching a play than like one of those rambling conversations you sometimes find yourself trapped in on train journeys with old men who insist on telling you their life stories. It might be pleasantly diverting between York and Peterborough, but if I had paid pounds 38.50 to hear them in the West End, I'd be furious.

For anybody who wants quality London theatre, they'll have to head far outside Theatreland, to a gorgeous little pub theatre in Battersea. Operation Wonderland is a strange, compelling parable about two people who work inside a vast neon theme park called Wonderland. Jeb is a cleaner who befriends the Blue Fairy - a woman who works in the grotto and tells children she can make their wishes come true.

It's a heightened world where the theme park divides families into green, amber and red on the basis of wealth, and is trying to establish "an independent legal constitution". This isn't as satirical as it might sound: there is a genuine dispute going on between Disney and the state of Florida about who has the right to police Disneyland. There have even been allegations that Disney staff deal with criminal matters - like the escape of a crocodile - without recourse to the Florida police.

Jeb and the Blue Fairy despise the dishonesty and hyper-commercialism rammed down children's throats. As an act of rebellion, they replace the artificial snow in the Winter Tour with elephant shit. When the excrement is sprayed across a group of dying children, Jeb feels guilty but the Blue Fairy insists, "We showed them what Wonderland is all about. You're being bought and manipulated to believe in this commercial magic. But it's elephant shit, and it stinks." As the plot spirals and the pair plan a suicide bombing on Wonderland's equivalent to the Magic Castle, the play becomes nightmarish. The Blue Fairy insists, "I'm sorry Jed. There's no chance we can make a difference. Blow a fucking great hole in Wonderland and they'll rebuild, turn it into a promotional video and sell remembrance popcorn on the crater." She insists she is doing it just "to see blood turning the whirly snowflakes red."

There are some misjudged attempts at a 9/11 parallel here - Osama bin Laden wasn't protesting against Disneyfication, folks. But as a reflection of what happens when commerce runs wild, when a mega-corporation is allowed to create its own artificial world and shut out all public space and accountability, it's totally compelling. If you are one of the many parents who has forced themselves for the sake of the kids to take an Easter trip to EuroDisney, this play is the hard slap in the face you need.

Kate Bassett returns next week

`The Holy Terror': Duke of York's, London WC2 (020 7836 5122), to 7 Aug; `Operation Wonderland': Latchmere, London SW11 (020 7978 7040), to Sat

You could spend the next year touring the world’s most corroded and savaged places, from the still-poisoned jungles of Vietnam to the slums of Calcutta. But if you can’t afford the cash or the despair, there’s an alternative. You can go to the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. There you will meet the broken families of Rwanda, the snipers of the Israeli Defence Force, and a man who led the Vietnam War. There is no better crash course in the problems facing us today.

The smiling, brylcreamed Robert MacNamara was the centre of attention at the Festival’s first night, appearing in the extraordinary documentary ‘The Fog of War.’ Now 85, MacNamara presents himself as ready to talk about his seven years as US Secretary of State during the Vietnam War. “I am at an age when I can look back and derive some conclusions. I can develop the lessons and pass them on,” he says in his rat-a-tat-tat high-speed tones. You might wonder what a man responsible for – on his own estimate – over 3 million Vietnamese deaths (and those of 56,000 American soldiers) has to teach anybody, except as a study in psychopathy. But MacNamara wants us to see him as an intelligent, reflective man, a man who can admit his errors and feel remorse.

For the first half-hour, the film almost persuades us, with its demonstration of the painful ambiguity of MacNamara’s life. As Chief Executive of the Ford Motor Company, he was responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives by introducing major safety measures. As Secretary of State during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he helped to prevent the nuclear annihilation of humanity. He adds now, “In the end, [during the Crisis] we lucked out. It was pure luck that prevented nuclear war. The major lesson of the crisis is this: the combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations. That danger continues today.”

The ambiguity continues: we learn that MacNamara learned the ‘skills’ he deployed in Vietnam during a just war against fascism – the Second World War. He explains, in disbelieving tones, how he masterminded unnecessary excesses – mass murders – like the dropping of fire-bombs on Tokyo, “a wooden city”, which killed more than half of the civilian population. He now admits that he was behaving as a “war criminal”, and that “proportionality should be a guideline in war.”

And then we – and MacNamara – are sucked into South-East Asia. A stark tape of President Johnson’s private conversations with MacNamara slaps us in the face: “Whoop the hell out of ‘em,” the President says about Vietnamese civilians. “Kill some of ‘em, that’s what I want to do.” MacNamara replies, “I’ll bring something back to achieve that objective, sir.” Then we see MacNamara with charts and pie-graphs, explaining coldly how he is incinerating Vietnam. He now admits that the Vietnamese were engaged in a legitimate anti-colonial struggle, not a war for Soviet Communism; that the deaths were, in effect, pointless; that the Vietnamese people did not want US engagement in their country. Yet when he is asked whether he feels guilty, he waves his hand, “I don’t want to go into further discussions.”

Like Adolf Eichmann, MacNamara passes responsibility up the chain to the President. He gets perillously close at several points to saying that he was only following orders. MacNamara even presents himself, bizarrely, as a Vietnam-sceptic from the beginning – something which is flatly contradicted by the historical record. There is no repentance short of suicide that would be sufficient for a man who slaughtered so many millions; but the paltry apology he offers here brought the taste of bile to my mouth. “We all make mistakes,” he says at one point, with a shrug. Mistakes. The very title of this film is a lie: ‘the Fog of War’ implies – and MacNamara wants us to believe – that Vietnam was so complex, so far beyond human understanding, that any stance was comprehensible. But plenty of people at the time sided with the Vietnamese people. Even when MacNamara left the Johnson administration, it took seven years before he publicly expressed doubts about the war. Yet still he talks of ‘mistakes.’

Even after starting with this remarkable film, the festival has not yet peaked. In ‘The World Stopped Watching’, screening tomorrow, the legendary photographer Bill Gentile and columnist Randolph Ryan are taken back to Nicaragua for the first time since they covered the civil war there in the 1980s. Here is a crime of US foreign policy almost as hideous as Vietnam: 30,000 Nicaraguans died in the attempt by Reagan-backed Contras to overthrow the democratic-socialist Sandinistas. Here again the legitimate war against Communism was used as a pretext to wage a horrific and unjust war against anti-colonial movements and in favour of US business interests. The Nicaraguan people did not want American intervention – but they got it in the form of bullets and butchery.

Gentile’s images of Carmen Recanez, a peasant farmer whose family – including her two sons – were slaughtered, became internationally famous. She and one surviving relative staggered through the wreckage of her farm. She explained simply, “We hid. That’s why they could kill us. We don’t know what we will do now. We don’t know.” Now, seventeen years on, Gentile pulls up at the same farm, now rebuilt. “I’ve been waiting for you,” Carmen says as she bursts into tears. “We used to have work and clothes for our children. Now we have nothing but misery,” she explains. The wreckage of that war is still everywhere: Nicaragua has been turned into a passive IMF-approved slum.

The film is as darkly meandering as a real road-trip. The men stumble through a grief-soaked country, finding one familiar, craggier face after another. We see footage from the 1980s of a crazed Contra thug called Jimmy Leo, who was responsible for massacring a wedding party, along with other atrocities. Ryan decides to track down the man responsible for that massacre, which he has never been able to forget, and he finds him – in the Nicaraguan parliament, where is now an MP. Fatter but no less thuggish, he dismisses the massacre as “a mistake” – that word again – and barks, “The propaganda against us was grotesque. Anyway, that’s war. They assassinated our families too.” He is one of 11 former Contras now sitting in the 93-member National Assembly. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the US should not be giving aid to the Nicaraguans. They should be paying reparations.

Other highlights include ‘Route 181’, another road-trip, this time along the border proposed in 1947 (in UN resolution 181) to divide Israel from the Palestinian state that never came into being. It is a journey along a line that bisects a Middle East that might have been, an imaginary border in a land obsessed with borders. The film-makers – one Israeli, one Palestinian – engage with whoever they find, bigot and peacenik alike. ‘State of Denial’ is a study of the 4.2 million South Africans living with HIV/AIDS, and how Thabo Mbeki is squandering the glorious history of the African National Congress with his bizarre denial that HIV causes AIDS. The country with the best prospects in Africa now has the worst AIDs epidemic thanks to a pair of hideous conjoined twins: Mbeki’s holocaust denial and the West’s refusal for over a decade to allow cheap imitation anti-retroviral drugs to be manufactured within South Africa for those who desperately need them.

Yet – perhaps this sounds perverse – these films inspire hope, not despair. They are not cinema-as-abyss, feel-bad movies for you to endure in order to make yourself feel virtuous. The films show that, even in the most depraved circumstances, there are heroes. My own choice would be Shanti, an 11-year old girl who appears in the film ‘Born into Brothels’, an account of the children of prostitutes growing up in the red-light district of Calcutta. Tiny and composed, she is full of concern for her mother and her younger sister – and at the end of the film, she has a place at boarding school (thanks to the film-makers) and – perhaps – a life beyond the slums. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival is a ticket to see the best as well as the worst of humanity.

In July 1983, the New York Police Department sent three officers to smash open the pyramid that sits on top of the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan. The stench was so foul that they all vomited. The man inside - a man with several names - had been dead and forgotten for over a week. In his 37 year-long life, he had been many things: a tramp, a millionaire, a madman, a genius, a hustler called Bruce Campbell, and a rock star called Jobriath. Now he was gone, and nobody seemed to care.

Only a decade before, he had dominated Times Square from a 40ft billboard on the corner of Broadway. Jobriath was booked that Christmas to perform at the Paris Opera House, where he was to perform one of the most audacious rock stunts of a decade addicted to rock stunts. Dressed as King Kong, he would climb a replica of the Empire State Building, only for the skyscraper to turn into a gigantic spurting penis that would ejaculate Jobriath on to a piano. He would land gracefully, slough off his King Kong costume and emerge as Marlene Dietrich.

Jobriath is impossible to summarise in one glib paragraph. He was a shape-shifting creature who took many forms; but he is best known for being the first openly gay rock star, the man who took the latent homosexuality of glam rock and made it blatant. Jobriath didn't come out of the closet; he set fire to the closet and roasted pink marshmallows on the flames. For a flickering, shimmering moment, he was, according to Rolling Stone, "the most promising thing in pop".

Yet today, few people remember him, except as a bad joke, an extinguished butt from what the NME called - with homophobic undertones - the fag end of glam rock. His music has never been released on CD. His records are chimerical (it took me weeks to track one down for this article). The only press mentions he ever receives are passing references to music- industry psychosis - a case study of over-hyping the under-talented.

In 2004, he may be on the brink of resurrection. Pop god Morrissey has recently declared that he is "obsessed" with Jobriath. Morrissey's office is cagey about reports that he plans both a tribute concert and a best-of CD. But Mark Simpson, Morrissey's biographer, explains: "He likes lost causes. Jobriath is somebody that Morrissey can possess completely. There aren't many Jobriath fans around, so he can appoint himself as the secretary of his metaphorical fan club. Morrissey has always been interested in people who have fallen off the edge of the world - and Jobriath certainly has."

Only the skeleton of Jobriath's biography is known. He was born in a dirt-track Pennsylvania town called King of Prussia in 1946. His father was in the army, so Bruce Campbell (as he was then called) spent his childhood as an "army brat", flitting from base to base with few friends and no stability. By his early twenties, he had so disgusted his parents with his open homosexuality that he fled to New York City and a new identity: Jobriath Salisbury.

He went along to an audition for the notorious hippie musical Hair, just to help a friend read through his lines. He was snapped up and the friend discarded. Within a month, he was playing "Woof" (it was the Sixties; perhaps the name didn't sound so absurd on acid) to crammed theatres, and reviews so glowing that they seemed radioactive. It turns out they were: the success led to the first of Jobriath's implosions. He started wildly upstaging his co-stars - partly because he was ingesting more drugs every day than most cancer patients - and he was sacked.

Years later, he described his first breakdown. "I was floating down in the gutter. I didn't eat. I just drank beer all the time. With no money, I hustled for booze and drugs." His parents sent him to a sanatorium in Pennsylvania, but he fled - straight into the pudgy arms of Jerry Brandt.

Brandt was the impresario who had discovered Carly Simon and unleashed the Rolling Stones on America. By 1972, he was looking for a new project, and when he heard a demo tape of Jobriath's music, he was convinced that he had found the American David Bowie. US producers were desperate to cultivate their own American glam-rock star, a home-grown variant of the strange new sounds blaring from London.

Barney Hoskyns, in his definitive history of this odd pocket of rock history, Glam!, explains: "Glam rock was nothing short of a camp attack on rock'n'roll and the Sixties' earnest search for 'authenticity' and 'a return to nature'. It was all about being false and loving the artificial. It represented a new and radically fluid model for sexual identity. The very opposite of punk, it thrust femininity into everybody's faces: men wearing glitter and looking like women, screwing what nature had given them. Glam was, basically, a group of sexual misfits who became able to accept themselves by transforming popular culture."

Into this, like a Tennessee Williams heroine, stumbled Jobriath, a gay fantasist with a drug problem and a wild talent. Both his homosexuality and his endless reinventions seemed perfect for glam. Brian Eno, one of the era's stars, explains: "Glam was all about the idea of changing identity or thinking up your own identity - whether it's your gender identity or whatever." Some of this was pretty trite: they would express their alienation by literally dressing as aliens (most famously, with Bowie's fictional persona, Ziggy Stardust). But Jobriath - with his fragile mental health - seemed to believe his own fiction, and often told bemused acquaintances that he was from another planet.

Brandt - in the style of Svengalis throughout the ages - took a vulnerable young man and promised to make him a star. Michael Butler, a friend of Jobriath's from the cast of Hair, remembers Brandt as "reptilian. Not a very warm man - I got such bad vibes from [him]." Brandt seemed to invite comparisons to a pimp, explaining, "I'm selling sex. I'm selling Jobriath".

But nobody can fault him for not lavishing enough hyperbole on his creation. After taking out a massive advertising campaign that put Jobriath's face all over New York and London, he described his protégé as "a combination of Dietrich, Marceau, Nureyev, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Nijinsky, Bernhardt, the best of Jagger, Bowie, Dylan, with the glamour of Garbo." (What, no Gandhi?)

But there was a polished elephant-trap waiting for Jobriath. Glam had made bisexuality trendy: its leading figures, such as Lou Reed and David Bowie, declared that they were attracted to both sexes. This seemed to give them an added sheen of sexiness and an added truckload of sales. Jobriath took the logical next step, declaring that he was not bisexual but "a true fairy".

He had unwittingly called glam's bluff. Its fair-weather bisexuals, happy to play gay and lap up the headlines, began to back away. (Bowie now describes himself as "100 per cent heterosexual", and Lou Reed refuses to discuss the subject.) Glam rock's pro-gay philosophy proved to be only glitter-deep, and Jobriath was left exposed. He was barracked at even New York venues by crowds yelling "faggot", and worse. One gay music critic, looking back on Jobriath's career in 1999, described him as "way too gay, way too soon".

Unable to live up to the preposterous hype, shunned for his sexuality, Jobriath became more dependent on drugs than ever. His glitter began to mingle with tears. In January 1974, he was booked on The Midnight Special, one of America's most popular TV shows. In rehearsal, a producer gaped in shock as Jobriath sang "Take Me I'm Yours", a hymn to the pleasures of sado-masochism. "You can't do that on live television!" he howled, and the appearance was cancelled.

Jobriath began to turn on Brandt, whose last comment on the singer was to describe him as "a fucking alcoholic asshole". His first tour of America was cancelled halfway through - and it was at that moment that he dropped out of recorded history. The evidence of Jobriath's life simply ceased, until the day that he was discovered as the Chelsea Hotel's first Aids victim.

Except, that is, for one interview. The US magazine Omega One tracked Jobriath down in 1979, living in the pyramid that was to become his tomb. His personality appeared to have fractured into several conflicting shards. He described himself as schizophrenic, and would only discuss Jobriath as a former personality who had now died. "Jobriath committed suicide in a drug, alcohol and publicity overdose," he said. "The whole hype just drove him crazy. His lifestyle was hotel suites and limousines, and enough drugs to get him from one to another. He struck back by disappearing into thin air. Jobriath is dead, and he had a reason for being. He was a vaccination for the rest of us."

He was living primarily as "Cole Berlin", a cheesy lounge singer. He refused to engage with the world or his past, explaining: "If sex, sugar and plutonium are too accessible; if rape, terrorism and hypoglycaemia are all too rampant; if imperialistic pigs are destroying the world, and if people are drinking too many pina coladas, then Cole Berlin doesn't want to hear about it."

Cole made a living singing in a cabaret bar ("he supports the rest of us"), although he claimed that, very occasionally, Jobriath would make a guest appearance from the grave and insist on going hustling. "He's the only one who doesn't know that sexual fulfilment is the banana life dangles in front of us just to keep us running," he said.

Thirty years on, that sliver of a person, that alien persona, is lauded by Jaan Uhelszki, founding editor of Creem magazine, as "the first out rock star. Jobriath's songs are really overt gay anthems, and no one was doing that. I mean, these were innocent times. He started in 1973! I think we missed how important he was to the gay movement. He didn't get his due. He became a joke. Only now is he becoming an icon." For Bruce Campbell, Jobriath Salisbury and Cole Berlin - who all died insane and abandoned on a hot Manhattan afternoon - this comes too late.

You could spend the next year touring the world’s most corroded and savaged places, from the still-poisoned jungles of Vietnam to the slums of Calcutta. But if you can’t afford the cash or the despair, there’s an alternative. You can go to the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. There you will meet the broken families of Rwanda, the snipers of the Israeli Defence Force, and a man who led the Vietnam War. There is no better crash course in the problems facing us today.

The smiling, brylcreamed Robert MacNamara was the centre of attention at the Festival’s first night, appearing in the extraordinary documentary ‘The Fog of War.’ Now 85, MacNamara presents himself as ready to talk about his seven years as US Secretary of State during the Vietnam War. “I am at an age when I can look back and derive some conclusions. I can develop the lessons and pass them on,” he says in his rat-a-tat-tat high-speed tones. You might wonder what a man responsible for – on his own estimate – over 3 million Vietnamese deaths (and those of 56,000 American soldiers) has to teach anybody, except as a study in psychopathy. But MacNamara wants us to see him as an intelligent, reflective man, a man who can admit his errors and feel remorse.

For the first half-hour, the film almost persuades us, with its demonstration of the painful ambiguity of MacNamara’s life. As Chief Executive of the Ford Motor Company, he was responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives by introducing major safety measures. As Secretary of State during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he helped to prevent the nuclear annihilation of humanity. He adds now, “In the end, [during the Crisis] we lucked out. It was pure luck that prevented nuclear war. The major lesson of the crisis is this: the combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations. That danger continues today.”

The ambiguity continues: we learn that MacNamara learned the ‘skills’ he deployed in Vietnam during a just war against fascism – the Second World War. He explains, in disbelieving tones, how he masterminded unnecessary excesses – mass murders – like the dropping of fire-bombs on Tokyo, “a wooden city”, which killed more than half of the civilian population. He now admits that he was behaving as a “war criminal”, and that “proportionality should be a guideline in war.”

And then we – and MacNamara – are sucked into South-East Asia. A stark tape of President Johnson’s private conversations with MacNamara slaps us in the face: “Whoop the hell out of ‘em,” the President says about Vietnamese civilians. “Kill some of ‘em, that’s what I want to do.” MacNamara replies, “I’ll bring something back to achieve that objective, sir.” Then we see MacNamara with charts and pie-graphs, explaining coldly how he is incinerating Vietnam. He now admits that the Vietnamese were engaged in a legitimate anti-colonial struggle, not a war for Soviet Communism; that the deaths were, in effect, pointless; that the Vietnamese people did not want US engagement in their country. Yet when he is asked whether he feels guilty, he waves his hand, “I don’t want to go into further discussions.”

Like Adolf Eichmann, MacNamara passes responsibility up the chain to the President. He gets perillously close at several points to saying that he was only following orders. MacNamara even presents himself, bizarrely, as a Vietnam-sceptic from the beginning – something which is flatly contradicted by the historical record. There is no repentance short of suicide that would be sufficient for a man who slaughtered so many millions; but the paltry apology he offers here brought the taste of bile to my mouth. “We all make mistakes,” he says at one point, with a shrug. Mistakes. The very title of this film is a lie: ‘the Fog of War’ implies – and MacNamara wants us to believe – that Vietnam was so complex, so far beyond human understanding, that any stance was comprehensible. But plenty of people at the time sided with the Vietnamese people. Even when MacNamara left the Johnson administration, it took seven years before he publicly expressed doubts about the war. Yet still he talks of ‘mistakes.’

Even after starting with this remarkable film, the festival has not yet peaked. In ‘The World Stopped Watching’, screening tomorrow, the legendary photographer Bill Gentile and columnist Randolph Ryan are taken back to Nicaragua for the first time since they covered the civil war there in the 1980s. Here is a crime of US foreign policy almost as hideous as Vietnam: 30,000 Nicaraguans died in the attempt by Reagan-backed Contras to overthrow the democratic-socialist Sandinistas. Here again the legitimate war against Communism was used as a pretext to wage a horrific and unjust war against anti-colonial movements and in favour of US business interests. The Nicaraguan people did not want American intervention – but they got it in the form of bullets and butchery.

Gentile’s images of Carmen Recanez, a peasant farmer whose family – including her two sons – were slaughtered, became internationally famous. She and one surviving relative staggered through the wreckage of her farm. She explained simply, “We hid. That’s why they could kill us. We don’t know what we will do now. We don’t know.” Now, seventeen years on, Gentile pulls up at the same farm, now rebuilt. “I’ve been waiting for you,” Carmen says as she bursts into tears. “We used to have work and clothes for our children. Now we have nothing but misery,” she explains. The wreckage of that war is still everywhere: Nicaragua has been turned into a passive IMF-approved slum.

The film is as darkly meandering as a real road-trip. The men stumble through a grief-soaked country, finding one familiar, craggier face after another. We see footage from the 1980s of a crazed Contra thug called Jimmy Leo, who was responsible for massacring a wedding party, along with other atrocities. Ryan decides to track down the man responsible for that massacre, which he has never been able to forget, and he finds him – in the Nicaraguan parliament, where is now an MP. Fatter but no less thuggish, he dismisses the massacre as “a mistake” – that word again – and barks, “The propaganda against us was grotesque. Anyway, that’s war. They assassinated our families too.” He is one of 11 former Contras now sitting in the 93-member National Assembly. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the US should not be giving aid to the Nicaraguans. They should be paying reparations.

Other highlights include ‘Route 181’, another road-trip, this time along the border proposed in 1947 (in UN resolution 181) to divide Israel from the Palestinian state that never came into being. It is a journey along a line that bisects a Middle East that might have been, an imaginary border in a land obsessed with borders. The film-makers – one Israeli, one Palestinian – engage with whoever they find, bigot and peacenik alike. ‘State of Denial’ is a study of the 4.2 million South Africans living with HIV/AIDS, and how Thabo Mbeki is squandering the glorious history of the African National Congress with his bizarre denial that HIV causes AIDS. The country with the best prospects in Africa now has the worst AIDs epidemic thanks to a pair of hideous conjoined twins: Mbeki’s holocaust denial and the West’s refusal for over a decade to allow cheap imitation anti-retroviral drugs to be manufactured within South Africa for those who desperately need them.

Yet – perhaps this sounds perverse – these films inspire hope, not despair. They are not cinema-as-abyss, feel-bad movies for you to endure in order to make yourself feel virtuous. The films show that, even in the most depraved circumstances, there are heroes. My own choice would be Shanti, an 11-year old girl who appears in the film ‘Born into Brothels’, an account of the children of prostitutes growing up in the red-light district of Calcutta. Tiny and composed, she is full of concern for her mother and her younger sister – and at the end of the film, she has a place at boarding school (thanks to the film-makers) and – perhaps – a life beyond the slums. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival is a ticket to see the best as well as the worst of humanity.

A drizzly airport in Beijing. A black-clad businessman strides on to a plane. His flu is a slight irritation, nothing more. He flies to New York. Or Amsterdam. Or Cairo. Within days, it doesn't matter. He was infected. A global panic. Several airports are forced into lockdown. It's a familiar story - except this is not the story of the Sars epidemic of 2003. It's the basis of a strange, narcotic little British TV series from the 1970s called Survivors.

And it goes further: the vast majority of the human population is culled in a global viral holocaust, engineered by a malign, unseen scientist and told from the Emmerdale-shaped perspective of rural England. The first episode - "The Fourth Horseman" - is hard to describe in words, because it is so tedious, odd, irresistible: televisual Mogadon with a hint of bad acid.

The plot is simple enough. A pampered housewife, Abby Grant, doesn't really notice the flu virus sweeping the countryside. A jab from the local doctor is all she needs, she concludes, as she hurries to collect her husband - eerily played by Peter Bowles, adding to the cosy Middle England mood - from the train station. Abby waits for six hours. No trains come - and then, finally, Bowles emerges. "It's outrageous! There was chaos in London," he fumes. "Six hours!" When the apocalypse comes, the English will complain that it disrupts the rail timetable.

Abby begins to worry about her son, Peter, who is at boarding school on the other side of the country. Bowles reassures her with a stiff whisky and a clipped certainty that everything will be back to normal tomorrow. And then Peter Bowles - star of To the Manor Born - is dead, and Abby is alone, on an island where 999 people in every 1,000 are swiftly and sweatily greeting death. Alone, she stashes a handful of photographs in a neat holdall, turns on the gas, lights a rag and watches her family home (the rotting Bowles included) burn. Abby sets off in search of her son and survival.

My friends and I have all become obsessed. We watched the new DVD - all 13 episodes - in a long, feverish week. The rhythm of 1970s TV seem so unusual now that they add to the sense that you are watching something wholly other: long, slow scenes; wordy dialogue; and elegiac tracking shots of an empty England.

On one level, the series belongs to a time when nuclear annihilation seemed not just possible but probable: a world of CND rallies and Richard Nixon's napalm. Terry Nation, the series' creator and also the man behind the Daleks and Blake's 7, said, in an interview in the Radio Times to plug the show's launch in 1975, that he was "in no doubt... that disaster - in whatever form - will come." Yet Nation's choice of a biological weapon - and the show's complete lack of explanation for the attack - makes the concept behind Survivors oddly contemporary. The creators of 28 Days Later, last year's multiplex-buster, freely admitted that the Seventies show had been a major influence on them. The ideas required little updating.

One of the factors that make this new DVD a bizarre looking-glass - a prism through which the world is warped in unexpected ways - is the show's appalling class-politics. Survivors is, at heart, the story of how the English middle classes try to rebuild civilisation, and how the indolent rich and parasitical poor disrupt and disturb them. The show's villains are those who reject the self-righteous hard-work ethic voiced by Abby: a Welsh tramp called Pryce who turns out to be a thieving murderer, and a rich-bitch it-girl called Ann who leaves her lover to die when he is crippled and can no longer wait on her. The most jolting piece of 1970s snobbery, however, is the character of the trade-union leader Arthur Wormley.

Arthur - does it sound like another union-leader, by any chance? - has decided to restore order. The breakdown of political order - a return to what Abby identifies as "feudal England, with barons running their own little fiefdoms through force of arms" - has left a vacuum. Wormley has appointed himself in charge, seized the scattered resources that remain and formed a band to execute anybody who disregards the orders of his "provisional government". The clash between an authoritarian union- leader and Abby, an aggressive right-wing woman, forms the spine to the series.

At a moment when Britain was more polarised than at any time since the 1926 general strike, when talk of the country's "ungovernability" was rife, Survivors simply took that fragmentation to an extreme: a new English civil war, staged in the wreckage of industrial civilisation. Survivors is not simply the story of the culling of the human race; it is the story of 1970s and 1980s Britain, written a decade before the miners' strike.

There is an even more interesting political strand to the show. Written at a time when environmentalist ideas were first trickling into the mainstream, Survivors can be read as a fable for the deep-ecology movement. Abby forms a community, with other survivors, dedicated to growing grain and achieving subsistence. "We are so dependent on complex support systems that we are less capable, less practical than Iron Age man," one character complains. Modern life has softened us up so much that we cannot possibly survive once the vast, dense safety net of industrial civilisation is ripped away, the characters lament. It is clearly implied that Abby and her community's reconnection with nature is a return to spiritual health. Go back to hoeing the earth: it's so much healthier - purer - than urban living, Nation seems to be saying.

The most hard-core strand of the environmentalist movement - a movement which was just emerging at the time Survivors was written - argues that we must prioritise the planet over mere humanity. It is only "species- ism" that makes us place what is good for us over what is good for "Gaia" (Earth, seen as a single, living organism). In the interests of Gaia, it may be that a large chunk of humanity must perish. As Marc McDonough - an activist with the leading deep-ecology campaign group Earth First! - explains: "If I had to choose between a world of happy humans with no rainforests, and a world of happy rainforests with no humans, I'd choose the latter without any hesitation."

Survivors is a deep-ecologist's dream come true. A central character called Jimmy Garland (played by Richard Heffer) explains their philosophy clearly at regular intervals throughout the show. Garland has reverted to living in the woods, where he has finally found peace, away from humanity. (The deep-ecologist Professor John Gray calls this humanity "homo rapiens", as though we were rapacious cockroaches infesting and devouring the earth). Garland tells Abby: "The world's a marvellous place. It always was. It was the people who turned it sour." Thank God, he implies, they're gone.

Such misanthropy hangs over the series: every character considers escaping the community to be alone in the countryside at one point or another. The cities quickly become infected cesspits, and vegetation begins to take over once again: to Nation, that clearly looked like victory. Just as Dr Astrov in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya is the first person in mainstream fiction to argue for the preservation of nature against industrialisation - the first environmentalist - it may be that Garland is mainstream fiction's first deep-ecologist. Survivors, this intense, fetid TV series rescued from the BBC archives after 26 years, hangs in the room long after the end credits, like smoke from a poisoned cigar.