The IP book features chapters on 'contemporary political conflicts over intellectual property rights' in the digital movie industry in Germany, Hazel Moir's empirical analysis of Australian and US patent ownership, Shadlen on the post-TRIPS politics of patents in Latin America, and chapters on biorights and patent governance.
Mikics offers an informed and nuanced appraisal of Derrida, arguing that
Derrida was neither so brilliantly right nor so badly wrong as his enthusiasts and critics, respectively, claimed.In discussing Derrida's The Post Card he suggests that the work ...
written more than a decade before the internet era, is, in effect, a blog avant la lettre. Derrida fills his book with tightly veiled personal references that only the addressee of the postcards (presumably his wife, Marguerite) could understand. The Post Card is unusually frustrating, even by Derrida's standards. (Future generations will no doubt be mystified by Richard Rorty's judgment that in this book Derrida achieves an "incredible richness of texture" rivalling Proust, Joyce and Sterne.) At one point in The Post Card Derrida gives us a feckless image of impossible desire: "When I receive nothing from you I am like a dying tortoise, still alive, on its back. You can see it erect its impotence towards the sky" (Post 109). The Derridean tortoise points its wilting, ineffectual logos at the heavens inhabited by the immortal philosophers: such is Derrida's joke against himself. (He evidently has in mind the tortoise that supports the world in Hindu and Stoic cosmology.)He goes on to argue that Post Card "presents an idiosyncratic version of philosophical esotericism, and as such it responds to Plato". Derrida as grand provocateur has fun along the way, with Mikics indicating that -
Derrida, commenting on the medieval picture of Socrates writing with Plato standing behind him, explores the possibility that Plato is sexually molesting his revered mentor: "For the moment, myself, I tell you that I see Plato getting an erection in Socrates' back and see the insane hubris of his prick, an interminable, disproportionate erection ... slowly sliding, still warm, under Socrates' right leg" (18) In addition to sodomizing Socrates, Plato, we are told, is riding a skateboard (17); also, he is a tram conductor (17); and finally, he "wants to emit ... to sow the entire earth, to send the same fertile card to everyone" (28). "Imagine the day", muses Derrida, "when we will be able to send sperm by post card". (24)My intuitive response to that is the line from Monty Python: "He's not the Messiah; he's just a naughty boy". Naughtiness does, however, have its uses.
A friend has meanwhile reminded me of the 'Dogs Do Derrida and Heidegger' video on YouTube.
