ABSTRACT
Reading Der Derian’s writings is often a bit of a rough ride. Many of his texts suck the reader into a magic world, a pastiche of science fiction, cartoons, Disneyland, CIA reports, spy novels, IR theory, movies and so on. She is pulled from one image into another and finally gets out, just because that full stop appears to be the last one (e.g. Der Derian 1993a). His writings thus embody a highly aesthetic dimension: they do not only relate particulars and wholes, but also draw enumerations of particulars. In this aesthetics the reader is moved from figure to figure in an almost photographic experience (Lash 1988, 1993). In this essay I cannot ‘reproduce’ this ‘light’ aspect of his writings. It might be attempted by constructing an essay as a compilation of semi-arbitrarily chosen pieces of his writings. However, such an essay would not fit the design of this work. Here, I shall rather introduce Der Derian’s reflexive contributions to IR, i.e. how he relates particulars and wholes, ‘facts’ and theories, theories and metatheories, etc. Hence, this essay (re)tells how Der Derian reflects upon conditions and changes of order/disorder (reality) and how he uses particular ‘instruments’ in his attempts to apprentice some fragments of the master ‘Life-world’.1 It is this ‘heavy’, more ‘scholarly’ Der Derian who is (re)written below. In this essay, however, I will not construct Der Derian into a continuously unfolding identity (a unity): ‘author in theories of international relations’. Rather, ‘Der Derian’ is understood to be a space-body which offers a home for particular intersections of many (inter)texts. This essay thus (re)-writes pieces of a space and not the struggle of a master-hero within the archives of international relations. Der Derian will be cut as a poststructural interventionist in IR-ir2 fed by a desire for disclosing IR-ir to make a life with-in difference possible. A first part will outline what a poststructural approach consists of. In that part, I will also indicate where Der Derian locates himself in the IR debates. A second part of the essay will draw his ‘empirical’ research project as an
analysis of mediations of estrangements. In a last part, some normative ‘claims’ which feed Der Derian’s narrative will be hinted at.
