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Questions for those who understand Derrida

  
  

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Saveloy
12:33 / 20.05.02
Re: the Derrida passage quoted by Deva in Nicks update thread in the Head Shop:

http://www.barbelith.com/underground/topic.php?id=6776

Deva, Nick, and anyone else who understands Derrida: this is going to sound like a very odd question, but - how do you read Derrida? When you first read that passage, did you understand it imediately? And when you read it, was it important to make sense of every sentence, every word, even, or were you happy just to get the most important bits?

I've given it two or three goes now and it remains almost completely incomprehensible to me. This is not a new experience for me, and I wouldn't worry about it if I thought I could pick the thing apart and come to an understanding by increments ("okay, this means that and connects to that bit there, therefore..." etc). But I'm fairly certain that I couldn't even do that - which is both interesting and frustrating for me because there are very few words in that passage whose individual meanings I don't understand (or have a good idea of).

SO, leaving aside for the moment the fact that I'm probably just a bit dim, my other question is: does an understanding of Derrida require practice? Do you have to become familiar with his style over time, or should any reasonably literate, intelligent person be able to make sense of what he says without reference to previous works?

Btw, I realise you could take these questions as implied criticisms, but none is intended, I really am just curious.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
12:52 / 20.05.02
Whooooaaa.

I don't pretend to understand Derrida. I like Derrida. I occasionally read Derrida. He writes far better than Stephen Hawking, but I sometimes feel he's about the same distance ahead of me. Witness the passage Deva quotes; I've been struggling to articulate some of that for a couple of years. He's saying it in passing, on his way to something challenging.

I read him in nuggets. Then I go away and think. And think. And think.
 
 
Lurid Archive
13:25 / 20.05.02
Funny. I think of Hawking - at least a brief history of time - as fairly easy to understand. Its not supposed to be good writing but, rather, clear and concise. Its more like journalism than poetry.

When I read bits and pieces of Derrida, I'm actually not entirely sure that I'm supposed to understand what is being said, at least not in the same way. But, like you Saveloy, I wonder if I'm missing something.
 
 
grant
14:44 / 20.05.02
I think a Derridean would tell you that the missing something is the point.

I also think he's really writing poetry disguised as critical theory.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:03 / 20.05.02
Personally I don't believe anyone understands Derrida except for my lecturer and my dad. Ok some people understand Derrida, I'm not one of them, but I find that if I read the introduction (by someone else) and a few other books by Christopher Norris and Culler and pretty much anything with the word deconstruction in the title then I almost get it. You see, what people fail to realise is, Derrida makes no sense. He does not distinguish his own work from everyone elses within his texts; in later work he completely contradicts what he once wrote without actually admitting that he is contradicting himself. The only way people understand him is if they've spent years thinking about him or if they've actually heard him explain his work.
Personally I have no desire to understand anymore, I feel very bitter that they actually ask anyone to read this pile of shit, and imagine you'd have to be fantastic to want to spend years thinking about someone who had no thought for his readers whatsoever.
 
 
Gibreel
13:40 / 21.05.02
I'd like to tie something more general in here about form and content. With Derrida (who is not an author I like), more suitably with Foucault and more blatantly with writers like Deleuze and Guattari, there are complaints that their work is *difficult*. What this often means is that their work feels stylistically alien. A lot of the reinterpreting (like Norris with Derrida) gets across their central ideas quite well. But the work of these writers is not just to be isolated as a set of core ideas extracted from a word soup. The way they undertake their projects indicates that they want the reader to come away thinking in a different way - not just thinking something different in the same way as before.

To put it another way, I disagree with grant. I don't think Derrida "disguises" his critical theory as poetry. I think he wants to write both simultaneously. It's just that as a professor of philosophy his work is automatically categorised under the 'critical theory' heading.

When Foucault was asked why he'd never written fiction, he responded that he'd never written anything but fiction.

So I'd say, lose yourself with these writers. With some of them you'll find points of contact and understanding. With others you'll find only confusion and disappointment.

BTW If remember correctly the Derrida quote in Nick's thread contains a lot of puns in French (mostly around threads and reading) that simply don't make it into translation. He's kinda funny like that.
 
 
johnnymonolith
23:23 / 21.05.02
I'd go with Gibreel's opinion that you should really lose yourself in Derrida when reading him; to be honest, i think that THAT IS THE POINT. He is being deliberately obscure and difficult because his work attempts to short-circuit the way you are thinking. To me he is a more "honest" writer in that he understands how complex and culturally-&historically-conditioned the acts of reading and writing are and he takes them to their "(il)logical" conclusions. This is even more the case with Deleuze & Guattari; i love their stuff to bits(heck, i am doing a doctorate based on their theories!) but you cannot really understand what they are trying to DO unless you examine it in tandem with what they are SAYING. It is great stuff but you do need to take your time with it- and there are times when i think that the Invisibles were SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Deleuzian!
 
 
alas
02:07 / 22.05.02
my spouse thinks that _of grammatology_ is a huge joke, and makes most sense if you start with the final chapter and proceed backwards.
He came to this conclusion after reading the work very carefully, for his PhD comps, several times. I did not have the patience for that, myself, but I trust my partner. He, after all, makes fabulous spareribs, while I know nothing about Derrida's cookery skills.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
08:54 / 22.05.02
He is notorious for his inability to get souffles to rise.
 
 
Tom Coates
07:33 / 25.05.02
I know that many Derridean's would lament me saying this - but an awful lot of Derrida requires a kind of grounding in continental philosophers over quite a long period of time. In order to avoid having to do that, it's worth reading a book like Jonathan Culler's 'On Deconstruction', which is quite an easy read yet doesn't treat you like you're an idiot and then turn from that back to Derrida and the writers in question. Often it's not the language per se that's the issue, but the fact that parts of the language (even 'simple' words like 'desire') take on different meanings and imply previous analyses from Freud to Nietszche...
 
 
Mystery Gypt
07:47 / 25.05.02
reading it in french is a big plus too. the translations depend so much on the understanding of the translator, and generally these people don't comprehend the text well enough to deliver it unharmed. even spivak will tell you to read the french. she'll also tell you to not read her introductions. in fact, i've heard her lament the fact that people more often read her introduction to grammatology than the book itself, when derrida's writing specifically shirks the concept of overview interpretation.

that said, i'm with tom -- you read the intros and the overviews and the essays and even the "for beginners" book (which is excellent) and then you can approach the text with more confidence and start to see what he's doing and why.

and even better, you can explicate derridean philosophy at cocktail parties.
 
 
Lurid Archive
08:19 / 25.05.02
The mixing of style and content can be a powerful tool, but I wonder about a common usage of this technique. For a start, the writing needs to be pretty good in order to justify it - this may be true of Derrida, but is it true of everyone? Secondly, as a reader I do not equate difficulty in comprehension with depth of meaning. Now I could be way off here and perhaps the most meaningless statement is actually the wisest.

However, I can resent having to wade through a piece only to come to the end and find nothing of value was said. Of course, it may be my own problem in not seeing the deeper meanings, but am I the only one to find this sort of defence rather convenient in its ease of application?

I think of these things differently, as I am principally a mathematician. In that area, writing something obscure is the easiest thing in the world. The real skill comes in writing in a way that is, to some extent, accessible. Science writing as a whole shares this approach, which is why I find it easy to read. And also why I find Derrida so frustrating.
 
 
SMS
02:49 / 27.05.02
am I the only one to find this sort of defence rather convenient in its ease of application?

It is a convenient defence if you think it needs defending. The value always comes from the interaction between the reader and the text. Judging whether a text is good or bad is judging how it tends to interact with readers. And even judging this sort of vague concept is completely subjective, so trying to defend a text seems a bit silly.
 
 
Lurid Archive
11:26 / 27.05.02
That line of argument tends to disassociate the author and their intent from the content of the text. Now where have I heard that type of reasoning before...
 
 
Gibreel
12:39 / 27.05.02
However, I can resent having to wade through a piece only to come to the end and find nothing of value was said.

Well that is surely the risk you take with any piece of writing. You're grown up enough to decide if what you are reading is worth it or not. Admittedly, if you are familiar with a particular writing style, you make be able to make this decision somewhat quicker.

Of course, it may be my own problem in not seeing the deeper meanings, but am I the only one to find this sort of defence rather convenient in its ease of application?

It's not your 'problem'. There's no reason why you shouldn't read some of the most estimed texts ever written and decide they're aload of shite.

The real skill comes in writing in a way that is, to some extent, accessible. Science writing as a whole shares this approach, which is why I find it easy to read. And also why I find Derrida so frustrating.

Fine. Derrida doesn't work for you. But I for one amnot saying he should.

BTW when you say 'accessible', to whom are you referring. Accessible to other scientists or to lay people. Most published science writing only falls into former category rather than the latter.

That line of argument tends to disassociate the author and their intent from the content of the text. Now where have I heard that type of reasoning before...

I don't know. I'm not a mind-reader for christ's sake. Spit it out.
 
 
Lurid Archive
15:16 / 27.05.02
I'm not saying that Derrida doesn't work for me but more that with the style adopted, the author has increased responsibility as to the content of the work. Its not about deciding whether the work is a load of shite, but whether there is in fact an idea to grapple with at all. (That may be interesting in itself, but limited IMO.) From my experience, Derrida does have loads to say and my comments were more generally about others using the same style.

As to science writing, most people think it is hard to read. The main reason for this is that people are ignorant of the subject matter. For instance, if one were reading a well written article to do with politics, it would quickly become incomprehensible if one didn't know what the UN was or what constituted democracy. This difficulty of understanding would be due to ignorance on the part of the reader rather than a difficult style. Of course there is lots of bad science writing, but I'm trying to separate these two notions of difficulty of a text.
 
 
Gibreel
06:56 / 29.05.02
LA> Depends what kind of science writing you're talking bout here. Pop science like Steve Jones, Simon Singh and Steven Jay Gould are well written and accessible. And the general public lap these up.

However, the majority of science writing is written for other scientists. Me and the guys often sit down with a couple of beers and the letters page of the Journal of Diffractional X-Ray Crystallography.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make about science writing per se. I think you need to draw it out more with examples.
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:18 / 29.05.02
This is starting to get very off topic, but I'll try to explain what I meant. Ultimately I'm talking about a culture clash.

Science writing may not be fun, evocative or rich with hidden meaning. Its purpose is to convey ideas and facts as clearly as possible. Your friends may not want to read some random science journal, but that is probably to do with lack of interest in the content. While science writing can be hard, the difficulty stems from lack of familiarity with the terminology, on the whole. If you ask a scientist to explain an idea, they tend to give you insights appropriate to your level of knowledge. The more you extend that knowlede, the more you understand.

In my experience, you don't get a similar thing with, say, critical theory. In fact, I've been told that an attempt at this sort of understanding is ill conceived. Perhaps. I've also heard the opinion, expressed by scientists, that some practicioners of obscure styles (not Derrida) deliberately use the style to disguise lack of content.
This could easily be lack of knowledge or excessive arrogance on the scientists part. I really don't know enough to say anything very much about this, but I thought I'd make a small contribution.
 
 
Jackie Susann
06:02 / 31.05.02
I think it's reasonably easy to offer understandable versions of crit theory to laypeople; anyone who says otherwise is trying to hide the fact they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Derrida, for example. That long wank paragraph quoted above basically says, 'you can't write about something without being implicated in what you're writing about'. Oh my God how fucking profound. As far as I can tell, Derrida has never contributed an interesting idea to the human sciences or, indeed, anything; but then even if he had, I wouldn't know, because his writing's so fucking boring it's impossible to finish any of his essays.
 
 
Tom Coates
15:35 / 03.06.02
I think it's very simple to define Derrida in broad strokes, but he doesn't really work in broad strokes so it becomes much more difficult when you engage with some of the writing he produces at the micro-level. Quite a lot of his work is unbearably precise - teasing strands out from each other in different directions, then revealing >poof< there were no strands at all. It's more action-philosophy than explain-philosophy. It's more 'look at what I'm doing' than 'look at what I'm saying'.
 
 
Loomis
13:43 / 06.06.02
As with anyone who's written that much stuff, Derrida has produced work that is good, work that is crap, and work which no one can understand. That does not bother me at all. I think you need to focus on the positive, and not think too much about the theory industry or the elitism. As long as you get a couple of recommendations on the good stuff, it's not hard to go and find it, and I for one am glad that I did. As has been said, it's not very hard to understand the main points of twentieth century theory. The argument that there is no meta-writing, writing is all on the one level and cannot escape itself or discuss itself without being tangled in the age-old limitations of communication. (Just being general here-don't attack my dodgy encapsulation). These premises and many more which I won't go into here have become almost taken for granted these days thanks to Derrida and his buddies. What sets him apart is that he not only puts forward many original ideas but is able to demonstrate them though ingenious argumentation, pointing out the flaws in what you thought you knew about language, and making you realize the impotence of what you thought was well grounded. Definitely a big wow factor for me when I discovered his good stuff. The article "Signature Event Conext" in which he destabilizes the concept of context, on which all communication is predicated, blew me away. All my books and notes are in another country, but there are some killer quotes in that article. Derrida is one person who has made me a far better reader and writer than I was before, and there aren't too many people about whom I can say that.
 
 
alas
16:02 / 06.06.02
I work with both scientists and humanists and i can say that most of your garden variety scientists--not the BIG NAME, creative minds, working on the cutting edge of thought and rationality and who, mainly, take joy in THINKING, but the ones eking out their grants at research institutions or working at major corporations or teaching at small colleges--are as fucking boring as any lot on the planet.

There. Now, when my students say of a text, "it's BORING," and expect, seemingly, me to say, "Oh, by all means ignore it then, It must be worthless!" I say: "Ok: that's your initial reaction, and there may be good reasons why YOU find this text to be boring. Typically it's because you are not included in the targeted audience of the text. So figure out WHY the text is Boring to you; what would it take for it to be interesting to you? Or, what kind of person would you have to be to find this interesting?"

The problem that I have, the thing that makes most of these basic, drone- scientists BORING to ME is that the kind of training that seems to happen in graduate schools seems to put blinders on big portions of the brain, so that ONLY the narrowest forms of rationality are taken to have value, validity. They are typically more conservative than their humanities counterparts, and as government funding except military sources dries up and they increasingly depend on corporate-funded grants/research, with corporate goals and strictures attached, they are getting even more boring. And it's not that they don't know interesting stuff. Indeed, when I have them explain to me stuff about their specific research interests, there's life in their eyes and they can tell you detailed stuff that has interest and elegance. But outside a narrow research interest, they are often dull as business management majors and just as politically conservative.

Is this an unfair generalization? Oh probably. I love the Union of Concerned Scientists, but I also believe that a kind of simplistic understanding of, faith in, Western standards of reason and rationality--especially as regards epistemology and ethics--pervades US graduate programs in science, and not nearly enough philosophical reflection.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
16:02 / 06.06.02
Going back, back, back... Whatever Spivak may say herself her introduction to Grammatology is absolutely fantastic. It's about the only thing that managed to separate off Derrida's own notions from Rousseau's, I found that part of the book particularly hard, if you're going to read an introduction for that book I'd recommend it. Actually I'd probably recommend it over Culler's work because it's so beautifully detailed in exactly the right places.
 
 
Jackie Susann
06:29 / 07.06.02
"Ok: that's your initial reaction, and there may be good reasons why YOU find this text to be boring. Typically it's because you are not included in the targeted audience of the text. So figure out WHY the text is Boring to you; what would it take for it to be interesting to you? Or, what kind of person would you have to be to find this interesting?"

Well, this is basically my problem with D - I think there is something fundamentally wrong with his 'target audience', i.e., anyone who finds his work interesting or insightful. I mean, if you think destabilising the concept of context is an at all useful exercise, more power to you, but really - wouldn't you be better off learning a new recipe or something?
 
 
Mystery Gypt
08:35 / 07.06.02
the target audience tends to be people who think about the relationship between language and politics. and i don't just mean academics... again with the spivak, but she talk at length (did i already say this?) about giving derrida talks and being approached afterwards by very poor women with no academic background who are activistic in their community and who, spivak claims, demonstrate an understanding of derrida's point which is much better than the general level of college students. because they are the target audience -- people trying to think on a higher level about politics and what we can do to make the world more just *in practice*.

on the subject of why you can't reduce derrida to a simple explanation and why you can with science: derrida writes in a way that the specificity of his words and the experience of reading are part of the concept. this is not very different that literature, poetry, etc. explaining to you why i like ulysses is possible and valid, but it is not the same thing as the point of ulysses, which is only generated when you read it (preferably out loud, with a pint).

i arduously concede the point that *other folks* who write like derrida not only are deliberately obscurist, they don't even know what they mean themselves. lit theory has become a very corrupt thing -- it was once practiced by the artists of the times (wilde, novalis, goethe, artaud) and has now become some so dire that spivak (again) accuses her students of sounding like they go trade school or business school when they write about literature.

i think that derrida is unique and peculiar; because you find his work in the philosophy section and beause he writes about phenomenology or plato, you think he's writing the same kind of thing. but he's not, and that's why simple explanations don't work.

there is an analogue in science. you can explain simply and elegantly the principles of what you mean, yes. but you cannot easily translate the experience of making a breakthrough -- of discovering a new principle, or of finding an unsolvable contradiction such as uncertainty -- in terms that are scientific. you would have to rely on non-scientific modes of description to emotionally convey an experience that came from science. maybe it's helpful to think of this kind of double-thinking when considering derrida.
 
 
Tom Coates
08:43 / 07.06.02
Well that's a very difficult thing to argue either way really. In terms of understanding what it 'means' to find 'meaning' in things - you may believe that to be a profoundly useless thing to do, but in terms of people working on things like Artificial Intelligence and neural nets, there may be some insights that are profoundly valuable - even if they are so simply because they demonstrate gaps in our understanding of how we believe our OWN mechanisms of understanding work.

Philosophy is very difficult to justify at the moment, mainly because discourses of science have colonised much of the subject over the last two and a half thousand years - and continue to do so. But if you're looking for a justification of inquiry, investigation and serious thought, then I think you're rather missing the point!

Think of it this way - every single thing that you believe to be self-evident isn't. None of it. All the tacit assumptions that every thinker, creative force, politician, businessman make are wrong. Plain wrong. They're generally very useful assumptions (as a rule), but that doesn't mean that more cannot be accomplished by thinking outside them. That's the philosophers job - to undermine received wisdoms - to think further and harder than anyone else. Everyone in the world shouldn't do this job, but it's profoundly important that SOMEONE does it.
 
 
Lurid Archive
13:21 / 07.06.02
i arduously concede the point that *other folks* who write like derrida not only are deliberately obscurist, they don't even know what they mean themselves. - Mystery Gypt

By saying this you implicitly concede that it is worthwhile judging the content of such a piece of writing. Thing is, most of the defences of Derrida work equally well with those *other folks* and the most ardently pro-D people seem to consider criticisms, like those of Crunchy, to be invalid - often for "meta" reasons. The poetry/literature defence is probably the strongest, though a cynic - someone entirely unlike myself - would probably ask how often D is listed under poetry and literature.

I'm not sure I buy your analogy with science and writing about science, Mystery. For a start, an account of someone's experiences of making discoveries written in the most obscure way possible - to express the frustration of research - would be dismissed. The style would add to the content, but its hard to see how it could do so to sufficiently justify a reader's effort. But perhaps I'm not understanding what you mean.

Moving on to Tom's comments, I don't think that understanding what it means to mean is a waste of time. Thing is, a lot of these concepts are played around with a lot. In some sense, this has been the theme of pure maths for a long time now - particularly this last century. Now I don't mean to nitpick, but

All the tacit assumptions that every thinker, creative force, politician, businessman make are wrong.

is just plain wrong. My base assumptions may be unfounded, but that doesn't make them wrong. Actually, the whole concept of wrong doesn't really make sense at this level. And thinking outside my usual boundaries can be illuminating - I think most people accept that. But...imagine you are having an argument about politics with someone who spontaneously interjects that your argument has no foundation because reality cannot be proven "real". Its not only irritating, its also lazy. Pushing the boundaries of your thoughts is good. Accepting the boundaries as a neccessary part of intelligent discourse is also good. To do the latter does not imply that one is not engaged in the former.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
13:29 / 07.06.02
My base assumptions may be unfounded, but that doesn't make them wrong.

See here for a new thread...
 
 
Tom Coates
12:24 / 08.06.02
Yes but I think that's precisely the point. It would be quite possible to argue with regard to day to day politics that Derrida doesn't have ANYTHING to offer except the ability to defamiliarise the material - push your thought in new directions. What you're advocating there seems to me to be a state of affairs where something is considered more correct simply because it is pragmatic - in fact that seems to me to be precisely wrong. If people actually DID operate in a sense of uncertainty about certain areas of existence then they wouldn't prop them up with the idea that they were 'right'.

I mean - I don't want to push this point excessively - the entire history of philosophy, political philosophy and interpretation has been about undermining previously held assumptions. Whether they are assumptions about the place of women, the place of 'voice of god' in the appropriate interpretation of the bible etc. etc. The fact that meaning, language, truth and comprehension itself are being subjected to these inquiries now is simply the continuation of that process... What may be derived from this kind of thinking is at the moment unknown - you simply cannot argue that it's without point. Even if the point is part of a larger current throughout human thinking away from grand narratives, unexamined notions of progress, control, authority, centralisation and the like - and towards flux, association, cellular groups and organic self-regulating shapes.

I'm getting a bit flowery now. I accept that. But let me say again that Derrida's decentralisation of what it means to 'understand' - what 'meaning' is - endlessly deferred down chains of associations have PROFOUND implications for people in the sciences trying to generate machines that can 'comprehend'. The fact that he has investigated the human reliance on binary opposites and posited a technique for undermining their potency is a profoundly useful - and political - one as well...

This sense of practicality that you reach for is a dangerous one - it's an anti-intellectual stance concealed under a down-to-earth cap of 'usefulness'. There are enough people in the world that we can spare a couple to think at the frontiers of concept and debate - even if the vast majority of people don't think it's going to lower their fuel bills or make trans-atlantic flights more comfortable...
 
 
Lurid Archive
13:06 / 08.06.02
This sense of practicality that you reach for is a dangerous one - it's an anti-intellectual stance concealed under a down-to-earth cap of 'usefulness'

I'm not sure if you are replying to me, Tom, but if you are its a very one sided reading of my post. I do not mean that an idea is more correct if more practical - just that one should not ignore the practical.

I accept, as I said before, that thinking outside boundaries can be illuminating. I also concur that thinking about meaning is useful - I even said that this is a big theme in maths. Is it slightly ironic that my last comment was "To do the latter [consider practicalities] does not imply that one is not engaged in the former [challenging boundaries]"?

But my concerns are precisely the oppposite of yours. I could be wrong but I detect a certain tide in, especially left wing, political thought where there is an unhealthy obsession with "the box". This is taken so far by some, that the quest to free oneself from assumptions becomes the ultimate goal. I believe that this is, to a large extent, the source of a lot of anti-rationalism and anti-science. Ironically, the quest to escape those doctrines traps one in a yet smaller box, where power and authority are paramount.

As I said, it is possible to challenge your boundaries while at the same time engaging in practicalities. You have "working assumptions", if you will. I'm really quite surprised that you think this sort of position is "anti intellectual". All I'm saying is that, for example, one can question one's fundamental assumptions about gender relations while still maintaining that equality is best. I would abandon neither the questioning nor, without major justification, the principle.
 
 
Tom Coates
15:16 / 08.06.02
Hang on - that's my point surely - that even though there is a level of academia and philosophy that doesn't strictly pertain to the practicalities of everyday life, it still has to exist and indeed is more useful than you give it credit for. But I wouldn't want it building my houses or arresting criminals.

I'm not by any means suggesting replacing policemen and construction workers with clones of Derrida each debating the binaries of law-abiding / crime or brick / mortar! Nice idea as that is, in retrospect...
 
 
Cloudhands
08:19 / 09.06.02
quote: it is possible to challenge your boundaries while at the same time engaging in practicalities.

Yeah. It needn't be that some people are questioning the structures while others stick within them. We can except boxes/boundaries as being unreal, as stories but also concede that they do work. For instance the 'box' of Newtonian physics got man on the moon though it was subsequently proved wrong by quantum mechanics. These boundaries/boxes are stories we tell to each other, they help us do what we want to do but they are still just stories. They aren't 'real'because they are about the human perception of the world not about the way the world is beyond human perception.
 
 
Jackie Susann
02:15 / 10.06.02
"the entire history of philosophy, political philosophy and interpretation has been about undermining previously held assumptions. Whether they are assumptions about the place of women, the place of 'voice of god' in the appropriate interpretation of the bible etc. etc. The fact that meaning, language, truth and comprehension itself are being subjected to these inquiries now is simply the continuation of that process..."

well not to get overly Nietzschean, but critiquing without affirming positive values is just ressentiment, however much jargon you can wrap it up in. i'm not saying that D's not 'useful' for some hypostatised sphere of everyday politics, but that his work is intrinsically miserable, lifeless and Dull, deconstruction=slave morality, etc.
 
 
Tom Coates
08:20 / 10.06.02
Cloudhands - I agree completely. But it's still worth having someone out there pushing in one direction undermining assumptions, destabilising categories, while other people operate within conventional ones. I doubt Derrida would turn down life-saving surgery because of his suspicion of the truth claims of science and medicine. You don't stop reading Derrida and finding him valuable because you need to believe in your fridge - instead you operate around two different modalities - levels of engagement. Einstein vs Newton is a prime example - simply because Newton works for the vast majority of things that we operate with in our day to day lives doesn't mean that Einstein's work isn't valuable. And that's what this argument is about - does Einstein's lack of day to day practical applications at the human level make his work pointless? Or do we use his work when we refer to a higher, larger, more significant order of the world?

And Crunchy - if you don't like Derrida (and fair enough - I'm not claiming to have read vast amounts of his work here, or to be an expert - I'm sure I've hideously caricatured the vast majority of his work), then perhaps the type of inquiry - the type of questioning you're interested in personally is different. Read Baudrillard, perhaps? Much more fun...
 
 
Lurid Archive
08:52 / 10.06.02
But to take up Crunchy's point about positivity...

It is easy to "push boundaries", "challenge preconceptions" etc, etc. This is the usual justification of trolls. I'd say that unless you judge a person's work by their status, you need some way of distinguishing worth. Many defences of Derrida rely too heavily on a abstract defence that works just as well for saying that trollish behaviour is "eye opening".

Also, Tom's reference to relativity is often used as an analogy - quantum mechanics is also a favourite here. Now, perhaps this analogy is valid, but one should recognise that relativity and quantum mechanics were developed not because they "challenged" old fashioned Newton. They were developed out of neccessity, to try to explain certain results not consistent with Newtonian mechanics. In truth, I can think of thousands of ways in which to supercede Newtonian mechanics - Newton could have thought of infinitely many. But this is a point which everyone in science accepts - there are different ways of looking at the world. The hard bit is to come up with new modes of thought that are actually constructive as well as, possibly, destructive.
 
  

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