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Questions for those who understand Derrida

  
  

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Baba Yaga
10:14 / 10.06.02
I used to have problems understanding Derrida but found that this was mainly due to my lecturers "telling" me what Derrida meant when I'd reached a completely different understanding. In philosophy there are no right or wrong answers.

With someone like Derrida, there is no set way of understanding his writings. I actually found him a lot easier to understand after speaking to a Buddhist friend of mine because I discovered that a lot of what he actually says is quite similar to Buddhist philosophy of which again there is no absolute definitions. Buddha originally laid some ground rules, but over the years these have been added to by Buddhists of different generations.

Also don't forget that with Derrida he believed that the title and cover of a book, actually contain the text and story of the book whereas the inside is really just the cover. So what is written insde is not as clear cut as it first appears to be.
 
 
Mystery Gypt
11:26 / 10.06.02
They were developed out of neccessity, to try to explain certain results not consistent with Newtonian mechanics.

derrida developed his concepts out of neccessity, to explain certain political results not consistent with what socialist revolutionaries had previously hoped for. as well as the result of decolonialization, and the results of language's legal use in the pursuit of justice.

also, most of this thread's discussion has been about whether or not the way derrida writes is valuable, but it seems to be forgetting that each book he's written is about a particular thing as well, and that he's not just making this same simple point about context and meaning every time. there is specificity to everything he does.

he desribes in one book, for example, the conflict that might arise for a philospher who belieives Heidegger's philosophical concepts but has problems with the histocial fact of Heidegger's naziism; he argues in another book how we might use Marx imaginatively even while accepting the tremendous failure of Marx's ideas politically. a lot of derrida has to do with resolving, or at least exposing, conflicts that come about between the hard logical truths of philosophy vs the soft human emotional response we have to these same things. this is why he is a combination of literature and philosophy, a combination that has value but which is very difficult for people to accept if they have too stringent a notion of what either one of these should be.

i find immanuel kant's Critique of Pure Reason to be more difficult writing than derrida's, but for some reason he doesn't get accused of deliberate obscuratism and the core concern over kantian debate is not over his use of language. because derrida writes about language and uses his medium to its fullest advantage, we are tending to get hung up on one-sided trivia.
 
 
Tom Coates
11:36 / 10.06.02
OK, I'm going to be a bit of an arse here and ask people to go and red Jonathan Culler's 'On Deconstruction' on the principle that he's a much better way to get a sense of what Deconstruction is about, and how it isn't a negative philosophy and that it'll almost certainly be far more accurate than I'm finding myself being with Derrida at the moment. I doubt very much that Derrida would be thrilled with me for the way in which I've reduced his philosophy to a kind of US TV cod-cool English teacher who makes you 'think for yourself, man'....

I think context helps a lot in this circumstance. You talk about facts not fitting into Newton - a NEED for a thinker to come up with a better model. THat's exactly what's happened with Derrida. He challenged the signifier / signified model of linguistics and meaning that seemed to be the basis of 'understand' and language, by positing that all language was a web of association, structured concept to concept along linkages, with meaning endlessly deferred down these chains. Each concept structuring itself by relation to what it is not and by a sense of those things that are closest to what it is (each of which defined by what they are not). Unlike Lacanian thinkers who placed the transcendental signifier of language as the phallus - or the 'name of the father', Derrida dismissed the very possibility of ANY one-on-one relationships between signifier and signified. And from that basis a new undertaking of philosophy emerged that challenged prejudices built into philosophy from the time of Plato and the emergence of the 'body / mind' split.

There was a logical flaw, therefore, in some of the structuralist models of philosophy that was not suitably exposed in large amounts of post-structuralist work, that Derrida revealed. And having revealed it, he suggested a whole radically politicised process of destabilisation of heirarchy. To me this seems eminently constructive, interesting and to be part of that broadening of perspective, reaching to a larger sense, that you could parallel to Newton and Einstein. In the process I make no claims that quantum physics or relativity can be parallelled with postmodern and deconstructive practice - because I think that's sloppy thinking...
 
 
Jackie Susann
08:04 / 11.06.02
i have to start actually thinking before i post, poss. even including references. vague thesis: deconstruction is just an incomplete Messianism - which Agamben argues (as an aside) in an essay on Walter Benjamin called 'The Messiah and The Sovereign' - deconstruction "nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation in a perpetual and interminable state of exception". so i'd say D never "challenged the signifier/signified mode", but endlessly deferred its critique by making signification a (happily post-structural) transcendental, the transcendence of irresolvable, hence endlessly sustained, criticism. this being, in large part, his appeal for career academics.

i do like Baudrillard, by the way - i used to hate him, but i'm coming round.
 
 
grant
17:27 / 11.06.02
The little I got of Derrida seemed a bit dangerously close to mystic religion to me, the idea of something real and essential being unapproachable by language or understanding, that shadow of what-is-not outlined by all the what-is-es.

Which both allows infinite criticism but also points out the uselessness of criticism, or of talking at all, at getting at what is true, real or worthwhile.
 
 
—| x |—
05:42 / 26.06.02
Hmm…maybe it’s simply me, but I have read through this whole un/holistic thread with the eager anticipation of coming to un/certain (real/rational)izations and have found/lost any non/sense of dis/interest to get at the heart of this diZzying anti/matter.

Deconstruction certainly appears to me as a positive thing: it is a way to implode a discourse in such a manner that the reader comes to see the un/reality of what has been (not)said. However, the curse is that the deconstruction of a discourse is itself open to deconstruction: the interpretation of the unsaid is as much concealing its assumptions as the (un)original work. Yay Po. Mo. Here we go ‘round the bend over backwards and eat your own tail. Oroborous (sp?) doesn’t bore us if only we want to spin a charmed dance ourselves diZzy in a tizzy of a betta’ meta-meta-meta-meta-and on/off to infinite regress. Readdress and redress the text in time and shift the (mis)interpretation.

There is no stability (as Lurid likely knows) to destabilize because once we begin assigning meaning to strings of symbols we get an uncountable model of (mis and missed)understanding lurking and working over/under and inside the outside of our heads. I mean, the combinations of strings, even infinite strings, are countable, but the moment we (mis)interpret those strings we get something larger than even Zeus himself could fathom. Isn’t this the bane of Po. Mo. non/existence: what is and isn’t is/n’t {is, isn’t} and this structure is/n’t the un/reality?

Who creates the un/meaning, who is it that is gleaning when the author is dead? A gleaming unseeming mental reaming ain’t some kinda’ intellectual parlor squalor! The boundary is the practicality! Push/pull your way through a Mobius strip of horrorshow (nadscat (sp?) and normal) mirror reflected gem stone sunlight. Crawl up your own arse and then out your own mouth, and then where are you (think carefully about that one)?

So read yourself RAW ‘till your eyes are Leary, then burn the brain of the brand unleft: those fellas are no worse or better than a dead mother in a tea time dress. But I digress.

Off course, of course! But is there any reality in relativity, a lost Newtonian absolute found in {is, isn’t}? The black holes of Hawking seep with energy thrown outwards even when light can’t escape, yet space is bent infinitely within Schwartzchilde’s (sp?) radius?!? But understand at the center/circumference of not/you there is only darkness that shines with light of all the suns. Funs with ones and zeros are our heroes because we can’t hope to cope with {on, off} = s (transcendent relation context contingent).

Un/essentially, we can’t say anything about Derrida because Derrida says nothing for himself: it is writing that goes to the Zero Degree, it is writing that sores to infinity. I don’t get it, I try to live it, and isn’t this theory as practice?

Only a couple more to go,
{0, 1, 2}
 
  

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