Jacques Derrida

But I'm fairly certain this would not REPAY the debt, so this book exists as a title only

(haha "debt" is JD's MUCH SUPERIOR alternative - ie clear and meaningful and useable - for the pesky i-word)

I would say that De Man is as good and better than most normal-style critics - his "arche de-bunker" schtick is simply magnificent

I have a feeling we have been down this dirt road before

PS / yes it is true that JD on lit is generally less incisive than at least early JD on eg Rousseau or Levinas -- though this is complicated irritatingly by the inclusion of his drama-king Rousseau essay on Acts of... Literature.

Because i learnt a lot from Derrida which is not stuff exclusive to his work, but common to a whole intellectual tradition / milieu (bit of both) I would probably attribute more of how I know think to his impact on me than any other thinker. But that's not necessarily to do with being Derrida, just someone I studied at a particular time, if you see what I mean.

Derrida is certainly nearer to philosophy than Foucault or Lyotard say, I'm not sure about Deleuze. The entire gamble of Derrida's work is (described one way) concerned with being super-philosophical but also being against or anti or just plain different from philosophy at the same time, and showing that it is strictly impossible to decide which. I'm not sure how fair it is to describe Derrida's work as mostly concerned with applying literary techniques to philosophy, because there is a philosophical trajectory underneath his work, which his interest in the concept of literature is put to work on. Certainly he has never claimed to be a literary critic in the sense Blanchot or de Man are (and I have yet to see even a cursory account of the influence of the latter on the former, although there are clear verbal echoes in at least one place), so I don't find it surprising that people don't find him particularly helpful in reading literature. What I find slightly interesting is why people think they should find him useful for this.

(this seems a bit unlikely - it requires wilder to understand lubitsch to understand that a. L's work should only be valued in money terms, and b. that the content of L's work at every level is an argument that all such work should only be valued in money terms)

also this is a debt which can never to arbitrated by a third party (which rules out the entire purpose of the cash nexus heh)

his daughter is still alive though

(this is bcz they are too caught up dealing - or not dealing - with the nature of their OWN debt to both prior parties)

Potlatch=like todal free-for-all? Probably involving jouissance, and lashings of derives?

Someone said upthread that philosophy = Oh Really? & So What?

Two more options:

Let's Try and Make This Simpler vs (or, and) Let's Try and Make This More Complicated.

Both impulses are comprehensible and exist in a dialectic, perhaps.

JD cannot on the whole be accused of the former. He may possibly be enlisted to the latter.

The question could then be: does he Complicate things in a useful / helpful / interesting / moving / nice / pretty / enlightening / funny [etc] way? Or does he complicate things unhelpfully and leave us not much better off at the end in any of those ways and more? Or: do the gains his complications give us outweigh the losses? Or: are they worth the effort? (Analogy with Proust here.) (Many different questions, perhaps, not all to be mixed up.)

Over years I came to feel that his brand of complicating was not doing enough of the good stuff, and was doing too much boring and unhelpful nothing-much stuff.

Mark S quotes me upthread - and it is nice of him to remember what I said. And his words suggest to me what I have sometimes thought: that maybe people (like eg. us) like or dislike (or a mix) eg. JD the way we like and dislike eg. Kafka, Beckett, or Defoe and Dickens for that matter.

I think I have taken this A-road before.

Sadly this thread has lost me in just the way Kogan has complained about a few times - I think I have the first idea about some of what Derrida has been on about, but if we are to just talk about this stuff in terms of how it relates to Mallarme and how Deleuzian it might be, I very quickly get lost. This isn't particularly a complaint, since unsurprisingly the discourse between Alex, Mark and The Pinefox is zipping around rather above my head, and asking them to take little baby steps everywhere so I can keep up would be completely unreasonable. I'm more meaning to apologise for backing away and looking for someone posting kitten pics...

False! The third party creates the debt and pays it as he/she sees fit, unless I misread Barthes! Crit theory exclamation point party hurrah!

the third party doesn't create the debt: the third party may not even be aware of the debt - not all readers end up being writers, their handling of the debt may only ever manifest in a world w/o possibility of audience (like, i dunno, someone who becomes a doctor after reading pushkin) (or chekhov, i forget which one was the doctor)

(actually for the purposes of the thought experiment it doesn't matter)

enrique the idea of debts which no amount of money can repay or address are commonplace, so THAT line won't fly

All readers are writers!

The festival of exclamation points continues!

i.e. in what way is it "real" to privilage "text" as everything, or is it just a historic "accident" of "text" (in the more traditional sense) being a place where thinking about it FIRST meant thinking about mediation? i.e. how do we distinguish "everything is textual" from "everything is everything" and what implications does that carry with it?

also how is consuming an apple like consuming a book or a sentence?

doesn't the redefinition of text simply recognise a colonial reality? that (eg) a visual examination of a painting can be converted into writing or speech, but not vice versa?

i actually really dislike that redefinition of text, bcz i think it's misleading (plus i get sick of the word being used instead of like "book' or 'article' or 'poem' when the general-technical meaning is not actually required by the context)

(okay that's a dodgy evasion there)

you can make a movie ABOUT a book, or a painting too though?

Why can't you grow an apple about a book?

The Pinefox, are you trying to claim that being good at philosophy is no more useful a guide to the value of the person's political opinions than, say, being good at singing (we all know that musicians are constantly asked for political views)? In its theoretical sense at least, surely politics is a branch of philosophy?

Alex mentioned that Derrida has avoided taking public stances, but I was wondering if this question could be answered in terms of the relationship of philosophy or theory to other disciplines. It's interesting that Alex called Derrida's approach specific. (I remember reading something by Heidegger for an English class in which the object of discussion was translated as 'thing'...)

What should I read if I want to find out more about how Derrida fits in with the phenomenological tradition and the relationship between phenomenology and the philosophy of language?

Yes, but the result was Adaptation, which for me was a waste of time, money and spirit.

As for phenomenology, wasn't that a major thing that he was reacting more or less against? That problematizing (well I like that word!) of metaphysical terms like 'presence' was surely addressing that.

This is pure ideology, and fails to take into account that narrative tends to be made after events, and to confer sense (often spuriously) onto them retrospectively. We actually experience the world through our senses (ie phenomenologically), which might be a better reason for invoking 'Heidigger' (sic).

the allegedly pure-presence state of the phenomenological [bracketed] sensual moment is demonstrably non-existent = derrida's (anti-heidegger) argument everywhere, pretty much (cf eg writing precedes speech)

ts: time as our internal structuring mechanism (cf kant/heidegger/derrida tho in v.difft ways) vs time as an externally existing - metaphysical? - dimension which god understands but we can't (ok this sounds like kant but actually is the opposite of what he thinks at least during his earlier funny period)

BUT

animals w/o speech (that we know how to translate) clearly have memory, are able in some sense to "tell themselves internal stories abt their own experiences and how these inform the current situation" - whatever the brain-body mechanism for this, it involves a kind of accessible-readable electrical-biological trace somewhere = writing obv

hence writing precedes speech

I have never bought the nothing-is-outside-text line and never will. Why? Because I can observe myself observing, and catch myself textualising my experiences after the observation. Sure, there are necessary structuring process going on ('cognition'), but they are pre-linguistic, not post-linguistic.

the non-technical word for deconstruction is "chicken-egg stuff"