Jacques Derrida

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"

momus yes by (non-poetic) logic that is obviously the case: what parts of the "world" do you consider by definition unreachable within this yes wide but coherent definition of "text"* (i don't in fact think the claim requires they be reached yet or indeed that we will actually ever reach them)

*(what is a better term for it? relayable consciousness? as i keep saying, i don't like "text" used in this broad sense bcz it's so easy to toss up bogus contradictions which get their specious force from the ordinary-language usage of text)

i'm really off the point anyway, carry on - i've totally lost the point of how this relates to the specialist use of "text"

(did we just reach a pf banality point)

yes, i'm aware of that; what i'm asking is, for derrida can we back date the existence of these 'laws' to the time before newton? ditto the existence of elements, pluto, etc.