Jacques Derrida

So, what's an Undecidable, and what makes you like it?

I don't think I'm being an asshole in asking you to apply that idea to particular thoughts and particular words. How else are you to explain it? How else am I to understand you?

E.g.: "I think I'll have some lunch." How does "I think I'll have some lunch" resonate in the traces the written word leaves as it passes through? The thought lives in a world of distinctions all right: I, as opposed to someone else, will, as opposed to won't - but also "I'll" as opposed to "I will," which identifies me as Ed Casual rather than Ed Formal - have lunch as opposed to having dinner but also as opposed to continuing to play checkers instead of eating (and maybe "I think I'll have some lunch" is heard by Maid Teresa as a command, so she'll have to make Ed Casual a sandwich now, which means she won't have time to dye her hair as she'd planned), and so forth.

Now, what does "trace" have to do with this? Is "lunch" tracing something? Is it leaving a trace? And what does it mean to say that this particular thought ("I think I'll have some lunch") resonates in the traces left by "lunch," "some," et al. as they pass through?

And also, what would be the difference between my believing that "I think I'll have some lunch" resonates in the traces left by "lunch," "some," et al. as they pass through and my not believing that "I think I'll have some lunch" resonates in the traces left by "lunch," "some," et al. as they pass through? How does my having or my not having such a belief change me? If I didn't believe it, what would I believe instead? What if I had no opinion?

Apparently "la déconstruction, c'est l'Amérique" because as a country, "il ne cesse pas de se défaire et de se reconstruire". Actually, from what I could glean, Derrida was much more upbeat about America than Debray was.

Not in the little Derrida I've read. It's more like showing how a text collapses its own explicit (so not "underlying") polar assumptions. So "signifieds" fail to be free of being "signifiers," "original thing that something's supposed to be a trace of" ends up being derived from its trace, and so forth. If anything turns out to be "underlying," it's the collapse, not the bipolarity. (And if I had the time right now, I'd go into why I think Derrida himself is being inconsistent - a mugwump - in believing that anything is "underlying," as I'd have expected him to dispense altogether with the idea that metaphysical preconceptions can actually underlie anything, or that there is a realm of the "underlying.")

In any event, this Derrida "deconstruction" (if that's what Derrida means by "deconstruction") only works on texts that really are attempting to create and sustain bipolar dichotomies, so I'm baffled when people claim to be deconstructing texts that don't do this. It seems like a scam: You claim that a text makes underlying bipolar assumptions (though the text doesn't claim this), then you show how the text itself collapses the assumptions that you projected onto it in the first place. Wouldn't it be smarter, and more honest, simply to note that paired opposites ("inside-outside," "foreground-background," "words"-"space between the words," "independent-dependent," "base-superstructure," "presence-absence," "signified-signifier") function not as bipolar opposites but as relative terms on a continuum? But then you'd have nothing to deconstruct.

I'll repeat something I wrote upthread: In the Derrida I've looked at, he analyzes thinkers who are explicitly working very hard to create bipolar opposites; he's not taking the average Tom, Dick, and Harry and "uncovering" their underlying bipolar assumptions.

Jacques Derrida gets a job at Carphone Warehouse and one day as he is working behind the counter, a customer comes in and asks some questions about the tariff he's on.

"This tariff yeah, I get 500 free messages a month, right?"

"Yes, this is correct."

"Do I get free minutes?"

"No, I am afraid not."

"Do I get picture messages?"

"No, that is not included in the plan, either."

"Do I get a free upgrade when the new model comes out?"

"No."

"Do I get internet access from this phone?"

"No, just the messages."

"So I don't get..."

Jacques becomes frustrated with this line of questioning and interupts with:

"Look, there is nothing outside of the texts!"

The Pinefox is really sur l'argent this time.
-- Omar, Thursday, 27 September 2001

that is so sweet -- thank you, Omar.

Derrida is so 20th century.

Bodrick that was horrible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V46yRvm8Nk#t=2m57s

XD

oops, click this: http://bit.ly/q2rbFq

it's nice that bodrick III and burt stanton weighed in on this thread
cool contributions, bros

“I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others”

olde ILMe at its beste

A masterclass from Kogan.

To me Derrida is no more than just an overrated jerk who writes melodically dead emotionally dry books.

A few more beatings administered with Wittgenstein's slabs here: Po-mo vs Futurism vs Modernism

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

Has Derrida written on film or literature?

Sometimes the pomo tendency to dwell upon the impossibility of meaning feels to me like an inverted objectivism -- building a "philosophy" around a bad natural tendency (nihilism, selfishness) rather than around aspirational aims. Then again, maybe I'm not typical in being naturally nihilistic, a lot of people don't seem to be.

I read a speech by Derrida wherin he explained that a lot of what 'deconstruction' did was in response to 68 and in general to French society at the time. I'm not sure I'd call it 'nihilistic' or 'selfish', they were writing in a society with a whole lot of ingrained, unquestioned truths and meanings.

to be clear I was associating nihilism with postmodernism and selfishness with Ayn Rand's "objectivism" but that seems fair.

D after not so much the "impossibility of meaning" but its inexhaustibility. been said before, but deconstruction is often (willfully) misconstrued as a critical technique of demystification. it's not something a critic does to a text, its something a text does (maybe even something a text does to a critic)--and at best a critic can trace its movements.

“I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others”

I went and read the longer paragraph. It seems to me you could just as well say in general that "I cannot do anything, without sacrificing the other others, the other others." On an absolutist idea of moral responsibility, nothing I do is going to answer more than a tiny number of the hypothetical calls that can be made on me. The fact I can't respond to any particular moral call, without sacrificing all the other calls, sounds less paradoxical and more just tragic if you regard it as one way of filling in the more general claim. I could fill it in with any kind of non-moral actions as well, which makes it seem less like an aporia for the concept of moral responsibility (the only way to respond to a moral responsibility is to sacrifice ethics), rather merely a fact about how infinitely short we invariably fall.

merely a fact about how infinitely short we invariably fall.

yeah, i agree, but this is a major theme of deconstruction. all discourses are approximate; the thing itself always escapes, etc

but the tragedy of our failure to achieve pull presence also has a positive dimension, because full presence would be stasis, death. the "opening" of... derrida often says language but martin hagglund has argued that you can just as easily say "time," so like, lived experience/existence... is the only thing that makes it possible/legible

you're reading The Gift of Death, right? that was my intro to Derrida and still probably my favorite by him. definitely in his tragic mode there--though maybe he always is.

close second, after the early foundational texts, is probably The Animal That Therefore I Am. contains a bonus and quite decisive critique of Lacan as well.

I feel like I've read a lot of Derrida but I still need to make my way through about a dozen of his books I have laying around. My only complaint is the creep of a "program," a performative contradiction, into the great amount of writing he produced--though I'm sure he'd be the first to admit his own work can only reflexively struggle against what it's so often about.

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Tuesday, January 13, 2015 9:40 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea, i got sucked into derrida big time in college and it was a shame because in retrospect i remember significantly more from the critical feminist theory and critical race theory stuff i read, and all that has had much more of an impact on how i think about the world than anything derrida wrote ever did.

gloria anzaldua, cherrie moraga, linda martin alcoff, and charles mills are all more worth the time than derrida, at least for me

good for you

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Tuesday, 13 January 2015 14:40 (1 hour ago)

sad that you are still hurting

lol.

i guess here's where i say i like deleuze more. is there good derrida to read abt ontology

i he's sort of opposed to ontology on principle.

i think, etc.

i always got the impression you had to be a big lit head with a minor in etymology to do derrida, that's my blockage. does he have anything to say about univocity / the nature of being? i guess if there's a nietzschean streak in derrida somewhere i would go there.

you'd probably want to read his stuff on Heidegger. Aporias, maybe. or: http://english.columbia.edu/files/english/content/geschlecht2.pdf

but i think you may be disappointed? if i know D at all he'd be concerned to show how univocity or the nature of being are themselves founded on deconstructable oppositions (no univocity without equivocity, etc). he doesn't go in for big master concepts like that.

To me Derrida is no more than just an overrated jerk who writes melodically dead emotionally dry books.

― Gombeen Dance Band (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 13 January 2015 12:50 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

deconstruction is often (willfully) misconstrued as a critical technique of demystification.

― ryan, Tuesday, 13 January 2015 15:11 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's some worthy intent in people who claim derrida etc is 'not that difficult' and can be taught to the average liberal arts undergraduate, it's just that it gets sold as a sort of readily deployable praxis for demystifying social relations and then they get all of these wounded solipsist responses when it fails on those terms

even if they do have the aptitude and talent for it they probably don't have the grounding in western philosophy that would be typical in france and absent that a lot of derrida becomes a bit kitsch

it's just that it gets sold as a sort of readily deployable praxis for demystifying social relations

yes this is a nice way of putting it.

that's not to say that Derrida can't be used that way, but if so you're sort of only engaging with half of his project.

✓

regarding "emotionally dry" there's a moment in Deconstruction and Pragmatism where Richard Rorty calls Derrida "sentimental" and that he "believes in happiness." or something like that. anyway in Derrida's contribution later on there's a remarkable moment where he (sort of) cops to it.