Re: vive !

Daniel,

Where does Derrida say "Communication is dead?" Or is this another simple
and sadly innacurate caricature of stuff you have spent no serious time
trying to understand? If so, I must say that this seems to me the worst sort
of intellectual bad faith.

Scottie,

Derrida's formulation of differance and his attempt in that essay to analyze
the deferment of meaning that takes place in written language, the space
between the sign and the referent that philosophers from Plato (in the
Phaedrus) to Heidegger (in the Anaximander Fragment) have attempted to elide
over with formulations of "presence" and "being," and his attempt to account
for the consequences of that deferment and displacement in the mark, for
example, of a seen but unheard letter, a difference only seen graphically but
not heard in French, is a simple beginning step in an attempt to formalize
Saussure's conclusion about the way language sytems derive meaning from
within their own system rather than from their relationship to objects in an
external world and to try and speculate as to what role such a set of
conclusions might play in the reading of complex literary utterances such as
philosophical and literary texts. The playfulness of the prose, at the same
time, is a self-conscious attempt to demonstrate precisely the described
actions and movements of the written and spoken words even as these issues
are being formally addressed.

In fact, the reading, if pursued slowly and with patience and through to the
end of the essay and the conclusions offered there, is not all that
complicated nor is it all that earth-shattering or "schizophrenic." It is
well-situated in a dialogue that had already been going between modern
linguistics and contemporary European philosophy since long before Derrida
arrived on the scene. It is within that dialogue, carried from Rousseau
through Husserl and Heidegger and their readings of the Western tradition,
that this essay and the related material in *Of Grammatology* takes it place.
 It is also, it should be mentioned, written well within the philosophical
and political scene of Paris, '68. Derrida's writing, as you may or may not
know, has changed significantly since then, even moreso in the past ten
years, since his illness. This can be seen in his recent collection *Acts of
Religion.* But even by *Glas* his work actually becomes, in many ways, more
of a complex challenge to the institutional dialogue rather than an exercise
within it, as this essay is.

In any case, if you'd like to go paragraph by paragraph or point by point
through the essay, off list, and discuss the arguments carefully laid out
within it, I'd be happy to accompany you.

In the meantime, flip nonsense like Daniel's should probably best be ignored.

All the best,

-John

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Received on Fri Dec 13 14:04:49 2002