Derrida

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

All the best,

-John
It's really not flip, its very serious (albeit harsh) and by its heat, it
shows a back handed respect. I know nothing short of a well peer reviewed
Doctoral thesis will garner any respect for this low life minnow in the
Bfish pond, never-the-less, I did read much of what you recommended (of
which, for your time in referring me to it I thank you) and seriously
considered it. What you failed to address in a previous post of mine is that
one of the large problems with Derrida and deconstruction is its Post Modern
heritage, like the Freud thing, the whole enterprise is suspect. Its like
the Colonial Brit invited to partake at the Headhunters table. So in the
spirit of the manifested goodwill of the fish bowl (not mine, I defer) I
will, in good faith, elaborate. First a provocative quote (very Derrida of
me) and then a running tab of comments written as I read.
THE APORETICS OF THE NUTSHELL
Deconstruction in a nutshell? Why, the very idea!
The very idea of a nutshell is a mistake and a misunderstanding, an
excess--or rather a defect--of journalistic haste and impatience, a
ridiculous demand put by someone who has never read a word of Der rida 's
works ( Points406). Nutshells enclose and encapsulate, shelter and protect,
reduce and simplify, while everything in deconstruction is turned toward
opening, exposure, expansion, and complexification ( Points429), toward
releasing unheard-of, undreamt-of possibilities to come, toward cracking
nutshells wherever they appear.
The very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that
things--texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices
of whatever size and sort you need--do not have definable meanings and
determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would
impose, that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy. What is
really going on in things, what is really happening, is always to come.
Every time you try to stabilize the meaning of a thing, to fix it in its
missionary position, the thing itself, if there is anything at all to it,
slips away (VP 117/SP 104). A "meaning" or a "mission" is a way to contain
and compact things, like a nutshell, gathering them
Comments:
He uses structure and coherence to attack structure and coherence,
reminiscent of my previous comment of pummeling florists with flowers. John
was right he does not say that 'you can say anything' he really says that
you can't say anything at all because value is dead despite the fact that
his writings are infused with value. Not intrinsic value but value language,
but if his thesis is true then we can't really know what he means. It
reminds me of that old Star Trek episode where they destroy that old probe
with a logical conundrum. You must preserve yourself but in order to
preserve yourself you must destroy yourself. In order to have a 'better'
community you must destroy community of course he doesn't say that but he
says you must construct the 'other'. Irony alarm, so Derrida is not a
deconstructor but a constructor. Like Campbell's old 'There are no moral
absolutes only moral absolutists', are you absolutely sure?
He is quite the provocative author, in the post modern sense. The other, the
other, the other until its all an effective pantheistic like soup where the
other has no distinction and so since everything is other than itself its
never quite anything. Pantheism vs. post modern deconstruction, which end of
the stick do you prefer to beat me with? Its not as if everything he says is
not without merit or all that new its just taken to absurdity. For instance,
his whole gift comments were said long ago by Jesus, but in his assumption
that different or other is intrinsically more valuable his swing continues
until the sword cuts back with the opposite edge. I think I heard it here
but it strikes true, he cuts his head off in an attempt to swallow it. He
wants a sack to put his things in but he is compulsively emptying it. He
should of just gotten one with a hole so he can go 'hog wild' with his
narcissism of going through the motions, not that it has slowed him down in
any way.
His comments on religion and faith were better said by C. S. Lewis with his
Tao discussion. Of course Derrida assigns different values and by doing so
he undermines his own 'construct' deconstructing himself. Hoyle (or whomever
it was) was a deconstructionist after Derrida's own heart with his
oscillating universe. Derrida looks more and more like a well groomed French
anarchist as I read on. Where Tolkien expressed the concept of subcreation,
Derrida advocates subchaos, a rooted anarchy, so I guess Jim was right his
deconstruction is rooted in the text. That's necessary, since a person can't
properly be stabbed without the knife at some point resting in the body.
He's very reminiscent of Nietzsche, did he die of syphilis contracted from
wounded soldiers in the Franco Prussian war. He uses language to attack
language like our favorite little oberman attempted to use reason to
undermine reason.
I guess my motivations are based in that ol' throwing out the baby with the
bathwater fear, but once I washed the dirt off all I found was a bunch of
mucky water.
Don't get me wrong John and Jim, Derrida is a genius and sincere as far as
can tell, but I think Hitler was a genius and sincere. Now Derrida is no
Hitler but he isn't exactly a Jesus, or even an Einstein, hell not even a
Churchill.
Again, he appears to be a dualist with a twist, a pluribus duelist, like the
dualist everything exists in tension and cannot without its opposite giving
it existence but in the process nullifying it. But unlike a pure dualist he
has a multitude in tension annihilating and defining a multitude.
He is on to something, yes life has some interesting paradoxes, but to say
the fabric of reality consists of these, goes to far, it ignores parsimony,
pure altruism, it makes (or tries to make) deconstructionism spiritual. He
is trying to breath pneuma into Frankenstein. He is the materialists Moses,
their deliverer from the wilderness, he promises sentience to the android of
the nihlistic world of materialsim.

Daniel
The dismissable but never quite dismissed
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Received on Fri Dec 13 15:00:35 2002