Re: vive !

I think John's just a little bit too comfortable with Derrida's material
-- and as a result, forgets the discomfort people usually have (esp. if
English is their first language) when they first come to Derrida's
writing. I think he also forgets that since Derrida is in conversation
with virtually every western philosopher from Plato to Heidegger (esp.
if they wrote about language) coming to him without this background is
like overhearing someone else's telephone conversation from the next
room - since you're getting half the conversation, you think you can
figure out what's going on, but since you're only getting half, you're
not sure.

These are the small downsides to the enormous benefit of having a real
live Derrida scholar -- who studied with him -- on the list with us.

When I read the response below, for example, I think I know what's going
on because I've read _Of Grammatology_. Not only that, on the back page
of my copy of _Of Grammatology_ I have the following titles listed:

Saussere: Course in General Linguistics
Plato: Phaedrus
Rousseau: The Social Contract and First and Second Discourses, and Essay
on the Origin of Language.
Claude Levi-Strauss: The chapter "A Writing Lesson" in Tristes Tropiques

I remember thinking later I needed to add these titles:
Heidegger: Being and Time
Husserl: Phenomenology
Nietzche: miss the titles right now

The list could go on. Those were the books I felt I had to pick up in
order to understand _Of Grammatology_ -- otherwise, I'd be listening to
half the conversation.

So when you get to this point, you gotta ask: is all this worth the
effort? For me it was. I don't think I can answer that for anyone
else.

More responses below:

Omlor@aol.com wrote:

> Scottie,
>
> Derrida's formulation of differance and his attempt in that essay to
> analyze the deferment of meaning that takes place in written language,

Right now, I'm really wondering if Scottie or Daniel knows quite what
you mean by "the deferment of meaning." It's a simple phrase, really,
but it has a specific meaning in this context. You describe it in a
later post when you say language doesn't have a "stable" meaning. This
isn't to say that language doesn't have _any meaning at all_. It simply
doesn't have a fixed, once for all meaning. The minute you try to nail
language down and say, "This is absolutely what these words mean," that
particular meaning slips away.

In order for the meaning to slip away, though, it has to be present to
begin with. That is why Derrida would never say language is
meaningless. That is the nonsense people who haven't read him, or
understood him, say.

> 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,"

The words "sign" and "referent" are again common words, but have a
specific meaning in this context that readers here may not be familiar
with. The word "sign" refers to, say, the words we use. Signs are
representations of trees and horses and walking and everything else we
think about and experience -- representations we share with each other
in order to communicate. The "referents" are the specific things the
signs refer to -- and it's not a physical tree or horse or action like
walking. It's the idea of tree or horse or walking that we carry around
in our heads. That's what's really referred to by the signs or words we
use. This piece is from Saussere.

> 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

That last sentence is what we want to focus on here: "language systems
derive meaning from within their own system rather than from their
relationship to objects in an external world." Since the word "tree"
doesn't derive its meaning from a physical tree out there, but from the
idea "tree" in someone's head, the word "tree" really gets its meaning
from the other words around it.

If you have a problem with this idea, think of the millions of trees in
this world, and then think of the image you get when you use the word
"tree." Then ask yourself: "What are the odds of someone living halfway
across the globe having the exact same visual image of a tree that I
do?" Pretty slim to impossible, I'd say.

So since words (signs) don't communicate the specific thoughts or images
we have in our heads when we talk, signs refer to other signs, not to
physical things or the images of physical things in our heads. It is
for this reason that language gets slippery.

But I don't see how people can get this just from reading Derrida --
they'd have to have read Saussere too. Adding Plato to your reading
would help a good deal too.

If they were to add Heidegger to their reading, esp. the later
Heidegger, who seemed to think that clearly thinking about a thing was
just as good as actually seeing it or otherwise physically experiencing
it, they would see how Derrida is a radical critique of this assumption
-- and they would see how he demonstrates that this radical critique
_was embedded in the thinking of the very people who formulated these
assumptions to begin with_. That's the most important thing.

Jim

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Received on Fri Dec 13 17:52:21 2002