/lit/ - Literature

Tell me, /lit/. You don't actually think statements of form "X is defined as Y" actually have a truth value, do you?

>>10300571
Deconstruct it.

>>9764865
partly because it is. j-pete always brings up lacan, foucault and derrida as archpriests of this and in many ways he's not wrong. the problem is that is reading of them is so uncharitable

>lacan wants to show you that desire is the desire of the other
>foucault is interested in the curiously sadomasochistic aspects of power, along with much else
>derrida wants to show how ill-equipped language is to deal w/representation

all of these things are going to contribute in a way to loosening the connections between the Heroic Modernist Individual, Who Knows What He Is Saying and What They Want, Which is Perfectly Reasonable and You Can Too and the World He Lives In.

b/c ofc it isn't. nobody works like this, and in the 60s-80s that stuff had to get deconstructed because it was and remains a completely silly way to do things. it also allows for all kinds of Because Reasons arguments to be given in favor of shit that is legit not great: namely, oppression, totalitarianism, cruelty, w/ev

today we now have to pick up the pieces because the issue is not *oppression* but *decadence.* hence the red pill

but at the same time none of those guys would have been especially impressed with the air-horning and deplatforming of people like JBP either. Derrida would have given j-pete a classic Derrida Look and he would have been right to do so. Derrida, and those other two guys, are beasts. they are also channeling shit that leads into the holocaust, Stalinism, and much much else.

but Peterson is also correct to sniff out what happens when all of this is interpreted as gospel, and why - even though language is profoundly fragile - people are still nevertheless required to use it, and in so doing invoke all the spectres of existentialism, finitude, and so on. one guy Peterson doesn't seem to talk much about is Heidegger, who both Derrida and Lacan are influenced by. Heidegger's involvement with the nazis is ofc a problem because B&T is a big deal book. JBP is more concerned with stalinist rather than nazi terror, which is what makes him interesting.

even derrida would have wanted people to *read* the canon before racing in to deconstruct it. although this of course is precisely what nobody does b/c they want to have all the fun of Unpacking the Discourse without actually realizing that there may be parts of the text that *aren't* discourse - namely, them, and what the fuck they are doing there reading it in the first place.

progressivism is dangerous stuff. it's why deleuze disliked hegel. it's also why land talks about atomization, b/c in the end you get a lot of people beholden to private gods they don't understand. there's a better way to do literary criticism, imho, and girard knows what it is. but sadly he seems to belong to a different age.

still tho peterson is way cool and he's got big swinging balls of steel. it's not like derrida wasn't used to being shit on either while he was alive. none of this would surprise him.

>>9764897
this

What is the end goal of Deconstruction?
I mean, it can be a way to understand works given their structural context (or that's how I see it), but what's the actual point of that?

I can get that people want to give their critiques a new scope, but that comes at the cost of striping away any value that the works have. And that doesn't even stops us from keeping this ad-infinitum, we can even deconstruct the critiques by that point and they lose value. We can analyze everything, but at some arbitrary point someone will think that X thing shouldn't be deconstructed, so who decides that and under what moral value? Even if we don't and our point is just showing how value-less and absurd every work and communication is, then why bother even trying to show deconstruction to the world, that too is absurd isn't it? Surely that value will be stripped away.

It just seems to me that it's like a snake eating itself (Ouroboros), there's nothing to gain because even deconstruction can be deconstructed. It's null and just madness at some point, if nothing has value (given that you accept deconstruction) then why do you even waste your time showing others that? Values become relative and fighting to show which one is better through reason is a waste of time then right?

I don't understand the end goal of Derrida or why this has become such an important part of post-modern critiques. It defeats the whole purpose of academic discussion and just tries to burn away everything that people built over the years for no apparent reason. And what's worse is that many people are ok with that. When you set something as "chaotic" as deconstruction, you simply don't let anyone any room to upgrade it or defeat it, it's like we don't even bother with creating "bosses" for others to defeat at this point.

I'm genuinely interested, I haven't reached any good point discussing this IRL.