/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2877358]

Derrida is a charlatan. He does not know what he is talking about and he acts like there is some sort of substance to what he is saying, when really there is nothing. The man speaks void.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1BuNmhjAY
Just look at this. He is speaking absolute nonsense. There is no rigor in his thought, and, even worse, there is no rigor in his articulation. Derrida comes up with vague, quarter-baked ideas and spits them out at you with complete certainty of their correctness. He's constantly going back on statements he'd earlier made, and can't seem to hold a consistent viewpoint, or even define Deconstructivism with any degree of consistency. Trying to gain meaning from Derrida is like finding a needle in a haystack.
The man is a mountebank.
Thoughts?

[Jeff Mangum Died For Your Sins !rAl8Mz2mp2 No.2877388]

I don't understand his distinction between who and what. We, as people, are just the accumulation of our properties, so if I love a specific quality of someone how is that any different than loving "them?"

[Anonymous No.2877396]

Typical american who thinks the word why can actually be responded.

[Anonymous No.2877402]

Well, he thought the academy was elitist and full of shit, so he purposely wrote difficult, hard to understand books in order to troll the community.

[Anonymous No.2877409]

And yet, deconstruction is still a really good idea.

[Anonymous No.2877414]

I've not read Derrida (apart from isolated quotes that made me wat) but I heard that a large part of his philosophy is the idea that "meaning is always deferred". The inscrutable way he writes is designed to foreground this. He often (but not always) conveys ideas that are much simpler than the language used to express them.

In short, Derrida uses language to showcase ideas.

>The archontic power, which also gathers the functions of unification,of identification, of classification, must be paired with what we will call the power of consignation. By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. It is not only the traditional consignatio, that is, the written proof, but what all consignatio begins by presupposing. Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together.

I read this and am completely unable to paraphrase what I just read.

[Anonymous No.2877448]

>>2877414
Maybe because it's a difficult passage way the fuck out of context.

[Anonymous No.2877462]

I dunno. Archive Fever is very intelligent and innovative.

[Anonymous No.2877817]

>>2877448
You'd think one of Derrida acolytes or even Derrida himself could summarize this stuff though, wouldn't you?

[Anonymous No.2878699]

bump

[Screwtape !!tdBUE9PLvpz No.2878736]

>>2877388

The difference of who and what is in "use value." The uniqueness of being and love (I recall somewhere Socrates said "I know of nothing but erotic matters") is in being more than a mere tool. Even in anthropomorphizing an inanimate object, like naming a car, you are marking its uniqueness beyond what it can do.

Where Derrida speaks of "seduction," it's also interesting to note that in the Lysis, Socrates reproaches Lysis for flattering the object of his [Lysis'] affection, when really it would be better to "trounce him," whereupon Lysis would make known that he can fill the void his lover never knew existed (no pun intended?). So in love there's always a sense of being reduced and filled up at the same time, it's a revelation of brokenness commensurate with the satisfaction of being made whole. I'm not sure if that's entirely on topic, tho, and I'm too tired to talk intelligently but maybe that's the best way to talk about deconstruction.

[Anonymous No.2878741]

>>2877414
The passage you quote is a classical case of Derrida overemphasizing the importance of homophones: What goes on here is basically that he talks about an 'archontic principle', now I have never heard of that specific term, but the way I know my Frenchies, it is probably something he invented himself and not a very tightly defined term, so that whatever way he uses it is by definition correct, but since the only definitive character of the 'archontic principle' is that Derrida has spoken or written about it, he cannot ever 'go wrong' as long as he does not express too clearly what it is supposed to mean (because that would open the term for criticism). Aside from that, an archon historically is just a person imbued with a certain institutional authority, so what he is talking about here is the power that is exercised by the person who is responsible for an archive. By choosing which texts go in the archive and thus constructing a canon, by creating different sections in a library and naming them, you are implicitly passing judgement on both the works included and those excluded, and your choices will have an effect on how these books are perceived by others (quality, importance, and so on, are judgements which depend largely on what we know or suspect about others' opinions on things), and these choices are imbued with a specific power and authority by the institutional position of the 'archon'. So, basically, I read this a yet another post-structuralist comment on the power of naming, the power of institutions, and the way that the status of books (art or theory, really applies to both) is not completely determined by their content, but by distinctly non-neutral mechanisms of social and cultural authority.

[Anonymous No.2878744]

My conclusion OP with Derrida, is that he was both a charlatan (more like a trickster in philosophy) and a genius. You are right in that there is very little continuity in his thought yet this is precisly what Deconstruction is. To "deconstuct" for Derrida is not a method or system of analysis but it is a study of language and meaning on texts of philosophy. Derrida "reads" texts of philosophy and by reading them in a certain way, he is able to deiscern not only a "hidden" meaning that the author did not intent but also the contardiction that are inherit in that very text. Derrida admits that the idea of Deconstruction is not new, he openly acknoqledges Nietzsche, Heidegger and Levinas that allowed for this idea of critique to prosper.
In conclusion I would say that while Derrida is not a philosopher to end all philosophers nor are his ideas ultimately productive or beneficial in general but they do offer a new insight into the reading we do of philosophical works that is worth acknowledging.

[Anonymous No.2878749]

>>2877388
Zizek has a good distinction when he talks about love being the thing which assumes the mistake and forgives it before the fact. So the thing of "true love" is actually loving the person, the personality equivalent of the ding-am-sich, and it doesn't matter what they do you will still love them.
The other kind of love is dependant on what they do, and where you cannot forgive the mistake before the fact (if they sleep with your brother or get you the wrong present you no longer love them). Often though, in the second case, people talk about "not being the person I fell in love with" or whatever, so they take the first case as what is really love (recognition of the true person behind the personality), but for all practical purposes they're the same result. What's interesting there is that people are saying "I was never in love with YOU in the first place", retroactively not being in love because they "mistook" something else for the real you.

[Nicolas Cage !!4L3ydrPrJqa No.2878753]

>>2877358
Is he a mountebank or a charlatan? I'm confused.

[Anonymous No.2878763]

>>2878749
>>ding-am-sich
That is pretty gewollt-und-nicht-gekonnt of you...

[Anonymous No.2878770]

>>2878749
>>the thing of "true love" is actually loving the person, the personality equivalent of the ding-am-sich

I'm not so sure that what you are saying is even compatible with Zizek's Lacanianism.

[Anonymous No.2878773]

>>2878763
Ding-an-sich fits well as a parallel here. Personality has always referred to an outward mask which is like the phenomena, behind which lies what Derrida above called the "absolute singularity", which is the fundamentally unkowable person (although of course not the "person" as that is the out in the world phenomena, but more like the "soul", but here we come up against a certain limitation of language).

[Anonymous No.2878780]

Well the woman in the video is asking him pretty dumbass questions.

[Anonymous No.2878781]

>>2878770
It seems to be one of the only parts that has stayed from his philosophy in the Puppet and the Dwarf. If you're familiar with Lacanianism, then it's like objet petit a if part of the desire is to have true knowledge of the person.

[Anonymous No.2878788]

>>2878773
a) I was referring to the fact that 'am' is not the correct inflection, although it creates an interesting, unintended, effect: Ding-am-Sich means something like thing-by/next to/at the-self, which I am sure someone like Derrida could immediately turn into a pseudo-meaningful excursion on some metaphysical issue or other. It is a nice mistake because ding-an-sich refers to a thing and its relation to itself, with a hint of intrinsic existence, while ding-am-sich turns the adverbial self-relation into a prepositional relation between two distinct things, the ding and the sich (soi is probably a closer translation than self: sich selbst means 'one (as in him or my) self', so the sich is closer to the soi in soi-meme).

b) Ding-an-sich is a very bad term for describing Zizek's opinion on interpersonal releations, because ding-an-sich entails an ontological claim which is explicitly rejected in the Lacanian conception of the subject. There is no such thing as the person an-sich for Lacan, because self-relation is fundamentally a misrecognition which creates the self in the first place. Zizek is a pretty ardent Lacanian, and even though he seems to treat Lacanian terms uncautiously, I seriously hope he wouldn't make such a blunder as to talk about persons in the way you suggest.

[Anonymous No.2878799]

>>2878781
But the objet petit a is very much not a Ding-an-sich... Originally it was located in the Imaginary, from 1974 on he puts it in the middle of the borromean knot, but the whole point of the Lacanian account of the structure of the psyche excludes access to an unmitigated experience of reality such as a Ding-an-sich. Under the assumption that Zizek retains even the most basic premises of Lacan, we can clearly state that the distinction between an unconditional love and a love that depends on the actions of the loved one does not, and indeed cannot, involve a separation along the lines of ontological being versus subjective perception, because both forms of love a processes which take place in the human psyche and are those fundamentally barred from accessing any such (hypothetical) realm as the one where a ding-an-sich would exists. This epistemological inaccessibility of course does not prevent the lover from desiring precisely this impossible access to a pre- or trans-subjective reality, but that is a self-delusion, probably connected to the idea of seeking a wholeness in the other which could make up for the traumatic lack at the heart of the self. However, there are no Dinge-an-sich to which the Lacanian psyche has access, and especially not persons, or subjects, which are not only psychological objects detached from any 'reality', like our access to 'real objects', but actually only come into existence through the act of symbolization which covers over the absence of any signified (like a simulacrum, a little).

[Anonymous No.2878811]

>>2878788
I see what you're getting at, but I would suggest you check out Zizek's work on Kant and Fichte vs Freud and Lacan, and then rechecking what it means to recognise the Thing in someone and its relation to love according to Lacan. Also, note there are equivalancies or at least enough similarities between Absolute Singularity, Objet Petit A and Anstoss.

[Anonymous No.2878826]

He's a one trick pony, but it's a pretty neat trick. There's a Rick Roderick lecture on youtube that seemed to extract value out of deconstruction. I still can't read Of Grammatology though. I blame him for making lit majors think they can deconstruct philosophy ("Philosophy is text, ergo I can decode it!").

[Anonymous No.2878827]

>Every human being can come to know everything about love, just as every human being can come to know that he, like every human being, is loved by God. Some find this thought adequate for the longest life others find this thought so insignificant.

>The intoxication of self-feeling is the most intense, and the height of this intoxication is most admired. Love and friendship are the very height of self-feeling, the I intoxicated in the other-I. The more securely the two I's come together to become one I, the more this united I selfishly cuts itself off from all others.

>Spiritual love, on the other hand, takes away from myself all natural determinants and all self-love. Therefore love for my neighbor cannot make me one with the neighbor in a united self. Love to one's neighbor is love between two individual beings, each eternally qualified as spirit.

>Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.

[Anonymous No.2878830]

>Is it an excellence in your love that it can love only the extraordinary, the rare? If it were love’s merit to love the extraordinary, then God would be — if I dare say so — perplexed, for to Him the extraordinary does not exist at all. The merit of being able to love only the extraordinary is therefore more like an accusation, not against the extraordinary nor against love, but against the love which can love only the extraordinary. Perfection in the object is not perfection in the love. Erotic love is determined by the object; friendship is determined by the object; only love of one’s neighbor is determined by love. Therefore genuine love is recognizable by this, that its object is without any of the more definite qualifications of difference, which means that this love is recognizable only by love.

[Anonymous No.2878833]

>If anyone is unwilling to learn from Christianity to love himself in the right way, he cannot love the neighbor either. He can perhaps hold together with another or a few other persons, “through thick and thin,” as it is called, but this is by no means loving the neighbor. To love yourself in the right way and to love the neighbor correspond perfectly to one another, fundamentally they are one and the same thing. When the Law’s as yourself has wrested from you the self-love that Christianity sadly enough must presuppose to be in every human being, then you have actually learned to love yourself. The Law is therefore: you shall love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself. Whoever has any knowledge of people will certainly admit that just as he has often wished to be able to move them to relinquish self-love, he has also had to wish that it were possible to teach them to love themselves. When the bustler wastes his time and powers in the service of the futile, inconsequential pursuits, is that not because he has not learned rightly to love himself? When the light-minded person throws himself almost like a nonentity into the folly of the moment and makes nothing of it, is this not because he does not know how to love himself rightly? When the depressed person desires to be rid of life, indeed of himself, is this not because he is unwilling to learn earnestly and rigorously to love himself?

1/2

[Anonymous No.2878834]

>When someone surrenders to despair because the world or another person has faithlessly left him betrayed, what then is his fault (his innocent suffering is not referred to here) except not loving himself in the right way? When someone self-tormentingly thinks to do God a service by torturing himself, what is his sin except not willing to love himself in the right way? And if, alas, a person presumptuously lays violent hands upon himself, is not his sin precisely this, that he does not rightly love himself in the sense in which a person ought to love himself? Oh, there is a lot of talk in the world about treachery, and faithlessness, and, God help us, it is unfortunately all too true, but still let us never because of this forget that the most dangerous traitor of all is the one every person has within himself. This treachery whether it consists in selfishly loving oneself or consists in selfishly not willing to love oneself in the right way – this treachery is admittedly a secret. No cry is raised as it usually is in the case of treachery and faithlessness. But is it not therefore all the more important that Christianity’s doctrine should be brought to mind again and again, that a person shall love his neighbor as himself, that is, as he ought to love himself? … You shall love – this, then is the word of the royal Law.

2/2

[Anonymous No.2878844]

>>2878799
Hmm, now I don't know what you're getting at. For a start you're ignoring the self splitting I and the relations between the Symbolic, Real and Imaginary. Of course, without those, you don't have The Thing or the objet petit a, which is perhaps where you're falling down. I also don't see where you think you have to have access to the Ding-An-Sich exactly. As well as that, Lacan wouldn't bar anyone from desiring the impossible, since we cannot reach the objet petit a anyway. Desire is precisely about missing that which we desire and being driven by the object of desire.

[Anonymous No.2878852]

>>2878826
>deconstruct philosophy

Leo Strauss was right when he said:
"It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists."

Philosophy is a way of life. If you can't dedicate your life to philosophy like Socrates did then you don't deserve the name philosopher. How can you expect a person who lives an ordinary life and only does philosophy as a hobby or as job to come to any real understanding of the world? It's ludicrous, you have to spend literally every waking minute to the cause.

[Anonymous No.2878850]

Derrida once spit on the floor of a conference room at my college. The comp lit department got really pissed when the school replaced the carpet a couple decades later, since they believed it contained some of his essence.

[Anonymous No.2878854]

[Anonymous No.2878856]

>>2878749
>>2878799
why the fuck are you using obscure french and german phrases that you don't understand?

[Anonymous No.2878857]

>>2878799
but the dippidy dippidy dippidy doo is not as near as you would do

[Anonymous No.2878858]

>>2878854
Thing is, they don't understand it.

[Anonymous No.2878859]

Guys, you can stop using Ding-An-Sich and Objet petit a now because this distinction in love has already been clarified by Kierkegaard, an actual philosopher: >>2878830

[Anonymous No.2878860]

>>2878856
It's called philosophy, dad.

[Anonymous No.2878863]

>>2878860
>a 20 year old throws buzzwords he picked up from a fashionable academician without spending so much as a couple of months examining them
>says he's doing philosophy

lol'd

[Anonymous No.2878866]

>>2878863
>a 20 year old throws quotes he picked up from a 19thC academician without spending so much as a couple of months examining him or later philosophy
>says he's doing philosophy

[Anonymous No.2878868]

>>2878866
> later philosophy

> philosophy progresses in a straight line, last century's philosophers are out-dated
>implying this isn't just faggot modern culture that fetishizes what's new and fashionable without even considering the merits of the old

stay pleb

[Anonymous No.2878870]

>>2878868
Considering the time period you're stuck in, I don't see why you aren't masturbating over Hegel and his Dialectics a little more.

[Anonymous No.2878872]

>>2878870
because I'm not stuck in a time period, that's you thinking that philosophy is a matter of trotting from Plato to the 21st century as though men are unfalteringly becoming more and more wise. I don't even think of philosophy in terms of the time it belongs to.

[Anonymous No.2878877]

>>2878872
>I don't even think of philosophy in terms of the time it belongs to.
>not even being familiar with Allan Bloom's intro to the Republic
>not realising that you absolutely must relate movements in philosophy to periods in order to see the bigger picture

[Anonymous No.2878879]

>>2878872
>>2878870
the fact that you even imply that half-assed "philosophers" like Derrida has more 'important' or 'relevant' things to say that Socrates irks me.

[Anonymous No.2878882]

>>2878877
>not realising that you absolutely must relate movements in philosophy to periods in order to see the bigger picture

I'm not a Hegelian though.

[Anonymous No.2878886]

>>2878882
>thinks that has anything but a superficial relation to Hegelian philosophy

[Anonymous No.2878887]

>>2878844
The problem is you said that 'true love' is loving the 'actual person', which you likened to ding-an-sich. However, in a Lacanian framework, you have no access to things-in-themselves, a notion which is not compatible with the ISR-disctinction. Now persons are even less 'things in themselves' in a Lacanian framework than anything else, because they based on a misrecognition of the self. So what I am saying is that you are incorrect (or you are correct but Zizek is incorrect) because you suggest that Zizek argues love has as its object the 'real person', when there is no such thing as a 'real person' in a Lacanian sense. It is possible for a person to believe that they are in love with a 'real person', or to desire this impossible 'real person', but in the latter case that means the objet petit a as a specific, empty, position in the structure of signs, and NOT A REAL PERSON AN SICH.

>>2878856
Those posts are not by the same person you retard, we are disagreeing. My post is the bottom one you cited and unless you can point out where I am wrong, kindly shut the fuck up.

[Anonymous No.2878889]

>>2878886
nope, it's the very crux of Hegelian philosophy and it is with Hegel that this historical perspective on philosophy becomes popular.

>... a much misunderstood phenomenon in the history of philosophy — the refutation of one system by another, of an earlier by a later. Most commonly the refutation is taken in a purely negative sense to mean that the system refuted has ceased to count for anything, has been set aside and done for. Were it so, the history of philosophy would be, of all studies, most saddening, displaying, as it does, the refutation of every system which time has brought forth. Now although it may be admitted that every philosophy has been refuted, it must be in an equal degree maintained that no philosophy has been refuted. And that in two ways. For first, every philosophy that deserves the name always embodies the Idea: and secondly, every system represents one particular factor or particular stage in the evolution of the Idea. The refutation of a philosophy, therefore, only means that its barriers are crossed, and its special principle reduced to a factor in the completer principle that follows.

[Anonymous No.2878894]

>>2878889
Enjoy your crypto-Platonist Enlightenment progessianity.

[Anonymous No.2878896]

>>2878894
I have no idea what that is but I thought I was arguing against progressianity.

[Anonymous No.2878900]

>>2878896
Well, by arguing that everything that is overcome still is a valid and valuable part of that more complete thing which overcomes it, Hegel is still painting a picture in which everything gets progressively better (presumably forever, or in a different light, until Hegel himself, who completes philosophy). You know, as opposed to the notion that we are steering towards the abyss.

[Anonymous No.2878910]

>>2878900
>You know, as opposed to the notion that we are steering towards the abyss.

But what I am saying is that philosophy doesn't "steer" any where. It doesn't move. It isn't history. Philosophy is the constant effort to understand, and that effort is available to every man in every age and not just a few trendy academics. Again, the idea that Derrida has come to a "better" understanding of the world than Socrates simply because he lives in a later age and the later age "knows better" is offensive to philosophy. If that is the case then there is no point even doing philosophy now because we're all as ignorant as apes compared to the grand ultra-philosophers that will be living a thousand years from now.

[Anonymous No.2878920]

>>2878900
I am not that guy and I agree the text cited could be taken as platonistic and that it is a progressian view of philosophy but it is also possible to maintain the point that the idea is not refuted even if a specific system is refuted without having to mantain a platonic point of view (that the Idea is independent of the physical world). You could say that a part of the system is still usable or valid under different terms, therefore not obsolete (even if the complete system as such is refuted)

[Anonymous No.2878923]

>>2878910
But some kind of knowledge has advanced since the time of Socrates, and a better understanding of the world is available for anyone that cares to see. I agree with you that Derrida living in a later era than Socrates doesn't neccessarily mean that he understands the world better but philosophy should in fact be affected by history and therefore moves.

[Anonymous No.2878934]

>>2878923
>But some kind of knowledge has advanced since the time of Socrates

Not really. I don't think knowledge "advances". If the knowledge I have tomorrow is different from the knowledge I have today, then that knowledge will be an altogether different knowledge, and the idea that tomorrows knowledge sprung from and is "evolved" from yesterday's knowledge is a superstition.
I really dislike the term "evolution" because it applies a positive connotation to the changing of species. All you can really say about a species today is that it is more adapted to today's environment and less adapted to yesterday's environment, while yesterday's species was more adapted to yesterday's environment and not today's. The idea that some "improvement" was made is tantamount that the Earth environment is getting progressively "better".

>and a better understanding of the world is available for anyone that cares to see.

Again, this offends me. It's modern arrogance. Are you telling me that if a dumb child sits in a modern classroom and he vaguely picks up an idea of evolution while sitting there drooling, that this kid's knowledge is "better" than say, Virgil's knowledge of the world which incorporates "gods"? Knowledge isn't a gift from society. You can't sit on your ass all day long and act as though you're more knowledgeable than Socrates because you live in a "more knowledgeable age". It's pretty disgusting to think so.

[Anonymous No.2878935]

ITT: some big-time ivory tower shit allright.

[Anonymous No.2878966]

>>2878934
I am merely speaking in basic terms. We are more aware of the exact shape of the earth than greeks could ever wish to be (yes, they knew of the spherical shape but they never suspected the change of shape in the poles, they had no way too) and we are aware that times flows irregularly (and we have proof of it) and we have a pretty good approximate of the distances between planets and the distances to some stars and the velocity at wich w travel in the solar system. Yes, we do have all sworth of knowledge that they could not possibly had (mostly because of technological limitations). And it is not offensive in any way. If we have this nowledge at our disposal is because of the effort of one generation after another, tracing a long long time back. Saying our knowledge has not progressed (extrictly in that sense) seems to me apologetic

[Anonymous No.2878993]

>>2878966
To put it bluntly, a person with identical information reception and digestion capacities will have access to more accurate information in some fields than he would have in previous eras.

[Anonymous No.2879036]

>>2878741

>wall of text

But well spoken. However, it's not a novel concept that our criteria for determining the worth of art is plagued by a level of human subjectivity that can't be erased.

[Anonymous No.2880171]

>>2879036
Thanks, it's good to get some feedback. And yeah, I agree that it's not a hugely revelatory insight. Actually for most of the central points that post-structuralists make unequivocally, I feel like I really didn't need them to tell me that, and certainly not in that fucked-up way.