/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3169101]

> Justice cannot be deconstructed
> deconstruction is justice
> deconstruction is inherently ethical


Can someone explain to me how this faggot is anything but an apolitical charlatan? I fail to see how creating a language that is supposedly freeing but can only be understood and articulated by a few ivory tower Phd intellectuals is somehow political and can enact change.


Sounds like Derrida is just trying to save his ass. "hurr my buffoonery is emancipatory" - Jackie Derrda

[Anonymous No.3169115]

It's not. The strongest criticism of deconstruction is precisely the fact that it is not political.

If you read Searle and Derrida's debates, both these guys held similar views on certain issues. Instead of exploring those similarities, Derrida consistently tries to shut Searle down and circuitously addresses topics. He was more interested in showing off and labelling Searle as naive than really engaging in issues.

He's not political.

But maybe I'm biased, because I don't see anything in Saussure to justify the post-structuralists. It's a weak reading of Saussure, if anything.

[Anonymous No.3169120]

the idea is that one can do one's work of critique in two ways: either without having a theory of one's object and one's practice, thereby succumbing to the illusion of "empiricism" and of "positivism," or by arming oneself with a theory that permits one to out-maneuver the ideological ruses by which the dominating "system" (with its arbitrary exclusions and preferences) tends toward the perfect reproduction of itself

[Anonymous No.3169125]

> theory
> a denunciation of authors for their limitations vis-a-vis the orthodoxies of the historical moment and its preferred “voices,” or, alternatively, a celebration of authors or texts for expressing the favoured politics or for merely embodying the requisite identity.

[Anonymous No.3169126]

where does he say that he is being emancipatory or political

ive never read this and it seems to be a really frequent assumption that these intellectuals (eg spivak) address the "common person" when really i never actually see any evidence that they conceived their audience as such anyway

[Anonymous No.3169135]

>>3169126
Have you read any Derrida? Practically his entire later period is him trying to justify deconstruction as political.

[Anonymous No.3169153]

> mfw critical theorists with shitty prose tries to usurp a creative writer with great prose

[Anonymous No.3169156]

>>3169115
>He's not political.
Except that he is. Read Force of Law, some of his texts on globalization, or Rogues.

Also, let´s not forget about his work for the Czechoslovak dissidents in the 80s.

>>3169101
Speaking of which, Force of Law indeed was a massive pain in the ass. If anyone can explain it, I´d be very grateful.

[Anonymous No.3169172]

>>3169156
He claims he is.

Force of Law is not really political though. Pseudo-political.

[Anonymous No.3171609]

ethics is where deconstruction is weakest

[Anonymous No.3171627]

ITT: Plebs

[Anonymous No.3171629]

In the Middle Ages and to some extent in the Early Modern period, we live in a theocentric world. Insofar as he understands himself as man at all, man understands himself as a product of divine creativity, as something derived from God, as one entity among all other entities who participate and benefit from the divine presence.

But then of course, the rise of the Enlightenment is also the rise of anthropocentrism, and by the time the Enlightenment is in full cry you get everybody from Blake to Marx to Nietzsche saying not that God invented man, but that man invented God.

Man has become the transcendental signified.

Everything derives now in this historical moment from human consciousness, and all concepts of whatever kind can be understood in that light. But then of course he says, having said "man," he says "and so forth."

In other words, something comes after man. Man is, in other words, an historical moment.

There are lots of people who have pointed out to us that before a certain period, there was no such thing as man, and in a variety of quite real senses, after a certain moment in the history of culture, there is also no such thing as man.

The argument Derrida is making about the emergence of his "event" is that a new transcendental signified has actually substituted itself for man.

In other words, the world is no longer anthropocentric; it's linguistic.

Obviously, the event that Derrida is talking about--the emergence, the rupture, an event which makes a difference--is the emergence of language.

[Anonymous No.3171630]

[Anonymous No.3171641]

>>3171630
>>3171629
>>3171627
oh look, a dogmatic follower of Derrida

There is seriously not a single follower of Derrida who ever critiques or goes against anything Derrida says. Awful fanbase.

[Anonymous No.3171644]

>>3171630
>>3171627
Are you trying to point out that Derrida is just an edgy rock star celebrity?

[Anonymous No.3171652]

"oh look, a dogmatic follower of Derrida
There is seriously not a single follower of Derrida who ever critiques or goes against anything Derrida says. Awful fanbase."

It's because Derrida himself in not the author of what he says.

What he says comes from the collective mode of thinking that he inherit, ie the language which is public.

As Deleuze says an organized "collection of enounciation".

So you can critic the man and his action and his limits, but the way he play the decentering game is really entertaining.

[Anonymous No.3171655]

>>3171652
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p36NeCAucRI

Owned.

[Anonymous No.3171661]

>>3171655
Love this clip.

[Anonymous No.3171672]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p36NeCAucRI

Owned.

Yeah :)
Just love it thanks anon.
But seriously, the presuppose of Lucien Goldmann qnd Lukacs is : identify the point of view from which you talk first; ie the glasses of "They Live" that are in front of your nose and then you can talked about your deformed view.

Who is really a fan of Derrida ?

Derrida is just a tool to use throught which we can see the world, like Hegel, Nietszche and Heiddeger, Lacan and Zizek.

They are tool to be able to switch from one interpretive community to another.

[Anonymous No.3171678]

I can support this thread. Derrida takes Heidegger too far and it pisses me off.

[Anonymous No.3171690]

>>3171644
>2012
>authorial intent

[Anonymous No.3171706]

>>3171690
Are you in high school?

[Anonymous No.3171709]

>>3171706
No, I just thought it was a stupid question

[Anonymous No.3171723]

>>3169101
It's extremely political in that it is an attempt to obfuscate and take credit for and ultimately undermine critiques of embedded ideology in the hegemonic western intellectual tradition. It's like Russel and Whitehead spending decades ruminating on the philosophical consequences of Goedel's incompleteness theorem in set theory.

[Anonymous No.3172190]

we need to say something about a number of key terms that Derrida uses to sustain this sort of criticism of traditional ideas of language.

The first has to do with the notion of supplementarity.

A supplement, he points out, is something that either completes something that isn't complete or adds to something that already is complete.

For example, I take vitamin C. I also drink a lot of orange juice, so I've got plenty of vitamin C, and if I take a vitamin C pill I am supplementing something that's already complete; but if I don't drink any orange juice, then of course if I take a vitamin C pill I am supplementing something that's not complete, but either way we always call it a supplement.

It's very difficult even to keep in mind the conceptual difference between these two sorts of supplement.

Now a sign traditionally understood is self-sufficient, self-contained. Saussure has made it a scientific object by saying that it's both arbitrary and differential, but a sign understood under the critique of deconstruction is something that is perpetually proliferating signification, something that doesn't stand still, and something that can't be understood as self-sufficient or independent in its nature as being both arbitrary and differential.

It is a bleeding or spilling into successive signs in such a way that it perpetually leaves what Derrida calls "traces."

That is to say, as we examine the unfolding of a speech act, we see the way in which successive signs are contaminated. That's not meant to be a bad word but suggests being influenced, one might say, in the sense of "open the window and influenza," by those signs that precede it.

Supplementarity is a way of understanding the simultaneously linear and ever proliferating, ever self-complicating nature of verbal expression.

[Anonymous No.3172213]

>>3169101
There's almost one of these threads a week. If you can't find anything political in Derrida's work, why not go to the people who claim that Derrida/"deconstruction" are political? There are many.