/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3696238]

I want to get into Derrida. What work of him should I read first?

[Anonymous No.3696243]

>>3696238

Get into?

Do you want to, like, cornhole the dude with, like, gusto?

How suave!

Sadly, it would be kind of, like, necrophiliac to do so, anon.

[Anonymous No.3696249]

>>3696243

>deconstruction

I see what you did there

[Anonymous No.3696260]

>>3696249

oui

I recall reading once a pamphlet-like afternoon newspaper when I was traveling in Peru, about a man who had been arrested after being surprised by the police high on glue and tricking a dog into penetrating him. Back then I did not know about Derrida, but funnily my first thought was "this guy is completely deconstructed". I don't know why, but that was my first precise thought and I did not know what it meant. It just evoked in my head the idea of a human being bringing down all the parts of his construction as human being into thousand pieces, and the angst of knowing that building it up again would be a Herculean task.

[Anonymous No.3696298]

there is nothing outside of logocentrism

[Anonymous No.3696755]

Start and stop with Borges.

[Tallis !!DxrlCMGAS2J No.3696757]

>>3696238
Start with Husserl, then Heidegger, then Derrida.

However to understand Husserl and Heidegger, you must read Kant, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides and Nietzsche, mostly.

[Anonymous No.3696767]

>>3696757
Wrong again. Just watch the Yale open lecture on Deconstruction theory.

People who tell you deconstruction is really complex and deep are fooling you.

[Anonymous No.3696799]

>>3696767
Typical pleb dropout comment

[Anonymous No.3696824]

[Anonymous No.3696983]

>>3696824
> derrida
> duckface

pick two

[Anonymous No.3696990]

>>3696767
yale is to derrida as the vienna circle is to wittgenstein

[Anonymous No.3696998]

>>3696990
Which is why there's two lectures on Deconstruction, one on Jackie Dee, the other on Paul de Man.

[Anonymous No.3697001]

>>3696998
de man is terrible

[Anonymous No.3697019]

Differance is where you should start.

[Anonymous No.3697038]

>>3696755
>Start and stop with Borges.

FUCKING THIS

[Anonymous No.3697148]

I'm reading Of Grammatology right now, and I can honestly say I don't really get it. This is my first Derrida. Help.

[Anonymous No.3697186]

>>3697148
tits or gtfo.

[Anonymous No.3697193]

>>3697148
I really don't know if there is any help that can be given here.
I don't think Derrida can be dismissed as the sort of flagrant and unsalvageable charlatan that, say, Lacan or Zizek might be dismissed as. But something kind of "stinks" about him, above and beyond the publicity photos in which his quiff of rich white hair is vying with his shirt collar, like a cross between Herbert von Karajan and Elvis Presley.
Eminence on the Parisian philosophical scene is basically just a matter of finding some original and inimitable "take" on things, which then becomes one's "trademark". And the more utterly counter-intuitive an idea is - short of being just batshit crazy - the more sure one can be of its being "original".
Derrida built his career on the utterly counter-intutive idea that we are grasping some sort of truth if we reverse common sense and the evidence of our senses and accept that "writing precedes and grounds speech". He labours throughout "Of Grammatology" to suggest different ways in which such an obvious untruth is somehow true.
As in all his later books, I thought all his huge effort ended up producing about 10 per cent convincedness - and 90 per cent incredulity - in the intelligent reader. The basic idea that he takes from Saussure - that the 'being' of semantic entity lies "outside" it, or is "deferred" from it - is a sound and a profound one, and Saussure is generally an author who MUST be read. But to build a vast philosophy of 'being as differance" on this truth is to put so much weight on it that it turns into a lie.
Read Saussure to understand Of Grammatology. But then don't bother reading Of Grammatology.

[Anonymous No.3697230]

>>3697193
>Saussure is generally an author who MUST be read.

But he wrote very little. The Course in General Linguistics was transcribed by his students.

[Anonymous No.3697242]

Fraudulent philosopher
Semantics is his game
Eats delicious food in a fabulous house
Dorito (laughing all the way to the bank riding on hipster doe)

[Anonymous No.3697314]

>>3697230
Yes, but it is basically all his thought, and immensely rich thought at that.

At one point in his life, Walter Benjamin published a little note in which he praised the merits of a specific sort of book: the "specialist" text written for a readership of people trained in a certain (sometimes very narrow and abstruse) discipline that does its "narrow" little job so well that it ends up amounting to a work of genuine philosophical import.

I think Benjamin cites as examples of that kind of book the (still genuinely obscure and abstruse) "Late Roman Art Industry" by Alois Riegl and Rosenzweig"s "Star of Redemption", originally an obscure study of Jewish liturgy but an acknowledged philosophical classic today.

I don't know if Benjamin read Saussure, but the "Cours de Linguistique Générale" is certainly a book of that sort too. Saussure had no "philosophical" ambitions with it, and he would surely have been horrified by all that was done with his ideas by Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida and co in the 60s. But everything he says about synchrony, diachrony, speech, enunciation etc is immensely thought-provoking in a way that points far beyond linguistics.

There is an absolutely beautiful annotated edition of the original French text edited by the Italian linguist Tullio de Mauro; which I think is one of the finest books on earth.

As I say, buy it in order to understand Of Grammatology, then throw Of Grammatology away. There would, I suppose, be something fittingly "Derridean" about that

[Anonymous No.3698057]

>>3697314
good posts

would email/10

[Anonymous No.3698299]

>>3697314

>>3697230 here.

You seem to have a great deal of knowledge about the Frankfurt School and their binary stars (Benjamin & Kraus). I would actually like to correspond with you. I've started Negative Dialectics a few times, but never finished it. Would love to read it "with" someone.

[Anonymous No.3698317]

>>3698299

aaawwwww, anon and anon sitting in a tree, k - i - s - s - i - n - g!

[Anonymous No.3698402]

>>3696238
You should biotactically read a bullet through the use-function of a pistol.

[Anonymous No.3698598]

>>3697314
god i love reading intelligent posts on /lit/. Thank you.

[Anonymous No.3698621]

An orthodox, crash course on Derrida might go as follows:

1. "Cogito and the History of Madness" from W&D
2. "Freud and the Scene of Writing" from W&D
3. "Structure, Sign, and Play" from W&D
4. The rest of W&D
5. On Grammatology

That being said, his most accessible albeit least influential texts are probably Archive Fever and Specters of Marx.

[Anonymous No.3698660]

>>3697193
Once you've separated Lacan from his way of speaking in public, which was definitely an act, and highly influential on Žižek, it becomes harder to dismiss him so quickly. He's actually quite systematic in his thought when he's not so keen on putting it into practice, i.e. demonstrating the pitfalls of language.

[Anonymous No.3698694]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I-CBxSuYSg