that of the guy who points to the inherent vagueness of things. Things, such as concepts, are often more vague than scolars think.
— Olivier5

Again...the kind of point I find in Derrida. — igjugarjuk

Ok, but remember, the mark is undecidable(because it is split into two equivocal aspects), not indeterminate, so he would probably bristle at the term ‘vague’. In its own way it is very precise.

He was a womanizer like Sartre, but with better hygiene. — igjugarjuk

I haven’t read much on this aspect of Derrida’s life. Can you say more?

Yes, and this requires more explanation, of course. When deconstruction claims that we really do not have grounds upon which the truth of our literary writings rest, this is the stuff that skepticism is made of. There's more, but I've been overposting here already. :joke: :

Note: grounds here means external foundation upon which truth is based on — L'éléphant

But deconstruction doesn’t need external grounds. When one assumes such ‘externality’, one is already courting skepticism. Deconstruction doesn’t do away with grounds , it takes what has preciously been assumed as ‘external’ and makes it internal to a structure. Put differently , what grounds any element of meaning is memory , history , a formal basis from which I intend to mean something. But the catch here is that in intending to mean what I mean , I alter that history , memory , form. So each element of meaning rests on a ground that it alters , and both of these features take place at the same time( form and content , memory and change. It is not the case that this constitutes lack of a ground, and therefore a skepticism. Deconstruction reveals an extraordinarily intricate order to the flow of meaningful expereince. It reveals ongoing patterns and thematics, and how they are created and persist by continuing to be the same differently. The kinds of things one expects from skepticism: chance, randomness, arbitrariness , meaninglessness, are utterly missing from deconstruction.

I used Miller because he provided an authoritative explanation for what I needed. — L'éléphant

I disagree with Miller’s account of deconstruction. His definition is one that has been used within literary theory, but their understanding of deconstruction differs from Derrida’s. For one thing, there is never just one “alogical” element in a structure, as if the structure is unified outside or apart from this one element. A structure is a system of differences in which no part has a ‘logical’ relation to any other part. This does not mean that these relations are alogical either. They are neither one nor the other, but both at the same time. We don’t first have structures and then their unraveling. The unraveling is one with their formation , always one element at a time.

The very idea of the rift is skepticism. — Jackson

I agree

I say that's skepticism based on my thoughts of what skepticism is. I don't care whether he claims he's a skeptic. His criticism is a form of skepticism. — L'éléphant

I have been describing skepticism in terms of the impossibility of transcending the rift between our representations of truth and meaning , and the world itself. Is that your notion of skepticism?

Derrida was well aware of Camus and Sartre (he continued to respect Nausea) — igjugarjuk

Here’s my collection of Derrida quotes about Sartre. They’re all nasty. Hold onto your seat:

The Pocket-Size Interview with Jacques Derrida Freddy Tellez and Bruno Mazzoldi “It is true that in my work Sartre was very important, in the beginning. When I was a student, he was already there, and it's by reading Sartre that, in a certain way, I began to get into the field of philosophy and literature. For this reason, it would be absurd for me to try to absolutely distance myself from Sartre. That being said, quite quickly I thought it clear that Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger. And so since then I have never ceased, in a certain way, to see better into all of that. [Lights up a cigar.]

FT: But do you mean that from the point of view of the legitimacy of Husserl's and Heidegger's thought, for instance, or of a critique of the reading offered by Sartre of Husserl or Heidegger? JD: Yes, I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader. And from that point of view, it turns out that the work done by him in France was very ambiguous. I am not saying that it was simply negative, but he and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl's and Heidegger's work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. This is not to say that it was simply a question of finding our way back into Husserlian and Heideggerian orthodoxy against Sartre. Not at all. But I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. The point is not here to issue some condemnation; since that's how it happened, it couldn't have happened otherwise, in those conditions and in a certain number of historical conditions. But it is a fact that Sartre's thought obscured in quite a powerful way what was happening elsewhere in German philosophy, even in the philosophy that he himself pretended to be introducing in France. To say nothing of Marx and to say nothing of Freud and to say nothing of Nietzsche, whom he, in a way, never really read. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted.

And so, from that point of view, we have to deal with a huge sedimentation of thought, a huge philosophical sediment that covered the French scene for quite a few years after the war and that, I think, has marked everyone from that generation. I would say that there was a lot of dissimulation, and subsequently it has been necessary to undo this sedimentation in order to find again what was dissimulated by it, in a way. But, in the end, I don't want to take it all out on Sartre now and say that he as an individual is responsible for this obscuring. If this obscuring has taken place it is due to a great number of conditions: the French tradition of thought, the state of the French university, the ideological scene in Paris, the political scene in the postwar period. OK, all of that is worthy of an analysis that would not be limited to Sartre as an individual. I would not want to privilege..not even in a critique..the case of Sartre. An analysis would have to be undertaken that would run, again, through very complex historical and political networks, right? Through, evidently, once again, what the French university was like. But Sartre is still, I would say, on this point, even though he left the university quite early and, until today, is very deeply marked, more than some professional academics, by the university, by this very building, by the rhetoric, by the display of the dissertation, of the lesson, in his writing. For this reason his writing, for instance (I haven't read the text on Calder, but I have read others), is still, in spite of his agility, his talent, and his resources, marked by a French university rhetoric against which he has never really busied himself, whatever his position against the university might have been. That doesn't change anything.

I think that, for example, "Cartouches" is more of a rupture with respect to this rhetoric..even though I, me, personally [smiles], am inside the university to a greater degree than Sartre..let's say, more of a rupture against that kind of writing than that of Sartre's.” From ‘Points':

Q.: It is then that you began to read Sartre, right?

J . D . : A little earlier. He played a major role for me then. A model that I have since judged to be nefarious and catastrophic, but that I love; no doubt as what I had to love, and I always love what I have loved, it's very simple . . .

Q.: Nefarious and catastrophic! That's a bit strong; you'll have to explain . . .

J . D . : Do you think we should keep that or cut it? Okay. First of all, I repeat, Sartre no doubt, well, guided me, as he did so many others at the time. Reading him, I discovered Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge-whom I now think one could have read otherwise. But finally, Same was himself the "unsurpassable horizon"P Things changed when, thanks to him but especially against him, I read Husser!, Heidegger, Blanchot, and others. One would have to devote several dozen books to this question: What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his timelet's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure? It is true that works can traverse their time like tornadoes, overturn the historical landscape, interpret it without seeming to understand anything about it, without being sensitive or acquiescing to every "novelty."

I don't think this is the case with Sartre but, while asking myself a lot of questions, even about his likeable and legendary generosity, I sometimes share the almost familial affection that many feel for this man whom I have never seen. And who does not belong to the age of those works that matter for me . . .

Q. : And that were being written at the same time . . .

J . D . : Or even much earlier, look at Mallarme! What must a French intellectual be if such a phenomenon can happen or happen again? What grants authority to his evaluations? What interests me still today is especially the France of Sartre, the relation of our culture to this man (rather than to his work) . And also Sartre's relation to the University. It is said that he escaped it or resisted it. It seems to me that university norms determined his work in the most internal fashion, as they did for so many writers who don't realize or who deny this fact. An analysis of his philosophical rhetoric, of his literary criticism, and even of his plays or novels would be greatly helped if it took into account, for better or worse, the models and the history of education, the lycee, the khagne, the Ecole Normale, and the agregation.4 I began this exercise, one day, with some students, taking the example of Sartre's Saint Genet. Thus an enormous screen of French culture. But reading it, I no doubt learned a lot and, even if it goes against him, I am indebted to him. But tell me, is this an interview about Sartre!

Q. : So, in short, you see in Sartre the perfect example of what an intellectual should not be . . .

J . D . : I didn't say that . . .

Q.: But, then, what should be the attitude of an intellectual in relation to political affairs?

J . D . : No one stands to gain by there being a model, especially just one model. Also the category of "intellectual" no longer has very strict limits, and probably never did. It is true that Sartre's example, which is why one has to insist upon it, incites one to prudence. His academic legitimacy (graduate of the Ecole Normale, agrege) and his legitimacy asa writer for a major publishing house5 (don't ever separate these two things, but I am going too quickly) lent to his most impulsive remarks, whether or not you take them seriously, a formidable authority, the authority that was not granted to stricter and more interesting analysts. In political affairs especially, as everyone knows. One could take other examples today, because the thing is being amplified here and there as new powers and new structures appear (media, publishing, and so forth). Not that one has therefore to go into retreat or avoid taking public positions: quite to the contrary, the moment has perhaps come to do more and better, that is, otherwise . . .”

“After the war, under the name of Christian or atheist existentialism, and in conjunction with a fundamentally Christian personalism, the thought that dominated France presented itself essentially as humanist. Even if one does not wish to summarize Sartre's thought under the slogan "existentialism is a humanism," it must be recognized that in Being and Nothingness, The Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions, etc., the major concept, the theme of the last analysis, the irreducible horizon and origin is what was then called "human-reality." As is well known, this is a translation of Heideggerian Dasein. A monstrous translation in many respects, but so much the more significant. That this translation proposed by Corbin was adopted at the time, and that by means of Sartre's authority it reigned, gives us much to think about the reading or the nonreading of Heidegger during this period, and about what was at stake in reading or not reading him in this way. Certainly the notion of "human-reality" translated the project of thinking the meaning of man, the humanity of man, on a new basis, if you will. If the neutral and undetermined notion of "human reality" was substituted for the notion of man, with all its metaphysical heritage and the substantialist motif or temptation inscribed in it, it was also in order to suspend all the presuppositions which had always constituted the concept of the unity of man.

I find the whole idea of cognitive bias unconvincing. Even if it is true, so what?
— Jackson
, ↪Joshs

Then you are doomed to indulge in cognitive bias. You are denying accepted psychology. — Banno

Not every school of psychology considers the objectivizing approach implied by cognitive bias as “accepted”. There are approaches which are troubled by the assumption that discerning such things as bias is a matter of passing judgments on easily discernible facts. This fails to acknowledge the deeply normative character of supposedly neutral and ‘objective’ descriptions of cognitive bias. The vantage from which empirical psychology determines a behavior to be biased is itself an unacknowledged normative bias.

I remain to be convinced that "an enormous constellation of perceptual, gestural and vocal features that could not possibly have been simply learned" explains... ostentatious gayness - for want of a better term. I think that is learned behaviour. — karl stone

Would you say that the pre-wired brain underpinnings of masculine vs feminine behavior in mammals comprises a large constellation of perceptual and behavior traits, such as aggressiveness , sociality, shyness, etc ( and for humans I would add to this ways of walking, posture , speech patterns, attentional predispositions, and many other details)? Have you talked to gay men about when they knew they were different from other males ( not just in terms of their sexual preference). Many will say that from their earliest memories they acted more effeminately than their male peers, even though they did not desire to act that way. Where does a 5 year old boy “learn” to act that way? Where do the most effeminate learn a lisp, a limp wrist, walking like a girl , a desire to play with dolls rather than with toy soldiers, even when they are not consciously trying to act this way, and even when they despise being different and want to be able to act like other boys? You really think this is all learned? You really think that what you call an evolutionary trait controls nothing but who we want to go to bed with? You can’t conceive that this evolutionary trait for gayness controls
the same brain wiring that results in the strikingly different behaviors of male and female mammals?

quote="karl stone;707150"]What if I am wrong? So what? I've thought about it, and formed an honest opinion. It's not an opinion that's grounded in unreasoning hate. If you present convincing evidence to the contrary, I'll happily reconsider my views. In that case, my wrongness would be useful to the discovery of truth.[/quote]

No, not unreasoning hate , but an ignorance of the global way in which pre-wired brain gender colors every aspect of behavior in a subtle way. This lack of recognition of such an important aspect of personality cannot help but color your view of transgenders. If you think that all there is to gender is who we
like to fuck you are totally missing the essence of who not only transgenders are, but who YOU are as a straight man. if I waived a magic wand and changed your brain wiring in the direction of effeminate gayness , you would be astonished at how much your style
of comportment toward the world would have changed. You might keep that in mind next time you hear someone say they were born in the wrong body. For the record , I dont think ones body can ever actually be ‘out of tune with their gender’, because body and behavior define each other inseparably What I hear them saying to the world is that others , like you, don’t get the fact that their gender-based global perceptual style is not that of their apparent biological sex. It’s not really their bodies they are out of tune with, it is a society that doesn’t see them as who they are. Transgender can’t exist for you , and most of what gayness is, since the only thing you think evolution codes for is who we fuck.

People need to be seen for who they are, and your suggestion that you , or any straight male , could potentially ‘learn’ to act and feel just as effeminate as some gay men is like telling a women you could ‘learn’ to act and feel the way they do as a female gendered person .

Small point maybe, but what do you imagine to be the center of a system of differences without positive elements? I don't see a center for language itself, but only a central cluster perhaps in certain language games (such as in philosophy there are few master concepts entangled with all the others.) — igjugarjuk

Hmm. A system of differences without positive elements. The question is how that system comes into play in contextual word use. As a normative , grammatical or rule-forming criterion, is the relation between this system and actual word use referential( the rule is accessed and applied to the current situation) or does the system only actually exist as it is being redefined by the present context of word use? Witty thought of such systems in terms of family resemblance wherein the particular context establishes the rule, (from the particular to the general) , rather than the pre-existing structure determining the contextual sense of the world ( from general to particular)

I'll prove it to you: how can the post modernist condemn Nazism? Post modernism is morally relativist - so cannot condemn nazism on moral grounds. I can condemn Nazism - because I know it's factually baseless, and immoral. But post modernism is also epistemically relativist - so facts are no help to you either. On what basis can you condemn nazism? You cannot! — karl stone

Here’s a reply from one of the right’s favorite punching bags, Derrida, the poster child of postmodern ‘relativism’:

“Of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let i t b e said i n passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”

The norm is the majority; and in the vast majority of people, sex and gender are related. Studies put naturally occuring transgenderism at as little as 0.1% of the population. Yet for the sake of these vanishingly small, and mentally disordered few, political correctness would dismantle gender norms in society - with the risks and costs suffered almost exclusively by women. — karl stone

I wasn’t talking about transgender. I was taking about gay men and women. There are many of them. I’m sure you know some. Your whole life you probably assumed they learned this from watching television or something, but many of them were born this way , with what I call a pre-wired perceptual-affective style that composes an enormous constellation of perceptual, gestural and vocal features that could not possibly have been simply learned, and of which sexual preference composes only an insignificant element. You may disagree that there are biologically formed intermediate genders, but what if you are wrong? What effect do you think your incomprehension might have on those around you, some of whom you may know?

Psychological gender is strongly correlated to the biological reality of sex. — karl stone

No, it’s strongly correlated to biology. Whatever biology can do , it will do, meaning that biological mechanisms of inheritance are capable of creating , and so do create, intermediate versions of just about every organismic feature. It creates intermediate versions of psychological gender all the time, which is why there are biological males and females whose parents report them having exhibited strong opposite gender behavior from birth. Your whole life you probably assumed they learned this from watching television or something , but they were born this way , with what I call a pre-wired perceptual-affective style that composes an enormous constellation of perceptual, gestural and vocal features that could not possibly have been simply learned, and of which sexual preference composes only an insignificant element. You may disagree that there are biologically formed intermediate genders, but what if you are wrong? What effect do you think your incomprehension might have on those around you, some of whom you may know?

Since you know some math, perhaps you know of structuralism in the philosophy of math? I think that's adjacent to Derrida too. The meaning or content of '1' (for instance) is 'only' its place in a system. — igjugarjuk

Deleuze is useful here. There is a lot of Derrida in his position on mathematics. He argues that quantification is inherently qualitative. That is , every repetition of a numeric counting (a counting of degree) is simultaneously a qualitative change. Every difference in degree is a difference in kind.

“ “ A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions
that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). … An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root.

The number is no longer a universal concept measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of numbers attached to that domain). We do not have units (unites) of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement.”( A Thousand Plateaus)

Our minds are not hermetically sealed spirit chambers. They are continuous with our bodies and environments. Or that's an idea I read into Derrida. — igjugarjuk

That’s certainly quite compatible with embodied , enactive , embedded approaches in cognitive science. Gallagher’s primary corporeal intersubjectivity, which borrows from the phenomenological
work of Merleau-Ponty, is one example. The relation of embodied phenomenology to Derrida, however , is quite complex, and has to run through Heidegger’s and Derrida’s critiques of the subjectivist underpinnings of Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment model.

under the auspices of the idea gender is a mere social construct, and not a biological reality. — karl stone

. Even if the claim were that gender is a biological reality you would reject it. Why? Because, first of all, gender refers not to sexual identity as in what chromosomes and genitalia one was born with, but to psychological
gender, which determines patterns of behavior. Think about the difference in masculine vs feminine behavior in dogs and cats. This is psychological gender. Many in the lgbtq community argue that psychological gender is inborn , and can differ from one’s biological sex. This inborn gender-related brain wiring would explain extremely feminine acting males and extremely ‘butch’ females.

Here’s more on Rouse’s disagreement with Brandom, McDowell and Haugeland:

“Haugeland, McDowell, and Brandom have further developed the “manifest” conception of ourselves as agents who perceive, under­stand, and act within the world as responsive to conceptually articulated
norms. Their work thereby complicates as well as enriches the task of achieving a naturalistic fusion of the scientific and manifest images.
Each of them takes his account of conceptual capacities to block any stringent or (in McDowell’s 1994 phrase) “bald” naturalism. They en­dorse a minimalist naturalism, arguing that nothing in their views is inconsistent with what we learn from the natural sciences. Conceptual
normativity nevertheless remains autonomous in their view, without need or expectation of further scientific explication. This opposition to a more thoroughgoing philosophical naturalism presumes familiar conceptions of scientific understanding, however, and also does not consider some new theoretical and empirical resources for a scientific account of our conceptual capacities. The other two developments guid­ing this book suggest that these presumptions are misguided.”

“ In contrast to traditional efforts to establish the epistemic objectivity of articulated judgments, Davidson, Brandom, McDowell, Haugeland, and others rightly give priority to the objectivity of conceptual content and reasoning. They nevertheless mis­takenly attempt to understand conceptual objectivity as accountability to objects understood as external to discursive practice. A more expan­sive conception of discursive practice, as organismic interaction within our discursively articulated environment, shows how conceptual nor­mativity involves a temporally extended accountability to what is at issue and at stake in that ongoing interaction.”

Still, I don't think a tamer version of that claim is anything Saussure would object to. Synchronic study is an abstraction. We take language, living evolving thing, at an ideal moment. Every tiny piece of parole will theoretically reverberate through the structure, changing it. But is this more than a footnote? The magnitude of that reverberation matters. Is it news? — igjugarjuk

A tamer version of that claim which presupposes the dialectical transformation of centered structures(reverberation through a structure) is a form of structuralism.

What is problematic here is the justification of a center, an ‘all of these together’. Deleuze showed how one can conceptualization a system with no center , a rhizomatic assemblage of differential singularities whose sense changes from one singular element to the next.
The Saussurian model is widely seen these days in the form of a dynamical reciprocal causality within patterned
structures.

It wouldnt be a question of jettisoning distinctions , but of making any singularity equivocal and indeterminable(which is not the same thing as indefinable).
— Joshs

Maybe you can tame what you are getting at. — igjugarjuk

I should have said the issue for Derrida was the undecidability vs the indetermination of the poles of distinctions.

“I do not believe I have ever spoken of "indeterminacy," whether in regard to "meaning" or anything else. Undecidability is something else again. While referring to what I have said above and elsewhere, I want to recall that undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts). These possibilities are themselves highly determined in strictly defined situations (for example, discursive-syntactical or rhetorical-but also political, ethical, etc. ). They are pragmatically determined.The analyses that I have devoted to undecidability concern just these determinations and these definitions, not at all some vague "indeterminacy. " I say "undecidability" rather than "indeterminacy" because I am interested more in relations of force, in differences of force, in everything that allows, precisely, determinations in given situations to be stabilized through a decision of writing (in the broad sense I give to this word, which also includes political action and experience in general). There would be no indecision or double bind were it not between determined (semantic, ethical, political) poles, which are upon occasion terribly necessary and always irreplaceably Singular. Which is to say that from the point of view of semantics, but also of ethics and politics, "deconstruction" should never lead either to relativism or to any sort of indeterminism.(Limited, Inc, p.148)

Not familiar w/ Rouse, and couldn't find much info. Perhaps you could summarize/paraphrase a choice nugget? — igjugarjuk

Rouse takes up Sellars’ distinction between the manifest
image and the scientific image , and shows
them to be inextricably dependent on each other. I’m this effort , he has some problems
with the views of Brandom, Davidson and Sellars.

I don't know if the word is worth cleaning at this point. — igjugarjuk

Here’s a good argument in favor of making the distinction:

https://youtu.be/cU1LhcEh8Ms

How can we ever be sure that the decision we’re making isn’t biased? Biases are unconscious… — Skalidris

I am not an advocate of the cognitive bias framework. Each of us interpret the world via value schemes which differ from person to person. In order to manipulate, shape, influence another’s thinking it is necessary to connect with their interpretive framework, from their own perspective. So what is called ‘bias’ is actually the necessary sense-making framework we bring to bear on expereince. Eliminate this ‘bias’ and the world disappears. ‘Objective’ truth is just a certain kind of bias.

Skalidris

I find the whole idea of cognitive bias unconvincing — Jackson

I agree with you here.

Post-modernism is a corrosive substance; eating away at organic value systems and conceptual schemes at the foundations of Western civilisation - and replacing them with artifical concepts and values that have little normative credibility, and so require denial of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress to maintain - and furthermore; implies social exclusion, disemployment, doxing, threat, violence against anyone who objects - for example, to their children being told in schools there are 99 genders, and when they consequently become dysphoric, being fed puberty blockers without parental consent. It's basically the philosophy of cultural vandalism, and it's only practiced in the West. — karl stone

First of all, contrary to Peterson and other conservatives, CRT, BLM and cancel culture in general is not a postmodern movement. It is a form of moralistic finger-pointing arising of of Marxism and related thought, which postmodern philosophers do not support.
Second, postmodern ideas don’t reject truth, they recognize that truth requires human beings to construct constructs , and those constructs are incomplete and can always be re-construed in better and more humane ways.

. Because language is a system of differences and a form without substance, it makes no sense to privilege the voice. — igjugarjuk

This would not be Derrida’s view. For him there is no form without substance. Form and content are equivocal in every meaning. Saussure’s system of language is a structuralism, because it is oriented around a systematic center. For Derrida the ‘system’ of language remakes itself one singular to the next, without reference to a pre-existing totality.

I hear you, but I don't think we think can or should just jettison that very distinctions that make such exciting claims possible in the first place.

Let's imagine a set of concepts such that, starting from any privileged subset, we can use that subset to rhetorically hobble all the rest.

Along these lines, see how your latest claim above depends on the concepts of singularity, polarity, and eventhood. Which, according to your own claim, must be metaphorical usages. As I grok the white mythology (and I expect you'll agree), it's no good to simply point out the metaphorical origin or residue of master concepts. The most obvious objection is that metaphor is itself a metaphor being applied metaphysically in such a context. This is a problem in general with centers of structures/systems, both inside and outside problematically. — igjugarjuk

It wouldnt be a question of jettisoning distinctions , but of making any singularity equivocal and indeterminable(which is not the same thing as indefinable). Singularity for Derrida , as the gramme, the mark, differance, is not a univocal concept, it is a bipolar hinge, a differentiation. an in-between. To be a singularity is to borrow from what it is not, and this is the essence of metaphor, or what Derrida calls the metaphoricity of metaphor.

Usage can change, become abstract or metaphorical. Meaning inhering in a system of differences seems especially important as this happens. What 'matter' is, it isn't mind. And maybe that's 'all' matter is. One bit of information, a system of two categories (imagine a device that returns one bit of information about its environment.) — igjugarjuk

I might add that usage doesn’t only become metaphorical. For Derrida there is no non-metaphorical usage. Also, one would not be able to separate ‘mind’ from ‘matter’ , form from content , the transcendental from the empirical, presence from absence except as poles of a singular event.

. I suspect that he obsessed over presence because he fucking wanted it and yet couldn't lie to himself about having it. — igjugarjuk

He does indeed place desire for pure presence at the heart of all desire. But pure presence for Derrida is death, so desire must always be thwarted or interrupted in order to continue to be.

↪Jackson Last I checked I was talking about what you said, not you. But perhaps as with Derrida, we can settle this the good old way: provide a quote which demonstrates Kant's commitment to skepticism. — Streetlight

Perhaps Jackson should have said that , despite the fact that Kant’s idealism was intended to avoid Humean skepticism , Kant’s split between our representations of the world and the thing in itself leads inevitably to its own form of skepticism. The veil that remains in place between subject and world is deconstructed by Derrida.

So you are not a skeptic, right?

My definition of skepticism: The knowledge we seek cannot be had. — Jackson

What is it we are seeking when we seek knowledge? A true correspondence between our maps and the actual territory? Or ways of seeing the world in more and more harmoniously ordered ways that we can anticipate more and more intimately? Popper advanced the former goal and. relived we could asymptotically approach absolute scientific truth. Others believe matching our representations to an independently existing world is not the goal of knowledge,but instead we ‘ produce’ worlds with knowledge, and we can progressively produce more and more intricately orderly worlds through repeated trial and error.
Does having knowledge mean having a truth that is forever unchanging? What if the knowledge we attain is an improvement over the knowledge we seek?

I don't think there's a correct reading of a text, there are just correct readings. There are erroneous readings of various degrees or kinds, and then there's some good readings -- some more creative than others, but mostly good and within bounds of the texts I read. — Moliere

Derrida would agree with you that there are better and worse readings of texts.

Which is the space and which is the object? Is there ever an object or just a field of differentials?

If Derrida's philosophy is to apply to all text, and everything is text, then it follows that the experienced world is not so easily separable from concept -- hence, not a skeptic in this sense. — Moliere

I certainly agree with that. I think of the modern Kantian and neo-Kantian forms of skepticism as arising from a presumed gap between our representations of the world and the world as it is in itself ( the veil of perception). As Zahavi puts it, phenomenology and deconstruction “dismiss the kind of skepticism that would argue that the way the world appears to us is compatible with the world really being completely different.”

It's the aspiration to be rational that drives the explication of rationality. A — igjugarjuk

What drives the aspirations to be rational? How and why do motivational-affective-valuative processes direct us toward rationality? Are you familiar with Brandon’s colleague at Pittsburgh, Joseph Rouse? He is attempting to ground meta-cognitive processes in biological niche construction.

Deleuze embraces Nietzsche’s anti-dialectical perspective against Hegel:

“Pluralism sometimes appears to be dialectical — but it is its most ferocious enemy, its only profound enemy. This is why we must take seriously the resolutely anti-dialectical character of Nietzsche's philosophy.

…the concept of the Overman is directed against the dialectical conception of man, and trans-valuation is directed against the dialectic of appropriation or the suppression of alienation. Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche's work as its cutting edge. We can already feel it in the theory of forces. In Nietzsche the essential relation of one force to another is never conceived of as a negative element in the essence. In its relation with the other the force which makes itself obeyed does not deny the other or that which it is not, it affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference.”

Are those guys outside the universe or do you have a point? — Clarky

I have a habit of posting before I have completed my edit.

Philosophers like Nietzsche , Foucault ,Heidegger , Derrida , Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty argue that the notion of the nothing as lack is the result of grounding difference and negation on identity and Sameness. They instead ground concepts like identity and sameness , which are the basis of the notion of the empirical object , in difference. Identity is an effect of difference. From this vantage , talking about the ‘nothing’ as a lack of identity is incoherent. — Joshs

that he prioritizes unity and identity
— Joshs

That would be Kant — Jackson

Doesn’t Hegel post a totalization of differences in Absolute Subjectivity?

So, I guess that means there can't be nothing inside the limits of our universe. What about outside? — Clarky

Philosophers like Nietzsche , Foucault ,Heidegger , Derrida , Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty argue that the notion of the nothing as lack is the result of grounding difference and negation on identity and Sameness. They instead ground concepts like identity and sameness , which are the basis of the notion of the empirical object , in difference. Identity is an effect of difference. From this vantage , talking about the ‘nothing’ as a lack of identity is incoherent.

I think of nothingness as negative space in a visual field. It is the space between things that helps define the objects. — Jackson

Like figure-ground? We could reverse these then, right? With a shift of perspective the negative space becomes the object and the object becomes negative space. Conclusion:no priority can be given to object over negation. This is the post-structuralist ( Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida , Heidegger) critique of Hegel, that he prioritizes unity and identity over the negative. The role of the negative and the nothing in Hegelian dialectic is subservient to the unity of the total structure; negation is overcome by synthesis. For these authors the nothing is fecund, affirmational, creative.