Personally, I hold Wittgenstein as a fake, an imposter. A very sad clown. I'd rather read from a funny one. — Olivier5

You are of course entitled to such a view, but I rate Wittgenstein highly. Given the general reputation of Wittgenstein among scholars, I think it's just not that plausible that Wittgenstein was a 'sad clown' and 'fake.' For that to be true, many experts in the field, who almost certainly have studied the work more carefully than you, have to be (self-)deceived in a way that somehow you were not. Is it not just as likely or more likely, from a neutral perspective, than you are yourself conveniently self-deceived in a way that conveniently exempts you from having to read difficult texts?

To be sure, it's of very little practical relevance whether you are right or wrong about Wittgenstein. No one cares. Only on obscure stages like a philosophy forum can such gestures signify. In my view, it's almost always a bad move to play the 'he's a fraud' card. Only by providing an immanent critique, demonstrating genuine familiarity along the way, can such an accuser differentiate himself from what is almost the default anti-intellectual position...that there's nothing to all these fancy words ... Without such proof, it's reasonable to write off the accuser as another fox who can't or won't reach the grapes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

I like elusiveness of meaning but prefer some kind of possibly humanesque organ weirdly represented in the visual art I admire. — ZzzoneiroCosm

In my heart of hearts, I'm a sucker for presentations of the human form and face. But I found a nice quote relevant to Ad's black paintings. As I see it, this sums up the implicit negative monotheism involved.

For at the stage of romantic art the spirit knows that its truth does not consist in its immersion in corporeality; on the contrary, it only becomes sure of its truth by withdrawing from the external into its own intimacy with itself and positing external reality as an existence inadequate to itself. Even if, therefore this new content too comprises in itself the task of making itself beautiful, still beauty in the sense hitherto expounded remains for it something subordinate, and beauty becomes the spiritual beauty of the absolute inner life as inherently infinite spiritual subjectivity....

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity...
— Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1

Since this is a Derrida thread, I should add a nearby quote that seems relevant.

...the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself. God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself....

If we compare this vocation of romantic art with the task of classical art, fulfilled in the most adequate way by Greek sculpture, the plastic shape of the gods does not express the movement and activity of the spirit which has retired into itself out of its corporeal reality and made its way to inner self-awareness. The mutability and contingency of empirical individuality is indeed expunged in those lofty figures of the gods, but what they lack is the actuality of self-aware subjectivity in the knowing and willing of itself. This defect is shown externally in the fact that the expression of the soul in its simplicity, namely the light of the eye, is absent from the sculptures.[2] The supreme works of beautiful sculpture are sightless, and their inner being does not look out of them as self-knowing inwardness in this spiritual concentration which the eye discloses. This light of the soul falls outside them and belongs to the spectator alone; when he looks at these shapes, soul cannot meet soul nor eye eye. But the God of romantic art appears seeing, self-knowing, inwardly subjective, and disclosing his inner being to man’s inner being. For infinite negativity, the withdrawal of the spirit into itself, cancels effusion into the corporeal; subjectivity is the spiritual light which shines in itself, in its hitherto obscure place, and, while natural light can only illumine an object, the spiritual light is itself the ground and object on which it shines and which it knows as itself. But this absolute inner expresses itself at the same time in its actual determinate existence as an appearance in the human mode, and the human being stands in connection with the entire world, and this implies at the same time a wide variety in both the spiritually subjective sphere and also the external to which the spirit relates itself as something its own. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/part2-section3.htm#s1

So instead of a preexisting world of Platonic essences, we have the mess of the world (neither mental nor physical yet in this time before distinctions) as primary, and it's within that mess that some of that mess develops a system of signs that slowly attains a self-referentiality which prefers to understand itself (deceive itself) as truly independent of its medium. As Feuerbach put, Christianity ('the Platonism of the masses') is essentially the fantasy that man is radically distinct from nature. The goal is a transcendence of nature, of all limitations. It's as if nature is created as that which is not yet under control. The self is that which one is socially responsible for. Nature is the shit in the way of our projects, and yet also their condition of possibility and value (sort of like our filthy inherited thought system, in some ways a prison, is also our only hope of a relative escape...we are the system trying to slide out of itself.)

wow, wiki. — Jackson

I thought you were afraid of me. Good to see you off your back, toy soldier.

And that perhaps deconstruction deconstructing itself would actually be an affirmation? — Moliere

Well put. In a way it's always doing this, because it's explicitly dependent upon the very ideas it challenges. It's even banal, since in general we've only ever had our own reason or rationality available for a critical examination of that rationality. What were Kant and Hume doing, after all ? Any science of science is a pseudo-paradoxical 'ologyology.' Yet Kant and Hume don't trigger folks the same way, perhaps because they are more familiar..and incorrectly assumed to be dead and safe.

In computer science, bootstrapping is the technique for producing a self-compiling compiler — that is, a compiler (or assembler) written in the source programming language that it intends to compile. An initial core version of the compiler (the bootstrap compiler) is generated in a different language (which could be assembly language); successive expanded versions of the compiler are developed using this minimal subset of the language. The problem of compiling a self-compiling compiler has been called the chicken-or-egg problem in compiler design, and bootstrapping is a solution to this problem.[1][2]

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurath%27s_boat

That quote I do understand. And you have a talent for entertaining and pellucid explication. — Tom Storm

Thanks for the kind words! It keeps me chugging along. I also clarify my own understanding by digging for paraphrases and quotes. It's an endless task to be a little less confused.

That sounds too rhetorical or poetic for my practical taste. I attach much importance to conceptual clarity. A good workman keeps a neat set of tools, and a philosopher's tool are his concepts. — Olivier5

I think it's fair to say that Derrida can be annoyingly poetical and rhetorical. I'm on a Brandom kick lately, and he's almost too dry and longwinded and careful. But I like those norms in general.

That said, it's exactly a concern for conceptual clarity that makes Derrida interesting in terms of content. My interest in him is primarily for what he has to say about semantics. Especially when folks wax metaphysical about mind and matter and truth and so on, it's my suspicion that they only very vaguely know what they are talking about. For instance, you use 'clarity.' I also seek clarity. But this is a dead, literalized metaphor. What exactly do we mean by it ? Can we just mean easy to read? But surely some texts are more intrinsically difficult than others. Do we mean then as easy as possible? That seems more like it. A clear writer minimizes the discomfort in interpretation. But clarity is not the only value. We also value a motivating dramatic context. We want to feel with the author. That emotional framing is not obviously secondary, unless we simply unphilosophically assume that philosophical truth is as cold a fact as a telephone number in a phone book. Rightly or wrongly in aesthetic terms or our comfort, Derrida 'lives' his transcendence of various superstitions of philosophy (that it's only secondarily metaphorical or literary, that it's a solemn, serious business, ...) This is the main thing that pissed people off, IMO. Derrida is simply not an irrationalist. He's more serious about truth and reason than most people, just as Nietzsche was (hence his willingness to question the foundation of the philosophical project itself ( the idea of such a foundation?), perhaps the maximal philosophical gesture, its purity.) The same people who love Wittgenstein (just as indulgent in his own way) reject Derrida, seemingly because Derrida is more of a jester than a holy ascetic.

I don't quite get non-expressionist or non-subjective. Can a movement be alembicated to sterility? — ZzzoneiroCosm

I'm passionately committed to elusiveness of meaning in such anti-practical contexts, but I feel like this motherfucker is as chill as possible. Art is some zen state of being. The opposite of business. Almost a negative theology of the (purified) idea of art. Probably the Japanese philosophers of nothingness are relevant here. IMV, this is a place where only modest claims or guesses make sense.

This is content that needs time and aptitude. — Tom Storm

Indeed. And it isn't axiomatic that grokking Derrida is the best way to spend one's time. Some people just naturally monger concepts. They really are turned on by what are otherwise extremely dry issues. In the same way some people really like math. The Weierstrassian definition of a limit is a beautiful piece of engineering, if you ask them (I'm one of them). Most do not care in the least about linguistic philosophy or math. Which is fine, because they are only very indirectly practical, and a taste for such things may even be correlated with underachievement in economic terms.

Well, I guess it could be both unclear, uninformative and yet accurate. — Olivier5

There's quite an industry of gentle introductions to famous and famously difficult thinkers.

Gasché is writing for insiders. But here's a decent expositor.

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written ...can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?” — Derrida

What are the consequences of this simple fact, that the concept of the sign implies an unbounded possibility of recontextualization? Especially given that philosopher's purported eternal truths live in this medium? What if anything anchors the meaning of signs ? Already in Saussure we get insights and rethinkings of semantics that threaten Plato and the gang. What happens if we lean in to such insights? Or what happens if we really think about how metaphor functions in philosophy? How is the possibility of grand, totalizing philosophy affected thereby? While Derrida is not only a linguistic philosopher, that approach toward his work has been helpful to me. He's something like Wittgenstein with Nietzschean exuberance-- without Nietzsche's creepier side.

Because if Derrida had wanted to refute Husserl or Saussure, then I don't think he'd have to develop deconstruction -- it would be straightforward, right? — Moliere

This is a pre-Hegelian vision of truth, that one simply refutes a strong thinker...from the 'outside.'

What Derrida does with Saussure is read his radical side against his obliviously still-phonocentric side. The points he makes against Saussure are made possible by Saussure in the first place. Metaphorically, it is immanent critique. One steps 'in' to the perspective criticized thinker and discovers where and how that thinker disappointments his or her own principles. Interpersonally, that'd be like me showing you how you have failed in terms of your own criteria and not mine. Saussure and Husserl are worth critiquing this way precisely because they are worthy. Their standards and insights are powerful, so that one would like 'fix' their system, unclogging it...but at the cost of shifting the original goal perhaps. For instance, Saussure insights really apply to more than just speech. They implicitly uncover the structure of any signifying code. For rhetorical/historical reasons, Derrida calls this new semiology a grammatology, but writing is something like the best introductory metaphor.

Thank you. That was neither clear nor informative. — Olivier5

It was pretty accurate, from my limited POV. It's just difficult stuff. And you need to see examples for that summary to have definite and significant content. Otherwise it's just vague grandiose claims. As Hegel saw, one really can't summarize philosophy. Or, better, such summaries are only for those who've already walked the path. To learn about Derrida requires (surprise!) jumping in the passenger seat for one of his readings of Saussure or Husserl or Austin or ....

the bells ring for no reason and we too
we will rejoice in the clank of chains
that we will sound within us with the bells — ZzzoneiroCosm

Excellent quote. I've only seen and loved the manifestoes. I've had good luck with artists. Like Ad Reinhart say (kwotes below.)
//////
Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Here’s my collection of Derrida quotes about Sartre. They’re all nasty. — Joshs

That's the attitude I remember. Personally I think Derrida is a more consistently powerful thinker, but Sartre has powerful moments, and not only in Nausea. Being and Nothingness is amazing at times.

It's hard not to see some relationship between the impossible project of being God and the pursuit of some pure and original plenitude. Being here, presence there. If philosophy ever gets its own Harold Bloom, the Derrida-Sartre anxiety might feature with the Heidegger-Nietzsche version. Bloom makes the point that the strong point isn't like most people. He's far more terrified of death. Hence the need to build A pyramid.

@Streetlight has clearly fucking read lots of Derrida and many many other thinkers, while certain other rowdy participants have clearly not.

Folks should maybe work out why they simultaneously want to nullify Derrida and yet find it impressive enough to have grokked him to demand proof of that accomplishment.

Just admit that you want in and put in the effort.

FWIW, I've been through weird bouts of resistance/desire myself with thinkers. It's normal...I hope.

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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? — Joshs

The tricky issue is that the meaning of 'actually exist' is caught up in what we are discussing here. Do we (can we?) ever 'actually know' what we are actually talking about when we say 'actually exist'? Or, and now it turns back on me, when we say 'actually know'? It's largely blind or pre-articulate skill.

Hence my interest in semantic constraint, presumably primarily pragmatic. As we wander from practical contexts, there's less and less constraint. Only the symbols returned by smaller and smaller groups, naturally biased toward the intelligibly and significance of the coin of the realm.


I suppose one could make a more or less successful case for one of the branches of your either/or, or for its dissolution in some more profound framing of the situation. But while I feel able, if willing, to play at this level of abstraction, I become more...skeptical...of this twilight kingdom's secret candy.

I'm glad I could give my own little testimony.

On the Plato thing, which I didn't get to, I think his work suggests that Platonic forms are unrealistically 'pure' (impossibly uncontaminated by and independent of history.) A nice analogue is the contamination of 'literal' and 'serious' conceptuality by metaphor. While such conceptuality cannot be collapsed into metaphor (or metaphor would itself so collapse), it's also never pure. That kind of thing.

The deconstructive critic seeks to find, by this process of retracing, the element in the system studied which is alogical, the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the whole building.

This is one of its virtues, and it's just good ol' Western rationality at work, looking for weakness in totalizing systems, looking for plot holes and confusions and the one loose brick that makes the whole thing vulnerable. Checking a totalizing system or theory of knowledge for weakness is no more absurd or irrational than checking every inch of a parachute you're planning to use.

What did Derrida's approach say about nihilism? — Tom Storm

Speaking loosely, his 'freeplay' seems like some sunny cousin of nihilism. Derrida was well aware of Camus and Sartre (he continued to respect Nausea), and Nietzsche was one of his heroes. So certainly he thought about it. But I think his message was more about the opportunity in godlessness (not that he'd use such a phrase.) On the other hand, his bio ( the one by Peeters) reveals that he was subject to intense intermittent 'nihilistic' depressions. On the bright side, he experienced fits of intense inspiration too. This is worth watching, if you haven't seen it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoKnzsiR6Ss

I'm interested to enhance my understanding of what Derrida believed he was primarily working towards. (I get that this is a blunt and perhaps reductive question) Was he essentially trying to reevaluate traditional Western values, build a new ethical process? — Tom Storm

For context, I'm a person who become fascinated with Derrida and put a substantial but still non-expert amount of time into some of his texts, primarily the early ones, because I was most interested in the issue of meaning (as in to what degree do/can we know what we are talking about.)

While he has grandiose moments like Nietzsche, his are hopeful and without the shrill negativity, and vaguely envision new ways of thinking rather than new values. His actual thoughts are detailed critiques of thinkers like Saussure, Husserl, and Rousseau. Their thrust is largely anti-Romantic. The truth is not nakedly there in some brutal intuition. Nothing is as simple and pure as folks might want it to be. Not even mother. So I'd say no. The early relatively apolitical Derrida is 'guilty' primarily of not being a joiner or of a certain vanity that exaggerated the significance or extent or originality of his version of the revolution (same old Western rationality purifying itself of its dream of purity, etc.), not so uncommon perhaps in '67.

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

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.)

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If fear is the mind killer - face your critics rather than insult, dox, threaten and deplatorm them into silence. Defend putting convicted sex offender and rapist "Karen" White in prison with vulnerable women. Because I'd honestly like to hear a defence of that politically correct policy. — karl stone

You must be talking to an imaginary postmodernist behind me. That's the problem, man. It's a one-bit worldview. Only a commie penis-snipping transvestite could question your good common sense. Funny thing is...I keep my mouth shut around my more progressive acquaintances. Because I don't need them to think like me and I don't like to argue with 'religious' people. I guess my own little indulgent polarization of the world, my own self-flattering fairy tale, features irrational tribal types on the one hand and lonely contrarian assholes on the other. But that contrarian asshole is what he is in the name of a universal rationality, and is of course for just that reason the right kind of conformist, just like the rest. Happy ending.

Deleuze is useful here. 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. — Joshs

That seems true to me, but we ignore such differences for practical reasons. As Nietzsche saw, cognition makes unequal things equal. Such 'lies' are life-preserving. Differences that make no (practical) difference are ignored. We are automatically and compulsively pragmatists in this sense. Note that we don't treat such things as lies. Instead Deleuze's claim would be suspect, an abuse of 'grammar' (proprieties of use), until it was made clear he was a philosopher.

Then we can consider that self which bears responsibility and suffers praise and blame as a piece of necessary 'fiction,' as a kind of successful meme or habit. 'Fiction' is not an ideal metaphor here, and 'convention' neglects that it's received like language, like the law. I use Shakespeare as an image out of respect for what Bloom, probably correctly, projects on the bard. All the world's a stage. A key aspect of the human situation is our awareness of ourselves as characters for others...and for ourselves, not one without the other. Hegel, who saw that Shakespeare invented self-overhearing characters, went on to emphasize the importance of mutual recognition in any epistemological context.

So on these historical grounds I would disagree with idealising writing as some sort of Ur-language. — Olivier5

I feel compelled to emphasize here that Derrida does not take writing (as commonly understood) to be the ur-language but rather sketches/develops the concept of this ur-language (or deep structure) and gives it, for complicated rhetorical reasons, the confusing name 'writing' (and lots of other names.) It's a bit like a fairy tale, where the anti-hero is given a name that emphasizes questionable origins, to grow to be the origin of origins.

Aka ideograms. Yes, modern math has rediscovered the power of ideograms. They are much more intuitive and shorter (essential almost) than alphabetic code can ever be. — Olivier5

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. Each number 'is' its relationship to the others. No Platonic realm needed, though one can argue that the norms for using numbers 'properly' have a kind of social existence (a pattern in our doings, which is somewhat accountable to patterns in extra-human nature, given the origin and application of math.)

I speculate my specialty (infinite compositions of complex functions) is a solution awaiting a problem. :cool: — jgill

I hope something comes along and make your work suddenly practical. That'd be exciting. I know it's happened for some mathematicians. (I'm a lesser angel in the field myself, working more in programming languages these days, though, for better or worse.)

where writing derives from accounting, and not directly from speech. — Olivier5

Derrida is interested in this kind of thing. Our math these days depends on symbols that are only very awkwardly translated into English. We learn to think with these non-phonetic symbols. We are also cyborgs in the sense that higher mathematics would not be possible without the memory aids of books. 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.

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it is now often used much like 'communism' was in the 1950's, as a smear and often as part of a thoroughgoing conspiracy theory about values subversions. — Tom Storm

Exactly.

As I am deeply offended by men invading women's sports, toilets, changing room, rapists in womens prisons, and other female only spaces under the auspices of the idea gender is a mere social construct, and not a biological reality. — karl stone

You have a right to be offended (there's no law against it, yet (joking)), but feelings alone are not justifications. Surely some are/were offended by interracial marriage, women in the workplace, the legalization of abortion, pornography, prostitution, or drugs. The first person to roll a wheel was probably viewed a threat to the good old days. This is not to say that every proposed innovation is good. It's just a reminder that all kinds of people have felt all kinds of ways about changes in norms. The end of the world has been just around the corner for centuries now.

More specifically, I doubt you can find many people who really no longer make the distinction between biological sex and gender performance. As far as I know, it's primarily a matter of shifting the meanings of pronouns away from what's in your underpants to how one performs one's personality in the public sphere. It's not unreasonable to object to such a shift, but such objections should take a reasonable form. Are the new bathroom arrangements really much of a problem? I'm not saying that all is well, but a case should be made for the alarmist tone. It may turn out to be no big deal.

n academic circle jerk of post modernists critical theorists and neo marxists applauding eachothers work - in denial of science and reason. — karl stone

To me the phrases 'post modernists' and 'neo marxists' indicate something like a conspiracy theory. I don't know if Fucker Carlson is using them yet, but they belong on the shelf with all the other spooks and goblins used to rile up the base. Seems to me that all that's really meant is progressive, but viewed through a dehumanizing lens...the same way that self-righteous doxing and career-destroying progressives view their own enemies (which troubles me more than you'd credit probably, if largely for my own selfish reasons as a cis het contrarian male.) What I deplore is tribal chest-thumping and demonization of the other on either side. Fear is the mindkiller, the death of nuance ...the death of the science and reason you celebrate above.

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

Cool vid.

I guess my concern is that 'postmodernism' has taken on a new meaning in a new context. This meaning is legitimate inasmuch as it is consistent and popular. The cartoon has its own reality now.

Rouse takes up Sellars’ distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image , and shows them to be inextricably dependent on each other. — Joshs

Thanks! That sounds good. I'm not terribly happy with the 'two images' view myself. In general, I don't philosophers have done (and maybe they can't do) a very good job in this domain.

I don't know how Rouse objects to Brandom, and I'm still exploring Brandom, but I feel like Brandom is mostly on dry ground. Folks can babble endlessly about mind and matter and mostly nobody minds, because it doesn't matter. There's very little semantic constraint. The words aren't put to use.

On the other hand, the norms governing such babble are more tractable, since they are primarily also employed in more worldly and arguably more worthwhile conversations. Indeed, these norms are involved in the making of these same norms explicit.

I'm curious about the 'gramatology' label. Saussure called his topic 'linguistique générale". — Olivier5

As I understand it, it's a slicker version of Writingology. Basically there's a deep structure in sign systems that's more like writing than (an idealized vision of) speech, and 'writing' is repurposed to refer to this deeper structure. As you know, Saussure glimpsed a semiology broader than linguistics, and Derrida (sort of) takes it over.

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. I like Derrida enough to have actually read a decent chunk of his work in my free time. And this is without having friends also into this difficult and now largely forgotten stuff. But I didn't like him because he could be annoyingly obscure. I tolerated it for the good stuff. I like continental depth, but I appreciate analytic clarity and directness.

This would not be Derrida’s view. For him there is no form without substance. — Joshs

That would also be my view of Derrida's view. Correctly or not, and speaking metaphorically, I understand him to insist on the total incarnation of the divine. Shit being mixed up is primary. Afterword we use signs to create purity and presence and eternity and the sign itself, etc.

Saussure’s system of language is a structuralism, — Joshs

Jesus, brother, I hope so. It's a or even the prototypical example.

For Derrida the ‘system’ of language remakes itself one singular to the next, without reference to a pre-existing totality. — Joshs

Maybe he made that claim. It's grandiose enough. If so, maybe it can be justified. 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?

First of all, contrary to Peterson and other conservatives, CRT, BLM and cancel culture in general is not a postmodern movement. — Joshs

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

I didn't call you a nazi. I do find 'organic values' a bit suspicious, hence the allusion. How exactly shall values be sniffed for their primordially organic legitimacy ? Of all animals on this planet, we seem the most unbound, the most self-creating, with a therefore to-be-determined nature.

Let me point out that you accused me of performing medical experiments on children. I'm not even offended. I'm just asking you to question yourself. If you are so quick to see such evil, you are at risk of justifying evil in your combat with it. While there are a few sadistic fucks out there, most evil is probably done by the self-righteous, who are haunted into becoming the kind of thing they fear...something cruel and unreasonable.




It seems to me that 'postmodern' often functions in political contexts and outside nerdier circles as a synonym for secular or modern. Post-enlightenment humanity has to make its own rules without appeals to its childhood toys. But this isn't easy. Hence Gods and organic values and every kind of substitute for difficult conversations and experimentation.

I am a philosopher and discussing ideas. I suggest you stop making personal attacks. — Jackson

I don't think you can do philosophy without some risk of your claims or expressions being challenged, and I am not defending pointless hostility by saying so. But I'm sorry if I caused more discomfort than I intended.

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Goodbye. — Jackson

Should I find the tiny violin player or will you?

I imagine you sounding like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Z2CklSxM0

And, Socrates says speech is superior to the written word...but it is Plato the writer giving Socrates these words. — Jackson

A Derridean point, by the way. But Plato may feel that writing is a lesser evil than oblivion.