I just think your critique is of a higher level than the original article -- the original article felt like the normal sorts of things I hear when people say Derrida is bad. And maybe that works for some, but for me it didn't. — Moliere

I tend to take the view @Joshs has already hinted at. Derrida is poorly understood and therefore derided. A cartoon Derrida is readily available. Ditto postmodernism. I also think for the Derrida cognoscenti, the right reading may be elusive. This is super complex, nuanced writing accessible to only the dedicated and bright, with time on their hands. Ideally academics. None of those things describe my situation, so I have opted out of Derrida and have not noticed the gap. :razz:

Heh. It's not a bad place to be. I'll admit to choosing the same with other authors.

Many read the section "Absolute Knowing" in the Phenomenology as saying dialectical history comes to an end. Hegel is criticizing subjectivity and saying we are in the stage of objective knowing. Like you said, a concrete thinker. Thus Hegel is not a skeptic. — Jackson

In that sense I'd say that I agree with you -- Derrida is a skeptic.

I suppose I feel more empathy with his skepticism than Hegel's optimism? But that shouldn't be a surprise given how I prefer Kant to Hegel :)

I prefer Kant to Hege — Moliere

Indeed.

Skeptics posit a totality which cannot be had. Platonism. The real object cannot be conceived.

I am not a skepic. — Jackson

In that sense I'd say that I agree with you -- Derrida is a skeptic — Moliere

Derrida insisted that he is not a skeptic:

“…it is impossible here to single out and to analyze in detail all of the distorting and malicious presentations of my work (or similar work, because were it merely a question of myself alone, none of this would have unfolded in such spectacular fashion), presentations by colleagues whose every sentence proves clearly that they either haven't read or haven't understood one line of the texts they wish to denounce. Likewise it is impossible to refute in a few words their accusations of nihilism, skepticism, or relativism.”( Points)

“This way of thinking context does not, as such, amount to a relativism, with everything that is sometimes associated with it (skepticism, empiricism, even nihilism). First of all because, as Husserl has shown better than anyone else, relativism, like all its derivatives, remains a philosophical position in contradiction with itself. Second, because this "deconstructive" way of thinking context is neither a philosophical position nor a critique of finite contexts, which it analyzes without claiming any absolute overview. Nevertheless, to the extent to which it-by virtue of its discourse, its socio-institutional situation, its language, the historical inscription of its gestures, etc.-is itself rooted in a given context (but, as always, in one that is differentiated and mobile), it does not renounce (it neither can nor ought do so) the "values" that are dominant in this context (for example, that of truth, etc.).”

“For of course there is a "right track", a better way, and let it be said in 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.”

(Limited, Inc)

"Derrida insisted that he is not a skeptic."

Yes, and I do not agree.

[

Yes, and I do not agree. — Jackson

You said skeptics posit a totality that cannot be had. What totality does Derrida posit? He defines idealism as the identical repetition of the same ( what he calls an idea in the Kantian sense) , and argues that deconstruction shows that when we intend the repetition of meaning , this repetition must incorporate the contaminating and altering effect of context, so we end up saying something other than what we meant to say. I suppose this transforming repetition of an ideality could be considered a ‘totality that cannot be had’.
How do you think Derrida is defining the concept of skepticism?

What totality does Derrida posit? — Joshs

The text.

I suppose this transforming repetition of an ideality could be considered a ‘totality that cannot be had’. — Joshs

Derrida's aesthetics are the sublime, like Kant. A vast unknowable which we know is there.

What totality does Derrida posit? — Joshs

The text. — Jackson

When Derrida uses the word ‘text’, he means context. Context for him is not a totality, it is an articulated hinge , a movement, a repetition which alters what it repeats.

Derrida's aesthetics are the sublime, like Kant. A vast unknowable which we know is there. — Jackson

For him what we know we always know differently. This is not the same as ‘unknowable’. There is nothing for Derrida which is simply vast or unknowable. I dont know where its ‘vastness’ would come from when it is always this context right now, which has no depth , vast or otherwise, and is known to us precisely as the structure of context.

I have opted out of Derrida and have not noticed the gap. — Tom Storm

Ditto. :up:

For him what we know we always know differently. This is it the same as ‘unknowable. There is nothing for Derrida which is simply vast or unknowable. I dont know where its ‘vastness’ would come from when it is always this context right now, which has no depth , vast or otherwise. — Joshs

Okay.

I'll admit -- this is close to what I feel on Derrida too.

I really think we could come together on our reading of Derrida. There's enough between us that we could find agreement here.

No?

I really think we could come together on our reading of Derrida. There's enough between us that we could find agreement here.

No? — Moliere

Lets give it a try. Here’s Husserl’s take on Humean skepticism:

“Unremittingly, skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, that of actual experience,
and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas.”( Crisis of European Sciences)

Derrida is not a skeptic in this sense, because he doesn’t locate truth in correctness or adequation with what is represented.

Here is an interesting version of the article Differance. Its first five paragraphs (which contain a dense presentation of that notion) are not included in the published version (in Marges).

http://mforbes.sites.gettysburg.edu/cims226/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Week-5a-Jacques-Derrida.pdf

A critique of 'logocentrism' (a term invented by Ludwig Klages) initially suggests that Derrida was a hippy. Mikic's Who Was Jaque Derrida emphasizes the 'revolutionary' timing of the early work (Of Grammatology in '67.) But the rebel who was going to fuck things up from the inside was honest enough to admit that all his weapons were stolen from the enemy. If there's something outside the haunted house of metaphysics, it's only to be fetishized at a distance. (What's so bad about metaphysics and dad's rock'n'roll? Is it not always already an assimilated sequence of failed revolutions? Derrida leaves a few nice stains of his own.)

Here's a nice quote from a mic drop moment that introduced him to the world at large. (I come not to prays structuralism but to berry it.)

From then on it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing its displacements and its substitutions for this law of the central presence-but a central presence which was never itself, which has always already been transported outside itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a beingpresent, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse... when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.

Where and how does this decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur? It would be somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order to designate this occurrence. It is no doubt part of the totality of an era, our own, but still it has already begun to proclaim itself and begun to work. Nevertheless, if I wished to give some sort of indication by choosing one or two "names," and by recalling those authors in whose discourses this occurrence has most nearly maintained its most radical formulation, I would probably cite the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and sign (sign without truth present); the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of being as presence. But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language --- no syntax and no lexicon ---which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

I'm interested in 'the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations' that seemingly cannot be evaded. What is it that's already there, wherever we have gathered to philosophize? What are the unwritten rules of the game that, among other moves, allow for making these rules explicit?

I'll admit that the skepticism I have in mind in saying he's a skeptic isn't so specific as Humean skepticism -- what I have in mind is less precise: I wouldn't call him a radical skeptic, or a Humean skeptic. I think he's skeptical of foundationalist philosophy -- I think he's skeptical of, not universally skeptical, and he seems to want to move beyond such skepticism. But I also don't know where Derrida locates truth; naturally I'm willing to hear more from yourself, though, if you so wish to say more. For myself it seemed like Derrida believes the deconstructive process will, in some sense, lead one where they're supposed to go or towards something like the truth -- but I'd have to say that these are impressions of my own, and nothing more.

Derrida is poorly understood and therefore derided. — Tom Storm

Or, as he might say write, Derrided.

Can anyone quote a passage or some passages of Derrida that substantiate the charge of skepticism?

That's too much work for me to want to pick up :D I'll fully admit I'm running from impressions of having read, here -- just out of interest, and to hear what others say. And I'm not demanding anything more from anyone else on that front, at least.

The problem I have with Derrida is going from his writing to scholar's writing -- where Derrida's texts read as extremely specific readings of a particular document, the secondary literature reads like an interpretation of his entire oeuvre. And I certainly haven't read Derrida oeuvre! I'm in a half-way house between absolute ignorance and confidence in my assertions -- a place of impression and memory, more than anything, but one I enjoy talking through if others are willing to talk with. While I normally like to bring quotes and such, I have a hard time doing so with Derrida because I feel like the philosophy is in the demonstration more than the words written.

Just thought I'd add some passages from '76. I value him most so far for his critique of phonocentrism (he got me reading Saussure.) I take him to put into question the 'superstition' that what we mean is present for us in some simple and direct way, the superstition that we know what we are talking about (beyond the foggy practical know-how with words that cannot reasonably be denied.) But he doesn't hammer much on that nail, perhaps because he's not afraid to make grand claims himself, and feels a relative mastery of his meanings.


///////////////////////////////////////

If, for Aristotle, for example, "spoken words are the symbols of mental experience, and written words are the symbols of spoken words," it is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind...

The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself. It is the stage of transparence. ... In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense ( thought or lived ) or more loosely as thing. All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself ( whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God) . The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the "signifier."...
...
But to these metaphysico-theological roots many other hidden sediments cling. The semiological or, more specifically, linguistic "science" cannot therefore hold on to the difference between signifier and signified-the very idea of the sign-without the difference between sensible and intelligible, certainly, but also not without retaining, more profoundly and more implicitly, and by the same token the reference to a signified able to "take place" in its intelligibility, before its "fall," before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below. As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology : the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God. Of course, it is not a question of "rejecting" these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them. It is a question at first of demonstrating the systematic and historical solidarity of the concepts and gestures of thought that one often believes can be innocently separated. The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth. The age of the sign is essentially theological. Perhaps it will never end. Its historical closure is, however, outlined. Since these concepts are indispensable for unsettling the heritage to which they belong, we should be even less prone to renounce them. Within the closure, by an oblique and always perilous movement, constantly risking falling back within what is being deconstructed, it is necessary to surround the critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse-to mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their effectiveness and to designate rigorously their intimate relationship to the machine whose deconstruction they permit; and, in the same process, designate the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed.
....
There has to be a transcendental signified for the difference between signifier and signified to be somewhere absolute and irreducible. It is not by chance that the thought of being, as the thought of this transcendental signified, is manifested above all in the voice: in a language of words [mots] . The voice is heard ( understood ) ­ that undoubtedly is what is called conscience-closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many-since it is the condition of the very idea of truthbut I shall elsewhere show in what it does delude itself. This illusion is the history of truth and it cannot be dissipated so quickly. \Vithin the closure of this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity-and at the same time in the condition of its possibility as the experience of "being."

https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf

Can anyone quote a passage or some passages of Derrida that substantiate the charge of skepticism? — Streetlight

His deconstruction theory alone is a poster child for this. So don't ask for a passage -- ask someone to explain the deconstruction theory and you get your answers. Skepticism should be the conclusion. I don't think Derrida himself would claim himself as a skeptic (if anyone knows, post it here). But you or Moliere or Joshs should certainly arrive at that conclusion. Or declare it is not skepticism.

See this post talking about logocentrism. Ask yourself if deconstruction theory's findings are warranted.

Just a general thought on deconstruction theory -- it is designed to question the truth we attached to what we say (in text) as being externally substantiated. So it is a tool to put doubt in our assumptions.

Critical theory is itself a form of skepticism.

To all, this is your chance to come up with a solid argument argument against critical theory and deconstruction theory by using skepticism as a criticism.

One thing to keep in mind is that "skepticism" itself is already a term with a multiplicity of meanings -- so much so that I don't feel like I'm in contradiction in affirming skepticism of Derrida and in affirming him not being a skeptic -- depending on what one means by "skepticism", of course. Also, I think we could start elsewhere, but "skeptic" is as good a word as any as far as I'm concerned. (There's also something funny going on here, in my mind, between pinning down a word, and Derrida's philosophy which seems to indicate the impossibility of doing so by reference to the signs alone)

For myself, I think I'm looking for some amount of agreement between us here -- I'm not as interested in defending deconstruction as understanding it. Or at least understanding perspectives on deconstruction to help round out my own understanding a little better than where it was. So to start here:

“Unremittingly, skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, that of actual experience,
and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas. — Joshs

In that sense Derrida is not a skeptic because I don't think he believes in the validity of the factually experienced world -- Or, at least, that it's not a Humean construct of the mind where one can separate the experienced world from the concepts. 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.

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.”

“Unremittingly, skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, that of actual experience,
and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas. — Joshs

In that sense Derrida is not a skeptic because I don't think he believes in the validity of the factually experienced world -- Or, at least, that it's not a Humean construct of the mind where one can separate the experienced world from the concepts. 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 find your conclusion startling. :yikes:

To put it in formatted form:

Joshs: skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas.

You: In that sense Derrida is not a skeptic because I don't think he believes in the validity of the factually experienced world

it's not a Humean construct of the mind where one can separate the experienced world from the concepts. — Moliere

Hume says the opposite.

How would you go about interpreting Husserl in the quotation?

What made sense to me was Hume's arguments regarding causation -- on the conceptual side you have the necessary connection between events, and on the experiential side you have habituation and the belief that what we experience is necessary, but only because of human habit. So necessity, at least, must be conceptually distinguishable from the world we experience.

Joshs: skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas.

You: In that sense Derrida is not a skeptic because I don't think he believes in the validity of the factually experienced world — L'éléphant

The preconditions of skepticism are that there has to be an objective or 'true' world to be skeptical of?