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
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
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
Yes, and I do not agree. — Jackson
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 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
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
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.
Derrida is poorly understood and therefore derided. — Tom Storm
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.Can anyone quote a passage or some passages of Derrida that substantiate the charge of skepticism? — Streetlight
“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
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:“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
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
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