Re: the last paragraph, it's aim seems to be to indicate the ramifications of Derrida's investigation, an attempt to explain how this seemingly trivial point about indication and expression has implications beyond what is immediately obvious. In particular, it bears upon "all the reductions to come, whether they are eidetic or transcendental." The whole first part of the paragraph (up to the words "And yet Husserl... (middle of p.26)) is just a series of ways of saying the same thing. Every 'reduction to come' will be affected by this problematic (I don't want to say problem), such that "indicative signification will cover, in language, all of what falls under the blows of the “reductions”: factuality, mundane existence, essential nonnecessity, non-evidence, etc." The bit about the 'hiatus' between indication and signification again, just says the same thing.

At this point (after 'And yet Husserl...), Derrida indicates that there are 'two paths', as it were, that one can follow at this point, paths opened up by Husserl himself. Husserl opts to follow one path, but Derrida signals his intention to follow the other. One is to follow Husserl in simply bracketing indication as something that must be taken into account, only be to put aside, as it were, in following the travails of expression. The other is to ask what would happen if we take indication to be intrinsic to expression itself, if, by necessity, it 'contaminates' the purity that ought to characterize expression. Derrida clearly opts for this latter understanding: "Although there is no possible discourse without an expressive kernel, we could almost say that the totality of discourse is gripped by an indicative web."

You can start here to see Derrida's complex relation to the phenomenological project more generally; Derrida never claims to be engaged in a 'critique of phenomenology'; rather, he always generally takes himself to hewing closer to the foundations of phenomenology than Husserl himself. Elsewhere (I can't remember where), he will speak of the necessity of the phenomenological reduction as a starting point for philosophy in general. Len Lawlor sums up Derrida's strategy thus: "Derrida argues that every time Husserl tries to define the transcendental without the empirical he fails, necessarily, to be rigorous. The transcendental is contaminated by the empirical and vice versa." This is the program that will be pursued in the following chapters.

I'd be careful about reading the Lacanian subject in terms of 'recognition': recognition belongs to the register of the imaginary, and the imaginary is decidedly not where freedom is located in the Lacanian schema. Freedom rather belongs to the register of the Real, which which is almost diametrically opposed to the Imaginary. Moreover, for Lacan, every attempt at recognition is marred by a constitutive misrecognition (meconnaissance), which is meant to account for the range of neurosis that subjects experience. The emphasis on recognition - and correlatively, the ego - is something that Lacan railed against his entire career, especially in his polemics with ego psychology which he considered an aberration of Freud.

The paper you cites put it this way: "The worst tendency of the imaginary order is exemplified in the subject’s tendency to uncompromising or crippling fixations on certain image structures, such as the belief that wearing a certain type of clothing will lead to social acceptance, or that eliminating a certain group of people will lead to social harmony. In general, the imaginary strives for homeostasis".

If you're interested in this stuff - especially the political dimension of things - check out Jodi Dean's Zizek's Politics and Yannis Stavrakakis's Lacan and the Political. If you're interested in the theme of recognition, which you seem to have been talking about alot recently, check out either Oliver Kelly's Witnessing: Beyond Recognition or Axel Honneth's work (The Struggle for Recognition or Freedom's Right) Kelly is 'anti' recognition, Honneth is 'for it'. And there's also the wonderful discussion between Honneth and Nancy Fraser in Redistribution or Recognition? which you might find interesting as well.

I'm starting to read a little on this topic, and there seems to be some psychological evidence that the OP thesis is false – apparently feral children raised with their physical needs met, but with no significant interaction with others, learn to distinguish between themselves and physical objects in order to gain the requisite non-communicative skills required to feed themselves, avoid obstacles, etc., but do not gain the ability to recognize the existence of other people, effectively existing in something like Husserl's solipsistic reduction to the sphere of ownness perpetually. With personal contact renewed, this defect can be ameliorated but not fully remedied, past a certain age. — The Great Whatever

I think this can be accommodated by the ideas articulated in the OP, with some modification. It would require taking into account the plasticity of brain development, in which neurons 'wire' differently depending on the developmental history of the organism. To the extent that feral children lack the chance to learn self-other distinction through interaction with other people, objects become bulwark against with all interaction becomes measured, and the loss of brain plasticity through age makes it harder for other people to be recognized as others after a certain time. It's a matter of taking a longer term view upon developmental history than the OP accommodates for, which largely deals with the 'ideal' case of a very plastic, young mind.

I posted a thread on autism not to long ago which jibes with much of what I wrote here too, and the case of grammar is neither here nor there I think, but I realize I'm not going into brusque with these last two points.

The analogical approach to 'other minds' is a common approach, but is beset by a problem which is equally often pointed out: what motivates the application of the analogy to begin with, if you did not already recognise the 'other mind' in the first place? In other words, aren't you simply assuming your conclusion?

I will post a very moving thread.

Please wait for chapter three! A lot of this stuff gets taken into account there, or at least, is made alot more explicit. May not solve anything, but will provide grist for the mill.

My approach has been to treat Derrida, in these early chapters, as a neutral exegete* who - & this may be a little too cute - is performing his own sort of epoche. I think, at least at this stage, he's bracketing the validity of these distinctions, and is simply trying to suss out the immanent logic of Husserl's project. — csalisbury

This strikes me as correct and commensurate with Derrida's 'methodology' more generally: his deconstructions are always immanent critiques, and they try very hard to remain within the limits of their texts they examine. His remark on the first page about his 'solutions... be[ing] valid only within the limits of Husserl’s texts", and "being halfway between commentary and translation", although strictly about his translations, is synecdochal of the reading as I whole, I reckon. One of Derrida's basic operations is to tease out tensions between facts and principles, and side with 'facts' as it were, showing how they exceed and destabilize what the principles are supposed to circumscribe. There's a reason Derrida always seems to italicize the phrase 'in fact'.

--

To start with, what does it mean to say a linguistic sign is indicative? The clear cases Derrida alludes to in Ch. 2, like brands and canals and chalk marks, make intuitive sense. But what is the linguistic expression 'indicating' in this way? It's not at all clear, and so the initial problem seems to have little compelling intuitive evidence. — The Great Whatever

Also, without looking too far ahead to the third chapter, if the category of indication seems a little fuzzy, it's perhaps best to consider it a purely negative category for now; it is everything that does not fall under the ambit of expression. Whether or not this should remain a provisional move will remain to be seen.

Conceive what?

Damn fine summary, think you got it all.

For what? In what context? To which ends?

Fair enough.

In the interests of keeping up momentum, might it be worth collapsing the reading weeks for chapters 1 and 2? Having just read over them, c2 is basically a slight deepening of c1, and week 2 might be a little boring if we just stick to the 4 pages that make up c2. Either way works for me tho.

Heidegger is odd. When he wants to, he can be masterfully clear, and then, just as you think you've got a handle on things, he completely switches it up. His Introduction To Metaphysics is one of the best examples of this I think: the first 3 or 4 chapters are lovely to read, and then all of a sudden he starts taking about Antigone and it all goes to hell. Same with his essay on 'What Is A Thing?'. First half of the essay is admirably clear, then he starts talking about the Earth and the Sky and again, the whole thing just goes tits up, stylistically. B&T is both at turns.

The question of individuation (how things come to be as they are) has always fascinated me, and it's probably what guides everything I do, philosophically speaking. Specifically, thinking individuation through immanence: a world adequate to itself, engendering itself though itself, innocently. And this ramifies all around: how to think art, biology, morphology, society, language, cyclones and ethics on this basis. Always a matter of forging connections, keeping on the move, looking elsewhere.

But surely that the car is red is true for everybody (even colour blind people! They just don't see it as red).

This could get messy now.

'Spose it depends whether or not you think taste is an inherently relational category. That is, to be tasty is by definition to be tasty for-someone. If so, to treat taste as an 'in-itself' would constitute a grammatical error.

But "liquorice is tasty" isn't true, or at least, it is neither true nor false.

But I thought we agreed that "liquorice is tasty" is shorthand for "liquorice is tasty for me"?

But it is true for everyone that I like liquorice.

I mean, I don't, but y'know.

Also I have nothing at stake here I'm just being a Socratic dick.

Would that make subjective truth a subset of objective truth?

Yes but (some ⊆ all) yes?

Would that make subjective truth a subset of objective truth?

Maybe, but I'd imagine that 'truth' in that case would be something like "liquorice is tasty to me."

No, you're missing the point. I asked what kind of conceptual work the qualifier 'objective' in 'objective truth' does, and you replied that it means that it must be open to public demonstration. But if that criteria is baked-in to the very idea of truth, then it seems to me you haven't answered my question, and the qualifier 'objective' still doesn't do anything.

Would truth that is not open to public demonstration be truth?

One wonders what kind of conceptual work the qualifier 'objective' in 'objective truth' does. Assuming that any other kind of 'truth' simply would not be truth, why not just... truth?

That's fair enough I think, and it's not the first time I've heard that line of reasoning used. As with any hot potato, I think there's always a degree of tact that's needed when playing with the fire that can be feminism, and there's little good in wielding the label as an axe to thump people with. Still, calling oneself a feminist - especially as a man - is to put oneself in the position of an advocate, and there are times where it is politically and ethically useful to do so. Sometimes correcting the misconceptions just is the goal.

Again, I'm simply not interested in policing the discourse of feminism in order to keep it in it's 'proper place'. Whatever my feminism is, it doesn't involve spending inordinate amounts of time, effort, and paragraphs speaking to it's own failures. Whatever the faults of modern feminism, feeding into a machine of self-flagellation is unproductive when that machine does nothing but poison the well of discussion so as to skew it all in the direction of 'the problem with feminism is...' - as almost the entirety of this thread has been.

The issues you raise are important, but they belong as much to feminism as they do a critique from without. What I find unproductive is not your raising of these issues, but your framing of them. You seem to take them as strikes against the very idea of feminism itself, whereas I would locate them as belonging to debates that ought to be conducted within feminism's ambit - as they regularly are. That your contribution to a thread on feminism has been almost exclusively focused on it's faults and it's controversies is anything but an innocent by-product of information sharing, but a pointed decision on your part. And there is very little reason to entertain such moves.

Hi Vegabond, I appreciate where you are coming from but in truth, I find discussions such as the one you're promoting unproductive. My feminism means focusing on issues that affect men and women with respect to gender disparities, and focusing on issues like 'social justice warriors' and 'outrage overreach' is a displacement of energy onto issues which are tangential and tactical. There is always a place for critical self-reflection, but given the overwhelming tendency of discussions about feminism to resolve into self-referential loops about feminism itself, rather than 'the issues' as it were, I simply have no desire to contribute to those discussions.

If anybody in this 'safe space' could explain why some feel the label is important, rather than the policies themselves, I'd appreciate the opportunity to learn about that. — andrewk

Speaking for myself, I identify as a feminist - a male feminist - and I think it's important if only to normalize the term, to make it absolutely pedestrian; that is, if one believes in the sorts of things you do (family planning, equal pay, etc), then why not call yourself a feminist? I remember in class once, a tutor asked us - who here is a feminist? - and while alot of people put up their hands, I didn't. I wasn't made to feel guilty about this or anything, it was simply a survey kind of question in the context of a class reading of a feminist text. But I asked myself afterwards quite seriously what it was that prevented me putting my hand up. I couldn't think of any good reason other than that, well, it felt kind of 'girly' to call myself one. I figured this was not quite a good enough reason, especially given that it was clear that my classmates who did identify as feminist and I were more or less in agreement about our views on women, and while I hesitated for a good few years after that class, I'm now comfortable calling myself a feminist (I'm not saying this is the only reason why people don't call themselves feminists - they may be other, perfectly valid reasons - I'm just explaining my own route there).

And that sense of 'comfort' I think is something that ought to go along with that label; the idea of feminism often arouses discomfort, if not hostility, and a big reason is that it is and can be discomforting and hostile. But if you can 'own' that label, and if, as far as you know, you're neither a hostile nor a threatening person (in general!) then so too can feminism be a perfectly 'normal' thing. The label is 'open' to everyone, and if one despairs at some of it's practitioners, all the better to take the opportunity to give the label a better name. Especially so if 'they' are fighting for the same general things that 'you' are. This doesn't automatically mean one will be a 'good feminist' - I still catch myself harbouring prejudice all the time - but trying to live up to that self-imposed label works nicely to remind oneself that one can do better than one is currently doing.

In this sense taking on the label of feminist turns back an 'external division' ('us vs them'/ feminists vs. the world) into an internal one: it becomes a matter of asking how I can be a better feminist than I am. But the more important part is that taking on the label normalizes it. It can show the world that feminism doesn't have to be something scary, something 'other people' do, a monolith that imposes. It makes it comfortable, something close to home, something that belongs to you as much as anyone else. It also makes it imperfect, and something to struggle with, but that's OK. I don't know if this is the 'right' answer to your question, but it does reflect 'my' answer to it. Feminism should be everyday, pedestrian, uncontroversial and 'ownable' by anyone. Anyway, that's my 'if I can feminist so can you' speech.

Pictures like that make me happy, haha. I should mention - not to burst your bubble! - that there's a newer translation of Ideas by Daniel Dahlstrom that was released just a couple of years ago as well. I've not read it, but it might be useful to consult if you get stuck on passages in the Moran translation.

Heh, the planning paradox seems to be almost exactly similar to the one that Freud encountered after postulating his pleasure principle: how to reconcile such a principle to the necessities of everyday life. Freud had to introduce the death drive/reality principle to account for it, which itself introduced a whole bunch of very interesting recursive elements into psychoanalysis, and left him more able to account for a range of neuroses. Is there a place for neuroses in the Cyreanic schema? It'd be an interesting project to compare to the two.

I'm happy to provide 'technical advice' as it were, questions about terminology and so on. Note that it does get somewhat easier after the introduction, which is quite sweeping about the claims it makes. Once you get past it, Derrida's analyses get quite precise, and it may even be a good idea to read the introduction after the body of the book - or even revisit it at the end of the reading group.

Took a quick read though the introduction and there's a bit more assumed knowledge in there than I recall (it gets 'easier' when the book 'starts' proper), but here's a violently reductive crash course in phenomenology to help with some orientation:

The basic operation of phenomenology is to divide the world up into two 'levels' as it were. The mundane world of 'stuff' and the ideal world of sense and meaning. It's kind of the difference between 'scribbles on a page' and 'words imbued with sense'. Methodologically, the idea is to 'bracket' the former while keeping analysis solely at the level of the latter. This is the 'phenomenological/eidetic reduction' or the 'epoche'. It is less a reduction to some substance or another (as is the common use of the word 'reduction') than it is a reduction in the culinary sense of boiling away the unnecessary ingredients to leave you with the important stuff - in this case sense and meaning.

Minimally, the important thing about meaning (in this context) is that it is 'ideal'. Ideal doesn't mean 'in the head' but rather something like context-invariant and infinitely repeatable. So once you 'fix' a term with a meaning, for example, no matter how one writes it - squiggly, neatly, in Arabic, in code - it's 'meaning' is 'ideal' and all the mundanities of it's 'matter' are irrelevant. Meaning here is a kind of 'form' (in the Platonic sense), which persists across all of it's material 'accidents'. This ideality is a kind of specialness which is 'present to itself'; it is correlated with 'transcendental life', a 'living present', and 'consciousness', as distinct from the 'dead' material 'stuff'. Terminologically, Husserl will refer anything that belongs to this order as 'noema', or as what belongs to the 'noetic sphere'.

So the question to keep in mind while reading is this: what is the relation between the two 'levels' of the mundane and the transcendental?

Yall need to remember that we're just a little forum run by guys and gals (?) who like a good philosophical yarn once in a while. We aren't an institution run according to best practices and precedents and so on. The rules are meant to appeal to your intuitions, as they do ours. If you try and test our limits, we're likely to flounder every once in a while because frankly, we're making it up as we go along.

So at the very least, the rules against racism, sexism and homophobia are meant as a bulwark for the sake of civility. They're flags, they indicate the kind of forum we are, especially to new users. As far as we're concerned, we want to do as little work as possible. We follow the path of least resistance. If you want to give us work, you're not likely to to end up on our happy list. This includes when you try and test our limits.

I'm not sure that, even if I were to fall on your rhetorical sword, I'd be that offended. — The Great Whatever

Good, I prefer it that way.

If this is not a fair characterization, what is wrong with it? If it is, in what way is 'oh you just don't like mystery' not a completely fair assessment of it?

No it's not the 'oh it's all mysterious' that gets me, its more like in the face of: 'look what we can say if we take this into account, and this, and this, and that'; only to have someone say 'naaaah, mysterious.'

My claim was simply that people are separated in such a way as not to brook, ultimately, complete understanding of one another, and a kind of soft, empirical solipsism prevails, because there is no universal place in which everything comes together and no one world that can be explained by a single field of interacting mechanisms.

To move to more interesting, philosophical ground, I don't think my position commits me to saying that there can be 'complete understandings of one another'. Indeed, one of the more interesting ramifications of the kind of thing I'm promoting is that we don't even have complete understandings of ourselves. The fact that the self is differentially constituted out of a trans-personal ground means that we always retain a constitutive relation to that ground, one that pretty much by definition exceeds us in ways which we cannot ever fully master. If it applies to the 'other', it applies to 'me'.

If I were to say that some position or another is 'radical', this would be it, because it affirms not just some sort of epistemological limit to our understanding, but an ontological one: the so-called 'mystery' is 'built in', naturalized from the very beginning, as it were. To use a quip of Zizek's: "the reality I see is never “whole” — not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it."

OK some prelim: it's 7 chapters plus an introduction of about 10 to 15 pages each, not including the translator's introduction (for the Lawlor translation). It's 10- 15 pages of density though, not because (I don't think) of obscure formulations, but because Derrida is very economical in his presentation. If he introduces a term or terms, he will launch straight into a discussion of the philosophical imports of those terms without spending alot of time on pedagogy. It requires a very quick uptake of unfamiliar language, but if you can keep track of it, it's entirely readable - but the 'keeping track of' is the hard bit.

Again, anyone want copies, please PM me.

Because I think it's utterly ridiculous - and I'm not just being polemic, I really find it completely incredulous - that when we can show the grounds for something like self-feeling, when we not only can provide accounts for, but actually test the ways in which the sense of self is a variable, differential production (which doesn't, by the way, make it artifice - all of reality is a production), that one can just throw one's hands up in the air, ignore the plethora of arguments for and evidence of, and just hearken back to some romantic ideal of the self as a free-floating affective ephemera (and really, what exactly is wrong with this characterization? How is it 'just' rhetorical bluster? Tell me why you don't think this).

As far as I take it, the charge that 'oh you just don't like mystery' is literally no different to what proponents of UFOs, ghosts and shamanism would say. It's the perpetual fallback of every mystic and peddler of crystal healing from time immemorial and sides with an ideology of ignorance that is both ethically and politically compromised. I mean OK, this sounds harsh - it is harsh - but that's just honestly the level at which I see these sorts of claims about subjectivity and self-consciousness operating. Perhaps we're just ships in the night, perhaps you think this is incredulous, but I guess at some point the spade's just turned.

Basically there are two translations, the older one being 'Speech' and the newer one being 'Voice', which more appropriately corresponds to the French voix, which is the original title. So if you can get your hands on the new one (tran. Leonard Lawlor), do so. Otherwise, hit me up. Assuming Derrida is a go.