I definitely don't have a voice that exhaustively narrates everything I experience, but I do find, if I pay close attention, that there's usually a sort of murmur. I'd have trouble agreeing that my inner life isn't inner, but it's definitely laced through with (and built deeply upon) layer upon layer of inherited forms.

You can't 'imagine' a discourse because to imagine it is just to have it.

Yeah, and that actually makes sense to me intuitively. I suppose the next step would be that if imagined and actual discourse are the same thing, by imagining discourse one introduces the same play of absence/presence reality/representation you find in communication into the very self-presence of the imaginer. The problem is that discourse is always working no matter where and how it appears, so you can't do the thing of calling it an 'irreal' product of a noetic act in order to fix it in place and observe it. The category of 'existence' never applied to it in the first place, and, as discourse, it continually produces itself. It kind of fuck ups the unilateral constitutor-constituted thing. I guess, that is, you can't observe discourse without actually being drawn into it and, in a way, doing it.

I'm not sure how much sense that makes. I feel similar to you, it's all kind of there in a tip-of-the-tonguey way, without quite clicking - It also gives me that slightly nauseatingly recursive feeling I get when trying to do something like e.g. determine if the word 'autological' is itself autological.

but I still just can't see why language is supposed to be shot through with fiction, or however you want to put it.

Just spitballing here, but maybe the idea is that, since the word is ideal in both actual and fictional discourse, language functions the same way whether used nonfictionally or fictionally. Like, that we are able to write fictions at all is because language operates in this ideal, iterable way. Words don't simply correspond immediately with their referents but operate according to this ideal iterability.

Does that make sense ?

To add to that, you'd mentioned, much earlier in this thread, sentences used to teach another language. Barthes has an interesting passage on this in his Mythologies

"I shall borrow [an example] from an observation by Valery. I am a pupil in the second form in a French lycee. I open my Latin grammar, and I read a sentence, borrowed from Aesop or Phaedrus: quia ego nominor leo. I stop and think. There is something ambiguous about this statement: on the one hand, the words in it do have a simple meaning: because my name is lion. And on the other hand, the sentence is evidently there in order to signify something else to me. Inasmuch as it is addressed to me, a pupil in the second form, it tells me clearly: I am a grammatical example meant to illustrate the rule about the agreement of the predicate. I am even forced to realize that the sentence in no way signifies its meaning to me, that it tries very little to tell me something about the lion and what sort of name he has; its true and fundamental signification is to impose itself on me as the presence of a certain agreement of the predicate. I conclude that I am faced with a particular, greater, semiological system, since it is co-extensive with the language: there is, indeed, a signifier, but this signifier is itself formed by a sum of signs, it is in itself a first semiological system (my name is lion). Thereafter, the formal pattern is correctly unfolded: there is a signified (I am a grammatical example and there is a global signification, which is none other than the correlation of the signifier and the signified; for neither the naming of the lion nor the grammatical example are given separately."

I'm still a little shaky on what this means or how it corrupts all expression with indication, unless the point is something like 'a sign always indicates the symbolic system it belongs to and all of its other possible uses' which doesn't seem right.

I don't know if that is the point, but it does seem plausible me that a sign always indicates --maybe not the entirety of the symbolic system to which it belongs, or all of its other possible uses - but that it indicates at least the linguistic neighborhood of which it is part. I suppose you could say the sign always indicates a larger language game (without necessary saying it indicates the totality of the system of signification)

yeah, i guess I wasn't looking at as something that simple or commonplace, but that makes sense - and you're right, it's eminently doable. But now I feel adrift again in terms of understanding V&P. Like the actual/imagined distinction w/r/t words would be simply an individual utterance vs the word itself considered ideally. Which is totally valid, even if iterability is baked into the sign.

yes, it's definitely an oversimplification - I have no idea how accurate it is - but the things someone does under a deeper guiding passion can have their own merit. Someone can bury himself in programming for this or that reason yet the insights they gain about programming can still be valid within that domain. The thing with the Tractatus tho is it goes well beyond that - it tries to be an ontology. and that's where the psychological stuff always bleeds through

Regardless of whether expression is mysterious, though, Husserl treats it mysteriously. My impression of the structure of 'essential distinctions' in LI is that it runs something like this: Husserl distinguishes between indication and expression, then slowly, step by step, excises indicative elements until only expression is left - the end-product is the chapter on soliloquy. It's very much like 'reduction' in the sense that street mentioned earlier in this thread, not an 'epoche,' but a reduction in the sense that one 'reduces' a sauce. Only after this reduction, does he finally move on to a broader discussion of sense and reference. But it seems strange that the one situation Husserl identifies in which expression is fully, exclusively, expression is one in which expression is entirely superfluous. If we take the idea of expression in Ideas, where an inner sense is 'exteriorized' in a sign, then we have a situation in which someone is externalizing and instantly reabsorbing something he already has in full.

I want to recap my understanding of chs. 1-4 very simply to see if others agree with this interpretation. Husserl sets out to determine what a "sign" is. He distinguishes between indication and expression. He explicitly defines indication but not expression. In fact, every time he discusses expression it's bound up with indication (as in the "intimation" of interpersonal communication). This leads to a very strange section on soliloquy where the use of expressive sign occurs in solitude. Here indication, it's true, is absent, but the idea of an imaginary sign that communicates nothing (and the idea that this is where one would find the non-indicative essence of expression) is so bizarre and contradictory that its worth looking at in detail - what's going on here, why's Husserl getting all weird? And when we look at the weirdness in depth, it's clear that he's trying to resolve all sorts of inherent paradoxes of the sign (prsence/absence, reality/representation) by focusing on an instance where a sign supposedly coincides immediately with what it expresses. In other words, he's trying to understand the sign by totally glossing over what a sign is and how it works. And it's this strange, confused knot in Husserl's text that Derrida uses as a springboard to jump into *all* the contradictions and hidden assumptions of phenomenology.

This goes beyond the scope of this thread, but I don't much sympathize with this way of looking at things. It's only if one takes on a Husserlian view of consciousness, even if only to oppose it, that this idea of the entanglement of absence and presence seems powerful. The whole Husserlian thing is to stand stock-still in order to closely attend to some intuition, the way a lepidopterist analyzes a butterfly at his desk. The derridean thing is to look at the intuition, or butterfly, and feel that one can never really understand it just by looking at it, that one will always be separated from it, that one can only look at it because one's separated from it. And but then where do you go from there? It seems to me like it would be good, at that point, to leave the whole Husserl thing behind, to realize that honing-in on something is precisely to forfeit understanding, and so to leave the absence and presence of isolated objects and intuitions in order to be in the world. But Derrida seems kinda neurotically obsessed with the play between absence and presence or the play between high or low or x and y - it's always the same thing - the opposition is turned into a play-between. It's always the same compulsive operation.* And it's as much a shield against death as anything in Husserl.

That interview doesn't feel beautiful or moving to me - it feels profoundly sad. Even near death he's still playing the same compulsive game, for an interviewer. It's like he doesn't understand he's actually going to die, that it's not a rhetorical game anymore.

*Claude Levi Strauss, in Tristes Tropiques on how philosophy was taught in Paris while he was at university: "I began to learn that every problem, whether serious or trifling, may be solved by application of an always identical method, which consists in contrasting two traditional views of the question; the first is introduced by means of a justification on common-sense grounds, then the justification is destroyed with the help of the second view; finally, both are dismissed as being equally inadequate, thanks to a third view which reveals the incomplete character of the first two. These are now reduced by verbal artifice to complementary aspects of one and the same reality: form and subject-matter, container and content, being and appearance, continuity and discontinuity, essence and existence etc. Such an exercise soon becomes purely verbal, depending,as it does, on a certain skill in punning..."

So - what is crucial to note (and this is Derrida's modification of, and contribution to, the transcendental tradition of thought), is that this condition of possibility (repetition) also doubles as what Derrida will later also refer to as the condition of impossibility of the sign. That is: if a sign is to be a sign, it must be open to the possibility of repetition. This is it's condition of possibility. However, because no one instance of the sign will 'exhaust' the ideality of the sign, because the presence of the sign will always be infinitely deferred, this condition (repetition) simultaneously functions as it's condition of impossibility (impossibility of 'full instantiation' at any one 'moment').

Which is the same as saying that a 'full instantiation' would be be irretrievable and unrepeatable, no? It strikes me that, if one wants to shift things to an existential-psychoanalytic register, in the same way Derrida might say Husserl is evading death ( by insisting on a presence that always underlies signification), one could also say that Derrida is evading trauma (by insisting that signification is always co-originary - so there's always something mediating, making sure the traumatic scene is never fully present.)

But then it gets confusing because birth, death & trauma all sort of bleed into one another. At the limit, man, I don't even see what the difference between full presence and total absence is. A sign that exhausts itself fully in a single instantiation and an experience totally free of signification are equally unthinkable. Maybe that's the point. But then you could even make the case that the interlacing of possibility and impossibility, in a kind of mobius strip, is itself a defense against death - preventing the two terms from collapsing into one another by fucking with the topology a bit. A flickering candle neither goes out nor illuminates too brightly an unbearable scene.

Though, also, at this level, I think you could say just about anything tbh.

You may have noticed that I haven't posted much on the forum lately and that all of my recent posts are rather short in length. If by your question you are telling me, with a straight face, to provide all the reasons why I greatly dislike postmodernism and its maddeningly obscure jargon, then I'm afraid I don't have the time. Nor would I enjoy doing so, since, as I directly implied, I try to avoid thinking or talking about it, unless to playfully make fun of it. I also doubt that you're really very interested in hearing what I have to say, given the sarcastically dismissive tenor of your posts.

If, on the other hand, you want a short and simplistic answer to your question, then I will say that, quite as one might expect, one finds postmodernism to be nonsense, if, being in possession of moderate intelligence, and after having made an earnest attempt to understand it, no such understanding is forthcoming. One could still be wrong, of course, but it is quite impossible to be certain about very many things. Some ideas are difficult to comprehend due to the inherent complexity and depth of their insight or because the author is an unintentionally poor writer. Other ideas are difficult to comprehend because they are incoherent to begin with or else are trivial ideas given the illusion of complexity through the use of jargon. I find, in my attempts to understand postmodernism, that it consistently conforms to either of the latter sort of idea.

First, let's talk about sarcastic, dismissive tenor. You've mentioned that I was being a bit of a dick. That's true. But I think it's equally true that 90% of what you've posted on this thread is nothing but flowery sarcastic rhetoric. And I think - I hope - that you're aware enough to recognize this. As you may know, postmodernists are often charged with eschewing serious argument in favor of florid rhetorical attacks on their opponents. He who fights with postmodernists should be careful lest he thereby become a postmodernist amirite?

Q how does one distinguish between sensical and non-sensical jargon?
A if moderately intelligent, earnest individuals fail to understand the jargon, after trying charitably to understand it, then it is nonsensical.

Welp, plenty of very smart people think Schop's 'will' is metaphysical nonsense. Plenty of very smart people think it isn't. But If one looks close, looks within, really considers things - one sees who's right and who's wrong.

Your criterion is interesting in that it provides no basis for itself, but directly flatters the evaluative capacity of the person considering it. What does a mean to be an intelligent, charitable person? Well, it's hard to pin it down exactly, but one knows very well doesn't one?

What does white privilege mean? Well it's obvious to anyone who sincerely takes a look at themselves and their environment. Only someone willfully blind could fail to understand how it pervades all aspects of contemporary american life.

Can you tell me what the essential difference is between those last two paragraphs?

It feels very much to me like your way of distinguishing sensical and nonsensical jargon is no different than the sjw's way of distinguishing the comments of those who truly understand the racial undertones of event x and the comments of those who are blind to their privilege.

You've recognized the sarcasm, but you've misidentified the source. Obviously you've no reason to read the Voice & Phenomena thread, but, if you had, you'd find that I've criticized Derrida every step of the way (I participate primarily because I enjoy the collaborative exegesis of reading groups. I voted that we read Quine, not Derrida.)

I'm giving you an opportunity to defend your views under socratic scrutiny, rather than trot out uninspired variations on 'I'd rather die than x." Betwixt you and me, I don't agree with Derrida on most things. Now, please, how does one distinguish between sensical and nonsensical jargon?

Means the same as while. Aren't you British? You should know that.

Oh, you're british? My mistake, I thought you were american too - Certain americans use british or archaic terms as substitutes for words that mean literally the same thing in order to give a certain affected timbre to their speech or prose. It was confusing to me for a second, for I've heard many criticize postmodernists for favoring appearance over substance, and I was sure you, who hate the postmodernists, would be guilty of no such thing.

Avoid people who use nonsensical jargon

I think I've found one! His name is schopenhauer and he says this: "That a priority finds its confirmation every moment in the infallible security with which we expect experience to tally with the causal law : that is to say, in the apodeictic certainty we ascribe to it, a certainty which differs from every other founded on induction—the certainty, for instance, of empirically known laws of Nature—in that we can conceive no exception to the causal law anywhere within the world of experience."

a priority? apodeictic? induction? I've never heard of such things! He seems very much like a postmodernist. The only trouble is I'm not sure if his jargon is sensical or nonsensical. How does one tell the difference?

Oof battery acid AND chemical fire? Postmodernists must be very bad indeed! Tell me, what is a postmodernist? How do I recognize one in order that I may avoid one? I certainly don't want to end up gargling battery acid! (Especially not while - whilst, that is - burning alive in a chemical fire.)

Time-consciousness has always been the most intriguing part of Husserl for me, but, though I own it, I've yet to read his work on the subject. I only know of it through the sketches of others. I've been reluctant to read it out of both intimidation and fear of being let down (everyone speaks so highly of Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, but Proust has so far exceeded any philosopher I've ever read on the topic (utterly on another level) that I'm a bit worried it won't live up to the hype. ) Anyway, Proust-signalling aside, I'll bracket my broader criticisms of Derrida's approach until the end of the book. I'm going to reread ch.4, as well, because there's still some things I'd like to say about the whole reality/imagination/sign thing.

The Tractatus takes model theory for a fist order language and turns it into a spiritual exercise, or as a kind of ontology.

What must your inner life be like in order to do this - and to believe absolutely in it? I'm aware of how reductive this sounds, but it just feels like a deeply lonely, utterly deprived, yet extremely intelligent person using the materials available to him to create a safe world (the philosophical equivalent of that house he made). Kind of like a logical Henry Darger - and just as strange. I could never get into the tractatus - it was too alien to me and I was too young, when I tried, to bracket my belief in its validity in order to understand it on its own terms.

yeah, idk, I'm fine with nonlinearity -usually prefer it actually - but I look to literature or avowedly experimental philosophy when that's what I'm after. I feel kinda of annoyed at the idea of book that painstakingly draws all sorts of distinctions, progesses from one point to another, pretending it's linear, when it isn't (If you want to just go for the jugular, why waste all that time on the early chapters?.) I'm still trying to charitably read the book as what it pretends to be, and criticizing it from that standpoint.

I think the point about my death is that the realization that everything I can communicate about myself, and what I am, is from something handed down from the past and that can be iterated indefinitely into the future.

You may be right, but I haven't read beyond chapter 4, and can't find this idea there.

I also think this sprinkling in of large themes has been characteristic of Derrida's style so far, but before some of it was in footnotes.

That's true, but earlier they were more like coquettish teasers of what's to come, little flashes of the summit motivating the weary reader to continue to scale the monotonous lower cliffs . What feels different about chapter 4 is that suddenly - bam! - we're at the summit and seemed to have skipped 70% of the mountain. Kinda like 'ok we've proved we can do a little bit of climbing, call in the helicopter, let's get to the good stuff'

Do you get that sense at all? It feels a lot like that to me.

I'm not trying to say that Derrida isn't touching on things that are deeply part of Husserl's philosophy - I'm just trying to understand how the first 3 chapters bring us to the themes of chapter 4. If, in chapter 4, the tight - tho oft-interrupted - analysis gives way totally to a freewheeling impressionistic meditation on various phenomenological themes, well, I feel a little disappointed. It seems straightforward that the the possibility of indefinite repeatability, or iteration, has no bearing on my death, unless it's specifically the possibility of my iterating.

So, if Derrida wants more than to simply re-announce the relation that the metaphysics of presence has to one's own being-toward-death, thereby elucidating for the readers that he's read Heidegger; if, that is, he wants to make of iteration tout court a privileged window onto this relation (which he surely does, given the labor he's expended in the first 3 chapters setting up all the pieces); then I think he's failed to do so. The most one can say, at this point, is that the possibility of indefinite iteration evades the death of all rational beings.

(I am familiar with section 39 of Ideas but (one of) Derrida's aim(s), in chapter 4, is to show that the discussion of signs in the first LI occludes the inevitability of my death. It would be easy to show that section 39 of Ideas is super presence-y and very death-averse. All you have to do is quote it in full. But presumably the originality of the book is that it's not making the easy move of saying 'someone who thinks consciousness survives the destruction of the world probably has some death-issues.')

It's interesting, if you read about the experience of growing up in the Wittgenstein family, how little they were allowed to express emotion - and how much silent suffering this led to, culminating finally, for many of them, in suicide. Whereof one can't speak (one's homosexuality, or need for affection, or fear) thereof one must remain silent (even if one must kill oneself to do so). just one way of looking at things. Imo ludwig, suicidal himself, preserved his life only by struggling his way out from the tractatus and into the PI. maybe he just wanted to prove to himself it was possible to actually talk to another person and could only do thay by trying to prove it was impossible he was simply talking to himself about a world he alone created.

I wonder if the examples of exceptional words you cite points less to a problem with possible repetition and more to a problem of access. Certain people can repeat these, others cannot. This is especially clear with twin language. I have twin brothers and have witnessed some of this firsthand - it doesn't seem all that different from watching very close friends exchanging in-jokes or personally charged words. a close friend and I, in high school, built our own secret language referring to certain shared ideas - "fly fishing" "glitch lake" "the french thing" - which allowed us to communicate quickly based on all-night conversations we'd had - these conversations, so to speak, were taken as read. What's idiosyncratic isn't unrepeatable, I think, it's just not democratic. Husserl's own idiosyncratic terminology is a perfect example.

I'll put together a more thorough response later this evening, but, I don't understand how the possibility of indefinite repetition occludes my death. In the first part of LI, Husserl waxes a bit poetic (& I'm smuggling in later terminology to paraphrase) - but he speaks with a certain solemity about science as a project of preservation and transmission which allows the noetic acts of long-dead men to be repeated anew. Wouldn't the death of all rational beings be what's effaced here? It feels a little to me like Derrida's forcing Heideggerean considerations where they don't quite fit - as tgw says, whether you agree with the ideas or not, they're allusions here, not arguments, and I'm not sure how well they illuminate the text purportedly under discussion.

whoa what a shift with this chapter - I take back what I said earlier about the soliloquy chapter in LI - I've read it 10x now and it really is a bottleneck where Husserl narrows in on what he sees as the purely expressive, in order to move on to more general concerns. It's just so subtle and almost insouciant, it's hard to recognize what's going on. I do think this imaginary communication falls apart for exactly the reasons Derrida cites. I look forward to Street's summary

when i do this same experiment, it's very strange. I have all sorts of attendant dreamlike images. I have the same sort of linguistic breakdowns too. But the word itself is like a weird center (a kind of 'fire pit') all these things congregate around. It seems like language is what creates these firepits that allow my thoughts to coalesce. But they also flow into pre-established channels. The word itself seems somehow outside myself, its in the shared space beyond my hut, so to speak.

That's perfect (let me build on what you've said about Derrida and language) How do you? Would most competent english speakers agree? Would this be possible without a deep immersion in the english language? What are you understanding in this solo imagining? Where does it come from? How do you think your understanding of this idea would be different if you hadn't immersed yourself in language?

I don't know Husserl as well as you, but I do know him well enough to agree with your comments about his often solipsistic tenor. What I meant, though, was that I just don't see the centrality here, in the first logical investigation. It's passed over so quickly, soliloquy (all of the sections on indication are as long or longer!). It's only by reading certain sections of Ideas back into the investigation that Derrida can give the soliloquy section such weight. And maybe that's fine. I don't want to press the point too much, but just note that we've definitely moved from a close reading of the investigation to something entirely different.

I don't find Husserl's notion that there's a layer of sense and experience that has no need for indication at all implausible. In fact it seems to me the vast majority of my experience goes on like this without communicative comment. Crispin Sartwell has a great comment to this effect as well, that even trying to imagine what it would be like to have a running commentary on all your experience, or to think that all experience is linguistically mediated, is just totally absurd and impossible

Mmm, but I guess that would have nothing to do with expression, right? For these experiences, one could simply say 'it is what it is.' What would it mean to express these experiences to ourselves? Or to indicate them to ourselves? I think self-directed speech is important, as well, but it seems something very different then presenting a mediately immediate re-experience of what we're already experiencing.

It's still phenomenologically important, though, because we can extract the essence of, say, the semantics of a word, or the semantics of it relative to a certain intention.

Do this, though, as an experiment - imagine the word 'contemplation' and extract the semantic essence from it. And attend closely to how this plays out. It's really not clear what's going on, at least when I try to do it.

'Here again, this exteriority, or rather this extrinsic characteristic of indication, is inseparable, in its possibility, from the possibility of all the reductions to come, whether they are eidetic or transcendental.'

I'm still not sure what to make of this one. For one thing, the 'here again' seems to suggest that Derrida has made this point before, or given some justification for it; but I can't find anything to that effect. Grammatically, it's a little confusing what's being literally said here: is it that the reductions cannot be performed without making use of indication? Or is it that indication cannot happen without the reduction? Presumably the former is more in keeping with the tone of the text. But then I do not know why this is so.

Grammatically, I think he's saying something like: "that (approach/stance/method) which makes it possible to consider indication as extrinsic, is also what makes it possible to perform (or even conceive of) eidetic and transcendental reductions."

Perhaps what is at stake here is not the reduction itself, but any efficacy it has in reporting its results. I suspect for Derrida that these two things turn out to be inseparable – if we can't secure phenomenological results, then tho that extent there really is no reduction the way Husserl wants for there to be one. This in turn seems to be based on the following gambit: knowledge is not properly knowledge unless it can be recorded and communicated linguistically, and Husserl's notion that there is a pre-linguistic stratum of experience is a fantasy. Husserl would hold, I imagine, that it is possible to conduct eidetic analyses intuitively, without needing to record them linguistically, and the fact that we must resort to language to communicate them is a mere accident (one that could perhaps be bypassed if we were a certain sort of intuitive mind-reader?)

This seems right to me. (It could be fruitful to bring PI-era Wittgenstein in here, but I'm not well-versed enough to do so.) The broad strategy of chapter 3 is to characterize the 'soliloquy' section of the first Logical Investigation as a larval 'epoche,' where words are seen as irreal noemata (which double, without modifying, other noemata.) The idea appears to be that the discussion of 'the solitary life of the soul' is the place, in LI, where Husserl determines the essence of expression and thus offers especial insight into what he's about.

Derrida shuttles between Ideas and LI constantly throughout this chapter, which makes things difficult. Everything about the 'ex' in expression, the movement outward, comes from Ideas. It's the story of a 'meaning' produced by a noetic act and then carried delicately into the arms of a word, which will preserve it. Derrida, if I understand him, is taking this later understanding of expression and retrojecting it onto the first investigation, in order to sketch a movement in which meaning is produced, proceeds outward, and is instantly reabsorbed. The 'imagined' word expresses something we already understand (having produced it in a noetic act) and so immediately grasp.

I honestly don't understand the purpose of the 'soliloquy' chapter in LI. It doesn't seem to have, for Husserl, the import or ultimate significance Derrida ascribes to it. It feels less like a honing-in on the essence of expression and more like an aside on a unique case. But even taken on its own terms, I don't really understand what Husserl is saying. If we already understand immediately what we're saying to ourselves, what's going on with these interpolated (and yes, inherited) signs? Why are they there? Why is the immediacy of meaning taking a superfluous detour through a self-dissolving mediator?

There is something deeply unintelligible about the soliloquy section, at least to me - maybe that's Derrida's point. Expression without indication doesn't make sense at all (why would we reflect what we already have back to us through a contingent symbol?) Either you dispense with the external movement toward a sign (and so are left, I guess, with 'pression') or the translation of experience into words somehow, by that very movement, reshapes that experience and gives you something new. A closed circuit from meaning to expression to immediate comprehension is a bit like mailing yourself letters which explain why you sent them. (This goes beyond the texts but, in my experience, if you listen, really listen to your interior monologue, it's not a neutral expression of your thoughts, but a very subtle kind of theater where different voices with different 'tones' present those thoughts to you in a certain way, consoling or cajoling you. Honestly, try it out, take a close listen for a half hour.)

Would you say that his notion of the architectonic is particularly compromised by this causal approach relative to the rest of his philosophy?

What do you mean by Kant's architectonic being a 'causal theory'?

Are you reading V&P? If you're looking for clarification to better understand the book, that's great, but, if not, it might be better to bring this up in another thread, just to keep the convo on point. Not trying to be rude, just the book itself is complicated enough.

What I was asking, though, is what similarities you see between Kant's archictectonic of reason & Constructal Theory

What are the similarities you see between Kant's architectonic of reason and Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory?

good stuff - I probably won't be able to respond til tuesday, pulling a couple long shifts at work, but I'll join back in when I can.

This isn't totally relevant, but I thought it was funny: The introduction to Strategies of Deconstruction includes a gallery of existing interpretations of V&P & one interpreter, Scanlon, thinks that the book is written in character, that it's a subtle joke - Derrida isn't writing as Derrida, is the idea, but as a caricature of a pedantic academic exegete, a bumbling one who believes that every detail of the text has to manifest, equally, the idea of the metaphysics of presence (perhaps the way a goofy monk might try to argue that that the most trivial or auxillary sentence in the bible is a perfectly clear manifestation of the essence of God's will.)

I think this is obviously absurd but its a funny lens through which to view the text (and i suspect Scanlon himself, whoever he is, probably views his reading the same way I do)

My copy of Logical Investigations mentions another book that includes a close (though critical) reading of V & P (one chapter for each chapter of V&P) - Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice by Joseph Claude Evans. Gonna see if there's any insight there.

I can see this, but the discussion of time-consciousness then seems far more relevant than the discussion of expression, whose significance I still don't really understand. I know Derrida wants to show there is no pre-linguistic substratum of experience, and that the fact/essence distinction somehow maps onto the indication/expression distinction, and that these distinctions can't be made pre-linguistically, but thus far I only know that he claims these things, but neither why nor how.

Yeah, I agree. (My cynical suspicion is that Derrida's starting with indication/expression for the theatricality: The very first distinction in the very first logical investigation! In Phenomenology's beginning lies its ruin! The optimistic and charitable part of me hopes this is cleared up a bit as the book progresses.)

I agree that showing that indication can't be disentangled from expression goes against what Husserl explicitly says. What I don't understand is why Derrida thinks this would be ruinous for the phenomenological project. — The Great Whatever

The best I can think is that it would be a matter of evidence - if evidentiary intuitions* are built on the nonevident (or intertwined with them all the way down) that would be a problem for phenomenology, no? Though, you're right, that's not quite what Derrida himself is saying, at least thus far.

*I'm sure my terminology's off, because it's been a while, but referring to the opening sections of Ideas here.