Jacques Derrida RIP

DadaKopf

The king of incomprehensibility died this week at the age of 74.

Is anyone familiar with his work? If so, what do you think? Perhaps his being dead now and all will bring new people to his ideas.

simu

He had a huge influence on literary criticism too. His idea that everything is text was spouted a lot at my French literature classes at college but I seem to remember that my impression of him (which could well be wrong) was that he went to extremely elaborate lengths to say very simple things.

His ideas will probably take on a life of their own now that he's gone.

trajan

I have to say, what I loved about the guy was his take on morality, and that simply because it's a much more complicated issue than previously thought only means we have to work harder on it. Also reading a lot of the obits he comes across as having been a genuinely nice man who took time dealing with people.

shiv

Hi Simu, what exactly did he mean with his claim that everything is text?

DadaKopf

Derrida said "there is nothing outside the text" or "there is no outside text" or something like that.

Like many postmodernists, he argued that man has no direct access to the objective world; the relationship between the subject (you or me) and the object (the world out there) is mediated through language (representation) so much that language constructs the social world.

In face, his early career was focused on dissolving the binary subject/object relation. It's only a function of language that such a dichotomy was invented. It aids comprehension but is a conceptual construct that, according to him, contradicts itself.

By claiming that everything is a text, he meant that all human activity is based on social context, of text and of power, where biary oppositions such as good/evil, private/public, intelligent/untintelligent etc are invented and maintained to support certain points of view. He went about deconstructing those binaries, revealing them to be all grey, thereby dissolving the authority of those who claimed to know or defend the Truth.

Derrida's project was a political project. He spent his life undermining fascists and subtle, nearly imperceptible abusers of power.

shiv

Thanks Dadakopf, his work sounds interesting, and slighly inscrutable. I see what people mean when they say he was a bit tough to understand, though I wonder is it like people being told the colour green looks a certain way because everyone else sees it that way and has been told the same thing..I remember reading somewhere that in some countries some colours don't exist (maybe more primitive societies), but maybe it's just the word for it they were talking about..My uni philosophy/psychology seems very far away now, but I recall being into the whole concept of constructs.

DadaKopf

Yeah, Derrida's hard to pin down. I mean, that's *my* interpretation of what he was about. At least, it's what *I* like to get out of his work.

Good question about green. I don't know where Derrida stands on any of that stuff. I'm fairly sure he would have denied that green is a kind of property in itself; drawing from the subjective/objective dichotomy, its entirely possible our experience of colour is a work of interpretation, at least significantly. (I remember my Dad telling me that when he was in Japan he made some of them laugh telling them he had black hair; he does have black hair but compared to them, they thought his hair was red.)

Another feature of Derrida's project, if I remember correctly, was how our social world is created intersubjectively. Like you say about colour, we think we have vaguely the same concepts about things when we communicate. Derrida argued that most meaning when we communicate (and think to ourselves in language) gets lost - it's just noise. There's only a small aperture of meaning we intuit when we communicate that gets picked up and reinterpreted by the listener. I think Derrida called this the 'trace' - there's a common thread of meaning that gets imperceptibly lost into the coded architecture of language. Fragments remain, and this is what we communicate with, but ultimately we're each, all of us, doomed to misunderstand each other. But we must keep trying all the same.

I would have liked to have met the guy. He came to UCD once but I missed him - spoke for three hours, apparently. Seemed like a nice chap and a good laugh. Probably a little mischevious.

shiv

Interesting stuff, Dadakopf. That's pretty depressing about only a trace of meaning being left when conversing with someone, and the resulting misunderstanding that inevitably takes place, albeit to different degrees. Did he say how the meaning gets lost exactly? Is it just through interpretation and something meaning something different to everyone?

DadaKopf

He did. He called it differance (pronnounced French stylee). I can't acutually remember what it means. The point is that words only signify things that aren't present. Books create words that don't exist before you, simple sentences stand in place of objects and concepts not present. Words actually only mean anything in relation to an entire system of language, which tends to get disconnected from systems of meaning.

Language works best when it refers only to something immediately present to the interlocutors - or, for example, a DIY instruction book which refers only to the immanent physical task at hand. However, when people try to exchange their inner thoughts, there's a loss of meaning; even in an ideal speech situation, it's one thing to use language to signfy the world, it's another thing entirely to signify someone's intentions.

Anyway, I found this excerpt from one of his more important books, On Grammatology.

ecksor

shiv wrote:

That's pretty depressing about only a trace of meaning being left when conversing with someone, and the resulting misunderstanding that inevitably takes place, albeit to different degrees.

This is demonstrated every day on boards.ie, the politics board (for example) is full of this sort of situation.

Suppose that poster A misinterprets poster B in some substantial way. It can often produce some very silly threads where poster A refuses or doesn't try to recognise that they misinterpreted poster B despite poster B taking steps to join the dots for poster A. That is assuming that poster B is willing to make the effort to overcome the communication barrier. It can also result in even sillier threads where the participants don't realise that they're both talking about quite different things.

I notice also that on this forum that the participants are more inclined to try to ensure that such a gap doesn't exist by requiring definitions to crucial words being used in the discussion which can frustrate those that aren't used to or willing to provide the information. The flipside is that if this isn't done then you end up with threads where it really isn't clear what point some posters are making exactly and the suspicion that they prefer it like that because they realise that their nonsense would be exposed far easier if they would just disambiguate their writing and give themselves less wriggle room.

DadaKopf

*Ahem*, is that aimed at anyone in particular?

ecksor

No understanding gap on this matter between us I think.

ecksor

Oops, I've only just read your recent posts on the other thread. In my defence, it is a relatively common phenomenon (as in, I would quite likely have made a similar post even if the point wasn't being demonstrated at the moment).

shiv

DadaKopf wrote:

He did. He called it differance (pronnounced French stylee). I can't acutually remember what it means. The point is that words only signify things that aren't present. Books create words that don't exist before you, simple sentences stand in place of objects and concepts not present. Words actually only mean anything in relation to an entire system of language, which tends to get disconnected from systems of meaning.

Language works best when it refers only to something immediately present to the interlocutors - or, for example, a DIY instruction book which refers only to the immanent physical task at hand. However, when people try to exchange their inner thoughts, there's a loss of meaning; even in an ideal speech situation, it's one thing to use language to signfy the world, it's another thing entirely to signify someone's intentions.

Anyway, I found this excerpt from one of his more important books, On Grammatology.

Thanks dadakopf, I pretty much agree with your first paragraph, especially when it comes to poetry, which is pretty much all about using various word combinations to stand in for a concept or emotion that won't be there for someone else reading it. As for your tendency to use 10-cent words, I don't mind As for the link, boy is there a lot of differance going on in Derrida's writing!! Everything you didn't want to know about the science of language (Perhaps the left side of my brain is just kicking up a fuss at the strain of trying to comprehend it.)

DadaKopf

Yeah, he's a slog alright.

simu

shiv wrote:

Interesting stuff, Dadakopf. That's pretty depressing about only a trace of meaning being left when conversing with someone, and the resulting misunderstanding that inevitably takes place, albeit to different degrees.

I don't know that this has to be seen as depressing. Language as we use it depends on constant shifts in nuance and meaning - how could it work as a closed system with strictly defined meanings for all words (or each word corresponding to a particular thing)? How could you express new ideas with such a system?

Maybe Derrida would be a good topic for a future "topic of the month*" even if he is a bit tough to read. I certainly want to read some of his stuff now as I've only ever heard his ideas at a few degrees removed, which isn't quite the same.

*where month = the period of time from the starting of the thread until people stop posting in it

Brenner

Only a mad Frenchman who would spend 3 hours giving a keynote speach at linguistics symposiums could spend the entire time explaining to his audience that they are as incapable as him at comprehending accurately what he meant from the moment he began his own speech...

loved Derrida and his fantastic use of oh-so-french metaphores totally revolving around sex...

sorry to hear he has disseminated