Foucault, Derrida's examiner did not know whether to give him an A or an F (fail)


 'Comprehension' – particularly if acquired ‘easily’, is a Derridean slur –What language purports to give us is the illusion of ‘mastery’ that Derrida he set out to puncture. 

Language, for Derrida, is always saying more than we want it to say; it has a tendency to undermine itself, 

even to turn against itself; there is no final liberation into some utopia of clarity, transparency and understanding.

 Language continues /the humanities from claiming the high moral pedagogic   coy game of disclosure and 

concealment/ the power of the secret./  he regarded every scrap as a ‘trace/

He employed supreme patience with intellectual difficulty and abstention from moral judgmentlike eavesdropping on a bad marriage./ (she was to remain sparing with her affection). / His teachers often complained that they couldn’t understand his papers: an quietening one’s conscience / desire to humiliate’/ Marriage Plot, asks a young theory-head this question, she is immediately set straight: ‘If it was “about” anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things./ a’s argument was that Western thought from Plato to Rousseau to Lévi-Strauss had been hopelessly entangled in the illusion that language might provide us with access to a reality beyond language, beyond metaphor: an unmediated experience of truth and being which he called ‘presence’. Even Heidegger, a radical critic of metaphysics, had failed to escape its snares. This illusion, according to Derrida, was the corollary of a long history of ‘logocentrism’: a privileging of the spoken word as the repository of ‘presence’, at the expense of writing, which had been denigrated as a ‘dangerous supplement’, alienated from the voice, secondary, parasitic, even deceitful./ The meaning of what we say, or write (a distinction without a difference, for Derrida), is always ‘undecidable’; it hardly takes shape before it dissolves again in an endless process of differing and deferring/ deed to give it any positive definition at all; to do so would be to give it an identity as susceptible to deconstruction as any other. 

Derrida did, that our subjectivity is ‘constituted’ in and through language, you have to bid farewell to the idea of a stable, unified self. That notion is another of those reassuring fictions – like god, Spinoza’s ‘substance’, Hegel’s Geist, Heidegger’s ‘being’, Lévi-Strauss’s structures – we have devised in order to escape différance and find some anchor, some ‘meaning of meanings’. We would be better off, he suggested, if we abandoned this search for foundations, and these god-terms, in favour of a ‘Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming … This affirmation then determines the non-centre otherwise than as loss of the centre. And it plays without security.’/ , who understood that persuasion wasn’t Derrida’s purpose, and that he was an heir of system-destroyers such as Wittgenstein, who used ‘satires, parodies, aphorisms’ to subvert the efforts of mainstream philosophy to ‘ground’ its claims/ You can’t bear my already having said what you want to say.’/ he ‘maddest aspect of his project’, he went on, was Foucault’s attempt to ‘let madness speak for itself,’ something it could not possibly do in the imperial language of reason. (/keen to protect speech-based tribes from the corruptions of literate societies. ‘/ was a covert ‘attempt at appropriation’. e ‘asphyxiating’. analytic philosophy – whose opposition Derrida preferred to call ‘resistance/ ‘If a right to a secret is not maintained,’ he said, ‘we are in a totalitarian space./ an act of filial repudiate/ Derrida’s call for ‘unconditional hospitality’ for illegal immigrants, a swipe at her husband’s policies: ‘There is nothing moreconditional than hospitality. The unconditional, in general, answers the longing of beautiful souls for the absolute and the pure … But it gives up the attempt to think through reality as it is.’/ ou can think only in the language of the other/ prickly / Heideggerian irrationalism./ Joycean mischief / ng Europe,’ portraying Marx as obsessed with ghosts: the inventor of what he called ‘hauntology. nscious of its ‘totalitarian, genocidal and colonialist crimes’, and willing to stand up to American hegemony/ He died in October 2004, his last request, in defiance of Jewish tradition, that he not be buried too quickly. He wanted to give resurrection a chance./ t’s fortunate that, as Lacan once put it, ‘the symbolic belongs to everybody’ and therefore ‘plagiarism doesn’t exis. 

Source London Review of Books/ A.M. Homes’s The End of Alice 

 

 

Peter Cheevers short stories and journalism published by Ether Books at:

 

A Night On The Moon
Pages : 1
Words : 3334
A wild night in Hollywood with a rock legend.
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A wild night in Hollywood with a rock legend.
Released on 17 November 2014
All Flesh Is Grass
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Words : 3651
Two young boys pray that their mother will not go to Prison again.
Listed in Historical Drama
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Two young boys pray that their mother will not go to Prison again.
Released on 25 November 2014
I Never Saw A Woman Look So Wistfully
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Words : 1916
A journalistic type story about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom
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A journalistic type story about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom
Released on 3 November 2014
No Atheists In Foxholes
Pages : 1
Words : 1707
A filmmaker has high hopes for his first film but hopes are dashed by the criitical reaction.
Listed in Dark Humour
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A filmmaker has high hopes for his first film but hopes are dashed by the criitical reaction.
Released on 26 November 2014
Not Even A Recall – Where’s That Revolver?
Pages : 1
Words : 1034
He is desperate to play Heathcliff – and her dad is directing. He gets the audition but not the part, with...
Listed in Contemporary, and Dark Humour
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He is desperate to play Heathcliff – and her dad is directing. He gets the audition but not the part, with dramatic results.
Released on 17 September 2014
The Nonsense of Living in the Now
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Words : 1623
There is voguish exhortations for us to live in the now, however this view and how we supposedly experience...
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There is voguish exhortations for us to live in the now, however this view and how we supposedly experience time is quite false.
Released on 11 February 2015
The Rats' Somme
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Words : 2117
A family endeavours to deal with an infestation of rats, meanwhile in California scientists are determining...
Listed in Horror






 


 

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