If you claim to understand this man then you have completely misunderstood him

Ive actually read him unlike most of you.

Is not reading him the only way to truly understand him? In that case I'm an expert.

>He didn't double the commentary

You wouldn't understand.

But I do.

I understand that he's the king of the pseuds

this.

tfw no derrida gf

...

shitposting thread

>privileging understanding of derrida over misunderstanding
>implying misunderstanding doesn't lead to differance and a multiplicity

Reminder that /pol/ spluttering about "cultural marxism" of Derrida is actually more in the spirit of Derrida than any of the English lit majors who couldn't hack it in the philosopher program.

This is some troll tier hot bait, let's see how many he gets.

If there is any group of people on this website who outright cannot understand Derrida it is /pol/.

what's the point of understanding him? you are not going to get dialectic powers from it and deconstruction is passé

This is true, I mean it "is".

No, under no conditions can you understand anything at all. Once you read Of Grammatology you will understand.

You will get better at reading though. Although that kind of anal reading gets really tiresome really quickly to be honest.
Derrida is fun only if you enjoy being as autistic as possible about writing. At certain point you stop giving a fuck what some text, whether your own or someone else's, "is" "actually" "saying".

Jewish nonsense

That would be OP.

so much confusion in this post

Then you don't.

Why?

He is one of the most interesting, cultured, and intelligente readers of philosophers. Thinking about the use of reading is so typical of the philistinism that has ruined higher education today...

Yeah... no. This is the typical reduction of Derrida to cheap tricks that happened in American english departments.

>unironically listens to jordan peterson

I can't believe people fall for that pea brained idiot. Not teaching philosophy in high schools was a mistake americans are still paying to this day.

You wouldn't understand. :^)

That's what unfunny people say.

Look at this guy, claiming to understand him. You obviously don't understand at all

I don't know why everyone claims that derrida can't be understood when there are actually numerous books explaining and commenting derrida

ITT everyone proving OP right.

OP I think you and I are the only two people on this board who understand Derrida

>ITT everyone proving OP right
How?

It was my intention to claim that, but writing does claim things that I do not intend.
>Once you read Of Grammatology you will understand that under no conditions can you understand anything at all.

user has been parroting this nonsense for a little while now. At least you realized the title of the book is Of Grammatology and not just Grammatology. Read it again.

I know, right?

wow...lit btfo!

You are forgetting the points about ethical seriousness and care that have to go into each misunderstanding.

If Derrida was really into that spirit he wouldn't be have told the lady that said that deconstruction is like seinfeld to fuck off.

Reducing deconstruction to tricks like "you can't know anything" or "everything is meaningless" misses the radical seriousness of that project.

But the points about ethical seriousness, when you get down to it, aren't they just radical centrist liberalism? Maybe even pop-Freud?

Deconstruction is not a social philosophy, it's about text and how they are deconstructed.

I'm not sure about pop-freud, and no they are not really radical centrism because they are intensely critical of institutions and the law.

A lot of the work of Derrida in the 80s could be seen as a movement from Heidegger concept of abandonment to a less reactionary conception of ethics as found in Kierkegaard.

That is an ethical seriousness that is absolute in similar terms to those of Levinas, but without his metaphysical structure.

For Derrida the ethical action has to happen independently of rules, institutions, procedures, with a full responsibility. Tu simplify Derrida is someone who is trying to build a convincing philosophical discourse for the "chaotic good" stance.

There is no doubt for example that in the "punching nazis" debate today he would stand with anti-fa and not with centrists.

The Politics of Friendship by Derrida is not liberal radical centrism to you?

>There is no doubt for example that in the "punching nazis" debate today he would stand with anti-fa and not with centrists.

does deconstruction endorse fukuyama? that liberal democracies are the end of history?

I haven't read it, I have to admit. Can you give an example?

The rehabilitation of Schmitt (albeit partial and with a lot of criticism) is def. not radical centrism and is hostile to the liberal tradition of Locke.

I mean modern anglo liberalism is a derivation of Locke's contractualism. Politics of Friendship demolishes that by constantly pointing at a more profound universalistic friendship.

Similarly when Derrida talks about the duty of hospitality it's a far call from the pragmatism of centrists. And it should not be confused with the calls for open borders of new liberals. Because those are conditional "open borders are good because they help capital". Derrida is unconditional: "open borders are good because the strange at our door is our guest and we have a duty to take care of them no matter what."

No it doesn't. Because for derrida the real democracy is always to come, it hasn't happened yet and we are still in an unjust society. Until justice doesn't come to end history is not over.

>And it should not be confused with the calls for open borders of new liberals
> Derrida is unconditional: "open borders are good because the strange at our door is our guest and we have a duty to take care of them no matter what."

sounds like he would only enable capital, Marx/Zizek are right on this one, over Heidegger/Derrida

It's vulgar materialism to dismiss any philosophy that doens't address capital. Marx wasn't like that and neither is Zizek.

Derrida by himself is not enough for a radical projects. But neither is Walter Benjamin, Adorno Trotsky, or Gramsci.

Derrida has fought the good fight, and is incredibly enlightening to anyone who has an interest in philosophy. Is he enough as a political thinker? No. Is he a centrist? No. He is a reactionary? No.

Were the people who wanted to centre their politics around him flabby liberals? Yes, and derrida often wrote against them.

I've not read him, so I don't understand him, so I understand him.

Are you jewish or do you have another excuse for misunderstanding jewish intellectuals this badly?

Fuck off nazi scum.

No, deconstruction literally creates an a political aporia behind which capital can continue to grow.

How?

The national socialists were disbanded over 70 years ago and you didn't answer the question. Would you like to try again?

That deconstruction can lead to Apolitical conclusions is a good criticism. But so does the study of Husserl and Freud. That's trying to make deconstruction to be do something it doesn't tackle.

Of course if you take a discipline born as a practice/event in reading and you make it the centre of your metaphysics you don't get much political, you miss a lot.

But the accusation of complicity with capital eh that's pretty hard. Deleuze & Guattari are actually much more susceptible to it. And Foucault too. But not Derrida exactly because of his distance from politics until the 90s.

The combination of its skepticism and liberalism. Plays into the stagnation of politics or else like Deleuze through progressiveness becomes the ideology of late capital.

That's some tankie shirt right there. Derrida's forms of skepticism are not answered by Marxist epistemological theories and should be taken seriously. Waving them away as reactionary does no thinking person any good.

>sounds like he would only enable capital, Marx/Zizek are right on this one, over Heidegger/Derrida
Marx only enables capital by continuing to believe in a society centered on production. His goal is a moral version of capitalism cleansed of any injustices, which is a very bourgeois dream. Besides, capitalism already short-circuited Marx' revolution by liberating all workers as "entrepreneurs". Now everybody is a capitalist, a pretty good joke on the part of capitalism.

You might want to read Thomas Piketty before continuing to recycle these lies.

But I don't think you are in good faith and you already know how false is what you are saying.

I understand that Derrida is a private ironist.
I also understand that, in the words of Jacky-boy himself, "deconstruction is justice."

>deconstruction is justice
A provocative statement for sure. I think it relates justice to deconstruction so to illustrate the force and urgency of what justice is, in context: it is needed and, in a way, unavoidable. This derives from the Derridean observation that deconstruction is what happens to texts, with an apparently similar drive.

"The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue... The idea is to disarm the bombs... of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants"

Jacques Derrida

And replace it with what? What bothers me most about Derrida and his followers is that this question is never answered. They aim to cut out what they perceive as a cancer. But what they are really cutting out is the beating heart of civilization - the very civilization that made their confused effort possible in the first place.

They don't believe they are cutting the beating heart out of civilization, because they have no answer as to what it would be replaced with. They don't appreciate the magic and majesty in it's development and coordination. Like the creationist, they think surely this is the work of man. And if it's the work of man, then they can make it their work as well to change it. But they are wrong. It is the work of evolution - it is a super-organism which has formed individuals into the tissues of organs of a bone fide organism, incrementally, over generations, through selective processes.

Argue that multicultural societies are always more tyrannical than homogenous ones, or that nation states are evolutionary objects which are millenia in the making (and that operating on a spinal cord is much harder than what they in their naivety suggest it is), and they will respond either not at all, or with nonsense so convoluted that you wonder if they, as Chomsky may suggest, actually have equation-envy for the physicists.

I find it impossible to believe that anybody who takes these ideas seriously has an understanding of the evolutionary, biological nature of the construction of society. Where they see order, they see the work of individual tyrants, where there is really merely a square inch of a root, of a large tree, which has been developing since man first began to organize himself in societies based on agriculture.

The ignorance, and even contempt, for biology and evolution - red in tooth and claw, but also gold in its crowning achievements - is the greatest sin of Derrida and his followers. And it comes from ignorance. If they wanted to seriously study society, language, and people, they would put aside fancy hyphenated words, and begin with rational, objective analysis from first principles. This has put us on the moon and cured polio, and the opposite has only ever put men into drudgery.

What does Rorty means by private ironist?

doesnt mean he is any less of a faggot

>Where they see order, they see the work of individual tyrants, where there is really merely a square inch of a root, of a large tree, which has been developing since man first began to organize himself in societies based on agriculture.
shizolyrical, I like it

Given Derrida's own history, and some of his remarks, I think that he takes the politocal purpose of deconstruction to be the dismantling of the narratives and ideas powerful individuals and groups use to maintain and justify control over their interests. Deconstruction is all about revealing the hidden contradictions that lie within an idea, and can serve to undermine it. Derrida seemed to care deeply about being able to hold the powerful to account and questioning/fracturing hegemony. The idea of deconstruction as justice seems to stem from its ability to do these things.

The question of what Derrida's positive political vision was, or whether he even had one, is important and difficult to answer. I think you're right to point out the often corrosive consequences of how deconstruction is used by many of Derrida's followers (particularly in some parts of academia, e.g. english departments, post-colonial studies, science studies, etc.) Still, it's important to remember that Derrida wanted nothing to do with the Stalinism that was prominent in French academia in the 1960's, he was critical of the May '68 student movements, and he never jumped on the Maoist bandwagon when that became popular. His politics clearly weren't of a kind with the contrarian nihilism you seem seem to see from certain followers of Foucault, for instance. He described himself as being on the left, and likely held fairly conventional positions regarding anti-imperialism, opposition to nuclear weaponry, dislike of perceived American hegemony, etc. Overall, though, it's difficult to say exactly what his views were because, unlike most French academics at the time, he wasn't very open about his politics.

Given the revolutionary force of deconstruction, and its wide reaching consequences, I can sympathize with your unease about how it's applied. It often does seem like those who use it in a political context are just supplying radical critiques without radical proposals for how to proceed. If you're interested in a political/ethical interpretation of deconstruction, Simon Critchley has some interesting work on that. You could also consider reading some of Derrida's work on Levine's, who he engaged quite seriously with.

An ironist, as Rorty defined it, is someone who understands and comes to terms with the contingency of their values, politics, the philosophical tradition they work within, etc. Basically, they've stopped believing that these things have anything to do with universally recognizable matters of fact, or "the Truth". Rather, they're just different ways of coping with the world, and had we been born in a different time and place, or under different circumstances, other methods of coping might be more appropriate. Furthermore, since none of these methods of coping provide one with the "True", "Right" or "Best" picture of reality, there will never be a final method that we all eventually recognize as the correct one.

I don't think you have any idea of what biology is since to any biologist the idea of a distinct Arab and Jew is ridicolous, let alone about race. The closest thing to race is such large groups of genetic markers that they don't make any sense politically and are certainly not the cornerstone of our civilization which is based at best on the universalistic values of enlightenment and christianity.

You are living in a world of fictions that have no reality, inventions by regressives who have only bankrupt systems. You are laughable ideologues who should hide yourself out of shame for your ignorance. No knowledge of science, no knowledge of philosophy, no knowledge of history.

>everything i know about derrida's from youtube

please friend, i'm thankful you've posted, it is impossible to say how thankful i am, but as a friend i must tell you to stop posting. i know it's impossible for you, but please friend

stop pretending, user got owned

My friend, please fuck off my friend. One just needs to have read the gift of death to know that.

>owning a blatant troll post

This is what the weltanschauung of chapo trap house and weird twitter does to people.

By ignoring troll posts a whole generation of teenagers actually grew up believing them. When I respond to them it's not for the person but for all the ones that are lurking.

>since to any biologist the idea of a distinct Arab and Jew is ridicolous

I don't agree with this at all. Siblings are distinct from one another biologically, for God's sake. People on earth are genetically indistinguishable? Or that they aren't distinguishable enough to manifest in-group preference based in genetics? Possibly true, but morphological differences that are too great very clearly prevent genetic and cultural assimilation, as it has with blacks, Hispanics and Asians in the United States, all of whom decidedly do not marry and breed in large numbers outside of their race. The degree to which this is for genetic preference and which is cultural preference is actually an unsolved question. I believe it's probably 70-30, genetics/culture, especially considering the levels of admixture in Brazil.

>The closest thing to race is such large groups of genetic markers that they don't make any sense politically and are certainly not the cornerstone of our civilization
I agree within a certain limit of genetic difference. When there is a lack of cultural and genetic assimilation for one group, and also within that group the manifestation of a unified racial and political identity, I think your argument is extremely contestable, if not plain wrong.

'Deconstruction' is passe but Derrida's ideas of deconstruction are still the hot shit

My girlfriend is Irish and I'm Italian, she has blonde hair and I have dark hair. Yet you collect us as caucasian. When in reality if you'd probably check my genetic make up you would notice that I have more to do with the north-africans that were in contact with Italy then with her. And yet I'm considered white just like her. Why because it has nothing to do with biology, it's a cultural construction. We just have assumed certain characteristics in order to create some collections.

Incidentally this is the big problem that EVERY biologist had with Nicholas Wade's book on race.

Some of these characteristics are not even biological but again societal: so much of what your race is depends on where you were born. So many of my friends in Italy with an olive complexion would be called Arabs if they had an Algerian passport, and White if they had an Italian passport.

And that's because it's all bullshit, race realism is creationism level science. And how could it be otherwise? Most of the research that right wingers publish don't go doing thorough mapping of people genetic inheritance. They use self-reported race from the census.

So don't even try to come and tell me that we hold evolution or biology in contempt. I know my Biology very well and so did Derrida.

Deconstruction doesn't necessitate a replacement. It doesn't create a vacuum.

>the very civilization that made their confused effort possible in the first place.

Derrida is very aware of this. Western philosophy makes his philosophy possible, so he doesn't move outside of or advocate the destruction of that tradition. He thinks it is impossible to do so.

A good poster.

>italian
No arabs allowed m8

I would call her Celtic and therefore Germanic, but this is a historical construction in that biology as you rightly point out is hard to categorize neatly. The Germanics are considered virtually everybody in central and northwestern Europe for some thousands of years. I find it a useless, overly broad genetic categorization except when the genetic distance between the Germanics and those humans in Asia, Africa and the Americas is compared. Then Germanics seem a lot more similar, and indeed this is borne out in analysis of DNA.

The classifications of race are not perfect, you and I agree on that. But that does not mean it is arbitrary either. Visual data, which forms an imperfect correlation to genetic data, but a correlation still, can reliably inform classifications, as evidenced by the supposed grouping based on skin color and other morphological attributes in the first place (white, black, asian) correlating to genetic distance among the members. Though those classifications are less perfect than genetically informed classifications (and genetically informed classifications are very fuzzy and where the line is drawn is arbitrary), they are less imperfect when the breadth is increased. In a world of Africans and Europeans, the world will be divided that way, with Mediterraneans finding themselves closer to Germanics because they are more related to each other than either of them to the Sub-Saharan African, genetically, phenotypically and culturally. But in a world of only Europeans, then they are separated and the same type of distance opens up between them, though on a smaller scale.

This argument over race has come from a misunderstanding. My original point had to do with the biological nature of society itself. Society is the organism I spoke chiefly of. It consumes individuals and families, and fashions them into the institutions of society. This is an incredibly complex thing that nobody really understands. And so I find deconstruction of it which does not rely on the same methods which (demonstrably) successfully deconstructed living organisms, to be lacking in the tools necessary to be valid, let alone sound - based in some notion of truth which can be arrived at by experiment, quantitative analysis, reason. I legitimately don't understand how to view the world any other way. To study actual living organisms with reason - observation, experimentation, quantitative analysis - yields results which are extremely impressive and predictive, and helpful to society, so my stance is a moral one, but I think an important one. To study the societal organism with a different tool set makes me question the judgement of the person that does it, and the validity of the claims, in the same way I question witch doctors and shamans.

??

>Similarly when Derrida talks about the duty of hospitality it's a far call from the pragmatism of centrists. And it should not be confused with the calls for open borders of new liberals. Because those are conditional "open borders are good because they help capital". Derrida is unconditional: "open borders are good because the strange at our door is our guest and we have a duty to take care of them no matter what."
Oftentimes I think entertaining a pinch of consequentialism is healthy. Other times I think a vital large dose is needed to prevent someones head being too up their own arse. Things like this just remind me of the priest from Nazarin. Even the synopsis depresses me, but sometimes throbbing sobriety is better than drunken, wasteful idealism.

Consider the faithful Catholic who wishes to hide Jews from the Gestapo, but when asked by the Nazis - not even interrogated - tells the truth that they are in his basement since deception is evil, and he says he cannot commit evil so that good may come about.

that's good

I think it's more a problem of collections. Species function well since you have a more or less a clear cut in whether they can couple and whether their offspring is fertile or not.

Humans are the same species so when it comes to ethnic division the whole this is fuzzy. Given a series of elements you can create an infinite number of sets. For example before I said Italian, and most would say I'm Italian, but in reality I'm Corsican which would resent being defined as Italian. But yeah I think we both come to an agreement.

>To study the societal organism with a different tool set makes me question the judgement of the person that does it, and the validity of the claims, in the same way I question witch doctors and shamans.

But deconstruction is not a tool set different than reason, it is a tool set that works within reason and that is why Derrida is a philosopher. Deconstruction necessitates philosophy to exist, and necessitates that we give importance to rationality, order and coherence to work. You can't deconstruction does not happen for example in Donald Trump's speech because coherence is not a value for Trump.

Besides that deconstruction needs two other things: writing and natural language.

Socrates philosophy is safe from this because it hasn't gone through the Pharmakon of writing.

Similarly the results of natural sciences in their use of formal languages to communicate (read math) they are safe from this. Communication between machines is safe too as it does not have the difference between voice/writing.

But as long as we are going to articulate our truth in natural written languages one has to deal with the results of Derrida.

>coherence is not a value for Trump

the man has staged the biggest political upset in 25 years by being consistent on a handful of principles. if you followed the campaign his speeches developed an idea of consolidating american identity by defeating illegal immigration, taking sovereignty back by going against liberal institutions and standing for the economic prosperity of the people. this is a deep understanding of the rhythms of history. Nationalism against globalism, patriotism over self hatred, law and order against anarcho-tyranny.

if you hate the man so much and can't bear to listen to his orations then I urge you to read this essay by Michael Anton:
amgreatness.com/2016/09/05/flight-93-election/

I wonder if you will write any coherent response to it. Like how legacy media treats Steve Bannon, they have gotten so lazy and soft and incompetent that they find it impossible to even engage and debate with this new surge of ideas so they have to shriek "white supremacy"

I don't hate the guy, I just find yours a silly positions like yours. He talks in very coincise and vague bites that don't effectively say anything and work as a projections tests for his followers.

Even this pose of a deep knower of rhythms of history and nationalism is laughable when you consider that trump is a man who has probably not read a book in the last 20 years. Let alone him being a modern day cultural warrior armed with homer and thucydides.

I mean yours is a typical invention of the right, incapable of actually looking at reality, you come up with a narrative that was never there.

See what German reactionaries did in the 19th century when they picked up Tacitus's Germania to straight up invent their racial unit. Never mind Germania was a piece of Roman propaganda already questioned at the time.

in his interviews with Charlie Rose, Steve Bannon, who is perhaps the most well read political operatives today (I hope you won't contest this. for example he gave a speech on radio over Arnold Toynbee's death when he was 22 years old because he loved A Study of History so much. or the fact that he described his role in the Trump Administration as "of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Tudors" and the list could go on and on and on.), praises Donald Trump's intelligence and his intuition and grasp of what is important and what isn't. He says that Carl Jung is the "third writer he (Trump) studied"

do you think bannon is lying? or that he is mistaken? yea, trump may not articulate the sickness and the degeneracy of modernity and of the liberal institutions but he is a pragmatic operative of those counter forces. that is why you should read Anton's essay (who is a solid Straussian). i don't know if you are familiar with the neo-reaction literature but they always have a problem of how to acquire power and how to apply it. Bannon and Trump are the first guys in the enemy trenches

I think Trump has read a paper of Jung when he was in college and that Bannon likes to spin his little millenarist story about how Trump is a 12d chess player rather than just a skilled marketer.

Also pragmatic... it's been almost an year since he has been in power and he has literally done nothing.

I mean my opinion of Bannon is that he is just a LARPER. He liked to play at the political intrigue, pull all the historical references to seem cool, and as long as he was winning people thought he knew something, but heh what happened now?

Anyway yeah he is the most well-read political operative in washington. In washington ppl read only one book: Harry Potter.

i won't argue any further than this. by 2024 if Trump accomplishes 1 tax reform, 2 infrastructure, 3 wall. and immigration reform 4 healthcare; he will be considered the greatest president since Theodore Roosevelt

but it was good talking to you man, here's to more civilized discourse

Given Derrida's criticisms of logocentrism, or "the metaphysics of presence", I don't think he would accept your claim that Socrates' philosophy, or formal languages are immune to deconstruction. In the case of the former, Derrida considers speech to be derivative of thought, which is composed of mental representations (i.e. symbols), and these mental symbols are just as subject to interpretation and indeterminacy as any other variety. In the case of both formal languages and speech, Derrida would push back against the notion of a self-interpreting sign with a meaning that is automatically "given" or "present" to us. All symbolic processing involves interpretation, and hence some degree of indeterminacy and potential for semantic drift.

Also, I don't know if you're the person I'm replying to above, but I would be cautious in saying that Donny hasn't managed to accomplish anything. On some matters, and by the standards of his base, he has been frighteningly effective. You might find this article worth a read: currentaffairs.org/2017/09/is-trump-actually-failing-though

>muh so post-modern you cant even understand me even if you are me

No no, Derrida does not consider speech derivative of thought but derivative of writing. In his introduction to the origin of geometry by husserl he explains how our geometrical thinking originates in our ability to trace a line. That is mathematics don't pre-exist as ideas, but are a development of possibilities included in our syntactic systems.

But as syntactic systems they are not affected by deconstruction since they don't properly have a semantic.

As for Socrates he would still be in metaphysics of presence, but he cannot be deconstructed since he hasn't left a trace. Plato yes, Socrates no. But in a sense that is an example of thinking the voice as preceding the written sign. We never experience Socrates but only Plato's creation.

On Trump: yes he is destructive, and sadistic and he is giving a lot of that to his base. He is a fumbling obscene father to say it with zizek. But he is not a mastermind. His damage should not be ignored but is nowhere near to what he could do if he had the political acumen of some of his colleagues.

Anyway Nathan is always a great read and I love current affairs.

>joke: i understood derrida
>woke: i misunderstood derrida
>bespoke: derrida's work is a prime example of the jewish process of cultural normative inversion, in order to weaken the native culture and align it more towards what jews perceive as their interest

There's a lot of shit posts in this thread but also some really good comments. Bump.