Did Derrida basically find the right answer to meaning's relationship with text, that it can't be ascertained...

>that it can't be ascertained
come on, user

>read and understand Heidegger just fine
>understand Foucault
>mostly understand Deleuze
>for some reason never get around to Derrida
>every once in a while, try to read a primer or summary or entree into Derrida's basic positions and the method of deconstruction
>well-trained in navigating pomo word salad, intimately familiar with the phenomenological tradition
>follow the descriptions fine, up to a point
>can understand the context of derrida's approach, can guess where he's going
>suddenly, but inevitably, there's a humean moment where the author leaps from intelligible word salad to using terms he hasn't defined to explain other undefined terms in question
>jumps from explaining derrida with reference to heidegger, to explaining derrida with reference to derrida
>despite how ironically derridean this is, it doesn't exactly help
>it's like reading a description of a vehicle in a fantastical scifi setting that initially begins by using familiar real-world concepts, but then just becomes gobbledygook
>"You see, the sneed is a sort of CAR. But it's a car that FLIES. You can imagine a CAR that FLIES, right? Good. Well, instead of doors.. it has CURTAINS.. Okay, you following me so far? Now, the Sneed has a burblrb. And the burblb is punctuated by the negative polarity of its difference from itself. This difference is called differance, which the Sneed designers use because it symbolizes porlxpbl."
>wonder if i'm retarded
>wonder if it's all my fault somehow that i keep losing the plot at some moment, in any description of derrida
>finally end up reading rorty's description of derrida
>it's perfectly straightforward
>derrida isn't even that complicated if you already understand heidegger and someone writes three paragraphs breaking down derrida's departure from heidegger for you
>mfw i realize all those derrida things i had been reading were written by "literary critics," not philosophers
>mfw i spent HOURS being hoodwinked by retard lit theory faggots who don't even understand the philosophies they're pretending to appropriate
>mfw i read other people talking about derrida and can instantly recognise whether they are people with mid-level philosophical knowledge necessary to understand his architectonic, or literary theory faggots who just cast a lot of smokescreen spells by shouting !!!BINARY OPPOSITIONS!!! THE TEXT!!

just so we're clear, you did not actually read derrida, you just read secondaries? why? if you go heidi to levi to derry then you're golden. structure sign and play my dude.

>just so we're clear, you did not actually read derrida, you just read secondaries?

How are you supposed to do that without knowing French?

There is this cool shit where someone will not like summarize an author or anything but like they take his work and go through the words and sentences and make it so like it's the same book that it says something reliably close to whats in the book except this time in a completely different language
woa

This is closer to Derrida's argument. It's not that meaning can't be ascertained, it's that the meaning is delayed through further deference to other meanings. In order for deconstruction to occur, one must understand what is being deconstructed. Deconstruction occurs when the common language we use to communicate sometimes works against what we are trying to communicate because language functions by its own logic rather than reflect the metaphysics of reality. But he works within philosophy (rather than literature) because it is defined structurally by its claims to truth. He couldn't possibly make claims to truth about language otherwise.

Lol yes literary deconstruction is a total mess

So are you saying that eventually you can resolve these deferences and arrive at the meaning? How might you ascertain meaning for a particular piece of text under what Derrida is saying?

Yeah the whole point of the whole "these philsophers are undermining the west" is to keep them in track by controlling their reading lists. Give them a justification to not think through or read certain books.

Yeah totally true. Derrida is complex but not that complex (less then hegel and kant and husserl). And mostly he is a good reader and commentator of texts. But he is right on many point.

>"these philsophers are undermining the west"
Well, that's exactly what they were/are doing. If you aren't able to comprehend that the problem lies with you.

>sneed

The point is that the West needs undermining. The New Left wasn't very good at it in the long run, the joke is that actual Marxists dream ahout having the power /pol/ believes them to have. In actuality, structural market forces do their cultural undermining every day, and people are powerless to affect them individually.
Real culture can only arise with the abolition of capital. I sure as hell don't consider your racist whining to be the enduring jewel of the Western tradition. The West is a common intellectual striving, an universalist project. It will survive through harsh criticism like it always has,

shut up faggot

Your reality is clearly a confused one. White people created the west and are the only ones who can maintain it, and those white people are getting their nations flooded with dysfunctional brown people. The last thing any sane white man should be advocating for is further undermining of our culture. Pull your head out of Land's ass.

The philosophers aren't. The literary theorists are.

Our conceptions of what Western culture even means are completely different, leading to an inability to agree on anything. I can't understand how Western culture has much to do with ethnicity. Its philosophical universalism is one of its defining traits, and Western values are adopted by people all over the world. The West is an ever-evolving sphere, not an exclusive property of one nation or another. As an intellectual tradition, it has went through perpetual revolutions, from Greek to Roman to Christian to Enlightenment philosophy. "Guarding the West" by being xenophobic is a very peculiar conception.

he's right tho

Postmodern philosophers have inverted the entire western philosophical tradition.

Race is the fundamental component in the creation of western civilization. That you're unable to grasp something this basic is probably why your POV is nonsensical.

You don't even need a trip.

In other words, your idea of the Western Tradition arbitrarily stops a few decades ago, probably post-WW2, while everyone else sees "post-modernism" as a critical stage in its development.

Whites have been steadily losing institutional power to jews since WWII, and jews are the main instigators and proponents of it. Postmodernism thus counters the western philosophical tradition.

Yeah but where effectively went wrong. Criticize the idea or the arguments. What are they saying that you disagree with?

>Did Derrida basically find the right answer to meaning's relationship with text, that it can't be ascertained?
How did you ascertain that?

What arguments? I'm referring to the general precepts of postmodernism as the direct opposites of European philosophy. European philosophy strives for truth, postmodern philosophy says there is no truth, meaning is subjective, etc.

I guess so, to an extent. I don't know how it applies to literature really since it is more based on philosophical writing. But in any case this is what he writes in Of Grammatology:

>We should begin by taking rigorous account of this 'being held within [prise] or this surprise: the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the [critical] reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.
...
>To produce this signifying structure [of the 'certain relationship'] cannot consist of reproducing, by the effaced and respectful doubling of commentary, the conscious, voluntary, intentional relationship that the writer institutes in his exchanges with the history to which he belongs thanks to the element of language. This moment of doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading. To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything.

So the endless deferences can be understood to the point where we can communicate by engaging in the language/logic, but since we let ourselves be 'governed by the system' in order to communicate (the 'commentary'), the life of language escapes our intended meaning often enough and -- in the case of philosophical texts at least -- leads (us) to contradictions in the metaphysical systems we are trying to put to paper. The doubling of commentary Derrida writes about is that attempt to understand the attempt at communication in reference to that system which governs it, which has to be successful enough (and ought to be since we refer to that same system) so that we can understand what the writer does command of the language.

So actually I don't know if this means to you that it is 'resolved' and I guess it isn't since if we cannot 'dominate absolutely' the language we use it can't be. But it's an understanding that is at least effective enough that a critical reading doesn't 'authorize itself to say almost anything'.

overrated nationalist meme

>real culture cab rise only with the abolition of capital
So you really think if everyone was equal common people would suddenly become interested in reading high-brow books and listen to complex music? What we call "culture" and "tradition" is inherently tied to authoritarianism. Those who talk about those things being destroyed are actually longing for a return of the elite classes that they can somehow be a part of.

>Postmodern philosophers have inverted the entire western philosophical tradition.

No, capitalism has done that. Postmodern philosophers are the ones actually still interested in the history of philosophy.

"Capitalism" is incapable of doing any such thing, it responds to the actions of people.

This is a thread about Derrida not 'general precepts of postmodernism'. What are you even doing here?

Is this you?

You don't know what you're talking about. I take it you've never heard about the ancient Skeptics? Or Cartesian doubt? Do you consider Nietzsche a postmodernist as well? Was European culture being destroyed in 1880 too?

Generally when people refer to 'capitalism' they are including the actions of people allowed by the system. But if we're going to be autistic, postmodern philosophers haven't retroactively inverted the entire philosophical tradition. Their writings are in books, and even if in the event they described an inverted idea of European philosophy, the text in the books doesn't reach out of those books to affect others. They just add to the vast amount of literature we call philosophy in the West which is otherwise untouched.

Yes.

No, you don't know what you're talking about. Postmodernism is not related to anything you mentioned except for arguably Nietzsche and it's imprudent to equate such things just because there's skepticism involved.

Capitalism doesn't have anything to do with this. But academic postmodernism has definitely impacted the humanities and therefore western culture. As it is driven by jews, the main point is to use that framework to attack western culture, traditions, social norms, etc.

>skeptics, 300 BC: we can't know the truth
>postmodernists, 1970 AD: we can't know the truth

See guys, postmodernists are doing something totally alienated from European philosophy, something that has never been done before and will DEFINITELY destroy our culture on its own by poisoning our ancient values.

It's one thing when critique is applied to one's own culture for the purpose of improving it, another when critique is applied by outsiders for the purpose of destabilizing it and undermining its institutions and populace.

>read and understand Heidegger just fine
You could have stopped there fampai

>for the purpose of destabilizing it and undermining its institutions and populace.
[citation needed]

I'm sure you'd agree that it is Jews who promote capitalism, so why do you think capitalism doesn't have anything to do with this? Capitalism has monetised the universities so that they promote poor understandings of philosophical ideas to wide-eyed 18-year olds who take out jewish loans to be cycled through an education system full of jewish teachers (for those who actually do study the humanities). Capitalism is what created a comfortable first-world society that attracts third-worlders since Westerners don't want shitty jobs maintaining our materially rich bourgeois life. Capitalism and the proliferation of wealth has incentivised exploitative journalism, politics, and media, all of which are in turn run by jews. Capitalism has an atomising effect by means of a hyperrational contract society that the French tried to combat with nationalism and emphasis on family values when the aristocratic Ancien Regime began to dissolve at the hands of the (bourgeois-led) Third Estate. The effect of capitalism on art production during that time directly led to the conditions (the public Salon, tubes of paint) in which the quality of art began to slip at the end of the 19th century when the audience for art was no longer educated in the classics. If it doesn't make money, it's not worth preserving -- that is the essence of capitalism.

In contrast the importance placed on critical reading (avoiding manipulative news and mystic interpretations of events), belief in the ability of Western civilization to withstand an influx of wildly differing people (and to learn from them), the necessity seen in preserving the environment and the diversity of cultures and languages, etc. all seem to me suggestive of the preservation of Western ideals and its humanism rather than their inversion.

eipcp.net/transversal/0507/weizman/en/

I didn't post the link and don't know what's contained within it, but I'm afraid you're just going to have to study the jewish question if you want to break through this barrier of understanding, and I encourage you to do so.

>the jewish question
I'm more of a reptilian question kind of guy desu.

...

You niggers make a big deal out of a small dela.

But capitalism isn't required for jews to climb through elite universities, corrupt them from within, and turn them into socially destructive ethnic rackets. Even if I concede most of what you said in your first paragraph, which I'm happy to do since it's generally correct and is certainly a tool that is being used in this process, I don't think it's possible to quantify how much any of that contributes to their ability to spread subversive ideas. Capitalism itself is not the issue here, the issue is the people influencing the results it produces, results that I contend would be very different were a white elite in charge instead of jews.

But I just don't agree with the polyannaism of your second paragraph and think you are ignoring important aspects of nature to reach those conclusions. Those are new age western ideals mostly enacted by jews: the notion that multicultural humanism is somehow part of our value system than that we should endure or withstand any of that instead of focusing on bettering our own communities and cultivating/preserving the culture that has always been and will always be connected to our racial composition adapted over millennia.

Orlly? Well, that's not something I'm going to rule out. The universe is a strange place and it's foolish to think we know the half of it.

I agree, Derrida's 'differance' is basically claiming that since we can't perfectly communicate what we're thinking to other people all communication is inherently flawed and meaningless. But what do you expect from a cultural marxist turned post-modernist.

>basically
shit-talkers way of making something mean something it doesn't

Obviously when somebody is expressing an idea they are going to be influenced by their inherent patterns of language but this doesn't mean all communication is untrue. The whole point of language is to evolve and change to better suit how we relate to each other but Derrida treats it as something that has to be cast into the flames for oppressing the way we write.

>this doesn't mean all communication is untrue.

Derrida doesn't claim all communication is untrue. He claims the connection between speech and truth (presence) is unfounded and goes on to prove that it is writing that has a greater claim to truth.

>Derrida treats it as something that has to be cast into the flames for oppressing the way we write.

No he treats it (writing) as an interesting avenue for determining truth. You can't assess truth claims if you toss those claims out. If anything he thinks institutions aren't adaptable enough to account for all the complexity involved in communication and pedagogy. By no means does he say it should be dispensed with and I think you will struggle immensely to find any quote of his that suggests otherwise.

>Derrida doesn't claim all communication is untrue. He claims the connection between speech and truth (presence) is unfounded and goes on to prove that it is writing that has a greater claim to truth.

This is opposite to Greeks, by the way. Then again they considered silence truth. Can't be spoken.

It is also implied by the Greeks when Plato refers to teaching being written in the soul.

...

Veeky Forums's speciality.

>So are you saying that eventually you can resolve these deferences and arrive at the meaning
laughing-hegelians.jpeg