Derrida

Hey Veeky Forums,

I heard about this crazy motherfucker, and I got really curious about reading him. Regardless of whether or not he is bait, I want to dig into this nerd. What work of his should I start with? Also, who should I read before I read him, if any?

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plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/

>What work of his should I start with?
Positions.
>What work of his should I start with?
You should know a bit from this a bit from that ... et cetera.
Primary heidegger and husserl.

Let me save you some time:
Everything is relativ so can you really even know ANYTHING?

deep

Do you have a quote on this?

--Derrida

man that's just deconstruction in a nutshell, basically the postmodern manifesto.
Its a response to structuralism which was all about psycho-analysis and shit.

Yes, you can know that you can't know anything for certain. Which, if you reflect on it, is actually a potentially uplifting thought, since it will prevent you from being either

a) trapped in a cognitive prison of someone else's making, or
b) trapped in a cognitive prison of your own making.

The desire to know things for certain, to Produce Truth But No For Real This Time is something us meatbags do, but just because we really really want it doesn't mean it's so.

There's a difference, a slight but important one, in saying that things are relative and saying, things are relative, *therefore x.* Personally, learning to resist the urge to impose semse and meaning on the world has been a cool discovery. It's fun invoking the emergency powers and all that but - again - how/why/when?

First thing that really clicked was Plato's Pharmacy

“I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.”

Dude, Derrida 101 according to this thread, summed up for your inconvenience:
Everything is relative, so anything can totally mean anything! I say this in response to structuralism which was all about psychoanalysis and shit like that. Well they're wrong! Also Derrida somehow relates to phenomenology and Husserl, which is some mystic magic shit, so just namedropping, y'know?

bump

the cruelty with which people respond to a project that sees the indeterminability of context and meaning as a problem, and not as an end goal, is really miserable. global heat death is literally the best of all possible outcomes for a species that so violently squanders the talent of writing.

In a 'start with the greeks' analysis; basically in Ancient Greece the concept of capital 'T' truth was alien until Socrates introduced the forms. With the forms you have this notion that you perceive representations of the truth in things but not the thing in itself. When Christianity arrives on the scene they run with this essentially saying that God disseminates truth into things. Big Truth exists 'out there' and depending on your view of Christianity it's either discoverable or Gods divine providence. Nietzsche is really the first to attack the Socratic move that starts this whole sharade, but a lot of analytic philosopher of the 20th century still operate under the auspices that the Socratic-Christian view of reality holds water - not specifically because they have taken it into account but because it's such an ingrained social phenomena at this point. Derrida arrives a little later on the scene with a methodology - deconstruction - to approach philosophy that rejects this notion of Truth for a view which accepts the malleability of context. It's really very interesting if you want to understand epistemology.

Can someone tell me how Derrida's conception of metaphor differs from Ricoeur's (which I like and which is based on the tradition I'm familiar with)?

What makes Derrida so different?

I'm not familiar with Ricoeur. Why don't you enlighten us.

For Ricoeur metaphor generates new meanings by creating a new concept in the space created between two existing concepts, when the two are equated. A "surplus of meaning" is created by the imperfect mapping of one concept onto another (its associative complexes of meanings, hints, possible foreprojects) etc., and the new meaning is hermeneutically and phenomenologically disclosed, because one has to interpret in what sense the old concept isomorphically applies to the new.

Ricoeur is building substantially on the Anglo tradition on metaphor, e.g. Max Black obviously), but just a lot of stuff on poetics in general (including Barfield's Poetic Diction, which is cool). That stuff I'm familiar with - the analytic and philosophy of science traditions, and pre-postmodern poetics (romantics etc., Coleridge/Schelling/German idealism on function of creative imagination).

White Mythology seems very interesting, and Derrida's coin metaphor is spot-on, from what I can tell? But based on the blurbs I've had time to read, I don't see how it's very different from what Ricoeur is fundamentally saying. Degenerate abstractions could be accounted for in Ricoeur's system. I don't even think Ricoeur would deny that the reality of language is very loose and fluid, since he's working from Bachelard's phenomenological poetics of reverie. Ricoeur obviously has as much a Heideggerian sense that we are adrift in all sorts of hermeneutic "traces," that meanings can be cut off from their origins, even that our basic perception is an act of interpretation (Merleau-Ponty etc.).

So how does Derrida move beyond that? What makes Derrida better than a loose phenomenology of reverie? I feel like I'm getting his point in White Mythology but the fact that there's some kind of disagreement between the two of them is confusing me, then.

We'll, that's very through. I cannot really speak to it without reading some primary sources, but it seems like the difference lies in that we dont merely reside in a fluid flux of language (Ricouer?) but that quite literally language cannot 'mean'. I.e. a metaphor for Derrida doesn't accomplish it's aim ever because the context of other elements of language interfere - inject themselves - rendering the 'intent' an object of folly. I mean, Derrida claims in 'Nietzsche's Styles' that the entire meaning of the work could come down to the fact that he pens in a marginal note in the rough draft of the work in question that he has 'left his umbrella (somewhere)'. Essentially the semantic content of all works come under fire for trying to designate any particular meaning at all.

I'm happy Veeky Forums is beginning to get literate enough to actually discuss Derrida without 90% of the thread being retards spouting "relativism" and "obscuritanism"

I've read quite a bit of Derrida. I consider 'Signature Event Context' a excellent entry point for anyone interested.

I kind of get that, I think. But that's where I'm having trouble - if I'm getting it, why did THEY disagree?

But I don't think Ricoeur, who was writing on the philosophy of metaphor in science, OR Bachelard, who was writing explicitly about science (and so, obviously, about the possibility of "real" reference) would claim that metaphors ever really refer to anything concrete. They're still Hegelian and idealists in that sense, not epistemological realists.

I don't think they'd say that it's not a messy process, either. Obviously things inject, interfere, etc. That's the fluidity, even the chaotic nature of poetics, isn't it? That's part of its power to radically redescribe reality.

But what does Derrida mean when he says that "meaning" is not possible in language at all? Does he solely mean "intent that cleanly translates?" What is meaning, if not the thing that allows us to stably and approximately communicate with one another? That's what I don't understand. As murky as it might be, as difficult as it might be to pin down exactly, I can still be pretty goddamn sure that "this German historian cared about German identity" when I read his 500-page book trying to show Germany's continuity in history.

I tend to subsume Ricoeur into late Wittgenstein here, where communication isn't one-to-one either, it doesn't idealise linguistic "essences" (which I don't think good Heideggerians did either, obviously). "Meaning," and therefore "communication," is a matter of "seeing" - language that Ricoeur takes from Wittgenstein and uses a lot.

To have successfully learned a meaning is to say "ah yes, I see what you mean, there." The test of successful communication, of understanding, isn't whether you have internalised the "idealised essence" of that meaning (which is a nonsensical concept), but whether YOU CAN COMMUNICATE. If the person says "you see what I mean, do you? Show me, then," and you say something back to him that proves to him you understand, you have correctly learned the "rule" of how to apply that concept -- it seems to him (i.e., he "sees") that you followed the rule correctly.

But this, again, Ricoeur wouldn't deny. Each use of meaning is hermeneutic, interpretative, novel, creative, original. That doesn't mean there is NO stability whatsoever. That's what I'm confused about here. Is Derrida saying no stability is possible? Is it possible that he's presuming an implicitly metaphysics of meaning (of idealised essences of meaning) that doesn't exist?

Plato's Pharmacy and pharmakon related stuff was interesting to read. Would recommend.

it's not so much that the attempt to mean one thing is attacked, but rather that writing has the capacity to be quoted, sound-bit, decontextualized, etc—i.e., reiterated, and that one has a responsibility to reckon with that possibility when dealing with writing. for derrida the possibility becomes a necessity, though: writing couldn't be writing WITHOUT the possibility to function beyond the collapse of an intentional context. why else, in other words, would i write a shopping list, if not for the fact that the present context, the one in which i know what i need to buy, wasn't inevitably going to collapse by my forgetfulness? and when an anthropologist reads my shopping list in the far future, and figures out something about my diet, this context is radically incommensurate in that there is no real sense in which i could be said to have "meant" to write a document that illustrates the twenty-first century diet to future scholars. but it's only insofar as this and an uncountable number of other contexts are potentially engender by my writing that the writing in fact functions as such: it's only by guaranteeing its own reiteration that a mark becomes a writing.

derrida only goes so far as to say that what is communicated is necessarily never identical with an intention, and that, to use ricouer's language, the surplus meaning must always be wrestled with, because writing presupposes it.

derrida is not talking about language. leave that to hacks like foucault and their discursive idealism. derrida demands a much more radical materialism of the mark, in which the fact of traces, of writing, determines context, rather than context determining the meaning for which writing is a neutral, disenfranchised vehicle.

But this is exactly what's fucking fucking confusing me, man. That just sounds like a normal axiom of the kind of Verstehen, or hermeneutic understanding, that Ricoeur takes up from its centuries-old tradition. You take anthropology as an example -- while it's certainly used less sophisticatedly (e.g.., more naively optimistic about "truly" describing some society, "functionally" or whatever) there, but even Geertzian anthropology has its Verstehen in the same tradition. There are all kind of nuances about how we can only approximate the "actual" intent of the shopping list-writer, only understand it by means of reference to our own, necessarily different concepts. It's never a one-to-one translation. This is in Wittgenstein, it's in Ricoeur, it's in Peter Winch, it's in fuckin' Dilthey.

I'm sorry to keep spamming you with "BUT I DON'T GET IT LOL" replies, I'm genuinely not doing it to be a pedantic or argumentative, honestly. I just legit don't get it and it's frustrating me because I want to like Derrida.

I'm really trying to torture my brain here to not subsume what you're saying into ho-hum hermeneutics, of which Ricoeur is just (to me) the most sophisticated expression. Even Heidegger himself was more pessimistic than Ricoeur about traces and intentions which are truly irrecoverable -- and Ricoeur and Gadamer both refute him on that point.

Interesting, do you happen to know where he writes most clearly about the "materialism of the mark"?

Perhaps the idea of the trace in Derrida would have some use in explicating the differences between Ricouer and him. With the trace the most abstract contextualization becomes the most prevelant by the very dint of its 'farness' from the 'perceived intent'. Of course this trace for Derrida really represents the most charitable course of iteration but as soon as this trace to radically different contexts has come to light the language which we use to describe this 'flow' points again in a completely different direction. In this sense Derrida's writing occurs to the reader more as a constant schism than a 'flow' per se. It's following these ever present nihilations of the 'given meaning' that comprise the writings of Derrida. Of course I'm not applying his method in so far as I describe his goals here, if I were I would have recourse to point out that you not understanding has a tantamount import insofar as one cannot 'understand'. One never does with Derrida. This very inability to understand points to other contexts (Ricouer) which nihillate Derrida's 'supposed meaning'. Even this word we use 'pointing' comes under scrutiny etymologically and in the exposition of its initial sense takes us into an aporia of sameness and opposition. I.e. We cannot go from there by dint of repeating the act of direction going and cannot remain by dint of the simplistic operation of opposition. We 'uncover' something about how language works by, to reference Wittgenstein, always breaking the rule when you've discovered the presence of a rule. That's how radicle this movement of Derrida's is.

bump

Hume demonstrated this hundreds of years ago, don't pretend like it's a silly new idea from the French jews

don't waste you time reading these hacks, just zizek books, he summarizes them extremely well to the point of not having to sift through post modern wordplay to understand it for yourself.

Kek. No he didn't, pseud

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