Holy shit he was a fucking genius what the fuck

What is he doing with his eyebrows? Is that what furrowing is for him? It looks like he was subjected to involuntary sub-dermal body-modding.

I think that's called the death-stare, user. Doesn't look like he's furrowing his eyebrows that much at all to me

He's also subtly giving the girl the middle finger.

His reading of Husserl for one.

>girl

It's a trap user. No seriously, go watch the video

Yes he was. You will now spend the next 5 years struggling with him and his aftermath. Buckle up

Just tell me this: has anyone even touched his level of influence?

Better pepare your anus for Deleuze then

OP you should check out Rorty's essays on Derrida. This is the most famous one: faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Rorty-Philosophy-as-a-Kind-of-Writing-1978.pdf

Not really. His work defies being boiled down to a few simple propositions. His texts are like performances, you have to actually read them yourself.

He's arguably the most influential of the second half of the 20th century, but Foucault is up there

Deleuze is Derrida lite

can you tl;dr his ideas, i'm genuinely curious.

you really have to have a decent understanding of "modern" philosophy up until then though especially these people:

Husserl,
Freud
Neitzsche
Sausure
Heidegger

because he basically says 2/5 were completely wrong and the other 3 weren't right enough. Basically his whole project is the death of metaphysics which was started by Neitzsche all the way back in the 1880s. Derrida is like the nail in the coffin,

>His texts are like performances, you have to actually read them yourself.

It is strange to me that this view on Derrida seemed very evident even though I had only some vague idea of postmodernism, partly from art history (his writing on the parergon) and partly from basic wikipedia reading. I don't understand how people can misinterpret Derrida so badly that they don't get this, or claim he is 'obfuscating'. Do they read even less than me? People expect philosophy to reveal transcendental truths?

so god is dead but not dead enough?

Because they don't read him. Or they read a single paragraph and say "this is difficult so he must be bullshitting. The problem's with HIM! NOT ME!"

More like: People haven't realised the extent to which God is dead

If you claim to understand Derrida then you have completely misunderstood him.

This isn't true.

I see you have misunderstood Derrida

You guys have completely missed the point. Either read Derrida before claiming knowledge regarding his ideas or head back to/r/books.

Ah I see you have misunderstood Derrida, good firs attempt friend

How about you kill yourself, you waste of human space

Fuck off m8. No one in this thread even said "I understand Derrida." Btw you could say that about any thinker because they always have to be interpreted. I genuinely don't know if you're trying to say that he's too deep for us mere mortals to understand or that there's nothing there to understand and he's an obfuscator. Either way you're wrong.

In claiming that the user you responded to lacks understanding of Derrida, you yourself have revealed your lack of knowledge of his ideas. Here's a tip for understanding Derrida; read his works, then read his works again with an additional deconstructional layer in mind, then again, and so on and so forth.

dude just read his shit. you've completely misunderstood him

>Deleuze is Derrida lite
And Derrida is diet Heidegger

Ah I see I'm dealing with an amateur not a novice here. You seem to be on a bad track but I wish you luck understanding Derrida some day :)

Hey, you stupid piece of garbage, how about you actually read his work before you type another incoherent and virtually idiotic opinion. If you don't understand him then don't praise him you vermin. You are literally what is wrong with everything. Hope you freaking get shot in the jaw so that perhaps some faggot will take pity on you and take you in his home, constantly molesting and raping your filthy and freaking stupid faggot body, but you don't complain because your level of stupidity is so vast that you know that you'll die (as you should you dumb little faggot) as soon as your left on your own. Go ahead and tell what your redditor friends would say, since your maggot brain can't seem to form an original though.

>diet Heidegger

Yeah same shit with all the useless fat pulled out

Trollish tone aside, this guy's assessment of those that claim to understand Derrida is actually correct. I find that those that claim to not understand him actually understand him more than those that do.

Philosophy that isnt applicable by the masses is ivory tower wankery.

The masses can go fuck themselves, the Ivory tower is where its at

>but I wish you luck understanding Derrida some day :)
Why would you wish for someone to not understand Derrida?

derridas ideas are pretty accessible tbqh senpai.

You are the masses.

How do you know that I've misunderstood him if I haven't said a thing about him yet?

I literally live in an ivory tower

read Of Grammatology and you'll understand why

I have

Then you have completely misunderstood him.

What do you think my understanding of him even is?

From your comments your understanding of him can be characterized as a complete lack of understanding.

Which comments would those be?

somebody explain this guy 2 me. im in community college

refer to

word games and sophistry so philosophy students have something to puff themselves up with

What specifically is wrong with ?

>you could say that about any thinker because they always have to be interpreted
If you have read Of Grammatology, you should understand why this statement signifies a misunderstanding of Derrida.

The French continue to ruin philosophy.

I have read it so why don't you elaborate and explain why that's the case.

>I have read it
Evidently you have not.

I think this is true to an extent. Like Nietzsche I don't think the idea is necessarily a complete understanding since he discards the idea of complete understanding of anything really its more like...you get ideas and make your own at the same time. It's more like a fashion show than it is, for example, a university lecture or a textbook.

Evidently YOU haven't since you're so afraid to say anything about it. Even if you had said something like it would have made more sense because that actually makes a point. Otherwise you're literally just being pretentious.

pretentious
prJˈtɛnʃəs/Submit
adjective
attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed.

"Oh yeah I've read Of Grammatology and nobody except me has the right reading of it but I'm not gonna explain it."

If you're gonna say there's some fundamental reason why Derrida can't be understood you have to fucking back it up. Otherwise we can understand just as we can understand anyone by picking up his books and reading his shit. He's not a fucking God. The last thing he would have wanted was to be deified.

Im taking a philosophy minor but I learned about him in english class. I can understand why he would piss of philosophers but if you're an artist I think he's really interesting,

His whole schtick revolves around perhaps the most basic and primordial question in all philosophy which is "why are things they way they are and not some other way?"

More specificially he wants to look at what he calls the logocentricism of western philosophy, that is, the habit of metaphysicians and philosophers before him (Like, Kant, plato, aristotle) to look for the "presence" or "essence" of things. Things like the Forms.

Plato and basically everyone after him comes to the question of reality, existence, ethics all those really deep philosophical questions with the presupposition that there is some idealised presence or truth that can be grasped. To see through the eyes of God or something like that. Derrida denies this, he posits instead that instead of a "unity" or ideal form or essence of truth of some kind all human thought and reality is dictated by difference and Deference,

He calls this thing Differance which is a kind of pun. its just difference with an a. he says Differance neither a word nor a concept but its a kind of metaconcept which allows human beings to conceptualize. It is the process through which things gain their identity. When you think of the word Veeky Forums for example the idea that it evokes in your head is only there because of the differences that you can discern between "Veeky Forums" and literally every other thing you know. "Veeky Forums" is only "Veeky Forums" because of reddit and because of the differences between reddit and 4 chan. A practical example of this would be the white supremacist movement which, if you think about it, could not exist without black people. Without that distinction of white and black-without the capital O "Other". Otherwise it would just be the supremacist movement and that doesnt make a lot of sense.

That's just a really simplified summary of his ideas. A lot of the justification and nitty gritty comes with an understanding of what's called "structuralism" the work of ferdinand de sausure and levi-strauss, (not the guy who made the jeans)

>Otherwise we can understand just as we can understand anyone by picking up his books and reading his shit
You've entirely missed the point.

Yeah I don't really see how this guy's not getting it. It's really not that hard to understand.

thxs this makes sense.

Apparently it is

Thank you. This makes sense, but at the same time it's trivial and useless. Just like one of these stoner epiphanies that seem so profound when you're high but are in fact rubbish.

this

Except Deconstruction posits some underlying rules about language that might as well be a new set of metaphysics... the fact that deconstruction leaves itself open to deconstruction isn't enough.

They are about writing, for the most part.

too true

is this your understanding of Derrida?

Idk how it is in Europe desu, but in America Derrida was influential for a few years with the Yale school, but they got trashed when de Man died and now Derrida is only important as "the last lit theorist you read in your survey course." he was pretty big in postcolonialism via spivak, but now Foucault has infected that discourse as well. Foucault is the only major takeaway from French structuralism for the Americas, and he is the literal dumbest, least intellectually threatening, and most easily digested of them all. He's a pretty boy historian at best and a fascist at worst, desu.

>DUDE FORM RELATIONS AND LANGUAGE ITSELF LMAO - Saussure

↓

>DUDE THE AMAZON SUCKS BUT I LEARNED SOME STUFF ABOUT THE TRANSCENDENTAL SIGNIFIED LMAO - Levi-Strauss

↓

>DUDE FUCK THAT SHIT IT'S TIME TO PLAY - Derrida

>Derrida

>alright so here's how language works
>yeah you can't really change anything because then nothing would make any sense but uuuh... yep thats how it works!

>Frogposters

>alright I'm illiterate.
>yeah you can't really convince me of anything other than my wikipedia-downloaded understanding because I'm illiterate!

Too bad for you that Derrida's post modern world was made just for illiterates like me

>the world was made for me
literal child

yes the world was made for children

just look around you and its clear

What a pity.

qed

That doesn't seem remotely profound or revolutionary.

How does he get us any further than Wittgenstein?

His focus on binaries and his deconstructive method are applied was that help people investigate why we've been making a lot of social and political decisions the same way with the same set of assumptions. Early Wittgenstein and the Vienna circle just sort of try to kill metaphysics and then ignore a lot of social decisions Derrida and the New Pragmatists are interested in. The way Derrida writes and comes around to his ideas, the way he practices philosophy, makes a big difference even if he hasn't pushed a lot of his ideas further than Saussure and Wittgenstein. He starts including previously excluded 'others' into our discourses. Praxis is just as, if not more important than theoria.

>Half the thread flinging shit "you don't understand him" "I do understand him
>Other half either saying he's an obfuscator or saying he's accessible
Well which is it?

Explain a pleb why that guy doesn't understand Derrida?

Let's just get one thing clear here, especially if we are discussing Derrida. To actually understand something is one thing, to say that you understand something is entirely different: that is, it is to put it into language.

Derrida reads the history of philosophy as an attempt, by philosophers, to write down what they understand. Here an element of speech in language is lost and subsequently transformed into something entirely new. Still, philosophy attempted to seek a ground for what they were saying and thus make it knowledge. In effect, the critique of metaphysics is a critique of the final attempt by thinkers like Kant and Husserl to place some internal self-justification to secure the ground for the knowledge they were claiming -- and in effect speaking -- for Kant this is his transcendental deduction, for Husserl the bracketing of the natural attitude, etc.

The element of speech in the act of reading and writing is found, finally, to reveal this self-positing, totalizing tendency in the history of thought as the self-affecting nature of consciousness itself. That is, the consciousness, in order to know itself, must posit itself. This process is inherent to every act of understanding and shows its structural limitations: also known as the hermeneutical circle and the problem of interpretation, and/or the fore-projection of meaning and the finitude of Dasein, etc., ect., and so on, and so on. This is actual understanding.

I'm tempted to say then that Derrida's thought is dedicated to showing, contra actual understanding, the move in to language where you attempt to speak about something you understand.

good post

I think, at its core, Derrida philosophy was Christian