More from the classroom

[triskellian]

The highlight of today's (Good) class was watching the lecturer trying to explain to a bunch of uncomprehending students the idea that there's no such thing as truth and everything is subjective because all truths are expressed through language, which is inherently subjective. It was a major diversion from the intended topic, but very entertaining.

And I've just remembered that I went to read the Wikipedia article on Derrida last week, as background reading for this class, got sidetracked into the Talk page by the disputed factual accuracy notice, and from there into reading about Wiki edit wars, and read barely a word on Derrida. I was just about to make another attempt before being distracted by this entry. I have no work ethic :-(

Comments

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

"With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That's very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether."

http://reason.com/0002/fe.ef.reality.shtml

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Derrida say that it's impossible to misread anything, since anything could validly mean an infinite number of things, and the writer's intention is unimportant in determining the meaning? Or is that someone else?

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

That's not an unreasonable interpretation of his work (though I suspect you might be thinking of Barthes on authorial intent) but Derrida was never consistent and frequently denied that it meant any such thing; certainly he often talked of the 'undeconstructable' but never condescended to define what criteria could be used to distinguish between what could or couldn't be deconstructed. For Derrida, like Humpty-Dumpty, words meant what he wanted them to mean and never what anyone else might think they meant.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

He sounds a bit like my dad. In fact, I suspect my dad of being influenced quite heavily by all that. It makes family rows quite tedious.