Derrida

[Paul Murphy]

I've been trying to avoid this thread as I don't find it particularly
useful to chatter in a broad, general, and caricatured way about a
philosophy which demands real work to try to understand it, or at least
more work than to say "well, he's clever, but all he wants to do is
destroy, and he's really just a sophist." In lieu of counter-argument, I'll
just humbly submit a few titles of works by JD I have found particularly
illuminating. Since lit-crit is more or less the focus here, "The Double
Reading" (on Mallarme) from _Dissemination_ is indispensible for coming to
terms with decon, particularly the passages wherein JD distinguishes
between ambiguity and undecidability (the former a matter of semantics, the
latter the 'effect' of syntax). "Shibboleth", on Paul Celan, is the best
essay I've yet encountered on this brilliant, enigmatic poet; the essay is
fully translated in an anthology called _Word Traces_ (edited by Fioretos,
if I remember right). Classic Derridian themes (iterability in particular)
get articulated here, within the context of a meditation on Judaism and the
Holocaust. His recent work on Baudelaire, _Given Time: Counterfeit Money_
is also very provocative, as it anatomizes and 'deconstructs' the notion of
the gift, a notion which has become very popular in continental philosophy
of late. Add this to the essays in _Writing and Difference_ on Artaud and
Jabes, and one will see that JD's lit-crit is oriented almost entirely
towards a kind of writing that one would be hard pressed to call 'pomo'.

And, of course, no discussion of JD on Plato can fail to mention "Plato's
Pharmacy" from _Dissemination_.

Cheers,
Paul