Logocentrism

[jbor]

>> No rules. Both/and, not either/or. Derrida & co. still read Plato, St
>> Augustine et. al. but with a critical eye to the intrinsic preconceptions
>> and hidden agendas which are made transparent by the processes of textual
>> deconstruction.
>>
>
> Can you explain that?  I don't get it at all.

It was just a reply to an erroneous contention made that deconstruction
attempts to put "rules" of reading or interpretation or language into place.
In fact, such rules are demonstrated to be the domain of traditional
philosophers and critics. Derrida's reading of Plato or Rousseau or Francis
Ponge is above all a descriptive process, and unabashedly creative, in and
of itself. The original texts are still read, and valued. There is no
question of these writers and their works being discarded or destroyed: this
is simply narrow-minded hysteria. But deconstruction enacts a critical
function in that it foregrounds and challenges the presuppositions and
cultural assumptions which underpin these texts, in particular the Western
metaphysical tradition with its dependence on the logic of identity: the
notion that there is an essential reality -- an origin -- which validates
the laws of identity ("Whatever is, is"), contradiction ("Nothing can both
be and not be") and excluded middle ("Everything must either be or not be").
[as phrased by Bertrand Russell in *The Problems of Philosophy*]

"[Oedipa] had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be
avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good
for diversity?" (*CL49* p125)

Pynchon's play on DTs and dts in this text, and the reference to bringing
"high magic to low puns" (p89), is reminiscent of (and precedes) Derrida's
similarly playful focus on such unconceptualisable linguistic doubles as
pharmakon (meaning both poison and cure), supplement (meaning both surplus
and necessary addition) and hymen (meaning both inside and outside).

best


----------
>From: Michel Ryckx <michel.ryckx at freebel.net>
>To: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>, "'pynchon-l at waste.org'" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: Logocentrism
>Date: Tue, Jun 20, 2000, 6:06 PM
>