Derrida Documentary

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "tess marek" <tessmarek at yahoo.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 4:21 AM
Subject: Re: Derrida Documentary
>
> --- JBFRAME at aol.com wrote:
> > Having just seen a new documentary about Jacques
> > Derrida, I am now willing to
> > admit that I understand a little about
> > post-modernism.  No Pynchon mention,
> > but an amusing confrontation with Anne Rice's
> > inclusion in his library.
> >
> > All in all, an enjoyable experience.
> >
> > jbf
>
>
> as far as i can tell, i'm the only one that has read
> him. yeah, that's right. all the rest of you are full
> of shit. same goes fort lots of philosophers. ya'll
> don't read philosophy or literature. this list is just
> a bunch of dougs. and that's sad.
>

Be careful, Doug maybe is one who is able to read Derrida in the French
original (a fact that may be important when I consider what sometimes
happens to texts translated into other languages).

You claim to have read all those philosophers but have you learned something
from them? For example about general statements! I'm reading Nietzsche and
Plato but I don't claim to have understood all that I've read, nor that the
others who haven't read this all are a bunch of fools.

I'm reading Derrida mostly quoted by others like Wolfgang Welsch, Jonathan
Culler or David Lodge:

"Taking its cue from Derrida's assertion in 'Structure, Sign and Play' that
'language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique',
deconstructive criticism aims to show that any text inevitably undermines
its own claim to have a determinate meaning, and licenses the reader to
produce his own meanings out of it by an activity of semantic 'freeplay'.
(...)

Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences

"(...) structure (...) has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a
process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a
fixed origin. (...) the notion of a structure lacking any center represents
the unthinkable itself.
(...)
The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does
not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality *has
its center elsewhere*. The center is not the center.
(...)
the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which
we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center
for center, as linked chain of determinations of the center. (...) The
history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of
these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix--if you will pardon me for
demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to come quickly
to my principle theme--is the determination of Being as *presence* in all
senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to
fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an
invariable presence--*eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia* (essence,
existence, substance, subject) *aletheia*, transcendentality, consciousness,
God, man, and so forth.
The event I called a rupture, the disruption I alluded to at the beginning
of this paper, presumably would have come about when the structurality of
structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is
why I said that this disruption was repetition in every sense of the word.
(...) it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the
center could not be thought in a form of a present-being, that the center
had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of
nonlocus in which a infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play.
This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the
moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became
discourse--provided we can agree on this word--that is to say, a system in
which the central signified, the original of transcendental signified, is
never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the
transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification
infinitely.
(...)
Where, and how does this decentering, this thinking the structurality of
structure, occur? (...) we doubtless would have to cite the Nietzchean
critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of Being and truth,
for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and sign
(sign without present truth); the Freudian critique of self-presence, that
is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of
self-proximity or self-possession; and more radically, the Heideggerian
destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of Being
as presence."
(Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences, from:
David Lodge (ed.) - Modern Criticism and Theory - A Reader - Longman, London
and New York, 1988, pp. 108-110)

respectfully
Otto

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