Searle vs. Derrida

[jolly]

Searle's critiques of Derrida and Culler are apt, to the point, and appropriate.  It's not even worth discussing.  Derrida's responses--Limited Inc. etc.-- were snide, childish and do not even address the points raised--just parisian-surrealist  ad hominems.  The denunciation of Derrida by hundreds of Harvard and Cambridge scientists and  logicians (including Quine and Barcan)  has conveniently  been overlooked now at his demise--and those denouncing him were not all "logocentric" conservatives or "jack-booted bourgeoisie" or whatever. 
 
If you have attempted to wade through Of Grammatology and tried to understand what Derrida does with linguistics and philosophy--especially his complete "misreading" and misconstrual of CS Peirce's system of signs, not to say Nietzsche -- you might begin to share the view of figures such as Quine who viewed Derrida's  "corpus" as the work of a dadaist huckster. And don't forget Derrida's defense of fascists such as De Man and Heidegger.  Derrida's massively obscure, useless tomes mock not only logic and science but even the leftist culture which he was a part of. 
 
I am not sure what Pynchon's thoughts are on Derrida's death, but given TP's overall rationalist and even mathematical bent, I would hope he would lean more to the Searleans and analytics (and they are not all conservatives or republicans either) .    Maxwell's anti-entropic Demon  is not very amenable to Derridean chaos, nor is the discussion of the mathematicians and behaviorists in GR--the pointsman, etc.    
 

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