RIP Jacques Derrida

[jbor]

on 11/10/04 8:20 AM, jbor wrote:

> Searle:
>> The problem that all these guys have is that once you give me that first
>> premise--that there is a reality that exists totally independently of
>> us--then
>> the other steps follow naturally. Step 1, external realism: You've got a real
>> world that exists independently of human beings. And step 2: Words in the
>> language can be used to refer to objects and states of affairs in that
>> external reality. And then step 3: If 1 and 2 are right, then some
>> organization of those words can state objective truth about that reality.
>> Step
>> 4 is we can have knowledge, objective knowledge, of that truth. At some point
>> they have to resist that derivation, because then you've got this objectivity
>> of knowledge and truth on which the Enlightenment vision rests, and that's
>> what they want to reject.
> 
> You've got to be joking. Step 2 doesn't even follow from Step 1, let alone
> Steps 3 & 4. Talk about your "excluded middles"! Searle's attack was never
> taken seriously by Derrida, nor by most reasonable persons within the fields
> in which Derrida worked, and it's easy to see why.

In Step 2 Searle refers to "Words in the language .... " ("the"?!) Whose
language? Which language?

Then he says that these words "can be used to refer to" stuff. Sure they
can, but they can also be used, both volitionally and non-volitionally, both
productively and receptively, not to refer to stuff, to conceal or
exaggerate or otherwise manipulate references to stuff, to differ or defer
"meaning/s".

A Christian has a very different understanding of what it means to be "dead"
than does an atheist. Or a Buddhist. In many cultures the word "mother"
applies to any older female relative. Step-mother, godmother, motherf***er,
mothership, mother lode, mother hen, the Virgin Mother, the mother of all
whatevers .... Semantic content (i.e. "meaning") *always* relies on context,
subject-object orientation, agency. In speech acts in many languages a
speaker's "meaning" is conveyed by tone -- in any language the notion that
there is an ultimate or inherent "meaning" to any given sequence of phonemes
or graphemes is absurd. See de Saussure, F.; Bakhtin, M.M.; et al.

best

> The contiguities between Derrida and Pynchon have been remarked on by many
> readers and critics. The dt -> DT thing in _Lot 49_ is just one example that
> springs readily to mind.
> 
> The wikipedia entry on Derrida provides an even-handed coverage of his
> career, including the hostility with which his work has been met by
> political extremists and clunky positivists like John Searle. And there were
> apparently just 20 signatures on that Cambridge protest letter which Ruth
> Barcan Marcus worked up, not "hundreds".
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida
> 
> Derrida had had pancreatic cancer for some time, so his passing wasn't a
> shock. One of his final interviews is on-line, and well worth reading also:
> 
> http://www.indymedia.be/news/2004/04/83123.php
> 
> best
>