Snappycrossdresser

[Otto]

> >
> >Mr. Derrida said: \"It is impossible to respond. I can only do something
> >which will leave me unsatisfied.\"
>
> This is a bit like punting on 2nd and 6, and claiming that, had you
> continued to play, you would have scored a touchdown.
>

Sounds good but I have to admit that I haven't got the slightest
idea of Baseball. It is really something that I don't understand about the
Americans.

I'm not writing an essay for PN, this is just a mailing list and the current
discussion emerged upon some really (unprovoked) nasty remarks of
pomo-haters on the death of Jacques Derrida.

> I do not mean to be mean--because I think in at least some
> measure you and the poststructuralists are correct--but
> poststructuralists have a nasty tendency to put forward
> a severely underdemonstrated theory and shake their
> heads sadly at those who continue to ask questions.

You're welcomed, no offense taken.
The theory has been presented here for years now (with lots of examples and
references, not only by me) but all we get are the same questions over and
over again, and no other theory.

> Poor fools, those doubters, they just don\'t get it.

Reading and interpreting novels requires further reading. I have encountered
an unwillingness to take the effort of working through some theoretical
stuff *before* deciding that postmodernism is just hocuspocus. If someone
can refute Jonathan Culler's reading of Derrida he/she should do so. But
just the claim that Derrida is illogical and obscure (as Jolly did) doesn't
make him so.

> There is in fact an epistemological problem here.
> Derrida and Spivak, Foucault, Fish, Barthes,
> etc. all say so confidently that there can be no reliable epistemology.
> HOW DO THEY KNOW?

I guess because all so-called reliable epistemologies of the past have
turned out to be logocentric constructs and, on the basis of deconstruction
in the end can be proven to be more or less nuts. It is Pynchon in "GR" who
points to the structural similarities of Marxism and Christianity, taking
them serious but refuting them both.

> Although their political goals are laudable, the way they
> reach them is circular.  They set up a reductio ad absurdum and then
> celebrate their refusal to provide arguments or evidence as revolutionary
or
> radical.  In fact, it is a failure of imagination.
>
> O.

I disagree that they refused to provide arguments. Those masses of books
haven't been written for nothing. To me it seems more a failure of study.

Otto