Deconstruction

[stilltrucking]

"4. Deconstruction is a system to give humanities and philosophy professors a pompous sounding justification to pop off on politics and other subjects they know nothing about."

http://dim.com/~randl/deconstruct.htm

[mnaz]

I wish the pre-emptive war-makers might see the moral relativity (and inevitable depravity) of their self-proclaimed moral absolutism. And what that has to do with deconstructionism and French men masturbating over blow-up dolls, I'm not sure.... A headache of a post. Thanks.

[stilltrucking]

.... A headache of a post.

This is how I feel about our government.

"Sweet is my sleep, but more to be mere stone,

so long as ruin and dishonour reign;

to bear nought, to feel nought, is my great gain;

then wake me not, speak in an undertone!"

FROM SHAKESPEARE to Existentialism. by Walter Kaufmann.

[petercowlam]

It is interesting to note that all the volatility in the world of text we inhabit is sometimes overtly brought to our attention in the texts themselves. Some, in particular, of Borges's texts are a case in point. In his short fiction 'The Book of Sand', the book he describes assumes monstrous proportions, and is one that its owner surreptitiously transports to the Argentine National Library, and evading its staff 'loses' on a shelf in the basement - a book engulfed by a good many others. Here already a fictive Borges is cast in the same blur as his biographical senior, writing as narrator of 'The Book of Sand'. In a dream of himself, in a dreamed apartment in a dream of Buenos Aires, 'volumes', or books that the wraith called Borges is accustomed to handle, include encyclopaedias, maps, sacred tomes, the world's fantasies concerning itself. Someone very like him, whose domicile is Belgrano Street, in Buenos Aires, receives a caller who initially introduces himself as someone selling bibles. But bibles aren't of interest, so the salesman, who is a Presbyterian from the Orkneys, instead sells him an octavo volume, bound in cloth, on whose spine are the words 'Holy Writ', and 'Bombay'. On opening the book, the pages appear - just as in a bible - in double columns and ordered in versicles. The bookseller advises a close look at the page, since it will never be found or seen again. He goes on to say that he acquired it in exchange for a handful of rupees and a bible, from an owner who didn't know how to read. It is impossible to find its first and last page, and is called <I>The Book of Sand</I> because it has no beginning or end - its very pages are terms in an infinite series. As to the bookseller's conscience, it is clear. He is sure of not having cheated the native in exchanging the Word of God for this, a diabolic trinket.

Hume is now mentioned, one suspects in opposition to George Herbert, whose 'Thy rope of sands' forms the epigraph to Borges's story about this miraculous book. Herbert, we know, balanced a secular career with a life of theological contemplation, and as poet might be said to have been in pursuit of what Derrida has called a 'transcendental signifier', God's summarising <I>logos</I>, the last syllable of recorded time, all as the divine extension of Genesis (<I>In the beginning, God said...</I>), a suspiration that renders as revealed and knowable everything that has been uttered and written in between - life and the world as a sacred inscription. 'Thy rope of sands, / Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee / Good cable, to enforce and draw, / And be thy law, / While thou didst wink and would not see.'

Above all, Herbert wants us to <I>see</I> God's revealed truth - which the Presbyterian bookseller believes is written in a book, in <I>the</I> book. To this end his evangelism extends even to the Hindu caste system in Bombay, where he has found what to him must be the opposite of incontestable writ, what with its textual flickers, its Derridean presences and absences. One imagines that for him God's truth is a simple truth.

By contrast one can't ever imagine this being the case for Hume, himself a son of Presbyterianism, whose want of religion shook the conviction of Boswell, and provoked Dr Johnson into some particularly unpleasant comments. Hume, apparently, had never read the New Testament with much attention, and anyway for him evidence for the truth of Christianity was less than the evidence for the truth of our senses.

It can be by no means accidental that Borges as author (as author of 'The Book of Sand') has passed into the simplified hands of an evangelical Presbyterian an object to undermine his faith in a Christian eschatology. Derrida has pointed out that a structure always presumes a centre, and himself finds only suspect evidence for such a co-ordinate. What we call a centre is a place where contents, elements or terms are forbidden, and therefore is the very thing within a structure that escapes structurality. Paradoxically, the centre <I>is</I> and <I>isn't</I> the centre. Any one page of an infinite book, for that moment while we contemplate it, is the central term of an infinite series, yet is merely engulfed by that infiniteness during those other moments while we don't. One might go further and say that this counter-Book posited by Borges is in fact an interpretation of <I>the</I> Book, to whom he has called Herbert, Hume and a Presbyterian bible-vendor as first witness. <I>The Book of Sand</I> is the book of the basis of Western Christianity, decentred.

[stilltrucking]

Peter Shaw
The Politics of Deconstruction

In the past few years deconstructionist literary criticism, after enjoying seeming exemption from close scrutiny by outsiders has been subjected to a number of searching critiques. As a result the intellectual implications of the movement have begun to be understood, and it has lost is sacrosanct aura. Deconstruction has been challenged on philosophical grounds for its dismissal of traditional Western thought and identified as a threat both to literary criticism and discourse. Yet among the now numerous critiques of deconstruction, there has been virtually no mention of what is arguably the movement's most significant feature: its origins in radical politics.

These origins continue to go unmentioned despite Gerald Graff's 1978 essay, "The Politics of Realism," and his subsequent "Textual Leftism" which together showed that deconstruction amounted to a politically inspired attack on the philosophical underpinnings of bourgeois society. The basis of this attack was the recognition by political radicals of the degree which certain common assumptions---that we live in an objectively knowable world and that we are able to communicate its nature to one another---make possible the day-to-day operation of society. The radicals put it that bourgeois society actually controls its populace and prevents revolution not so much by force as through its control of concepts such as these. Realistic writing for example, even when it is "radical in content," serves this society, as Graff explains the radical argument, merely by employing "formal modes of perception that [are] conventional and reactionary." These modes lure the reader from revolution by securing his acceptance of the world as it is.

From the Partisan Review #2 1986.
____________________________________________________________
I have been thinking about Chavez at the UN holding up a copy of Chomsky's book. I picked up the Partisan Review in a used book store years ago. But I just started reading it again last week.

My eyes are much larger than my brain. I hardly know what I am saying here. But it interests me. Thinking about the good sheppard and his flock. I been seeing people as sheep, myself included. Why do we elect wolves to power I wonder?

-----------------------------------------
I listened to Andrew Maybee Got Elected.
Nice work.

[petercowlam]

I agree that 'deconstruction' is more an instrument of politics than philosophy. I argued this one recently with a friend of mine who has studied philosophy formally, and can only see in Derrida someone who is dismissed by the philosophy faculty. Not having been trained in that discipline myself, I won't dispute that point. Yet somehow I can't see that we live in a world where all our cultural activities have no interaction with one another.

Thanks for comments re Andrew Maybee. There are two more recordings I have yet to make, when I can get the studio time.

[gypsyjoker]

My education is very spotty. I hardly know anything about philosophy. Husserl The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Lectures from 1905. I hve been reading at it for thirty years. I picked it up in a book store in Moro Bay California in 1976. Last itme I checked I was about three quaters of the way through it. So much Greek and Latin it is difficult for me.

It is a miracle I have held on to it after all these years. I have scattered so many books behind me the past million miles. I used to have a book about the Hebrew and Greek Concepts of time. Something about the Greeks inventing historical science and the Hebrews historical religion. I think this may be what I have been searching for the past tweny six years. Ever since I left it behind in a rooming house I used to live in.

......October 2005 Review Reviews Time and Process in Ancient Judaism. By Sacha Stern. Pp. viii 144...this short but dense book is that ancient Judaism knows nothing of the Greek concept of chronos, time: The concept of time as an entity in itself was unknown in ancient Jewish culture, and reality was experienced only in terms of processes. This simple and extreme thesis......

Say you wouldn't happen to have access to the archives of The Oxford Journal? I been trying to find that book since 1980.

http://services.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/ ... title=Time+

and+Process+in+Ancient+Judaism.+&andorexacttitle=and&titleabstract=&

andorexacttitleabs=and&fulltext=&andorexactfulltext=and&author1=&autho

r2=&fmonth=Nov&fyear=1849&tmonth=Dec&tyear=2006&fdatedef=3+Nov
ember+1849&tdatedef=1+December+2006&flag=&RESULTFORMAT=1&hits

=10&sortspec=relevance&x=45&y=12

Thanks for the comeback.
jack tilles
please pardon sock puppet
stilltrucking is in a "cat state"

I ramble a lot


Freud is very interesting to me. More like a cultural anthropologist of my soul then a clinician. Derrida. Lacan, Kohut, not for the likes of me. I am an intellectual featherweight. I been reading Norman O Brown's Life Against Death longer than Husserl. I picked it up in College Park Maryland. It was a textbook in the Psychology Honors program at the U of MD my last semester there. 1972 the year my twelve-year career as a college sophomore came to an end. (no shit, twelve years) I think the course that really blew my mind was Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. Maybe it was the mescaline. I liked Brown’s comment about the Protestant work ethic and his belief that intellectual work should be for the relief of man’s estate.

[Zlatko Waterman]

(. . .)

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; ( . . .)

--W.B. Yeats

( sounds like the Bush foreign policy . . .)

My favorite word in this excerpt is Yeats' "mere."


The opposition of a reliable center ( or English . . .centre), and the shifting centre in Borges' "The Book of Sand", when applied to Derrida's "theories of reading", suggests a Borgesian infinite regression--

Or Zeno's Paradox, also a favorite with JLB.

Here is an attempt to clarify-- or reify, Zeno's Paradox:

http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/3 ... Arrow.html

Derrida wants to permit the reader "no privileged position" ( for example, in PLATO'S PHARMAKOS). He probably would accept the proposition that "a series of nows" is fallacious.

(PHARMAKOS link)

http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/ENGLISH/CO ... rmacy.html


It reminds me of a delightful anecdote from the lecturing life of William James.

( paste)

The following anecdote is told of William James. I have been unable to find any published reference to it, so it may be that I have attributed it to the wrong man, or that it is apocryphal. Be that as it may, because of its bull's-eye relevance to the study of syntax, I have retold it here.

After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, William James was accosted by a little old lady.

"Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it's wrong. I've got a better theory," said the little old lady.

"And what is that, madam?" inquired James politely.

"That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle."

Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.

"If your theory is correct, madam," he asked, "what does this turtle stand on?"

"You're a very clever man, Mr. James, and that's a very good question," replied the little old lady, "but I have an answer to it. And it is this: the first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him."

"But what does this second turtle stand on?" persisted James patiently.

To this the little old lady crowed triumphantly. "It's no use , Mr. James -- it's turtles all the way down."

( end paste)

( note: This story is dubbed an "urban legend" by some students of James and Bertrand Russell, another philosopher associated with this anecdote.)

I have referred to Derrida as a comedian, and I based my remark partly on his sense of humor and irony. THE POST CARD, for instance, is both humorous and expresses ( yes, JD CAN actually show human feeling, frailty and longing) erotic yearning, in a Derridean way.

Beautiful set of comments, Peter.


--Z

[Zlatko Waterman]

More on THE POSTCARD ( one of my JD favorites)

here:

http://www.houseofleaves.com/forums/vie ... php?t=3381

This is a discussion forum, but full of lively analysis.

--Z

[petercowlam]

Thanks for that, Zlatko. Anyone who can reveal Derrida I greatly appreciate, as he is so monstrously difficult to read. I'll be chasing down those web links.

Peter

[Zlatko Waterman]

Right, Peter:

He can be monstrous-- by design, I think.

For some reason, he often thinks HE has to be "sous rature" ( or "under erasure") in writing about texts he claims are "sous rature."

(a nice page of partial definitions, including a stab at "sous rature.")

http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Derrida.html

Some of JD's "dualities" and semiological games are briefly discussed on web page above.

I find him fun in small doses and read THE POSTCARD every few years, along with other bits. THE POSTCARD is so much fun because little kinky erotic bits are so deliciously suggested in the cards themselves, regardless of what you may wish to think about Socrates and Plato.

A remarkable scholar with an unusual name ( not in Bengali, of course), Gayatri Spivak, wrote the best introduction to JD's "methods" that I know -- the 90-plus page preface to her translation of OF GRAMMATOLOGY.

When my neice was studying French Post-Structuralist Theory at UCLA ( in French!) I recommended that introduction ( it's in English) and she found it very helpful in her classes. It's a brilliant piece of work by Ms. Spivak, who I think currently teaches somewhere like Yale or Columbia University.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayatri_Spivak

Ah . . .you rascal, you . . .

[Zlatko Waterman]

To gypsy:

Here's a link for you:

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/access_pu ... hives.html

to the OXFORD JOURNAL online. They want you to purchase the whole set, of course.

But here's something to try ( my wife is a professional researcher, if you're wondering where I got this idea . . .):

Go to your local college library, whether you're a student or not. If you can get a library card ( they usually call them "community borrower" cards, and they're usually free), ask the librarian to do "an I.L.L." ( Inter-Library Loan") for you on the OJ issue(s) you are seeking.

They may subscribe or be able to do an online search for you even if they don't. It's worth a try if you've been looking for something you can't find elsewhere.

You can try the same thing at a large public library ( say in Dallas or Houston-- aren't you in Texas?).

Good luck hunting.

--Z

[stilltrucking]

Whenever I read a book by Derrida I feel as though I have committed a great transgression, as though I had committed a crime (at the university I studied, Hegel was deemed unphilosophical; we were not allowed near Nietzsche, let alone Husserl. At that university we focused for the most part on texts published in the English speaking world over the last twenty years. Nothing older, nothing French or German, nothing ‘Continental’). Among Anglo-American philosophers, Derrida could not be taken seriously because his work slashed right at the heart of the Analytic assumptions about the goals of philosophy and the status of Reason. Younger philosophers like Lars Iyers had good reason to feel protective of their interest in Derrida's work.

***

The great damage that was done both to literary study and to Derrida's reputation is perhaps summed up by Timothy Burke, who correctly notes the way in which during this era what came across most loudly was "the cry of all or nothing at all, that if communication could not be perfected, then there was no communication, if texts could not have a correct meaning, they meant everything, anything, nothing in particular." This was not, I hasten to add, what Derrida himself believed, but unfortunately what was most often represented as "Derridean" was indeed this sort of anti-intellectual nonsense (its anti-intellectualism disguised by much obscurantist theory-ese), the result of which, finally, was the complete loss of credibility on the part of academic literary study and, unfortunately, the labeling of Derrida as the obscurantist-in-chief.

http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_ex ... rrida.html

I suppose I have read too much about Derrida and not enough of him.

Was that a parody above? The bit about the turtle.

[petercowlam]

Derrida’s teleology…

…means
the sum total

of civilisation

is the permanently

failed
convergence

of two
hopelessly

parallel lines.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Well said, Peter.

To which I might add:

Were there any lines, for JD, in the first place?

--Z